EPISODE 1657

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:01] ANNOUNCER: 
Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 are MetroidVania action-adventure games developed by the Spanish studio The Game Kitchen. The games have a stunning distinctive pixel art style and atmospheric world, which is inspired by Spanish folklore and religious themes. They are known for their challenging combat and intricate level design. 

David Erosa is the Lead Producer and Dani Marquez is a Senior Programmer on Blasphemous 2. David and Dani join the show today to talk about designing the game systems, the game's development framework, engineering character movement, console optimizations and more. 

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

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:07] JN: Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today I'm joined by David Erosa and Daniel Márquez of The Game Kitchen. Creators of Blasphemous and it's recent sequel, Blasphemous 2. David and Daniel, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.

[00:01:22] SMS: Hi. Thank you, I'm David. I am the producer for Blasphemous 2. With us is Dani. Dani? 

[00:01:32] DE: Yeah. I'm Daniel, Dani. I'm one of the programmers of the game.

[00:01:37] JN: Awesome. Thank you for putting out your job titles as well. Very helpful. And very excited to talk to you today about Blasphemous 2, which I've been playing quite a lot of in the lead-up to this. I guess to kick us off, you mentioned your roles there. We've got a producer and a programmer. Can you talk a little bit about what it is you do at the Game Kitchen? Also, on Blasphemous. 

[00:01:53] DE: Well, I always joke by describing my job as I try to prevent people from tearing each other apart. The producer's role is trying to get in sync of the different aspects that are involved in game development. You have to know a little bit about programming, a little bit about art, animation, audio to be very knowledge of how all these different areas are related during the development of a game and the dependencies that are involved. And to get to agreements with our publisher in order to keep everyone happy about the progress of the game. Let's say that it's my fault. I'm guilty for everything that isn't really working. That's my responsibility. 

[00:02:54] JN: It's a very relevant theme with Blasphemous. You are the penitent one for the whole studio. 

[00:02:58] DE: Well, I wasn't the producer for Blasphemous 1. That was Mauricio, who is the current CEO and Director of the studio. I took that role for Blasphemous 2. 

[00:03:09] JN: Awesome. And Dani, your role as a programmer? 

[00:03:12] DM: Yeah. Well, as a programmer is a wide variety of stuff. But mainly in this game I was responsible for system and let's say architecture, yeah, in a way. Also, rendering stuff, too. But mainly systems and architecture. 

[00:03:31] JN: Awesome. Perfect. We would definitely want to dig into that shortly. But for folks who haven't played either of the games, can you introduce Blasphemous 2 to us? And I guess the wider world of Blasphemous as well would be useful. 

[00:03:41][]DE: Well Blasphemous is – the second game is a MetroidVania game. The first one was more an action platformer. Some people call it souls-like game. That wasn't really the original intention. But people gave it that description. But Blasphemous 2 is a pure MetrioidVania game that is based on a lot of the Spanish culture. It's a dark fantasy inspired by Spanish painting, architecture or religion-inspired. We try to avoid direct references to any kind of religion. But the inspiration is in there.

[00:04:27] JN: Awesome. Yeah. I have to confess. I didn't know about a lot of the associated iconography before I played the game. And while I was looking at other interviews about the game and Levi had saw you comment on Spanish Holy Week in another one. And I looked at the images from Spanish Holy Week and I was just like, "Oh, okay. I get it now. I understand the aesthetic vibe." I'd highly – for any listeners who haven't seen it, definitely look it up. It's definitely an aesthetic. I guess onto the implementation of the game, where is Blasphemous 2 built-in? What are we talking in terms of engine and technologies? 

[00:04:58] DM: Well, it's built upon Unity engine. We are using pretty – some plugins here and there. But almost everything is written by us from a scratch in Unity. Yeah, that's – we call from zero – okay, we didn't reuse anything from the first part. I had to say I wasn't on the first Blasphemous. We built this from the ground up upon Unity. 

[00:05:25] JN: Awesome. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the areas I was really interested in. That as you approach a sequel, especially when there's a lot of shared aesthetic, it's still that 2D side scrolling platforms, etc. How do you think about code reuse? How do you think about, "Hey, are we building on the previous game? Is it starting scratch?" What was that process like going from Blasphemous 1 to 2? 

