EPISODE 1620

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Hypnospace Outlaw is a hit indie game, which features an internet and operating system simulator set in a surreal alternate version of 1999. The game is entirely unique, both in its design and aesthetic, and it has an impressive development history. Jay Tholen is the developer of Hypnospace Outlaw and he joins the show to talk about the engineering of the game, the creation of an entire fake Internet, and he gives an update on his next game, Dreamsettler.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Hello

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:59] JN: Hello, and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My name is Joe Nash. Today, I am delighted to be joined by Jay Tholen, game developer, musician, probably most well-known for Hypnospace Outlaws, but there's plenty of other games beside. Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.

[0:01:14] JT: Thanks for having me.

[0:01:15] JN: I want to kick off with your game development journey so far. I mentioned Hypnospace Outlaw, which is certainly the game that I'm most familiar within your back catalog, but you've also worked on some of the titles, Dropsy, Slayers X, and an upcoming game. Can you tell me a little bit about how game development started for you?

[0:01:33] JT: I started game development, it's a little foggy exactly where I founded this, but I found a demo of a program called Klik & Play. I think it was on a SimTower CD. Klik & Play is an easy-to-use game development software from the 90s. Maxis bought the rights to distribute it, I think for a short time, so it got decently popular. I might be wrong about that, but it was packaged with a lot of Maxis stuff.

Anyway, I used that to make things that really weren't games, but more like, ripped sprites of Goku bouncing around with a corn MIDI file in the background. I don't know, just whatever I could scrounge around, threw it in there, and a little eight-direction game where you shoot fireballs at Goku. I don't know. But that's how I got started. Then I just used that software, which really helped me hone, I guess, I don't even know if it was called that back then, but pixel art skills, and then I got really into pixel art and tracker music, because both of those things are something you could use with the Klik & Play/Games Factory software.

Yeah, that's how I got started. Ever since, I was - well, yeah, we got a computer 97, so I was about 10 or 11, and ever since then, I've been doing it professionally, only the last third of my life, but yeah.

[0:03:04] JN: Right. Yeah, let's talk about that last third. My impression, I might be wrong here is that Dropsy was your first "professional game," is that correct?

[0:03:12] JT: Yeah, Dropsy was my first commercial game, legitimate commercial game. Some I threw online and tried to charge 99 cents for them, but I had no reach, or anything. They became free very quickly.

[0:03:26] JN: Perfect. Then after that, obviously, we have Hypnospace Outlaw. That's where we're going to be spending quite a lot of the time today. I have lots of questions about that. I guess, for folks who aren't familiar with the game, who haven't experienced it yet, and bearing in mind, that it is quite a unique game as a concept, can you tell us what Hypnospace Outlaw is and describe it a bit?

[0:03:43] JT: Yeah. Hypnospace Outlaw is an internet and operating system simulator set in an alternate reality 1999. We pretend that a technology exists that allows you to surf the web, or use a computer while you're sleeping. You do this by imagining that you're typing on a keyboard in your dream, or in your sleep, or something like that. Then somehow the device, the device is actually - it's almost like a glorified monitor, and that also reads your inputs. Then it hooks up. It's a peripheral, though. It hooks up to your PC, which then does processing, and then it - so, you have to be hooked up to your computer at all times, even though you're sleeping, which we should have done some strangulation angle, but then think about that.

Yeah, but that's what it is, and you basically have a simulated operating system and a walled garden Internet service that you explore, maybe not unlike AOL's homepage communities, or GeoCities neighborhoods. You moderate it. To you are an enforcer, which gives us a good excuse to close off why you can't access chats and stuff, because it wouldn't be fair for some junk, I don't know. You're an enforcer and you have a set of rules and you have to go out and find violations that people have broken the rules and you have a little gavel tool when you hammer the element on their page where the rule was broken, and then you get paid.

