Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:00)
Hey, my name is Aaron Nemoyten and this is Make Games Drink Coffee, a podcast featuring interviews with game developers about their hobbies, their jobs, their interests, and whatever they’re into right now. I’m gonna try something new this week and we’re just gonna get straight to the interview. But first, we’re gonna hear the intro music.

Daniel McLaren (00:27)
My name is Daniel McLaren. I am a game director currently for Stoic Studio. You might have known them from making the Banner Saga game trilogy. And I have been making games now for 21, 20-ish years, somewhere in there. You kind of lose count after the number starts getting that high, mostly because you don’t want to actually associate that with how old you really are.

Aaron Nemoyten (00:54)
I understand that. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, which segues us into the first question that I had in my notes, which is, whenever I have a guest on the podcast, like I sent out a questionnaire, but I also look through your LinkedIn. And I

Daniel McLaren (00:55)
Yeah, I knew you would. Thanks, buddy.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:10)
marveled at the crazy variety of games you worked on. just, wrote a few down, World of Cars at Disney, which I assume is based on the Cars franchise, a game called Music Mastermind, which was a multiplayer music creation game, a multiplayer drag racing game on iOS. We worked on Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes together. And you’ve also worked at ArenaNet, now you’re at Stoic.

Daniel McLaren (01:16)
Sure.

Yep, yep, it sure was. Yep.

Yes, we did.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:39)
But I actually want to tie that into a note that you sent me, which is sort of a hot take. We don’t build games for ourselves. And I assume you mean by we, either game designers or developers in general, our customer

Daniel McLaren (01:52)
Yeah, yeah,

Aaron Nemoyten (01:55)
But I’m wondering, did you bring that philosophy to your work or did you develop it by doing the work?

Daniel McLaren (02:02)
I think it’s the latter, right? Developing it by doing the work. Because think when I started in games, I was very young. I was in my 20s. And I think when you’re in your 20s, you’re supremely arrogant. A lot of times because your mindset is, I can take on the world. I can do whatever I want.

I think when I got into it, I had this idea that I was going to be a legend. I was gonna make great things. And the guy that actually took me under his wing and kind of trained me had been the lead designer on Diablo II and the expansion Lord of Destruction. And he kind of took me under his wing and showed me a this guy was so humble. He was just like a really cool cat. I know him to this day. I haven’t talked to him in a while, but.

Very cool cap, very humble, very confident in his work. But I always thought of myself as, you know, well, it’s only a matter of time and then I’m gonna kind of do the next big thing. And in the early portion of my career, that arrogance both served well in some regards because it made me not afraid to do and reach out and experiment with certain things, but it actually cost me quite a bit as well. And it’s pretty funny because you talked about Music Mastermind there.

I went to that studio kind of at the height of my arrogance thinking that I was this great game designer and that I was gonna have this future. And I had conflict with the owner of the company and we wound up butting heads and he eventually laid me off, which was a kindness that he did to me. I he fired me, but he laid me off so that I could say I was laid off. I got severance. And I remember I had just bought a brand new BMW. I was living in LA.

Aaron Nemoyten (03:40)
my

Daniel McLaren (03:41)
I was like, and

Aaron Nemoyten (03:41)
God.

Daniel McLaren (03:41)
so I am in this car that I bought, no joke, like two weeks earlier, and I’m humiliated. I’m totally humiliated. realized that it was my fault that it was completely preventable. And I’m going home at like 11 in the morning on the 101 back to Hollywood where we had our apartment, just crying. And I’m like sobbing. I’m like 30 something years old sobbing in my car, realizing that I was an idiot and arrogant and really quite rude.

And that really shifted my mindset a lot. I went into the next job, was C Games, was that drag racing, car, carton streets was, was the, their primary project that I’d been working on. And it really went into it with the mindset of like, I am going to practice humility. Like I might not be humble. knew I wasn’t humble and I knew it wasn’t a thing. You could just flip the switch, but I was going to basically fake it till you make it, like just force myself to be humble and.

forced myself into like humble responses and surrendering, not fighting, you know, just trying to say like, how can I fix me as a person? And that job was very pivotal because there were some challenges there and there were several times I just had to bite my tongue and just go like, what did I say I would do? You know, and just kind of work through it. But I began to realize and my philosophy really started to develop probably,

probably around Galaxy of Heroes because I don’t want to tell too many tales out of school here, but whatever, I’m gonna tell some tales out of school here. I don’t know if you remember this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don’t know if you remember this, but when we were about to launch, the feeling in the studio was they’re gonna cancel us. They didn’t recognize us in the mobile town hall that they had just run a week earlier.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:18)
mean, it’s a podcast. What else are you gonna do?

