Antti Laakso is a Finnish independent filmmaker and game designer known for the recent HP Lovecraft game adaptation Dreams in the Witch House. We're also joined by the MK Schmidt, designer of Cyclopean: The Great Abyss to dive deep into how Lovecraft continues to inspire games.
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Chapters
00:00 Start
3:38 The Journey into Game Development
15:13 Balancing Game Mechanics and Player Experience
23:15 Crafting an Immersive Story
33:35 Symbolism and Artistic Influences
54:05 Tying Science and Fiction Together
1:03:32 The Importance of Sound Design
1:15:00 The Nature of Inspiration
1:27:21 Developing Dunwich Horror
1:40:47 Adapting Lovecraft to Video Games
1:55:08 Emergent Storytelling in Games
Music:
[0:00] Music
Tyler:
[0:44] Yeah i've never been to finland i've been to everywhere around finland but for strangely like never made it there so your language is uh deeply annoying is the the single hardest language to crack i think other than like sumerian in the whole world so you'll have to.
Antti:
[1:02] It's pretty different than everything else yeah yeah
Tyler:
[1:07] It's it's it's it's gonna be it's gonna be fun but we'll do our best and if we if we screw anything up we just all shout Perkele together and we'll move on.
Antti:
[1:16] Oh, wow. No finish?
Tyler:
[1:18] Oh, just that one word. Okay, so we have Mike along with us. So MK Schmidt, still record holder for the most appearances on the podcast. Probably never going to be broken. But he is a super duper fan of yours and I promised I would let him gush.
Tyler:
[1:33] So I think we should let him go ahead and do that now. And we'll use that as a segue to get into your game.
Mike:
[1:40] Oh, fine. Thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. But, Auntie, I just want to say thank you for making that game, Dreams in the Witch House. That was always, it's always been one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. But it's also, like, one of the most frustrating for me to read because the guy, you know, Walter Gilman, he behaved so irresponsibly. And I always thought, like, if I was in that situation, I could totally handle this better than him. He did everything wrong and the game was just the fulfillment of that you know being able to go through the story in a way where i can behave the way i think i would have in that situation and it was just it was just perfectly done uh wonderful work wonderful work i loved i and i saw this as a complaint by some people some of the survival mechanics were a little bit rough But I thought that just added to the whole atmosphere and made it feel like something was at stake. You're not just clicking buttons to see the next part of the story. It was really well-balanced.
Tyler:
[2:52] There was very few point-and-click adventure games in which you can die. That's right.
Antti:
[2:58] Yeah. The Sierra ones, there you could die, but it was like sudden death.
Mike:
[3:03] Well die lose your soul all these things were possible yeah
Antti:
[3:10] So where did the idea for Dreams of the Witch House come from? Were you just
Tyler:
[3:14] Reading a book one day and decided to make a game?
Antti:
[3:18] Like, let's see. I guess it was like 2014 when things started to move forward.
Antti:
[3:29] I don't consider myself as a... Game development is a new thing for me. My background is in film. I'm an animator and a filmmaker, and I teach animation and have directed short films and even one live-action short film.
Antti:
[3:56] But then like it it's a little bit silly how it started because i was kind of thinking that like i had money problems and i kind of was thinking that you can't make money out of short films like if you're lucky you will get money to make the short films but nobody is going to buy the short films anymore like you put them on youtube and people watch them there nobody is there's no tradition that people pay money to see a short film so so i was very naive and i kind of thought that what about games like people like games and people buy games and i like games i have played games my whole life so it mustn't be like like i'm a clever guy i'm sure i could make a game uh and then then i kind of jumped to it and uh i was looking for different in engines like what would be simple and and free and i stumbled upon uh adventure game studio like free community-based uh program or engine and i was like fiddling around with it and i started I guess I had an idea for a detective game
Antti:
[5:20] And I started to make it months past, but I was kind of frustrated it was so slow and it was quite difficult to learn the game engine because I had no background before that I had only made mods or a Silent Hunter submarine game. So it was very different. So I kind of abandoned my detective game, like, ah, like this is, it's not so easy after all, like I was thinking. And then time passed, but the idea of the game still kind of hovered in my mind, like what would be a nice game to make, something that I would be motivated. And it was basically like a lightning bolt struck from the sky. One night, I have the big Necronomicon XP Lovecraft, the collection of short stories, and I was rereading it and reading the Dreams in the Witch House. Then it just instantly snapped in my head that, wow, this would make an amazing game.
Antti:
[6:39] Like I want to be I felt that I want to be inside this story and be like active protagonist, be Walter Gilman and like explore in Arkham and like walk around and go to a store, go to a lecture
Antti:
[6:59] Like suffer these strange incidents in the night and struggle against brain fever and and lose your sanity and Arkham was the best setting for this kind of thing and I was so
Antti:
[7:19] Excited about that idea that I just kind of jumped on it and I had no at first it was supposed to be just like a hobby project like a free like a really short game and I would release it for free but as I get better and the game kind of started to progress at some point I decided that this is pretty good and let's do this properly and let's make it into a real game and so it was really my passion and I worked on it I think I started it in 2015 making the game and released it in 2023. So it was like eight years.
Antti:
[8:13] So to put it shortly, it started as a very kind of, how do you say, very kind of like money thing. Like what is the easy way to make money? But then it suddenly turned into a really passionate project and a hobby. and I was planning to make it for free.
Tyler:
[8:37] I would tell anyone if they're looking to make money, don't get into game development. It's one of the worst things you could do.
Antti:
[8:47] Yeah, but the same thing is with movies. And I have gone into an art school, so still making games may still be better than making paintings. It's a step up from that, I think, money-wise.
Mike:
[9:05] I have to agree with you there. I have a fine arts background myself. I feel like I was a good painter, and I could actually sell paintings. But I had to be there talking to the person and explaining it to them and forming a relationship. And then they'd leave, and sometimes they'd come back. And once in a while, someone would buy something, which was great. I felt very honored for that. But it wasn't lucrative. It was always a struggle. Like with games, and I'm not saying it's easy to get into games. It's a struggle as much as anything. But you don't necessarily have to be there explaining what a game is and why someone would want it. Once the game is out there, people do buy them. If you're fortunate enough to reach that audience.
Tyler:
[10:03] What um what would you say were like kind of the biggest challenges like as you're as you're basically learning to design a game as you're making what ultimately became your first kind of debut.
Antti:
[10:13] You know uh well like yeah the biggest obstacle was that i had no experience in making games i had no coding skills uh i had um but also that was like one of the uh good things that i I didn't know anything about making games, because I didn't know how long it would take and how difficult it would be. I was kind of naive and it was just
Antti:
[10:45] Kind of liberating just to jump blind and compared now, now I know so much that I think about every aspect and it can be stressful to think about the reception and like knowing how much work it will be so it was like a two-sided thing but I don't know, I really liked experimenting and learning stuff and I was getting really excited when I knew I managed to do something clever or like a game mechanic or something. So it was really motivating to learn as you go so quickly. And what are the obstacles
Antti:
[11:46] Because the whole thing was like a learning process I guess it was like a big one big obstacle I had to kind of basically learn everything the good point was from my animator's background was easy or helpful that I could do all the graphics and the background and the animations. So those were something I kind of knew how to do. And the sound editing, I had experience on that. But filmmaking background was helpful. But I think it's easier to learn how to code than to learn to draw or paint I feel like that, and I was getting help from the Adventure Game Studio community. They were really helpful, nice community, and they helped with the code. So that was nice as well.
