Faith, Innovation, and Humanity: An Inside Look at Life Eater with Xalavier Nelson Jr.

Welcome to another episode of The Gamerheads Podcast! This week, Roger is joined by Xalavier Nelson Jr., the brilliant mind behind Strange Scaffold. In this episode, they delve into the intricate development of his latest project, Life Eater.  Xalavier discusses how he addresses mature themes, the careful casting process, and the innovative recording techniques used to bring depth and humanity to the game.

They explore the dynamic between characters Ralph and Johnny, highlighting the team's commitment to creating a compelling and respectful narrative. Xalavier also shares how his faith influences his storytelling, particularly in Life Eater, adding a personal and philosophical layer to his creative process.

This episode is packed with rich storytelling, creative insights, and the unique philosophy that underpins Strange Scaffold's innovative works.

Buy or wishlist Life Eater on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2632930/Life_Eater/

Follow Xalavier Nelson Jr on social media!


Check out our sponsor!

Magic Mind

Discover how Magic Mind, our favorite energy drink, can fuel your energy levels. You can get it at magicmind.com/gamerheadss and use promo code Gamerheadss.

Seven Bridges Premium Sauces

Looking for something that will add flavor to your veggies and meats? Check out Seven Bridges Premium Gourmet Yum Yum Sauce! We love it and we think you'll love it too!

You can get your bottle at Amazon.  

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 9:57 Balancing Sensitivity in Game Development
• 18:14 Creating Atmosphere in Game Development
• 22:50 Exploring Faith in Game Development
• 34:47 Genre-Smashing Game Design Challenges
• 41:07 Challenges of Game Development and Risk-Taking

Transcript

Roger Reichardt: 0:00

This episode of Gamer Heads is brought to you by Magic Mind, the healthy energy drink that will help you take your creativity to a new level. Hi, I'm Celia Schilling from Yacht Club Games.

Intro: 0:11

Hey, this is James from Mega Cat Studios. Hey, this is Matt aka Stormageddon from Reignite Screen Snark and the Fun and Games Podcast.

Intro: 0:19

This is Stephanie from the Boss Rush Podcast and the Boss Rush Network. Hey, this is Mark and Kion from Bonta Affold. Hey, this is Sebastian with the PronerdReportcom and the Single Player Experience Podcast. Hi, this is Chris, mike and Garrett from Daylight Basement Studio. Hey, this is BaronJ67 from Level One Gaming. t Hey, this is Todd Mitchell from Code Right Play. Salutations. This is Mike Carroll from. Stroll Art. Hey, this is Jeff Moonen from Fun and Games Podcast. Hey, this is Patrick from the Backlog Odyssey. Hey, this is Rune from Runic Codes. Hi, this is Andrew from Spalada Birds. Hi everyone, Jill Grotde here from the Indie Informer.

Intro: 0:59

Hello, this is the Crypt Master and you're listening to Roger Ritchie. You're listening to Roger on the Gamer Heads Podcast.

Roger Reichardt: 1:18

And welcome to another episode of the Gamer Heads Podcast. My name is Roger Along with me. This week I have a very special guest. I have writer, voice actor, creative director at Strange Scaffold and returning guest, amongst all the things, zalavir Nelson Jr Zalavir. Welcome back to the show.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 1:34

Thanks so much for having me again. It's a pleasure yeah.

Roger Reichardt: 1:38

I didn't tell you this, but actually your episode is one of the most listened to episodes of the Gamer Heads podcast.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 1:47

Oh heck yeah.

Roger Reichardt: 1:48

I'm glad to hear it, yeah, yeah, and I don't get a lot of comments about like, oh, I really like that episode. I get a couple, but this one when I had the last time you're on the show, like people actually said to me that was a fantastic episode and I want to hear more from Zalavir a fantastic episode and I want to hear more from zalavir, so it's like I have to have you back on the show because, well, that certainly means a lot.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 2:09

Uh, I, I contend to yap. So gamer has was a wonderful place to chat last time. I love having a place to talk about not just the creation of games, but their philosophy, um, something that goes beyond marketing, right? So thank you again for having me and for, uh, having had really cool questions last time and some more cool questions. You give me a preview of this time. I'm excited to get stuck into it awesome.

