[Show Intro] Jala Hey, thanks for coming! I'm glad you're here. Come on in! Everyone's out on the patio right now. Looks like a couple of people are in the garden. I can't wait to introduce you! Can I get you anything? [turned away] Hey folks, our new guest is here! [Intro music] 00:00:01.57 Jala Hello world and welcome to Jala-chan's Place. I'm your host, Jala Prendes (she/her) and today I'm joined by Mottzy (he/him) of Drattzy Games to talk about Alterium Shift. Woo! How you doing today? 00:00:16.54 Mottzy I'm doing all right. How you doing tonight, Jala? 00:00:19.66 Jala I'm apparently energetic. I don't know where the energy is coming from, though, because I tried and failed to nap. I don't know where it's coming from. 00:00:29.95 Mottzy Well, you know, there's only things to look forward to these days. 00:00:33.38 Jala Right, right. Well, the thing is, though, is we're talking about a game that I like. I have played the demo. I have been following avidly the development process and hanging out in the Discord server and stuff ah to kind of, you know, get the insider information about your project Alterium Shift that you are working on. 00:01:04.34 Mottzy Targeting finishing and in a few months by end of year, at least to the 95% mark, and then getting our publisher to start their part of the job. 00:01:17.56 Jala Right, right. And that'll take some time too. Cool, cool. Well, first things first, I'm going to read a little bit of a blurb off of your website. Drattzy Games LLC is a small but determined indie studio on a mission to blend the nostalgic charm of retro RPGs with modern game design. Born from the passion of two lifelong gamers, our journey began with a simple dream, to recapture the magic of the classics while forging new paths in storytelling and gameplay. As we work on our premiere title, Alterium Shift, we stay true to our guiding principles. And here they are, craft with care, commit to constant improvement, transparent teamwork and community connection. 00:02:01.17 Jala So before we get into the game proper, first, I want you to tell folks what Alterium Shift is. I do have a little description that we'll read when we get there, but let's tell them a little bit about that. And then we'll get into the studio a little bit and then onto the game. 00:02:21.11 Mottzy Of course, yes, no problem. I've had to say the um elevator pitch for Alterium Shift so many times now, I kind of can do it in my sleep. 00:02:28.86 Jala Yes. 00:02:30.66 Mottzy So we normally just say it's a retro-inspired JRPG that's inspired by the classics like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and Secret of Mana. It follows the journey of three characters, three main characters that you can experience from different perspectives and go through a course of saving the world as a classic retro RPG would be. 00:02:52.22 Mottzy We do add a lot of new modern elements to it, quality of life features. And there are aspects to the game that we hope will surprise people. They're not really major secrets, but there are they are designed in a way to give people an experience that they're in a living world. 00:03:09.52 Mottzy And it's hard to just say here's every little possible thing you can do. Of note, the biggest thing I'd say about this game is it's highly interactive and you are encouraged to explore. 00:03:20.36 Jala Yes, and that is one of my key words. People who know, who've listened to this show and The Level long enough know that exploration is one of my absolute favorite things. Give me a place to explore and also give me characters I like and I will like your game. And we have talked about that. 00:03:35.44 Mottzy Yes, we've talked about that, actually. The idea is that you start the game and you never get anywhere because you end up trying to see what you can find or what you can break. 00:03:43.71 Jala What I can break, yes, exactly. That's exactly... 00:03:46.26 Mottzy Yes. 00:03:46.47 Jala I need to actually sometime stream playing The Chronicles of Riddick because I started that game, Escape from Butcher Bay, and I was just...I did not leave the little opening area where you're supposed to go into the prison because I killed the guy who was trying to help me and then I couldn't kill Johns, unfortunately. 00:04:04.10 Mottzy Oh, my gosh. 00:04:12.52 Jala And then I ended up running under a bridge and taking shelter from the fire from the... place but then like nobody came and got me but also I couldn't I couldn't go out I'm like oh no they should have they should have planned for this they should have planned for me 00:04:23.83 Mottzy you couldn't move yeah 00:04:27.07 Mottzy yeah They should plan for players not trying to at least move forward in the game and you know support their allies. 00:04:32.25 Jala right 00:04:34.44 Mottzy yeah yeah. It is a funny experience when, as a game designer, you craft something a certain way thinking people will at least pick up on the most obvious hints. 00:04:47.11 Mottzy And then sometimes people don't even see that and they just go off on their own, um which can be good or bad, right? 00:04:51.95 Jala They might get the hint, but they might decide against the hint if they just want to go do their thing anyway. 00:04:54.63 Mottzy Yeah. 00:05:00.12 Jala So... 00:05:00.15 Mottzy Yeah, and that's actually my favorite part about doing the design because I do think about those people. And so I say, what if someone went here and they tried to talk to this five times? And there are some things like that where but i don't think anyone's going to get this unless they knew exactly where to go. So I'd have to like tell them. 00:05:18.19 Mottzy There are some things if you talk to them enough time, you get just wildly weird answers. And I just enjoy doing that. 00:05:23.19 Jala Right. 00:05:24.75 Mottzy I mean, I know that some of this content will just never be seen. 00:05:27.95 Jala Right. 00:05:28.17 Mottzy But I like the idea that someone somewhere is going to sit there and pound on the spacebar or the decide button to talk to something a thousand times to see what happens. 00:05:39.79 Mottzy So it's funny to me. 00:05:40.80 Jala Right. Well, oh yeah, for sure. And it's funny that you mentioned that too, because one of the projects that I have in mind for future is going to have some elements similar to that. 00:05:52.59 Mottzy Yes, well, it's it is really enjoyable to write that kind of story. 00:05:58.23 Jala So let's get started with talking about like the background of Drattzy and you as a developer and stuff like that. with how did you get started in game development? Where did this come from? 00:06:14.41 Mottzy When I was a young boy, I mean, most of the things you talk about with someone's story can be wildly varied. um I've always wanted to be in game dev ever since I was a kid and I knew what video games were and I saw arcade games. I didn't actually think I could do development because I didn't know what that was, but I wanted to do things with video games. 00:06:36.53 Mottzy And unfortunately or fortunately, when I got to the age which I could start a career, I decided that video games probably wasn't the most lucrative approach to take. 00:06:48.58 Mottzy So I went down the path of B2B software development. So my whole career has been startup companies and large organizations. You know, I've worked with companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, ah not at the same time, obviously. I've worked with places like AutoTrader. I've worked with places like healthcare, big healthcare companies, small healthcare companies. 00:07:12.67 Mottzy Yeah. I've done a lot of different things. I've always wanted to do game dev. And the actual thing that got me back into it or really seriously into it was right before the pandemic. 00:07:24.16 Mottzy I was talking with my eldest daughter at the time. but How many years ago was that now? She's 12. So it would have been she was like six or something. 00:07:32.92 Jala Math. 00:07:36.60 Mottzy And I was talking to her about video games. I wanted to make her a video game. And so I decided I would commit to that. I had to throw out all the ideas of playing any more video games myself. And I had to dedicate myself to actually trying to make something. 00:07:49.90 Mottzy And that happened right before the pandemic. literally four months before the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit, I started streaming. And, you know, I would say it's kind like the rest of this history from that regard. How did I get into game dev? 00:08:03.40 Mottzy Well, always been interested in it, but I finally committed to it. And then I feel like the pandemic solidified that because I had nothing better to do. 00:08:11.45 Jala Right. 00:08:11.79 Mottzy So I streamed, I did the work, I was finally able to get into a groove of it. And then in that process, I met my partner at Drattzy Games, Jacob. And Jacob and I decided to do a game jam together, which was I think the first game jam I had done, or maybe like the second game jam. 00:08:30.23 Mottzy And i decided I would finally learn Unity. And I know that I have years of software development experience, but trying to switch from developing web applications to game dev is a whole different ballgame. 00:08:42.45 Jala Mm-hmm. 00:08:42.79 Mottzy And we made a game called Out of Hentrol. It was for a game jam. It was like a fox in a hen house where the fox is the one being tortured by the hens. 00:08:53.74 Mottzy And we had a really good connection and chemistry with that. And right after that, he was showing me some ideas for and RPG he wanted to make. And he came up with a style I really liked. 00:09:04.19 Mottzy And that's where, you know, Alterium Shift was born early 2021. And I said, I got to make we got to do something with this. And that's, you know, we built from there. We never expected Alterium Shift to be what it is today. 00:09:18.46 Mottzy We thought it would be our first tester game. We just get an idea out there. 00:09:22.41 Mottzy We you make a small-ish game, see what people like, and then make our next game. But it just kept building. And because of my years of experience working in software, I had my own consulting company at one point. 00:09:35.88 Mottzy I know how to take things and build off of them. And Jacob knows how to make things quickly. And also he knows how to market it like crazy. He'd say he's not a marketer, but he's really good at it. And so we just kept building and building and building off of things. 00:09:49.01 Mottzy And, you know, four years later and multiple deadlines not even delivered. ah Here we are but finally on the home ish stretch. 00:09:59.45 Mottzy I hope. 00:10:00.81 Jala I know. Well, you guys are working really, really hard right now, too. Just constantly, constantly. 00:10:05.02 Mottzy Yes. 00:10:08.81 Mottzy As you saw over the weekend, right? 00:10:09.11 Jala Mm hmm. 00:10:10.03 Mottzy It was pushing the build. 00:10:12.20 Jala Mm hmm. Absolutely. But tell me more about the team. So you already mentioned Jacob. 00:10:19.71 Mottzy Yeah, because we have a real team now. 00:10:21.47 Jala Yeah, know. 00:10:21.96 Mottzy For the longest time, it was me and Jacob. And then we had ah one publisher, which we're no longer working with, who we had some of their team members that were not really helping us other than doing QA. 00:10:33.61 Mottzy And with that process, we met Jonathan Shaw. 00:10:37.55 Mottzy He is a UK-based composer. I would say he's young ish, but he's, you know, it's been years since we've been working with him. So he's not so young anymore. um But he's really talented in our view. And we hope that ah once we get this out, hopefully we'll get some notoriety for him because he's just an amazing, amazing composer. 00:10:57.21 Mottzy And he's to this day, he's still working with us right now. We've got some music that still gives me goosebumps, just chills all up and down. He's just that good. 00:11:07.79 Jala Right. Well, I mean, I've listened to some of those tracks too, and those are awesome. I'm looking forward to the full soundtrack. 00:11:13.25 Mottzy Yeah, and so those are some of the earlier tracks. Now, like the later tracks and the ones that have to be epic, he's nailing it. 00:11:15.41 Jala Mm-hmm. 00:11:19.53 Mottzy And that's a really important part of doing an RPG is having memorable music, at least from the retro era we're inspired by. 00:11:27.88 Mottzy Those games, like Chrono Trigger music, still runs through my head on a regular basis. 00:11:33.65 Mottzy So he's one of our main people in this process. We also worked with a developer who goes by his studio name, which is Han Dune Games. We got connected to him from another developer. 00:11:46.63 Mottzy He's done a lot of, the you know, in and out, sort of one-off work for us. We have Mark, who's another developer who does just tons of heavy lifting for us. He does bug fixing, enhancements. 00:11:59.09 Mottzy He's always there working on stuff. He's really a workhorse. If I didn't have him, i would be drowning. because there's so much work to do, but now I can hand it off to him and he's just like, okay, got this, got that done, got that done. 00:12:12.25 Mottzy He's fixing tons of bugs too. So he's a really, really useful ah member of our team. And all this stuff is on our website. So that's where people can look. um We have an artist, Marcel Mosqi, who does all of the key art. 00:12:26.12 Mottzy So the art you see in the capsules on Steam, we have some key art no one has seen yet, but maybe some of our Patreon supporters and VIPs will see some hints of that in the near future. 00:12:38.03 Jala Mm-hmm. 00:12:38.31 Mottzy um We have another art you artist in South America, Galetita and Agua. and We have a whole QA group. um team based out of India, who is someone I worked with from the B2B side of things. 00:12:52.53 Mottzy We have Ven, which you see on Discord. 