Life Goes On - When Death is REQUIRED to Beat a Game... WHAT??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,394 words · ~6 min read
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lineus Tech tips coverage of PS 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel
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and steel series hey guys we're here at the Indie Mega Booth with life goes on
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and this game as far as I can tell is about dying to progress is there any
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more you can tell me about it sure yeah well life goes on originally started as
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a global game Jam project in 2012 the theme for the year was about the aura
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Boris and that's a symbol of Life Death and rebirth so what we wanted to do is
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we really wanted really wanted to create a theme that fit with that so we figured
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death and reincarnation was the perfect idea so in what way does that actually
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make sense we figured making a puzzle game where your deaths are actually
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meaningful and alter the state of the game is something that we really wanted
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to explore and that's something that we were really interested in because generally speaking death in games is
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really bad you know it's a very common Trope it's been like that way since the
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very beginning and we we really wanted to take a look at it and see how we
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could do it differently and show people that maybe innovating on traditional
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mechanics is a very a very good idea and
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it can actually sell some great games yeah and it's it's cool how you took a
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like you said traditional mechanic of death but then just completely destroyed
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the idea of it which is my favorite part cuz you just murdered the classic idea
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of death where you go back to a checkpoint and you're like no to get to
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a checkpoint you must die which is my favorite part of the whole game um I
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love the art style I love the different elements that's all awesome is there
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anything else you can add about the game like is there any little story elements or anything like that sure well you know
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we have a knight and he's searching for a Grail because isn't that what Knights
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do the problem is is that none of the Grails are really the right one so they
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keep going through to get through all these traps and puzzles to find the
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right Grail you know they just keep finding stuff that isn't really right
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for them so they just keep on going your grail's in another Castle something like
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that yeah yeah it sounds like that I didn't want to say it but yeah generally
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maybe we'll make a joke where someone comes out and says your Grail is in
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another Castle I don't know that's going to take some localization though so yeah
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yeah that makes sense um all right how can people get this game sure um well
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first off we have the demo available for download off our website uh we have on
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our website it it's available for PC Mac and Linux um we also just put it up on
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Steam this week currently on Steam it is PC only because you know we were coming
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to packs things got really busy and all that stuff so well we uh after packs is
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over we're going to throw up the mac and the Linux builds and we're going to make sure people can play it on those
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platforms as well we really want to support all the platforms and spread the
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gaming love and make sure that it's not just PC users that are getting all the
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great games now speaking of different platforms and all that kind of stuff you
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guys as far as I've heard are a giant group of programmers that you met at
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gamescub how did or games Jam sorry how exactly did that work out being all of
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you being programmers all right well that was a bit interesting when we were delegating roles you know we were
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talking around and it's like what can you do oh I I have a programming degree
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oh I have a programming degree in engineering oh I'm doing my Master's in
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Computing science oh I did a math degree it's like all right well what can we do
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with that so it's like okay well do you have experience making any art yeah I I
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took like a course and we're like great you're our artist um they were like we
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need a sound guy I'm like well I made sound effects once they're like great
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you're the sound guy you know and and Susan was like well really I'm just a
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programmer like great you're now the Code Monkey you're you're only going to
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be programming for the rest of the project so that's kind of how we delegated rules Eric is kind of our jack
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of all trades so uh we just get him to do whatever we need him to do and you
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know he's been great he just goes and gets it done and and you know we need
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people like that cuz we're you know we're four people we're really small
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company you know we're bootstrapping it ourselves and uh you know everybody has
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to contribute in every way so you know we all contribute to design we all
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contribute to the levels we give our feedback on the art style you know it's
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not always what our artist is looking for because he's like hey give me some
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feedback and we're like yeah looks good ship it he's like no but what about this
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and we're like yeah I guess so but yeah so sometimes it can be a bit frustrating
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when you're trying to get feedback on very specific things but other than that
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you know we we got to help out with everybody in every way we can so that's
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awesome and one little thing that they have here is as he was saying he's done
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some sound effects work so he is the sound effects guy um instead of just
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having his voice dying in the game repeatedly he has decided to allow other
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people to have their voices dying in the game repeatedly so if you're here at PA
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you can come down and check out their yellow box and do your own little death
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sound into it I know I'm going to do one of mine and then you can have your
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little part in the game is there anything else you have going on like that sure we also have a a mailing list
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signup sheet and if you sign up for our mailing list all of our Knights have unique individual names so if you sign
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up for our mailing list you can suggest a name that we get that we're going to
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put in the game but the way our names work is they're all randomly generated
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so we picked bits and pieces from every name in order to randomly generate our
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names so when you come and you could give us a name you're actually giving us
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20 or 30 different names based on how many names we have so that's that's I
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think that's pretty cool that's really cool it's it's awesome that people can
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contribute to the game that they might like hey guys so I'm doing my death
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sound animation right now so hopefully the mic picks this up well my voice is a
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little bit horse but I'm going to go forward anyways
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oh man hopefully that picked up well I almost thought like I was going to throw up but that worked all right so if
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you're here come down put in your email showed into the box if you want to if
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you like life goes on if you want to see the rest of our Indie meab Booth content
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if you want to see the rest of our packs content be sure to subscribe to Linus
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