[00:05:44] DM: What I have to say, just because I wasn't there on the first one, I can answer really with much – I don't know the truth or the correct answer. But this one from – we are making sure this one is reusable. Okay? We didn't make the same mistake again. 

[00:06:08] DE: I know the reason because I was there during the development of the three DLCs. When we made the decision to start the sequel, one of the discussions was, "Of course, what do we do? Do we reuse the old framework that we build for the first game? Or should we start from scratch?" And this is a really tricky decision. Because, of course, on one hand you have the whole game already built. Most people will think that this is just a matter of, let's say, switching assets. 

But the harsh truth is that we wanted to explore many design paths that would be maybe not impossible but really difficult to implement using the old framework. For example, we only had one weapon in Blasphemous 1. And we have three of those in the sequel. And that's something that I find – I can't even start imagining how would that be implemented. 

Also, there were many really important things for the gameplay feeling, mainly the controller of the character, that were not great in Blasphemous 1. When the game was released, we are aware that it could be really improved. And the controller was improved for the DLCs. But we knew we could do that better. But the only way to do it was to start from scratch. This is something that we are asked about quite frequently, "Why did you start a new project from scratch instead of reusing Blasphemous code?" It's something that we can't really recommend to everyone. It's a risky decision. And we can guarantee that everyone would success in making this. It's not something that we would recommend. We took the risk and it turned out okay. But it could not has been this way.

[00:08:18] JN: Yeah. It's very interesting. I think a lot of folks would be surprised to hear that adding extra weapons is such a huge constraint. But I guess if you've got a design of a game that's not assuming there's any reason to switch weapons from the start, it's really, really baked-in. 

I want to follow up on something that Dani said. And to your last point there that you wouldn't recommend starting code from scratch. And Dani, you mentioned that Blasphemous 2 has been built to be reusable into the future. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that that's happened? 

[00:08:45] DM: Okay. Let's say we build features around – how can I say let's use the term that Unity make it trendy. The data-oriented DOTS technology, something like that, which you said in our framework it's – okay, don't take me like I'm an expert. But it's like an array of stuff, okay? And we build our engine around modules. Okay, let's say the managers of systems that just manage stuff. Okay. And let's say you just have to add or remove modules in order to implement a feature this way, for example. 

Let's say some basic example. Let's say you want platforms that when the player stand on them they dissolve, they collapse. We build this module. Okay, that's the component of that when the player is standing still that that will disappear. Okay. We want to remove it. Just on the our, let's say, config table, we remove that module and nothing is executed. That's our first stepping stone, let's say, this way. 

With that in mind, build all the features. Okay. We can build features that in the end they are easy to remove, okay? Maybe we made a little harder to implement. But then it's just – okay, I don't want this feature anymore. So, remove it from the core of the game." That's one of the basis on how it's built, the framework.

[00:10:32] JN: Okay. Awesome. 

[00:10:33] DE: Yeah. We could say that Blasphemous 1 was like a monolithic kernel. Sure. Blasphemous 2 is more modular. 

[00:10:38] JN: Okay.

[00:10:39] DM: Yeah. And more like I know that it turned data-oriented, like, "Okay, you got a system. You got components." And the system will be internally implemented on how hard you want. But it's like an array of components. And then you have the game is nothing more our logic engine. Our logic game is nothing more than a for loop with a deterministic order of modules that, "Okay, that platforms disappear." Okay, player movement. Inputs. Reading inputs. Et cetera. Et cetera.

[00:11:13] JN: Awesome. It's been a little while. I don't think I've touched Unity properly since like 2016. But it sounds to me this Unity DOTS thing sounds to me like an entity component system. Is that correct? This is an evolution of ECS?

[00:11:24] DM: Exactly. 

[00:11:24] JN: Awesome. Perfect. I understand. Awesome. That's great. With that in mind, I guess when you're thinking about we want this game to be reusable, and this might be a question that I'm not allowed to ask, but is that just for future DLCs? Or are you talking like other games entirely outside the Blasphemous universe? Is it like we just want to make sure, if we do another Blasphemous, we're not riding from scratch? Without committing to doing another Blasphemous. 

[00:11:47] DE: That would be the ideal situation.

[00:11:49] JN: Cool. I understand.