00:12:55.66 Mottzy I mean, we have a team, right? It's a real big team. I feel like I'm looking at our website. I think we're missing a couple of faces on here. um Like Wayne Kubiak is a sometimes artist for us who really helped us re-envision our main characters, which some of that stuff is coming soon. 00:13:13.82 Mottzy Regardless, it's a big team with a lot of people doing a lot of things. And um you know some of the people we're using some of the time and other people we've used a lot recently to try and get us across the finish line. 00:13:26.93 Mottzy It's a pretty big team. And we enjoy um actually working together on a lot of this effort. Would not have been possible without the support of everybody from the Kickstarter, which we really appreciate. 00:13:38.84 Jala Absolutely. So that's awesome. um And I have to say, ah so one of my co-hosts on The Level is named Moxie and then you're Mottzy and then you have Mosqi for the artist. 00:13:53.39 Mottzy Yep. 00:13:54.24 Jala And I'm like, ah yeah when I'm talking to Dave or anybody else or I'm on stream and I'm trying to say different people's names, it's like, there's too many similar names. 00:14:04.30 Mottzy Oh, yeah. Well, I'm a parent with three kids and all of our kids have similar names. 00:14:05.56 Jala Yeah. 00:14:09.85 Mottzy So I'm always calling them the wrong name anyway. I'm used to it. 00:14:14.93 Jala that's okay as long as they turn around 00:14:17.35 Mottzy As long as I get somebody's attention, right? 00:14:19.07 Jala Right right so yeah since you talked about the Kickstarter let's kind of segue right into that. You had a successful Kickstarter and what went into the decision to launch that campaign in the first place? 00:14:33.30 Mottzy Oh, my goodness. Well, we didn't want to do a Kickstarter. um When we had a chance early on to consider doing it, a publisher had reached out to us and we decided to go the publisher route. 00:14:47.07 Jala Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 00:14:47.59 Mottzy So we did a publishing agreement that included us getting some funds in order to work on the game. Now, the problem with that relationship isn't because the publisher was bad. It was because it just wasn't really a good fit. 00:15:00.79 Mottzy We needed more from them um so that we could actually do most of the development. We ended up doing more work but besides development, which made it much harder for us to hit our targets. 00:15:12.89 Mottzy And of course, naturally, when you have another party involved, there are some dynamics you just got to work around. 00:15:19.62 Mottzy Well, after we terminated that relationship, we did so briefly seek for other publishers because, again, we didn't want to do Kickstarter. But the writing was on the wall by end of 2024. 00:15:30.77 Mottzy If we wanted to get the funding we needed to finish the game like we wanted to finish it, we'd have to try a Kickstarter. And so it was we cut we held out as long as we possibly could. 00:15:42.59 Mottzy We knew it was going to be a lot of work. And it was actually probably 10 times more work than I thought it was going to be. um But we knew that the only way we could build things the way we need to with the space and time was to get some funding for it, because both Jacob and I have been working full time at other jobs. Until recently, I was i mean, now I'm part time at my day job, but it was a huge challenge. and um And it's a huge risk to do a Kickstarter, but the only we just couldn't foresee any other path. 00:16:18.12 Mottzy And that's how we just decided, hey, hey well, let's we're going to do it and see what happens. 00:16:22.54 Jala Right, right. So that must have been kind of nerve wracking and everything when you first launched the Kickstarter and you know, you weren't sure how things were going to go. How quickly did it fund? 00:16:34.57 Mottzy It took it less than half of the time of the campaign, but definitely not like 24 hours. I think it was like a week and a few days or something. 00:16:45.49 Mottzy I can't remember the exact number. It did not fund as quickly as we wanted, but we also set a higher goal than some people do in their Kickstarters. Sometimes people do really low goals so they can say they funded and they they build on top of it. We also had some really beneficial but unfortunate learning experiences. When we launched, there's things that we could have done better with decisions we should have just made from the beginning. And that led to i think, a challenge in hitting the goal sooner. 00:17:18.02 Mottzy We still did it, but some of it's like we do certain rewards we should have offered sooner or we should have combined them all as one or we should have had fewer rewards because there's just too many choices 00:17:28.39 Mottzy But, you know, it all worked out in the end. But I can see in retrospect, there's so many things we could have done better to hopefully get the word out sooner or get more support. 00:17:39.61 Mottzy It's fine. I'm happy with the outcome. And next time, if we do another Kickstarter-like fundraising, we'll have some experience under our belt to help with that. 00:17:50.58 Jala Right, right. Yeah, like the Kickstarter experience for just various different individuals that I know that, you know, have gone through developing different things, not just the video game side of things, but like just developing anything. They always have this kind of like learning curve. 00:18:09.62 Jala And it's almost always for, you know, consistently, oh, it's a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. And I already thought it was going to be a lot of work, you know. 00:18:17.97 Mottzy Yes, I remember distinctly that the launch, like everything leading up to launch was a ton of work. And then the day of launch, I had this realization that I had... 30 days of this. For some reason, in my mind, it was, okay, you just got to make it through the launch day and you're good. No, then every single day you have to be working on the Kickstarter through the entire process. 00:18:43.98 Mottzy And maybe not maybe that's not what everyone else does. But even if you hit your goal, you still need to keep working at it. You need to be following up with questions. You need to be on top of it. You need be supporting people. It was nerve wracking. Worth it, but nerve wracking. 00:18:59.83 Jala Yeah I actually don't remember where I first heard about the Kickstarter I don't think it was just me opening Kickstarter and seeing it there um i it must have been like blue sky or something is where i first saw it but then as soon as i saw it i was like hey everybody look at this Kickstarter and you know, all of that. 00:19:18.54 Mottzy well, thanks for the support. 00:19:21.19 Jala And, you know, it's been kind of like that ever since. Cause I'm like, you guys have to see this thing. Definitely it's in the wheelhouse of a lot of the folks in the listenership, both for this and for The Level on Duckfeed's show. But yeah, so how the experience has basically been um with Kickstarter overall a positive, net positive, because it got you where you needed to be so you can do the rest of the development work. 00:19:47.40 Jala But you said you might actually do it again in the future with preparation, maybe. 00:19:54.33 Mottzy Yes, I don't know if we would use Kickstarter as a platform. We've gotten a lot more support from Backerkit. I know that they ah originally started out as more of a fulfillment side of ah Kickstarter crowdfunding. 00:20:07.53 Jala Yes. 00:20:09.42 Mottzy However, they've also been dipping their toe into or but they're fully going into doing crowdfunding themselves. They have a much better perspective on customer service. Kickstarter is much more difficult to get help even during campaign. Even during a campaign that has funded, it's it was really surprising to me how poor the support was. And that was unfortunate because Kickstarter as a platform has you know a good draw to it, but it doesn't I don't think it has a good reputation on its ability to support its creators. And I can tell you from personal experience, they don't. Not unless we were a creator that, you know, was raking in three times as much. Maybe they would spend more time with us. But, you know, it wasn't the most pleasant part of the experience. 00:20:52.96 Jala Right. 00:20:57.97 Jala Right. And that's unfortunate because, you know, Kickstarter has been around, you know, as like the big name in crowdfunding for so long. But yeah, there are other folks that I follow the work of that they release stuff exclusively via Backerkit. So they do campaigns and stuff on there. 00:21:15.46 Mottzy Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, my hope obviously is that getting this game out will produce enough revenue for us to maintain a stable company so we can work on our next product. 00:21:26.37 Jala Right. Right. 00:21:28.68 Mottzy And whether we do crowdfunding or not, that's going to be a question on whether we think it's necessary. Because it's a lot of work to run a crowdfunding campaign and then support the backers. So not that I'd mind doing it. It's just it takes away from other things we got to get done. 00:21:41.82 Jala Right, right. And it's just kind of a trade off of do you want to invest the time and effort that it takes to do this campaign to raise more funds so that we can do the rest of this, you know, this, this project that we're working on in this certain way, or do we want to just, you know, buckle down and work on the project? 00:22:00.89 Mottzy Right. And frankly, i mean, you read at the beginning, you talked about our um ah core values, basically. I don't think we call them core values, but guiding principles. 00:22:10.91 Jala Guiding principles. 00:22:10.96 Mottzy And I don't I know this is not the way other companies work, whether they are game studios or not. But these are things that we truly believe in. And I can't imagine running a studio and working on a game without having some regular feedback from the community, without posting ideas out there, without having some back and forth and being transparent about where we are. It works for some companies to not tell anybody anything and then launch a game and, you know, take Steam down, for instance. 00:22:47.35 Jala Right. 00:22:48.07 Jala ah Certain. 00:22:48.06 Mottzy Team Cherry, right? 00:22:49.90 Jala Yeah. 00:22:50.64 Mottzy But we're not Team Cherry. 00:22:50.71 Jala Right. 00:22:52.00 Mottzy And so I actually really do like the interaction. I like working with people and supporting them and even responding to their criticism. I just need to be able to do it sustainably. 00:23:06.33 Jala Right. Right. So, yeah, you already mentioned that you went part-time at your other job that you do other than game dev, but now you are the um CEO of Dratzy. So congratulations. Yay. 00:23:24.15 Mottzy Yeah so I self-selected that. 00:23:26.77 Jala Yeah. Has very much changed for you other than the shift in the work thing? No? Because you've already been-- 00:23:34.09 Mottzy No, I mean, it's just a title, right? Technically, I've been the CEO since we started, but I called myself the president of Drattzy Games. Now I'm president and CEO, which just means I just do everything that's business related for the company. Which again, given that I'm also the lead developer on the project that does... creates some challenges with doing business-like activities versus doing development activities. 00:23:59.71 Jala Right. Mm-hmm. 00:24:01.47 Mottzy Because I can't just work on the game. I've got to do contracting. I've got to look ahead at our budgets and our forecasting and see what we'll be able to do. I've got to negotiate agreements. We do have another publisher now who is going to be doing the console um porting and physical release for the game. 00:24:16.84 Jala Right. 00:24:19.55 Mottzy We haven't been able to name them yet. I think that'll be when we get closer to finishing the game. 00:24:24.59 Mottzy But, you know, I've got to coordinate with them. And I've also got to talk with them about deadlines and work out with them what's going to be ready and when it's going to be ready. So there's a lot of things I end up having to do that are just not at all related to purely working on the game. But that's what a CEO has to do, right? CEOs have to wear many hats. 00:24:43.69 Mottzy And I've been enough startup companies to know that's literally how it is. 00:24:47.94 Jala Right, right. Well, and the thing is, somebody's got to do it. 00:24:53.19 Mottzy Or they don't do it at all, right? 00:24:57.02 Jala But I mean, you know, if you want things to be a success, somebody's got to eventually pony up and do the thing. 00:25:04.37 Mottzy I wish that that was true. 00:25:06.51 Mottzy I wish that was true consistently, right? 00:25:07.50 Jala Yeah, I have enough friends who have worked for startup companies to know that that's not actually how things actually work. 00:25:15.25 Mottzy Right. There's startup companies that like end up making millions of dollars and the people in charge of it didn't do half the stuff that I have to do right now. And they just somehow stumbled into it or they came up with a good idea or they just happened to find the right path. And I'm not at that path. So I'm having to do a lot more of the work. But I also think that's just my way. Like I have to do it that way because in the process, I learn to do it better. 00:25:40.76 Jala Well, and the thing is, is that that's the more stable route and that's what you want for a company that you're starting is a stable route. You don't want to ah have the ground shift under you like that. 00:25:49.10 Mottzy Right. 00:25:52.34 Mottzy Yeah, arguably some of those people have better safety nets too. So sometimes it's because the people have the ability to draw on more resources than I do. So I've got to do something that's more maintainable as we grow. And it's just slower work. It's much harder. It's harder to tell customers we're not releasing the game at a specific date despite our desire because we know they're not going to be happy with it and then have people get really mad at us for it. I wouldn't say that's usually why people get mad at us. Usually they're like, the game isn't perfect like I want it to be. And it's like, well, we're trying. We have more updates coming, but you got to work with us if you want to see where we're going. 