Roger Reichardt: 2:35

Well, thank you for the kind words. Before we get into the game, they're gonna talk about life eater. I do want to say congratulations first of all for El Paso Elsewhere getting a movie adaptation. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's exciting. Like I mean how you must have known that that was in works for a while, but like that is, that is pretty, pretty amazing.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 3:00

Yeah, it's deeply surreal because El Paso, elsewhere, elsewhere, especially having released so recently, to have people of this caliber see not just the potential in it as an ip right. It sold 1 billion copies and so we got to make something out of it. But to look at this indie games indie game that performed well and reviewed well but did not, you know, demand adaptation for commercial reasons and say, no, this is a really exciting story. We get this story, we want to bring this story to other places, um, and we've had other people sniff around other things that we've been doing a strange scaffold both before and especially since. So just, yeah, just recognition of what the teams have pulled off and that storytelling spirit is um, deeply gratifying and validating, and I'm really thankful, uh, at the end of the day, to the players who have advocated so strongly for us to get here in the first place yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a good game, great story, and I can't wait to see what that looks like on the big screen.

Roger Reichardt: 4:09

So thank you, uh. The other thing I just want to say congratulations to um. I heard you on npr, which is very cool, thank you talking about ai and gaming, so that was very cool and, like, I thought that's a future topic that I want to have you come back on to talk about. But, uh, that was really cool to hear you. I'm like I know him, that's a future topic that I want to have you come back on and talk about, but that was really cool to hear you.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 4:27

I'm like I know him. That's it. That's the second time I've been on NPR. For some reason they keep knocking on my door, so as long as they want to keep bringing me there to all the white people who listen to them. I'm happy to talk.

Roger Reichardt: 4:52

Oh, happy to talk. Oh well, um, let's talk about life eater then. Um, so, before we talk about some of my questions that I have, can you tell us about this game what is?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 4:55

this game about. So, for those who don't know, life eater is a horror fantasy, kidnapping sim about a druid living in modern day suburbia who, every year, must sacrifice people to uh, the God who he serves, in order to delay the end of the world. The, of course, lingering question behind the game, uh being does his God exist at all?

Roger Reichardt: 5:20

Uh, and that's before you even get to the twink that he has uh locked inside of his basement yeah, and uh in it you know now we'll get into this a little bit more but explores things like morality. It explores things like mental health, right like when I was playing, that's what I was thinking um and it's. I've never played anything like this before, so, uh, it was real interesting and I'm excited to talk more about this. What?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 5:52

what inspired the concept behind this game, me and a friend were talking about the saw franchise and I love pulling reference from a bunch of different places. One of the things that's been core to my development as an artist has been avoiding snobbery so I don't say, oh yeah, I'm too good to listen to k-pop. When someone shows me, says, hey, this k-pop song is really good, I listen because I'm going to learn something. And often discounting, uh, artistic mediums or trendy people, uh, just ends up separating you not only from your audience but from things that could potentially make your art and your diversion perspective stronger. So we were talking about saw, a series that I did not always love but have come to love in the years since, as I understood like what it was doing, and we were just idly talking about, hey, what game would you make of the saw franchise? And they said their pitch, and it was a good pitch, and I thought about it for a second. I said you know, I do not think you can have a saw game that's about either being jigsaw or being the person escaping the traps. I think the only one that makes sense with the limitations of games and that really would allow you to have an experience that took advantage of the medium and translated.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 7:08

The heart of what that series is about, in terms of moral dilemmas and really tricky, sticky circumstances, is the moment before Saw begins, when the targets have been identified or are being identified and then gathered. The kidnapping process is, in fact, I think, the ideal point for a Saw game, and I just was riffing off the top of my head and I went wait, wait, holy cow, that's actually really good. So I removed the Saw name from the concept. I thought through what would make a kidnapping sim palatable to the general public and I realized that there was something to be done with a supernatural and kind of eldritch, cosmic horror angle, religious uncertainty and the. That started its own rolling stone. Uh, that culminated in being a new IP, a new universe that we're happy to have made, called Life Eater, available now on Steam and itchio.

Roger Reichardt: 8:13

Yeah, one of the things that struck me with this game is the character of Ralph, and I kind of alluded to this before, but you said this too you don't know if his religion is real, you don't know if this God that he believes in is real, that he's struggling with something going on in his life. He's a flawed character, right, and as a player, somebody that's playing that how challenging is that to write for a character like Ralph, that somebody is playing and make sure that the players can still connect with him, because it's different than a movie, because a movie or TV show I watch but I'm not. I have to be invested in the character to watch it, but I'm not playing that character. And here I'm playing Ralph, like how? What's the challenge behind that and and how do you ensure that you can still connect the player with, with the character I?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 9:13

I would say that this is the entire reason that life eater has voice acting, because we had designed out the game. We were nailing down the game loop and how this entire thing progresses. We pulled together all of these elements. The game was coalescing, the story was coalescing, the script was finished and I said it's a cheap trick to a degree, but the instant that you can get the right actor voicing this character and hear the humanity of this person, this game has a much higher chance of landing the entire dev cycle to a degree.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 9:57

The team was concerned, rightfully, about reception. We made plans of like what if we uh, flown a little bit too close to the sun this time, taking this uncomfortable and, I'd say, to a degree, necessary artistic territory? Movies could make this story, literature could make this story, but in games, as soon as we start getting beyond certain kinds of quote-unquote mature content, right once we get beyond blood, to what is it like to think through the process of how you invade someone's life? Then suddenly everybody goes whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like you were just enslaving people in rim world a second ago. It's like, yeah, that's different slavery is you're talking?