[00:11:51] DM: But, theoretically, in other games, too. In fact, some modules are being reused in our prototypes.

[00:11:57] JN: Awesome. Very cool. During that, David, you mentioned the movement, which was one of the things that when you look at Blasphemous players talking about Blasphemous 2, so many people are talking about the control and the movement being super improved. You said that was a bit of a complicated process. Can you talk a little bit about what the problems were with the control in Blasphemous 1 and how you overcame those for 2? 

[00:12:19] DE: I am hearing about the same situation that Dani was during the development of Blasphemous 1. I was one of the packers of the Kickstarter and I already knew that.

[00:12:29] JN: That is awesome. That is a journey.

[00:12:32] DE: Yeah. No. We were friends. We knew each other. I already knew Dani as well on that time. But I've heard about that and I had to deal with the code during the DLCs.

[00:12:43] JN: Sure.

[00:12:44] DE: The reason is that Blasphemous was the first platformer game that was made in the Game Kitchen. The previous game, The Last Door, is a point-and-click adventure game, which has nothing to do with this kind of game. This code was written by Paco, who I hope doesn't listen this. But he's the one that tells this story. 

It was made like they could. It's not something that they had experience with. It was the first game that Paco made. That was the best effort that could be put into the game with the resources that they had, which were not many. Time, money. Even having a Kickstarter that was successful is not as much money as people think. Money flies when you talk about game development. 

And it's something that we really wanted to improve in the sense that, hey, now we know what we want to do with the controller. And I think that we could – Dani, correct me with this. But I think that we got even a little bit obsessed with the controller of the character.

[00:14:03] DM: Yeah. I can do a little trip if – hope. I'll try my best again with the language. But the character controller, okay, let's say something obvious. Its basic implementation is the character and control obviously. The character is like the physical appearance, okay? The locomotion and the animations for, that's the character. Then you got the controller. That the inputs and the logic you do with that input and with the queries from the locomotion from the chart.

We wanted to improve this a little. As I said, even going a little deeper and say, okay, character controller. That's not the character. Just this another module, let's say. Locomotion, say, animation. Inputs, say, the logic you do with that thing. And then that logic, we divide it with something we call abilities. And these abilities are nothing more than states that can be executed concurrently or exclusively. 

We got what I call that. I think I didn't invent it. Like, hierarchy, finite, concurrent state machine. Okay? The controller itself, what it does is manage these abilities. For example, jump – when you jump, you cannot crouch. When the ability of jumping is executed, it blocks the ability to jump. 

But, for example, you can attack. That can be executed concurrently along with the jump. This way, you got kind of flexibility. And you can scale and manage the complexity of the controls because it – okay, then inside each ability or each state, you can implement it as a state machine, too? Okay. That's why it's hierarchical. But inside that ability, you can do more or less like whatever you want in order to do the behavior or make the character do what you want. We got the inputs, the locomotion, the animation part and the abilities. 

And just our controller, just manage. Then, okay, you can execute or you cannot execute right now but you can interrupt this one with disability and things like that. With that approach, I think we made something that works pretty well.

[00:17:00] DE: Yeah. Much better. In Blasphemous 1, for example, I remember the ladder climbing ability. For trying to find a book on the ladder climbing, you have to check on three or four different places including the animator state machine, which was a nightmare. Because I think that – well, Paco did. But it was almost impossible for anyone that was in Paco to try to deal with the controller issues. Now with the architecture that Dani and the rest of the team made, it's way more easy to – I was going to say to fix issues. But there are no issues.

[00:17:45] JN: Whenever I think about this topic, the thing that always comes to mind is like the stories you hear of platformers like Super Meat Boy or Celeste where they say they have like on a thousand-line file of if statements just for the movement and the platforming. And so, that sounds like a very, I just say, flexible architecture. 

You mentioned interrupts there, which I think in action RPGs and anything with precisely-timed boss combat is always something that players are very conscious on. Like, "Can I interrupt this ability with a block?" for example. It sounds like this architecture allows you to change that and swap it easily, right? 

[00:18:18] DM: Okay. For example – okay, that's just for curiosity. I was a really Street Fighter 3 fan. And the attack ability that itself is – okay, I really wanted to try to simulate as good as we can that game. Because it's really cool how the interruptions of each attack are done. And at least me, I wanted that kind of flexibility that, "Okay, you can interrupt this ability," for example. The dash, you can – from this frame to this frame, you can interrupt that with the jump. Or you can interrupt this with this attack. So, you can do – I don't know the – that I try to do. 

