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Rollers of the Realm: Reunion interview with Tony Walsh

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·52m 6s·analyzed·Feb 14, 2022
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Phantom Compass director Tony Walsh on Rollers of the Realm: Reunion's design evolution and indie development challenges.

Summary

Tony Walsh, founder of Phantom Compass, discusses the development of Rollers of the Realm: Reunion, a pinball-RPG hybrid sequel releasing in 2022. The conversation covers the original game's creation (2011-2014), the 8-year gap before the sequel, funding challenges for indie developers, and significant gameplay innovations including hot-swapping characters, directional launching, and diverse playfield types beyond traditional pinball.

Key Claims

  • Phantom Compass was founded in 2008 and has been operating for 14 years

    high confidence · Tony Walsh directly states founding year and math provided in conversation

  • The original Rollers of the Realm was released in 2014 after concept work began in 2011

    high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'from concept in like 2011 to receiving funding in 2012 or 2013 and then finishing the game in late 2014'

  • The 8-year gap between games was primarily due to funding program constraints that didn't support sequels until guidelines changed

    high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'we made the first Rollers in 2014 and couldn't figure out a way to make a sequel under those funding programs until they changed the guidelines and started providing for sequels'

  • Rollers of the Realm: Reunion is targeting a 2022 release but specific month is uncertain

    high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'we do have that 2022 release date looming. I wish I knew exactly which month, but we're working real hard to get it out this year'

  • The sequel reduces playable characters from 10 to 5, with hot-swapping mechanics replacing the character selector system

    high confidence · Tony Walsh detailed character system changes: 'we really wanted to focus in on five available characters' and 'you can hot swap at any time'

  • Rollers of the Realm: Reunion includes diverse playfield types beyond pinball: side-scrolling, top-down marble rolling, platforming, and pinball stealth

    high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'We have side-scrolling. We have top-down marble rolling, parkour and platforming. And we even have pinball stealth'

  • The original game's plunger mechanic is replaced with a called-shot launch system from between the flippers

    high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'The traditional plunger, which was in the first game most of the time, is now mostly not available in the sequel. What we have instead is the ball spawns between the flippers'

  • Phantom Compass ranges in size from 6-26 people depending on projects and relies heavily on service work to sustain operations

Notable Quotes

  • “I grew up in pinball and video game arcades in the late 70s, early 80s. You know, D&D was like the first role-playing game I ever played, you know, at the age of like 10 or something like this. And so it was kind of like all this stuff always comes back.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~12:00 — Explains the creative inspiration and personal motivation behind blending pinball and RPG mechanics

  • “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~28:15 — Succinctly articulates the classic project management constraint triangle in game development

  • “When you don't have that set of constraints – I mean, you still have a budget and you still have a timeline, but you have other levers that you can pull. It's a lot more 'you're a master of your own ship,' but you know, there's a lot more going on that has to be dealt with.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~29:45 — Contrasts the freedom and chaos of developing original IP versus contract work

  • “The first game as well – we turned pinball tilt into RPG agility. So it's okay to tilt. We expect you and want you to tilt.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~49:30 — Key design philosophy change: reframing a traditional pinball mechanic (avoiding tilt) as a core gameplay element

  • “We don't get to make the same game twice. Which is why it's a pleasure to work on the sequel to Rollers of the Realm.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~18:45 — Illustrates the indie studio's diverse project portfolio and the rarity of sequels in their workflow

  • “It's been tough because we rely on that kind of feedback to make improvements to the game... we don't get to workshop this thing in front of actual game players that much.”

    Tony Walsh @ ~53:00 — Indicates pandemic impact on playtesting and iterative development

Entities

Tony WalshpersonPhantom CompasscompanyRollers of the RealmgameRollers of the Realm: ReuniongameJosspersonEricapersonSilicon KnightscompanyTriversalgameChris Freebus (Shut Your Trap)person

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Phantom Compass relies on contract/service work to sustain operations between original game releases; indie sustainability model requires diversified revenue streams

    high · Tony Walsh: 'if you don't have a breakout hit, then you don't have the money coming in' and 'that's why we do a lot of service work, because it's a great way to keep the lights on'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pandemic prevented in-person playtesting at expos/festivals; studio missing critical real-time feedback from actual players for iterative improvement

    high · Tony Walsh: 'it's been tough because we rely on that kind of feedback to make improvements to the game' and 'we don't get to workshop this thing in front of actual game players that much'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Rollers of the Realm: Reunion intentionally diverges from pure digital pinball (Zen Studios style) to create diverse playfield experiences including side-scrolling, platforming, and stealth modes while maintaining ball-physics core mechanics

    high · Tony Walsh: 'We still don't have very many boards that are just like straight-up Zen Studio-style digital pinball. If you want that kind of game, go play a Zen game' and 'we kind of wanted to have a palette cleanser'

  • ?

    event_signal: Rollers of the Realm free demo released on Steam (late 2021) to drive interest in Reunion sequel; conversion rate from demo to purchase was strong on PlayStation

    high · Tony Walsh: 'We actually did make a free demo for the 2014 Rollers, put that out on Steam. So that was I think late last year we did that. Because we found with PlayStation, they had had a demo and the conversion rate was really good'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.156