Antti:
[12:56] Well, because it was my first game, I had no idea about the release, so that was really kind of a nerve-wracking thing.
Antti:
[13:08] And maybe also that because I had worked on the game so long, I kind of became blind to it. And I had a couple of really good testers who had been playing the game for many years. They really loved it and I was feeling confident because they were loving it. But then I kind of realized that when a completely new person started to play the game, they were like they didn't have a clue what to do they were really lost so I think for the last year I was just trying to make it more approachable and trying to add all these guides and hints and kind of things to make the game more approachable so that was one of the biggest
Antti:
[14:04] Obstacles Also, okay, now I remember more. Also, of course, because this game combines different genres, like elements. It's a point-and-click game and a survival game and like a role-playing game. So one obstacle is that Like somebody said that if you make just a point-and-click game, the point-and-click hands will love the game. But if you combine these elements, they have to love these other elements as well. And it can be more difficult because some point-and-click players don't like survival games and vice versa. So it could cause I didn't think about that beforehand because I was just making my own dream game I didn't think that there might be people who get upset when you mix stuff I
Tyler:
[15:03] Found that when I first started playing it it was difficult for me to tell if something happened and like oh I'm dead now.
Antti:
[15:13] Being you know
Tyler:
[15:15] Being a point and click adventure game player i didn't really know if that like is that the end okay cool i guess i got the that was the end i got and that was it and that i didn't really i didn't immediately understand like oh i just keep going until i find more and more and of course i did um but it it does it so so many interesting ways like you have this like sort of insanity kind of thing that it drives you constantly to keep walter's character in you know in line you know and as mike said earlier he's kind of constantly screwing himself over and in all these different ways and making these very poor decisions and and it's you as the player's you know job to kind of keep him going to school keep him studying on time and and it's the game is working against you in every conceivable way like it just makes everything that you intend to do more and more difficult. It's arguably more like real life than most games are. I would say.
Mike:
[16:11] Yeah.
Antti:
[16:12] You have to have dis- Um, again, because I was like playing and testing it for so long, it, uh, I guess I might have, like, I, I thought that it was too easy. Like, like there's no way how, you know, I always got a good ending and I wanted that, that there, it can be like, it can be like tricky situations like that. But you really have to think about, okay, I have no money, I'm sick and it's raining, I have a lecture, maybe I'll stay inside, maybe I'll skip the lecture and lose the exam or maybe I'll miss the exam because otherwise I will die. So I wanted to put those kind of situations in the game and later on I added the difficulty levels so that some people just want to experience more casual in play so there's the easy difficulty which should be a little bit more stress free but
Antti:
[17:32] Yeah like many have said that like first you play the game you get a bad ending or you die and then next time you know the rules and how it works and it's much much easier of course like it could be I don't think there is a way to make a tutorial that explains it so well or maybe there should have been I don't know maybe five days just for tutorial but uh but yeah it's it's not made um because i was kind of making my own dream game uh i really didn't
Antti:
[18:13] Think that much about how games are made normally or what is the reception of the game. I was kind of making a game that I would like to play myself. And I understand that it might not be the easiest one, but it's been so great to hear from many people that like mike said that some people just really love it and and kind of understand what i was going trying to do with the game and and play it like like instant some steam reviews i can see that there's like 60 hours like somebody has played my point and click game for 60 hours like normally you play a point and click game it's I have six hours and then it's done and you probably won't play it again.
Tyler:
[19:14] I have 23 hours in the game. Oh, wow.
Antti:
[19:18] That's nice.
Mike:
[19:19] Yeah. I have 26.7. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the time plate because I have games that I've played a lot longer than this but they didn't have the impact of this one. This game impacted me severely when I was playing it. I was obsessed with it. Those 26 hours were straight. But I'm so glad that you didn't think about what the audience would think because I think that is kind of the mother of invention when you make something that you're interested in. And if you make something you are interested in, and I'm quoting someone else here, at least one person's going to like that, right? Because if you make something you think other people are interested, maybe the actual number will be zero. So I'm glad you did that.
Antti:
[20:19] Yeah, I'm really happy with the game, and I don't think I could... You know, I kind of gave all I got to the game. I guess I could have kind of released it earlier, but i would i just kept adding more and more stuff uh so i probably won't make a game like that like like like that kind of deep uh anymore because i'm you know too old for that uh i don't want to spend it eight next um next eight years making the next game so But I'm really happy that I did it this way. So yeah, it's my special, my other child.
Tyler:
[21:15] I really enjoyed the game sort of requires knowledge that honestly a lot of people my age and younger don't have like using the Dewey decimal system or whatever like nobody even knows how to go to a lot I took my wife to a library recently and she was like wow, you could just take whatever you want and then bring it back whenever you want and I was like yeah she's like how do you find the books you want I'm like you you know and it's honestly like people are so used to the internet that they don't even know what the with what a library you know how it works anymore um which is adorable but it's also it's a it's a fun thing that the game is almost educational in that respect um and and a lot of the situations that you put players in uh we we alluded to it a bit earlier but.
Antti:
[22:00] How you know you have to make these decisions
Tyler:
[22:02] Like do i cut class today because it's raining or i'm cold or you know all these different factors that play into decisions you make and it's very very interesting how you sort of force the player to make the best decision in the worst case scenarios most of the time was that something you did intentionally or was it yeah.
Antti:
[22:27] What like like the biggest thing was that i wanted to When I re-read the Dreams in the Witch House, I was thinking that you could make a short film out of the story. It can be good, but you're a passive watcher. You follow the story and then it ends. I got this kind of feeling that I want to be inside the text. I want to be and live there. Some great games give me this. The same kind of feeling that...
Antti:
[23:10] So, I tried to make a kind of honest adaption of the story. So, for example, the story has a quite clear timeline, like there are several months, the story happens during several months, and it tells how the situation gets worse. First there are like small incidents he sees something scuttling in the room some furry thing but then the nights get crazier and crazier and he sees goes into a different world and sees all sorts of crazy trippy stuff and finally like elder things and things like that and constantly he is saying that I should do something about this brain fever I should see the doctor that's a common thing in the story I don't know maybe five times that I should see a doctor because this brain fever is getting worse so
Antti:
[24:18] This aspect that you are sick I wanted to include that also in the game like in the story it kind of says that maybe because Walter was I guess he had a fever about the story and it says that maybe it kind of heightened his senses, maybe he could hear more things and maybe it was kind of his brain was kind of zooming and working over time or something like that so that element came also from the this story and yeah I I can't really remember how each of the mechanics came to be. Of course, it's not like it seems that you have to go to the bathroom or toilet or otherwise. There will be problems. But yeah, I wanted to make it a little bit like this student simulator in like a crafts world.
Tyler:
[25:34] Yeah, doing chores around the house even and then like burning time during the day. That's another fun part of the game is the time management aspect of it. It's like, well, if I do this, then I can't do that.
