Evan Connolly: {0.57}

So this game was made by three people, right?

Scott Steffes:  { 1:02 }

Well, it's sort of made by 5 people. So, I did the Unity development.  Let's see here. So yeah. So we had someone else do the initial web server, like the networking stuff. And then we had a 3D modeller, a 2D artist and a person who did the music.  But as far as, you know, relative contributions, I guess, you know, the musician put about two hours into the game in total. The 3D artists probably play about six hours.   But then the main three people, you know, so the two D artists is probably put about, you know, 100 hours in. Same with the networking guy. But I guess I've been kind of the lead developer. You know, people have kind of moved out of other things. They still help out sometimes. But I'm the one who's been working on it, you know, constantly for the last two years, Yeah.

Evan Connolly:  { 1:52 }

Yeah, cool.

{ 1:55 }

So my first question, I suppose, was what was your inspiration or your goal for creating this game?

Scott Steffes:  { 2:03 }

Yeah, well, it's, I mean, it was initially part of a game jam, right?  OK, so sorry, are we, are we, are you recording or?

Evan Connolly:  { 2:11 }

I am yeah, sorry.

Scott Steffes:  { 2:15 }

Yeah, so basically it was initially part of the game jam and the theme was, I don't know if you're familiar with which Ludum Dare. It's one of the bigger game jams around. And every year they have a theme or twice a year. And at the time, the theme for Ludumdare 50 was Delay the Inevitable, which was, you know, kind of odd and kind of specific, but we talked about it for a long time. So, you know, you, you only got 72 hours to make the game, but we usually spend about, I don't know, six hours doing the design at the beginning because if you get that wrong, it's just going to be a bad time.  And so, so yeah, so we spent about six hours probably discussing various ideas for that theme, Delayed the Inevitable.

{ 2:54 }

And we came up with this idea of it's inevitable that if you make an online creative space, people are going to draw or create inappropriate things in it. And so you, you delay the inevitable by, so the first layer is supposed to be the inevitable. People draw, add things. And then the second layer is you're delaying the inevitable by painting over it.    But I think, you know, probably the reason that we went with that idea was that it was kind of in line with other things you wanted to do, right. So I, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, how do you make games? You know, games can be addicting in certain ways, but can you make that into a good thing when you're actually practising a useful skill or, or an interesting skill?  You know, before working on this, I'd also worked on an application for help helping you practise drawing. So it's like not not tracing, but like it would show you a certain curve on the right half, that half of the screen and you're supposed to recreate it on the left half and they would score you and stuff. So I, I kind of made this like drawing teaching app before, which is why we, we all acknowledge about how to do, you know, tablet, tablet integration stuff.

{ 3:57 }

But anyway, there was kind of a background of like wanting to make a game like this anyway. Not not super strong, but yeah, it just kind of came out in the initial design session. And we, I mean, we just kind of went with it. And it ended up being, I mean, we weren't also weren't quite sure we could pull the whole thing off in 72 hours, but we did it turned out really well. And and it kind of blew up from there. We saw just, you know, we got a lot of attention if we got third place overall for innovation. OK, sorry. Yeah, third place overall and 1st place for innovation for the whole competition out of like 2000 people.  So that was pretty cool. And it seemed like it had some legs to it. And so we then went and developed it into a more full game, and we're still doing that now.

Evan Connolly:  { 4:39 }

Yeah, Deadly. That's actually really interesting because one of my questions I was going to ask later on is about vandalism and inappropriate drawings. And I think that's really cool that you had that considered from the get go that like you're delaying the inevitable by drawing over these drawings.

{ 4:58 }

But also there's the inverse where someone might Draw Something nice and that gets vandalised.

Scott Steffes:  { 5:06 }

Yes, I mean, it has kind of evolved over time. Like, you know, the initial theme was that the first players are going to be inappropriate and then you fix them. Although I think over, you know, I think we've kind of cracked down a little bit on inappropriate stuff. You know, initially the idea was that the first layer could be like as offensive as you wanted it to be and then someone would fix it. But just in terms of like community building, we sort of cracked down on that a bit more. Like if a if a first layer is like really really explicit, we'll probably do something about it.

Evan Connolly:  { 5:32 }

Yeah. So I haven't played Different Strokes in a couple of months, but I do remember walking around the galleries and seeing quite a few, you know, nice drawings being defaced by like swastikas and that kind of stuff.

