Transcript
Balance
Hey everyone, it’s Balance, and I’m here at Ysbryd Games to demo a couple of their games, [one of them being] Love Eternal! And I’m here with the programmer.
Toby Alden
So my name is Toby Alden, I’m the lead developer on Love Eternal, so I did the design, programming and sound effects on that.
Balance
Nice, I heard earlier from someone else that this is kind of a sequel to a previous game that you guys have made, just called Love on Itch.io?
Toby Alden
Yeah, so it’s sort of more of a remake. I started to work on that game 11 years ago, I think I finished it 9 years ago, it took about 3 years. And that’s like a very bare-bones, stripped-down, Master Core (? unsure of what was actually said) platformer, absurdly difficult for the true freaks. And when I decided I was going to make a commercial project, I sort of went back to that and decided to use it as the foundation for this game. So there’s commonality in the mechanics are identical, a lot of the levels are borrowed and modified, but this game obviously has a strong narrative focus that wasn’t present in the original game. And it’s also a lot easier, I think most people will be able to get through this game. It was not true of the original.
Balance
Do you have any other games aside from Love Eternal and Love?
Toby Alden
Yeah, I do, I have a dozen or so things up on my Itch page of various scales. This game is definitely the most polished, serious release I’ve done to date, but I do have other games out there that are floating around.
Balance
Yeah, from what I heard, this is like the debut game to go out into like the beyond Itch.io, if I recall.
Toby Alden
Yeah, and it’s the first one I’ve had a publisher for and that’s going to be released on console and all that.
Balance
That’s very exciting, I can imagine!
Toby Alden
Thank you, yeah, it is!
Was there a reason why you chose specifically Love to kind of remaster and remake?
It was the one I was most confident in. It also, it was my very first game, so I had a lot of time to sort of let the ideas in it percolate. I had a lot of people play it. No one had beaten it, it took eight years for anyone to beat it.
Balance
Eight years?!
Toby Alden
It took eight years, yeah.
Balance
Wow…
Toby Alden
And I think only like nine or so people have beaten it so far. So no one had beaten it when I started working on Love Eternal, but I was confident enough that, you know, the people I had seen play it, enjoyed the opening levels, and I thought there was enough meat there to sort of build into a fuller game.
Balance
You’re kind of piquing the little challenger side of me, I’m curious to see how it’s like. So I’ll have to give that a look.
Do you enjoy using psychological horror as a genre for story telling?
Balance
One thing that I noticed with Love Eternal is that there’s a little bit of a psychological aspect to it that seems to kind of blend different kinds of realities together. Is that the sort of genre of storytelling that you enjoy doing?
Toby Alden
Yeah, I would definitely place it in sort of the psychological horror canon. And, you know, when I was thinking about the influences I was drawing from for it, a lot of them did sort of fall into that canon of work. You know, I think at the time I was making it, I was thinking about stuff like Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s films, especially Pulse, I was thinking about the most recent season of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks The Return, Serial Experiments Lane, Satoshi Kon‘s works, especially Paranoia Agent, so… Sort of stuff within that genre where, you know, it was horror but maybe not explicitly gory or like jump-scary stuff, sort of more a general sense of unease.
Balance
I think when it comes to horror, I think the actual most difficult part is to create that tension between you and the viewer and the movie and to continue that sense of unease throughout your experience. If a game can accomplish that, it says a lot about the storytelling and the gameplay aspects.
Toby Alden
Yeah, I mean, hopefully I was able to get it. You know, I do think there’s something about the short loops of trying and retrying and failing and success in a platformer like this where it’s like small self-contained challenges can really put you in this sort of hypnotic state that sort of primes you for surprise, you know, maybe not necessarily an explicit jump-scare, but, you know, you were so fixated on the challenge that you sort of maybe forgot there was that narrative component. And when it comes back, it sort of like can be especially unsettling or subversive if you weren’t anticipating it.
Balance
Interesting. I like that concept. Almost like a very physical feeling mental reboot in that aspect.
Is Love Eternal developed by a team of two?
Balance
So I also heard that it was just a team of two, you and a sibling?
Toby Alden
So my brother did the art and then there was actually a third person on the team who was the musician. She’s Emily Glass, based out of Australia. She killed it. I mean, as you’ll hear.
Balance
Music is also another one of those components where it can definitely overstay its welcome, especially ironically, if it’s too good. It kind of takes you out from the gaming experience.
Toby Alden
Sure. I think, you know, I think I really tried to do audio that was sort of understated. And I think the music fits that as well, where the default sort of type of music for these games, I think tends to be like pretty high energy excitement, which never quite reflected to me the mental state these types of games actually put me in, which was sort of more meditative. So the sort of overall sound design and music definitely leans more kind of like ambient contemplative, which I think also complements the horror angle.
How do you think the fidelity graphics impact the portrayal of horror?
Balance
Do you feel when there are simplistic graphics like this, it lends you to be able to emulate horror elements a little bit easier or more difficult?
Toby Alden
Yeah, you know, I think it lends itself to sort of different aspects of horror. The sort of abstraction that pixel art tends towards, I think does reward the more sort of psychological horror than like something like, you know, beautifully realistically rendered guts spilling out of somebody or something. And it was an interesting challenge, I think, to do horror from a side scrolling perspective, because the default for horror I think is 3D and particularly first person, because you get a lot of sort of just stuff by default that is scary, you know, to occupy a body with that sort of visceral sense of place is really intense. So it was interesting having to work around the limitation of sort of the 2D remove. There’s a sense of remove from the character, you’re more of a spectator.
