{"id":69658,"date":"2019-08-22T03:10:20","date_gmt":"2019-08-22T10:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/why-the-developers-behind-pax-10-game-heartbound-live-stream-their-production-process\/"},"modified":"2019-08-22T03:10:20","modified_gmt":"2019-08-22T10:10:20","slug":"why-the-developers-behind-pax-10-game-heartbound-live-stream-their-production-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/why-the-developers-behind-pax-10-game-heartbound-live-stream-their-production-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the developers behind PAX 10 game \u2018Heartbound\u2019 live stream their production process"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
(Heartbound screenshots)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At first glance, Heartbound<\/a><\/em> looks like a nostalgia trip. Its Steam page describes it as a \u201cnon-traditional RPG,\u201d with hand-drawn pixel-art graphics and a jazzy, catchy chiptune soundtrack, in the spirit of weird \u201890s 16-bit games like Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, <\/em>and Earthbound<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Jason Thor Hall, founder of Pirate Software. (Jason Thor Hall Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once you actually play it, though, things get strange<\/em>. Heartbound <\/em>goes against the grain in a lot of ways, from the player\u2019s path through its story to how it handles its UI to its development process. Whether you like it or not, it\u2019ll give you a lot to think about, particularly if you\u2019re at all interested in game design or production.<\/p>\n

Heartbound <\/em>is one of this year\u2019s picks for the PAX 10<\/a>, a curated list of ten new indie games that will be shown at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. The team behind it, Pirate Software<\/a>, consists of three people. Jason Thor Hall<\/a>, designer, writer, and programmer, and Bradie Shaye Rehmel<\/a>, artist and animator, are based in Washington state. The third, Stijn van Wakeren<\/a>, is a composer and sound designer from the Netherlands, whose other projects include an upcoming 3D platform game called Here Comes Niko<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hall has a long, behind-the-scenes history in both computer science and the video game industry. He holds three black badges<\/a> from Def Con, the annual hackers\u2019 conference in Las Vegas, and has worked in intrusive security testing \u2013 preemptively hacking computer systems to make them more resilient to intrusion \u2013 for both Blizzard Entertainment and the U.S. Department of Energy. Hall\u2019s other projects include Champions of Breakfast<\/a><\/em>, <\/em>a game he made in 24 days as an experiment, and a first-person steampunk MMO he built inside Linden Labs\u2019 Second Life.<\/em><\/p>\n

Hall currently works full-time on his projects at Pirate Software, and unusually for an American game developer, livestreams most of it. Every day for about 10 hours, Hall and Rehmel go live on Twitch, talking with a small audience as they work on the art and code for both Heartbound <\/em>and Pirate Software\u2019s next project, a similarly genre-busting shooter set in the same universe called Kill the Moon<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

While Pirate Software\u2019s Twitch channel<\/a> doesn\u2019t have a big subscriber count, it has enough of an audience that roughly 50 percent of the company\u2019s income comes from \u201cbits\u201d on Twitch<\/a>. Most indie games tend to get their production budget from one big crowdfunding payout, angel investors, interested publishers, or their developer\u2019s other jobs. Heartbound <\/em>being able to double its income via streaming donations, and become essentially self-supporting, is incredibly rare if not unique in modern game development.<\/p>\n

Part of it, Hall argues, is because their content on the channel is creative rather than specifically gaming-related. \u201cWe\u2019re in the top 0.68 percent of creative channels on Twitch currently,\u201d he said. \u201cI find that people are more interested in supporting creative channels monetarily than they are gaming channels. I\u2019ve spoken to a few other gaming-related channels that are averaging 500 to 1,000 thousand viewers, and their average income is about the same as ours, when we average about 50 viewers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s really interesting that people are more inclined to support people who are making new stuff, rather than people who are just playing games,\u201d he continued. \u201cNo one has really done a good deep dive on the monetization methods of streaming. They all talk about the largest numbers, but the largest numbers does not mean the most income. There needs to be more actual published research on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Heartbound <\/em>began as a comic book Hall made in high school, and eventually became a side project he began to work on while at Blizzard. It\u2019s built primarily in Game Maker Studio, with initial funding coming from a successful Kickstarter in 2017.<\/p>\n