Mike:
[25:46] That's the game loop, right? you're spending a day over and over and over again and you
Antti:
[25:52] Have to choose
Mike:
[25:53] Before I forget I just want to highlight the soundtrack is just one of the best things I've ever heard in this game I bought it immediately when it was available and it's on my iTunes but
Antti:
[26:08] It goes Troy Sterling is the composer he's amazing
Mike:
[26:15] He worked
Antti:
[26:16] On the the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's radio dramas and also the feature films, the Hall of Cthulhu and Whisperer in Darkness. Oh, okay.
Mike:
[26:31] I didn't know you. Fantastic.
Tyler:
[26:34] I think at one point I tried to get in touch with the Lovecraft Historical Society to do something about the podcast. I never got a response. It's funny that you bring that up. Maybe that's my... Yeah, there you go.
Mike:
[26:45] Okay.
Antti:
[26:46] Uh like i uh we made this a short film in 2017 called sound from the deep which is like uh lovecraft uh like inspired by his works uh you should see it it's on youtube uh it's a like uh happens on a icebreaker or like a science vessel going for a uh looking for oil in in north pole and they hear a mysterious sound. So anyway, the film was selected to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in 2017, I think. I had already started to make the game. I had made it for a couple of years and I knew that the historical society would be in the festival as well. So I had already in mind that it would be great have Troy do the soundtrack so I bumped into him in the festival and I introduced myself and showed the game from my phone
Antti:
[28:03] With trembling hands and said that I should be interested to work on this game like I have no I can't I was at the stage that I couldn't offer pretty much anything then he was instantly interested and finally we ended up working together and his music really puts you in the right mood and really kind of elevates the game it's a huge part of it I think
Tyler:
[28:39] Mike we're getting a Cyclopean in front of those.
Antti:
[28:42] People well we'll
Mike:
[28:44] See yeah that's a great
Antti:
[28:45] Idea but
Mike:
[28:46] Um i think ty you were hitting on something that's really important in the game which is the if i can use the word the juxtaposition of the mundane right the daily routine and then
Music:
[28:56] Music
Mike:
[29:00] The abnormal it comes in and it's it's that was what's so interesting about it for me
Antti:
[29:07] Because you can't
Mike:
[29:09] Just focus on one, right? You have to deal with both and it's just terrifying and it's hilarious at the same time because there's this ancient witch who's out to curse you and you gotta fix your light bulb, you know? You can't...
Antti:
[29:30] I like that stuff always. I enjoy films that kind of dance
Music:
[29:39] Music
Antti:
[29:45] By David Lynch, I like this, that there's this very kind of normal, maybe a suburb, like really kind of normal sun and sunny shining, but underneath it, it's something very dark, and it's a really kind of...
Antti:
[30:07] The sweet spot is when the two worlds kind of combine. Like if the game would be just this like dark fantasy monsters and tentacles and like this it wouldn't be so interesting to me at least some
Mike:
[30:28] Of my favorite parts were just like you know you go get coffee with your friend and I just
Tyler:
[30:33] Can't trying to get a girlfriend I like that you can just become a drunk as an option like you just like well, I did after I realized that like the game I can keep playing it in different ways I was like okay let's see what happens if I just become an alcoholic this time and not a good choice uh but, you have to go through so much trouble to do any little thing in the game and that's a really interesting part of it is like nothing comes easy so if you want to become a drunk you got to like talk a guy into tipping you off is where you can buy some hooch and you know go to a dark alley in the middle and it reminds me of my teenage years a lot actually but yeah it's it's so fantastic the the way that you had just like let the players make all these interesting decisions while also sort of gating them in so many ways um you could be creative as the player you can you could decide so many different aspects of how your day is going to be but at the end of the day the the forces that are there are going to punish you for them and i love that um there's also Oh.
Mike:
[31:35] Go ahead. Sorry.
Antti:
[31:36] Well, I think the decision was quite early on that you have a couple of months' time and then the game will end. And depending on what you did during those couple of months dictates how the game will end. So when I had that in mind, And then it was just kind of try to fill the two months with all the good stuff and lots of weird stuff and the normal stuff and try to put much as interesting things there as possible. And little hints about the story, like how the menace kind of intensifies and so on.
Tyler:
[32:33] I wanted to circle back around to, you mentioned David Lynch, and the first thing about this game that really took me in and made me think, I've got to talk to this dude. You have a lot of symbolism in the game. And my first instinct was, this dude's like a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn or something, or he's a Freemason, he's got to have something. But since you mentioned lynch i do see a lot of influence from the the the sort of black lodge world or the checkerboard floors and i had sent mike an image right before this of this uh i think it was from the boda where it's the the doorway that leads to the universe with the two towers of the tarot on the side a lot of cobblistic thinking and everything and your game has i don't know if it's an accident or on purpose but there's so much of that stuff in there that it's hard to ignore um so what were sort of your your artistic and symbolic influences on um.
Antti:
[33:29] What should i say it uh
Tyler:
[33:31] It's a secret he can't tell us well like.
Antti:
[33:36] It might be difficult because i did uh most of the things myself and i just kind of started to do it so of course many of the stuff might be just kind of natural to me, my way of drawing and doing things.
Antti:
[34:00] I'm not an occultist myself, I don't do rituals in my home and so on. So I guess I researched quite a lot, you know, you can kind of Google which symbols and, of course, there's lots of great art made from Lovecraft's works, so those inspire. I tried not to, of course, not to mimic them or copy them. But, you know, you take something there and you take something there and you mix it and put it through this pixel graphics. I guess I think I had an image library that I just took interesting-looking images. I, you know, browsed some old paintings, like for example, the first Dream World, I found some old paintings with kind of cultistic vibes. I took something from there and, I don't know,
Antti:
[35:24] Yeah, it's...
Antti:
[35:27] Yeah, pieces from here and there, but the point is that, like this is, like now I spoil everything when I tell you how I did it, but the point is that it gives you a feeling and it feels concise and it feels everything has its meaning and place in the game. So it might be like the kind of it's not a good answer but you know some things you just kind of google and find something interesting and then put it in your game and it looks amazing but yeah like today like if I let's say a couple of decades earlier it would be much more difficult to make this kind of game and do the research you would have to go to the library yourself and study books and how it's really i mean really easy and with
Tyler:
[36:25] Like ai is.
Antti:
[36:27] Even more when you do research now ai is much even easier than than some google search so right so yeah it's it's quite easy to jump into the you know deep end and and study these things online yeah
Tyler:
[36:48] I feel like if you if you were to go to chat gpt and like show me some esoteric symbolism and it's just gonna pull straight from like i said order of the golden dawn freemasonry yeah uh it's gonna be pulling a lot of that stuff uh the theological society or theosophical society my bad but all that stuff is what i find the most interesting about the fact you know you you said you were just kind of like looking for it, In a way, the universal language of a lot of these symbols is there regardless of whether or not it's an esoteric thing. It's just, it is. Like people, when they see a checkered board floor, you know, whatever that reminds you of, it reminds you of that. Or if you see the eye of Horus somewhere or the, I don't know, the pyramid or the all-seeing eye, anything like that. It's so ubiquitous throughout all of our society, especially in America, because we were a country founded by Masons. So all of those symbols are just like everywhere.