Scott Steffes:  { 5:44 }

Yep. So we already.

Evan Connolly:  { 5:46 }

Have a reporting system there.

Scott Steffes:  { 5:48 }

Yeah, well, yeah, there's a reporting system in the game itself which can kind of flag things for us to see.

{ 5:54 }

I mean, fortunately, I don't want to go into the specifics, but if things get reported enough, then they sometimes get automatically reverted.   So, you know, so there's at least some kind of auto moderation going on from users. But then we have moderators who actually look at stuff.  And I know we actually, we had, we had talked to one of the bigger publishers about, you know, getting some kind of publishing deal, like making this a really big thing, which we ended up not doing. But one thing we had talked about was, you know, if we were going to become, you know, be on their platform or whatever, we would need to have some kind of like guarantee of moderation and like guarantee that there's not going to be a bunch of questionable stuff. So, yeah, we weren't really ready to commit to that. But I think we're doing a pretty good job.    You know, sometimes we we submit the game to streamers taking, you know, stream our game and they're they're worried sometimes like, oh, look, am I going to get like banned on Twitch for whatever shows up in the game? And, and generally, well, I haven't heard of anyone getting banned yet. And I think we do a pretty good job moderating, but there's always a chance something slips through.

Evan Connolly:  { 6:59 }

Yeah. Has has that kind of design principle changed as you've continued developing the game? Like, is it the premise still about delaying the inevitable of graffiti and vandalism?

Scott Steffes:  { 7:12 }

Well, yeah, the when you first talk to the first character at the opening, in the opening room, if you talk to the friend, she mentions that, you know, has the has the phrase deleted the inevitable in the text? I mean, actually, it's funny. For the game jam, we actually got a very low score for theme because people didn't really get how the the game applied to the theme. But so I think, yeah, I think it's kind of taken out a life of its own where it's supposed to just become a collaborative art game, right? I still think it's really funny. Like it's really funny when someone draws like I can think of some good examples of, you know, offensive first layers that became really funny 2nd layers. I think that's still a very cool thing when it happens, but I think it's become much more broad than that and we're cool with that.

Evan Connolly:  { 7:58 }

Yeah, cool.

{ 8:01 }

What kind of design decisions were made when you were developing this game, either for the Ludum Dare or kind of in later processes that like, what decisions were made just to kind of lead you towards the goal that you set out to make?

Scott Steffes:  { 8:17 }

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the decisions, it's hard to tell where it's going to go. You know, with a regular game, you're often designing for what's going to be fun, and that has a certain certain things behind it, but, you know, fun in the sense of like an interesting challenge or whatever. But I think a lot of our design decisions for this game specifically were about what kind of community is this going to make?   One thing our 2D artist was really adamant about was they didn't want to become an, an elitist kind of thing. You know, they didn't want to have lots of like really difficult tools and, you know, the colour wheel. And like, you know, if we made it kind of like Photoshop, then it's going to become this thing where it's really intimidating.

{ 8:58 }

And, you know, the really good artists are going to make really good pieces and and the average artist is going to be intimidated and people, you know, it'll just become like another the Internet based going to become like Twitter basically just a place to post, you know, whatever you could do with it, your skill. So we kind of wanted to make it.  How would you say it? I mean, we had lots of discussions back and forth and I think there's certain tools that we added that.     Yeah, yeah. I mean, like it, it goes back and forth though, because like sometimes like the the original version of the game had five colours and the brush was like really big. 

Evan Connolly:  { 9:37 }

That's the kind of version I remember playing.

Scott Steffes:  { 9:38 }

Yeah, yeah. And so there was a, there was a certain point where it was very much not like Photoshop. It was very limited.  And I think there was a put, you know, back and forth with the team about if you wanted to keep it that way.  Because, you know, over time we've slowly added our features.

{ 9:54 }

There's a, there's a small like single pixel brush now and there's, there's the, the fill tool, like the pattern tool, there's a bunch of stuff that's kind of added to what you can do with it. But we would, we've been somewhat careful with that, you know, design decision wise. Yeah. So people are asking us for more colours, like a colour wheel all the time. And we're not doing that because I think the second it's got a colour wheel, it's basically just a drawing programme that isn't kind of special.   But yeah, I think overall we've done a pretty good job though. I notice, you know, there's the, there's the, what do you call it, the recent favourites, you know that the top ten images of the week and there's one.