00:26:28.90 Jala Right. Well, it's also an early access. I mean, you know, so. 00:26:35.16 Mottzy Can Not the best idea, honestly. If you're doing an RPG, early access is not necessarily the preferred option. Because it's a story-based game. People want the full story. They don't want to play part of the story and then wait forever to see the rest of it. 00:26:51.03 Jala Well, I played part of it and I was happy to stop and be like, okay, I'm going to wait until later to do more. But you know, I'm the weirdo in the room. 00:26:59.35 Mottzy I mean, you know, it's sample size plus one. It's not that I actually like early access. I like being put in a position where we have to support something early because one difference between what we're doing and what a game that just launches without doing early access is when they launch their game, they have to learn all the support process at the time they launch it. By the time we launch this game, we've got all that stuff solved. so we can So we've been supporting the game. We do releases. We do bug fixes. We have a way to intake all that information. And um when we launch the game, it's just going like another version increase of the of the full game. Yeah, there's going bugs, but we already know how to handle that. It's not brand new. 00:27:40.00 Mottzy We won't be like freaking out because we don't know what to do next because we know. We've learned the hard way. 00:27:44.62 Jala Right and some folks who do early access they like that because that's like a more direct pike pipeline to um folks who are playing the game who are interested and invested who then will you know give you feedback about what's going on currently with the game and everything like that so yeah 00:28:03.04 Mottzy Yes. Good and bad. Some people will probably never play our game again, but they gave us feedback that has influenced the change of the game and in a positive way. It did delay our timelines. I was reflecting on this the other day. We could have launched... this year or even a year before. Had we not decided to do certain, I decided because Jacob was like, we should just you know finish it and launch it And it's like, well, and there's no offense against him. I agree with him in some ways. 00:28:31.85 Mottzy But if we want to do it right, we need to take the fundamental things that people are saying they want and they know that they'll enjoy. Apply it to our pillars of the game and see what makes sense to address what we think is the fundamental need. And 9 times out of 10 is something that we already thought of that resonated with us. 00:28:50.76 Mottzy And we heard the feedback enough, we realized, okay, we really need to do this. And we didn't have to, right? Like the new battle new battle system coming, the full reskin of the UI that's coming, the revised character art that's going to be way better. There's so many things that we've been doing to the game that we thought we'll do that for our next game. And we're like, now we're going to do because we know that people are going to enjoy the game that much more if we do it the right way. 00:29:16.19 Jala Right. And even things like, you know, just the new sprite for Sage. I'm just very happy with the new sprite for Sage. 00:29:25.83 Mottzy I think that Wayne Kubiak, so he's the member of the team I mentioned that he's sort of sometime developer artist. 00:29:33.11 Mottzy He's got years of experience. He worked on Cave Story. He worked on, man, I wish I knew all his games off the top of my head, but he does pixel art for a living for video games. And he's got an eye. 00:29:44.85 Mottzy He's never done RPGs, weirdly enough, but he could take what we wanted and create the characters we were seeking. And that really spurred us to ah do the whole makeover for all of the characters. It's a lot of work. And we have one artist I forgot to mention because she's not on the website yet. Her name is Spitdoll in New Zealand. And she's like a protege of Wayne. And she's doing all of the reworks of every single animation. And we have tons of them. 00:30:16.81 Mottzy So, you know, we're not a huge, even though we have some funding from Kickstarter, we're not a huge studio. So we have one person doing all the rework of this UI stuff or this AI stuff. We have AI, arts, character art. 00:30:29.98 Mottzy And then we have a racing minigame that we had Agua Arrida, who's not on our website either, doing... We got to update our website. He's doing all the racing minigame stuff and he's doing all the NPC rewards and he's doing a bunch of other stuff. And then we have Galetita who's doing, ah she did all of the UI rework, which is, mean, she's just a beast. She's done an amazing job of this. And she also pixelized all of the key art for the game. So there's just like all these little pieces of things that we're doing with these people who are amazing, yeah, 00:31:06.30 Mottzy you know, with our limited resources. Anyway, you asked about the new character art. Wayne is the one who, who did it. And we're just really excited to take it. You can see my excitement by just talking about how the team is structured and what they're working on, which is amazing. 00:31:19.31 Jala Right, right. Well, and then too, I did want to also say on this, I mentioned it when I talked about the game when I was playing the demo, and I was talking about it on The Level, that the reviews for the game, I looked through them, and a lot of those reviews are old, old, old reviews from like two years ago or something that are saying stuff that doesn't actually apply because the game's been updated since then. 00:31:48.82 Jala So like the reviews that are out there, like actually look at them and read them because like for, for people listening, if they, you know, are concerned about that at all, just look at the reviews and see how outdated they are n you know, try it out for yourself. And yeah. 00:32:05.02 Mottzy Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. And I don't know if your listenership and or viewership consists of game devs. I assume there are game devs in there and people who want to make their own games. 00:32:17.65 Mottzy And a lot of studios worry about that sort of stuff. Certainly having negative reviews has an impact on whether someone decides to buy early access. But early access is the testing ground. So even though we're getting negative reviews, we're using those to learn and grow. And the audience of that is really small. You think it's a big deal, but it's like, what, we have 80 some odd reviews or something. and i don't know the numbers, but it's not very high. um So even though those exist, it does not necessarily indicate what the game will be received as on a broader scale. 00:32:52.96 Mottzy It gives us some hints, but doesn't tell us exactly what it's going to be. And while I don't love some of the reviews we get, we have some people who I don't even know what happened. Sometimes it feels like they get vindictive for some reason. 00:33:05.53 Mottzy And they like play the game intentionally to come back and say all the things they didn't like about it and then give us a thumbs down. So I paid for the game. 00:33:12.01 Jala There are people who are terminally online is what that is. 00:33:15.76 Mottzy Yeah, I guess so. 00:33:17.36 Mottzy And, you know, I actually like that someone is willing to spend that time. I don't love the impact it has on the visibility of our game, but I don't mind that someone is willing to pick things apart and tell us what they don't like. I don't like people who are being completely rude. i don't like people who get wound up about things that aren't related to the actual game and they start taught bringing in things like outside politics into a video game that's a fantasy game. I don't love that. And sometimes I'll even just cut those people out of our boards. But I don't mind the reviews, negative or positive. And i don't mind if people read them and think, oh, well you know, should I even try the game or not? I mean, it's your choice. I always recommend people try the demo. The demo is the game. It's not, you're not playing some, you know, different version of it that we have to maintain. It is literally the game that we build and launch, which again, I don't think a lot of studios do. But we do because I don't want to maintain multiple versions of the game. Here's the demo. It's exactly what's currently released. You just can't go past a certain point. Tell us what you think. So even people who have who've never played the game, who don't want to pay for it, they can play the demo and see all the newest features for free. They won't have to wait until the full launch. They just have to wait for the story, I guess. 00:34:41.10 Jala Right. But, you know, and that's what I was going to say is that when I first, you know I already backed the Kickstarter and then I was like, I'm going to go play the demo because I backed the Kickstarter before I played the demo. 00:34:55.61 Mottzy Appreciate that. 00:34:56.75 Jala Yeah. Well, I mean, all the stuff I was looking at on the Kickstarter, I'm like, okay, I'm interested. I'm interested. You have my attention. I'm also going to eventually play this demo. 00:35:07.11 Mottzy get it. 00:35:07.40 Jala I like supporting people, but I also have limited time. So like when I finally got to the demo, I was like, oh, okay, I really like this. And then I was curious because I was like, why are the ratings like they are? 00:35:19.00 Jala And so I started looking through the reviews and I was like, Okay, yeah, this is old. This doesn't even this isn't even pertinent. Not anymore. 00:35:26.54 Mottzy Yeah. 00:35:26.71 Jala I mean, I'm sure from before, but you know. 00:35:29.46 Mottzy You can't control for it. But the great part is that Steam does have a mechanism to deal with that. Once you launch the game, um it still counts your early access reviews, but it flags them. So don't even know if it counts towards the overall score at that point. Because once, you know, it's early access reviews are the testing ground, like I said. So I don't worry too much about it, but. 00:35:53.15 Jala Right. So, another thing that you do among the various other things that you do is you stream, how do you get any work done? 00:36:01.44 Jala You stream doing dev work theoretically, but. 00:36:02.17 Mottzy I don't. I don't. I don't get any work done. I get a couple things done. Well, streaming with my face, I found, is the thing that distracts me the most. 00:36:13.92 Jala Ah, okay. 00:36:14.86 Mottzy Because I feel like when there's a camera on my face, I have to be more attentive to like looking at it as if someone was looking back at me. ah So when I do my nighttime streams, which I only do twice a week, I pretty much expect that I'll get very little done. And I just don't worry about it. And if no one's talking to me, great. I'll just work. I still can't focus as well, but I try. And if people are talking to me, then whatever. I'll talk to them and I'll go off on tangents. That's totally fine. Streaming without my face, I have found from a co-working perspective, is totally fine. It actually makes me stay more focused because knowing that I have potentially people joining the coworking stream forces me to keep working on what I'm working on and not get sidetracked, which I tend to do. I still have the day job. but I do juggle my coworking streams during the day with my day job. So I have other distractions pulling at me. But when I have the stream running, I'm usually trying to get work done. So that doesn't really distract me as much. But yeah, I mean, you just do it, right? It's it's not really to go back to your question, like how do you get work done? My philosophy on streaming dev is not about getting work done. It's about having a cadence and people to essentially report to, to show that I'm getting stuff done. Not on stream, obviously, but I'll show things that are happening. It's a way to keep myself honest because before I started streaming, it was really hard at night after a long day of work to do game dev instead of playing video games. Because loved playing video games. And then I would play video games and I would imagine myself making video games, but I would never actually make anything. 00:37:50.49 Jala Uh-huh. Right. 00:37:56.05 Mottzy So streaming forced me to do something. Even if I did it badly, I had to do something. So I always had to do something. And um that cadence has just been really helpful for me. If I stop worrying about whether I deliver and I just think, am I maintaining my cadence? I feel much better. Otherwise, I would be beating myself up all the time because I never get anything done when I'm streaming. 00:38:24.32 Jala Right. Well, I was inspired by you streaming your co-working streams and stuff to actually stream when working on my own game project. And I actually did get some stuff done when I was doing that. And I had people come in and they were kind of chatting with me about it. 00:38:37.90 Mottzy Nice. 00:38:41.29 Jala And some of those conversations ended up leading to some decisions that I had for, you know, some later stuff. So that was good. It was all good. 00:38:49.59 Mottzy Yeah, you stream when it's dinner time at my house. You told me about how you were doing that and I was like, well, I can't join your stream while I'm eating dinner at the family, but I'd love to catch it sometime because it sounds like a lot of fun. And you're doing story writing while you're streaming? 00:39:01.03 Jala Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. 00:39:04.80 Mottzy That, to me... don't know if harder than coding. Like trying to use the same part of your brain to work on something as you use to talk to people has always been a challenge. 00:39:16.97 Mottzy That's why it's hard because if you're coding or if you're writing, you're using the same leg linguistic centers in your head versus artists. They can sit there and draw and like you can draw and talk at the same time just fine because there's two different parts of your brain. 