Danny: 00:00 Welcome humans, bandits, goblins, demons, one at all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts Danny Austerity Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:20 And Eric Oestrich. Danny: 00:21 And we have with us today Huw Millward, the creator of the game Warsim, The Realm of Aslona. This is a slight departure for the Titans as it is not a mud but it is a text based game with a bit of ASCII art thrown in or maybe more than a bit of ASCII art. It's currently available on steam in early access. We're going to get right down to the nuts and bolts of Huw's history with text gaming and game design and get to know a bit about Warsim itself. Welcome to you Huw. Huw: 00:52 Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Eric: 00:53 All right, so let's get started with what is your history with text games? Like how did you get involved? Huw: 00:59 I think it was more coincidence to be honest. I mean I've played like the, that like text adventure game. Danny: 01:05 Yeah, Zork would definitely be one of the earlier ones. Huw: 01:09 Yeah. Yeah. I think I remember playing that, but so long ago no, when I got into game development I wasn't really trying to get into game development. I was just sort of working on random little task projects here and there. I think they just got out of hand basically. That was, that was all happened. I was, I didn't pull back and realize I've made a game messing around in programming sort of basic text games. Huw: 01:29 After a few years of constant development, obviously it's turned into something way more than I ever thought it would be. But it's purely coincidental. I was never going out, let's make a text game or anything or a text based game. But I've definitely, I think gained an appreciation for the genre, the whole style of game play and things like that and how it, I think it does allow the imagination to go a whole lot further than some more visual games sometimes. So there's definitely some strengths to text gaming. Danny: 01:54 What were your inspirations for Warsim? You mentioned you started doing something and it turned into a game. Was, was that Warsim or or was that like an earlier prototype of something? Huw: 02:04 Yes. So they, I think there were quite a lot of inspirations that came about throughout the development. So when it started off I was, I was making sort of basic concept mini games and things like that that ended up growing into something else. But as the development went along and it turned into more of an RPG and a simulation game, I think a lot of games that I was a big fan of inspired the direction of development. So things like Mount and Blade, which is one of my favorite games ever. And one of the things that I didn't like about it, which is it's like the greatest game of all time in my opinion, it's such a good game Mount and Blade. But when you sort of go from being like a peasant to be in a king in the game and it's awesome and it's an amazing path and you get there and then all you can't really do much when you're a king and it's just really annoying. Huw: 02:42 It's quite like quite let down I think in a way. And I just thought, what would I like to do if I was the king of, you know, a big kingdom in some fantasy world and I want it to allow the player in Warsim o basically do that. So if you want to tax people for walking or breathing or you want to change everyone's name Fred and make everyone wear hat, or do you want to execute the child that just came into your court to ask you for a coin? Like you can do literally anything you want, good, bad, or ugly. And I think that sort of transcended what I was inspired by for me. Like I've made, I've been able to take stuff that I really loved in other games, but do it in my own way, which has sort of made it so, so personalized and so perfect for me playing. So a lot, a lot of different inspirations. But I think I've tried to take what I can from them all and put them into something. Eric: 03:26 All right. And so what, what a programming language framework anything like that. What is Warsim written in? Cause it's a, it's a command line app. Right? Huw: 03:35 It's written purely and C++ from the first line to the last all in Code Blocks which is a free IDE. It was pretty easy. Danny: 03:46 And what what have your, what have your experiences been actually getting the game on to steam? Has, has it been mainly positive? Getting it sold on there? I know it's been on there for quite awhile. Huw: 03:57 It's actually surprised me to be honest. I never wanted to sell it. I never thought it was worth selling when I first was working on it. So it was free itch.io and after getting, I think about 15 donations cause you can be donated to even if you're not selling it, I started to think fucking hell. Like people actually want to pay for this. Like, maybe it's better I think so I started working on it a bit more and when I was a bit more confident with it, I submitted it to steam when greenlight was still a thing and it wasn't looking like it was going to go through, but steam ended up letting a lot of games through. And after that I was, I was really happy. But then I was also kinda thinking, you know, I've seen a lot of really bad steam reviews on games and some games got torn apart and I was, I was really worried of like a negative response, but I think it was at least a year before I had one negative review on there. I had maybe 90 positive. It was really crazy. I wasn't really expecting that at all. People really nice, really supportive. And they really seemed to like the game. I've, I think I've had a handful of negative reviews and most of them have been pretty fair criticisms of things that they didn't like personally. So yeah, I've had a great time on steam to be honest. Eric: 04:57 Right. And so like, normally when I think of steam I think of like graphical games and whatnot. And like when you integrate steam, it kind of has those little like UI and whatnot. But how, like what was the