Get to know your indie #1 — Death Carnival by Furyion Games

Today we start a new set of articles on Anybrain’s blog, the “Get to know your indie”. We are part of a gaming community that produces indie games of enormous quality and we wanted to meet their creators, and understand the difficulties and the good moments that they went through in the construction of the game, but above all, we want to capture the love for the art of creating a videogame.

For this first Get to know your indie’s text, we interviewed Herbert Yung, founder of Furyion Games, an indie studio from Canada.

In an incredible conversation Herbert told us what is to be a game dev, and how it all started: “I was always very competitive as a person and that was reflected in gaming, I was a hardcore gamer since my teenage years, where I played 16h a day, something that at the time was not very well seen (…) I played Quake and trained with friends as if we were a professional team, I would wake up and do aim exercises, and team strategy exercises and then we would go to the server and beat everyone in the whole world, that was the routine”, after much laughter from both of us and the realization that I was talking to someone who invested a lot in video games I begin to realize how this of being a gamer led him to be a game dev, “that thing of passing challenges, getting better and better, I took that to be a game dev; being a gamer is not easy, it’s super hard, you have to have a certain kind of mindset because we all start at a low level and then you have to overcome challenges one after the other. When we started as game devs (him and colleagues from Furyion) our skill level was to make a text-generator game (like the texts that appear as descriptions of the stats you earn in Diablo), that was our level…”.

Well, if there is one thing that is indie, it is this, to take a passion (gaming in this case), to start loving videogames so much that you want to make a videogame, to think that the level of skill and knowledge you have is enough to make games based on text-boxes, and still, to have the courage and resilience to learn by yourself how to improve, how to move on to the next skill, to the next level of skill in programming, just like you did for so many years in Quake, going up and up in skill to be one of the best… INDIEAWESOME

Let’s go now to the beginning of Furyion Games, Herbert tells us that “we started by getting together and having fun, building different prototypes and seeing where they took us (…) and we were horrible at first, but we kept going and going, even if our skill-level at the beginning was bad, it was still something we were enjoying doing (…) then we got to a level where we realized we were already making things that people were enjoying.” Here was a turning point in the life of Furyion Games, here the thing became serious as he said: “we thought, it seems that we can even have some success in this thing that we are doing, so, what are we going to do?”, here comes the definition of strategy, of language, the “mark” of what would define Furyion Games but also the indie game Death Carnival!

Now, let’s get into a trip to Herbert’s thoughts and ideas… as you remember, he used to play 16h a day, train skills, try to be the best and many times he really succeeded, this led him to want to apply the same strategy to improve as gamedev and to look for a known feeling: “when I spent so much time playing a game, investing so many hours, I got to a point where I started playing based on reflexes and not on thinking, when you reach a certain level there is no time to think about every action and you have to have reactions and reflexes, you have to use instinct, and when you get there what happens is you get this hyperfocus, and because of that your brain enhances the part that allows you to get to that hyperfocus and increases your adrenaline and that enhances your gaming experience to something never felt before when playing the game casually.” It’s the love of this professional gamer experience, this adrenaline rush, this feeling that led Herbert to think “can we offer this somehow to the casual gamer?”, because in his opinion it was impossible in general, maybe with some horror games being the exception, that the casual gamer, the gamer who just plays a couple of hours straight the game, the one who doesn’t invest time in the hard training to get better, to be able to feel this incredible experience that he was able to feel when he got to this level. And after years and years of prototyping, Herbert and his team at Furyion Games managed to create a game capable of bringing that from the first minutes of gameplay, Death Carnival comes into play. To finish this point I leave an example capable of illustrating this effect that Herbert found and intends to dissipate with this game: “there came a time when we let a person play the game and he played for an hour and immediately had to take a break because he was so involved and his sensitivities were so in check that he had to take a break, he loved it!

All this will be possible for the average and even weak player in Death Carnival, it is not necessary to train a lot to experience this level of energy and contentment, “we make it accessible for everyone through amazing control systems, easy camera angles, and other things…”.

A revolutionary gaming system that carries the company’s motto of three simple but important words: empower, encourage, and entertain. It is through “giving people the tools to achieve incredible goals and experience something completely new (empower); now that they have the tools we want everyone to know that every person can achieve anything in this game, it won’t be nearly impossible to reach the top, we believe they can reach the top (encourage); and of course, being a video game studio we want to entertain above all, the game has to be great fun (entertain).

Now, one thing is for sure… I was very excited about all these ideas that Herbert told me about, all these ideals behind the creation of Furyion Games but… there have to be some not-so-good things or, come on, challenges for someone who created a video game studio from nothing and learned how to make a game by himself, for someone who is making an extremely complex indie game… so I asked him what are the biggest challenges in his day-to-day life: “the biggest challenge is to understand what people like to play, it’s not easy to get feedback from YouTubers or gamers because it can be hard to put into words what they felt playing a video game and so learning about people and understanding what they are feeling and what they mean the words they use to qualify our game, as well as, learning how to be a good game dev were the biggest challenges.” To do this, Herbert and his team had several conversations with people who had experienced the game and watched hundreds of hours of players of different levels playing the game, to try to understand what could be there as a product and which way they would have to direct the rest of the Death Carnival build. In this process, Herbert didn’t try to ask the question “what do you think of the video game” but rather “we wanted to ask at key moments, what emotion were players feeling, and then we tried to translate that raw emotion into gameplay to see if it would work, almost like a very advanced form of machine-learning…”.