Antti:
[37:45] Yeah. Okay, now that you said, yeah, there is the black pyramid with the eye. I don't know if there is a word for it, for that symbol, but that's, I'm not sure if it's, did I found it somewhere where or was it like where it came? But it's a nice image, I like it
Tyler:
[38:07] It's called the Eye of Providence which is probably why Lovecraft's hometown is named what it is and I think he was probably quite likely exposed to a lot of this stuff he was reading books about all of it, the alchemist, not just his short story but the book The Alchemist also pulls a lot of this stuff together, well Well.
Antti:
[38:32] One thing that I was really fun to research was that the Miskatonic University has the library and it has an occult section. So to come up with the books that might be there and then I researched what books would they have during that time. And like basically for the whole library, I researched, I filled it with books. So when you go through the index cards, those are actual books that were like could have been in a school or university library at that time. So I remember one summer, two weeks, I was alone home and just studying these books. It was beautiful summer days outside. I had curtains drawn and I was just looking at these books, copy-pasting the names and doing a little bit of research about what they are all about. So the occult section has real books as well, like Blavatsky and Malleus Maleficarum and things like this.
Antti:
[39:59] And on top of that, of course, the Lovecraft's greatest hits, Necronomicon. Yeah. Can I
Mike:
[40:08] Just add that I
Antti:
[40:11] Think all of that,
Mike:
[40:13] I loved having to study a book and take the test and see what I learned. You gamified study in a way that I've never seen it done before.
Mike:
[40:22] But I also love the fact that you incorporated, I think, what Lovecraft was after. I don't know his full intentions, but it seemed to me it was a cautionary tale about getting into stuff that you don't really know the depth of. And it's like the brain just pulled that really together for me, where, yeah, you can go study these things and do these rituals and do that stuff, but you don't know what's actually going to happen. And that was like, it nailed the point home for me.
Antti:
[40:57] Yeah, like probably in the game like I don't know, it might be the easiest way to get a good ending is just to stay away from everything like occult related but just focus on your studies and sleep and eat well and see some friends and just stay away from the things.
Tyler:
[41:25] Yeah, I love that it appears to at least induce all these wonderful dreams and everything that he has and I know that's part of the original source as well, but, I'm a big fan of the story The Rats in the Walls and I loved how that stupid little pesky piece of crap rat keeps just terrorizing you throughout the whole game he comes out and bites your toe or whatever like ah and then you you have to go through all these like silly things you know you're trying to board up the hole and you're trying to like just leave me alone and and even things like you know getting earplugs and trying to sleep um just it it reminds me so much of like the house that i grew up in and not that i had rats biting my toes but just like i just want some peace and quiet please um and and walter have you guys ever seen the movie meet the parents with uh ben stiller i'm.
Mike:
[42:18] Familiar with it i never watched it you
Tyler:
[42:20] Really should it's it's a comedy it's a dark comedy movie where him and robert de niro plays this sort of father-in-law character but it's the same principle in that the entire movie is just watching ben stiller's carry uh character his name is gay lord fucker uh just screw everything up he's just like under impossible circumstances and always makes the worst decision possible so um walter is just you know he gets so frustrated and then you just want to do whatever you can to get this stupid rat to leave me alone. Little do you know on the other side of that wall is a whole world of horrors, waiting to unwind on you. And there's really nothing you can do about it. It's sort of the inevitable, and Lovecraft talks a lot about that, like these forces that are just bigger than us. They don't care about us.
Antti:
[43:08] Well, in the game you can kind of change the story because not to spoil anything, but But you can get a good ending in the game. You can overcome the threat and you can defeat the rat and the witch and you can even stop the whole ritual and get the cult arrested. Can I just
Mike:
[43:39] Say when the rat was killed you just said you can defeat the rat so I hope I'm not spoiling things I can always cut this out but that was one of the most joyous occasions of my entire life I was so happy
Tyler:
[43:59] You poisoned him.
Mike:
[44:00] Oh man it was great it was so great I
Tyler:
[44:03] Got that one too.
Mike:
[44:06] And then the music at that point the music just kicks in and it's just like it was like this I don't know, I didn't want to describe it with a crescendo.
Tyler:
[44:17] There are so many layers to that little mission there, where you can get so far and still fail, and then there's just one more thing I should have done, one more thing I should have done, one more thing I should have done. It really traps the player into trying as many things as possible over and over and over again, which is probably why I put so much time into it.
Antti:
[44:36] Yeah, I think I kind of felt at some point like this, I have this one shot to make this game. I have already made it several years so I wanted to make it as deep as possible because I was quite sure that I won't be making a game like this again so I kind of I don't know, spent a couple of extra years trying to make it more uh kind of uh know that it would stand the test of time and maybe like i don't know maybe even 10 years somebody might buy it and and enjoy it and find new things in it it
Tyler:
[45:26] Was definitely my favorite game of that time frame like 2023 was honestly a pretty rough year in my life too so I was alone in my apartment for a solid week just every day when I got home from work. I'm like, I got to figure out if I can kill this stupid rat. It was really nice. And it was honestly like, I would say that this game was therapeutic because it made everything about regular life feel attainable. It's like, at least there's no witch in my apartment.
Antti:
[46:00] That i know of then
Tyler:
[46:02] Again i guess it could have the opposite effect in me like you might you might
Tyler:
[46:05] get sucked in and start thinking like oh this is my real life but.
Antti:
[46:08] I doubt that yeah i think like in in lovecraft stories uh that's why i probably like them because uh like i don't like uh drama that much um i get stressed and uh if i watch a drama film like like i like i'm so happy now but something awful is going to happen and they will fight and like like real life is like that so when i want entertainment i i usually enjoy something maybe horror or something fantastical or science fiction some kind of something different than this everyday life uh so uh Yeah,
Antti:
[46:58] I enjoy those things, how to, like those special, like, I don't know, fantasy elements, but in order to them to work, I think, like we talked earlier, you have to have that baseline, like that normal life, ordinary mundane thing. And then the special fantasy stuff feels much more powerful like for example if I just say quickly like in H.P. Lovecraft usually has bases his stories that there is a normal starting point for example like Dream Quest of Kadath that's completely that's just weird stuff like All around, that's completely easy and fantastical and really strange story. And I don't think that many people enjoy it because there is no baseline. It's just crazy thing after crazy thing.
Mike:
[48:18] You're talking to the number one fan of DreamQuest. Oh, wow. But yeah, I think I agree with you. I've been on Lovecraft forums on Facebook and stuff. And that is the general opinion about that story. Because it is so weird. And most of his stuff is based in some reality. And so, yeah, it's a different kind of approach. I love it. I read it when I was like 14 or something. So maybe I was in the right phase of my life. Yeah, I think
Antti:
[48:50] I like everything that he has written, but it requires a little bit more of effort to go through it, I think.
Mike:
[49:06] Yeah, it was also not finished. I mean, he finished it. He didn't die while it was unfinished, but he never intended to publish it. So I think, had it gotten a once-over by the editor and stuff, it could have been tightened up, I think. I just love the imagery in there. Just all the different places and things and monsters and fantastic.
Antti:
[49:33] Cats going to the moon. Cats, oh yeah.
Mike:
[49:39] But I do agree with you, though. By and large, his work is based in his reality. And it kind of starts off with the normal setting, and then he kind of veers off into the strange, which is what makes it resonate, I think, with a lot of readers.