Daniel McLaren (05:31)
Everybody basically just kind of knew yeah, everybody just kind of knew like this is it we’re gonna ship It’s not gonna do great and they’re gonna cut anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the studio

Aaron Nemoyten (05:32)
I remember that.

Daniel McLaren (05:41)
And when it came out, everybody, including us, were like, wait a minute, did you see this like number, triple digit, six digit number we’re making a day and it’s not going down? And the consensus was like, well, it’s just a peak, it’s Star Wars, it’s gonna fall off. And it never did. It never did and it kept going and it kept going and it kept going and I don’t think, at least for myself, I wasn’t prepared for it to do that. And it was working with the community day in and day

I started to realize kind of more and more that my job was a steward. This was something that didn’t belong to me and sorry to go long but I want to kind of pull this right back around to your opening kind of comment there which is even if you’re making games on an indie perspective, if you’re, if you’re,

wealthy, guess, and you can build for free and you don’t care and you can just throw stuff out like great, that’s fine, like more power to you, but I think the reality is that the idea of creating art for art’s sake is very valid and I think that is one of the beautiful things about humanity is that we have a passion for something and we wanna create something, we wanna put it out. But the moment that you say to yourself, I want to try to make a living off of this, there is a line that is happening that it’s like, it doesn’t matter, right?

If you build only for yourself and it doesn’t sell any copies, was it good? And what does good mean? What is the relevancy to that? If it’s good to two people, if you’re happy with that, cool, but if you’re not eating at night, I don’t know. But the point is, I look at these things and I think Concord’s a great kind of example of the manifestation of what I’m trying to say here, where it’s like, Concord failed. Doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s.

you put the wrong art in, or people thought it was woke, or people didn’t think it was woke, or people thought it was political or it wasn’t political, or the gameplay was terrible. It doesn’t matter. Customers didn’t buy it. And at end of the day, being mad at the customer because you made a terrible burger or a burger that people didn’t want to eat, okay, how are you gonna reflect on that and go, wait a minute, what was I doing? Was I making that for my own ego? And if so,

And if so and people rejected it like, okay, could, you know, I can be mad because my egos hurt. But the reality is, is like, there’s no obligation for anybody to like anything that you make, whether it’s a book, a movie, a song, a video game. If you are going to be a creator, the risk is that even if it’s your magnum opus, people may not like it. And I think there’s a great example where like, you look at a game.

like Minecraft when it came out and on the surface it was very simple. You know, was very kind of basic. There was this kind of initial look of like, you know, whatever, but it just was a monster, monster game. You look at a game like Lawbreakers where you have Cliff Blasinski coming off, probably one of the greatest runs in modern gaming history. He could do no wrong. There’s nothing technically wrong with Lawbreakers. It’s a perfect game as far as like visuals and

Aaron Nemoyten (08:29)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel McLaren (08:55)
Stability and performance and character design and all that sort of stuff. mean these are masters of the craft and yet it just bounced off people and so If lawbreakers didn’t resonate with an audience like Are you stopping to reflect on what it is? And so ultimately we are beholden to the customer and I look at my job and I know a lot of people a lot of game designers and in particular Hate it when I use the word customer. But again, it goes back to that humility mindset of like I have a job

Like this is digital construction. have a job because people are buying the things that I am making. And if I don’t make those things for what they want, then I don’t have a job. And I don’t really have a lot of other skills. Like what am I gonna do if I can’t continue this job?

Aaron Nemoyten (09:39)
You

most of your experience developing games in the United States, but you spent almost a year in Finland and I know that they have a thriving game industry, but also a very different culture. So can you talk about that?

Daniel McLaren (09:53)
Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Spent a year and almost a year in Russia, too. Traveling back and forth, working over in a game studio there. And it’s yeah, it was surreal. Super surreal. The European culture is very different. It always amuses me to know when people point to Europe for things and I’m like, it’s not really an apples to apples sort of comparison.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:01)
That’s wild. Yeah.