00:39:30.21 Jala I get absorbed when I'm painting. Okay. like it's I have a hard time focusing on working on the artwork that I'm working on and also talking to people. So like when I get to that stage of working on my game, when I'm actually doing the illustration work, I don't know if I'm going to stream it or not because I don't know if I'm going to actually want to talk to people. Like I can listen to things, but I can't talk to people when I'm doing that because I'm very absorbed, very absorbed. 00:39:49.03 Mottzy That's funny. 00:39:55.70 Mottzy I want to find out now I have to talk to you even more so beyond this, because now I'm curious if it's something about like the type of brain, person you are, because to me, it's completely reverse what you're describing. Working on code is really hard when people are watching and talking to me. But doing art, I used to do voxel art when I first started streaming. That's great. I can do voxel art all day while someone's talking to me. I'm totally fine. I can go read the chat and then go back and work. Totally fine. But trying to do code, oh my gosh, I can't. I can't function. 00:40:26.95 Jala And it's funny too, because for me, ah when I'm doing my story writing, I very often like I'll type a little bit and then I will read it out loud because I'm proofreading, you know, first draft, proofreading it, seeing how many times I repeat words and trying to fix that and all of that because, you know, you're just getting it out on paper first. And then at that point, I'm talking to somebody and I'm like, okay. And I read it aloud. And then I'm like, okay, what do you think? Blah, blah, blah. And, you know, get input and thanks, you know, spit out what I think I want to do next with it and whatever. And then it turns into a conversation. So, that's easier for me than to do art. 00:41:04.62 Mottzy Yeah, I think there's also a thing about just the type of person that I am. I see other streamers, this streamer named Walaber who made Jelly Car World, and he's got a bunch of other games out. um 00:41:17.48 Jala I know if that person, that person's been in your chat. 00:41:19.37 Mottzy You know Walaber. He's great. I love Walaber. He is able to work while he streams because he cares more about working than he cares about chat. But when I'm on a stream, I care more about like tending to chat than I care about working and I'm easily distracted. So he's definitely not easily distracted. He's more like, you know, he's got remember to look at chat where I'm like, oh, is someone say saying anything? I see little blink and like I gotta check the chat again. Yeah, it's harder for me. 00:41:48.60 Jala Oops, and here's me in your stream constantly talking to you. Ha ha ha. 00:41:54.17 Mottzy Like I said, I don't stream for the progress. If I had to do that, I would and I did that for a period of time where i was like, you know what? I'm in focus mode. Don't talk to me. Like I would set a timer and I would every five minutes check chat. I didn't really love that, though. And I honestly think at that time, my viewership isn't high anymore anyway, but especially at that time, I think it did a pretty good damage to my viewership because people wanted to talk to me because I've been you know years I've been spending just talking to people. And now I'm like, don't talk to me. I'm working. They're like, fine, I'll go somewhere else. 00:42:27.17 Jala Right, so with that note let us move on and talk about Alterium Shift because we got through the work mode we have talked about the Kickstarter about the studio and all of that mess so let's move on to the game proper. Your copy from your, and I don't know if it's the Kickstarter or from your website, one of those things, reads: "Embark on an unforgettable adventure in Alterium Shift, where the fate of two worlds hangs in the balance. Choose your hero, shape their destiny, and uncover the intertwined stories of Pyrrha, Atlas, and Sage in a richly detailed living world. Inspired by SNES era classics, but built with modern mechanics, Alterium Shift promises a nostalgic yet innovative experience for RPG fans. Inspired by the classics, fans of Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy will feel right at home while discovering fresh takes on the genre. With Alterium Shift, we aim to honor these classics while carving a path of our own. Dimensions collide, and adventure awaits at every turn. Set in the vibrant world of Alteria, your heroes must navigate a dimensional conflict while discovering how their intertwined destinies will determine the fate of both worlds, and possibly more..." 00:44:04.67 Mottzy Dun, dun, dun. 00:44:05.82 Jala So you already answered the question of like, when did you start making Alterium Shift? It all happened way back when, when you did a game jam. 00:44:14.99 Mottzy Yeah, 2021 was when we started, beginning of 2021. After Jacob had shown me some ideas, we got on a phone call and started talking about what we could do. So we didn't have any preconceived notion of a story. I feel like there are some people who make RPGs and they've, you know, since they've been kids or for years, they've been imagining what the ideal story is. We're just like, okay, let's just put some new ideas together and let's see what we can come up with. Which I, by the way, liked way better because every time I try to do something I want to do, I don't feel like I can ever succeed because always want to do it to my level perfection. Oh, it's got to be exactly the way I envision it. So instead of creating that vision, we just created something and then we built on top of it, which I kind of enjoyed that process. 00:45:05.97 Jala Right. Well, I mean, like the whole the whole adage that is usually thrown around the internet is, you know, first get it out there. You can make it nice later. You know, just get it out there, whatever it is, make it however it needs to be for now. You can spruce it up and make it nice later as you continue. 00:45:25.80 Mottzy Correct. That's actually what streaming taught me to do because I learned to just put it out there, see what it looks like, and then keep improving. Where previously, like, no, I'm not going to tell anybody my ideas, and I'm going to sit here on my own, not talking to anybody, and try to make something. It just doesn't work for me. 00:45:44.29 Jala Right, right. Well, I mean, everybody works in a different way, but I'm also the same type of way where like I when I'm making something, I like it to be kind of collaborative. I mean, yes, I'm the main driving force behind this story that I'm working on. Right. But at the same time, I am talking to other people, whoever is interested enough to want to talk to me about it. We are having discussions about this because other perspectives really help with the whole design process, I thinkit can shore up. 00:46:14.82 Mottzy Yeah, I think so. 00:46:16.40 Jala Yeah, it can shore up, where maybe you have a spot that you might have overlooked or something, then, you know, oh, I never considered that while somebody else did. 00:46:27.61 Mottzy Well, and more so, I think being able to talk about it and share ideas starts your process of marketing your product. And a lot of game devs don't understand the value of early sharing when you're an indie studio. Bigger companies, they can afford to hide information and have a secret that they're going to reveal. But nobody knows about you. No one knows about your game. They don't, you know, you might love it, but no one else may like your idea until you start getting it in front of your audience and finding your audience. And that's why it's also important to start sharing as soon as you can, um despite what some people might think. No one's going to steal your idea. No one cares. They want to make their idea. They don't want to make your idea. 00:47:08.83 Jala Right. Right. 00:47:10.02 Mottzy It's a creative industry. There's plenty of ideas out there, but someone has to do it. And that's what you got to do. 00:47:14.68 Jala Right. 00:47:15.57 Mottzy Do it and show it. 00:47:17.09 Jala Exactly. So we do have those reference points. So you mentioned SNES era JRPGs and specific titles, things like that. So what elements of this game will feel familiar to players who have played Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy? 00:47:37.11 Mottzy Well, the biggest thing is the visual style harkens to all those types of games. um The original asset pack we used is something called Mana Seed, which is a secret of mana or mana, as people say. 00:47:51.68 Mottzy It's a style of that genre. And that's very much the squaring Square Enix era. 00:47:58.51 Jala Squeenix. Yeah. 00:47:59.78 Mottzy I've never heard of it referred to that way. 00:48:04.15 Mottzy It's that sort of era of game that is one obvious thing that we hear a lot. And some people say Golden Sun, which is, you know, I think a derivative style from ah a later era. So visually, of course, they'll see a lot of that in here. The thing that we like to do with the story is replicate the feel that the characters in the world exist in the world. And what I mean by that is sometimes modern games and some of the retro games, you see the characters standing there, but they don't do anything during cinematic sequences. It's all reading. It's like you see a little profile icon making a face and you see words, but the characters on the scene are just standing there. Where Chrono Trigger especially does this, the characters react to things. 00:48:54.45 Jala Right. 00:48:54.95 Mottzy So they would see a lot of that feeling. The characters will laugh or they yawn or, you know, look sad or get knocked around or knocked back because we wanted to make the scene feel alive, not just some static thing standing there. And I loved Chrono Trigger. So anything story related from a flow and a feel is heavily inspired by the way Chrono Trigger goes about telling its story. Chrono Trigger does not tell you what's going on. I think you have a very like a very brief hint of what the backstory is. But basically, you wake up in your bed and you're told to go to some fair. And that's it. you don't You're not told what your purpose was. You're not told what your direction is. Just go check out the millennial fair. Then you show up and you start playing around like, OK, I'm here. Now what do i do? And while the story, it does kind of guide you to the next step, you don't have to go. You can just run around for a long time, which I did the first time I played Chrono Trigger. 00:49:55.97 Jala Guess what I was doing when I was told to go to the Millennial Fair: going everywhere except the Millennial Fair. 00:50:02.79 Mottzy You went everywhere. Right. You go to the forest to fight monsters, to level up, go across the bridge and see what towns are down there. 00:50:07.83 Jala Right. I did. 00:50:12.89 Mottzy Like there's so many things you do. But it's not heavy handed in its direction. And I love that way of telling a story because in my mind, because that's the era I played, that's a way to encourage the player to investigate the game. Where if you if you start with a big flowery intro that tells you all the details and tells you where to go and has little markers everywhere that you're following, then what are you doing is you're just like on rails almost. Like go on the rails and play the game. Like that's not what I want to do. So that's where we heavily pulled from Chrono Trigger. Now, to our detriment at times, because now we're realizing in the modern era, there are a fair number of people who want their handheld. They want to be told exactly where to go. They don't want to have to go investigate. 00:51:02.62 Jala Right. 00:51:04.50 Mottzy Get me to the action. Get me to the experience. So we're trying to balance that. But certainly, I've heard people say, well what is this Is this like a town? Am I just walking around in town? And when I was a kid, that's literally what I experienced too. But then I was like, oh, I wonder what's over here. And then I would find my way to the story, right? But these days when people play demos and stuff, they don't want to sit around and experience the story. um They want to get to the point. You know, they don't want to, like find their way to it. But, you know, Chrono Trigger feel, ah Final Fantasy being a JRPG and being sort of epic in size and having...You know, it's still linear, but it's got a lot of interesting things to pull from. ah Stylistically, so you know, there's some concepts in there. um But, you know, just common tropes that you would see in a Final Fantasy-like game. Really, with Secret of Mana, the thing that we that's very much pulled from that is you can go everywhere on the map by just running through the paths on the map. So Secret of Mana, there's no overworld map you walk on. You just exist in the world. And that's how this works. You go everywhere. I later learned that Chrono Trigger, despite my recollections from the past, doesn't have any towns. There's no town map where you have a bunch of houses that you're walking in on, you know, in the main view of the map. You only have an overworld town and then you go into the houses from there, which I don't know why I didn't realize that. So, you know, we didn't have that originally. We didn't have overworld walking because we're like, no, you're going to experience a game by having to travel. And then people didn't like that. So some people want to be able to go places fast, which we don't blame them. So we have an overworld map now. um So all three of those games, like we have like, kind you know, flavors of each one of those interwoven within the game. It's kind of interesting how we try to fit that together. 