The first reason is that there are far too many games available for anyone to be hung up on one not fitting their particular difficulty level desires.  I have a backlog of games I want to play so extensive that I’m fairly certain I will not have the free time within my lifetime to do so.  If you can look at the latest “Midnight Soulsborn IX” and say, “this looks too difficult for me,” then you can move on to the next more approachable title and have a great time.  Let those who are masochistic (or “skilled” I suppose) enough to play those sorts of games have their fun and be happy doing it.

If you catch some gameplay from the latest “Jumping Plumberman Universe” game and it feels like it’s not enough of a challenge for you, shift your focus to a game that gives you the abuse that you seem to crave.  Let it be accessible to those that find value in it.  There is no shortage of games out there that will fit your tastes, assuming it’s not classic stealth.

The second reason you shouldn’t waste your time being unhappy with game difficulty levels is that it’s not your choice to make.  Game developers can make a game as tough or as easy as they want to.  It’s their design and they have the final say in what market it’s going to appeal to.  Some developers, and especially publishers, will want their game to appeal to the widest audience possible, so they’ll work to make a game have adjustable difficulty to suit a variety of players.

It’s fine to make your voice heard, everyone’s free to say they want something to be easier or more difficult, but the best way to show developers and publishers what you want is to vote with your wallet.  If people aren’t buying games, then there’s a good chance that games are going to change down the line.   Then you can refer back to the original resolution of spending that money elsewhere on games that do fit your preferences.

At the end of the day, the topic gets more discussion than is necessary.  No one is entitled to have the game envisioned except for the developer.  If we want to explore new genres and experience the creativity that drives the game industry, developers need to be unencumbered by the demands of different players.  In trying to get games to adhere to our individual standards, we risk further homogenizing unique games.  Developers and publishers are already shifting franchises to adopt gameplay from the status quo even when it doesn’t fit within the game’s context.

Make an effort to explore games with which you are comfortable.  No one has an excuse to be ill-informed about the nature of a game these days.  Reviews, gameplay, and streams are readily available and can give you as much information as you could ever need to make an informed decision.  Buy games that you will enjoy and don’t let the ones that won’t entertain you be on your radar.

With Canvas, Developers can create full-screen visuals, custom animations and transitions, custom layouts and GUIs data visualization, and video playback (although right now video is not fully supported may play in Canvas).

“The Canvas is a framework built on the Google Assistant that allows developers to add a visual, immersive experience to conversational Actions. This visual layer is an interactive web app that is sent as a response to the user in conversation.”

Source: Google Blog

Artist and Game Designer David Wright has wanted to create games for some time and decided to follow in the footsteps of some of his favorite titles, Diablo and Path of Exile, for his own project Eitr. This combat driven exploration game was inspired heavily by Norse Mythology and follows the quest of the Shield Maiden as she tries to restore order to the 9 Norse Worlds that have been corrupted by the toxic substance known as Eitr.

With plenty of enemies, items, and areas left to create, Wright and Programmer Tobi Harper, are currently remaining quiet on their release date. Wright had plenty to say in our interview about the studios use of the Unity engine and how they are holding up financially.

Jesse Tannous: How much experience did either of you have with the Unity 3D engine before starting to develop this game?

David Wright: I personally didn’t have too much experience in Unity, I’m the artist and game designer. I had used Unity on a few projects in the past but I’m no guru. Tobi Harper however, the coder behind Eitr has many years of experience in Unity and is actually the main reason we decided to use Unity, simply because of how comfortable he already was with using it.

JT: How easily have you been able to pick up the Unity 3D tool?

DW: There’s a ton of resources available for Unity on the internet, because it is free and appeals to so many Indie Developers, the community has built a wealth of knowledge, tips and tricks available to everyone. It makes learning the tool that much easier. We’re both for the majority self-taught, we both have a background in Software Development through education, but almost everything we have learned has just been us following tutorials and guides we’ve found on-line over the past 10+ years.

Just like with any piece of software, the more you use it the more you feel comfortable with it, but Unity has that added benefit of having an immense amount of free information available.

JT: For most players, how long will this game generally take from start to completion?

DW: As the game is still early in development, this is a question that I can’t answer at this time. What I can say though is you won’t be blowing through this game in a couple hours on your first play-through.

JT: How much have you both already invested in the development of this title? Has funding become an issue yet?

DW: Well we’ve been developing the game for around 6 months, however for 2 of those months we were still working and not working full time on Eitr. I think funding is always going to be an issue for indie developers, but our expenses so far, similar to most indie devs, are just for our survival. We are still evaluating our options for funding, for now, we’re “okay”. Haha.