Roger Reichardt: 10:39

about kidnapping what?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 10:43

so the taking those concerns really seriously, trying to not, as with all strange scaffold games, use this story not as a avenue for sensationalism or for easy press, but to deliver something that was human, that was utterly unique, that players could surprise themselves by falling in love with. The story got finished and I said, you know, we didn't originally budget for this, but if you can hear the humanity of this character, a game loop that's already working and a story that already has lines that are internally into our funding partner, like the story is working. We're running this past people. The story is working, but when you can hear it, it is an additional dimension of humanity that you cannot ignore. And I'm so glad we found we went through, I think, 300 people, 300 auditions to find Jarrett Griffiths and he brought such life and humanity to such a very, very tricky uh role. I am so grateful to have found him and I am also a voice actor in this game.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 11:55

I play johnny who, in the first year of the game, is very light spoilers you get noticed for the first time just by a kid, early 20s. He's trying to put in a little bit of extra effort at his job and figuring man, I might as well, and he remembers the name of a customer and it turns out that customer who is used to going through life anonymously and it's necessary for him because he kidnaps and sacrifices people every year. He goes oh god, oh no, I gotta stuff him in my car and so I end up spending uh time in your basement. I am the twink in the basement, johnny um, and once we recorded all the lines and we're like man, this performance is popping. All this is working.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 12:42

Then my performance comes in, and the way we like to record, at least at Strange Scaffold, is we don't separate out our actors unless it's absolutely necessary. We try to have them all in the same room. So Janet and Dracule sorry, janet and Dracule are the same person Dracule and James were recorded simultaneously. That was inspired by things like Batman, the Animated Series and how Pixar and other things have shared, how that simultaneous casting and recording process can bring out things in a performance you'd never get otherwise.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 13:18

So my performance, recorded simultaneously with Jarrett's really, really tricky balancing act, was a second crisis point for the team in terms of narrative, because it was like okay, this character has to simultaneously be a normal guy, but also someone you pretty much care about and who becomes a friend to his captor but also simultaneously never really drops the fact that you know I am in your basement. You are not letting me out of a cage. That's why I'm here, yeah, and that is such a tricky road. We ended up re-recording a few of the things, but for the most part, the audio engineer. It's always fun when your audio engineer tells you, hey, this is something I've never encountered in my entire career. This is something I've never encountered in my entire career. But he said when you listen to the first six parts of what of what we talked about is about a 10 part story.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 14:15

When you listen to the first six parts, it will sound completely wrong and like you are actually at total cross purposes with the other actor, and then it will change and it will retroactively change how you see the rest of the story and I listened through it and I don't like listening to my own voice.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 14:31

But I had the exact same curve where it was like, oh, here is Ralph, relentlessly vulnerable, and here is Johnny the man he's stuck in his basement, reacting realistically to being stuck in his basement. Is Johnny the man he's stuck in his basement, reacting realistically to being stuck in his basement? Yeah, and the development of that friendship and how that landed. I was like this is not working, this is not working. But then the progression occurred and I was like damn it, this is we gotta keep this because, yeah, it allows for a dynamic like nothing I've seen in games before. And so we recorded like two different sequences, again separately from Ralph's performance.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 15:10

But, yeah, life Eater is a story in terms of execution, its development and the amazing work of folks like our QA and engineering partners over at Astralore. Rj Lake, again, again doing voice direction, david Mason from Dredge doing music. Everyone on this dang team made what is one of the hardest games you can make and didn't choose the easy way out at any stage to again duck into sensationalism, go a different path. I'm waxing eloquent, but I'm just really proud of the fact that we pulled this off, because I genuinely think, if you look around the landscape of games, I don't know anyone else who could have made life eater quite in the way we did and not had that turn into a heinous press nightmare that destroyed the studio in the process yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that's interesting because I agree, I think that, um, I have played games that probably cross a certain line only for sensationalism, just to get that that good bad press right, like bad press is good press for them.

Roger Reichardt: 16:31

So they and they knew that, they knew what they were doing and they knew they crossed that line where I never felt that way with this game. I never felt that it crossed a line of like, oh, you're just doing this to be different or unique or try to, oh, look at us, sensationalize them, you know.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 16:47

So I I appreciate that a lot, um, and that that is tricky, I'm sure to to balance that and, and thank you so much for that, I'm glad it landed for you.