experience of integrating it into something totally different than that? Just like a command line app? Huw: 05:13 I didn't think I'd be able to do it actually. I was assuming steam would require it to go through their overlay, but it didn't, I think I saw one or two other games that manage to do that as well. I think it was sort of flash games that were converted, but they didn't have an overlay either. And it was the same for, for Warsim and they didn't require it. They were still able to track playtime, I thought originally was gonna have to package it up so that it wasn't running directly through the command line. But no, no problems at all with that. Danny: 05:39 Has anyone really commented onn the fact that it's a text game of, I mean, I, I'm, I'm trying to think of heavy ascii art games on steam. And really, really the only one I can think of is actually a game called Sanctuary Black. Yes. Which is a very classic, has really gotten on about that? Huw: 05:58 No, no, not really. I've had a few people say they weren't expecting to like a game that was ascii art based and it sort of grew on them but otherwise, I mean some people have said, you know, they would prefer if it was a graphical game, but they can still get along with it. Yeah, I haven't had much problem. I think sometimes you can see what you're getting when you're buying it on steam. You can see that it's a, it's an ascii art game and if it's someone who's really not into that, they probably not going to buy it to begin with. So I think I've gotten lucky to avoid anyone sort of being too off about it, just by it being, so obviously text based. Eric: 06:29 So steam is a very big platform at this point. Do you find it hard to get people to find the text based game on steam? Huw: 06:40 Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's, it's a constant a constant battle. I think for attention isn't it really? It's, it's quite surprising actually when I got into game development I didn't realize just how important marketing was and just how vital a role that plays nowadays for indie games in being seen. I mean there are like some games that are just so good that they will naturally jet to the top when it gets seen by a handful of people because there'll be praised so much. But I think for in general for the vast majority of indie games it is a fight if they want to succeed and it, it's definitely been that for me for sure. I've had to learn a lot of marketing things and send a lot of emails, things like that, but I think steam is quite fair. It does give a lot of opportunities for you to do certain things and semi levels the playing fields I think, but obviously AAA games are always going to still dominate the market. I can't complain. Steams only done me good I think. Danny: 07:31 Have you ever been invited to join in on any of those? Like well you were on for the summer sale. I suppose did Steam asked you to be a part of the sales or just tell you, hey, you're going to be on sale now? Huw: 07:44 Yeah, well Steam are actually quite good with that. They anyone can put a, put the game on sale at any time basically. So they'll, they'll send you an email in advance before those sales run and say, these are the dates we're thinking they might be subject to change. If you want to do it, go here and submit this. So I think they automatically invite everyone and most developers will reduce their games to be part of the sale. And then you sort of around those dates as well. You, you have a few times you can do it. I think there's a cool down basically on personal sales you can do and sales they're a great way to, I think rack up another bunch of customers. I think a lot of people only wait for a sale before they buy it. There's so many websites and apps and tools, keeping an eye out for lowest prices and sales on and things like that subreddits for it all sorts of stuff. So it's definitely an important tool, I think for the lifespan of a video game. That seems pretty fair with how they do it. Danny: 08:33 On that note, I will take a brief moment for a word from one of our many sponsors of this podcast. Vineyard: are you looking for a MUD host that cares about your needs? Just point your web browser at vineyard.haus. That's V I n e y a r d. Dot. H a u s. Vineyard.Haus. Vineyard where the hosting is free and you get more than what you pay for. Eric: 09:01 So what is your process for going about designing new features in Warsim? Huw: 09:08 Oh, it's nuts. I definitely need to get a bit more organized. But when I first started with everything, I had like a sort of just to do list of all the ideas I came up with and I would play the game and I'd be like, oh, wouldn't it be awesome if you could do this? So I'd nail that down and I'd play at Warsim quite a lot and then rack up a massive list of things that I thought would be cool to put in. And then I would spend time trying to cut those down. Then when the game started getting more popular, I would take notes of basically any suggestion the player put forward if it was decent and I thought it was going to be maybe like one in 10 suggestions would be something I would want to put in but surprisingly, basically everything anyone said was great. Huw: 09:42 There were so many ideas and that there weren't many people coming forward with weird ideas or bad ideas. They always fit the game. So I've, I think I've put in thousands and thousands of players suggestions over the years and we're at a point now where I think that checklist has at least eight or 10 things on it, what I'm trying to cut down over time. So it's, it's now kind of a battle to maintain and maybe push towards release at some point. But for the time being I'm still having fun and it's not declining in popularity so I can work on it. I think people appreciate the constant updates in early access cause it's not always the way it goes. Danny: 10:16 Would you say that, you know, design wise, you've, you've, you've added quite a bit since the beginning. Is, is Warsim as