0:00
blockade pinball podcast this is the blockade pinball podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world it's jared morgan hey everyone how you going i know i'm doing good we're back quickly here jared it's only been a week since our last one it has yeah it feels sort of weird but sort of good at the same time to be honest yeah part of that reason well i should say the main reason for that is we have content folks we have a uh we have somebody else joining us from another corner of the world um and uh new to the show here so let's get him on right now it is the uh company director and founder of phantom compass uh responsible for rollers of the realm which you guys might know tony walsh hey how you doing Doing well. I know you're East Coast as far as I know, but you're up in Canada, yeah? Yeah, I'm actually in Toronto, Canada. Toronto, okay. North America's fourth largest city.
1:13
Currently overrun by truckers. Yeah, exactly. Yay. Way to clog up the world, guys. Yep. So, just want to get a little background here. uh phantom compass you guys have been around since i believe i read 2010 is that right 2008 actually uh yeah so i guess that makes it like our 14th operating year um yeah it's been a interesting couple you know dozen or so years right and you guys are i mean obviously you're an independent studio um but are you pc primarily do you do mobile what is your what's kind of the scope of fan yeah we're pretty much all platforms uh as far as releases uh go these days you'll find us mostly on windows pc on steam um our uh game rollers of the realm uh which was released in 2014 was released for playstation 4 and playstation vita uh and pc um and we've also done mobile games it's just you won't find many of those uh non-pc products out there uh because The company, basically, we produce original games, and we also do service work for other teams. And sometimes some of the games that we work on for other teams we can't talk about, and others of them that we do produce and release to the consumer market don't have a long shelf life,
2:39

high confidence · Tony Walsh: 'we range in size from say six to 26 people, um, depending on how many projects we have in' and 'that's why we do a lot of service work, because it's a great way to keep the lights on'

Jared Morgan
person
Zen Studioscompany
Yooka-Laylee's Island Expressgame
Farsight Studios / Pinball Arcadecompany/game
Ice Cold Beergame
Devil's Crush / Pinball Questgame
Odamagame

community_signal: Tony Walsh directing Reunion sequel; describes collaborative studio culture with input from all team members (QA, coding, art); iterative design approach with heavy playtesting dependency

high · Tony Walsh: 'I'm directing the second game. It's a very collaborative process... I'm super interested in everybody's opinion, you know, from QA to coding to, you know, 3D art'

  • ?

    product_strategy: 8-year gap between Rollers of the Realm (2014) and Rollers of the Realm: Reunion (targeting 2022) primarily due to indie funding program constraints that didn't support sequels until guidelines changed

    high · Tony Walsh: 'we made the first Rollers in 2014 and couldn't figure out a way to make a sequel under those funding programs until they changed the guidelines'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Rollers of the Realm: Reunion features significant gameplay design improvements over original: reduced character complexity (5 vs 10), hot-swap mechanics, called-shot launching system, and directional tilt agility to improve accessibility and casual player experience

    high · Tony Walsh detailed multiple mechanical changes designed to 'make this game easier to play and to advantage the player more. Because we did take, in the original game, we took perfectly fine pinball and we actually made it harder.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Original Rollers used non-standard physics scale (weird ball size, playfield angle); Reunion rebuilds physics from scratch with simulated table tilt rather than true physics to improve gameplay feel and consistency

    medium · Tony Walsh: 'in the original game, in Unity, we had a weird scale going on... In the sequel, we are faking the pull-down table... it's all a lot of it's just straight fakery'