Evan Connolly:  { 10:32 }

Displayed in the lobby, isn't that right?

Scott Steffes:  { 10:34 }

Yep, Yep. Yeah. So, yeah, also worth mentioning. So there's the there's the free version of the game which has the five colours and the Super limited or seven colours? 8 colours? And then there's the deluxe edition which comes with all the extra stuff.  But I think it's good to see pretty much every week when I check, there's at least one painting in the top 10 for the week that was made using the free version.

{ 10:58 }

And so, yeah, the hope is that part of the goal of the game is to make, like, funny images, entertaining images, not necessarily just, you know, talented, you know, detailed images.

Evan Connolly:  { 11:09 }

Yeah.

Scott Steffes:  { 11:10 }

So whenever like a really poorly drawn thing that's funny makes it to the top, that's that's a heartbeat. And we hope that happens more often.

Evan Connolly:  { 11:17 }

Yeah, your, your, your goal isn't really really to make like a place where good artists can go, but you just want to encourage people to draw really.

Scott Steffes:  { 11:25 }

Yeah, yeah.

Evan Connolly:  { 11:26 }

Yeah.       So I have another question here, is there anything else, like anything more you would have liked to do with the game or are planning to do with the game?

Scott Steffes:  { 11:40 }

Oh yes, so that's a partially secret, but OK.

Evan Connolly:  { 11:44 }

Yeah, tell me. Only tell me what you're comfortable with.

Scott Steffes:  { 11:59 }

I've got a different game I'm working on that I've been working on for six years. It's this big pixel arts, isometric kind of horror action RPG game. And it's taken six years to make and it's just like giant thing. It's way too big for the team we have, but, you know, we're doing it. And so the plan is to finish this big game and then get back to working on different strokes. But finishing this big game has turned out to take, you know, even longer than I thought it would. And so different, different strokes. It's kind of been on the back burner for a bit. But we're really close. We're really close to finishing this big game. And so then I want to turn my attention back to different strokes. And we've got some other ideas just to increase the amount of interactivity that players can have with each other, you know, in the opposite direction, though, people sometimes asked if we could have comments in the game, and I do not. I do not want people to be able to enter random text into the game because that just seems like a complete disaster. Like you'd be getting, I don't know,

Evan Connolly:  { 12:58 }

You could like a Dark Souls system.

Scott Steffes:  { 13:00 }

Yeah, I wonder how they do that because I feel like the danger would be like you could like host like, you know, malware, like malicious URLs and like all manner of things in the game. I mean, I guess you could still do that right now with a painting, but, you know, it just seems like allowing text would be a complete would be a bad a bad time. But yeah, so we've got some other ideas though, to make it. You know, for example, right now, you know, the game is very asynchronous. So you see other people's paintings, but you don't have any sense of there being other people in the game. And so I think we kind of want to add some to that.

Evan Connolly:  { 13:33 }

Was going to ask you why? Why is the game single player? Was that a conscious decision that you're in the gallery on your own? Or was that a limit a game play limitation like a programming limitation?

Scott Steffes:  { 13:44 }

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely game play limitation. Yeah. Going from asynchronous like that to like proper multiplayer is a huge undertaking. I mean, there's some kind of halfway measures that we're looking at. I mean, so this is all secret stuff, right?

 { 13:59 }

But yeah, I mean, you know, going all the way to like full real time where you could like watch someone else paint. I think that'd be really cool. We'll see how much effort that takes. I mean, part of the trouble is just like, what kind of servers you need to maintain to handle all this. So like right now we just have a single server we pay like 20 bucks a month for and it, you know, it runs the whole game. Whereas I think if you if you're doing like real time stuff where you're pulling like multiple times a second and all that, it becomes a bit more of a, you know, pretty serious undertaking to run servers like that. I mean, we're looking into different options. But yeah, so basically to answer your question, it's mostly been a technical limitation. I think it would be cool if you we're able to see other people. I mean, although, you know, if the other people are getting annoying, I mean, maybe you want maybe you want the ability to turn it off, right? Like I don't want to see all these people running around and whatever. Yeah.

Evan Connolly:  { 14:51 }

No, I was just curious because I was wondering if there was a an active decision for that.