it stands today and its future, is that when you have originally envisioned it to be or has it kind of grown in a different direction? Huw: 10:34 It's completely, completely grown out of anything I wanted it to be or expected it to be. And I'm so much more happy with where it is now than it ever was going. I think so many times where I've, I think I've had the developer goggles on or I've looked at the game through developers lens cause I knew everything was going to happen and plays with suggest things or point out to me and giving me a reality check. And I started building the game more with a variety of opinions in consideration and it started to grow a completely different direction. But I think a better one by far than I ever planned it too. So I love the game that has grown into thanks to the tons and tons of people who've sort of gotten involved really in the development of it. Danny: 11:10 Let's talk about something specific in the game. The throne room, one thing that happens in the throne room a lot and it reminds me quite a bit in the throne room in general reminds me quite a bit of playing the game Reins which mostly a mobile game, but you can also get it on steam for PC. And there's a lot of humor. Reins has, has its share of humor and there's a lot of humor in the throne room in Warsim. What gave rise to something like the musicians guild, which is humorous and also made me want to turn it off almost immediately. I think after the first long grunting song, Huw: 11:46 Ah, the ORCS. Danny: 11:48 When I was, when I decided to turn off that feature, where did that come from? Huw: 11:54 Yeah. well I worked on a game before called tTe Wastes and I really wanted it to be sort of like a weird wacky experience of you traveling through a wasteland. And one of that was you'd encounter some kind of singing person wanting to sing you a song and I just randomly mashed together some sounds and it would sort of procedurally generate a really terrible sort of singing, I lost that game. I never ended up finishing that game, but I really liked the idea. So I tried to adapt it for Warsim. So I took I think seven or eight different races and gave them a different instrument. So goblin drummers, orcs were grunting, gnomes, whistling, things like that. And yeah, I think it's just, it's nice to have weird features like that. The catch people off guard when they're expecting a more serious game cause it can loosen you up a little bit and make you go, oh, okay, well maybe I can try this. Huw: 12:38 You can invite I think you can actually hire most of them to be your own personal musicians. And if you hire a vampire you can play like a Simon Says game with them. Any bard you have, there's some sort of potion you can find in the world. And if you give it to one of the bards they'll play a song at like a thousand speed and just keep saying "I'm so powerful". And there's loads of weird features like that to do with like bards and all sorts of musical things. I think just make the game more silly. I'm more on the vibe I want. And as for Reins as well. I have played the game before. The throne room was based on a flash game called Sort the Court, which I think is similar in the, in the same sort of style as Reins. Huw: 13:15 But not with the cards. You have all sorts of people come into your kingdom and you got to kind of keep it balanced. So I guess it follows the same structure. And I was playing this Sort of Court game for like four hours straight and I was like, man, I need something like this in Warsim. So then I set out to make a sort of complex system of all different things from your kingdom, all your different decisions you've made and factions in the world and have a more visit your throne room with various different things that they can ask. And I think we're at the point now where there's about a thousand different encounters roughly. So it's, it's quite mixed, which I like. And sometimes when I'm watching people play it on stream and they're going through the throne room, it really can shape the play through depending on what happens. Huw: 13:50 And I'm biting my nails sometimes like, oh, I hope you know, this doesn't happen because there's loads of things that could go wrong or right. And you play through depending on what's going to happening in the Throne Room. Definitely one of the funnier features in the game. Eric: 14:00 Yeah, I was, I was playing the game last night and talking with Danny as I had the, the first barred came into the courtroom. I just have a message. Oh my goodness. There was a bard that whistled at me. Yeah. I was not expecting that. So I guess, do you want to go over some of the other cool features that kind of makes Warsim unique? Huw: 14:23 For sure. Yeah, I'd love to. Well I think the, the thing I've been focusing on recently, I've I mean going through it, I know it sounds silly and it's subjective and stuff, but I've gone for a world record potentially for the most fantasy races in a video game. I'm not sure I'll get it, but I think it's just an interesting idea. I took like a, a sort of list of every fantasy race I could find on the Internet and I searched through so many things. I took loads of players' suggestions and then I took multiple prefixes that could be attached to those and that would have different on the races. We're as point now with this, about 75 million possible races in the game and each of them plays completely differently in the game worlds. So you could have one faction that is ridiculously powerful. Another one that will at some point completely disappear because they're doomed to die. You might have another one that's chaotic, so they'll just attack everyone at random and soon make everyone into their enemies. Can I have Raiders like rading orcs or something like that who can invade the world. Huw: 15:18 On a, there's, there's just like a whole ton of different possible races and race combinations that I think makes it interesting every game because it's pretty much guaranteed