[0:05:17] JN: Excellent. Yeah, I think that's a very comprehensive description. For folks who hear that initial operating system simulator, internet simulator, it's definitely - I was shocked at how comprehensive it was, how large this internet slice was. I highly recommend checking it out. We'll definitely come back to the gameplay elements of that later, but first, I wanted to talk about the concept. That concept that you've described there, to my understanding from here and you speak before, was not the original concept for the game, right? It grew out of another game you released called Hypnospace Enforcer, not Outlaw. How did that happen? Do your games often - when you have the initial vision for a game, do you often find that the end result is different, or changes along the path of development, or is this a unique experience?

[0:06:03] JT: Yeah, that happens all the time. I have a motivation problem. To keep motivation, I have to follow what is peaking my interests the most at any given time. Well, the operating system and internet simulate your side of things. I was finding more exciting, and also, I was sharing development, footage of it on Twitter and elsewhere, and people were responding really well to that. I was like, "You know what? I'm having more fun doing this." Because the original game, Hypnospace Enforcer was a more or less like an endless runner game. The sequel, Hypnospace Outlaw would have been the same, but you can go in two directions. You can flip and go left and right on an endless information super highway.

The Internet part was in there. The operating system part was in there, but it was really just a way to see, to look at the person's page you were hunting down to get clues about how to find them on the highway, and also, to see what they had done wrong and get maybe some empathy for them before you throw them into jail and stuff. Yeah, it was going to be a large part. At least, half of the game was going to be highway stuff.

People's operating stuff would have been visible in the highway. It's a play on information, super highway, the buzzword. If you had a virtual pet on your desktop, it would have shown - been shown following your car on the highway, or if you bumped into someone's car, maybe it would spill files out that they had on their hard drive, and you could just steal files from them, kind of a cartoony information super highway treatment. It was going to be inspired a lot by those ads, where you're flying through 3D space to connect with someone in Australia through email.

That marketing gave this very cartoony, sensational idea of what it's like to be on the web. It's a new era and stuff. The game was playing into that a lot. Yeah, the whole web, more dry, adding little tinkery features, all of that just really - me and Mike Lasch, who's the other main person who worked on this. He did coding and some design. We just found that more of an enjoyable direction to take.

[0:08:31] JN: That's awesome. Yeah, I love the metaphor of the invasion super highway. I do often find, I think, that the images and renderings and marketing for what it's like to surf the Internet are much more compelling than actually surfing the Internet. I'm glad you explored that direction.

[0:08:44] JT: That sense of disappointment is a big part of this game, too. In '97, when I first got a computer, I'm like, "Okay, where is it? Where is the 3D world where I'm chatting with?" In movies and stuff, it just looks so much cooler than the reality in. I still liked it, but it wasn't what I was hoping. I wanted to capture that here, too.

[0:09:07] JN: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned there, and obviously, in the past that, as you were developing those early concepts, fans and people who are following your work really grabbed on to the fake operating system. This is a bit of a thing that's a common genre. I think aside from Hypnospace Outlaw, Zachtronics, Last Call BBS, also explores this and has a lot of other titles in the genre. Why is it that you think people really enjoy playing with what is essentially their desktop computer, but amped up and made into a game?

[0:09:36] JT: That's an interesting question. We actually weren't sure how accessible it would be, because computers - mobile computings having a large influence on PCs now. We took the game to a show and at that time, it was default. Default behavior was double clicking to open a program. Everyone was clicking once on the desktop icons. Nothing was opening and then they would leave and they thought it was broken. Or just, I don't know what they thought, but I'm assuming they thought it was broken, because they left.

At that point, we had a big talk about, oh, maybe we need to make it single click. Instead, we just put a giant sign that points at an icon at the very beginning, that's like, "Double click here to get started." Because I think our audience is still people who have some computer experience, or something. To answer your question, yeah, I guess in part, I guess it depends on if maybe your age and your experience with computers, I think a lot of younger people feel maybe they missed out on this era, where people even really used the desktop icons much at all. I feel like, they, according to our reviews and some of the feedback I've had from younger people who were too young to have been on the web in that late 90s, early 2000s era, it's almost to them feels like a period piece or something, like a time machine thing.