[00:19:08] DM: The lunge. 

[00:19:10] DM: Lunge. Exactly. That's the word. Lunge and things like that. We made that – we built a bunch of tools around the frames. The heat frames or the cancellation frames, that was part of our main objective. 

[00:19:29] JN: That's awesome. Yeah. I started with the big mace, Veredicto. And then the first weapon I unlocked was the pair of rapiers. And it really suddenly felt like I went from like, "Oh, I'm just going around smashing stuff," and that's relatively simple to like, "Oh, suddenly, I need to be caring about interops and doing fancy tricks when I pull off different attacks, and dashes and lunges." It was a really like striking gameplay transition, which actually, I guess, do you want to introduce the free weapons and how they influence the gameplay. Whichever one works? 

[00:19:58] DE: Yeah. That's something that we knew for sure. We had a lot of doubts about what we want to do with the sequel. But something that we knew for sure was about having multiple weapons. We weren't sure how many of those. But it's something that we definitely wanted to explore. 

And, also, the community have asked about that a few times, "Hey, it would be cool if we could use different weapons." And it was really hard trying to do something that could compare to the weapon of the first game. Because that's where Mea Culpa was kind of iconic to the game. We had to try to find something that matches that sense of wonder of the first weapon. 

And that's where the – I'm sorry. Code names for the weapons and the elements of the game are stuck in our head. And I have to think a lot about the real – the public names of the weapons. Is that – 

[00:21:08] DM: The Sarmiento Centella. 

[00:21:07] JN: The single sword? 

[00:21:09] DE: Sarmiento & Centella, those are the pair of rapiers. Rosary blade is the internal name for the – 

[00:21:19] JN: Okay. Rosalin blade? 

[00:21:22] DE: Rosary blade.

[00:21:22] JN: Oh, Rosary blade. Got it. Yeah. Awesome. Makes sense. 

[00:21:25] DE: We have a lot of game development full of silly names. 

[00:21:29] JN: Cool names. Yeah. 

[00:21:31] DE: And silly sometimes. That weapon is kind of like a cursing of the Mea Culpa. Because they really share the move set. There we had the, let's say, Mea Culpa. But then we wanted to have more variety of gameplay. That means we need something really powerful but slow. You have to really commit when you decide to attack with it. That's the sensor. 

[inaudible 00:22:08]. 

That's the Rosary Blade. [inaudible 00:22:15]. 

[00:22:21] JN: Okay. The one big sword, the Rosary Blade, as you call it, is [inaudible 00:22:23]? That's the replacement for Mea Culpa. 

[00:22:26] DE: Yes. 

[00:22:26] JN: Okay. Understand. Yeah.

[00:22:28] DE: Yeah. It's really embarrassing when you come to these interviews and you don't know the real name of the stuff in your game.

[00:22:35] JN: Honestly, it's delightful. As a big fan of name-driven development, I'm really enjoying hearing the internal code names and picturing how they came about. 

[00:22:42] DE: But sometimes people ask us about something and we are like, "I don't know what you're talking about." Yeah, I forgot the name. Again, the sensor is really heavy and it punches with a lot of power. And it's really powerful. And it has these spinning attacks that feel really nicely. But it's kind of slow. You have to be careful when you use it. Because once you commit to attacking with it, you are – we say that you are sold to the enemy. You are at his mercy. 

On the other side, we have the pair of rapiers, which are Sarmiento Centella, which is blazing fast but deals a little bit less damage. And that's the three approaches that we wanted to try with the three weapons. We find that three is a proper amount of weapon to have in this kind of game. We could talk during hours about the weapon-switching feature. 

[00:23:52] JN: Yeah. That was the first moment when I realized how quick it was to change weapon and how you were expected to change your midair to continue moving, for example. That was the moment where I was like, "Oh, the skill ceiling on this game is so much higher than I had appreciated so far." It suddenly feels very – yeah, you have to understand a lot.

[00:24:10] DE: The mechanic for changing the weapon I think – correct me, Dani. Was it four or five iterations of the weapon exchange? 