    • kind of partner with local TV studios and broadcasters to create content that backs up their televised content. So that would have been like the first half of the company's lifespan is doing a fair bit of kids TV work.
    2:53
    Yes. Also, those ones up on the website, actually, they look interesting. There was a collaboration with I think it was Shell. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've done our share of Adver games and educational games and straight up entertainment here in Canada. We did do a fair bit of work for places like YTV, which is like a kids. It's like the Cartoon Network in the States, I guess, and clients like that. So anywhere from mostly youth market stuff and can be for marketing, education, entertainment.
    3:27
    Is there a particular style of game your studio primarily does or do you kind of have a cross game? Because when I saw the thing, I saw like a racing game. I saw a puzzle game. I saw RPG. It's kind of. Yeah, we're all over the map, you know. it's yeah, it really has been an interesting dozen or so years. I mean, I would really like to specialize a little bit, but just the way that our company career has taken us, we don't often get to make the same game twice, which is why it's a pleasure to work on the sequel to rulers of the realm. Right. But definitely we've gone across the gamut from multiplayer online car combat to puzzle to, you know, visual novel. Yeah, lots of different genres. So I'm curious, just going with Rollers of the Realm,
    4:18
    what made you guys decide that, hey, there's pinball, but then there's RPG. Let's combine the two. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was a dark and stormy night. So actually what ended up happening was after, you know, five or six years doing mostly flash games for kids TV, as I was saying, our little studio needed to kind of amp up its game and increase our capabilities, work on higher quality projects. And we did iUnity as an engine that would be good to work with and start working on some 3D games because we'd really been primarily 2D for years. and we were able to partner up with a round of laid-off triple-a workers in st catherine's ontario which is the former home of silicon knights which was a sort of a triple-a console primarily console company yeah and so there were there was a big round of layoffs there we knew people in there um one of our staff members uh was formerly from that studio uh and her husband uh and a bunch of his friends and so we we just cherry picked some of the best team members um and said hey let's work on something together because my studio makes very compact small scope games in very short amounts of time and you guys have these amazing production values and it takes you three years to finish a game. And if we combine our skills, maybe we can do something that's a so-called triple I or double A release and we can do it quickly. So we thought, okay, we're going to make a game for XNA for the Xbox. And what can we do with like 20-odd people who came to the first few meetings?
    6:16
    We thought, well, what's simple to produce? And we kind of went to ball physics. and you know long story short a lot of the folks who uh were involved in the concepting stages were all kind of you know late 30s early 40s at the time um you know i grew up in pinball and video game arcades uh in the late 70s early 80s uh you know dnd was like the first role-playing game i ever played you know at the age of like 10 or something like this and so it was kind of like all this stuff always comes back you know it's like the stuff you cut your teeth on as a kid always comes back and uh it was really a fun idea for us to consider doing a kind of a medieval themed pinball um and that idea took like two years to get fully funded enough to produce into a real video game okay um and uh we did start on it in x and a and then we switched to unity uh and finished it in Unity. And it also started off as a 2D game in XNA, which is, in case your listeners don't know, it's basically the, it's like middleware to produce indie games for the old Xbox systems. Nowadays you do it differently.
    7:32
    So, yeah, and then we shopped it around at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco one year, and the response was really good, and it sort of bolstered us to look for additional funding. to produce the game, which we had originally targeted for a six-month production cycle. And I think from concept in like 2011 to receiving funding in 2012 or 2013 and then finishing the game in late 2014, you know, it was quite the process. So, you know, we didn't think it was going to take us that long from financing to the completion. But, you know, it was a good journey and we learned a ton as an indie team and we retained some of those AAA team members for quite a while after that game was launched in 2014. Because it's interesting, I mean, that's basically right when digital pinball was just in its infancy. I shouldn't say infancy, but it's just starting to accelerate there, because Zen had been producing some, you know, their independent stuff. Farsight all of a sudden had the pinball arcade, which came out in 2012, and that was really starting to gain by 2014. It was definitely starting to gain traction.
    8:43
    And so it's just like you were right there, right where it was kind of going. And I think, like, the team members who were involved, you know, we had some moderate pinheads on the team. And although I did grow up in arcades, like, I mean, I remember pinball fondly, and I loved to play it. But I am not a pinhead. Like, I'm not even that good at pinball. that pinball um but um you know some of our influences actually were some of the early digital pinball games like um i don't remember which name it shipped on uh as there's um i think it was devil's crush um pinball quest uh these are games for like snes and and uh sega sure um yep you know um odama um for nintendo um which wasn't really pinball but had like it was this crazy game with drumming and rhythm and this big battlefield ball that would go around um so we kind of had yeah yeah we kind of had influences from all over the place um and those of us who had been in the kind of arcade scene and stuff like that so it's a real good a wide range of experience on the whole team which was great right well it's um it's interesting that like you were talking about the, I guess, the lead time going up to the first Rollers of the Realm. And here we are at Reunion, and it's sort of been around that eight-year gap. So I'm wondering if you might explain, is it the reason why there's been such a seemingly long gap between the two releases? Is it because it just takes a long time to sort of envisage the new game and how it works, or is there other factors at play? yeah a little bit um from each category uh so it does take a lot can take a long time to produce a game um in i think on most creative industries there's something that's called development hell which is um trying to find the financing to produce the thing uh and you know along the way of finding financing you may pick up partners along the way that have their own ideas and so on and so forth so when we produce original games here at our studio um we do leverage uh programs that are available here on the um provincial level or state level basically uh and the federal level um and we because of the way that those funds are provided to game developers they're competitive funding programs so you know there may be like 300 submissions and 20 or 30 get selected um And we cater our pitches to those funds to maximize the chance of us getting funded because we'd much rather