Daniel McLaren (10:18)
Finland is very interesting because it is a dark, cold country and the average assessment of a Finn is that they are dour. It’s a dour country. And so that’s kinda what I went, I was like, I’m gonna go hang out with a bunch of dour people. But it turns out they’re not dour per se. They’re very reserved and they are very tight knit, even if they don’t.

know somebody, it’s still very culturally very tight. They have a very strong work ethic, largely because like you work like a dog during the winter because there’s literally nothing else to do. And then you enjoy the two and a half days of summer that exists and it’s awesome over there. they, once you get to know them and once you kind of really adapt to their culture and you can kind of break down barriers with them, they are genuinely some of the most kind hearted, warm,

people and they’re just very interesting to talk to and their work ethic. I got invited to join a couple of studios over there and I had to turn them down because I needed to come back to the States for family reasons. But I’ve kept in touch and I’ve consulted over there and have worked on certain things and just. Their mentality is so scrappy. It feels like almost, you know, reading about like an early American history in a history book where they’re just like, well, we have no choice. We just got to kind of figure some stuff out and we’re just going to go.

you know, do a bunch of things and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, well, I die and the buffalo eat me. And you’re just like, okay.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:51)
So I asked for contrarian takes and one of your contrarian takes was stop calling it sports ball. and, and you said, and I, know, I can’t argue with this. These games are older and more successful than the games that we build. So, you know, let’s understand.

Daniel McLaren (11:57)
YAH!

Aaron Nemoyten (12:08)
their design and the rules and why they’re so appealing. I cannot argue with that, but I did want to sort of pose the thought that I had about that, which is that, yeah, I can’t argue that, you know, like soccer is a great game, like objectively, right? Or, golf or bowling or, you know,

Daniel McLaren (12:10)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (12:29)
But I do wonder if there is something about the tactile nature of sports that makes some of the might say game design lessons not applicable to other mediums. And I kind of wonder about that. And I think maybe if you were a like if you were a hardcore VR developer, you might say like, we’re bridging the gap. But I don’t know.

Daniel McLaren (12:34)
Mm.

100%.

Right. Sure.

Yeah. Well, so all right. I love this topic. So first of all, I must caveat. Look, I’m wearing a San Diego Padres hat. I love baseball, but I love baseball when I was a kid and I had a gap where I just kind of didn’t follow it. And then I’ve recently gotten gotten back into it about five or six years ago. And I just I love baseball. But even when I wasn’t in my kind of thinking about sports at all, I still really hated it when people denigrated

Sports because fundamentally it’s a denigration of people like other like you’re stupid because you ho ho you drink beer watch sports ball, bro You sit around play video games of smoke weed. Like I don’t think there’s like a moral ground for you to sit and start casting stones at people here, but the reality is Yeah, 100 % but here’s the thing fundamentally this again this roots into my customer service mindset, which is People don’t need us

Aaron Nemoyten (13:38)
Or you watch people play League on Twitch.

Daniel McLaren (13:51)
If something happens where video games like hardware costs exploding into unreachable, know, brackets where video games are going to be directly impacted by this, there are a million things, board games, sports, things that can exist outside of hard, very expensive hardware that people will go and do. What is important to understand here? I’m not even talking about

Can you make a tactile translation into a game? That’s not what I’m talking about. When I talk to designers, especially when I meet lot of younger designers or designers that I think are caught in the like, I’m so special, I make games or like I’m a systems designer and I’m obsessive about this, I always tell them to go pick a sport and go understand it. Go understand the rules.

What are the rules? Why do they operate the way that they do? Were there any recent rule changes? Why? What drove those changes? What’s the impact on the audience relative to those changes? Because those things are direct one to one to us, right? Like, why does a rule change? I’ll pick baseball here. A couple years ago, baseball added the pitch clock and people were super mad. And if you’re not familiar with baseball, the idea used to be for like a hundred years that a pitcher, part of the game was the psychology between the pitcher and the batter.