Roger Reichardt: 16:57

I can understand for some people it had, it didn't, and I get that too yeah, I but think I think part of what you were just saying there too about having a voice actor, cause I think this would have been a completely different game and I think that having a player not hear the voice of the voice actor there is a little bit of a separation. Then, right, it's like I don't hear my voice reading the lines, I hear the voice actor reading the lines, and it allows me to separate that makes sense.

Roger Reichardt: 17:30

I think that helped.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 17:31

I think that helped probably like I didn't think of it as a and that's interesting right where I didn't think of it as a psychological separation element. But I get that that that creates a little bit of a distance immediately that gordon freeman doesn't have. And if you were gordon freeman climbing into the back of people's windows to kidnap them for a god who you didn't know existed, uh, or whether or not they existed you'd probably feel significantly more uncomfortable yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly uh.

Roger Reichardt: 18:02

But yeah is the voice acting is so good and I and I, when I heard johnny the first time, I'm like, oh, that's alivier, I could. I knew, I knew that was you, I knew that was you, uh, which was cool. That was a cool uh moment for me too. Um, can you, can you discuss, though, like you talked a little bit about this, but can you discuss the process of creating that, that atmosphere for the game? Because there is that delicate balance of making it, not making it too dark, but making it. You know, a game, that is a game and it is a game. You have to play the game right, but you still want to like, tie into these dark elements. Like how, what was that process like?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 18:37

so the way that life eaters atmosphere was constructed is very much a thousand different small decisions it is. What sound does the games ui make when you zoom in on a timeline? It is what is too menacing versus not menacing enough. What is like the main gameplay track versus the one that we use in the endless mode or in the post game. There are so many tiny, tiny, tiny ways which is again why I give so much praise to the team that everyone had to lock in and iterate on a single vision of this thing to make sure it didn't become the worst version of itself. And I think that that's one of the key roles, if not the most key role of the, of a game director is to find where it is important to empower the team and where it's important to give them constraints to understand what we're all making. And one of my favorite examples of this was in dark souls. Uh, miyazaki, his art director, notes yeah, I made an undead dragon and I brought it to Miyyazaki. It was covered in rotting worms and stuff, and miyazaki brought back a note that said could we not give this beast the tragedy of a creature who is facing an un, a decay that may itself be unending? Uh, despite having previously been majestic, something to that effect, and that's a really important note right, dark Souls, for as much as it riffs on medieval fantasy tropes, is such a world, tinged by very specific creative choices and overall tonal direction. That's quite simply just like every piece of a game, both being a space for someone to individually express as well as, potentially, a space for a director to step in and say no, this is something to understand further. Here's what we're actually making and here's how we bring it to life.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 20:44

So I think one of my favorite examples of this is the game soundtrack. David Mason is an orchestral genius. We worked with him on stuff before. We're working on him with stuff in the future and for Life Eater. The first thing he brought me was sweeping and dramatic and emotional and I said, if we need to strip that back, like 90%, and they stripped it back. And I said strip it back again.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 21:13

And we got it stripped back and stripped back, and the term that I ended up using to try to guide it was islands of sound, as you are just in this environment, following this meditative, methodical, in inherently morally repulsive process, this thing that would just kind of follow you and allowed you to, to take it as a lull.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 21:35

That's also why the cut scene things don't change is because I wanted you to get into a very specific rhythm of.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 21:41

This is the sound of gameplay, this is the sound of a cut scene and you're just clocking in and clocking out at the end of the day, which creates a sense of removal in terms of your, the consequences of your play, and it makes the tracks more iconic because you're hearing the multiple times, just some really specific decisions that it's like hey, david Mason is an award winning sound designer, musician. You don't come in and tell him what to do unless it's to make something that really matters. And that's where the collaboration comes in and that's where I think ethical auteurship is possible, because this soundtrack and this sound landscape is so distinctly David, it's so crafted with skill and heart, but it's also very much guided by when two people bounce against each other and, ideally, good direction is happening. That track gets to all those tracks and all that sound landscape gets to meld with the rest of a thing to build it and have it become more than the sum of its parts.