Scott Steffes:  { 14:58 }

No, yeah, I mean, I mean, other than getting annoying that there's people everywhere, I think it'd be totally cool to be able to see other players.

Evan Connolly:  { 15:06 }

Did you have a target demographic for this game? Obviously, gamers, I imagine.

Scott Steffes:  { 15:12 }

Yeah. Well, gamers, I mean, it's, let's see. I mean, obviously it's on Steam. Although, you know, we thought about wait, this tough thing where, you know, if you wanted to put it somewhere else, like if you know, people I've talked to said, oh, this would be like really cool for schools, some kind of like education thing.   And I think that would be cool. But then it kind of makes you wonder like, well, then do we need to like really crack down on the inappropriate stuff or do we need to be able to like make separate servers for, you know, so I think we looked at exploring kind of different worlds because, you know, gamers are one thing. We've actually thought about advertising on ArtStation. So we're going to kind of have this bigger update to the game in the future.

{ 15:57 }

We want to kind of do a big marketing push when we do that. And so we've actually thought about like where would be the good place to advertise? And so we're thinking more about advertising to where artists are as opposed to where gamers are. So that's definitely where we're looking. And like our, our demographics, you know, we do, we've done some kind of demographic surveys in Discord server.  And I think it's, I can't remember the exact numbers, but you know, relative to Steam, the, the gender ratio in in the game is, is much more balanced than most games.

Evan Connolly:  { 16:31 }

Yeah.

Scott Steffes:  { 16:32 }

So I think, see, I think it definitely appeals to a slightly different audience than Steam in general.

Evan Connolly:  { 16:39 }

Yeah, right.       Yes, we have two more questions for you. It's got, I've gone a bit over the 10 minute mark. But back to the vandalism.

{ 16:52 }

I was wondering, obviously you had it considered when you were designing for the ludum dare, but do, so you're saying that with these have been pre-drawn by you guys and that you had to paint over them?

Scott Steffes:  { 17:07 }

Oh, as in like we as in like we make the offensive paintings and then other people fix them.

Evan Connolly:  { 17:14 }

Was that the? Yeah, like was that the original kind of output?

Scott Steffes:  { 17:20 }

No, I think we always had. We always had user generation all the way in mind. I mean, that being said, there was a multiple once where our our 3D artist is from. How do you say it? I don't know. Our 3D artist is from a part of the world where certain ideas about certain political, politically correct ideas haven't necessarily percolated. And so we were talking about, oh, should we make some example offensive things to show people what it's about? And so our 3D artist who also does 2D art was like, oh, I'll go do something. And so they went and drew some offensive things in the gallery and they were like way too offensive. Like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

{ 18:00 }

No, yeah, yeah. So we didn't as far as like how the game generally works, we haven't really done something where like the base layers are controlled by us or something like that. We do have the ability to do, We have the ability to do that technically. So there's a certain, there's certain parts in the game where you can you can encounter. Yeah, there's certain parts in the game where you can encounter canvases that are made by us and they keep, they keep responding with that same first layer especially. We have the ability to do that, but we haven't really used it that much.

Evan Connolly:  { 18:28 }

Yeah.  So yeah, I was wondering if there's any design decisions in the game play or in the design of the game that you may have used to encourage people to, you know, be more respectful with their drawings and kind of take it more seriously, I suppose.

Scott Steffes:  { 18:48 }

Yeah. I mean, we've, let's see, it's making.

{ 18:52 }

I mean, I think part of it is just seeing the general, like if you, I think if people go in there and they see lots of offensive drawings, they're going to think that's OK and do more of them. I think if we try to, the way we, there's like a random, a randomish algorithm that serves paintings to people and we try to make it so that it shows you, it shows you the recent ones that need to be finished, like the first layers. But then for the second layer ones, it's showing, we, we do try to prioritise the ones that have, I mean, there's some randomness to it, but like we try to prioritise showing like things that have gotten a decent number of likes. And so I think hopefully when people walk into the game, they see all the nice paintings and kind of see what the culture is like here and, and contribute to that. I mean, they also know, you know, like the really bad trolls, like the people who are obviously just drawing swastikas and everything or whatever. Yeah, we banned them. We, we banned them pretty quick and there isn't like, like we haven't like one or two times. Maybe we've had somebody who like, is like, like obsessed with screwing with us and like makes new accounts and like whatever.