JT: Given the current speed at which you are developing the game and the funds you have available, do you have any idea when the game might be getting close to release?

DW: At this moment in time, the best answer I can give to this is that we want Eitr to be as great as we want it to be, we want the game to be complete and polished before release and we’re going to do whatever we have to do to make this happen. So at this time, we’re not going to make any promises on a release window.

Similar to Eitr’s nameless Shield Maiden, much has been left to mystery as to what the game will truly be upon completion, but it seems that both Wright and Harper will be giving their project all the attention and dedication they possibly can.

Jesse is a reporter first who just happens to love video games and enjoys writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals.

Already successfully funded on Kickstarter at over $200,000, The Flame in the Flood is a rogue-like survival experience that sets itself apart with its’ unique backwater style and emphasis on the perils of Mother Nature. The Molasses Flood utilized the expected random level generation in a different way, replacing dungeons with river rapids and swamp riddled woods that host a variety of dangers. Players control the character Scout as she travels with her loyal dog Aesop as they journey to the end of the river against rapids, hunger, natural predators, and much more.

Dowling, a veteran of AAA development, discussed how this new studio formed, what the small teams’ hopes are for their project, and some financial facts regarding the development of a game on this scale.

Jesse Tannous: It seems like your entire team had worked on some part of BioShock Infinite, is that where you all came together? How did this partnership come about?

Forrest Dowling: Almost the entire team worked on Infinite. Bryn worked at Irrational years ago, around the time of Freedom Force. The rest of us knew each other through working on Infinite. The partnership came about after the closure of Irrational. There were suddenly a lot of talented developers in a town without a lot of jobs available in games. We knew we’d all have to move or start something new. Around that time, Damian was finishing up his own project, Third Eye Crime, and was looking for a new team to work with. We convinced Bryn to leave his job at Harmonix to come join us. Working on a small team on your own project is a pretty appealing idea for a lot of developers, so it wasn’t a very tough sell. The hardest part was convincing everyone to forego a salary for the unknowns of indie development.

JT: So far how has the team enjoyed the smaller studio environment as compared to working on something as large as the BioShock franchise? What have been some of the key differences?

FD: The biggest difference is scope and resources. Working on a large project means that you can do just about anything you can think up. If you need a voice actor, or motion capture, or weeks of an artist’s time, it can be done. Now we have 6 of us. If an idea can’t be done by someone in the room, in a reasonable amount of time, it’s not happening. That being said, on a large project you can do anything, but you can’t do everything, so we’ve always had to worry about scope. It’s just a much lower threshold now. One big advantage of working on a small team is nimbleness and speed. If I need a new tool written by an engineer, I can get it almost immediately. On a large team, there’s always more steps along the way, and changing things means fighting a lot more inertia.

JT: While a $150,000 Kickstarter goal is not the highest, especially considering previous video game projects that have appeared on the website, but it is on the higher end. What was the main motivation for setting a higher Kickstarter goal like this, especially when backers seem fully willing to fund projects well-beyond their stated goals?

FD: We set the goal at the lowest point that we felt we could and still make the game. $150,000 really is a shoestring budget for a game of the size we’re making. If we set it lower, there would be a risk of hitting the goal, but not blowing past it. At that point, we’d be in a pretty bad position, in that we’d have some of what we needed, but not all of it. I’d rather miss an honest goal then set one that was too low and hit it, leaving us unable to deliver what we promised. While backers are willing to go beyond funding targets, it seemed really dangerous for us to count on that.

JT: You state in your Kickstarter that you are combining self-funding, and crowd-funding in order to make this game a possibility. For those less experienced with developing a game on this scale how much does it really cost to put something like this together and how does it break down?

FD: That’s a good question. Not so long ago, Tim Schafer tweeted a number. It takes about $10k a month per developer to run a studio. That’s pretty accurate when averaged over a large team. You have some entry level people who make a bit less, and senior engineers can make a bit more. So for us, if we were just bankrolling this project and hiring experienced developers, the napkin math would point to about $720,000 in payroll alone.

Considering that we’re all pretty experienced, I’m guessing hiring the 6 of us at a major studio would even run a little higher. Payroll is the single biggest expense in making games, particularly on the engineering side, as you’re competing with Google and Facebook to hire people. Beyond that there’s QA, localization, certification costs, marketing costs… those can all be extremely variable and shift based on how many platforms you’re supporting.