Herbert Yung continued to surprise me during the conversation I had with him, his ability to go further and not settle for what was reasonable was evident in every sentence, at one point he told me: “it reached a point where almost everyone played our top-down shooter (the type of game that Death Carnival is) and said something like “it’s great fun” but that wasn’t enough for us, we always wanted more and more, we didn’t want to be just another top-down shooter, we wanted to innovate…”.

Death Carnival is in the final stages of development, there will be an early access phase with several phases to make sure everything is going well and that they are taking feedback and suggestions from gamers and fixing any bugs or errors that arise once the game starts to be played more. With all this and since the game will have a very strong online PvP component, I asked at what stage of development of Death Carnival Herbert and his colleagues started by thinking about the game’s security, by this I mean, thinking about strategies to fight cheaters and toxicity of the players… “from the beginning… when we formed the studio one of the things we focused on was that each person in our team could not be toxic, each person had to have a very positive mindset for the team not to collapse by some stepback we could have” from this tactic and belief within his team, he moved on to what he wanted in his game and gave me a clear example of how important it is to think about the toxicity of the players and to create the necessary mechanisms so that this toxicity does not have room to happen and can even be rewarded players who do not have such behaviors: “compare the players of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, in FFXIV we have lots of features that encourage positivity and we were inspired by things like that.” It was from this thought that all menu language, UX/UI, ways of interaction of characters with the player and vice versa, and the way trolls are managed whether they are playing or communicating, all of that has to focus on building a positive community, that is the Furyion Games ideal.

As for cheaters, “we want to make sure that we have a very strong anti-cheat because we really want to preserve our leaderboard in PvE (player vs environment, the player battles against the AI of the videogame) and we don’t want it ruined or anything because if you have cheaters taking advantage of the leaderboard you don’t need to have it, it won’t make sense…” we see here that for both PvP(player vs player, the player battles against other players) and PvE, the two aspects of Death Carnival the anti-cheat will be important and completely necessary for this video game to continue to bring that unique feeling that Herbert and his team try to give to their players.

After learning all this I immediately remembered to ask more about what it is that gets Herbert up in the morning, and what it is that motivates him to continue this hard game dev work. Now, the answer is clear “it’s the act of constantly innovating and creating something new, that’s exciting because when you create something new it’s something no one has ever seen before, something new to your brain, to any other brain, and that’s amazing!”

All adventures have bad and good moments and although the whole tone of the interview was extremely positive I ventured to ask if the build of Death Carnival had had more boring, more demotivating moments… Herbert tells me that yes, of course, it had, like everything in life: “When we encountered bugs that we couldn’t solve for weeks or even months and that’s really bad because it’s not a creative block it’s something that gets on your nerves because you try to solve it as much as possible and you can’t… you try to minimize its negative impact as much as possible until you can solve it completely.” While talking about this topic with Herbert I realized that despite encountering these difficulties that could be a reason to boil in little water, a cause for cries of frustration, and much more, they found creative solutions to solve the problems, i.e. the problem itself was identified as a cause to creatively improve the game and I find that to be of incredible power!

Now, the good stuff… “it’s been an incredible journey with Death Carnival, we started with a text generator, and now, after teaching ourselves how to build game textures, how to build basic 3D models, how to use Unity, and everything else… we spent a lot of time on the grind, that 16h that used to be spent playing have turned into 16h learning how to be game devs! Pure grinding to condense years and years of learning into a small number of years.”

“What do you do when you can’t offer a great graphic? Gameplay! “ this was another of the mottos in building Death Carnival told me Herbert; it’s known that indie studios don’t have big teams with the possibility of each person to focus on a single part of the game and because of that, most of the indie games don’t allocate resources on the graphics but, for the game to gain fans without having that flashy graphic that in the cases of a AAA is sometimes enough to have many players, the gameplay becomes a main and very important figure of a game and, in this amazing indie game we have a serious case that this really happened, The gameplay of Death Carnival promises a lot and for what we can already see, it will revolutionize the top-down shooters so much that the game may leave this term and may create new barriers and ways of classifying games, in the future we may even hear phrases like, “it has a weapon system like Death Carnival, has a movement system like Death Carnival”, I fully believe that this will happen.

What’s next for Furyion Games, I asked. Herbert answered promptly, “we have a plan for the next 10 to 20 years, or even more… Death Carnival is the first phase, a universe that we are going to build amazing things with, things that no one has ever done in the gaming industry, we have a lot of things that are going to surprise a lot of people because of the type and scale of innovation that we put in place; being a studio is not only about creating new video games, it’s also about creating new technologies”.

To finish this interview I asked Herbert what would be the words he wanted to leave for a person who has the dream of creating a video game studio, as it was during the whole interview, I felt he was truly passionate about this profession and this dream that he has been pursuing in recent years and left some excellent advice for those who want to follow this dream so if it is your case pay attention to the following: first of all, following this career makes perfect sense today, it is a market that grows exponentially or beyond… it’s massive! But because of that, it is very competitive, so a person has to be prepared for that, to be very hard working to have more knowledge and overcome that competition with work. You have to be motivated, and hard-working, because there will be many times when you will fall but that’s ok, as long as you don’t give up, you will come out a winner, and you will succeed. And that’s our motto here, don’t give up, effort and that will bring good things.”

At the end of all this there was still room for a sentence from Herbert that I think is fantastic, “the gaming industry is the industry where you get together the largest number of people who are interested in the subject, who are passionate, you can not find a group of people so passionate anywhere else,” this sentence sums up perfectly the spirit of Herbert and is one of the reasons why the result of his work is so amazing, when you combine passion to work amazing things arise and in the gaming industry we have been able to witness many cases of these, Death Carnival is another example of that!