Aaron Nemoyten (14:55)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel McLaren (15:07)
I’m gonna throw a pitch, maybe I’m not. I’m gonna make you wait, I’m gonna dog you a bit, and then maybe the batter trying to threaten the pitcher a bit, creating this intimidation, because the slightest variances can cause a batter or a pitcher to be wildly successful in a scenario. Eventually, people got sick of spending three and a half hours watching a baseball game. And when there’s 162 of them a year, turns out three and a half hours or more is quite a lot of time. And even me, I’m like, listen,

I kind of was anti-pitch clock and then I saw it in action. I’m like, you know what? I actually really like only watching a game for two hours of 30 minutes or two hours of 45 minutes. This is fantastic. And so the dynamic change and what it did and how it impacted the audience, like those are critical things for us to understand. when, well actually I’m not gonna say the game and I’m not gonna say the person because I think this person can figure out who they are. I got into a…

discussion with a systems designer who I have a lot of respect for, but they argued with me about their spreadsheet and how perfect the math was in their spreadsheet. And I said, I don’t care. And the player doesn’t care. Perfect numbers can be lousy. And I have gone in to many games, including Star Wars.

and made on the fly adjustments. Now, granted, I didn’t do it foolishly. I had a lot of knowledge of the systems, had been working on it for many years. I understood the thing that I was doing and changing, but I made changes to make the experience more delightful and more exciting, and it had direct trackable improvements, demonstrable improvements to the player experience. That goes back to designing for yourself. I’m so glad you’re happy with your perfect spreadsheet. Player doesn’t give a rip.

Like they don’t care. designers fall into this trap of like, I’ve got the perfect thing, even if it punishes the player. And there’s almost this delight that they have as well. Like I enjoy punishing the player. And so again, you can look at sports, you can look at what they do, you can look at how they understand their rules. You can look at, they are driven by literal views and audience changes. you know, mean, NBA doesn’t seem to realize that, but you know, whatever.

But the other leagues seem to understand that and make shifts on that. And I think when you can understand that and when you can relate to people who are not you and not interested in the things that you’re interested in, and you can understand a person who is fundamentally different than you, right? Like if you can understand the guy over there who’s like working a hardcore blue collar job, comes home, he just wants to kick back and watch football, but he’s good to his family, he works hard, he pays his taxes.

He’s a decent member of society. Like if you can understand that person, you can create something better to reach that person and other people. And that’s the thing that I want that I really wish we would get away from this idea of like denigrating others because they like a game that you don’t like. Like I don’t, really a FPS guy. I’m not really a league guy, but I marvel at the skill and the talent that went into making that stuff. And I marvel that they’re able to sustain an audience. Like Cod continues to fascinate me, you know.

that it just continues year over year to do some interesting things. But it’s not my jam, but I don’t sit there and be like, sweaty first person shooter bros, What am I doing? I want my industry to be better. I want humanity to be better. I’d like us to, know, what’s that old, what’s that comic, like, shh, let them enjoy their things. Who cares? Yeah, let people enjoy things, man.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:39)
Yeah, let people enjoy things. Yeah.

So one of your other contrarian points was, hey, it’s okay to do things besides eat, sleep, play video games. I would argue hobbies are good. I don’t think that’s a controversial topic. And I’ve actually had some guests on the podcast with unusual hobbies, like a blacksmith.

Daniel McLaren (19:21)
Hehehe.

Mm-hmm. All right.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:37)
What are some things that you like to do outside of games that might surprise people? And the way I asked that sounded very corporate icebreaker, but you know what I mean.

Daniel McLaren (19:40)
Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah.

No, there’s nothing surprising about me. I consider myself to be a dilettante in the mindset of I have no general follow through. I’d like to dabble in things. And then when I feel like I have some level of understanding, it’s like you start to hit the line where it’s like, OK, for you to actually enjoy this hobby or to be good at this hobby, you got to start doing the 10,000. I’m like, no, no, no, I’m interested. I’m good. So there’s pretty much like I’ve done everything from like, you know,

playing an instrument to card magic, playing paintball, mountain climbing, all the stuff that everybody kinda does. And so for me, I’m a bit of a dilettante in that what I really just enjoy doing in general is reading and I like hanging out with close friends and close family and I think that’s what I spend most, if not all of my non-time, non-computer time doing. I think also as I get older,

It’s kind of one of these things where I just, so for my wife and I in particular, we just never had kids. And a lot of our friend group, we’re at that age now where our friends have not only had kids, but they’re all getting to be a certain age and we’re very close to many of them and we’ve watched a lot of them grow up. And there’s this thing where it’s like, I don’t want to lose that time. I want to be able to have these friends.

as I grow older and I want to nurture those friendships and I want to do things with them. And so I actually kind of just wind up doing things that other people like doing. One of my buddies really into bourbon, like really into bourbon. And I’m like, yeah, it’s good. I like it and I’ll drink some of it. but I’m not.