00:53:11.89 Jala It's kind of funny that you mention that because one of the games that I've been streaming recently is Cyclopean: The Great Abyss. And it is based on old 80s and 90s CRPGs. And a lot of the design conceits of that particular developer's games, like all of them, are basically the kind of older, here's some stuff, have fun you know kind of way of making games. And, you know, I've it's been in my mind a lot lately about, the modern era of game design and how it really is very handholdy in a lot of ways for a lot of folks. Not every game does it, but a lot of games by and large people kind of expect it these days to be like, Oh, you need to give me a very clear direction because I have a backlog of 7,000 games. Now it's not like back when, when people were playing, you know, when we were kids. 00:54:13.75 Mottzy That's true. And to your point earlier, I mean, I I'm similar with video games. I don't play games that are too involved. I have not opened. I have not purchased or open Silksong because i will at some point, but because I know the second I get into it is going to be really heavy. I'm going to have to really focus and dedicate my time. So I understand it from the logical standpoint, but the younger version of me that was playing Chrono Trigger really wants people to experience the game that way. So we're trying to find the happy medium. We're trying to bring in modern elements and even options that let people get through things faster without doing it so heavy-handedly that we're doing it everywhere, right? If we have to make a decision that requires us to put something on the map to literally direct somebody, right? First off, we probably failed at our design because it should be obvious. But then if we have to do that, it's only because we've tried a bunch of other options that we can't find a better way. So whatever. We'll do it if we can't figure out a way to do it without, you know, handholding. I have a, do you mind if I give you a really good example of this? 00:55:20.46 Jala Go for it. 00:55:21.91 Mottzy of something that worked without having to do the little marker thing. So the, I noticed you have something about burbs in here. So this somewhat relates. The chicken minigame, basically, from the beginning, where you go and catch the chickens, so chicken quest, basically. The original version of those chickens, the way they were scripted, they would fly away from you, but they would never leave the world. Like, you couldn't knock them off a cliff. um But the problem was, you still had to walk to pick them up. And we kept trying to put these signers that said, you know, walk to catch them, do all that stuff. And um they people still wouldn't figure it out. They're like, well, but I'm on top of the chicken. Why can't they pick it up? And so in the process of me revising this, I tried something where I let the chickens, you know, change where they are on the terrain. And a chicken fell off a cliff. 00:56:11.29 Jala Yeah, that happened to me. 00:56:11.64 Mottzy I thought that was hilarious. And I was like, we got to do that. Because what happened was, then people realized they're not going to be able to just catch the chicken anyway. If you back it in the corner, it it'll hop up and climb over things. So you'll never back it into a corner. um I guess if you happen to manage to grab it, you could still you could still grab it technically. But then then they started paying attention and they realized, oh, I need walk. And we later introduced analog stick walking. So you can just slightly nudge the stick. And watching someone play real time, like, oh, I got to catch this chicken. And then they start... analog stick walking to it and they catch it. And to me, that was the design that we needed to have. That was the game design where we observed behavior one way. And while we could have been like blaring across, you know, giving them the little icons over the chicken or doing other things to remind them that they need to walk. We just changed how the behavior worked. And suddenly now people are like, oh, well, I guess I i can't just catch the chicken by running at it. I'm going to find another way. And that's where they start like nudging and walking up to it. So I thought that was a really good example of trying to make a design work without first going the easy route of, you know, putting a sign putting a little blinking dot or something like that. 00:57:34.34 Jala And I will say I am a known hater of tutorials. I am a hater of tutorials. 00:57:41.20 Mottzy Yes. 00:57:41.64 Jala Like it is very rare that any kind of a tutorial in a game actually is fun to me. So like that or like tells me what I need to know and just keeps it simple, you know. 00:57:53.08 Jala And like, so I do not like it when you get all the little pop-ups all over the place that telling you what you need to be doing. That's not my favorite thing in the world. So, right. 00:58:01.31 Mottzy Oh, my brain turns off. It's like that you get a big manual right in front of you before you're trying to do a battle. And it's explaining every aspect of battle and how every little piece works. 00:58:09.84 Jala And they're like, no, right. 00:58:11.21 Mottzy And like, oh, God. 00:58:12.66 Jala Yeah, and no, no, no, no. Let me, like, do the thing and then we'll talk about it later. We'll refine it later through, like, other dialogue you can have or something, but, like, not right in the... 00:58:22.80 Mottzy Now, to be fair, we do have that option, but we don't we don't force it on them. 00:58:23.00 Jala Yeah. I know, a little bit. And it's not pages of a manual. It's like highlighting certain things and explaining it. 00:58:33.09 Mottzy And we're gonna we're going to refine some of that too. But I do think there has to be a place for that somewhere because not everyone's going to want to figure it out on their own. 00:58:39.38 Jala Oh, absolutely. 00:58:42.04 Mottzy But you just got to do it, you know, in in a... 00:58:45.01 Jala In a svelte kind of way, like a non-painful way, you know, non-painful. 00:58:46.97 Mottzy ah I was trying to find the word. Yeah, svelte. 00:58:50.53 Jala So yeah, let's talk about what are the unique elements that you are bringing to Alterium Shift? 00:59:01.48 Mottzy You know, I love the question about unique because in some ways, when you represent a retro style game, you don't want to be too unique. Sometimes that can actually ruin the experience because people want things that they're familiar with and comfortable with. However, with all that said, um the things that we are doing from the modern, you know, pulling in modern elements, is the notion of branching dialogues that are flavor as opposed to game impactful. So the notion that every time there is an opportunity for your character to speak, your character doesn't speak for themselves. You are given the options in their voice as a player. And then they take action based upon those options. And most things have at least two, if not three options that can visually change your experience, but not necessarily affect the outcome. It's a lot of flavor. I mean, there's places where as Pyra, you can bust someone's door down um if you're given the right choice. 01:00:05.78 Mottzy There's places where you can be extra mean to somebody and that person won't want to talk to you. But doesn't affect your you know overall game experience. That's one big thing that I think people start realizing is there's so much that they can do. um Even though it's a turn-based RPG, one of the upcoming features that will probably be in the follow-on release from the next one is on-map abilities that you can use in real time. So it's not an action RPG, but Pyra's got a spear and she can whack things with it. Even just, you know, she's going to have an ability to do a slice. She's going to have ability to do a slice that can be used like cut grass and stuff, sort of like Secret of Mana. Or smash boxes and things like that. And Atlas will be able to shoot his arrows whenever he wants to. And Sage is going to have some other abilities in addition to what they have in game. So that will, I think, continue to expand the feeling that they're in a living world and that you can interact. Another one that we talk about, or I talk a lot about on stream, but we haven't fully implemented or revealed yet is the ability for the saves to be used as part of your sort of mini new game plus. So the save system right now, basically lets you have as many saves as you want. which is not, I don't know if that's normal for game. Usually you get like five save slots or something. But in Alterium Shift, not only can you have, I mean, up to 30 saves per character, so 90 save files, basically, in addition to having all of your auto saves, but you will be able to use those saves in a way that affects other save files. So you'll be able to say like absorb a save and, and normalize it to another save file. So you can level up or get certain equipment or items. You'll be able to start a new game, but you'll be able start a new game at a higher level because you're absorbing your, your save files. So the game is sort of interwoven with the notion that it's not just one save for your game. It's cumulative across all your saves. Okay. And in addition to that, there's things you can change in the game that affect every single save. There's switches that affect every single save of the game. There's doors that will open based upon what that switch is. um So things of that nature. So there's a lot of little things that we've we're through peppering in there that really alter some of that experience. It's not just go from point A to point B. There's going to be a reason to go back and play as other characters. 01:02:47.70 Jala Right, right. And I will say too, I love the very, very robust autosave. I love that. Because like, there are times where I'll go in and I'm doing like flavor text stuff, but like, it didn't pan out the way that I wanted it to pan out and or I accidentally hit the wrong thing. And I'm like, Oh, it's fine. I've got to save right there. I can just go back to going back into this house and, you know, do this part over again without having to worry about, oh no, I saved way back there, you know. 01:03:18.47 Mottzy Yeah, autosaves was actually a pretty big thing. One of the one of the pieces of feedback where um i think we we didn't even have autosaves then we had it, but we only had one autosave. So the problem was with one autosave, you can't you know jump back a couple paces. It was just like the last thing you did, which could be problematic. So that has been really helpful. um we're We're toying with the idea that we should limit it to maybe five or something. But I don't know what the magic number is going to be. So we might even put that in the hands of the player, let them choose. 01:03:54.63 Jala Awesome. Awesome. So tell me more about the world of Alteria. 01:04:00.70 Mottzy Well, the world of Alteria is the human world in this game. um And it is you know, retro, classic JRPG flavor. There are towns, there's grasslands, there's every biome you can imagine. In many of these areas, some of these areas touch on like end game stuff. So I'm not going to talk about that too deeply. But the world of Alteria in our mind, when we first conceived of this game, is just like...I don't want to make this political, but the at the time, it was our attempt to look at how the world was just, you know, whitewashed, you know, like privileged white America sort of style. It's not as evident now in the game than when we first started. But, you know, there's a bunch of people who live in nice towns that don't face a lot of adversity. There was some adversity in the past, but for the most part, there's magic and there's people and everything's hunky-dory. That's kind of what Alteria is like. And then there's another world that is literally the reverse of Alteria, which is Eretla, which is a dark elf world. And the dark elves have a little bit more trouble for themselves. The storyline that you're presented with is the dark elves are bad people. The humans are the good people. Turns out that's not necessarily the truth as with the reality of the world. There's never just purely good or purely bad people. And then there's a whole storyline interwoven with that. The dark elf world um certainly appears to be less well off than the human world. Human world's green and vibrant. The first area you show up in the dark elf world is purple, which is like the opposite of green, basically. um It looks diseased, doesn't look healthy. There's, you know, more nasty monsters. um And there's a bunch of dark elves everywhere. So not really much else I can say about between the two different worlds, because most of that's experiencing it in the game. But all I can say is just like all these classic JRPGs, there's a fair number of towns that you can explore and all of them have their own denizens and experiences that you can explore. Enjoy where the dark elf world is closer to like monster worlds. So you'll have more places where there are humanoid monsters um in in addition to the elves and the human world is mostly human with natural-ish beasts that you encounter. 01:06:32.00 Jala Right, right. So let's move on and talk about the characters then and I will say right off at the top here that when I saw the Kickstarter and I saw Sage I was like yep I'm backing this game. So my listenership will be 100%, 100,000% backed up on Sage for sure. 01:06:48.00 Mottzy That's good. 01:06:55.17 Jala Sage is the non-binary, snarky mage character. 01:07:01.28 Mottzy Mage. 01:07:02.20 Jala Sage, mage. But you mentioned you mentioned that Sage has kind of got some of your own personal kind of humor written in. 01:07:15.00 Mottzy Yeah, all the characters have... I'm the writer of the game. That was not how we originally planned it. But Jacob didn't want to do any writing, and it was two of us, so i was like, I'll give it a shot. So I became the writer. And it's fine, because I've always wanted to do writing for this, I just didn't somehow believe I could do it. But each of these characters end up having some of my personality in them, which is... probably obvious because I haven't learned yet how to completely separate my personality from what I write for characters. As far as the characters go, you have Atlas, Pyra, and Sage. yeah I think you called her Pyrrha, but we call her Pyra. I don't know which one's right, but earlier you said Pyrrha, like you said it differently than Pyra. 01:07:54.48 Jala I don't... did I? Oh, Pyra. 01:07:59.30 Mottzy Pyrrha, yeah. 01:07:59.45 Jala Okay, yeah. Maybe. Pyra. 01:08:03.79 Mottzy Pyra, like Pi, but with a Y. So get it? 01:08:07.59 Jala Why Pyra? 01:08:09.95 Mottzy Phi, Pi. The characters um all have their own unique personalities and capabilities. Pyra is the leader of the group of the group of students because they all, they're just basically, you start while they're finishing their learning with their mentor, Dolion. But she tends to take on leadership roles. She's the melee character. She has an elemental capability that is flame, i.e. Pyra, very obvious. That's what you do in RPGs. You make the characteristic traits obvious. So she's, you know, what I don't like this word, but the best word I can say is that she comes off as bossy. um It's not necessarily male-female, but just bossy as in she might be pushy about things more so than being, you know, reasonable sometimes. 