Roger Reichardt: 22:47

Yeah, I like that. One of the things I wanted to talk about was the religion here and I wanted to ask about was the religion here? And I wanted to ask you a question about religion and your own faith. Can you share how your faith influenced the development of Life, eater and even some of your previous projects, like El Paso, elsewhere and how does it intersect with the themes that you choose to explore and the stories that you tell in your games?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 23:18

That's a really big question. But if only to focus the aperture on Life Eater, yeah, my faith I'm a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ as my savior. I've been a Christian for about the past 11 years, so it has in some way, shape or form impacted my entire game dev career and you can absolutely see the roots of it in Life Eater, because a lot of my early forays with my personal faith, when it wasn't just something my parents believed, it was something that I believe was getting past the idea of being trapped in a room with God, the idea of god being so immense, god being, if fully comprehended, kind of a cosmic horror uh in terms of, uh, his army presence, his, his omnipresence, his omnipotence, his omniscience all of that contained in a human brain, and that thing having a personal relationship with you is something that I found an existentially terrifying concept for a lot of my Christian faith.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 24:27

Like, going into my adulthood I still, as much as I loved God, as much as I was trying to cultivate a healthy relationship with that, there was mixed with that the idea that the thing I am serving, the God who I'm serving, a real and alive, separate being from me. It is terrifying that he is so, so, so, very big and I am so, so, very small, and he, he, sees me, and the thought even came to my mind of like it'd be great if you just didn't look at me for like 10 seconds, because the immensity of those eyes, those eyes actually caring about you, uh, disturbed me. And so, when it came time to make the story for life eater and to find a fantastical twist to put on it, to make the core concept more than just a kidnapping sim, I realized that there was an opportunity to express the corrupted version of a fearful expression of my faith. What, what if a very real god, or at least a god who you could feel the distinct presence of, wanted a personal relationship with you, and you specifically, out of everyone else on the earth, and he fucking hated you. What if he wanted you to suffer? And that relationship was an expression itself of suffering, which resulted in Zimforth, a recurring name in the Strange Scaffold catalog. Yeah, just being this very distinct Malevolent presence and I think his malevolence works in a way that a lot of dark gods do not, because it is personal he, at one point in the storyline you're reading the only time you get to see Zimfort's direct words expressed are in the objective text and he at one point said it talks about giving you a break because he's going to have you kidnap and murder some people who actually deserve it for once. Yeah, the divine entity who you have a personal relationship with gets off on that being a cruel thing ended up being a really cathartic expression of those fears. Because can androids pray?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 27:08

The first game I directed, proper, had elements of this and spoke of even you know, a degree of fear around god, as much as that was commingled with love.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 27:18

It uh el paso.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 27:20

Elsewhere, uh, james is canonically a believer, kind of estranged but also very much existing in that space of believing in a god limping up the uh, the steps of a pyramid at one point and saying just give me one more step, lord, just give me one more good step. Um, here comes in life eater, no longer really kind of stancing around those ideas of God, but really directly confronting them and saying here's the worst version of the thing that I fear. It allowed me to be able to look at it from a remove and see how different that was from my relationship with my God and to hopefully provide people with some catharsis who are similarly, whether it's with the Christian God or whatever is the being they serve or find their worldview framed by. It does a lot to see your villain expressed in plain text and to realize just how divergent he is from what you say you believe.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 28:36

Life Eater and all my games to a degree are opportunities to try to learn or grow in some way, and in this case, one of the things that I learned and grew in was saying, yeah, my God isn't like this.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 28:50

So if my brain is still saying this regardless and still holding this fear, that's something to really directly confront has your faith gotten stronger through the development, then, would you say, through the games I feel like life itself does that, but I think my favorite example of what it looked like to grow as a result of working on games was working on an airport for aliens currently run by dogs, because that was partially a coming of age game for me. Yeah, so having a game where the entire thesis point is what would it look like if a universe of airports were run by dogs? Well, they wouldn't have money, because dogs just want you to be okay. They want to give you things. There is no currency exchange. At most they'll have you give them a thing they want and then they'll give you the thing and they'll give you endless number. That's the thing a dog that gives you not one plane ticket, not 12 plane tickets, but 50 plane tickets, because what matters is the fact that you want to go to Uranus, or Uranus.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 30:04

That really forced me, on a daily basis, as I was, to a degree, coming of age and gaining pieces of adult cynicism to say and gaining pieces of adult cynicism to say man, to properly write this dog that cares in a very pure way about you. I need to confront my fear of intimacy and I would. For that day of game development, I'd work on a different task, or I'd literally just like take the day off and think about man. I have a problem with this, or I have a difficulty expressing love in this way, or I have a difficulty receiving love in this way. And in all those ways I don't want to overstate the biographical, autobiographical nature of my games, because I I do a lot to make them. Uh, I'll just put it in the pure terms I do a lot to make sure that my games are not masturbatory, because it's real easy when you're an auteur to get into that space.

