BANKWAVE

What is BANKWAVE? Well. You’re about to find out.

Jude: [00:00:00] Growing up for a brief period when I was ten, up until I was 14, my friend Buzzy and I would experiment with designing our own levels for video games. Games like StarCraft and TimeSplitters 2 made it easy to design levels that you could play. Well, then we found a program called GameMaker and we started making our own video games. This was 1999, so there weren't many tools available, and what were available were not exactly user friendly, at least not for our age group. But GameMaker made it feel somewhat approachable.

Alex Mills: [00:00:29] One of the biggest issues with game development and indie game devs is trying to build the game that you know you can't build.

Jude: [00:00:36] That's Alex Mills. He's the founder and CEO of Frabjous Studios, an independent game developer headquartered in Texas. Alex started out the same way we did, tinkering with a process he didn't yet totally have a handle on.

Alex Mills: [00:00:49] The scope creep. And I don't know if novelists or writers have to deal with this as well, but the scope creep is a huge thing.

Jude: [00:00:54] Scope creep would be like me and Buzzy saying, oh, let's go build our own StarCraft or our own TimeSplitters 2.

Alex Mills: [00:00:59] And you've never built a game before. You have no idea what it takes, and it's just not going to happen.

Jude: [00:01:05] We actually tried making a game based on The Matrix where you would play as Neo. I spent days after school designing Neo using MS Paint. His black trench coat, his shades, all of it, pixel by pixel. And for every movement Neo would make, like if you were going to press the spacebar to jump, I would have to draw another version of Neo. You know, what he looked like when he jumped, just like you would in a Mario game.

Alex Mills: [00:01:27] And you can be quite a ways into something before you realize, oh, this, this, this isn't working and it's never going to work.

Jude: [00:01:35] And that's pretty much what happened. As the weeks went by, we got as far as making Neo jump around and fly and shoot bullets from his gun, and we even got the bad guys in there, the agents. But the agents would appear on screen and then suddenly disappear. We couldn't figure out how to keep them on the screen so that Neo could actually fight them.

Alex Mills: [00:01:54] Platformer mechanics are surprisingly hard. It's really easy to get them wrong. There's a bunch of weird bugs that can come up.

Jude: [00:02:03] In 1999 and the early 2000, playing video games had a heavy stigma attached. Popular kids called games nerdy. Parents called them a waste of time.

Alex Mills: [00:02:11] I was worried they'd be upset I wanted to spend my life on the computer because that was the feedback I'd always gotten. You know, I think a lot of us did.

Anonymous #1: [00:02:18] I think people were a little bit more chill about it now.

Anonymous #2: [00:02:20] I mean, I didn't play video games, but...

Anonymous #3: [00:02:22] I did. I love video games. My parents made me or they got me Nintendo just because we were too rambunctious and it was a way for them to take a break.

Anonymous #1: [00:02:31] I don't think games have ever been really a waste of time, but a way for people to escape.

Anonymous #3: [00:02:36] It wasn't until like middle school and high school maybe we they said we were playing a little too much.

Anonymous #1: [00:02:41] If you do it too much, maybe that becomes a problem. So I think it's just in modesty.

Anonymous #3: [00:02:47] It's just about like portioning it out and not playing for twelve hours, because when I was 15 years old, I could play Halo for, I don't know, a full day, like no one could stop me.

Alex Mills: [00:02:58] Get off the video games and go, go play outside, right?

Jude: [00:03:01] In all reality, the playing of the game is very similar to the making of the game. In the same way you would get good at playing Mario, learning the layout of a level, figuring out secret things you could do to play it more efficiently, these are things that developers discover when they're building.

Alex Mills: [00:03:15] That's the fun in every game. It's the learning process. It's the developing a skill. That's what games are for, and that's why they're enjoyable.

Jude: [00:03:24] And for those who understood this core philosophy, many of them would sign up for what is called a game jam. A game jam is sort of like a 48 hour or 72 hour film festival, where filmmakers have an allotted amount of time to make a film. They assemble their team. Who's going to be the writer, the director, the cinematographer, the actors, the sound designer, the boom operator. Once they get their team together, and the first day of the festival arrives, and they're given a set of criteria to follow, they have two or three days to make a movie following that criteria, but with a game jam, instead of making a film, those people are making, well, a game.