01:09:00.89 Jala She's Leonardo from the Turtles. That's all. 01:09:03.70 Mottzy She is Leonardo from the Turtles who's also very bossy. 01:09:06.51 Jala Yes. 01:09:06.68 Mottzy She often gets frustrated with the other two because they don't seem to take things as seriously. Atlas is just a dumb kid is the problem. Atlas is the youngest. He's our archetype of what you normally see in RPGs, just some young kids who's coming of age. Uh, we didn't give him a sword this time though. We gave him a bow and arrow, but it's, In effect, he's your classic trope of young boy who's going on an adventure. And then Sage is the eldest of the group, not by much, but you know by the age differences, Sage the eldest and is the witty, snarky one who ah acts like they don't care about anybody, but it's clear they do. They didn't learn right skills. because of the way that they were treated as a kid. Ironically, and I didn't intend it exactly this way, we wanted a not male-female option. And so non-binary is the next obvious, right? And we didn't, it's not, Sage isn't mistreated because they're non-binary. They're mistreated because they're magical, because the humans see an excessive use of magic as bad because that's the dark elves. That's their enemies. 01:10:26.50 Jala Right. 01:10:26.91 Mottzy And so they tend to ostracize Sage. And Sage really wicked smart. So they learn how to cope with that with their humor, essentially. But by the time you meet Sage, you know, that's just part of their personality. They're just snarky and jokey and they like to make jokes and they yeah they tend to think really highly of themselves. They think they know all the answers, which you find out they don't always know all the answers, but they certainly act like they do. Um, honestly, if anything, it's almost like my elder brother, he'll never listen to my podcast. I don't ever talk to him, but you know, it's very much like that false confidence. You got some intelligence, but you don't always recognize that other people might know as much or more than you. So you just sort of act like, you know everything, but you know-- 01:11:19.70 Jala Well, and then also like going from a psychological standpoint, it makes sense because somebody who is basically dumped on all the time, constantly, like when I was first playing the demo, I immediately picked Sage and I was playing through and I'm like, this is the character I'm going to go through with this game. And I was like, why is everybody in this town terrible? Oh my god and then I played the other characters and I'm like everybody's so nice like wow. I played Atlas right after Sage. 01:11:47.67 Mottzy Well, not to Pyra. It's actually the only person that the town seems to like is Atlas, which... Totally fitting, right? Right. Yeah, everyone's nice Atlas because Atlas is just a young kid who he doesn't really, you know, he's not very interesting. He's kind of boring as a person at the start of the game because he tries too hard to act smart or act like someone he's not, right? When he's talking to Sage, he tries to be witty with Sage, but he's just not capable of it. He's not his personality. But he's just, you know, he's a kind, caring kid and You know, he wants to be cooler. He sees Sage as cool, but also doesn't like Sage because Sage somewhat mean but to him. 01:12:32.13 Jala Well, the thing that I was going to say, though, is that Sage with everybody in the town dumping on them, you know, then going, well, I know magic. These people don't know anything like it kind of causes a reciprocal disregard, if you will. 01:12:50.60 Mottzy Yeah, yeah, for sure. 01:12:50.70 Jala So it tracks. I mean, it makes sense for the character in the situation that they're in to have that kind of personality trait. 01:12:56.88 Mottzy Yeah, well, and every character, too, has a personality trait. Because I don't know how to write characters, I've never written characters like this before, when we were investigating it, when we were developing the characters, I went into, there's like a website that you can look up the personality traits, the INFP, ENFP, all that. So I went to that website and I just started reading all the different personalities and then developing the characters based upon these archetypes. 01:13:27.76 Jala That's great. Okay. 01:13:29.40 Mottzy Yeah. So all of their profiles have a primary archetype and a secondary archetype. So even though like one of them might be an INFP or whatever, I also found some traits of other ones I thought were relevant as like a secondary personality part. And then we built their stories around those types of personalities. I don't know how true they stay to those now because haven't gone back and looked at their personalities, but that was at least how we got started with them. 01:13:58.10 Jala Right, right. Well, that's pretty awesome. I mean, for me, like I tend to write characters and I have the characters and the overall concept before i flesh out the rest of the story. So like the characters, people are interesting to me. So characters are something that I am drawn to. So that's like the big thing for me. So that's very funny that I would have not thought to just go and look at the little personality test thing and then take that to make your characters off of or at least to start them. 01:14:26.44 Mottzy Well, you know, I'm an engineer, right? 01:14:28.47 Jala Right. 01:14:29.21 Mottzy My career has been in software development, so I'm very methodical. So whenever I start doing something before I know how to do it intuitively, I have to have to do it by thinking through it and like logicking my way. And to me, the logical way to develop a character that regard was, okay, we've defined the characters we want as in their names and kind of roughly who they are. let Now I need to figure out their base personality trait. And I did little character profiles for each one. I talked about their backstory and what sort of critical event happened that shaped their life. And, you know, a few other things about who they were and sort of how they became who they are. And then once I had that, I don't ever refer back that ever. I never go back. And I don't know how true some of this stuff is, like I was saying, but at least gave me way to get over that hump and then actually develop the characters. 01:15:20.45 Jala Right, right. Well, I mean, we talked about it, not on mic, but we did talk about how when you were first developing Sage, nobody liked Sage because there weren't the choices to make between the different dialogue options. And so like when you can choose whether or not Sage says something mean, that made the character likable for everybody. 01:15:52.40 Mottzy It's funny how that worked. Yes. The first demo, which we probably can't. We have it somewhere. But the first demo, all the characters spoke for themselves. They had their own voices. And everyone hated Sage because Sage was always snarky. Because that's what Sage would do. Sage would take the snarky path. Then when we got the publisher and revised the demo based upon this idea that the characters would be voiced by the players, the players wouldn't choose wouldn't like write their words, but they would choose something that would be in their voice. It gave me an opportunity as the writer to have alternative versions for the characters. And once that happened, it was amazing how many people like Sage. It was completely reversed. Everyone loves Sage because, you know, everyone wants to be a little snarky in video games. yeah You want to be like I don't want to do that thing. And see, so you can choose it to be completely mean. Which I thought was really funny to watch that transition from everyone hates this one character too now it's the one they want to use because, you know, they can stay in bed all day if they want to, which is the funniest thing. It's like the people spirit animal is I want to sleep all day long and that's it. 01:17:07.12 Jala Living the dream. Living the dream. 01:17:08.74 Mottzy I know. Yeah. 01:17:09.60 Jala But yeah, so also the birbs. ah The birbs are important for to me because I love birds. And so there are birds in this game. The chickens that were aforementioned, there's also another type of bird. 01:17:25.39 Mottzy The Shobii? Is that what you mean? 01:17:26.16 Jala Yes. Mm-hmm. 01:17:27.35 Mottzy The mounted bird that you can ride? That is totally not like every other trope. 01:17:33.20 Jala It's so cool. 01:17:33.52 Mottzy It's actually not based on Chocobo. It's based off of a bird from... ah What's the name of the game? Ragnarok Online. So Ragnarok... ah was done by Gravity or owned by Gravity. And Gravity was our publisher. Gravity Game Arise from Japan. And so we use whatever. There's some bird in there that um Jacob based it off of. But yeah, I mean, obviously Chocobo, right? I mean, Chocobo is like the foundation of a ridable bird. But and the actual style of this Shobi based on Ragnarok Online games. 01:18:12.37 Jala Cool. Cool. And the chickens. When are we getting Uglyfacington? 01:18:20.12 Mottzy Uglyfacington what? Plushie? 01:18:21.77 Jala Yes. 01:18:23.23 Mottzy You know, I was supposed to... 01:18:24.27 Jala Makeship's gotta to happen sometime. 01:18:26.34 Mottzy I know, but they have to they wanted us to fill out all this stuff. And I can't do that. It's got to be Jacob because he's the one that does all the visual stuff. And he just hasn't had any time. 01:18:36.68 Jala Okay, gotcha. 01:18:36.93 Mottzy We want to we want to get a Makeship out there so that we can get people some plushies. I had a lot of fun making these characters. And the funniest thing to me about the chicken names is that they were all placeholder names. I made a demo or like when I refreshed the demo in the chicken catching quest, I wanted to give them names because I now had the option to really easily do branching dialogue. ah So I just came up with four random names. And that was it. I wanted to have like my vision was just like 100 random names. Like I would eventually go in and make a bunch. And I probably will. There's still going to be these, you know, Jeremy and Petunia Wigglebottom and Uglyfacington, but we'll probably have a bunch of others too at some point. 01:19:24.52 Jala Well, it's funny because I can't remember the first chicken either because the first one has a different name and I can't remember that chicken's name for the life of me, but it wasn't as funny. And it was it was like just a name, just a name of a name you would give a chicken, you know? There was that one and then the next one was Petunia Wigglebottom but Petunia Wigglebottom looks very angry and I was very amused by that because you know like that particular one and then it's Jeremy and then Uglyfacington. 01:19:54.94 Mottzy I know it's just random Jeremy and then Uglyfacington and they're all chickens. They're all chickens, but you know, I think the first one even has a male name, like a masculine name, but they're all chickens, right? Which is funny. And Jacob actually was the one that had the idea to make the visual pictures of them, which I think really cemented the personalities of those chickens, those random chickens. And the funny part is doesn't matter which one you catch first. It's always the same first one when you deliver, which is, I find that hilarious in my mind, but yeah, I don't know what first one is either. 01:20:33.15 Jala I have a screenshot somewhere. I'll find it sometime later and I'll message you. 01:20:35.93 Mottzy I can literally look it up in the game. I can go look it up in the game if I want to, but where's the fun in that? 01:20:39.55 Jala Right. Right. So yeah, we've already kind of talked about the early access part and everything like that. So let's move on to talking about the visuals. So you've got those overhauled and basically you said all of the main character sprites are changing or is it every sprite in the game is changing? 01:21:01.58 Mottzy Oh, God, no, we can't. 01:21:03.24 Jala I was going to say 01:21:03.62 Mottzy Unfortunately, no. We don't have the time or the budget to change out all sprites. And I think that the baseline NPC style is fine. There's nothing wrong with it because you don't really you don't need those to be as individualized. um All of the main characters, though, are getting a makeover, which in the Kickstarter, people could see the Atlas, Pyre and Sage. We also have the Hermit and Dolion we're sharing with people. We have three other, well, two other characters. I'm not going to spoil too much here, but we're going seven total supporting characters. And all of those ones that we've defined are also getting themselves overhauled too. Just a much better style. They feel more epic as characters and they don't blend in as much to the background because they're stylistically standouts from what the rest of the background looks like, which I think is what you'd want with that which is super exciting. ah You know, the artist Wayne really captured the personalities of those characters from the art that Mosqi did, which was a, re you know, a revision of the original key art we did for the game. And I think Mosqi's done such an amazing job capturing the real personalities of the characters that we just like, well, you have to make the characters in game match them, right? You got to make them align. So people really feel that connection. 