Roger Reichardt: 30:58

Yeah, yeah.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 30:59

Hopefully I succeed most of the time, but the experience of working on dog airport game was often like to do this universe justice, I have to look at every piece of the universe that I create and make sure that it matches the pureness and enthusiasm of a dog's perspective. So there was originally a concept for a game mechanic called Cop Dog that I was excited to buy, where there would be zones in each airport that were monitored by Cop Dog and it would have a little sign and if you walked into them, there was a random chance that cop dog would come down and literally give you a random check and if he found anything, his uh, because he looked like a porch, a portrait of a husky. The portrait would change to like a mischievous husky and he'd say you sly dog, and he'd take your contraband items and then go away. And it was a way of like, if you're trying to transport something across several airports, you would have to avoid the cop dog zones in some way or hope that you could, like bribe him or in some way move past it.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 32:01

Yeah, and the game continued its development. We were getting further and further into the day to where it's like, hey, we got a feature lock. And not only was cop dog an unexpectedly expensive feature to build if we were going to build it, but we were having the discussion as a team and we realized, well, this sounds flippant. But like why would a dog do this? Why would a dog be a cop in the derogatory sense?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 32:33

interesting the idea that a dog exists to punish you doesn't align with the philosophy of dogs and so confronting that led us to make security dog. Who, uh, security dog is at a little booth in every airport. You can find him and he's like hey, I'm here to help with security. If you ever find anything that could hurt someone, anything that's like dangerous, you know, bring it to me and I'll give you like a finder's fee, I'll give you like a special gift, and on every planet that gift changes. And the beauty of security dog is you still have the concept of airport security.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 33:14

We didn't lose it, but we both saved money on the feature, saved time, saved budget and made the game better and more philosophically whole by saying here's how dogs would actually do this. A dog is not sitting here waiting to catch you unawares and steal your contraband. This dog wants everyone to be safe and his name is safety dog. And if you give safety dog things that are unsafe, he'll give you special gifts and you can use those to continue your modular open world comedy adventure across the universe. Yeah, that is a very direct, one-to-one translation of to make dog airport game.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 33:54

I every day had to make sure that I was as best of a person as I could be, or at least conceive of what it looked like for a better world to exist, and that's a really good thing to have hit you when you are entering proper adulthood and running a business and trying to understand what it means to be a good person under late stage capitalism.

Roger Reichardt: 34:12

Yeah, I love that, I love the, I love the thought process behind all that, because I'm not I'm not 100 percent sure that everybody thinks the same way that you do. Right, and gets into the philosophy of of every, every decision and every aspect of of the game. So I really, I really appreciate that. Um, I have a question around the technical challenges what? What were some of the biggest technical challenges you faced with developing?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 34:42

life. Eater is a really tricky game because it's pulling from so many different reference points, and this is where my hubris in terms of, uh, doing genre smashing really came to life, because I was like, yeah, I'm a genre smher.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 35:07

I'm smashing up genres together. Every day I can smash this thing together and so life eater. It's pulling some stuff from video editing timelines and it's pulling some stuff from some visual and auditory and gameplay language, from investigation games, from immersive Sims, from puzzle games, from video timeline editors, from lo-fi horror things Like. It has so many different reference points. At a certain point, before we revealed the game, we didn't just have one, but we had multiple come to Jesus moments where we had to say there's so many reference points that all of the pieces of the game exist and they are all are good, but because the visual language does not have a uh, the visual language in particular does not have a unifying principle, it looks muddy, the game feels like it's playing wrong, not because it's actually not functioning, but because we are pulling from so many places. Your brain cannot just pick a lane and then drive down it. So my new thesis coming out of that is that if you're going to genre smash, if you're going to visual smash, you have to choose one to two reference points at most and then ensure relentless consistency on what it touches. And the thing that we landed on was the idea of a glitching, broken computer. If you smash a laptop on the ground and open it up and it still works, what does that visualization look like? And that's why we have all these glitch after effects. We have specific glitch after effects because there's not just one type of glitch that are all inspired specifically by a broken laptop. A broken laptop, a broken laptop.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 36:48

And as soon as we found that, as soon as we revised the user interface and everything to use a unified color palette, a unified uh visual language and an auditory language, we had the exact same game. But it all felt right because our brains actually knew what we were doing. Your brain, when you step into a game, experience again continuing the philosophy and my thesis coming out of life eater is really immediately trying to look for what is this game like? And this is why some of the best games of days past were misunderstood or unseen in their time. It's because people were saying, oh, this is another third person shooter, right, and didn't realize that, for example, 50 cent blood on the sand is operating in high camp territory and everybody needs to play it. They were like, oh, this spec ops align notorious example.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 37:45

Everybody thought it was just a standard third person shooter, not that it was really leaning into being a post-modern american, you know, 20th century fiction novel in the form of a game that was because, among other things, in their marketing, they really struggled with how do we express what this game is in a form that people will take it and then internalize it and use the right prism to evaluate us. There's games that have been evaluated in the past as like ah, this isn't a great, I don't know open world game, but it wasn't trying to be an open world game. It was trying to be a linear game that existed in an open world and it simply got judged incorrectly based off of that. So the technical challenges of Life Eater we didn't have a huge amount. We had an engine change a month and a half into development.