that every player will have a completely different set of races and any race in your game will probably never be seen again by another player. But they do all play differently. So it's very unique to you and I still think that there's a possibility there are some races that could spawn that might be ridiculous overpowered that I'm not aware of. So I is fun, but it's so random. It's hard to discover a lot of that. So it just happens when I'm playing through and I go, Whoa, crap, that's a bit of overpowered and go and edit it. Obviously with something so random, there's a lot of stuff that I won't be able to see, so yeah, have fun with that. Anyone playing. Danny: 15:59 Does that ever come up in the community discussions of like, oh, this is like super overpowered and, yeah. Even in single player games you get in forums and on Reddit, people complaining oh this is too overpowered and take it out even though it's not affecting anyone and you could easily just don't use it, but people still complain. So does that ever come up? New Speaker: 16:21 Um not so much anymore actually. No. I I thought it would more, but it came up before the game used to be a lot harder when it was in early development and I used to get a lot of complaints then. But I think it's a bit easier now. There's a lot more you can do to save yourself from trouble so people aren't complaining as much. So no I don't really have any problems. Usually it's just people asking for features as opposed to moaning about preexisting ones. Although there are some features that people say it would be much more convenient if this was the case and usually they're right. So a lot of changes happen that way, but that's mostly okay with the balancing so far it seems. Eric: 16:55 So following the updates on steam it's pretty obvious that you're heavily interested in building out the game mechanics. Where does Warsim go from here and will it ever be finished? Huw: 17:06 Well, I think if I can cut through some of the major things that are left to do, there's no reason it can't come out of early access and be fully released. I probably still support it and keep updating it because I still enjoy the game myself. But as for sort of specific features, there's, there's quite a lot of ideas I have for things that I'd want to put in there in the future. But I've learned not to promise about them too much just in case they're too hard to put it in or problems come up where it takes a lot longer. I think there's definitely gotta be a combat overhaul. That's something that has to happen before a full release because the combat is probably the oldest part of the game. Everything else has been renovated or modified so many times, but the combat is still quite basic. I've got a lot of plans for that. And other than that, just further development of everything else. I know the input of a lot of ideas that have been suggested. Got a couple of things I want to work on really soon. Sort of weird ideas people have sent me. Other than that, it's all just whatever one of us there on the day on that to do list until eventually you hit full release. Danny: 18:04 Is there a followup, not necessarily a sequel because it's obviously not done. Is there another game that you'd like to create besides Wasim? Do you ever, do you ever think, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to also work on a different project when it's so different that it doesn't really fit as a mechanic in Warsim. Huw: 18:22 Yeah, for sure. I've had a few ideas of games I wanted to do over the years, but it's surprisingly normally I'm quite hoppy with projects. I tend to flip from one thing to another, but I've managed to stick to Warsim them for a long enough time because there's nothing I'm too sort of pulled away by concept wise. When I eventually finish Warsim if I ever do finish Warsim I really would like to start working on a graphical game actually and try and remake one of my old text based games but in a more widely appealing form and have it go a more serious game development I think; try and hit a bigger crowd. But I think I'm going to be stuck to Warsim for quite a long time before anything else happens. Danny: 18:59 Is there any piece of advice that you could give on to the listeners on making on actually making a game, getting a game to the point where you've gotten Warsim where it's on steam at this point. It's been on itch where people were playing it to the point where you've built up this amount. Like is there any, is there any good suggestions you can give to people on getting it this far? Huw: 19:25 Yeah, I guess I mean I wasn't really expecting anything to happen. I wasn't aiming for it. I think when, when the game first started off, I was really receptive to everyone that commented. I was really eager for any feedback whatsoever. And I think when your receptive to feedback, people want to give it more. And that really did help the game in the early days because even when it wasn't anything like it was now getting that feedback from people made me want to work on it more and knowing that people were playing it made me want to work on at tenfold more. And over time, I mean the game's subreddit has about 1,100 and something subscribers right now and quite a lot of them comment frequently and things like that. And it is, it's really motivational, but obviously you don't have that feedback when you first start out. So I think my advice would be so try your best to make something that you yourself would play. I think sometimes people make games that they think other people would play, but they wouldn't find interesting in themselves. And I don't think I could ever do that because you can't be sure you're making a game anyone would really enjoy. Whereas if you make something that you know, you will enjoy yourself, I think the rest will come. Eric: 20:25 All right. Well, thanks a once again, Huw, for coming out and joining us on the episode of Titans of Text. Huw: 20:29 No problem. Thanks for having me guys.