[00:24:21] DM: I don't remember. But I have to say that the difficult part wasn't – okay, the technical. It's like the feeling was more like, "Okay, that doesn't feel great. Let's try another thing." And then another thing. And let's try stopping the game for – 

[00:24:41] DE: Half a second. Or let's slow down time. Let's pop up this wheel, this wheel selection. 

[00:24:49] JN: I guess just to give an example for listeners who haven't played. A case where this might come in. For example, the pair of rapiers, you can use those to ride these currents of light. And then at the end of that, there might be a bell that you have to smash with the sensor. You have to, while you're midair, change from the rapiers to the mace really quickly after having done this jump. I can see why you'd be experimenting with delays, or wheels, et cetera. That's really interesting.

[00:25:13] DE: Yeah. But that introduced – for example, slowing down time introduced the prowling of, "Hey, people can use this to beat bosses way easier that we intended." Because they can slow down time and have think – sorry, and have time to dodge projectiles or to think about what to do. This was maybe one of the most challenging aspects of the game. One of the most.

[00:25:46] JN: We'll come back to what the most was. But I guess one – while we're on the weapons, one thing I think is really interesting, you describe the games of MetroidVania. This idea of gaining equipment and abilities to unlock new areas. But you do that through the weapons as well. They're not just like, "Hey, I've got weapon in my inventory. I have a new style of attack." They're also your navigation ability or obstacle-clearing ability.

And then you can choose any of them to start with. That just seems like a whole heap of design problems. Like, the layout of the world. Which areas can people do first? What order do they get the weapons in? How did that decision to give the players that much flexibility come about? And how on earth did you start dealing with that? 

[00:26:23] DE: That's one of those situations in which maybe you make the decision before knowing the consequences. Truth is that we knew what we were assuming when we decided to give players that selection of weapons. It was quite a challenge for the whole team and design. Because they had to take into account that players could go three or four different paths when they started playing the game. You have to be able to traverse the world with any of the weapons. And you had to be able to beat the three first bosses with any of the weapons. It was an interesting challenge. But I think that it was worth it.

[00:27:11] JN: Yeah. I would definitely say so. Yeah, it's one of those things where, as you're playing a game and you realize kind of what is happening and how things would play out if you restarted the game, it was one of those elements where I was like, "Oh, this is very interesting." 

You mentioned that the weapons weren't the hardest technical challenge you faced, which I have to ask, what was the hardest challenge? 

[00:27:29] DM: Don't get me wrong. But we are doing a little indie game. We are not doing high AAA game. Just take it with a grain of salt. Okay. One of the things I found difficult was we weren't in charge of the port. But switch has some memory limitations. Okay. Our artist tends to use really large textures. That was a little challenge. And, also, remember the [inaudible 00:28:08] weren't smooth as we wanted. But that was not in switch. A little. But with simple optimizations, a little of detail. But with [inaudible 00:28:24], that was more than okay. But in PlayStation 4 – 

[00:28:31] DE: That was really interesting.

[00:28:33] DM: Truth be told, I didn't know how much optimization to do. Luckily, one of the guys from the porting team got an answer from Unity, which I don't know how it works. Because it was like use that instead. Move the [inaudible 00:28:55] thread on a different thread. 

[00:28:58] DE: Because they were facing with the issue of having songs of the game which were running at 60 FPAs on the switch that dropped to 40 on the PS4. 

[00:29:12] JN: Wow. That's not the order round I would have expected. Yeah.

[00:29:16] DE: That was our reaction. The Xbox One and PS4 version were released a couple of months after the release of the game. And we were pretty confident about the performance of the game on those platforms. But when the producer of the console port told me, "Hey, we are hitting a severe raindrop on many songs of the game on PS4." I thought that he was joking, "Ah, this is a console programmer joke that he's making fun of me." But, no. He showed me the benchmarks of the different songs. It was true. There was a huge drop in performance on PS4.

[00:29:59] DM: And when you don't know the reason, it's something that when I read it, I was like I have no idea. I don't know how much or how – I don't know what to do in order to help them.

[00:30:14] DE: It turned out to be, as you said, something from the internals of Unity how it managed different threats or something like that.