I’m not like gonna go to a brewery and be like, this is a 1932 bourbon from Cow Jenkins over there and it’s made from, I don’t care. I like it. But my friend is super interested in it, collects all and loves to talk to me about it I love to listen to it. I love to hear it. I love to ask questions. And he’ll say like, what do you want? I’m like, you know my taste pal. You know the things I like. Surprise me. And he gets so excited about that. And I think those are the things that I really enjoy doing.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:50)
ask a fun closing question, which is, what are you playing right now?

Daniel McLaren (21:53)
All right, let’s do it.

boy, okay, so I again, going back to the fact that I’m a dilettante and I just basically stick to nothing, which is weird. The only game that I play with any sort of like regularity is Path of Exile. That I don’t know why I have like 3000 hours into it. I have these gaps, but then that’s kind of always my jam. I will always fall back to POE 1 at some point, but I’m kind of on an off stroke with them right now. My wife wanted to start playing, my wife and my brother actually were like both kind of simultaneously out of the blue.

ping me, was like, hey, we should play classic World of Warcraft. And I was like, okay. So we jumped in. In fact, my wife, is supposed to not be leveling right now, is leveling ahead of me. So that’s fine, that’s fine. So we’re doing that. And then Division Two, like I love the Division. I think the Division is such a fun game, so I’m playing a bit of that.

And then there’s a couple games I’m just kind of waiting on. in my mind, Light No Fire is like the ultimate game that I’m just waiting for. That’s the Sean Murray, No Man’s Sky, big next game. And I’m just so stupidly hyped for Light No Fire. Like that’s all I want in life. And then Outward too, because I loved the first Outward. Like that was one of my favorite games. I just freaking love that game.

And then I heard Crimson, no, yeah, Crimson Desert just went gold today. And I’m pretty stupidly hyped for Crimson Desert. So yeah, there you go.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:34)
You’re you’re all

about the big open world experiences. It sounds like.

Daniel McLaren (23:38)
I love

open world experiences. People talk about how much they hate them and I get it, but I’m like, I just want to run around and do stuff and just be like, I’m here to entertain myself. I’m here to entertain myself. The jokes that I tell, if they make me laugh, they’re good enough. You know, I’m only, it’s like, yeah, it’s like, I’m just here to have a good time. Let people enjoy things. Here to have a good time.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:53)
Hahaha

Are there

any weird indie games you’re into?

Daniel McLaren (24:05)
So I’ve never been an indie game guy. For a long time, so I don’t know if you know this, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this, but I’ve talked about it with a couple people before, which was like, I didn’t grow up with video games at all. We were dirt poor, was, my mom made us read books all the time. Who makes kids read books? My mom does. My mom would make us pick a Charles Dickens novel over the summer and read it and write a book report on it. Now.

As an adult, I’m really appreciative that they did that. was hugely valuable. So I didn’t play games. So for me, for the longest time, like I can’t look at like 8-bit and 16-bit games and these classic games. I’m like, they’re hideous. I can’t. I can’t. I just I can’t look at them. I can’t play them. But something happened and I started playing. one of these like rogue light.

kind of games, kind of like ball pit is like in that same vein. So lately I’ve been consuming like ball pit. did slots and daggers. did it’s the same poker, your Joker, which I loved. And I’m like, I’m so sad it’s so short. So there’s like a lot of those that just played and just consumed Balatro Like I think everybody fell into the Balatro thing, but I kind of fell into it late because I was like, I’m who’s going to play pixelated stuff. Apparently people do that. So I got into it and I enjoyed it. And then the game that I beat

Aaron Nemoyten (25:03)
ball fits good stuff.

Yeah.

Daniel McLaren (25:29)
beat over Christmas break that I absolutely loved was Blue Prince That surprised me. That surprised me so much and I just loved every minute of that and I like, it was so great. Like I had my little notebook here that I was like writing stuff. I was like, oh, I’m gonna write stuff down. I’m writing for real, who does that? It was great, it felt so good. I had so much fun playing that game.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:54)
I’ve sort of developed a thing where I have I like to have like one game that I can play while I have a video on and you know, it’s like just multitask. Also, I need something to play like while the kids are home because I’m also playing Doom the Dark Ages right now and like, you know, my son will just come in to be like.