Alex Mills: [00:04:01] The first game jam that I got involved in was, was Ludum Dare 53, the one that we well, I should say that's the first formal game jam I got involved in. We did some informal kind of game a day jams prior to that, where we were just getting some friends and I together and we're like, okay, we're going to see how we like working together, and we're going to try to make a game in the course of a day, and spent just like seven hours doing it and went from there. But yeah, Ludum Dare was the first one.

Jude: [00:04:29] Ludum dare is the longest running indie game jam competition, founded by Jeff Howland in 2002. Ludum Dare runs semiannually, but it started out as a game development forum. The idea was to make the forum stand out by making a contest where they would make games from scratch in 24 hours. The name Ludum Dare has Latin origins. Dare meaning "to give". Ludum meaning "a game". Ludum Dare. To give a game.

Alex Mills: [00:04:56] I want to build something in 72 hours that I can be proud of. From a programming perspective, like, okay, let's see how many features we can pack into this game. That's a terrible design driver, by the way.

Jude: [00:05:10] Alex isn't just the CEO of Frabjous Studios, he's also their lead programmer.

Alex Mills: [00:05:14] So the hardest thing about programming, for me at least, is not coming up with something new and creating it, but it's taking something that's in the middle of the process and reworking it to be what you actually want it to be.

Jude: [00:05:29] Alex started leading his first video game project at 17. Since then, he's acquired almost twelve years of software developer experience. But Alex knew he couldn't do it all on his own. He had a lot of ideas, but not enough time.

Alex Mills: [00:05:43] And I would need a team of hundreds of people in order to make this work.

Jude: [00:05:47] Well, maybe not hundreds of people, at least not to begin with. So by the time Ludum Dare 53 was announced, the 53rd semi-annual online game jam, Alex had already established Frabjous Studios with multiple games in pre-production.

Alex Mills: [00:06:02] The main core of the team was myself doing the programming, Jay doing the pixel art, Greg Rossetti doing the music.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:10] Some gamers I've worked with don't know anything about music. They don't know how to communicate it. They say, I'll write me a piece of music, make it sound like this game.

Alex Mills: [00:06:19] We ended up coming up with something that was the top 3% audio.

Jude: [00:06:22] That's top 3% in the whole game jam that their game scored for sound and music alone.

Alex Mills: [00:06:28] That tells you all you need to know about Greg.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:30] What's cool with working with someone like Alex is he speaks music.

Alex Mills: [00:06:34] I found Greg via networking on a Discord server.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:37] It was Discord, I think I just responded to a post on a Discord.

Alex Mills: [00:06:42] For another game called The Witch of the Woods.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:44] It was this game called the Witch of the Wood.

Alex Mills: [00:06:45] It is still in pre-production, and we don't have too much to say at this point.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:49] Or the Witch of the Woods. I heard him go back and forth with the name.

Alex Mills: [00:06:52] And he had already expressed interest in doing the music for that game.

Greg Rossetti: [00:06:57] So Alex wrote back, and it was just, it was an eloquent response. And I've gotten a few of these in my years using Discord.

Alex Mills: [00:07:04] Hey, Greg, we're going to do this game.

Greg Rossetti: [00:07:06] I think what I liked is the fact that it was there were no spelling errors. Everything was worded very organized. Sometimes I get a lot of kids on there and I'll like respond to a post and it'll be a kid who's like 15 years old, like, yeah, can you do can you write me a song for my game? Or like my mom says, I have to get off the computer in fifteen minutes. I'm like, what did I just get myself into? And we had talked about this narrative based game, a text-based game.

Alex Mills: [00:07:30] It's an ode to late-stage capitalism.

Greg Rossetti: [00:07:32] And I was going to compose themes for every zone, and I started sketching out ideas for that.

Alex Mills: [00:07:36] It involves synthwave music, is that something you'd be interested in? He's like, sure, I could try that out over the weekend.

Greg Rossetti: [00:07:43] But then a game jam came up.

Alex Mills: [00:07:46] And then we kind of formed the team at the last minute. We were just like, oh, this is starting in on Friday. It's Wednesday. Do you guys want to spend the weekend doing this?

Greg Rossetti: [00:07:56] And there were other people on the team that wanted to participate in this game jam.

Alex Mills: [00:07:59] And thankfully people said yes.

Jude: [00:08:02] So Frabjous Studios signs up for Ludum Dare 53, the longest running indie game jam competition, and they're doing so under a very tight deadline. 72 hours, to be precise.

Alex Mills: [00:08:14] I did a grocery run before. Before we went out. Before. Before the game jam.