There's even been teachers who messaged me about like, just if it's okay if their class plays it, or whatever. I don't know if that ever happened. I guess, for some people, it's that kind of thing. I think I've told this anecdote before, but in my high school, there was in our art class, there was a little corner of people who had this weird late 60s subculture thing coming back in our art class, where they were really into the Woodstock Festival and the doors and the whole mystique around all that, like Jimi Hendrix and all that, that era and we're wearing the clothes and the art teacher was ragging on. Because he was a hippie in a nice way.

I think, there's this mystique about these eras that you were too young to have experienced and it feels cool to travel back there and maybe see what it was like, maybe. I think with Vaporwave and stuff, we're seeing these other subcultures, where we're maybe seeing another version of that, where there's a lot of people who find it compelling just that whole time. But in terms of just purely using an operating system, one of the feelings I wanted to capture was when I - in '97, and then '99, we got the Internet, I didn't - when we first got the computer and the Internet, I didn't know where the boundaries were to this stuff and I don't know what was possible.

Like I said, I was hoping to find that 3D world where people were chatting and never quite found it, especially because we had dial-up, so it wouldn't have worked too well anyway. I think there's something a little bit magical about - it's almost like, stumbling upon a machine and not knowing what the heck is this and poking at it and seeing what it does.

We weren't trying to replicate Windows 95, or anything. When you open this thing up, you see, oh, it looks like an operating system, but it has a lot of strange quirky features. I think that encourages people to, I don't know, it fosters a little sense of wonder about what they might be able to do there.

[0:13:10] JN: Yeah. I think that's the area that I'm most intrigued by, because it does feel like, it has so many of the bells and whistles and operating system has. It does feel really open. I'm really intrigued of, as you were building it, as you're adding these things in, how did you balance that creation of an operating system simulator with what is - I mean, for folks who haven't played super deep into it, a very narratively driven game? There is a point to this. There is a storyline, right? It does take players' places. How do you balance those two? What seemed to me very competing ideas?

[0:13:43] JT: Yeah, they are. It was pretty hard, because we just started. I started with the web. I don't know, is there a word for method acting, but it's when you're making stuff? I was using the page builder. No, so what I did, I drew a mock-up of a page builder right when we started, just from my dreams. Like, this is what it would ideally look like. And a sequencer, a music sequencer, basically a tracker, but in a beat sequencer form.

I sent both of those to Mike, who is the Hypnospace's coder. I didn't expect this. I was expecting to see Windows-like temp graphics, but he cut up all my graphics, stuck him in there and just basically, within a few months, made them function, like almost exactly what I mocked up in the image editor. A few things are crusty about the way he did it. Like, that didn't quite match for what I was imagining. As I was making pages, and certain things that were a little too crusty, of course, we would touch up.

Eventually, I think we both settled on this idea where it was like, you know what? Some of these things, let's just roll with them. When you started to open a new text box, when you start a new text element, it says, hypno text, or it says something like a 'double click here to edit this text box', or something. It's really easy to just make one of those and it gets lost in the hierarchy. Sometimes you'll just see double click here to edit this somewhere. We're like, let's just pretend that that's just something users do, which is making a game where most of the content was created by amateurs is really good, because it's really cheap. Anyone can make it.

I could just very quickly make a lot of content, because it's not supposed to sell a professional presence, or a big realistic world, or something. Yeah. I forgot what the original question was, but there you go.

[0:15:52] JN: No, that's great. I think that's such a fascinating part of it, because it does feel so much of the content you experience does feel so of the time so genuine. Of course, that means that a lot of it is being made by kids who've just got their first computer and that kind of stuff. You really feel that. I imagine as a creator, that gives a lot of almost psychological safety knowing that like, oh, if someone finds a mistake, it's going to feel like, it's the characters of.

[0:16:14] JT: It doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah.

[0:16:16] JN: Yeah. It's fascinating. You mentioned that Mike is your developer who's building this stuff. I'm really interested, what was the initial tool set? What is Hypnospace Outlaw made in?