spend other people's money than spend our own. It really goes a long way to sustaining the studio. And so we made the first rollers in 2014 and couldn't figure out a way to make a sequel under those funding programs until they changed the guidelines and started providing for sequels to be made. and at that time we thought well look like are we crazy why would we not do another rollers game like it was super fun to work on and uh so that's what we did we pitched it and and we're fortunate enough to to get the funding to produce the sequel um and it's turning out to be just as fun if not more fun than working on the first game because it's interesting how the in that interim i had never i hadn't heard of the game i know a few people had kind of made mention of it and that was around the time there was a another game had just come out that i had paid attention to which was uh the yokobu's island express which also does pinball mechanics without being pinball and um and everybody's like oh if you yeah if you like that you get you got to play rollers of the realm and and then soon after i had heard that you guys were working on a sequel and i was just like Oh, well, why don't I just wait for the sequel?
    12:47
    Yeah, fair enough. We actually did make a free demo for the 2014 rollers, put that out on Steam. So that was I think late last year we did that because we found with PlayStation had had a demo and the conversion rate was really good from people trying out the demo to actually buying the game And so we thought, well, you know, the sequel is coming out. We should really try to leverage the first audience in a way to get them motivated to look into the sequel. But, yeah, we're like super stoked. It's our first sequel as a studio. and we do have that 2022 release date looming. I wish I knew exactly which month, but we're working real hard to get it out this year.
    13:36
    Yeah, right. So, well, that's really interesting. I wouldn't have thought that, you know, that's the other bit I think as consumers we don't think about, but how to actually fund the thing and get it out. And it seems like there's a real balancing act. in play there well first of all indie teams like our studio you know we range in size from say six to 26 people um depending on how many projects we have in um and you know we don't have dump trucks full of money dropping off loads of gold coins at our house houses every day so um you know indie studio sustainability is is very tricky and um i'm super fortunate to have been able to lead this studio through the last dozen or so years through the many ups and downs my gosh it is uh you know when i started this studio i had come off a really successful freelance career and i thought oh that it's been so great this freely i'm rolling in dough i should just start a game studio and it It was like, oh, my God, I have to run a business now? Are you kidding me? My background is creative. I'm an artist sort of by origin, and the amount of stuff you had to learn. I mean, I love to learn, which is, I mean, I don't know how you could do it otherwise. But, yeah, it's not for the faint of heart running your own business. And definitely, you know, it's even tougher, you know, if you don't have a breakout hit, then you don't have the money coming in from that game that you sold last. And that's why we do a lot of service work, because it's a great way to keep the lights on and people in full-time jobs. It sounds like I was just going to lead on with another question I had too. I was curious, there must be a difference in the way that a studio works when you're developing sort of the more contracted games versus something like Rollers, where you've got the team in-house and you can really sort of throw ideas around and develop the game in, I guess, the studio's guise, if you want. So how does it differ when you're actually doing contract games versus more long-term games like Rollers? Yeah, contract stuff typically is done for a flat fee. So there's your constraint right off the bat. is you're working backwards from a certain budget. And this is, again, similar to lots of industries. People say, well, how much does it cost to make a game? What's involved? You can say, well, you can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two. Yeah, pick two. The triangle. Yeah, exactly. And that is 100% how it works. And so you are trying to manage constraints. You are trying to manage clients and accounts. And, you know, it's a service business. So you're providing a service and trying to often shepherd the client who may not have a lot of games experience, but their kid plays games through, you know, the actual reality of making a game and what's involved. And that has all of its own rewards and challenges for sure.
    16:55
    You know, making our own games, we can be our own worst enemy in the sense that when you don't have that set of constraints, I mean, you still have a budget and you still have a timeline, but you have other levers that you can pull. You know, you may find you're going over budget in one area. And so you're pulling a little bit from this like lesser used area. It's a lot more you're a master of your own ship, but, you know, there's a lot more going on that has to be dealt with. And thank God. So there's three partners in this studio, our technical director, Joss, and our production head, Erica. And Erica and I mostly wrangle the productions and keep things kind of under control. And we're often working on two to three projects at any given time. When we were working on, and we still are working on Rollers of the Realm Reunion, but last year and the previous year, we were concurrently working on a puzzle game called Triversal. And on top of that, every once in a while, we'll still do service work while we are doing those other two projects. Busting it all in. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, but that's indie life. You know, if you're not making crazy good money on all of your games, which is actually quite rare in the indie space, to be totally frank, you know, you've got to pull the money from somewhere. So we're hustling just like everybody else.
    18:19
    So let's talk a little bit then about where you guys left Rollers of the Realm and where you're now going with it. Like I said, I hadn't played the original. Jared has played the original. We both have played the alpha that you guys were kind enough to provide for us to get a sense of what it is with the first chapter of that game.
    18:44
    So, I mean, my impression just with playing that alpha was just like, hey, this is great. This feels exactly like what you're hoping for. A lot of pinball action. Perfect. There's a lot of aiming going on, which I was worried that it was instead going to be kind of like very simple, basic, yay, there's a flipper and there's some pop bumpers, and that's the end of the story. Whereas this, there's a lot of enemies that are moving, therefore your aiming is mandatory, and your flippers are getting shortened by taking hits and everything. And all of a sudden it was like, hey, there's some strategy that goes on with this. This is really cool. And then add into that the RPG element of throwing in the strategy with upgrading your ball and which ball you're going to use and all that. And I was like communicating that to Jared. He was like, yeah, there was a lot that wasn't in the first game. Yeah. Yeah, it really is an evolution from the first game. I mean, the first game had a lot going for it. You know, it's a product of its time. So it was our first major consumer release. And, you know, if we had to do that one all over again, we'd probably make