Jude: [00:08:19] What did what did you get for your grocery run?

Alex Mills: [00:08:20] Trader Joe's and filled up on the peanut butter filled pretzels and all sorts of stuff. I ate well during the game jam. That was taken care of.

Jude: [00:08:29] Every team participating in the game jam is going to be given a theme to work with. That theme is kept secret up until the kickoff, when the first 24 hours begin. For Frabjous Studios, the strategy was to look at a game that they had already been discussing, and then try to work the theme in somehow afterward.

Alex Mills: [00:08:45] I don't know how well that is received in the community, but that's what we ended up doing. We had a pretty detailed plan going into Ludum Dare. We didn't start making anything, but we knew what the assets we needed. We knew exactly what the game loop was going to look like.

Jude: [00:09:01] There's the key to what makes a game a game. The game loop. For the first 24 hours, Alex and his team are figuring out the art and the music. But what is saving them time is that they already know what their game loop is.

Alex Mills: [00:09:15] All games are played in a loop where you've got the player providing input, and then you give the player some response to that input.

Jude: [00:09:23] Like in Mario, the game loop is to go from left to right on a level, not dying, and reaching the castle within a specified time limit.

Alex Mills: [00:09:31] And then you keep doing that over and over again as fast as the computer and the player can keep up.

Jude: [00:09:37] This is what Alex was talking about. The fun in every game. It's the learning process. It's the developing of a skill.

Alex Mills: [00:09:44] The fun comes in where the player learns what it is that they need to do in order to get the feedback that they want, whether that's your score going up or, in our case, an attaboy for giving a customer good customer service or handling their banking transaction properly. It's a weird game. I'm not going to pretend it's not.

Jude: [00:10:04] You're not mishearing things. Okay. Good. Customer service and handling a bank transaction properly are actual things for players to do in this game. The game is called BANKWAVE, developed by Frabjous Studios in the mad race of Ludum Dare 53. Now, the objective of any game jam is to complete a playable game. With Ludum Dare, these playable games will most likely not be perfectly polished since they are made within a 72-hour window. But a game jam is a great way for a team to get their feet wet and to get some feedback. It is a peer judged competition, after all, so if you submitted a game, then you get to play and score the other games. Your competitors are responsible for your ranking, which is determined by eight categories: overall, fun, theme, innovation, graphics, audio, humor, and mood. And in the case of BANKWAVE, Frabjous Studios did score in the top 3% for sound and music. That's where Greg comes in.

Greg Rossetti: [00:11:05] Sometimes Alex tells me, like, you know, here's a cliche chord progression. Can you use this as a foundation? And I'll take it and play with it so much that it's no longer really that progression.

Jude: [00:11:16] But with this game, Greg had some heavy lifting to do. The score had to play a major role in keeping the player invested.

Greg Rossetti: [00:11:23] In BANKWAVE. The game has this like monotony in the game. It's a capitalism simulator, right? It's kind of like tongue in cheek, like, okay, we're working at a bank. Let's do this monotonous work at the bank. There's a stock market level, there's a soup kitchen level.

Alex Mills: [00:11:38] The game loop we've already come up with, we were delivering customer service.

Jude: [00:11:42] They kind of lucked out when Ludum Dare 53 announced what their theme was going to be.

Alex Mills: [00:11:46] Thankfully, the theme was delivery, and we realized that we could incorporate a daily delivery of cash into the game.

Jude: [00:11:53] Now, if you're still wondering at all how any of this sounds like a video game, you may not be totally familiar with the history of games as art.

Anonymous #4: [00:12:02] I have video games on my resume. I'm like a ranked player in a bunch of different games.

Anonymous #3: [00:12:08] Yeah, it seems like almost maybe now people are more cognizant of it just because there's a screen for everything you know.

Anonymous #1: [00:12:14] I had a pretty simple childhood. I'm from Africa, so we spent our time outside, really. So I wasn't much of a gamer besides like the Gameboy and like Super Mario, so like some of the classics. But I've never been much of a gamer.

Anonymous #4: [00:12:30] Yeah, I think that as people who grew up playing them get into more positions of power or, you know, become adults, really is what I mean by that, there's sort of a slightly higher level of respect for it as, as a hobby, but also as sort of a challenging endeavor at the same time. And so I think that people have a more positive outlook on it as at worst just a hobby and at best something that's actually skill expressive and telling of some sort of talent or knowledge.