[00:30:22] DM: I can't do any less [inaudible 00:30:24] or I can – we can't do any less use of the physics. We implemented like it was very basic. But it was a level of detail. When the enemies are not on screen, they are likely puppets. Or they use a little – for example, instead five or three [inaudible 00:30:46], just one. And it's just the bare minimum. We can't do anything more. Because if we do less, it's like the leaf NPC or the enemy just [inaudible 00:31:00] and the player will not exist. 

[00:31:04] JN: The world freezes when you're not on that screen, right? Yeah. Fascinating. Console porting has been widely discussed on so social media and stuff recently because of Godot and Godot not coming with facilities for compiling to console like Unity does. And it just seems so many obscure complexities that you need to ask the console developers or porting houses for help with, right? Yeah. That seems like an impenetrable issue. Fascinating.

Earlier you mentioned the bosses. And I wanted to ask a little bit about that. Because in this type of game, with the combat system and I guess like the, as you said players, had kind of given it a souls-like label on the first one. Obviously, players are very sensitive to boss design and building a satisfying boss is a whole thing. How did you approach the boss design for this game? Did you have a particular ethos and what you wanted them to feel like? 

[00:31:53] DE: This is kind of hard to answer. First, because it's not our direct area. But I can say that, basically, the whole team is always involved in nearly every aspect of the game. Art, enemies, how the game feels. Bosses is one of those places in which everyone has something to say mainly from the creative direction of the game where we always try for the bosses to be related to the song. They are appearing trying to be meaningful for the whole story. The game for the lore. We try to approach those in a way that they add to the game. They are not in there just for the sake of being a boss in the middle of a palace or in the middle of basement. They have a reason to be there. And they contribute to the lore of the whole game. 

The design has to be something that is split between creative direction and game design and they work together into defining what's going to be the aspect of this boss? What role does it play on the story that we are telling? From that point, they keep on working together to define how it should be – should this be a humanoid? A human-sized boss? Should this be huge? Does it fly? Does it have multiple? I think we don't have flying. Well, yes, we have one flying boss, which is – I don't know the real name. But it's [inaudible 00:33:31]. Maybe it's [inaudible 00:33:32], the real name.

[00:33:35] DM: I think another one was the – I was going to say the girl in the elevators. I don't remember the name.

[00:33:45] DE: It's not a girl. But a ghost.

[00:33:48] DM: Ghost girl. Okay. Or the ghost.

[00:33:49] JN: Yeah. I guess it also depends on your definition of flying. The embroiderer does a flying thing at points, right? 

[00:33:55] DE: Yeah. That's a really popular boss. And I like her a lot. We have our favorites as well in the studio. 

[00:34:04] DM: As an intra feature, we had that – I remember with the bosses, with the bosses and enemies. For example, in the game, you can change – because when you build a boss, maybe you try some behaviors in order to see if the animations are internally or something like that. The game has a hidden feature that you can change, swap the controls to that character and play a little, test it a little. Although it wasn't really used much. But it was there. And I used it maybe twice. But it was there.

[00:34:41] JN: Awesome.

[00:34:44] DM: Just to say. It's another feature we had in order to test the bosses.

[00:34:50] JN: That is great to hit. There are so many – you spoke about the iterations for things like the movement, and the controls and the weapons. And things like bosses and platforming segments are another area where I imagine there must be so much testing and iteration for feel as you mentioned as like an indie studio, as a smaller studio. What does that testing look like? I think people tend to imagine focus groups and huge open betas and that kind of thing. But what does it look like for a studio of your size?

[00:35:20] DE: Well, it's not until the game is mostly done that we don't start testing in the studio. I think that the first playtesting session was a year before the release I think it was August '22. That was the first time we had someone from outside of the studio to come and play the game. And that was a point in which you are supposed not to be changing many things. Because we had the content complete and the gold version. The content complete was in April maybe, '23.

[00:35:58] JN: And what was the total development time? 

[00:36:01] DE: It was 37 months. Very producer answer.

[00:36:05] DE: I remember that people tend to say three years. But it started in July. No. It was 37. It was in August. And the content complete was set for February or April '23. On the gold version, I think it was May. 1st of May. Something like that. There wasn't really a lot of time to make important changes. But we did change things based on that play-testing session. 

Well, of course, a play-testing is not the same as a QA session. The publisher starts with the QA since very early in the development process. But that's technical testing. We wanted to see the reaction from players.