some changes. But, you know, with that game, you ended up being able to collect up to 10 different characters in your party, each of whom represented a life in pinball and so if you maxed out your 10 uh heroes you could have 10 lives in a pinball board and you actually did need 10 lives in some of the pinball boards it was yeah yeah some of them were brutal pretty punishing yeah yeah so um you know having to learn 10 different character abilities and all this kind of the nuances of all those 10 characters we really wanted to focus in on five available characters. In the alpha you played, there's only four. There's a fifth, which we'll probably announce at some point. And you are able then to get to know on a better tactical level what each hero is capable of. You'll get to be more familiar with their particular physics, their statistics, and their upgrade paths. and it's much easier to wrap your head around the five and focusing on the five and then beyond that whereas in the original game you could field 10 characters at once they were sort of all supposed to be in your party fighting at the same time um and then you would switch between available characters in the first game by cradling the ball um and then uh using a character selector to change what we did in the sequel is that you can hot swap at any time um and your party may consist of up to five heroes but you can only field three of those heroes in any given play field you can actually handicap yourself if you want you can only you can play as few as one um heroes if you if you really want to but um this gives us some dynamics between heroes um and we you're still sort of like tinkering with the balance and whatnot, but there's some nice combinations that can occur where the Knights really good at knocking enemies down. When the enemies get back up again, they're temporarily stunned. When an enemy is stunned, the rogues got a higher chance of her opportunist attack, which is kind of like a surprise attack and can do massive critical damage. So you can kind of set up characters to do different things. You can, if you're the healer, you can build up your mana you can summon her healing staff which is sort of a widget on the pinball field that just pops up wherever you hit her ability button if you hit that thing three times it fully repairs the flippers so you can set that up and then switch to any other character you can use the rogue summon her multi-ball dog while the multi-ball is in play you can switch to another hero so it kind of gives you a lot more flexibility instant flexibility that the first game didn't have yeah i found myself i'd be playing and i was playing with the knight a lot um just because i liked how he was but then it was like wait a second what am i why am i beating my head over you know trying to defeat this i can just swap and and you know lightning zap everybody here and you know so yeah it was kind of like you found yourself settling in a mode and then going wait i've got other tools in my you know chest here that i can be utilizing this is okay i'm gonna have to really wrap my head around this and and doing exactly what you're saying you flip the ball it starts hitting what you want boom immediately hot swap to somebody else and you know let's go so yeah it's very interesting on that the um the other thing i noticed with the just the way the actual characters of the balls into the play field is actually sort of it moves away from the more traditional approach that you had in rollers where you would actually plunge the ball into play yes um whereas now you actually launch the ball into play from between the flippers and you can actually control the direction of it um was that sort of uh obviously that was a change based on probably gameplay feedback you received um or was there is there something else at play there like is there a reason for that design change in the way yeah absolutely i mean it's a big change you know you it's it's our game is not really traditional pinball at all i guess for anyone who's not familiar with it it really is a blend of uh rpg and pinball and then the pinball part of it um you know there are some traditional aspects but we're we're taking definitely taking some liberties and so the traditional plunger which was in the first game most of the time uh is now mostly not available in the sequel and what we have instead That is the ball spawns between the flippers, just above the flippers. And then you can pull back and launch and aim. So your first shot is a called shot. And what we were trying to do with the sequel, and I'm not sure how successful we've been yet because we haven't had enough eyeballs on the game yet.
    24:44
    One thing that we're missing because of the pandemic is we don't get to workshop this thing in front of actual game players that much. Yeah, right. So what our intention is, is to make this game easier to play and to advantage the player more. Because we did take, in the original game, we took perfectly fine pinball and we actually made it harder.
    25:07
    It was challenging, yeah. Yeah, because your flippers get whittled down by enemies. Again, this is in case your audience is not familiar. Enemies will melee and ranged attack your flippers. your flippers kind of represent your combat viability. And as your flippers get whittled down, as you can imagine, A, it changes the dynamic of play. Like now you're working with these stubby little flippers.
    25:32
    And B, obviously your ball will sewer a lot more easily. And that still happens in this game, but we afford you a lot more ways to actively take care of that problem from your very first shot on a pinball board, which is a called shot. so one thing that we found the more casual gamers were having trouble with was hitting specific targets so we just give you a little nudge off the top and go ahead and get that target if that what you want to do and speaking of nudge the first game as well we turned pinball tilt into RPG agility So it's okay to tilt. We expect you and want you to tilt, and you would tilt left and tilt right as you might expect in pinball. In Ruler's Reunion, you can literally move in any direction. Tilting goes in any direction you move the thumbstick. and that opens up a whole lot of other gameplay modes that are not strictly pinball but are ball physics related.
    26:34
    And we did borrow from a physical pinball, not pinball, a physical arcade machine called Ice Cold Beer by Taito. Oh, yes. Great game. So we have a couple play fields in the game that are pretty much that. Awesome. Yeah, yeah. So we have side-scrolling. we have top-down marble rolling uh parkour and platforming and we even have pinball stealth uh which is pretty crazy okay yeah yeah pinball stealth geez that's gonna be interesting yeah it's i was actually gonna ask this is one of the questions i wanted to know like it from something that was very flat out just traditional pinball in the first rollers to these like just in the demo alone there's like about three or four different gameplay styles in the way of the extra play field mechanics like you know as you say platforming and and maze like action as well that must have been a bit of a jump to actually go how do we level up the first game and how would you how did you actually make that decision to bring these elements in to the to the Well, we iterate a fair bit and it was definitely like I'm directing the second game. It's a very collaborative process when we have a small studio.
    27:53