Jude: [00:12:58] In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a great deal of discourse surrounding video games and their connection to violence among teens. Games were often talked about as a waste of time. Even film critic Roger Ebert went so far as to say that video games could never be art.

Alex Mills: [00:13:13] But I don't think anybody can play What Remains of Edith Finch or the Suicide of Rachel Foster and not come away with it, seeing like, oh yeah, that was art. And I don't think those games existed when Roger Ebert said that.

Greg Rossetti: [00:13:27] That's why I argue. I don't I don't agree with that. I think games are the perfect form of art.

Alex Mills: [00:13:31] I don't know, someone's been asking that question again after sitting him down to play one of those games. See what his response is.

Jude: [00:13:37] Unfortunately, we can't ask Ebert what he thinks about video games today, and maybe he would have a different opinion. Maybe not. In 2014, a year after Ebert's death, a game called Papers, Please was released for PC. Created by Lucas Pope and described as a dystopian document thriller, Papers, Please puts players in the role of an immigrant officer for a fictional communist nation. As the immigration officer, you get to decide who gets into the country and who stays out.

Alex Mills: [00:14:05] The thing about Papers, Please is it's surprising that it works as a game. The game criticism that I've read in some of the some of the Steam reviews, even, they're like, wait, why? Why is this fun? Why does this work?

Jude: [00:14:16] And while Papers, Please did not find its origins within a game jam, it was the recipient of numerous awards. It has been studied in classrooms, and it has been categorized as an "empathy game". What commonsense.org describes as "a game that builds social and emotional skills, allowing students to inhabit worlds and points of view and test out approaches to life in a safe environment where taking risks is encouraged".

Alex Mills: [00:14:40] There's some really interesting stuff out there in the indie game scene or along those lines.

Jude: [00:14:45] Roger Ebert declaring video games could never be art stirred up frustrations for people who saw video games as an art form in its infancy, less than 100 years old, not too far behind film. After all, what can a video game do that no other art form can?

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:15:00] My name is Alan Pablo Kistler, and I have for years been a consultant with storytelling, a script doctor, among many other things. My job includes going into games that are still being developed.

Jude: [00:15:14] Alan works at Dark Burn Creative. And I asked Alan to play BANKWAVE, the game that Frabjous Studios first developed during Ludum Dare 53 and has now since continued to develop.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:15:24] With BANKWAVE, I sort of laughed with amusement and honest curiosity about just the concept of it, because on the surface, the game tells you right away you're a bank teller and you're going to be doing this job, and you're going to be doing it with very little training and with no experience.

Jude: [00:15:42] BANKWAVE is a customer service simulator in a strange dystopian universe. In BANKWAVE, the character you play is a bank teller for a mega corporation called Multiverse Mutual. As a bank teller, you will be forced to deal with wave upon waves of customers, satisfying their every whim while making sure to follow the ever changing rules and regulations of your tyrannical boss.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:16:04] And so the open question is why? Why would I? Why would I want to? I particularly have actively avoided trying to have jobs like that. I mean, no disrespect for them. They're absolutely essential.

Alex Mills: [00:16:18] These are exactly the sorts of problems that people face every day making these hard decisions. And a lot of people that play video games don't get to see that.

Jude: [00:16:27] In BANKWAVE, if you work hard, you could become the employee of the month. Finally, see that big promotion! Or maybe even win an all-expense paid retirement at the fabulous Sunshine Resorts!

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:16:39] And you've got some added twists. Because this is a science fiction setting, you're in some form of the future.

Alex Mills: [00:16:44] The player is a clone, a VatBorn clone.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:16:48] You're apparently this artificial VatBorn being.

Alex Mills: [00:16:53] That was created by this company Multiverse Mutual to basically serve as a bank teller.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:17:01] Who was made for this job, which already indicates what kind of society this is, because essentially, you're almost playing an ATM with a will and a voice box.

Alex Mills: [00:17:12] And without getting into spoilers on anything, that's not necessarily what you want to be doing as the player in the game.

Jude: [00:17:21] As the player in the game, you are trying to escape the system because this is a game about agency.

Alex Mills: [00:17:27] The agency that workers have, the agency that we all have in the system of capitalism, right? We don't choose to be in it. It was decided before we got here.