Roger Reichardt: 38:43

That was biggie.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 38:45

Unity announced a runtime fee thing. We talked about that last time you were on the show. Actually, that was really biggie.

Roger Reichardt: 38:48

Yeah, unity announced a runtime fee thing and we were, we were talking. We talked about that last time you were on the show, actually, yeah, that just happened Right the last time you were on the show.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 38:56

So the day it came out, I said, hey, our lead programmer was Timothy Gatton. I said, hey, Timothy, do you know any unreal? And do you know any Unreal? And he's like, yeah, I know some Unreal. I said, cool, we're switching to Unreal. We will burn the money to switch engine today to make sure that we are not caught in the potential blast zone of this thing. So that was a technical challenge, but most of the technical elements of Life Eater were not incredibly difficult to figure out. It was really for something that pulls from so many places and requires your brain to live in such a specific space. It was finding unifying principles and then consistency among them. That ended up being the highest point of iteration, sure yeah, uh, I like that.

Roger Reichardt: 39:42

I mean it's that's that design principle of making something feel familiar to them, so they know, like everything kind of ties together, right? Yeah, I like that. This game's been out for a while now, like what a month and a half or so, right, I think.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 39:59

Yeah, about a month and a half.

Roger Reichardt: 40:00

A month and a half. What kind of feedback have you received from players and critics and what, if anything, surprised you the most from players?

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 40:08

and critics. And what, if anything, surprised you the most? I expected us to get roughly five out of tens, four or five out of tens, not because the game wasn't good, but because we made a kidnapping sim man.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 40:24

We made a horror fantasy, kidnapping sim. It's taking such a big swing, the nailing down the iteration on the concept, the design of it, even because I was like, oh yeah, it's pulling from so many different adjacent things. Like we generally know, what we're making, no turns out. Kidnap, horror fantasy, kidnapping sim, and kidnapping sim in particular is a new genre with new things to figure out. When you add enough things, you aren't mashing two things together, you're actually just making something new inspired by several different things. So making those things work and work well and work consistently came together really late in the day, so reviewers had a busted review copy for a while. It was a hard game to make.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 41:09

We made the entire thing in seven months nine months if you count the engine change and for all those reasons including the fact that, just like strange scaffold right on the heels of el paso, also our biggest, most polished and visible game yet we were saying no, where strange scaffold exists is in making high quality things quickly and humanely, with specific compromises to aid in that, which means for a game made in nine months, there's features we just aren't going to have or we aren't just going to have them at launch. Endless mode. We push to post launch because we weren't going to burn the team and we weren't going to lower the quality of story mode to shove them both in there and try to balance them at the same time. There's all of these, the idea of, in the current media landscape, saying no, we choose specific compromises to make for better experiences made humanely. That doesn't seem like an old, a really popular message. It seems like the message to say is we spent 90 million dollars on this video game because you deserve it, it has everything, it has everything because you like everything. Right, please like us, please love us, to set a flag in the ground for a for controversial subject matter, for highly specific, chosen choices, and say please understand what we're doing here and that it matters and that it's good.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 42:33

I was like it's, we're gonna get fives and we ended up getting like we got some.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 42:41

I think we got a nine or a ten, we got some eights, we got quite a few sevens, we got six, like the moral panic I expected or anticipated, just to consider team safety if the worst should happen right, or people not appreciating that we made specific choices to bring a specific game to life. Both of those fears ended up being not unfounded, but uh, they ended up not coming true here and I'm very, very grateful for it because, among other things, if strange scaffold is out here saying you know, there's features we don't put into a game so that we can make other features better or so that we can give an experience that you wouldn't have, you have that feature in there. That means other people can do it. That means strange scaffold can make more games like that. And uh, I don't know how much I can say because I don't know when this is going out, this will be uh, this friday, this friday, this coming friday, and I definitely can't say this, but for future games that are going to have highly specific limitations.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 43:48

Yeah, we can have more confidence in simply saying hey, if you trusted us on a horror fantasy kidnapping sim, this next one is going to continue to blow your mind. Because we make these specific choices for you, because otherwise you don't get these types of games. You won't see them because, at minimum, no publisher would fund them, because what they think that you're into is an asymmetric multiplayer game again yeah, yeah.