[0:16:26] JT: Yeah. Hypnospace Outlaw is made in Construct 2, which is, I mentioned Klik & Play, which is almost more or less, you could say, a kids game making software. Not unlike today's scratch or stuff like that. That turned into the Games Factory, which turned into Multimedia Fusion, which turned into Clickteam Fusion, which is still going. One of the Clickteam community people who I remembered when I was a kid, he broke off, because of he stopped using the software, because there were certain things he wanted to do and the developers weren't interested in that. He started Construct.

Construct is basically Klik & Play. Fundamentally, the ideas behind it are basically what I was using when I was 11. We were like, "You know what?" I met Mike through the Clickteam, Klik & Play community as well a while ago. We're like, we're comfortable with this. I guess, we'll worry about porting and stuff later, because it's not great with porting. That's why we chose Construct. It's quite difficult to do some of the things we wanted to do, especially in a performant way in Construct. We had to circumvent a lot of the out-of-the-box features, or get a little hacky sometimes. Ultimately it worked okay.

[0:17:54] JN: Yeah, I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but to my understanding, Construct is web technologies, right? Like, it's HTML and okay, so now I'm doubly fascinated about the page builder, because the page builder -

[0:18:04] JT: It's web technology, but it's like, it's none of that's exposed. It's all an event-based editor, where it's like -

[0:18:12] JN: Okay. That makes sense.

[0:18:13] JT: - if variable is higher than blah, then do this, this, this.

[0:18:18] JN: Right.

[0:18:19] JT: Or if this collides with this, then do this, this, this. It's a visual scripting thing.

[0:18:24] JN: Oh, you got you. It's not like electron, where you're building applications in that stuff. It's just, the output happens to be web technologies, but you -

[0:18:31] JT: Yeah. It outputs into HTML 5, like web technology, yeah, which was a problem, big problem for performance, because computers see that as not needing the GPU. By default, it says, no, don't use the GPU for this application, unless you go in there and manually set our executable to run on the GPU. Then it runs on the CPU-only, or integrated graphics. It's just, some laptops have a dual integrated graphics. It just runs so poorly for some people, which a lot of people think is intentional and okay, but it's -

[0:19:11] JN: That's incredible. I had that exact situation in months, for someone who was a really low frame rate and they just thought that was the walking speed. It was incredible. Okay, so one more question on that. It's also on consoles, right?

[0:19:24] JT: It had to be rebuilt.

[0:19:25] JN: Okay, okay. It's not the original web technologies version. It has been reworked in some way?

[0:19:31] JT: Now, we worked with a company called Ratalaika, and they have their own Construct porting thing they've made. They do other Construct games and they used that and they had to - because we circumvented some Construct things, they had a little extra work to do to implement some of our custom stuff. Yeah, it's just rebuilt using their stuff. I don't know much about it.

[0:19:55] JN: Perfect. That makes total sense. Back to the, I guess, the construction of the core game. There were various parts throughout the game where the narrative moves forward. There were time skips, or jumps, that kind of stuff. How do you amongst these web pages and the feature set, the operating system, how did you deal with progression and access gating to features and that kind of stuff within this? I guess in my head, it's really a faithful operating system simulator, but I imagine that's not necessarily built like operating system, right? How does that work?

[0:20:25] JT: Right. Okay, this will actually answer the question I forgot, because now I remember the old question, too. That all has to do with how the game was - how development worked happened, which was first, we made a big fake Internet. Well, first we made the operating system, but then we made a big fake Internet. By we, I mostly mean me made this fake Internet. Just a pile of pages.

When I'd make a new page, I think of a person, try to pretend to be that, like them. What would they do? Do they know the technology well enough? What is their education level? Blah, blah, blah. Then when I'd make a new page, I would think, okay, well, what zone are they in? Which in our game is a neighborhood, or a community, sub-community. Then, who would they know? Who would be their friend here? Who might they not like here? Then, I would edit their page and say, "Hey, these are my friends." Then I would write a notepad or something, a list of their friends, or enemies, or whatever. Then I would go into the pages of people who are this new character's friends. Then I would go edit those pages again to add maybe some references to this new person I added and say, "Yeah, we're going to go hang out and play tennis. Meet in real life."