Jude: [00:17:37] Okay, I know this is all getting a little too abstract and weird. Believe me, it gets weirder. But instead of going further into the weeds with the story of BANKWAVE, I'm going to pause here. And we'll get back to Alan, as well as some of the other people who play tested this game. It's April 28th, 2023. Ludum dare 53 has just begun and the official theme has been announced. Delivery. Thankfully, Frabjous Studios already has the perfect game idea in mind to match this theme. With almost 6000 signups, this game jam competition will only see 2300 final submissions.

Alex Mills: [00:18:19] The worst news we got in the first 24 hours is that our writer came down with the flu. Thankfully, he said, oh yeah, I'll still get something out there. So yeah, we ended up getting his stuff for the game, but that was pretty scary and nerve wracking for a while.

Jude: [00:18:33] With the writing underway, the next order of business was the artwork.

Alex Mills: [00:18:38] The start of it was I was just putting squares on the screen that the artists would come in back in and fill in later. Then Greg started going to town on the music.

Greg Rossetti: [00:18:46] Alex said, make the hippest elevator music possible. So it's like, okay, what are elevator music tropes? Now, here's the weird thing. I'd never heard music in an elevator. I just knew it from what people call elevator music. It's usually associated with jazz, which I find disappointing because I love a lot of jazz, and I played jazz in college. I mean, I was saxophone and guitar in the jazz groups. To me, elevators are like, when you're in a building, I just hit the button and go up. I don't know what it sounds like.

Jude: [00:19:16] Naturally, the name of the song is "Hip Elevator".

Greg Rossetti: [00:19:20] This was one of the tracks in BANKWAVE. It's going to be like the first level. I play bass, but I thought, why bother learning the part when I can just write it and have the computer play it? So that's actually a fake Rickenbacker sample. That's a virtual instrument, and the virtual instrument randomizes the velocities for you a little bit to make it sound more human. So I had that going and I want little attack. So it sounds warm. And that's the more jazzy sound. Superior Drummer is just a pre, it's a drum program if you will. Drum machine, but it's a real kit. So they're real samples of the instruments. It's not like an 808 when they're faked. So I found sounds of a record player, the needle from a record player with lots of compression. But I have it side chained so for whenever the drum hits, it adds a little bit of that grittiness to the drum. It's not just random, it's actually being pulsed instead of just random record noise. So that gives it that kind of hip and jazzy sound at the same time.

Jude: [00:20:28] These are just the basics. When it comes to Greg Rossetti, well, it's all about hidden textures.

Greg Rossetti: [00:20:35] This here is a heavily modified sound from Earthbound. The NES game.

Jude: [00:20:42] Why sample this random sound from Earthbound?

Greg Rossetti: [00:20:45] Because it has a lot of like 50s rock tropes, but the game was super ahead of its time in that it used sampling like in a creepy way. They use like a Beach Boys song, and they totally warp it until it sounds just scary. They take part of All You Need Is Love by The Beatles, where they quoted the French National Anthem and they quote that on top of it. So you just get these strange ideas of taking things and recontextualizing stuff that's usually innocuous and making it sound evil.

Jude: [00:21:15] Talking with Greg, it's clear why him and Alex get along. In the same way that Alex will take a deep dive into science fiction and abstract philosophical talk, Greg loves getting into music history. He teaches classes in popular music, music theory, music technology, and he recently finished his PhD in composition at Rutgers University, where his dissertation explored how musical tropes build worlds in early role-playing video games. All I had to do was bring up the music from Donkey Kong Country.

Greg Rossetti: [00:21:45] So on the Super Nintendo, there's eight channels, but you can program different sounds to each channel, and the channel sounds can change, whether it's Mario versus like the DuckTales game versus Mega man, they all had the same sound palette. It's just how you worked with the channels. Super Nintendo, you can have any sound you want. That's why Final Fantasy 6 and 4 are so orchestral and epic, while the Castlevania 4 is much darker and uses lots of organs and everything because those are the sounds that were programmed into it.

Jude: [00:22:15] What Greg is really speaking to here comes down to technological limitations, and how those limitations in early video games led the developers, or in this case, the music composers, to innovate how they approach the score.

Greg Rossetti: [00:22:28] I talk about that in my dissertation. I talked about why, and in a lot of papers I've written, like why restraints are good because it inspires creativity. The reason why these these composers wrote such interesting chord progressions, I think, is because they didn't have the ability to make different sounds. So if you're working with beeps and bloops and you're using a basic chord progression, it kind of sounds boring, but they're like, well, how do we make this interesting? So they would do things with weird chord progressions that you wouldn't expect to go to.