Roger Reichardt: 44:15

Well, I think that's what I appreciate about your studio is the fact that you guys, you're all willing to take risks and, uh, part of it is telling a story that, like you said, nobody else is willing to tell. And and I know, I know it's a kidnapping sim game, I get, I get that, but I think that there's more to that game. At least you know what I interpret it as is like you know the mental anguish that this ralph is going through and and you know he thinks this is real, but he's's alone, like he's alone, he's except for now, obviously, johnny, but he's alone in that and he's he's been alone for that in a really long time. And and to Dive into that, that world where somebody is alone and they, they feel like they have to be alone because and and this is I thought about, I thought a lot about this actually the fact that he, uh, he feels he's doing the right thing, even though morally he knows it's wrong.

Roger Reichardt: 45:15

He knows it's wrong, but the overall like, he feels like he has to, because if he doesn't, something bad could happen to everybody. So he has to do the right thing, right, but even though it's wrong, um, the, the mental the, the, the mental anguish that he goes through I think has felt really, really well in this game and I think that that is something that nobody else is willing to tackle. Right and and to me, I think that's that's to me was what I took away from this game is just how powerful that is and the powerful, uh, story elements, storytelling elements, that you all did in this game thank you so much for that.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 45:52

I that's the thing for strange scaffold. That I think has been the thing that brings people in and has people following us, title after title, even though we go from a a what, what was the what was even the term I used for the genre for that game again, uh, I'm looking at space world organ training simulator. Yeah, we go from a sci-fi body horror market tycoon to a supernatural throwback third person shooter to an open world comedy adventure game starring stock photos. I think the thing that brings people on that journey, as well as the thing that makes it the hardest to quote, unquote, break into the mainstream with our work, is that we don't take the joke. We don't say, ah ha ha, isn't it funny or isn't it horrible that we made a kidnapping sim, a horror fantasy kidnapping sim. We don't say, uh, hey, we're making a game like max pain, it looks like max pain, it's doing max pain. Again, we take the thing the game could be dog report game being an amazing example, and we say, no, we're going to treat this with meaning, we're going to treat this like it's a prestige video game. And so I get a giant burst of dopamine every time I watch dog airport game get streamed, because I'm excited to say that people still stream it to this day.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 47:20

Yeah, within the first half hour hour that game, someone has cried, having an interaction with the dog. Someone has attached such humanity and real emotion to us that they are oftentimes on camera having a visceral human interaction to a stock photo is a jpeg that we made rotate, and they are having their souls touched by that. It is the greatest magic trick in the world to pull. It is so satisfying, but it's also, I think, a thing that, particularly in a games market that is increasingly looking to say we just want something that sells. Just tell us exactly what it is and sell us the exact thing that you say you're making.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 48:10

We're making a thing like Destiny again Good, we're making a thing like something you've played before, but it has a popular, it has a popular license attached Great. We're going to make an RTS of that, of this, of insert X here. Yeah, that is a needed and an understandable gravitational pull, but we picked the hard route and we've benefited from that, and it's also made our lives tougher in several ways. I wouldn't choose a different route, though, because I'm the guy who gets to watch people stream my game and they cry because they're having a genuine human interaction with the dog. You can't trade that in for anything in the world.

Roger Reichardt: 49:00

Agreed. Yeah Well, zalavir, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule and meeting with me and talking about the game. I would love to have you back on the show when you release your next project. If you're willing to come back on the show, I would love that It'll end up being very soon.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 49:17

Like we've, our two next games are coming out within the next few months. Oh, really, yeah, our two next games. Okay, one is the most distressing and unhinged game idea I've ever had. This is one that we're talking about a lot as a studio, having a lot of conversations, having a lot of consultation conversations around, and the other one is, uh, a black jason bourne comic book inspired shooter story. So awesome, yeah, if you want to talk around the release of next game, we'll be talking much sooner than later and I would not object by any means, because it is always a blast. Thank you for having me here.

Roger Reichardt: 50:00

Oh, thank you. How can people follow you on social media and follow you? You're the progress of a strange scaffold.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 50:09

You can follow me on social media, um, and follow you your the progress of a strange scaffold. You can follow me on social media at writ nelson w-r-i-t. Nelson, everywhere. You can also follow strange scaffold at strange scaffold uh, all places. Strange scaffoldcom as well. We have a newsletter. You're gonna want to follow uh us on something, because even if we don't have your favorite game today, there's a very good chance we'll have your favorite game tomorrow. We're always pumping out something new and choosing the best compromises that we can to bring you something that you didn't know. The next game that you didn't know you needed Nice.

Roger Reichardt: 50:46

And listeners. I'll put the links in the show notes so that way you can follow Zalavir and also check out the game. I'll put the link in the show notes to Life Eater, to the Steam page Wishlist. It Buy it. It's fantastic, Zalavir. Again, thank you so much for joining me this week.

Xalavier Nelson Jr: 51:05

Thank you for enjoying life here and thanks for having me Been a delight.