Daniel McLaren (25:59)
Right.

Right, Yeah, right, yeah. Not really,

you don’t want the kids playing it, you’re like, hey, you wanna hop on Doom of the Dark Ages? Let’s go, buddy.

Aaron Nemoyten (26:16)
Yeah, yeah, no, he walked in and he’s like, Oh, this is cool. And I was like, what are doing? Like the first doom came out when I was a year older than him. And, you know, and that was scary to me at the time. But, but anyway, so my, two screens at a time game right now is mega bonk.

Daniel McLaren (26:20)
Yeah

Right, right, that’s so funny. Wow. Yeah, of course.

Yo, Mega Bonk is so good. Mega Bonk is so good. I freaking love Mega Bonk. That’s so great. it’s such a great game. Man. All right, I approve. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (26:40)
You

It’s so it’s so ridiculous. And there’s

a few things in it that like I got to click through quickly because I don’t want my son to read them. Yeah, like the the slutty rocket.

Daniel McLaren (26:53)
Sure, sure, yeah, of course. Well.

Right, right. Yeah. Why wouldn’t you want your son to read that dude? What’s wrong with you? Come on, Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, no kidding. it’s so funny, dude. I remember seeing that. I just went, I was like, I didn’t, I mean, I guess I didn’t expect that. But then Mega Bonk’s the kind of gamer just like, yeah, okay. I mean, I guess this is on brand.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:03)
I wanted I want to like family friendly toggle in the game. It would be like, okay, we’re gonna we’re gonna change five strings and that fixes it.

Maybe I’ll

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I should say also I have many, many hours on Vampire Survivors, so Megabonk was just like the logical…

Daniel McLaren (27:29)
I couldn’t,

yeah, I never got into Vampire Survivors. I think it goes back to that thing I was talking about earlier where it’s just like, I looked at it I was like, this is too ugly for me. I’m sorry, I just can’t. I have no visual appeal for it whatsoever.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:38)
dude, Vampire Survivors

leans into the ugliness and the ridiculous and by the time you’re like fully leveled up the screen is just chaos and it’s hilarious because you can’t even play anymore. You’re just like, I guess I’m winning.

Daniel McLaren (27:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

You’re like, I guess I’m winning. Yeah, exactly. I just I’m such a snob. Like I’m such a visual person that it’s like if I don’t have some affinity for what I’m looking at visually, I just I just can’t. And I know that’s not right. I know I should have more of a an open mind towards stuff, but I just that’s always been a hurdle I’ve I’ve struggled to get over. And so there’s a lot of games I just never played. You know, people always people are always surprised when I tell them like

I never watched any of the 80s movies. I never played any of those games. I had a friend who had a Nintendo and I would go over and play Mario or change to Ninja Turtles for a little bit, but I never played any of the Zeldas. I have no affinity for Nintendo whatsoever. It’s zero to me. I played 10 minutes of Breath of the Wild, my weapon broke, and I was like, nah, I’m done with this game. I’m not playing this weapon roulette piece of garbage. There’s no universe where that’s gonna happen and I’m gonna not be angry and split my switch in two.

So yeah, so it’s so for me like yeah Doubt X to doubt but yeah, you know, you’re not alone. You’re not alone

Aaron Nemoyten (28:48)
That game is so fun.

I will say my

my argument for the weapon breaking mechanic in that is basically that if they didn’t break, I would just use the same weapon the whole game. And by forcing me to just grab other weapons, I’m now like, I can use a pole weapon and it’s kind of cool, or I can use this and it’s kind of cool. And you know, it like forces the variety.

Daniel McLaren (29:13)
Sure.

That’s fine.

I am a, I’m an old Luddite. Don’t make, don’t make me change. Don’t make me change, Bessie. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:26)
All right, so Daniel’s internet died just as I was about to record the outro with him, so I’m just gonna do the outro by myself. Normally I would say, Daniel McLaren, thanks for joining me on Make Games Drink Coffee, and then he would say like, thanks, it’s been great, something, something. Instead, he sent me a message on Discord saying, hey, my internet died, but it was great talking to you, so you’ll just have to take that Thanks for listening.