Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and steelseries hey guys we're here at the Indy mega booth with life goes on and this game as far as I can tell is about dying to progress is there any more you can tell me about it sure yeah well life goes on originally started as a global Game Jam project in 2012 the theme for the year was about the aura Boris and that's a symbol of life death and rebirth so what we wanted to do is we really want to really want to create a theme that fit with that so we figured death and reincarnation was the perfect idea so in what way does that actually make sense we figured making a puzzle game where your deaths are actually meaningful and alter the state of the game is something that we really wanted to explore and that's something that we were really interested in because generally speaking death in games is really bad you know it's a very common trope it's been like that way since the very beginning in really wanted to take a look at it and see how we could do it differently and show people that may be innovating on traditional mechanics is a very very good idea and it can actually sell some great games yeah and it's cool you took a like you said traditional mechanic of death but then just completely destroyed the idea of it which is my favorite part because you just murdered the classic idea of death where you go back to a checkpoint and you're like no to get to a checkpoint you must die which is my favorite part of the whole game I love the art style I love the different elements that's all awesome is there anything else you can add about the game like is there any little story elements or anything like that sure well you know we have a night and he's searching for a Grail because isn't that one nights do the problem is is that none of the Grails are really the right one so they keep going through to get through all these traps and puzzles to find the right Grail you know they just keep finding stuff that isn't really right for them so they just keep on going your Grails in another castle something like that yeah yeah it sounds like good want to say it but yeah generally maybe we'll make a joke where someone comes out and says your Grail is in another castle I don't know if that's going to take some localization though so yeah that makes sense alright how can people get this game sure well first off we have the demo available for download off our website we have on our website it it's available for PC Mac and Linux we also just put it up on Steam this week currently on steam it is pc only because you know we were coming to pax things got really busy and all that stuff so what we after pax is over we're going to throw up the mac in the linux build and we're going to make sure people can play it on those platforms as well we really want to support all the platforms and spread the gaming love and make sure that it's not just pc users that are getting all the great games now speaking of different platforms and all that kind of stuff you guys as far as I've heard are a giant group of programmers that you mad at Gamescom how do our games Jam sorry how exactly did that work out being all of you being programmers alright well that was a bit interesting when we were delegating roles you know we were talking around and it's like what can you do oh I have a programming degree oh I have a programming degree in engineering oh I'm doing my masters in computing science oh I did a math degree it's like all right well what can we do with that so it's like okay well do you have experience making any art yeah I took like a course and we're like a great your are artists they were like we need a sound guy I'm like well I made sound effects once they're like great you're the sound guy you know and and susan was like well really i'm just a program we were like great you're now the code monkey you're only going to be programming for the rest of the project so that's kind of how we delegated roles eric is kind of our jack of all trades so we just get him to do whatever we need him to do and you know he's been great he just goes and gets it done and you know we need people like that because we're you know we're four people we're really small company you know we're bootstrapping it ourselves and you know everybody has to contribute in every way so you know we all contribute to design we all contribute to the levels we give our feedback on the art style you know it's not always what our artist is looking for because he's like hey give me some feedback when the guy looks good ship it he's like no but what about this and we're like yeah I guess so but yeah so sometimes it can be a bit frustrating when you're trying to get feedback on very specific things but other than that you know we we gotta help out with everybody in every way we can so that's awesome and one little thing that they have here is as he was saying he's done some sound effects work so he is the sound effects guy instead of just having his phone boys dying in the game repeatedly he has decided to allow other people have their voices dying in the game repeatedly so if you're here at PAX you can come down to check out their yellow box and do your own little death sound into it I know I'm going to do one of mine and then you can have your little part in the game is there anything else you have going on like that sure we also have a mailing list signup sheet and if you sign up for our mailing list all of our nights have unique individual names so if you sign up our mailing list you can suggest a name that we get that we're going to put in the game but the way our names workers they're all randomly generated so we picked bits and pieces from every name in order to randomly generate our names so when you come and you can give us a name you're actually giving us 20 or 30 different names based on how many names we have so that's that's I think that's pretty cool that's really cool it's awesome that people can contribute to the game that they might like hey guys so I'm doing my death sound animation right now so hopefully the mic picks this up well my voice is a little bit hoarse but I'm gonna go for it anyways oh man hopefully that picked up well I almost saw like I was going to throw up but that works alright so if you're here come down putting your email shout into the box if you wanna if you like life goes on if you want to see the rest of our indie mega booth content you want to see the rest of our packs content be sure to subscribe to linus tech tips