{ 19:57 }

But in general people, you know, yeah, there's, there's been like one or two like really dedicated problematic, problematic people. But most, most of the time, like the offensive people come in, they draw swastikas and everything. We revert that and then they, they just quit. Like there there had, there aren't a lot of people who are like motivated to really mess with us.     Yeah. So basically like the the the really problematic stuff tends to kind of solve itself more or less.

Evan Connolly:  { 20:25 }

Right, Yeah. So the gallery layout, there's kind of a mix of finished pieces, halfway finished pieces and blank canvases. Is that right? Like when you walk into the space.

Scott Steffes:  { 20:40 }

And we, we kind of adjust that for a while we were having a trouble where there were like too many unedited paintings. So there's maybe like 3000 unfinished paintings and people were still making more of them as opposed to finishing new ones or finishing other people's.

{ 20:55 }

And so we, we adjust the gallery depending on how many backlog, how many extra first layer paintings we have, we get to show more of those or show more blank canvases or, you know, there's a balance there.

Evan Connolly:  { 21:07 }

Does that draw into your kind of design? I have a question here. Like what design decisions have you made that encourages players to be creative? Like maybe if they're stuck for ideas I don't know what to draw or like aren't used to drawing.

Scott Steffes:  { 21:22 }

We definitely, we definitely push people to do edits and also like in the Discord if someone comes to us and says, you know, Oh my gosh, like someone ruined my first layer of the painting. Like, why do you, why do you allow this or whatever?  Generally, I think we should be more explicit about this in the instructions when you start. But generally we say if you're going to spend a bunch of time on a painting, you should really do it as a second layer, you know, as a finished piece. Because if you put a bunch of it, like in, in general, we want to discourage people from putting tons of effort into the first layer because the whole point of the game is somebody else messing with it, right?

{ 21:56 }

So like, sometimes we'll have an artist who like puts tons of time into their first layers and they get wrecked and they're mad and it's just, and we'll, we'll, we'll like work with them. But you know, we, I'm not saying that I'm like, no, actually, you really shouldn't be putting all this work into your first layers because like, the whole point is that someone else is going to screw with it.

Evan Connolly:  { 22:12 }

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So that's, that's kind of your approach is that you, you want people to find these first layers and that may inspire them to, to kind of come up with something to put over them.

Scott Steffes:  { 22:32 }

Yeah, I mean, I think people have said like in the Steam reviews, people will say like whenever I have art block, I just go into the game and find someone else's painting to kind of inspire me. So I think that's either that or just the game itself being less intimidating. You know, there's fewer tools, all that. Like, I think the main goal of the game is to just be super low barrier to entry. Like when you're just like not feeling it, you know, you open up like blank, like a blank page in Photoshop and you're just like, I can't do this.

{ 22:58 }

The hope is that you can go into the different strokes and either, you know, start a fresh painting because it's really simple or get inspired by someone else's work.    Yeah. I think our main goal is to just make a place that gets you over your art block.

Evan Connolly:  { 23:14 }

Yeah, do you think it's easier to draw over someone else's work rather than open up a blank canvas I.

Scott Steffes:  { 23:21 }

Guess it depends on the kind of person you are. I mean, I think there's some people who like they get anxious, like, “Oh no, like I don't want to ruin this person's art.” I mean, fortunately usually like the, there's a lot of first layers that are just like scribbles basically. And so I think for those it's like not intimidating. It's like, OK, clearly this person didn't spend a lot of time on this first layer, so I can go rest with it. I can go fix it.   But yeah, I'm, I'm guessing it depends a lot on like the person's psychology, you know, how do they feel about messing with people's stuff 'cause there's some people who do not care, right?

{ 23:51 }

There's, I mean, I don't know what we should think about this, but like there's, sometimes there's artists who are maybe not especially talented, but they're very bold in people's very like taking someone else's very nice painting. And you know, I'm sure you've seen, there's that, there's that picture of Jesus that some lady restored and kind of ruined.   I feel like there's, there's a little bit of that sometimes. So you you have to admire them for their bravery.

Evan Connolly:  { 24:20 }

All right. Well, that's all I have. Scott, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to answer my questions.

Scott Steffes:  { 24:29 }

Yeah, thanks, it was fun. Good luck with your class.

Bye.

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