01:22:28.12 Jala Right, right. Well, I was going to say, Mosqi's art is the art that I gravitate to the most out of the illustrations. 01:22:39.63 Mottzy Mosqi is amazing too. Mosqi does there's a digital sketch and then digital line art to like finalize it and then prints it out. And I believe Mosqi even retraces it onto paper that then he paints it with watercolor and then scans it. It's amazing. 01:22:58.55 Jala Well see. I was in the Watercolor Art Society here in town for a number of years. And so watercolor is one of my things. So I have a predisposition to liking that kind of thing. 01:23:13.15 Mottzy Yeah, well, we were when we were trying to revise the key art, we were looking at Mosqi and then we were looking at another artist that does things that are more like Final Fantasy-esque. And the other artist, like I can't remember what the pricing was different, but the other artist wasn't available. And I saw Mosqi's like, ah you know, it's okay, whatever. But I'm so glad we went with Moski. I think that the vibrant colors and the feel really fits closer to what we're trying to accomplish. And what I find the most interesting is that Mosqi's art is kind of a combination of multiple worlds. It's a digital and physical medium being combined. And since our game also kind of sits in the middle, it's like it's a 3D game on the back end. Like it looks like, but it looks like a 2D game if you see a screenshot of it. the one Until you start playing and you realize, oh, it's actually 3D. Well, that's crazy. So I like the notion of having an artist that's also using um a style that's a mixed medium like that. 01:24:12.53 Jala Well and then too a lot of the JRPGs that I played way back in the day if you opened up all of those instruction manuals--remember when you had those?--they would have that art it was all watercolor it was all watercolor art in there so you know 01:24:25.26 Mottzy Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, we got lucky. I mean, I know we chose Mosqi, but we got lucky that the timing worked out. He just recently did some new art for us. We can't share, but we're really excited eventually to share it. He's just a very solid, amazing artist. And what we really like is he seems to like us, which is good. Sometimes you do work with contractors and like, yeah, I'll just do this thing for you because you want it but both Mosqi and our musician, Jonathan, they really seem invested in what we're doing. They care about what we're doing and they like the project and they support us. And that's really fun and kind of unique and rare, I think. 01:25:12.96 Jala Right. Well, and that that kind of aligns with the whole Drattzy Games vision in the first place of having that kind of invested, you know, experience for everybody involved, him including the people making the game. And that includes, by extension, anybody who's contracted to work on the game. 01:25:32.02 Mottzy Yes, but it's ah it's hard to, but you know, when... o This is more of a personal thing, and and i don't know if you need you don't need to include this or not, but I'll just tell you this, that my history of trying to do projects has met with a lot of failure trying to find people who are interested in working with me on projects. Not because of me, but because people aren't interested. There's no alignment, right? 01:25:55.06 Jala Right. 01:25:57.22 Mottzy And so to see some of this stuff coming together, it's really... nice and extremely surprising sometimes. Like we have Agua and Galette who are doing the pixel art stuff for us. And they are so engaged in what we're doing. And we're in their community, even though they're contractors, even though they're not full time all the time. They want to be part of it and They want to to go back and forth. And, you know, Mosqi's just plugging our work. And we we're not asking him to, but he wants to. And Jonathan, he's not only is he promoting us, he's doing things like getting real instruments, like getting a guitarist to come in and play portions. He got a singer for one of the songs, which you guys haven't heard yet. A singer to sing in a different language for one of the musical tracks. We didn't, we're not giving him extra for it. He's like, but it's going to be better if we do it this way. And like, that's amazing. That's a lot of investment. And it gives me chills to think about because it is really hard to build a team. And it's really hard to build a team of people who are interested. and it's amazing to find this coming together for us. well Despite, you know, my previous failures at trying to build teams. Yeah. 01:27:12.16 Jala Right. Well, and that's a thing too that I've experienced as well. Sometimes you just, even if you have people who have the knowledge or have the capacity or have the time or any combination of those things, sometimes the visions just don't align or the personality types. And, you know, there's not a lot that you can do about that. You know, like if they're invested, they're invested. And if they're not, they're not. I mean, people kind of come into any kind of an exchange with like a preconceived concept of how they're going to leave the room you know what i mean so yeah 01:27:50.02 Mottzy Yeah, and mean and I know like logically I know how it works. And, you know, emotionally it can be hard when you're trying to get things done and you don't have support. So when it does come together, it's just like a relief. It's really enjoyable and good feels. And hopefully it validates that what we're doing has interest. I mean, i think the Kickstarter validates that too, but I just mean even on the creation side of it. I hope that what we will do eventually when we have a stable studio is show that these values that we have, these got these ah game what did I call it--guiding principles. 01:28:34.83 Jala Guiding principles. 01:28:36.79 Mottzy I always forget the term I use there. These guiding principles will have actual meaning and not just be you know buzzwords or you know brand words that lot of companies do. 01:28:49.53 Jala Absolutely. So moving on and talking a little bit about the music, you already said, Jonathan's been doing a whole lot to build these tracks up and make them better. You know, just because he's invested in the project, which is awesome. The music overall is really fantastic from the bits that I've heard, even the works in process, you know, the stuff that he's in the middle of working on. I'm like, Oh yeah, I know like this isn't hundred percent done yet, but I can already tell it's fantastic stuff. And that stuff that I've picked up both from the Discord and also from the Patreon because you guys do have the Patreon just for little extra stuff if people want to kick a few bucks that way and get other behind the scenes stuff that isn't available anywhere else. 01:30:01.49 Mottzy Yeah, the Patreon...It's weird to have a Kickstarter and say, but also back our Patreon. But when you have a small studio, you've got to find ways to generate revenue to continue to do things, right? It's just, you have a business, you've got to find revenue streams. um But what we decided was the Patreon, you won't always get things purely exclusive, you know, in perpetuity. But Patreon people get things at least a month in advance before anyone else gets a chance to see them. And some things we will only leave on the paid Patreon because it's secretive enough that we don't want it to be public yet, not until we're further along. But it's been really kind of fun to have that funnel where we shoot things out to patreon Patreons, Patrons, um Patreons. 01:30:46.43 Jala Patrons. Mm-hmm. 01:30:48.37 Mottzy And then we get to hear some feedback from them. And that also helps sort of guide what we're going to bump up to other people, you know, the backers and just public posting and stuff like that. So that's been fun too. 01:31:01.81 Jala Awesome. Awesome. So the battle system you mentioned is getting overhauled. So what what's the new version like? Like I've already played the demo. Is that something you can't talk about until it's-- 01:31:15.54 Mottzy Oh, no, I can talk about it. I wanted to have it ready. We wanted to have a working demo of it in this next release. But now it's looking like it'll be in the follow on release um because it's a complete overhaul. We started this game and I said, I want on map battles. But we started using an engine that has the current battle system as one of its baselines.And while we've enhanced that engine, it's the classic side view, you know, it's changed to another map and then do your battle and then change back to where you were on the map. That's the sort of style of the battle, right? Side view, choose your attack, do your thing, move on. It's not a very exciting battle system. There's things about it that are just so basic that we know we knew we wanted to improve it. But since I was working with an existing engine, it was very difficult to work with. So this vision of battle always goes back to the Chrono Trigger characters jump out and get into a fight and then you finish and you're right back, you know, there's no map switch or anything. This is not unique, nor is it even recently unique with games like Sea of Stars. 01:32:31.65 Jala right 01:32:31.97 Mottzy But it also feels better in general for this game to have that. And Without even talking about the battle mechanics, the one thing that will set this battle system apart is that it can happen anywhere in a map on any level of terrain without us as the developers having to be very carefully scripting what's happening when and where. Most of these systems that do on-map battles, even though it's happening within the map, they still have to carefully script where everybody goes. And we'll have some of that for a certain battles um because we're in a 3d world. We can even move the camera wherever we want. We can move the battle in mid battle. We can move it wherever we want. And the characters will be able to move because they're all designed to be able to walk around on this terrain, which to me is very intriguing. There's a lot of interesting things we can do. If a monster hits you while you're, you know, on half of a path, you stay on the path and the monster can be down on the ground or above you or something. And it doesn't really affect the mechanics of the battle. Although I might want to do something where if it's a different height, maybe I have the high ground, so you're did is stronger or something. So I really like that concept because I think it'll give us a much more dynamic flavor than games like Sea of Stars, where it's very evident that they had to script out where everything goes for the battles for every battle, right? Every time you fight this monster, it always goes to exactly this spot because this is where they have to be in the battle to make it make sense, which is not what ours is going to be. Then as far as the mechanics of the battle, um we are continuing to incorporate the notion of choice. So the thing I think that will stand out is first off the base mechanics, as you see, like the attack, whatever, that's going to be there. But every action you take can have modifiers. So an attack, you can choose to do full on attack. Use all your power, like which would mean maybe there's a there's a consequence like you have to skip your next turn because you used up all your energy on that attack or you can do a reserved attack, and by doing so, you do less damage, but then maybe you build up some of your magic back you build up some other resistance. Or with magic, using your skills, you can use any skill, no matter what the cost is, but if you want to use a skill that costs more than you have, you spend all of your magic to use it and it does less effect. So it's less effective because you're spending less on it. I like the notion that the battles then become ah matter of you choosing when and where you want to either use overpowered or reserved attacks. And... ways in which you might use up all your magic to do something, then you have to use a non-magical attack or your one of your other basic things to rebuild some of your magic so you can then go forward. Every character is going to have their own abilities and capabilities for the character style. So Pyra is always going to be melee. So she's very, very obvious and easy. Atlas shoots arrows. So being able to target more than one enemy seems like a normal thing you should be able to do if you have arrows. But then Sage is a mage. So Sage's base attack should be a melee attack. It's going to be some kind of magical thing you can do. um So that's sort of, you know, that's where people are going to get some of the flavor. The battle system itself is much more robust than what ah the core engine we started with has. So we'll be able to do a lot more customizations per character style, do better AIs for the monsters, um and just make the overall flavor feel better for people. 01:36:38.08 Jala Right, right. So some of the things that you were mentioning there, I immediately have games that I like in my head that I was I was referring to. I was thinking about Azure Dreams when you mentioned the different, you know, but possibly having the different levels have like a bonus or a minus to you know your stats in the battle depending upon you know like where you are relative to what you're attacking um because in that game that one is like it's turn-based but it's like you move a square and the enemy moves a square kind of you know kind of thing um but 01:37:13.30 Mottzy Mm-hmm. Like a tactical turn-based. 01:37:16.03 Jala Yeah, it's a single character that has some little critters with him. And you're going through this randomly generated dungeon. Various floors of a tower and those floors change every time you go. And so like you can't rely on memory of the map because the map keeps changing. 