[00:37:01] JN: Yeah. Making sure the game doesn't break and that kind of thing, right? 

[00:37:04] DE: Yeah. What we wanted to test was the reaction of people who hasn't been playing the game here in front of their faces, well, for two years. It's because you have been playing the game forever, you lose perspective of the game and you fail to see the mistakes or the things that could be improved. There's this moment in which you need fresh eyes on the game. 

We brought people to the studio. I think it was like 12 people. People that we knew. Most of them we knew personally. But when you make this kind of testing sessions, you don't need a fan who will be happy with whatever they play. Because they are excited to try the sequel of the game so everything will look great. Well, we wanted to have people who are really brutally honest. 

Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. We contacted these people who some of them were friends of us. Asked them to be brutally honest of the game. And from that session we got a lot of good feedback that we implemented. One of the feedbacks that we got was related to the weapon change system. I remember we give them pen and paper so they can write down their thoughts and their comments. Then they fill a form online with the thoughts. 

And there was something – one of the players left the paper on the desk and there was this comment. I'm trying to translate it. Sorry for my French in here. But it said weapon changing, motherfucker. 

[00:38:57] JN: Excellent.

[00:38:59] DE: When we saw this, we were suspecting that the system wasn't really what people expected. But that phrase, that comment confirmed it. That was in August. And then we had another play-testing session in February. I think it was February. Barely a month before the content complete, which was really risky. It was barely a month before delivering the alpha of the game. There was not enough time to make huge changes. 

[00:39:35] JN: Sure.

[00:39:35] DE: But being as we are, we made big changes. In some systems that we weren't really happy about, some things that maybe people take for granted like when do you save the game? What if I have explored this huge amount of the map and then I die? Do I have to go through the whole map again or is this progress safe and you keep every item that you already found? Because this, which seems pretty obvious, wasn't that obvious during the development. That's one of the things that we changed with that play-testing session. I think that we weren't saving the progress after dying. People got really angry about that during the play-testing session. Because you had to remember, "Ah, I went to this place and I picked this item. And then I had – I don't know, money in this place and these bosses over here. 

We enter in kind of a crisis state in the team because we needed to fix that. But we weren't sure what to do. At the end it's like with the weapon change, the solution, the final decision is something that, after it's made, it looks pretty obvious simple. But it wasn't. 

[00:41:01] DM: One of the versions when saving game was, okay, the classic Metroid or Castlevania approach that is you save on a room, okay? Or [inaudible 00:41:15] in our case. And when you die, you appear like you were never there. Except the guilt, okay? This is a little weird. You go back to – you restore the state but the guilt is there. And that doesn't have much sense.

[00:41:31] DE: Yeah. Because the guilt is on a song of the map that you haven't discovered yet. Because we were removing the progress on the map. That was one of the first versions. 

[00:41:42] JN: Yeah. I get it. Okay. For listeners, when you die in Blasphemous 2, you gain guilt and that changes like mechanics and different – what abilities you have and how much mana, et cetera. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. 

Yeah. Sorry. For a moment there I was like – I thought you were saying that the guilt always appears somewhere you haven't been. And I was like, "Wait, did I just completely miss that on my playthrough?" But no. I understand. That means because you rolled back the map progress. Yeah. Okay.

[00:42:06] DM: Yeah. But it was like – okay, the guilt now sounds obvious. But a lot of games Implement like we did like Metroid and it just works. But when we try it, it didn't work for us. 

[00:42:21] JN: Yeah. You changed enough of the Metroid formula that you've broken a standard element of it.

[00:42:26] DM: But it sounds obvious. But it's not so obvious. Because for Metroid works, why it doesn't work for us? 

[00:42:32] JN: Yeah. And you've ended up with I guess a checkpoint system that I guess is the only souls-like. Well, one of the most souls-like remnants where you kind of have this like – you save at a checkpoint and that's where you come back. And then you have to go get your – pick up your guilt in a very kind of – yeah. Awesome. Perfect. 

Wonderful. We are getting close to time. I wanted to ask a couple of questions to wrap up. And I guess the first one, do you keep an eye on the speed-running scene for Blasphemous 2? You mentioned earlier that players – being conscious that players will break things, do you pay attention to what they're up to? 