    You know, everybody's got a say on how the game is coming along. And, you know, although I'm directing it, I'm super interested in everybody's opinion, you know, from QA to coding to, you know, 3D art or whatever the case might be. So we wanted to give you a little break from traditional pinball from time to time. I think that there is definitely a balancing act to be had with regards to keeping enough traditional pinball to satisfy that gameplay urge. and we do have a majority of the boards are sort of the more traditional style pinball. We still don't have very many boards that are just like straight up like Zen Studio style digital pinball. If you want that kind of game, go play a Zen game. But our game is we play a lot with the wide aspect ratio of the screen because tilt is agility. you're kind of expected to move laterally a lot more often than you would in traditional pinball. But in any case, we kind of wanted to have a palette cleanser and to have a few more fun things to work on because we'd already done a full pinball game and we're just like, well, what else can we do that's still ball physics, but also super fun. And so we'll continue to kind of keep an eye on where we've gone with some of this stuff. And I think it's possible. There could be some people that played the original game that are like, I wanted every play field to be straight pinball, and I'm disappointed that there's some side-scrolling thing. But I think most people will be pretty happy about some of the changes we've made. Yeah, I was going to say, honestly, when I get kind of annoyed at – and this is mostly on mobile games that we see this – where you know that they want to go kind of like what you're saying. You're saying that they want to try different things, but they try and keep it under the constraints of a regular pinball field. And it just it fails on both accounts then because you're just like, this isn't how pinball works. You know, my flippers don't go that way. And, you know, you don't go all the way outside of the, you know, the framing of the cabinet and everything else like that. Whereas when I was playing with this, it was like, well, no, this is it's navigation via pinball. as a concept, but it's, yeah, definitely doesn't feel like it's a hundred percent pinball. And yet it's very much shoot the lanes. Hey, there's your target way up there and, you know, knock this couple of times and that's going to open up a trap over here. And, you know, so I kind of felt that it, it like you said, palate cleanser, definitely. And you're playing to the strengths by embracing what you're embracing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that, uh, that you enjoyed it. I mean, again, it's been a real, um, difference for us for the last two years. We often go to expos, public expos and festivals and to not be able to stand next to gamers as they're playing your game and read their faces and listen to the comments. You know, it's been tough because we rely on that kind of feedback to make improvements to the game. And we may, you know, we may do something like a semi-private beta or something like that prior to launch. I know that Steam has some kind of, not, I mean, we all know about early access, but I think they actually have a beta program.
    31:22
    Because we'd love to sort of like street test the thing before we ship. And really, there's not a whole lot of months left in this year, even though it's only February. Yeah, true. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's very true. Like what Chris was saying is so true about pinball and that, you know, the flippers are your link to the game. And they really do help you connect yourself into the game when you're experiencing it. So I did notice as a pretty avid player of the first one, there was a definite difference to the flipper feel from the first game. um how did the how did you refine physics because we were talking about physics before as well and the fact that you have the agility now which is very different how did that what you learned from the first game um flow into reunion and um what sort of tweaks do you think you made as a result of that sort of iterative approach yeah that's a great question i mean i think that you know for us the physics aspect is pretty much one of the most important aspects in the game so if you don't get that right there's going to be a lot of players who are not going to be happy with it yeah yeah uh and you know video game physics uh even using an engine like unity uh any physics-based game has lots and lots of problems behind the scenes um that make it a challenge to develop uh and i think that you know we went with a total redo in terms of how we approached um this is sort of a little bit technical but like in the original game in unity we had a weird scale going on like the ball was a weird size and the angle of the play field was at a weird size and i think we like i think the ball would like physically roll down whereas in the sequel we are faking the pull down table and um right you know a bunch of other stuff it's all a lot of it's just straight fakery um but there are um you know it's an interesting point about the flipper field because we don't get a lot of feedback like that on the team because we've been playing the same damn game for two years. Been too close to it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if there are, well, I guess, I mean, it's fine if it's not, but is it any better for you or is it at least like just different but relatively on par? No, I really feel it's more refined now. I think you can actually pick your shots better. And even though you've got the agility to sort of course correct if you're a little bit off, I think your ability to aim and shoot for targets is a lot more directed now. yeah so that is actually my feeling as well and i cannot tell you that like we deliberately fine-tuned every gear to get that exact result but it's something that i think we may have felt as a team like something's off here i can't hit targets like i get i feel like i have a way more ball control in this version than the original version and maybe it's because i hammer on the thumbstick a lot for agility but i'm not sure well i mean is it definitely i can see it becoming in in reunion it's definitely gonna be a key feature of the game and i can only imagine that in the later levels you're going to be using agility to actually get into different areas of the play field oh yes objects and stuff like that oh yes yes so so that's where i got from the demo for sure for that like the ability to move four ways instead of just two left and right is a key gameplay mechanic in this new game so that's really cool yeah it's pretty neat to be able to add speed coming down or or you know it's like it's a pretty fun way to do it and it's intuitive i feel even though in pinball maybe if you're traditionalist you're used to just left and right tilts it's just for for the way we're playing it now it's like the way most video games move i didn't actually even think like when you just said you know applying speed like essentially increasing rake of the table like or decreasing or increasing the break of the table based on agility i had never thought of that actually as being a thing but you're right like if you wanted to get up to a high area you can actually give your the upward motion on the controller and then get a little bit more speed yeah now there still is real physics so that's not gonna that will work for the lighter balls like the rogue um yeah it won't work no chance yeah exactly yeah yeah no that's really really interesting so uh yeah i'm i'm glad that it's it definitely does come through for me at least um as as a marked improvement and just the ability just like that ability to you know you don't have to trap up anymore on the flipper