Jude: [00:22:58] So that stereotypical video game sound, the beeps, the bloops, that 8-bit noise, it exists because the composers were restricted and they were trying to make the sound of a big chord on a piano, but they would instead put the notes right next to each other because only one note could sound at a time per channel.

Greg Rossetti: [00:23:17] The restrictions inspire creativity 100%. That's why I like having. I always put restrictions on myself when I compose something. The worst thing to me is opening up a blank canvas and saying, okay, what do I do?

Jude: [00:23:30] So it's 2023. There are virtually no restrictions when it comes to composing music for video games, unless, of course, that restriction comes in the form of a time limit. A 72-hour time limit.

Alex Mills: [00:23:44] The next 48 hours was banging out scripts and getting things integrated and making sure that stuff worked.

Greg Rossetti: [00:23:53] The artist is always making new characters, it seems. I'll go on our Discord server and I'll see something and be like, that's great, look at that awesome character. And that would inspire how I'm doing all the voices for the characters.

Jude: [00:24:05] Not all of the characters created during the game jam would ultimately make it into the game that Frabjous Studios would go on to develop, but the pressure of the game jam did help generate some characters that stuck around.

Alex Mills: [00:24:16] This old man comes in, withdrawing $75 every day in order to keep his wife in hospice, right?

Jude: [00:24:23] And in the world of BANKWAVE, with all of its themes surrounding capitalism, there's going to be a financial collapse.

Alex Mills: [00:24:29] And at some point during the game, they limit deposits to $50 a day. Withdrawals. You can't withdraw more than $50 a day.

Jude: [00:24:39] The man who has been withdrawing $75 every day in order to keep his wife in hospice, is now faced with a problem.

Alex Mills: [00:24:45] And that obviously has an impact for this guy. So the player is put in this position. What is it you're going to do? Are you going to break the rules and risk getting a demerit at your job in order to help this old man or not?

Jude: [00:24:59] So the game jam is generating some good ideas for BANKWAVE. The team is eating well thanks to Trader Joe's and their peanut butter filled pretzels. Jay's been doing the artwork, Greg on the music.

Alex Mills: [00:25:08] And then we were trying to put polish on the game.

Jude: [00:25:12] Alex is just programming nonstop. The clock is ticking down.

Alex Mills: [00:25:17] Saturday night I didn't sleep. I got like two, three hours of sleep, which was just where my brain was.

Jude: [00:25:24] And even with the clock ticking down, Alex still manages to get a little sidetracked, wondering what else could they add into BANKWAVE?

Alex Mills: [00:25:33] And then the day after, I spent most of the day just adding polish to the game that we didn't really need added a day night cycle because that's what we wanted. And it kind of worked. No, it didn't work for the jam, but I spent spent some time doing it anyway.

Jude: [00:25:49] At this point, getting the game finished and submitting falls largely on Alex. The rest of the team has turned in all of their assets, and Alex has to make sure it works. That it's a playable game. But there is one aspect to all of this that we haven't touched on that allows a game to be made in such a short span of time. The engine. If you're not familiar with what a game engine is, a video game engine is like some pre-built scaffolding or foundation that you built your game on. Similar to the GameMaker program that I would use as a kid to make my very own Matrix video game, a game engine will simplify the process, allowing you to use the same code for multiple platforms. PC, Mac OS, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox. The engine is the toolbox that developer builds with. Thankfully, Alex is not having to build an entire engine from the ground up like a game. An engine is not the sort of thing that one can build in 72 hours.

Alex Mills: [00:26:48] BANKWAVE is 2D, and we want to ensure that there's a lot of flexibility in the gameplay. So we're using a lightweight, minimalistic engine called EbitEngine.

Jude: [00:26:57] The creator of EbitEngine, Hajime Hoshi, has spent ten years developing and maintaining his engine. Hajime describes EbitEngine as a dead simple engine designed around a core philosophy of minimalism.

Alex Mills: [00:27:10] He's even given a talk or written an article where he compares it to an elegant work of art. Like game engines can be a work of art. In fact, it's simple enough that one of my interns has been able to jump in and be productive with it just over the course of the last six months or so, and this is one of the first codebases he's worked in. I haven't had to explain a whole lot of the intricacies of a heavyweight engine, which is saved me time and saved us time on the project.

Jude: [00:27:35] So I sat down with Hajime because I wanted to know what it was like developing a game engine and witnessing all of these games being created because of his hard work.