Just development happened that way, where it was just very, did whatever I wanted and tried my best to keep track. I had some spreadsheets after a while, because it got a little messy and to keep track of who knows who and maybe this person has a crush on this person. What is the other person's temperament? What do they think about this person having a crush on them and do they know?

Then after a while, just had this whole pile of pages. Then really, there weren't many violations at all, or any - wasn't any gameplay for a long time. It was just later on that we were like, okay, now, how do we get these people in trouble? What would they be doing wrong that the players can, and how in the zones, players are given access to zones as they accomplish more. First, you have just the blue collar, fly over state country people zone and the cafe, which is more like the liberal everyone's welcome. Sort of really 90s, like people holding hands zone, where they try to make it feel - it looks like a coffee house and it has that global village aesthetic to it and stuff. That's just really is what it sounds like, is just mostly random, maybe more urbanite people, slightly people who might actually go to a cafe.

Some people are there by accident, because it's the default zone, which I thought was funny. Some people are like, "Hey, I'm not a communist. How do I move my page to the other place?" Then after we had all this, though, that's when I started thinking about - and that's when Xalavier Nelson, Jr., who did Narrative design, he wrote a lot of the news articles, too. He came on and helped, really helped add some progression and helped make sense of this and how to slowly unlock new zones and how to do the time jumps after certain things happen.

Basically, the game, the fake Internet was mostly made. The operating system features were mostly made and then a game was stuck in there afterwards. Which in retrospect, I liked doing it that way, because you have a broad view of everything and you can, I don't know. I liked how that worked in the end.

[0:24:15] JN: Yeah. No, I think that what you described sounded you really got to know the characters and why they were there and what they were operating in before the game arrived. I imagine that's a very useful process. Linking everything together. You mentioned the creation of the tools between yourself and Mike. I want to come back to those tools, because you released them pretty soon after the 1.0 release. We had the page builder and the music creator. You've released those at the community and allowed them to build whatever they want. How did that go? 

[0:24:46] JT: It didn't take off. I don't want to discount what people have done. I think there's some pretty cool stuff out there. If you click mods on the main menu, you can see some of the things people have uploaded that they've made. I think it's a combination of being Windows only when this game really - if any game would appeal to Linux, or Mac users, this would be one of them more than, I think, your average game. We couldn't port them with it being worth it. It would have been a lot of work. We would have to rebuild to port the tools to anything but Windows.

We polished them a little bit, but they're so fundamentally janky that with things that we just got used to, that for other people, it's a bit of a learning curve. Then the other thing, I think the other reason that it didn't take off too much is because sharing requires you to upload a zip to a modding website. Then there's no in-game way to share your pages and stuff, which we had preliminary plans for, but combination of things led to us not doing that. Like, concerns about moderation was one of them. It would have just been a pretty big job to moderate that.

[0:26:04] JN: Yeah, I'm surprised that you say it didn't kick off. To me, when I look at your Discord and there's still people making stuff today, I spent a good amount of time poking around that calculator, trying to work out how they built a whole app outside the page builder.

[0:26:17] JT: You know what? When the tools came out, it wasn't like what I was hoping, but it has been steady and people have been making stuff. I think over the three years, three and a half years now they've been out, we do have a substantial amount of stuff people made interesting stuff, but there have been no big game mods, where people would add a whole zone of, okay, someone did add a whole zone, actually. But new gameplay, or anything like that that we were hoping for. Yea, but not that I don't appreciate. Because there's a little scripting language that we made with variables and stuff.

Yeah, like the calculator you mentioned, there are other really interesting things. Cobalt by this - it's a fellow named Tom K. He's made so many different doodads and they're all very impressive for the game. Just for the heck of it. Yeah, very cool stuff.