to change yes yes but that was a that was actually like a detriment you actually felt like the game it was like a stop go moment where now you've got more of a flow in the way you actually control character movement well it's funny because there was one particular board where uh you know obviously in that particular one when you got into the pop bumpers that uh maxed out your meter and i needed that meter maxed out really fast and i found that if i was in the night with the night he just stayed there bumping a long time would max it out as soon as it's maxed out boom switched characters while it was still up there yes went to the mage bam zap lightning on all the goblins that are around as soon as it drained down switch back to the night and so it was just like hey this is really cool that I can, you know, even within the board, there's certain areas that certain balls are going to be better equipped to get you to your goal than any others. Yeah, that's 100% our design philosophy, and it's something that we're, you know, as we refine and refine and refine, it's something that we're going to be paying closer attention to in the refinement stage. There will actually be areas that are accessible only by specific characters.
    37:15
    Beyond the kind of like this character will just generally do better, there's actually gated per character in some cases.
    37:23
    I actually fired up the new game, fired up the old game before the interview just to sort of familiarize myself again with it. And the mechanic of reviving was a real thing in the first Rollers of the Round where you could revive characters between rounds.
    37:43
    I didn't notice that in the demo. Is that still something you do? or is it different now with the rebalancing of the way the characters work? Yeah, it's totally different. So I'm so glad that you did play the first game and that you have these specific mechanics questions because I love to answer these kinds of questions.
    38:02
    We do like to go deep. Yeah, so again, for anyone in the audience who's not familiar, when you sewered a hero in the first game, that hero was technically not dead, but out of commission until they were revived. and revival I believe required a full mana bar which requires you to work the table quite a bit and again I think you know the way I felt about that was I liked the idea of it but the again for flow reasons it was sort of taking away from your speed of getting table objectives and stuff like that you're like well now I Christ I have to divert and do this and it was a little not I what What I wanted to do was make it even easier to play and even easier to understand how not to lose the play field entirely. And so in the sequel when a hero sewers that hero is not taken out of play but you lose a heart So now it more like RPGs It like you see a little lineup of hearts and when the hero sewers a little heart explodes and is gone and now you have one less heart. And when all of your hearts are gone, now you've lost the play field. And I just looked at that as, that was my ball count. That is basically your ball count. Hey, it's a three ball game? It's a three heart game. Okay. Yeah, now what's cool about that is when you do hero upgrades, you're going to be able to upgrade your hearts on a per hero basis and then since you can only field three of your five total it's like well what am i going for here am i going for like the fast ball with a little bit of health or the bigger ball the slow ball with more hearts or like how am i concocting my recipe for this particular play field because you're not going to be able to like easily upgrade hero hearts it's going to be an expensive upgrade and so you'll have to really think about what you're doing in terms of the the uh spread of your um what you're sinking your gold pieces into for upgrades i'm getting final fantasy 8 flashbacks of oh crap i only upgraded three of my six heroes that suddenly i need to use and those other three are like yeah i mean yeah it's one of those tightrope things again you know it's a real balancing act between like you know i felt that the first game um which was you know we love it we love the first game and we wanted to make some changes and improvements to it and and definitely like i felt like the first games item upgrades were more about how many upgrades you had rather than kind of what specifically they did um and that's not entirely fair i mean definitely you could read and understand what they did and you could that's how you made the choice of which ones to get but i think in the second um in the sequel we're working on now you know there's more more depth to the progression system um and the combinations of things that you're buying with the heroes you're including in your roster for that play field really make it more of a medic there's some meta game going on that we didn't have the first time i definitely noticed that um between the two like the first one with the i guess the the rpg elements of the game, it felt like you were essentially, well, I've just got to collect them all. I've got to upgrade all the competitors and just buy them all. Which meant you had to go back through and I guess that's sort of like a help with the replayability issue of the game as well. To essentially catch them all, you had to go and replay the game a lot, get more gold, go and upgrade. It felt like a bit of a grind.
    41:35
    And that was a bit of a detraction, I think. But it seems like as you were saying, and this confirms my suspicion about it, is that the aspects of each character's abilities in Reunion, they seem to be way deeper, and it seems to be the game can actually change depending on how you actually upgrade and manage your character upgrades. And we did that by reducing the number of stats that the characters have, actually, which is wild if you think about it, that the first game had a wider range of statistics, and this one we tried to work with as few as we could reasonably given that it's an RPG and all this and that allows us to more deliberately more deliberation in design to cater to a smaller set of numbers that you as a player have to keep in your head and weigh the various pros and cons about so your number space in your head is easier to figure out than just like, I don't remember the exact number from the, maybe it was 18 stats and now we've got eight or nine. You know, it's like a lot fewer statistics because we just, you know, it helps us as game developers. The less stats we have, the easier the game is to tune and tweak and balance. But it also makes the gameplay more pure because, you know, it's sometimes simplicity can really help everybody. it can help the developers and it can help the player understand what's happening and that's the most important thing like you need to know like and feel it you need to feel the change so there's fewer stats you're going to notice the changes better right right because it was interesting when i saw when i felt this in the game in the demo i was going oh okay because it's a thing that sort of turns me off playing rpgs actually it's the complexity of them and actually managing character weights and everything like that it's a i'm very much a like a instant gratification game yeah i just want to play the game which is why i like pinball right like it's it's exactly gives you exactly that so when i was feeling this i was going oh okay so they've changed this mechanic is that going to make it more focused on character management and is that going to make it harder for me to actually progress and play the upper levels in the game or is it actually going to be a help for me and i i wasn't quite