Tyler:
[49:57] Yeah, he's very good at pacing and kind of having something emerge onto a player. I'm thinking of something like, I don't know, Juan Romero, where you just kind of get little hints along the way, and then at the end.
Antti:
[50:12] You know, whatever.
Tyler:
[50:15] I mentioned the rats in the walls earlier, too, but just kind of slowly dragging the player quite literally downward into the, you know, oh, now there's a big cult worshipy thing, and then boom, that's the end story.
Mike:
[50:28] I love how his protagonists are always, they're very honest. They're very, like... Forthcoming in their experiences and saying like well this is what i saw and what i experienced i don't know if it was real i don't know if it's a dream i don't know you can judge me you know but this is what i experienced and they kind of go through this struggle of explaining their experiences in a way that they're trying to rationalize and that always struck me as like really powerful because yeah like how what do you how do you process something like that if if that happens to you it's
Tyler:
[51:01] An interesting time in history like because lovecraft would have come around during the same time that freud and young were doing sort of their their big works into human psychology and psychiatry and everything and we they didn't really understand a lot of these things and the the idea of madness of going crazy was the single scariest thing that could happen to you losing your mind um and he plays on that so much and that's a lot of what it is like.
Mike:
[51:26] Well he defines it as not losing your mind but becoming more aware of what's real.
Antti:
[51:33] Right.
Tyler:
[51:35] Go ahead. Our guest is speaking.
Antti:
[51:38] And the time is also very interesting because science took huge leaps as well. Like combined just psychology and so on but also Einstein and quantum theories and That kind of surprised me when I was doing the research. Like for example, when I was doing the exams in the school, university, of course the exams had to be
Antti:
[52:10] I have information from during the late 20s, like 100 years ago. So I researched what people knew then. And it was kind of amazing that you are already talking about different universums and dimensions. And like Einstein is talking about quantum theory and like really wild stuff when thinking like it happened 100 years ago but they were already kind of dealing with those same things that we are like even now trying to figure out. So it was very interesting that I think one of the key points that why Lovecraft is so important, because he mixes the science in his works, that they are not supernatural demons, or in a way, they're not ghosts or angels. Or maybe they are or maybe just humans give those names to them. But yeah, it was a really...
Mike:
[53:35] They are and they aren't. They are in the sense that that's what people would have called those things. That was the name we gave to those things. And they aren't in the sense that maybe their origins are within the realm of science, which is a science we can't fathom at this point.
Antti:
[53:55] So, yeah, that's like, I think, the key point why it's so kind of interesting
Antti:
[54:02] and fun, the mythology that he created.
Tyler:
[54:06] So you're saying that the fish people are actually aliens, right? That's what I'm gathering.
Mike:
[54:12] I think they were here before.
Tyler:
[54:14] Trans-division.
Mike:
[54:15] We are the aliens.
Antti:
[54:17] Yeah.
Tyler:
[54:19] I love thinking about that kind of stuff. I love like, positing you know like david ike and his whole reptilian idea i'm like how do we know that some of the reptiles that would have been destroyed i mean we know we have surviving reptiles that didn't die at the end of the dinosaurs uh sorry jurassic age uh why couldn't some of them have gone on to become intelligent and if they had this many million years hundreds of millions of years to evolve you know why do they have to be aliens from some other planet why can't they be, infraterrestrials or whatever they call them or ultraterrestrials and it's the meaningless city, There's so much interesting stuff that Lovecraft touches on in regards to life coming from the ocean. Everything kind of harkens back to the water. And I find that...
Antti:
[55:12] Also, it's interesting that he didn't have a clear system or a mechanic, like a graph, but this is how it goes. There were this and this, and then this and this. He mixes the names and the events and there's no messy thing you can't kind of decipher it it kind of doesn't make sense and that's why it's I think more fun that you can't just kind of put it on labels and kind of
Mike:
[55:54] The label for that it's called The Unreliable Narrator
Antti:
[55:59] Which he
Mike:
[56:00] Did brilliantly the
Antti:
[56:02] Guy explaining
Mike:
[56:04] The story really doesn't know what happened and sometimes he thinks he knows what happened but as the reader you actually see what actually happened and it's not what the guy was seeing the case of Carl's Dexter Ward is maybe the best example of that and I thought that was just a brilliant piece of literature because of
Antti:
[56:24] That yeah i think in in the game it was fun that you could kind of just toss stuff in it and and mention like um wild things and and you can just like with a couple of sentences you just throw some idea there and and mention some weird planet or or creature and and uh it kind of It's this atmosphere and that the player starts to try to connect the dots, but it was like a perfect game to incorporate all of these different Lovecraft elements and names and stories, a hint about other stories as well.
Tyler:
[57:17] So i mean i'm interested aside from lovecraft maybe growing up or just whatever like what are the other authors other movies films tv shows whatever things that influence you and things that capture your imagination that may have made their.
Antti:
[57:34] Way into this um Well, I was born in the 80s, so the Finnish entertainment then was really, I don't know, I didn't enjoy it that much. It was like you know farmers drinking vodka and shouting so of course I was born with I was looking at you know he-man and transformers and that was completely those things just arrived in Finland Did
Tyler:
[58:16] You guys have GI Joe in Finland?
Antti:
[58:19] No I don't think or it was it called Action Force I think I think it was a little bit too American thing, but He-Man was more universal. I think it worked better. But of course, all the great 80s films like Terminator, Robocop, which is my first one, is probably in my top five movie list.
Antti:
[58:54] Like those kind of stuff maybe then a little bit later on I got a lot of the rings as a first gay present when I was like 13 and I really really loved it, it was a tough thing to get through as a kid but I started to read once a year, I read it, I don't know So I had a habit of reading it once a year at least, I don't know, six, seven times. And I read all the Silmarillion and all those. I was playing role-playing games as well, like Hero Quest, Rune Quest, and the Middle Earth and things like that. At some point, I think I discovered Lovecraft as a teenager. It was mentioned in some gaming magazine, and I went to the library and found a couple of books and read those, and I was just blown away as well. I had never read anything like that.
Antti:
[1:00:17] He was so cleverly mixing real stuff into his works that I remember I went to a local library in the city. I was in the small village I was born and was trying to find if they have the Necronomicon there. I was disappointed that they didn't have it. Yeah, like all sorts of fantasy.
Antti:
[1:00:49] This good, exciting stuff. And then a little bit later on, I found maybe David Lynch and Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. And those are really big things for me yeah, films like that are probably that have influenced me I was curious, I mean,
Tyler:
[1:01:21] We talked a couple of times now about David Lynch, and the sound design in the game is so good. David is always spot on with sound design. If you're watching The Elephant Man with the machinery and all that stuff, or Eraserhead, even Twin Peaks, the sound is sometimes more important than what's on the screen. And I really love the way that he would handle that stuff. And your game also really plays into a lot of the sound cues and things, hearing the rat rustling around at night or a bang going on or whatever. It's so good. Was that a big influence on you at all?