Hajime Hoshi: [00:27:45] So I'm delighted to see games made with EbitEngine, because it further convinces me that my model is effective in the real world. And my idea is sound.

Jude: [00:27:57] You scrapped at least ten different engines before finally hitting the mark with EbitEngine. What is it about developing and refining an engine over time that feels so fun and fulfilling to you?

Hajime Hoshi: [00:28:09] Yeah, for me, seeking the truth is what feels fun and fulfilling. As you mentioned, I've tried to develop many engines with this model for a long time but failed in most attempts.

Jude: [00:28:22] The way Hajime speaks about developing a EbitEngine sounds like a vocation, a higher calling. He calls the process of development "seeking the truth", and in his case, seeking the truth means the most minimal model possible, making it dead simple for developers to create their games.

Hajime Hoshi: [00:28:42] I believe every 2D game could be implemented with this concept, so this might be akin to mathematics, in my opinion. In mathematics, the fewer axioms required, the more elegant the theory.

Jude: [00:28:56] In minimalism, Hajime finds elegance. But developing EbitEngine took a long time. As I mentioned earlier, he scrapped at least ten different engines before finally hitting the mark with this one, and he continues to maintain EbitEngine, improving upon it to this day.

Hajime Hoshi: [00:29:14] So in my experience, my game engine was not of top quality and not many were keen on using it for practical purposes, although a few did give it a try. So I overcame this challenge by having a friend use my software for his game and providing feedback before and after its launch.

Jude: [00:29:36] By having his friend use the software and provide feedback, Hajime was able to further realize that truth he was seeking.

Alex Mills: [00:29:43] The best way to do software development is in tight loops where you write something, see if it works, and then realize it doesn't go back and fix it until it does.

Hajime Hoshi: [00:29:52] This helped me identify and rectify some performance issues. Consequently, my engine became more sophisticated and adaptable to real world applications.

Alex Mills: [00:30:03] And that's one of the things that's most frustrating for most people learning programming, starting out that failure before success thing. It can really get you down. If you haven't seen the success enough over the course of your life to have the confidence that now I can make this work, it can really kind of get to a place where it's frustrating and extremely demoralizing.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:30:21] People have this idea of if I plan everything out, if everyone has their individual parts of the plan and each part is perfected, then each of us has to just do this once or twice at most. And then the pieces fit together like this beautiful puzzle. And it's all fixed and it's perfect. And our product is done. And it's absolutely not the case. That's not how it works.

Jude: [00:30:43] Remember Alan from earlier? His work with Dark Burn Creative, where they're crafting gameplay trailers, it allows them to see video games at all different stages of development. Quite often, the game they're making a trailer for is not finished.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:30:57] The story's there. The broad strokes are there, but some of them are still working out the kinks. Some of them are still changing what certain characters will look like, or what some of the gameplay will be. And I get to see that evolve over time so that it can be a very different experience playing that version of the game, that early build of it versus the version of the game, the build that we use to make the trailer that you're going to see on YouTube.

Jude: [00:31:21] Which brings us to one of the most critical stages of software and video game development. Testing.

Alex Mills: [00:31:28] Writing and going in and playing and making sure that it works and coming back to it.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:31:32] Unfortunately and unfortunately, it is never going to go exactly like you planned, and it's going to be up to you to decide, is this new development, is this great?

Jude: [00:31:42] Since the end of Ludum Dare 53, Alex and his team at Frabjous Studios have continued to expand the world of BANKWAVE. There are so many new ideas being developed, especially when it comes to the music and the story. But for the preview version that has been available for a limited time, I thought I would ask a few gamers and professional writers what they thought of BANKWAVE so far.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:03] So I installed the game demo off of Steam.

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:05] So I played it yesterday for about an hour.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:32:07] A little over an hour.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:08] I played for about an hour.

Gary Sandelin: [00:32:10] I did like the opening sequence. The orientation was definitely creepy and...

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:17] I like the creepy vibe of it.

David Jenkins: [00:32:19] Weird.

Gary Sandelin: [00:32:20] Weird dystopian.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:32:21] Retro 80s approach to sci-fi.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:24] And once I was in the game, I just sat on the menu screen for like 5 to 10 minutes because the music was sick.

David Jenkins: [00:32:29] I love the music.

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:30] I really liked the pixel art.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:32] The aesthetics of the game. The pixel art is beautiful.

