>> Hi, guys, I'm Preston... >> And I'm Will...
>> and our buddies over at Epic asked
us to go over how we came up with the idea
for a Alluris, which was kind of our big first full featured
game.
>> Yeah.
>> So Alluris was a "swipe your own adventure" game.
Imagine an RPG adventure DND experience
meets Tinder.
>> Yeah.
>> So you're going on this broad, expansive journey,
but every single decision you make
is either swiping the left or swiping right
on a series of cards that each represent a day in the game.
So I'm going pass it to Will because he was the one that
actually came up with the idea for it
and started it before...
>> The whole project started--
It was like we were working on another project
and in the kind of like late hours and kind of, you know,
after you get to work, you know, it's 10 a.m., it's midnight,
like I'm bored or what am I going to do
for the rest of the night?
It's like, well, how about just as an exercise here,
I'm going to start designing a little game
because like I'm willing to bet, given just a few days,
I could probably build something that you could play that would
be really, really small.
And it kind of as an exercise in like,
what is the simplest thing that you can build following
a bunch of conversations I had with a bunch of friends
on my Discord servers and stuff that have physical disabilities
or, like, that can't play anything that's
really intense, like, they can't even play first person shooters.
They can't do a lot of the high energy roguelikes.
>> So we had this idea come up
and it was this interesting situation where
the games that we played a lot of, you know,
like I play a lot of like CS Go
and, you know, high twitch precision games
and you play a lot of like technical and other ways,
like Kerbal Space Program.
>> Lots of button games. Slow games.
>> And it was this situation where we looked at it and we went
there's a whole swath of people who regularly have
their favorite thing, their best hobbies stolen from them.
>> Yeah. >> Just randomly.
And it's just something that they just
have to live with for their entire life.
So we thought if there's like a fun game
that you could come home to at the end of the night, that
wasn't very challenging physically.
It wasn't very, you know, overly analytical or demanding,
but it could still deliver on the sense of joy and fun
and exploration and fulfillment that--
>> Really accessible.
>> Yeah, but something that was really accessible
in its own right.
Three days before we had something honest to god,
it looked like the game.
>> Yeah but by day three, we had all the stats and stuff.
All the underpinning systems we're like, oh, here
it is, this is what we're tracking.
This is kind of how the game works.
And it wasn't until-- but, you know, as we get to a 10 day 12.
Right like, well, there it is.
>> It's a whole game.
>> It's like there's the game-- >> Like we already
figured this one out!
>> It's already cracked.
And then it was just, you know, the first 12 days was
building the game but then the next six months
was like making it really nice--
>> Making it really precise, building out--
>> All the content.
Just, yeah, all the different parts.
>> The initial version of Alluris didn't
have sprawling backgrounds that give you a sense of place.
>> Yeah, it was just a map.
>> We actually-- we did our first, like public access
through our Discord with just a map as the background.
There was nothing else. >> And people didn't realize
when they were out like--
It's like I'm in town now.
>> Yeah, I'm in town--
Am I in a cave where all the cards cave?
They were just on the left side of the pane.
There's little text that said "cave."
Nobody's looking at that.
So we added the big parallax scrolling background.
Then like we made the card selector smarter so like it
wouldn't give you repeat cards.
And it was like doing a little bit of a low key dungeon master
and like just that was all the polish of, like, you know,
like here's a rock.
It's like, well, how can we make the most sophisticated rock?
Well, here's a stick.
What's the straightest this stick-- Just for months.
Until eventually we launched it in October
last year.
And then that was a lot of fun because of course,
when we did end up launching on PC with, you know,
any controllers you want to plug into it as well as on Xbox
and and eventually Switch with everything--
>> For iOS and Android too.
I definitely wish everybody well.
Thanks for hanging out with us.
Have a good one, guys. >> Bye.