Antti:
[1:02:00] Well, I think the sound thing, because I've made films and understand how important the sound is. Like somebody said that the movie theater if there's something wrong with the with the image of of the movie like people will they don't mind that much but if there's something wrong with the sound they will get upset and will stand up and say that you have to fix this so sound is very important and and because um it's also kind of uh um well very effective and kind of most effective way to create tension and and make this atmosphere like a horror game uh sound is so so important So I had a sound designer in my game, my friend who had worked on some of the films I had made before. I asked him if he was interested and luckily he joined. And he made all those wonderful ambient sounds for each location and was really good at that stuff.
Antti:
[1:03:24] So, yes, sound was very important early on, and of course, the music.
Antti:
[1:03:33] And I wanted that the music has this, because there are day cycles, day, night, evening, so that the music would change during the day, and in the daytime, it's quite happy, but in the night, it's like horror film.
Tyler:
[1:03:54] Music yeah yeah mike made this program called anomalies it's like available on steam and it basically lets you like sort of screw around with these different synthesizer settings that makes a 3d anomaly of some kind in space and the sound of that whatever that would be makes this pseudo creepy music and then a lot of his scores for his games are like him pulling stuff from that And I think that's so interesting, because it has this...
Antti:
[1:04:29] Go ahead. Is it on Steam?
Mike:
[1:04:34] Yeah, that was my first released game on Steam. And it was kind of an experiment in game design in that I didn't really have a design. I just kind of started with a thing and then I would see if I could do something with that thing. And if it worked, I would keep it. And if it didn't work, I would drop it. And I just kept adding sort of features randomly until it is what it is. It wasn't going to make any noise originally. It wasn't going to move. Like all of those things just kind of got added as I went along.
Tyler:
[1:05:11] Yeah.
Mike:
[1:05:13] It was a long way to design something, but commercially, I don't know how
Antti:
[1:05:19] That would go.
Tyler:
[1:05:19] What's cool about it is that you can, you know, if you're looking for creepy, weird-sounding music that doesn't play by the rules, you know, and you want the ambiance of a place that doesn't play by the rules, like a weird, you know, planet in Star Explorers, for instance, or now in the dream world, in the underworld, and all that kind of stuff, same thing.
Antti:
[1:05:43] One thing, I don't know, maybe I could have used it. One tricky thing was that in Lovecraft's work, there is the idiot guard at the center of the universe. And it said that there's this piping, this maddening piping around it. I guess like flutes. And I was trying to search. I was thinking like trying to search that has somebody tried to make that like like so that it would seem and sound like horrible or like really scary and chaotic and weird. But i i didn't find like anyone who had right that and i was thinking that it would be cool to include that but uh maybe it was a too big challenge to try to kind of capture that uh idea a
Mike:
[1:06:48] Lot of people think
Antti:
[1:06:49] Yeah go
Tyler:
[1:06:51] Ahead you go ahead i.
Mike:
[1:06:52] Mean anomalies didn't set out with that in mind but i suppose that could be one interpretation of the result you get i
Tyler:
[1:07:02] Was gonna say a lot of folks think that lovecraft invented as a thoth but that is not necessarily the case the zaza sauce was sort of the word that would get used to describe the the zero of the sephirot.
Antti:
[1:07:21] Or if you're counting
Tyler:
[1:07:23] In kabbalistic numbers like the fool or the the idiot i don't know what it would be called depending on what language you're in but yeah in the tarot like the the zero card the fool is is basically that same idea and at the center of the universe or also as the as the zero it would be like undefined just the the idiot idea being like that there is no definition of it and he plays with that a lot he he did a lot of research into the occult for someone who was so scared of it which is probably why he went crazy and, maybe maybe wrote all of these warnings and all of his stories to tell other people like don't do what i'm doing it's bad like i'm i'm really losing it over here uh i can't even leave my mom's house oh my gosh but.
Antti:
[1:08:11] I don't know where he got those ideas. I think, well, if we talk about Lovecraft, I think it might be that people imagine that he was some dark, brooding, I don't know, maniac who was lurking around. Well, I haven't done so much research, but it's evident that he had a lot of events. He wrote a lot of letters to other authors, and they had their own groups. He wrote a crazy amount of letters. It was like, I don't know, some ridiculous number, 100,000 or something like that. yeah
Tyler:
[1:09:06] He and robert e howard were like best pals pen pals yeah.
Antti:
[1:09:10] Um so so like if you are so active communicating with people and and discussing things and ideas and like uh like you are not you can't be totally out of your mind if you are active socially I think
Mike:
[1:09:33] I think any creative person I mean I wouldn't say any creative some creative people are probably crazy by the dictionary definition but
Tyler:
[1:09:43] I prefer the word enlightened inspired you might say I.
Mike:
[1:09:48] Think it gives your brain something to do that would prevent you from going crazy so to speak if
Tyler:
[1:09:55] You are suffering from schizophrenia I mean you have an overwhelming amount of dopamine flowing through your brain, which is just like if you're tripping on acid. Like if you take a bunch of cocaine or acid, more so psychedelics than stimulants,
Tyler:
[1:10:11] but that's exactly what it's doing, is flooding your brain with dopamine. Or in the case of MDMA, it would be serotonin, which doesn't give you hallucinations, it gives you what they call hyper-empathy.
Antti:
[1:10:28] But still, you're
Tyler:
[1:10:28] It it's not like you're experiencing something that isn't real it's just your your brain is doing something that it doesn't usually do.
Antti:
[1:10:37] So if you're calculating
Tyler:
[1:10:40] Infinity or in lovecraft's case you're you know like dreaming up all these crazy ideas it's not necessarily that they aren't we touched on this earlier about talking about the the entities that are represented and everything it's like who knows if they're real or not it's just that most of the time your brain in its dormant state is not in touch with whatever that is nowadays people are you know a lot of young people are taking like dmt um and they're they're all like reporting seeing the same things like i see these elves and they're they're telling me you know like come with me follow me let me show you this look at this um it's like if they weren't real to some extent how are all these different people having the same experience and that's a big question i think i would love to have low craft's opinion on he'd probably say don't do that bad i'm like that naturally i don't.
Antti:
[1:11:32] Yeah like um like i feel that uh well if you're an artist you the the The biggest thing is that you do the work, like it's so much work and you have to be, like inspiration is great, but ultimately it's that you just do the work, you grind and do the stuff. And if you are not feeling well, you can't do the work, I think.
Antti:
[1:12:08] So, for example, if I made the game eight years, most of time it's just work. You have to sit down and spend the day drawing some doorknob or a piece of board or some very mundane lamppost. It might take a day to get that damn lamppost, right? Yeah, so it's not so, how to say, romantic, the creating process necessarily. So that's kind of why it's kind of interesting to me because Lovecraft didn't do drugs or didn't drink or smoke Okuo was kind of a square, if I understand correctly, but still had these really wild visions and ideas and dreams. He took lots of stuff from his dreams. So that's kind of interesting that you are so kind of... You might look so really kind of boring, but inside your mind there is all sorts of things happening.
Tyler:
[1:13:33] I wanted to talk about inspiration in general, and I'll do a little etymology on the word inspire, meaning to breathe into, to have the breath of God approach you. Are you guys familiar with the idea of the muse with its connotations to creativity?
Antti:
[1:13:54] Vaguely. Yeah, maybe vaguely.