Is it difficult to find the right sound effects for your games?
Balance
Do you think there’s a sense of difficulty when it comes to trying to find the right kind of sounds for your games?
Toby Alden
Yeah, you know, it’s honestly one of my favorite parts of making games is doing the sound design, because it just feels really sort of like there’s a big element of play, you know, I can sort of mix and match samples, try and get the thing I’m imagining in my head. And there’s a lot of also just sort of like happy accidents of messing around, of layering sounds you maybe wouldn’t necessarily expect, like, you know, the death sound in this game, which you’ll probably hear before too long. That sound I knew you would be hearing it so often that I wanted to make it as satisfying as possible. So when I was thinking about satisfying sounds to incorporate it, I tried to include what I considered to be the most satisfying sound, which is pull tap can opening. So if you listen really closely to it, you can actually hear that in the background.
Balance
So this is pretty tame, all things considered. So it makes me wonder just how much more difficult the first game was.
Why was the original Love game so difficultToby Alden
It was crazy. Yeah, it was it was messed up, honestly. I mean, I’m the person who made it and even I think it was pretty cruel. But you know, I also think that’s maybe one of the cool strengths of independent or hobbyist games that they’re able to lean into is like those types of extremes. You know, which is why you see such vibrant communities around stuff like I Wanna Be the Guy Fangames or speed running or really pushing the limits of how difficult a game can be.
Why was the original game, Love, so difficult?
Toby Alden
I mean, it was literally just because that was what I like to play and also what I like to make. It’s also difficult. Games are a lot easier to make than easy games, ironically.
Balance
Oh, I could see that honestly.
Toby Alden
Yeah, because sort of all you have to do is just sort of like, you know, add as many obstacles as humanly possible and then try and beat it. You don’t like need to finesse it that much. Whereas when you try and make an easy game, there’s a lot of sort of iteration and standing off the edges because the stuff that’s hard to you is sort of invisible often.
Balance
What I really like this is that it just feels so smooth. There’s a lot of intuitiveness behind this that like when you when you die like that, you don’t feel slighted by the game. It’s always nice to have a game where it just feels good.
Toby Alden
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, for the type of genre, this is it was important to me that the controls felt really responsive. It felt like you had pretty precise control over your character for the things that were being demanded of you. You know, personally, I do actually have a lot of fondness for games whose controls are sort of, you know, more cumbersome or clumsy. I really like this game Quest of Ki for NES, which has these like, you know, really devious challenges that require you to like hit your head on the ceiling. So your character will like grab it in pain and duck under a fireball, stuff like that. I do like the sort of like range of expression you can get with games. For this specifically, I knew I wanted something that felt like very tight and precise.
Balance
When you’re mentioning games like that, it sort of reminds me of the infamous Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The movement is just so difficult, but there is a method to it, right? And once you understand it, you can well get over it.
Toby Alden
Yeah, it sort of just depends where you as the designer want to locate the challenge. Like is it in, you know, the act of controlling the character itself or is it, you know, more in sort of the obstacles you put in front of the player?
Balance
Right. That makes sense. Like you also have to manage the expectations of the players who are playing, right?
Toby Alden
Yeah, absolutely.
How often do you test your own games?
Toby Alden
Yeah, I mean with this game, you know, I sort of have to test it after every major iteration I do. I guess you would get this response from most developers, but I’m pretty sick of playing my own game at this point. I think it’s why it’s tempting, you know, for a lot of indie developers to make stuff like roguelikes or multiplayer games, because the game sort of has more opportunities to surprise you as its creator. Whereas this, I’ve like pretty exhaustively explored most of the possibilities for how you can play it.
Balance
I really do like the puzzle aspect of this platformer too. Like I had to really think about how you wanted me to go through this. That’s what makes this really fun!
Toby Alden
Yeah, I’m glad you like it. It’s, you know, I don’t bill it as a puzzle game because I think the elements are pretty light, but I definitely did want the player to have to do some consideration.
Miyazaki vs Ito Meme
Balance
Have you seen that one meme where you have Hayao Mizao where he’s like depressed looking, but he has like the most beautiful art things and then you have Junji Ito who is like has the most horrific looking things, but he’s like the happiest looking man in the whole world. I feel like in a way I can connect to that because I love these sort of games. Generally in public, I’m pretty happy-go-lucky. And you seem like a very chill person too. So how do you feel about that, like that contrast between the games that you make and possibly how some people look on the outside?
Toby Alden
Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know. You know, I think I think there’s a lot of commonality between horror and humor. And I think there’s parts of this game that I think are funny too. I think it’s sort of a there’s sort of commonalities of like, you know, surprise, subverting expectations, callbacks to previous things, perversions of established situations. So maybe that’s the link, I guess, is scaring someone is a little bit like telling a good joke.
Balance
I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s a that’s a very interesting analogy. Well, if anyone ever asked why I like horror, that’s that’s what I use from now on.
How many appointments do you have for this PAX event?
Toby Alden
Pretty booked. A lot more than I thought, actually. It’s like four or less nine to five all four days.
Balance
That must feel pretty nice, I imagine, especially like having this being the published game.
Toby Alden
Yeah, I mean, it’s nice. You know, it’s for the game’s been in development for like six and a half years. And so it didn’t really feel real outside of the confines of my bedroom. So it’s it’s nice to be able to bring out in the world and show it to people and see how they react to it.
The End
Balance
Well, in any case, thank you so much for having an interview with me.
Toby Alden
Yeah, of course! Thanks for taking the time to come play.
Balance
So yeah, I’m Balance and Toby Alden of Love Eternal. See you next time!