[0:27:13] JN: Love an impressive doodad. Your next game, Dreamsettler, is also a fake operating system game. This set me on a real journey, where I was like, is this just because it's the natural sequel to Hypnospace, or is this - are you just really looking forward to building an operating system again? What's the motivation here?

[0:27:31] JT: Yeah, the motivation was in part, well, you know what we were talking about right after Hypnospace was a cart racer, where you can exit your cart and it becomes a FPS. But you don't tell anyone that until they discover it and then you can go back through all the tracks and then explore them and go into the interiors in the FPS mode after you realize that you can exit your cart. That was what we pitched.

Then our publisher was like, "How about you just do another one? Another Hypnospace, because people liked that?" Because also, that we hadn't done 3D yet. To them, it was sounding quite risky. And it was. I think, still might do that one. That's how that started and decided to set it. I think, originally, they wanted to have it a little later in our initial talks, like set up between 2005 and 2007, or 8 when YouTube was just kicking off and stuff, but I decided to go more for the beginning of MySpace. 2003 to 2005, roughly.

[0:28:41] JN: It's a deeply cursed period to set it. I can't wait to see some of the selfies that are going to be on these people's pages.

[0:28:48] JT: Flash was, I think, at its peak around then, too. Yeah.

[0:28:52] JN: Very cool. I'm getting the sense that a lot of your game concepts come from altered car games, fundamentally. Got him those space enforcer with the highway and now I'm at a car game. All operating systems stand link cars.

[0:29:03] JT: I don't even like racing games. I don't know why.

[0:29:08] JN: Incredible. You mentioned that original genesis as a 3D game, and it's been a couple of years and you've got, I believe, another developer joined your team. Is it Mark LaQua  has joined?

[0:29:18] JT: Yeah. The team's a little bit bigger. It's a little bit time on how is your development process changed? Are you still using Construct? Have you changed technologies? We're using Unity now. Again, having to wrestle against the software a little bit, because Construct made it very easy to set a native resolution and then just, boom, everything's on the grid. Unity, everything is sub-pixels, and to get it to feel like a legitimate low-resolution takes a lot of work, especially having to do a text. That's pain in the butt. Things are working now and it's been working for a while. The operating system is much more robust. Needlessly, it's really, we have to make the rest of the game justify it somehow, but it's just basically, an operating system.

[0:30:07] JN: It's very exciting. Very much following the arc of the first one that we discussed, operating system first and the gameplay is coming.

[0:30:14] JT: Yeah. Originally, the team didn't want to do it that way, but I intentionally just did what I wanted. Right now, I'm actually taking a break, though, because I'm a stay-at-home dad right now. My son hasn't have a daycare spot, so waiting until January for that. For the last maybe two months, I haven't really been working much on it, doing side projects and stuff. It's exciting, but it's scary, because with Hypnospace, the resolution was 480 by 270 pixels. Not only did we have a low resolution, but we had a web safe palette that I put together. I called it the Hypnospace palette. I dithered everything using Floyd Steinberg, or Atkinson dithering to that palette.

That meant, if I wanted to make a fake album cover, I could do a really bad Photoshop, scale it down to 200 pixels by 200 pixels, put dithering all over it, and it would look like, pretty much like it could be a legit album cover. This game, it's more or less true color and it's 960 by 540. The amount of time a single asset takes is just - it takes a lot longer to make a convincing asset. I'm such a stickler for it being convincing to a degree, but it's just much more slow process.

[0:31:41] JN: That's fascinating. Yeah, that's a real consequence of the time job I hadn't thought of. If listeners are interested in that description of the asset creation that you described, you do it, you have a tutorial on your YouTube that you made for the community, right, that walks through that process and making Hypnospace assets. I'd highly recommend checking it out. It was really - it was very illuminating to watch.

[0:31:58] JT: Yeah, I do. I should redo those. They're a little dated, but I think they still work with the software I used.

[0:32:04] JN: Yeah, sure. Whilst we're still talking about Dreamsettlers, also, it's still to come It's still in development. Is there any teases, anything you can tell us for any of the Hypnospace fans who are listening about the upcoming game?