Tyler:
[1:13:57] I think you and I probably talked about it before, Mike, but there's that wonderful book, The War of Art, and the gentleman that wrote that talks a lot about the the hellenistic archetype of the muses you know the the things that come along and give you ideas and i think that whether that's true or not is a very useful way at least for me to think about creativity like i i used to kind of like sit myself down and try to force myself to be creative and then i think over time i started to think about it more and more like i should just act when it happens like i try to think about it like waves on the ocean like you can't just go out there and decide you're gonna surf you wait for a wave to come and then you get on it and you ride it for as long as you can and then when it crashes you paddle back out and try to do it again um and that's helped me a lot but in terms of the the word inspire like like respirate
Tyler:
[1:14:53] comes from the same root spire so to to rebreathe you Breathing is what we do. And then inspire is like the idea, though, that something is being given to you, like breathe into you. But when you guys are working, whether that be on games or films or fine art or whatever it is that you're doing, how do you experience inspiration?
Antti:
[1:15:22] Do you want to start? he does I can tell I'm happy to go
Mike:
[1:15:31] First but I would definitely wait if you had something to say first
Antti:
[1:15:37] Go ahead I will form my idea
Mike:
[1:15:41] That's fine for me I would say the inspiration side can give you a direction, it can give you a starting point But like you were saying, it's getting down to the work that's going to make that thing come into being to get it complete so others
Antti:
[1:16:03] Can experience it.
Mike:
[1:16:05] You kind of have to have both. And I think that's pretty much any activity. You need to be inspired with an idea to do an experiment in a scientific setting. Right you have to have some kind of direction first before you can get to the science and other things well here's a here's
Tyler:
[1:16:25] A question like if you are setting out to make a new painting do you just decide all right i'm gonna paint something and then put it on paper and see where that takes you or do you like wait until something you see or hear is like aha and then go right.
Mike:
[1:16:43] Um i usually have those moments and then catch something quickly or write something down if it's a game idea and so i can have a backlog of ideas that i can go to but they don't always you know get made into the full uh into a full game sometimes just to prototype and realize oh this isn't that fun or this is way too challenging for me right now i'd have to put it on the back burner uh
Antti:
[1:17:15] Yeah for me maybe um like um well for example like i said how i got the idea to make this game was that i had already started to think about making a game uh i had started one and then abandoned it but the idea kind of was hovering inside my head i was doing other stuff but it constantly was there kind of bouncing around. And then when I read the Grims in the Witch House, then it was kind of like a snap. I guess that was, I don't know if it was an inspiration, but that was an idea, a very strong idea.
Antti:
[1:18:03] And now because I did the first game, I had no experience, so I just started to make the game. I started from the first room and kind of I didn't have any rules, just adding more stuff, and the game started to kind of come alive, and things started to kind of make sense. But now, like I'm making my next game, Dunwich Horror, this time I kind of had to... Okay, like this time, let's be more professional. Let's write a Bible for the game. And I started to write it and then I started to write the story but like how to make the adaptation and it was really kind of difficult and I had kind of troubles I couldn't get very like
Antti:
[1:19:06] Excited about it it didn't I wasn't excited I was kind of doing work and it didn't feel that good and I didn't think the ideas felt that good. So I noticed that when I started, then I decided, okay, I need to draw at least one background first to see what Danwich would look like. And when I drew the background, things started to happen. Then I decided, okay, let's make a one citizen of Danwich. And then when I started to work on that, more ideas started to come, and this time it was more fun, and I kind of noticed that, like some point-and-click adventure game makers say that they write the whole thing first. They have the whole game in paper before they write even a line of code it sounds really nice and good but I found that it didn't work for me that I had to I had to kind of start to make the game and then ideas start to come and
Antti:
[1:20:27] Like fun little things happen and and give new directions to the game. I have a general outline of what will happen, but I like that there is this sense of inspiration and improvising. It's not locked, and I'm just filling the blanks. And now that I'm still making the game on my own, I can do that. Nobody is saying that you can't do that. So, I don't know if I answered your question, but to sum it up,
Antti:
[1:21:10] maybe it's easier for me if I see something visual and then ideas start to come to me.
Tyler:
[1:21:19] Yeah, I get that. Definitely just seeing something that sparks a train of thought. It might not even be really related to what you end up with, but it's just like, oh, that's interesting. And then it makes you think of something else and there's like this this chain reaction of events that lead to whatever you're ultimately going to create definitely can relate to that i have a i have a big habit when i'm especially writing like right now i'm probably not supposed to talk about it but i'm writing a a script for a game and i me and my writing partner will constantly kind of come to this like what should we name that or what should we call this and then we're like we won't know and i'll say all right well we'll just i'll just write something and be like okay if if nothing else occurs to us that's the name and if something else comes along that we're like that's better we'll just stick it in but like i it a it keeps me moving and be like i'm really just open to the idea like if it's meant to be something else it will occur to us and then there are those times where it's like after everything's done you're like oh i missed out on a great opportunity but it i just try to think about it like it was it was meant to be what it was and i don't beat myself up about it whereas when i was first starting out i think in creative writing i definitely found myself uh getting stuck on i don't i don't know what this little detail is and i can't move past it i try not to be caught in that anymore.
Antti:
[1:22:44] Yeah i i think they say that you kind of first you kind vomit the text on the paper. Just do the worst thing. Just make the words and It will, you know, better and things start to evolve. But if you start with the idea, okay, this will be the greatest thing ever. And the first sentence has to be the best sentence ever written, then you are stuck.
Tyler:
[1:23:16] I definitely found, like, when you're taking exams, you know, and your teacher tells you to, like, if you don't know the answer, just skip the question and come back to it later. And especially um in math but in a lot of things i would do that and then something else that i'm doing would be like aha that's what i forgot that one little detail i need to go back and fix that um so i just try to approach everything like that like if i come to a part of the story where i don't know what to write and i'm like okay i'm gonna write that right now and then i'll do something else and then maybe that fills into blank like oh well if i'm doing this then maybe this would be an appropriate way to segue from point A to point B.
Antti:
[1:23:54] Yeah, and same thing happened a little bit because we had the baby and then it made a pause for the game development that I had many hours in the night when I was trying to watch over the baby or something. The ideas are still kind of in the head moving around and I got a couple of really good ideas it's I was stuck with some problems, but when there was this pause, it kind of, yeah, I got those missing pieces because of it. I didn't try to, I could have, you know, banged my head against the wall and try to think the solution, but the solution came just like unexpectedly deadly at some night watching the baby.
Tyler:
[1:25:01] Right.
Mike:
[1:25:02] One of the skills I've picked up over the years is knowing when to get up and stop. Because so many times the solution comes when you're doing something else. If you keep trying to fix something, you're somehow blocked.
Tyler:
[1:25:19] Usually the idea comes to me when I'm doing something that prevents me from going and writing it down, like taking a shower or on the toilet or something.
Mike:
[1:25:26] Go for a walk, go clean the dishwasher out, whatever it is. I'll just be like, oh, I'm in one of those points. I need to get up,
Antti:
[1:25:36] Get out of my office,
Mike:
[1:25:38] Do anything. And then by the time I come back, I have the solution. And it's almost like a process now. It's almost systemized. I'm not going to say it is because I still get stuck. And it takes me a while to realize that I'm stuck. but much better than it used to. I would spend weeks on things and not be able to resolve them.