sure about that so this is sort of helping me understand it's actually it's less to manage even though it feels i feel that it is it's less from um again like the that um meme with the um all the numbers floating around you know you have a few fewer of those you know to think about uh you know it's like complexity is not often actually that good of a thing in the breadth of statistics that way and when you have fewer things to consider well what will this upgrade affect and it's only eight possible things it can affect and i'm just throwing that number out because i cannot for the life of me remember exactly how many stats we have it is about that yeah the way that we the way that we show you what you can do with the characters as well should be a lot more straightforward like we've categorized the types of upgrades and within each type there's different options that you can pick and i think it should be comprehensible enough at least this is what we're shooting for that if you feel like you're not doing enough damage and you really want to use this one particular character just upgrade the weapons until you're satisfied with how much damage you're doing you don't need to overthink it you can just sink gold and just sum up look there's going to be a lot of places you can put your gold and i guess you know you're making me think well maybe we should have like a level up for me option or something like that. Yeah, that could actually help. Yeah, yeah. So something like that might be good, because we don't really want to bog people down with this stuff, but I think if you were giving it just some thought, not overthinking it, not pouring through each stat, I think you'll be fine. You just pick a bunch of different upgrades to get based on your favorite characters, and you should be good to go. It's not going to require... I did actually find in the first game, I was sort of overthinking it a little bit but at the end of the day i was just like well i'm just going to keep getting gold and just buy everything for everybody just keep buying it i'll level up one character at a time i just did it per character per character and said i'm just going to max out each one yeah obviously starting with the knight because i want that thing to basically just run through everything yeah um the other thing it's like in addition to the way that you've re-leveled the RPG aspects of it as well. We're seeing some extra game modes in there, which are quests, and they sort of seem like they might help with the replayability and getting people back into the game again. Yeah. Is that the intent with the quests? Yeah, 100%. So quests will be, you know, little mini missions, collection missions, and stuff like that, that you'll receive at various points in the campaign. And there are quest items in play fields that you can pick up related to whichever quests you happen to be on.
    46:59
    And although it would be possible that you could get those items on a first playthrough, it's more likely that you won't get them on a first playthrough and you'll have to go back and pick those up again. And we'll have to be careful about, we want these play fields to be replayable. We just don't want you to have to play them 10 times. maybe play it a few times, you're good or just twice, you're good and we've actually added, did you guys find any, did you go to the world map and happen to find any mysterious things? Secret areas? You bet I did I don't think there's anything I haven't touched in that demo yet so I'll be drinking it all up I definitely have a tour of the world map just looking and bumping into things It's still fairly nascent so there's a lot of stuff that we're you know cooking up that's not in yet so um but one thing we wanted to make sure was in um were these mysterious holes so uh the way that they will work is um when you come back out to the world map from a play field there will be a new mysterious hole somewhere um and once you've gotten it you're not going to get another mysterious hole until your next play field completion so they're they're kind of metered and they could be anywhere that's accessible to you on the world map so they won't be in the same place twice um and then we haven't put these into the demo i don't think they're in the demo that you guys played we also have just random gold pieces around the world map so you can just kind of you're like oh geez look at that over there pick that out it's good it's just pocket change but it's it's fun it's fun to just roll around and grab these things uh and we're also uh so we sort of have this on our maybe nice to have list but it's not going to be that hard to add.
    48:42
    Sheep to herd, merchants to bump into, and unlock certain upgrades that you may not have in your original list. For the demo you guys played, all the items are available,
    48:57
    but the full game, probably you will unlock some of those through happenstance as you work your way through the campaign. So there's a lot more coming to the world map, And I think a lot of ways to play the game in terms of replayability that don't rely on grinding the same play field too many times. I was going to say, not knowing what the stealth mode is, if suddenly you have to hide under a cardboard box and a little ping noise, I'm going to laugh. Oh, it's funny you should mention. It's funny you should mention.
    49:28
    I can't say cardboard box, but we know the game that's from. We take an awful lot of cues from that, so you won't be disappointed. You know, pinball design is all about playing homage to other designers. Yeah, now I'm like, I'm literally gears turning in my head about how we can put a cardboard box on it.
    49:47
    We'll think about it. It's like Easter eggs like that are just too awesome to do. Yeah. They make hardcore fans smile widely when you do it, so it's great. It's like, it'd almost be like if all of a sudden we're, hey, look at this castle that has all these really narrow pathways that are going with the little chompy worms. Hmm. yeah um hey we've dominated way more time than we thought that we were going to dominate we certainly appreciate that uh folks for those that have not played the first rollers of the realm uh we've been generously been given five copies that we're going to be able to give away uh stay tuned to probably our next episode and we'll uh devise a way that we'll uh hand those out to you guys uh that way you're able to uh get taste and if you don't win those don't worry it's not like it's an expensive game over on steam i think i think it's only 10 bucks full price and i don't know if you guys do steam sales but sometimes yeah yeah it's it's worth the money if you haven't played it put it that way it's a really fun game yeah uh and uh certainly if you need uh more players testing uh as things come by, absolutely feel free to let us know. We can put you in contact with various folks over at Digital Pinball Games. Yeah, 100%. It was a great chat today. I'm really happy with the questions you guys got into the dirt there, so that's good. Thanks for that. Absolutely. Thank you. Again, when the game's getting close, if you feel like you need to come back on, talk some more. We're happy to have you. Sweet. Thanks. Alright, thanks so much. That was Tony Walsh, the company director and founder of Phantom Compass. we'll be back with another episode not quite sure when but it'll be definitely not in a month's time and sooner than that but probably not next week either so there you go probably not until then the next time we'll be talking about all those things that Jared loves so much which are stuff and things take care folks bye bye
    52:02
    you