[0:32:15] JT: Yeah. Hypnospace had a whole roster of fictional music, musical artists. This time, we're trying to expand into, for example, wrestling, professional wrestling. There's a wrestler who me saying this, I'll give it away, because there's not that many of these guys, but he's a professional wrestler and he likes video games and streams them sometimes. He's actually going to help us this next year, ideally film a - well, it has to be this next year, film a wrestling match for some of our fictional wrestlers. I think that's going to be cool.

Yeah, it's a fun part for me is just filling it with fictional bands' music. There's some returning musical artists, especially some of them who had big personalities in the first game will come back around. It's been pretty fun figuring out how to do this, because a big part of the 2000s was, I guess, 9/11. We're like, well, we have a 9/11 and how do we do that and what kind of a 9/11 is it and what's the thing? We mixed. We brought Hurricane Katrina backwards a little bit and 9/11 forward a little bit and just mixed them together. We'll see how that goes.

[0:33:31] JN: God, yeah. That is such an interesting problem with creating something that is fundamentally about cultural artifacts of a time period. God, that's incredible.

[0:33:40] JT: That's one thing I wanted to do more here to make it feel more cohesive is make world events and make things from the world matter to people more, which the Internet was mostly people Sailor Moon shrines, or recipes, or whatever. But people did, especially as you get more into blogging and social media era, you had more of a sense of the time, instead of just reference material people were putting up, or their galleries, or whatever.

[0:34:10] JN: Yeah, especially as you start to explore MySpace, early social networks. You're third in the series, it sounds to be like, the Twitter generation. What a monster that would be.

[0:34:20] JN: Can you imagine a game in 20 years about right now? I don't think I would have an interest in playing it, but who knows? That means, I can't really be to annoyed at any Gen X people who are like, "Why would you want to go back to 1998 and a computer? Ugh." I can't fault them for that, because I think I'll be the same way in 20 years.

[0:34:45] JN: Yeah. No, that makes total sense. I know we're getting close in time, so to bring us out. You mentioned some characters that are returning have their own lives. One of the characters from Hypnospace is very much, I guess, escaped the game and got on to release his own game is Zane Rocks. You've been working on a game called, and I will try and get the whole title here. Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer, which was made by a character from Hypnospace, Zane Rocks. Can you tell us a bit about this game?

[0:35:14] JT: Yeah. There was a boomer shooter, or a early 90s, 2.5D shooter in the vein of Blood, or Duke Nukem 3D, or Doom. The idea is that it's a mod of an in-universe game called Cataclysm, which is a 1995, our world's version of Doom, or Duke Nukem. This is a mod that this kid and his friends started in high school and worked on it a bit and then life happened and then they forgot about it. This Zane, his friend from high school, promised him at his own peril that he would help him finish their game later on, I guess, at that graduation, or something. I don't know, some sentimental promise. "Bye, buddy. I'm going to college."

Then Zane held him to it and then they finished their game earlier this year. Yeah, so we did a lot of stuff to replicate the sector effects of like a Doom mapping to give it that - and the limited palette, so the colors snap when you, to the next color in the palette when things get darker. To give it that build engine, Doom vibe.

[0:36:30] JN: Yeah, and that's quite a genre jump from Hypnospace. How did you find building a, I guess, a shooter full stop, especially a boomer shooter, which is a very distinct art form in itself?

[0:36:39] JT: It was a lot of fun. I was a big Duke Nukem fan as a kid and I'd run around quoting Duke Nukem all the time. It was a lot of fun. My favorite thing about those games are the little dioramas you're exploring and the levels that are supposed to look like real places. I liked making a dollar store, or all kinds of stuff that Zane might know from his life. He works at a dollar store in real life. I love to think, trying to do some subtle storytelling with the level design. For example, there's a rich neighborhood and Zane, everything is scaled way up in the rich neighborhood. Your head goes up to like, the counters are a little over your head, even though Zane is an adult in the game.