At a baseline, if someone wanted to hire the group of us to make this game, they would probably need to budget close to a million. Fortunately, we can make this game for a lot less because we’re dramatically decreasing the biggest cost, payroll, by living off savings. We’re willing to do this because we’re not working for a paycheck, we are hoping that we’re building a studio that is ours for years to come.

JT: How did Chuck Ragan get involved in this project?

FD: Chuck and Scott Sinclair go way back. Sinc has done most the album covers for Chuck’s previous band, Hot Water Music, and their bands used to play the same shows back in Sinc’s college days. While we were figuring out what we wanted to make, I had initially proposed looking at traditional American acoustic music, folk, bluegrass, that sort of thing. Sinc proposed that we see if Chuck was interested. We approached him, told him about what we wanted to do, and he was immediately interested and wanted to help out.

JT: Are there any plans to update or add expansions to Flame in the Flood after it has been released?

FD: While the game could be expanded pretty easily, we’re just focused on the core experience right now. If it does well and people love it, we’d consider additional content down the line, but that’s pretty far off and not something we’re really thinking about right now.

The Flame in the Flood will have its’ own challenges to survive throughout the development process, but with the popularity of rogue-like games and the professional experience The Molasses Flood brings to the table, it could be the perfect move for a young studio hoping to make a name for itself in the wake of the Irrational Games closure.

Jesse is a reporter first who just happens to love video games and enjoys writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals.

Best known for his role as Rucks, the omnipotent narrator of the hit indie game Bastion, Logan Cunningham, of Supergiant Games, sat down to talk about his experiences with voice acting and, among other things, his roles in Gravity Ghost.

Jesse Tannous: You came into voice acting pretty recently. How did you get into voice acting?

Logan Cunningham: I started with Bastion, that was my first anything. That came about really just through the way I grew up in San Jose California. Amir Rao and Darren Korb have been friends of mine from there, I’ve known them since I was about 14, Darren and I went to high school together Then the three of all us all went to New York for school for college, to different colleges. They were just my old friends from California that I had in New York, which was really cool.

After college Amir went to EA, and Darren and I stayed in New York and we’re still here. All I knew was that my friend Amir quit his job and created a startup and they were making a video game and he asked me to help. They got to the point where they wanted to try some voiceover. Like a shoestring operation with very little money to go around, so Amir just kind of called in favors and looked around and saw who was around he knew who could help with this game. Darren was already involved doing all the sound and music at the time. Also, Darren and I were roommates, so it was kind of a perfect situation. I was just the actor that they happened to know.

JT: Are you still trying to reach your ultimate goal of becoming an on screen actor or has voice acting taken over?

LC: Voice acting has taken over in the sense that it accounts for 100% of my income. I’m trying to do more theater and eventually get to on camera film and TV. As mysterious as the path towards being a working actor at all is, who knows when that’s really going to happen, but that is the ultimate goal for me.

JT: Is there a particular genre of films you’d like to be involved in?

LC: I don’t know, I’m a bit of a movie and film buff, I guess I have been since high school. That’s when I think I first started looking closely at movies and discovering what good ones were what bad ones were. I like a lot of the smaller stuff like indie films.

This year I’ve been slowly working with this theater company here in New York called Labyrinth, which is like an off Broadway company of some renown, they’ve been around for just over 20 years. Their most famous member probably was Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I was right in the middle of doing this sort of acting workshop thing with Labyrinth when he died in February, and I was pretty surprised how much that affected me.

JT: How did it affect you?

LC: I admired him as an actor a lot, he was something of a role model for me as just in terms of how to live like an actor, how to have a life as an actor, because he moved effortlessly between film and theater and was so involved in both and gave himself completely. But he was also important for sentimental reasons, because when I first started getting into movies and first started thinking about them intellectually he was in a lot of those like Magnolia or The Talented Mr. Ripley. So he was pretty important to me.

One thing that surprised me was my initial reaction which was disbelief. I thought it was a hoax at first. Then getting really kind of angry about it, and angry about all the stuff he had yet to do that we’ll never see, so I kind of had this selfish reaction to it. I felt a lot of things.

JT: How did you get involved in Gravity Ghost?

LC: Through another actor in the game named Sarah Elmaleh who’s a voice over artist in a bunch of independent games. She’s worked on many Wadjeteye Games. We did two Wadjeteye Games together Primorida and Resonance. So she was already working on it and they needed to cast a role or two and she recommended me, and I recorded an audition and it just kind of worked out.

JT: What kind of character are you playing in Gravity Ghost? How does it compare to your previous work?