It puts you in the role of Lore, a kid with a bad home life, whose only friend is his dog Baron. When Baron disappears one night during a storm, Lore sets out to find him. As it turns out, however, Baron hasn\u2019t just run off, but was taken. To find him, Lore sets out on a strange, increasingly metaphorical adventure through space and time.<\/p>\n

Pinning down Heartbound<\/em>\u2019s actual genre is tougher than it looks. I can see the Secret of Mana <\/em>and Earthbound <\/em>influences, particularly the latter. Both games have a feel to them like you\u2019re playing through a children\u2019s story that takes some seriously dark turns, although Heartbound <\/em>front-loads its darkness more than Earthbound<\/em> ever did.<\/p>\n

However, the gameplay of Heartbound <\/em>reminds me more of the point-and-click adventures that LucasArts used to make in the \u201990s<\/a>. It\u2019s got the same focus on unique characters and clever dialogue, with side jokes and fine details attached to every stray piece of the environment. Your challenges come from finding ways around obstacles and playing minigames, no two of which are alike (and one of which is a straight-up twitch shooter), rather than any of the stat-building or go-to combat mechanics that you\u2019d expect from any kind of RPG.<\/p>\n

In fact, Heartbound<\/em>\u2018s systems are stripped to the quick, without a pause button or any sort of menu. Instead of an inventory screen, you can use save points to return to Lore\u2019s bedroom, which slowly fills up as you go with the items that you\u2019ve picked up along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually did that for two reasons,\u201d Hall told me. \u201cOne is that I hate menus. I think menus are garbage 90 percent of the time in games. They really take you out of the experience. Two, information density. You can take a screenshot of Lore\u2019s bedroom and give it to another player, and they immediately know what you\u2019ve done in your game. If somebody sees something in your screenshot that they don\u2019t have, then they can go and look it up, or search in-game to find it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to run into situations like that in Heartbound, <\/em>as different players will often end up with wholly different experiences. On a first run, it can feel a little linear, and being in Early Access only gets you the first couple of hours of the game, but there\u2019s a lot packed into it in ways you won\u2019t expect.<\/p>\n

Like a lot of modern games, the way Heartbound <\/em>plays out is built around the choices that you make while you\u2019re playing it. Here, however, you often aren\u2019t told that you\u2019re making those choices. Many of the big decisions that shape your game are invisible, well-hidden, or initially seem irrelevant, like how thoroughly you explore a crowded room. A couple require you to deliberately try to fail or work around what seem like major story objectives. One of the first big story branches is about five minutes in, and I didn\u2019t realize that it had been a choice at all until I looked at the game\u2019s achievement guide on Steam.<\/p>\n

Speaking of achievements, Heartbound<\/em>\u2019s are as weird as everything else about the game<\/a>. A couple of them require the player to input codes that the game\u2019s community had to play an alternate-reality game<\/a> to discover, one involves editing your own save file in Notepad, and one requires you to beat the first real fight in the game without taking a hit, picking up your first weapon, or even getting dressed first.<\/p>\n

\u201cI came from a time when achievements were achievements,\u201d Hall said. \u201cIt was something that you could show off, something that you could be proud of, that you could show another person. I think that we\u2019ve moved as an industry more towards handouts. \u2018You logged in! Have an achievement!’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo Heartbound <\/em>has achievements that you actually achieve,\u201d he said. \u201cLess than 0.3 percent of the community has the achievement for beating the first boss without getting hit, but people have it, and the ones who do feel very proud about it. You wouldn\u2019t feel the same way about it if it was easy to obtain. It\u2019d feel like a time sink, rather than something you had to strive for. I don\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hall estimates that the next chapter of Heartbound<\/em> is roughly 87 percent done, with new, potentially unstable versions of the game going live every Sunday.<\/p>\n

Pirate Software will have a booth on the PAX West show floor on the weekend of August 30 in Seattle. Heartbound <\/em>is currently available for $10 via Steam Early Access, Itch.io, and GameJolt.<\/p>\n

Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Heartbound screenshots) At first glance, Heartbound looks like a nostalgia trip. Its Steam page describes it as a \u201cnon-traditional RPG,\u201d with hand-drawn pixel-art graphics and a jazzy, catchy chiptune soundtrack, in the spirit of weird \u201890s 16-bit games like Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, and Earthbound. Jason Thor Hall, founder of Pirate Software. (Jason… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":69659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t