In this podcast we talk with Lunatic Dancer about how he got into gaming, his upcoming game-Echoing Serenity, and his inspirations. The listener will learn more about Peter, aka Lunatic Dancer, who works at Pyramid Games in Lublin, Poland and also creates Indie Games in his one man studio, Lunatic Dancer.
TRANSCRIPT
0:20 Podcast Open
0:45 Episode Intro
1:55 How Did You Get Into Game Design?
1:10 Game Jams
1:53 Current Game Progress
2:02 Random Generation
1:54 Inspiration
0:42 Outro
Podcast Open: (0:20) Music and Voiceover
Doug Kent: “Hello and welcome to the Spark of Game, where we talk with Indie Game Developers about their upcoming projects. I’m you’re host, Doug Kent.”
Episode Intro: (0:45)
Doug Kent(0:25): “The Video Gaming Industry is a billion dollar business. In 2020 it hit an all time high with 66.88 billion U.S. Dollars. All this money is not only flowing to the big industries like Sony or Nintendo, though. Hollow Knight sold 300 million copies by December 2020. We will be looking further into the world of Indie Game Developers.”
Doug Kent(0:20): “We will be talking with, Peter, aka Lunatic Dancer. For him, gaming is his life. He works for Pyramid Games as a developer in Lublin, Poland. He also is working an Indie Project of his own, Echoing Serenity, which we will be discussing in more depth later in this podcast. Peter has been gaming from a very young age.
How Did You Get Into Game Design?: (1:55)
Peter(1:10): “So I got my first computer at the age of eight. I was living computer free until the time and when I got the computer and got some games with it, I was instantly hooked. I just yeah, games are my thing, started playing them, like crazy. And then a few years later, like I was about 13 I just had the revelation that you can make games. You not only can play these things, but you can also make them. So I was immediately researching how to do these things. And I was learning a lot of programming languages. I was messing with a lot of engines, and that’s how I got into it.”
Doug Kent(0:20): “I was also engrossed in just computer games, that kind of thing. And I also started doing some game design pretty, pretty young. Nothing as advanced as doing computer programming languages, I used something called Games Factory, which is a kind of a drag and drop system where you could set up interactions and things.”
Peter (0:20): “Yeah, I was using that a lot. Like it was my first engine. I was the Games Factory. Then I went into Multimedia Factory, which is the same thing just reskinned. When Game Maker finally it took me like three years to skip to Game Maker.”
Game Jams(1:10):
Doug Kent(0:45): “I got really into games once I did my first Game Jam for Ludum Dare, which was only a few years ago. So that was when I really got into game making. And if our listeners don’t know what a game jam is, it’s a short period of time where you make a game, usually either a weekend or a weeks amount of time and you you create a game in that amount of time, which is a really good experience for upcoming game developers, because it gives you a goal to set and you complete it and you end up with a finished product. not going to be anything fancy. Obviously, it’s not gonna be a triple A thing that you made in a weekend, but you have a game and that’s really pretty cool. That’s, that’s where I got started.
Peter(0:25): “Yeah, these are cool challenges like I was spamming jams pretty pretty frequently when I got into Game Maker like I was every jam I could get my hands on. I was just Yeah, I’m participating. But nowadays, that’s too much crunching for me to do like I’m, I’m an old geezer. Now I?”
Current Game Progress(1:53):
Doug Kent(0:37):
“I came to the same realization once I was doing one pretty much every weekend, it gets draining. And then also, once I entered university and doing my Master’s in Game Design, it just kind of kind of changed the whole feel of what I kind of wanted to be doing for games and kind of want to do a larger project which I noticed as we were talking we’re going to be discussing your game, Echoing Serenity and segue into that. Tell us more about more about that and kind of where you’re at on it and plans for the future and so on?”
Peter(1:16): “Yeah. So if we are to talk about where is the game at, let’s say it’s slowly approaching some alpha stages, like the game is randomly generated. And so it’s pretty system driven, like it has to has a fundamental that needs to be done for it to function. And then you add content, like in most randomly generated games, so at the moment, it has a fully functional generator, it has a fully functional dialogue system, like you can talk with NPCs, you can choose options, there’s some already some dialogue to talk through. Any ever game is pretty early on, like, once I’m done with the fundamentals, it will be a lot of content making, and like the fundamentals, it’s like 15% of the whole process and then I’m, I will be machine gun crafting the content of the game.”
Random Generation(2:02):
Doug Kent(0:17): “Yeah, so how much is randomly generated? The world or NPCs and things also randomly generated and kind of their dialogue and things what what’s the whole backing of the engine that’s creating the world?”
Bumper(0:20): “You’re listening to the Spark of a Game. I’m your host Doug Kent. We are going to be back to our interview with Peter.”
Peter(1:45): “Yeah, so it’s, I kind of set up, set it all up. So it’s pretty reasonable, like the NPCs are premade, all of them will be pretty deeply written like they will have a lot of dialogue per NPC. So randomly generating that would make little sense, especially because the game is about something. So I just don’t want to let it all be done by chance. But various world generation is based on chunks, like you have these rectangular pieces, like very little levels. These levels have exits, like you can just set which ways it can be traversable and which ways are solid walls. And the generator just puzzles, these fits these so they make sense together, like it just tiles them many levels into a coherent world. And within these many levels, there’s also random generation of things like some, some levels can roll in various grass or various knots on the ground, or whatever tiles of walls and etc. It has, like it has little variation within the levels, and then various levels and then these are pre made and they can just make more of them. And even the world is more varied.”
Inspirations(1:54):
Doug Kent(0:04): “Okay, so I was wondering, what were some of your inspirations then for the game?”
Peter(1:50): “Yeah, of course, but well, like the first inspiration I had for this was when I was browsing steam. And there was this free game called Himno. And it looked really promising like What it what it promised was, you get a randomly generated platformer. And you cannot die within it. Like it’s supposed to be a relaxing exploration. So like, Yeah, I like this concept. And I downloaded it and played it quite a lot. And I’m like, Yes. So this is, this is not what I was promised, like, you can die in this game pretty easily. And when you start over from the beginning, and not only that, it’s pretty clunky to control sine like, yeah, so this is a great concept that was not yet done properly. And that sparked the initial idea for the game. Then, other places of inspiration. The most obscure one is this album, this music album called soft hair by the group also called soft hair. It’s this like, chill, chill album is called psych pop, basically is pop, but psychedelic, and it’s, like, both joyful and sad. At the same time. It’s a really weird kind of music. It’s both it’s relaxing. First and foremost, it’s relaxing. So like I was, yeah, I want to make a game that feels like this album.”
Outro(0:42):
Doug Kent(0:06): “Thanks for your time. Yeah. So there any social media or anything you wish to plug at the end? While we while we just wrap up right here, go for it.”
Peter(0:21): “For sure I I’d recommend checking out my itch.io which is lunaticdancer.itch.io. Where all my games, like the jam ones and the more serious ones. And my Twitter which is @lunaticgamedev because lunatic dancer was already taken.Yeah, thanks for having me.”
Doug Kent(0:15): “Thanks for listening to the Spark of a Game. You can find all our episodes at edspace.american.edu/the-spark-of-a-game. Make sure to tell all your gaming friends, and I have been your host, Doug Kent.”
SHOW NOTES
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