LC: I play a young guy who is a love interest for one of the characters and I play the main characters father. That was interesting, playing a young character and an old character. That’s the challenge of voice acting overall, all you have is a voice, you have one tool and everything has to come across in just a voice. I’m still learning about it and I’m not sure how good at it I am, but I guess the reason I keep saying yes to anything voice related is just to keep doing it and learning about it because it seems to be a nice club to have broken into. It’s something I never thought I would do, I thought maybe one day I’d become an actor who did voice over on occasion, but at the moment that’s pretty much what I’m doing.

JT: Is voice-over something that is fulfilling to you?

LC: To be completely honest I find voice acting to be really really hard. It’s harder than people think, and the ones that do it well are amazing to me, because I find it very difficult. For me, it’s very frustrating, I don’t get the sort of satisfaction and the ultimate pleasure that I can get from acting on stage or acting on set in front of a camera.

I miss so much when I’m doing voice over. It’s like you’re amputated, I miss my body, and a costume, and props, and especially other actors. I think the biggest difference is the lack of other actors in the room, you’re always alone. I know for voice over in animation often they will record actors together, but in video games you’re almost always alone, and I’ve always been alone in the video games I’ve done. So I miss the connection of another person, another actor.

The second thing is you don’t do is memorize, you very rarely memorize in voice-over and that is frustrating to me because you are still just reading. For anybody that’s ever done a play, there is a huge difference between the last day when you are off book and you get that script out of your hand and you just have it in you. Being on book, having a script you have to read, and having to act at the same time, there is an obstacle there, at least there is for me. Unless I’ve learned it, I feel like I can only be so good, once I learn it then I feel like I can get cooking.

JT: Do you plan on branching out and doing other projects or build some sort of social media community?

LC: I don’t see something like that happening in the near future. I tend to avoid anything that would cultivate some sense of me as a personality, or persona. I don’t know, the only way I really parlay the voice over success with the rest of my life is that it supports me, I’m making a living, and using it to keep existing and do what I do, which is trying to do more of everything else.

JT: What has been the most rewarding or fulfilling experience in your acting career so far?

LC: You know I would really have to say the first one, it would be Bastion. We really had no idea what we were doing and I was just making a thing with people I liked and people I respected. Amir, Darren, and Greg Kasavin, these are three of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known in my life. There is nothing better than creating something with really good friends and having that thing turn out really well. At least we all loved it, we made the thing we wanted to make and we were happy with it. Then we got to release it, and you have no idea what’s going to happen. To have it do what it did was just a bewildering, wonderful little dream. If five years from now I’m cast in some hit show or amazing blockbuster movie, I don’t think I’m really going to have another creative experience like Bastion.

JT: How have you enjoyed working with Supergiant?

LC: Working with Supergiant as a voice actor is a unique experience, it’s incredibly luxurious in a way. We just do it and do it and do it, in terms of recording sessions or doing takes. You just don’t have that luxury in other situations or other voice over jobs, or at least I haven’t. Most other studios or games will book their actors for a day or two, and you get through it all and that’s it, we don’t do that at Supergiant.

I will most likely be working with them for as long as they ask me. Which is an exciting idea so hopefully a few years from now I’ll have a little handful of games that we made and were happy with that people have enjoyed. I’m so aware of the fact that it was and is a happy accident. There is no plan with me, I don’t have a two year plan or a five year plan, and there is no dream role for me out there. When I want to do

something I know it when I see it.

JT: What attracted you creatively to Gravity Ghost?

LC: Not so much roles, but the game itself the project itself. I’m a big fan of atmosphere and tone, and just from the small amount of footage that was out at the time, this was late last year that I worked on Gravity Ghost. I just watched the trailer a bunch, I read about the game and it sounded interesting. It felt like something I wanted to be a part of, and I was attracted to it for whatever reason on some kind of gut level.

JT: It doesn’t sound like you know quite yet what elements specifically attract you to certain projects. Is that something you’d like to figure out for yourself one day or are you happy going off your gut?

LC: Probably some combination of those things. It’s a different reason for different projects a lot of the times. It’s very specific to that situation. Sometimes you’re at a point where you just feel like working. You wanna do the thing that you do and you haven’t done it in a while. If you write you can do that every single day, you can wake up and just start doing that, or you can paint every day, but with acting that’s impossible. You get good at something by doing it and doing it and doing it, but with acting, as a performing art, it’s almost impossible to have that regularity or discipline. That’s what attracts me to the theater because you can get very close to doing it night after night.

JT: How often do you get requests from fans to say something in Ruck’s voice?

LC: In my regular life almost never. When I’m at something like Pax that could happen like a handful of times a day. It’s great it’s fun. It was hard for me to do for a while, I would be asked to do the voice and I couldn’t think of what to say. So I finally had to just pick a favorite line or something and that’s what I do now.