01:37:31.93 Mottzy Mm-hmm. 01:37:36.51 Jala And as you go through though, there's elements and some of the elements are stronger against other ones, but there's also like the level changes make a difference to the attacks and in your defense. So all of those things become things you have to really worry about. And if there happens to be a trap too, cause like that, that's a totally different element, but like, if there happens to be a trap, you can lure. 01:37:57.58 Mottzy Oh, yeah. We're not going to go that crazy, but yeah. 01:37:59.39 Jala Yeah. Yeah. You can lure like critters over to the traps and things like that as well, which is really fun. 01:38:05.19 Mottzy Yeah, we certainly are keeping more of the turn-based concept without having too much of the world interact. But yeah, I think there's going opportunity for us to do things like the level effect. Because in reality, this is a number, right? I can tell what the height difference is. So one character is higher than the other. I might be able to just affect their damage. 01:38:26.37 Jala Well, it's kind of like in Shining Force, a very easy example. In Shining Force, you've got centaurs, but centaurs are very, very fast moving. They have a high movement rate, except when they're in like mountains or forest areas. And then the terrain drops down their ability to move. I mean, drops everybody's ability to move, you know, changes everybody's. But like the centaurs very, very noticeably, you know, they go from being able to go completely across the map to oh, you can go like two squares. 01:38:57.62 Mottzy Yeah. So, you know, We are so the core of that system is in place. We are still toying with how these differing effects will happen. um But we just want to make sure it's done right. I don't want to rush to get a new battle system out just to get it out when I know that there's still work to be done. So that's where we're at with it, though. 01:39:23.32 Jala Awesome. So while you were at PAX, you had Ven run a pop-up ARG thing. And that was fun. i was in the middle of that. I was in the middle of cooking when ah that that started. So that went really well. And you guys have plans for more of those in the future. So how do those tie into the game itself? I mean, I know the answer, but. 01:39:52.93 Mottzy That was Ven's idea. I mean, he's a moderator under a different name in the Sea of Stars server. And Sea of Stars does ARG, so that's where he got some of the motivation for it. 01:40:03.09 Jala Oh, okay. Cool. 01:40:04.52 Mottzy I've never done ARG. have no idea about it. I was like, I don't know if I'd ever participated in one personally. So I let him run with it. That one was actually supposed to be multiple days, but he had some personal things come up. So he was able to sort of scramble to get it on one day, which I think was probably better, just a single day of it. He wants to do more. And we absolutely support it. I'm not, as an individual, I'm not very no knowledgeable about what it takes to make a successful Discord server and what people want in those servers and half the things people want, I'm probably not interested in because I've got to make a game, right? 01:40:44.25 Jala Right. Right. 01:40:46.32 Mottzy I like talking to people, but I don't really participate in any things. So Ven really wants to be able to do things like this. So we're encouraging him. um He liked the outcome of that and he'll want to plan another ARG. We just don't know timing wise what will work. And yeah you can expect to see something. I don't know what that something is or when that something is, but yeah, 01:41:10.24 Jala That all kind of depends on him then. 01:41:13.41 Mottzy If we hear a lot of people asking more about it or you know poking us about it, what we might consider doing something sooner. 01:41:16.24 Jala Right. 01:41:19.92 Mottzy But we just haven't yet. We got a game to make, so it just hasn't been a priority yet. 01:41:24.10 Jala Right, right. So tell me a little bit about like, what are your aspirations for like the player experience when they come into Alterium Shift? 01:41:35.68 Mottzy Are you talking about the just from the beginning are you talking about overall within the game? 01:41:39.98 Jala You take that question and run with it whatever direction you feel like answering. 01:41:46.81 Mottzy I think there's a couple things i would go I would go towards and I would mirror the experience I had with Chrono Trigger. What I want people to experience is that sense of wonder when you see something that looks like, oh, it's just your basic RPG. And then you start realizing there's more under the hood. And then the more you play it, the more depth you find out of it. I want people to feel like feel like they never found enough of the game. They've they never explored enough, that there's always more that they could possibly do. I want every phase of the game in which they get exposed to a new concept to be like, whoa, wait, so now I can do that? And then they get excited to go back and like try other things. you know We want a game that people don't just do a one and done. We want to encourage them to go back the game is designed so that um there are multiple endings and that going back as other characters will ultimately have value for them so we'll want them encourage them to go back and play as other characters we would encourage them to have as many saves as they want and jump around between their saves um we really want people to feel like engaged and interested in what all the things that they can do. Or, you know, the flip side is at the end of the day, we want them to enjoy their experience and the choices they have, whether they play as one character or all of them. We want them to feel like, wow, that was that was enjoyable. like I came, I went through the whole game. I've got the end. I'm satisfied with where I'm at. And I feel like it hung together and was an enjoyable experience. 01:43:37.18 Jala Awesome. Awesome. You said right at the moment, of course, development is still in process. So, you know, asterisk next to anything we're thinking Q1 2026 is when stuff is going to be--? 01:43:52.97 Mottzy Yep. Our strategy for the rest of this year is to do as many releases of updates as we can while trying to finish the game. So we won't be releasing any new content beyond what this next release will have. We'll probably be releasing like content updates and fixes and we'll expand content in existing areas, but we're not going to produce any more. We're not going to release any more story beyond what this next release will have. But in that timeframe, we want to get that UI reskin out. We want to get um the on-map abilities refined out. We want to get the racing minigame delivered, ah the cooking minigame, or not minigame, but the cooking and alchemy capability. No one's going to be able to build their own house in the current version because that's later in the game. But... you know or not build their own house, get their own house. um So we want to get a lot of features released by end of the year and then finish the game. Then we just want to finish the game, which is a lot more, it's less technical by that point and more just content, which is honestly the easiest part of the game is writing the content you know other than having to do the work, which is work, but it's not hard to write content. It's hard to solve technical problems that we need to make sure feel good and are well tested and they work well. It's hard to go back. and you Complicated cinematic sequences are challenging, but it's not, I wouldn't call that the biggest challenge of the game. It's of making the game. It's the you know all the other pieces that fit together. So yeah, I mean, you know, what's left on development docket, all the things I've mentioned pretty much, including the battle system. And I did mention the save system too. So I guess that's another piece is just solidifying the way save the save absorption is going to work. And then finishing all the content. 01:46:07.46 Jala Right, right. So just to wrap up, because we've already talked a lot about Drattzy and Alterium Shift. Do you have any words of wisdom for anybody else out there who is interested in making games? 01:46:22.96 Mottzy I'm going to mirror what you've probably heard from a lot of people. The thing about game dev is you have to start getting content out there. Work on your ideas, share them with people, and figure out what works. Do game jams if you don't know where to start. But once you have something that you really think you want to work on, develop it as much as you can. Even if it's a, you know, a small one hour session a day, do some work on it. Even if it's just once a week, post something on whatever your favorite social media platform is. Get information out there and start posting it and learning what people like. And if you're not getting any traction, then just release something. Just get something out there and then see what people think and then release the next thing. um Because that's the only way that I've heard developers are successful is by doing the thing and releasing the thing, whatever that is. 01:47:28.90 Jala you're right 01:47:29.18 Mottzy Sometimes that thing happens to be super popular and then you've made it. ah Most times it's not. you got You just got to keep doing. Honestly, that's like a for life, really, right? Whatever you want to do, you can't rely on something magical to happen. You've got to keep doing and learning and improving. 01:47:46.61 Jala Right, right. So we are all slaves to the algorithm gods. 01:47:53.76 Mottzy Yes, unfortunately. 01:47:54.86 Jala Yep, yep. But if you could be anything or anyone in the world of Alterium Shift, who or what would you be? 01:48:06.15 Mottzy I don't think I've ever even thought about that question. I mean, technically, I'm already a number of the people in the game. Uh, who? Okay, no, like, at this point in life, who would I want to be I'd want to be, you know, one the guys that's like fishing all day. You know, well I don't like, I don't like fishing, but presuming I liked fishing. But, you know, one of the people who's just like living in a town and relaxing. Not the people that are going out and fighting the bad guys. No one, no one important. No one anyone knows anything about it. 01:48:42.87 Jala Right, right. So that's cool. And so y'all have been working your butts off to get this game done. You continue to do that. And, you know, that that's the way of things. 01:48:56.72 Jala Once it's launched, are you all going to join some kind of a bootcamp so you can work your glutes back into shape? So you got glutes again. 01:49:05.29 Mottzy Well, I stand all day, so I don't know what you're talking about. I don't sit on my bottom. You know, it's funny because most people, when they launch games, they do the opposite. They, like, collapse. 01:49:17.02 Jala Yeah. Yeah. 01:49:18.03 Mottzy They don't go do a bootcamp. But, yeah, I don't know, man. 01:49:22.19 Jala I know. I'm just teasing you. 01:49:23.35 Mottzy We're going to start working on the next game is what we're going to do we launch it. Or the next DLC. 01:49:28.03 Jala You already have your ideas up here? 01:49:33.30 Mottzy Yeah, we have ideas. We're intentionally not spending a lot of time on what's next because we need to get what's now. But, you know, game studios can only survive by continuing to release something. You can't live off of one game launch. 01:49:50.24 Jala Right. 01:49:51.92 Mottzy So, you know, if we're going to make this a thing, we got to keep working after this. 01:49:56.94 Jala That's right. Well, first you need to get some sleep. So before I let you go, so you can do that sleeping business, where in the world can people find you on the internet and find the game? 01:50:07.64 Mottzy Well, the... Yeah, the most obvious and easiest place to find us is alteriumshift.com. um Alter-E-M, Alterium. We also have drattzygames.com, which you can find associated links. We are on Twitter. Some people might call it X, but we're under dratsy on Twitter. And um otherwise, Steam, you can look for Alterium Shift. I think you got the links down there. So all these different places. 01:50:36.41 Jala All the links will be in the show notes as well. But a lot of people, they just like to hear it. They don't ever read the show notes. So, you know, for those people who want to hear it, yeah you're also on Bluesky. 01:50:43.18 Mottzy Oh, certainly. I mean, thankfully we're searchable on Google. So if you search for Alterium Shift, you'll find a link to us, right? 01:50:51.58 Jala Right. 01:50:53.92 Jala You'll find it. Mm hmm. 01:50:55.42 Mottzy Or, or Drattzy might be, I'm not sure which one is easier remember. Alterium is not too hard to remember how to spell, but Drattzy Games is, you know, not too hard either. So. 01:51:07.63 Jala Well, either way, either way. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to me about working on this game and the release of it and all the updates and all of that wonderful fun stuff. I have appreciated that. As for me and this show and all of that wonderful fun, if folks already don't know this, you can find me on all platforms I may be found @jalachan, including jalachan.place where you found this episode and all of the others. So, 01:51:37.31 Jala Until next time, take care of yourself, remember to smile, and don't chase the chicken off the cliff. 01:51:45.90 Mottzy Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jala. Appreciate it. 01:51:48.49 Jala Thank you. Bye-bye. [Show Outro] Jala Jala-chan's Place is brought to you by Fireheart Media. If you enjoyed the show, please share this and all of our episodes with friends and remember to rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice. Word of mouth is the only way we grow. If you like, you can also kick us a few bucks to help us keep the lights on at ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia. Check out our other show Monster Dear Monster: A Monster Exploration Podcast at monsterdear.monster. Music composed and produced by Jake Lionhart with additional guitars and mixed by Spencer Smith. Follow along with my adventures via jalachan.place or find me at jalachan in places on the net! [Outro Music]