Gary Sandelin: [00:32:34] I am a fan of the aesthetic of this game.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:37] The writing though, the dialogue and the writing. The clever dialogue is really my favorite aspect of this game.

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:42] I like this type of sim game even though I don't play it very often.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:46] The game is a bank telling simulator.

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:48] I don't know what it's called. Maybe like labor sim, I don't know.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:32:50] Where you're helping customers withdraw and deposit, and you're kind of interacting with them, and…

Troy Wiggins: [00:32:56] You are just a person doing your work for a day and trying to do it efficiently.

Lesley Swor: [00:33:01] To just solve the like, the, the puzzle and be a good employee of that company, like be a good teller.

Alan Pablo Kistler: [00:33:08] I also, I did like the character of the boss who is is terribly unhelpful, but also feels put upon somehow. We've all had colleagues or bosses who are like that.

Troy Wiggins: [00:33:18] I think the thing that stuck out to me most were like the ways that it replicated the doldrums of service work or retail work. You know what I mean? The strange customer interactions, the unhelpful manager, the fact that, like, the money is difficult to handle.

Gary Sandelin: [00:33:34] The picking up of individual pieces of money and depositing them, and...

Troy Wiggins: [00:33:38] Definitely love the fact that you get absolutely no tutorial.

David Jenkins: [00:33:44] And I like how you have to literally figure everything out for yourself. Like what all the buttons do.

Troy Wiggins: [00:33:50] The guy's just like, do it. And you just got to click around and figure it out, which is really great.

Jude: [00:33:53] What would you say being a teller is like?

Lesley Swor: [00:33:55] It's hard work, man.

Jude: [00:33:56] It's annoying?

Lesley Swor: [00:33:57] It's confusing.

Jude: [00:33:59] Now, because BANKWAVE is still in development. The version that everyone played is not a fully finished game, which means certain mechanics are not going to function the way they're intended to, and the developers will learn through testing that there are features they can improve upon.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:34:12] There is a few mechanics that I thought were too tedious, like dragging single dollar bills from one pile to another pile.

Jude: [00:34:19] This is Rhythm Delucco. He's a musician and comedian, but when he was younger, he used to code video games.

Rhythm Delucco: [00:34:26] When I first got into the game, after I got through the tutorial, there was a little bit of jankiness in trying to figure out what does this button do? Where does this thing go? And again, we got to realize that this game is in development. It's a Kickstarter. And so a lot of these things might grow and change, and they might get refined and polished.

Troy Wiggins: [00:34:42] When it drops, I got Steam back on my computer now, so, you know, let's do it.

Jude: [00:34:47] That was Troy Wiggins, an award-winning writer from Memphis, Tennessee, just one of many awesome people who came on in the last second to give BANKWAVE a test play. Also, thank you to Gary Sandelin, David Jenkins and Lesley Swor. But a huge thank you to Alex Mills, founder and CEO of Frabjous Studios, for opening the door into this process. So I'm going to let Alex take us out with our final segment.

Alex Mills: [00:35:17] You're dying, but you don't have to cooperate so enthusiastically with the process, I like that. Who said that?

Jude: [00:35:25] That was Leonard Cohen. He said it in one of his final interviews with The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Alex Mills: [00:35:32] Oh, wow, this is this is brilliant. Um. Wow. This is about living the life that I think you want to live, right? I mean, and I think of, like, all the things that we could do with our lives that would, like, we're all dying. That's. That's how this works, right? It would be a real shame to spend all that time dying and also be dead inside. Don't cooperate enthusiastically with the process of death. Cooperate enthusiastically with the process of life. Live it while you've got it. Part of me, I feel like I've finally figured some of that out with going into indie game dev and being part of this creative process and building stuff that I can be proud of. I couldn't be happier.

Jude: [00:36:27] Thank you to Greg Rossetti for chatting music. You'll hear more from Greg in a future episode. We got way in the weeds and there was just too much stuff to pack in. If you want to follow BANKWAVE's development, check the links in the show notes. You can google BANKWAVE: Neon Networth or just check out Frabjous Studios. "Frabjous" is spelled F-R-A-B-J-O-U-S. If you want to know what "frabjous" means, well, go check out Alex's dev log. He's got a few little rabbit holes that he likes to write about. The music you are listening to was created originally for this show by John Fio. You can learn more about John and his music in the show notes. But most importantly, if there is anything you do, go involve yourself in a process that fulfills you or at the very least, give yourself a chance at discovering what kind of process that may be.