I think, I was thinking maybe his memories of these places are like, they're scaled up, because he only went in them when he was a kid at a sleepover, or something. They also have cartoonishly rich, like people stuff in their house, which also from a lack of experience in a rich person house. Yeah, I thought that was fun. It also inspired just by amateur Doom maps that Doom wads that people make, where they make their house. There's a famous MyHouse.wad that came out this year that explored similar themes, or they make their neighborhood. It's not really a great level per se, but it's just - it's almost a weird version of a diary, or something sometimes, some of these wads.

[0:38:08] JN: Yeah, that reminds me of the Duke Nukem 3D map, which is every event in British culture in the last 20 years or something. That's, yeah.

[0:38:17] JT: Dukes Nukem.

[0:38:19] JN: Yeah, that's the one. Yeah. God, wild. I guess, my final question to close us out here, so you've got a complete genre jump. Lots of things going on there, but it's very rooted in Hypnopace. Is Hypnospace character referencing their events and lives in Hypnospace. How did you, as a developer with an audience, how did you go about who's playing Slayer X? How did you find the audience for that game?

[0:38:43] JT:  Well, I started Zane's Twitter and I just made - I gave him a present on Discord and Twitter. I actually had him join some retro FBS YouTuber Discords. He just goes in there and talks about getting with people's moms. For people who are listening, Zane is who haven't played Hypnospace, Zane is very, you would say, edgy. He didn't grow out of it. He's in his late 30s. He's a little gentler in some ways. He has a kid. He's a little contained now. He's a responsible adult, but his interests haven't shifted too much. He's still into Numetal and sick and twisted clowns. He thinks they're awesome and whatever. I would probably be a little like him if I stuck around my hometown longer, or something.

Yeah. I legitimately and still, even though I like Numetal when I was a kid and it was a little embarrassing thing and to wear the baggy pants, I still like that. I'll put on those albums sometimes. Yeah.

[0:39:46] JN: Very much like creating the persona and having it in habit spaces while people play these games.

[0:39:51] JT: Yeah. I think people were attracted to that and the few people who knew Hypnospace from those servers explained it to everyone else, what the heck was going on. I think leaning into it, not being connected to Hypnospace in the marketing and stuff and just letting it be Zane's game and also, letting it be - I didn't want it to be cynical. I wanted to celebrate all that stuff. A feeling, because there's plenty of people who still love Numetal and they still like those aesthetics. I don't know.

I guess, the game does borrow a lot from the sort of 1999 and 2000, The Matrix and Dragon Ball Z, this era of - or animated music videos, where they would put anime to Numetal, or Korn songs, or System of a Down songs. Just that whole era, there's not - isn't too much pulling from that a lot. Not directly. I thought that that was a nice open door. I'm not competing with many people there. I think the people who remember that era and whom it resonates with, then they're attracted to it maybe. It seemed to work out pretty well.

I think one thing that, I guess, bugs me, but it can't be helped, just because of how dumb Zane's humor and his one-liners are, and just how in your face the aesthetic is, s people think it was a very quick meme joke thing and we tried our best to make a legitimately good shooter just with this aesthetic and this made by a juvenile guy. I can't fault them for just thinking someone kicked it out in a month, or something.

[0:41:38] JN: Which is a shame, because as we know, it took Zane 23 years to make that game.

[0:41:41] JT: It did take him 23 years. It took us two and a half years. There's some overlapping games, but yeah.

[0:41:47] JN: Was that Unity as well, that one?


[0:41:49] JT: Yeah, that's Unity.

[0:41:50] JN: Awesome. Perfect. Well, Jay, thank you so much. This has been for me a huge pleasure. So many topics I've had long on my mind about the game. Been delightful to talk all with you. If people want to keep up to date on what's happening with Dreamsettlers and your other game, where's the best place for them to follow your work?

[0:42:05] JT: I guess, it's X, Twitter.

[0:42:09] JN: Rest in peace.

[0:42:10] JT: Yeah. @jaytholen. Jay Tholen.

[0:42:16] JN: Perfect. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

[0:42:20] JT: Yeah. Thank you, Jeff.

[END]