JT: Do you ever narrate your life when alone at home now?

LC: I’ll do random voices sure, but not from anything I’ve done. It was an interesting coincidence when Bastion was happening, one of the early character notes for Rucks that I got from Amir, was Al Swearengen from “Deadwood”. Just a few months before getting that note a friend of mine had lent me his DVD’s of “Deadwood.” I just burned through it in like a month or something and completely fell in love with it, and fell in love Ian McShane’s voice.

I developed this actor crush, it was the most amazing deepest thing I’d ever heard. I had never really seen him in anything before so I was interested in a new actor. So I just kind of walked around my apartment doing Ian McShane’s lines from “Deadwood,” and it was this weird like vocal exercise thing because it kind of stretched and deepened my own voice so when Bastion came out of nowhere I was actually pretty well primed to do that.

JT: You mentioned you wanted to give a shout out.

LC: I want to give a shout out to everyone who has gotten Transistor and is enjoying it. Seriously it’s been

really great to see, just going on Tumblr and doing a Transistor search and see all of the crazy fan art and fan fiction. One of the really nice things about Bastion is the Bastion fandom that exists. There is a smallish but dedicated and fervent fandom for Bastion specifically on Tumblr and we’ve gotten to meet some of these people in person, and they are just awesome. The same thing seems to be happening with Transistor but there is just so much more of it already, it’s a strange thing to be a part of, but it’s amazing, so thank you to all those people.

While Cunningham’s ultimate goal is set on developing his talent for performance art in film and theater, he is clearly invested and dedicated to his friends at Supergiant Games, whose fans will likely be excited for whatever comes next.

After leaving several big name studios Lee decided to try and grab hold of the same success that many indie game innovators were having on Kickstarter by releasing his own campaign with his personal passion 18 years in the making. We recently had the opportunity to ask Lee why he would leave one of the biggest names in video games to launch Timespinner.

Jesse Tannous: Can you give me a little background into your work with Microsoft and Bungie?

Bodie Lee: At Microsoft I worked in the Xbox Test Division, doing Quality Assurance on big titles such as Alan Wake, Gears of War 3, and Kinect Star Wars 3. After that I moved on to Bungie where I was a Production Engineer. My job there consisted mostly of writing software tools to help streamline workflows.

JT: What ultimately made you decide to leave companies like Microsoft and Bungie to pursue your own indie project?

BL: It started when I saw the Kickstarter for a Metroidvania game called Chasm. Their success, and the fact Timespinner was so similar, gave me the “indie bug”. This got even worse when I went to PAX Prime and saw how awesome the Indie Megabooth was. One day my manager asked me about my career: “What do you want to do?” I realized that all I wanted to do was work on Timespinner. So that’s what I did!

JT: In what ways has your experience as an indie developer differed from your work with those previous companies?

BL: There’s a really good blog post that a former co-worker of mine wrote, that sums it up pretty nicely. When you’re working for a big game company, you’re a small cog that fits in a bigger machine. While your work is important, your responsibilities are limited within a specific scope. When you’re working independently, your scope of responsibilities grows infinitely in all directions. It’s suddenly up to you to determine where you spend your time and energy. This shift was probably the most jarring for me, but I eventually got the hang of it.

JT: You described how you’ve developed the world of Timespinner for the last 18 years. How did you approach narrowing down the content you have to an approachable game for the masses?

BL: Timespinner is a side-story in a much bigger story in the galaxy of Erneah. The primary plot of Erneah is designed to be told in RPG-form, simply because of its sheer size. In the past I’ve tried making games that tell the primary story with tools such as RM2k, but it always proved to be too big of a task to do on my own. When I first made the prototype for Timespinner, I knew that I wanted to take a manageable piece of the Erneah story and turn it into a side-story game. This is the primary reason that Timespinner is a platformer- this genre is well suited for smaller teams and stories.

JT: What kind of experiences do you hope players of Timespinner will walk away with?

BL: I hope that people enjoy the story and gameplay so much that they can’t wait to hear about what happens next in the galaxy of Erneah!

Timespinner has already acquired its Kickstarter goal and is now moving forward in final development. Lee is just one of many creators who have stepped out of the corporate office in order to take a shot at independent game development.

Lee and his Timespinner, like the name implies, may have just picked the best time to make an eighteen year dream project a reality.

Jesse has been writing video game related articles and interviewing industry professionals for almost 3 years and strives to become a professional nerd.

Source: The Wall Street Journal