[00:43:05] DE: Honestly, I keep an eye on the community in general. Mostly Reddit. Most of the people from the team are not really – don't really interact with the community. But there are people who are constantly interacting with social media. But most of us don't. We see what people comment about the game and what they want us to do with the game. 

This morning, I sent the lead programmer thread from Reddit in which someone was talking about the progress of the rapier and dagger. And, "Hey, check this and see how much reason this person has." But for the speed-running thing, I haven't seen anything yet for Blasphemous 2. 

We did for Blasphemous 1, and I remember that the first speed run that we saw as a team, I was cooking on the kitchen and I had my iPad on the side. And I was checking the speed run and I was like, "How is he doing that? What was that jump?" Because there was a bug on the jumping, let's say, system. Because Blasphemous 1 didn't even have proper systems that allowed players to jump in an infinite amount of distance. But I haven't seen that for Blasphemous 2. It's not that it doesn't exist. Honestly, I'm sorry. I don't know. Now I'm curious. When we finish this, I will go and check. 

[00:44:35] JN: Have some fast runs. Yeah. Some fast runs. That was the fastest run. There was a really fast run that got submitted for games done quick that I believe the reason it got rejected was because you patched it. And I don't think you patched it intentionally. But a patch you released fixed the run. There were some quick runs. 

[00:44:51] DE: We made only one update to the game. And, honestly, I don't remember. 

[00:44:56] JN: It was a sub-40-minute run. And then the first – the patch fixed it, which was amazing. 

[00:45:00] DE: Yeah. I remember it was something pause the game – 

[00:45:04] DE: Ah. The run switching. When you do the lunge attack with the Rosary blade, you could use – 

[00:45:12] DM: Or something like that with prayer that freeze the times.

[00:45:15] DE: Yeah. I remember. And I did that myself when I saw it, which sends you upwards. Yeah.

[00:45:22] JN: Yeah. 

[00:45:22] DE: Yeah. That one, we patched. Yeah.

[00:45:27] JN: Amazing. I guess inevitable question, and it's totally okay if you can't, but can you share anything about what's next for Blasphemous 2 or what else the Game Kitchen is working on? 

[00:45:36] DE: As a company, I can say that the Game Kitchen is working on multiplayer projects. Some of those are public, like the VR platform that it's been built. But sadly, or luckily, most of the games are not. Most of the projects are not public yet. As for Blasphemous 2, after the release of the game and the update, we took a really long holiday, most of the team. Those who could afford. I'm sorry for Dani because he's one of the few who couldn't. And I didn't took as many days as I was supposed to have. 

[00:46:17] JN: Blasphemous 2 started really soon after Blasphemous 1, right? There wasn't much gap between the two of them.

[00:46:21] DE: That's something that we didn't talk about. But Blasphemous 2 started the development where we were working on the three DLCs. 

[00:46:29] JN: Okay. Yes. You're long overdue holiday. 

[00:46:32] DE: Blasphemous 2 started in July 2020. The first DLC was released – I can't remember. I made a presentation not long ago. And I had to check all the dates because I totally forgot. I think it was February '21. I think it was more than a year. Or maybe September 2020. October? I'm sorry. I can't remember I had to check Wikipedia the last time. Yeah, we overlapped the two developments.

[00:47:02] JN: Yeah. Very overdo. You took a lot of time after Blasphemous 2 and still thinking about it.

[00:47:06] DE: When we came back from holidays, then we started talking with Mauricio and with our publisher about the future of the game. We haven't decided anything yet. If we had, I couldn't say. Of course.

[00:47:20] JN: Absolutely. I had to try. I had to try.

[00:47:23] DE: Yeah, I know. I know. For sure, there are always things that teams want to add to a game. I don't know who said this, but games are not finished but abandoned. We would like not to abandon it yet. But who knows? 

[00:47:42] JN: That feels truer than ever in the age of games being patched online. Long gone are the eras where you shipped a cartridge and didn't have to think about it ever again. Perfect. 

Well, thank you both so much. This has been delightful. It's always nice to learn more about how the games we play are built. Thank you both for your time today.

[00:47:58] DE: Thank you, Joe. Thank you for having us.

[00:48:01] DM: Thank you for having us, Joe.

[END]