Antti:
[1:25:59] Yeah, that's annoying when it happens. Yeah. And I think every time, at least for me, it's a struggle. It's never just fun and games. It's kind of you are battling the things that you are making.
Mike:
[1:26:23] Speaking of, the last game jam I entered was a roguelike. And I had seven days to make my roguelike. And I thought, oh, it would be neat if I did this cool kind of perspective where the character is kind of going over the curvature of the Earth. And I think later on I realized Animal Crossing uses a similar viewpoint. And the first... Yeah, there's certain ones. Galaxy. The first six days were spent just getting that to work. There was no game, but I did finally get it to work, which was nice.
Antti:
[1:27:04] I might have seen it somewhere on social. Did you post? Probably on my
Mike:
[1:27:10] Blue Sky account, yeah. Yeah, I might
Antti:
[1:27:12] Have seen it, yeah. Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:27:15] So pretty quickly, I think, after Dunwich came out, you secured funding to do... Sorry, Dreams in the Witch House came out, you secured.
Antti:
[1:27:24] Funding to do the
Tyler:
[1:27:25] Dunwich Horror. And you've alluded to a lot in this conversation that it won't be the same type of game, but can you tell us anything about it, What do you expect from it?
Antti:
[1:27:35] Well, first of all, I got some funding to it, but it's for nine months' work. So it won't cover the whole game, but it's a very, very good start. In those times, I had nothing. So I'm really, really happy about that. It's called Finnish. How do you translate it? It's called Suomen Kulttuurirahasto in Finnish, but I can't remember the English. Finnish cultural funding, something like that. So, yeah, I'm really grateful for them. And I think if I didn't have gotten that grant, I wouldn't have started to make the game, I think. Because i know that it's like now i know that it's so big and you are going to sacrifice many years of your life making it and and there's no guarantees that it will the dreams in the witch house wasn't that successful that i could just you know do whatever i want next 10 years I still have to pay the bills but it's a good start
Antti:
[1:29:02] So yes of course I want the Dunwich Horror to feel like a similar game as streams into Witch House so that people who enjoyed that game feel like home when playing this but the story kind of dictates the mechanics and Dreams in the Witch House I had I didn't just slap those survival mechanics on top of it like some I think somebody said that in some negative Steam review that survival mechanics are just to get more
Antti:
[1:29:48] Playtime out of the game or something like that but no they were in the story and they were a critical part of it and they were from the one in the game. But that was like a student simulator in a way. Now, Dunwich Horror is basically like a monster hunting story. There's a group of main characters who are hunting for some weird, weird, amazing, chaotic being. In the wilds of Dunwich. So I don't want this kind of epic chase that somebody says that, you know, I got a cold, let's go home.
Antti:
[1:30:45] So probably you won't get sick in that game, for example. There are, I think there are health and sanity I don't want to say too much because things are still moving many things haven't been locked down but I guess that there will be there won't be so many of these survival things in Dreams into Witch House there will be some because it's like a chase and hunt for the monster so everything that reinforces that idea try to bring like the day cycles and the weather and things like that yeah that's
Tyler:
[1:31:35] Really cool did you see the Nicolas Cage Color Out of Space adaptation?
Antti:
[1:31:42] I think it was pretty good I think it was surprisingly good because I think I didn't have that my hopes of course it's not a direct adaptation I really loved the original story but this film is a little bit of its own thing but I still enjoyed it I had no problems with it
Tyler:
[1:32:13] Have you ever been to New England?
Antti:
[1:32:17] No I've been the only time I was in USA was like when was the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival so I was in Portland for I guess three days or something like that.
Tyler:
[1:32:35] Oregon or Maine?
Antti:
[1:32:38] Which one is it? It's like in the In the West, no, no, West, yes, West Coast.
Tyler:
[1:32:48] Yeah, in Portland, Oregon. Yeah, okay.
Antti:
[1:32:50] Yeah, yeah.
Tyler:
[1:32:52] Yeah, it's opposite of New England.
Antti:
[1:32:54] Yeah.
Tyler:
[1:32:55] One of the things that I really liked about that movie is just how they portray the area, the setting, which would be essentially the same area as Dunwich.
Tyler:
[1:33:03] I've personally actually never been to New England, so I'd like to go visit one day.
Antti:
[1:33:06] It looks amazing, like when I studied the images and it looks really nice and kind of massive, those mountains and forests, and it looks really great. yeah
Tyler:
[1:33:23] Did so do you think that i'm assuming it's still a point-and-click.
Antti:
[1:33:29] Game but
Tyler:
[1:33:30] Are you trying to kind of capture like large swaths of land or are we talking about walking kind of like frame to frame in the woods or seen seen.
Antti:
[1:33:40] By like the i would say that the map screen is in big part but I think I want to try something a bit different with the map screen that like in Dreams in the Witch House you just click and then you are transported to that place so I think there will be like traveling maybe on the map and maybe something unexpected happens on the way and like you I don't know, maybe you accidentally bump into the monster before you are equipped to do that and this kind of events might happen i yeah i don't want to reveal too much but i think the map screen will be important and to kind of give sense of the the wilds the the hills and the forests and so so you when you travel there you are like uh like uh on like on your own or maybe risk something nasty might happen what does the
Tyler:
[1:35:06] Dunwich monster look like in your mind.
Antti:
[1:35:11] I can't tell you well first of all I can't tell you because I haven't drawn it yet but I tried to try to do a faithful adaptation of the story so So I won't be changing it too much. It's a bit tricky. I think it's a more difficult story to adapt compared to Dreams and Witches. Because in Dreams and Witches, you have a protagonist, a student. Most people can relate to him and...
Antti:
[1:35:54] In Dunwich Horror, there is a group of people, three persons, and in the short story, basically the biggest part of the book is Lovecraft tells the history of Dunwich and the Waitleys. And the main characters kind of jump into action in the ending or the end part and they kind of do their thing and all is well and of course that won't work in a game or in a film so it has to be called otherwise and I think I have a pretty clever idea how to do it but I don't want to tell it yet but basically it's about changing the where to tell those stuff where to tell the background in a game so that it's not just kind of boring that you read or narrator tells something to the player but how to make it like active and make the player figure out these things more herself.
Tyler:
[1:37:20] Was it your decision to do this particular story, or was it like a commission?
Antti:
[1:37:27] Yes, it was my idea. I think because it's hinted in the Dreams in the Witch House, and I was kind of like putting some elements of the Dino Witch horror in Dreams and Witch House. If you read all the, you might like read about the Wakeleys already in Dreams and Witch House examining the Miskatonic University. So basically it's like it's not a sequel, but it tells what Professor Armitage did when he kind of disappeared from the game. He had his own adventure. So this links really closely to that game. So I consider them to be kind of twins in a way. Yeah, like they should make a nice combination
Mike:
[1:38:36] Very clever. Sorry. He leaves for a week or something during Dreams in the Witch House. That's like Gandalf leaving the Hobbit and having his home.
Antti:
[1:38:48] Yeah, exactly. Great. But again, it wasn't a clear idea when I was doing Dreams in the Witch House that the next game will be that. But I think I had some idea, maybe like a joke idea in my mind, that it would be to make a sequel.
Antti:
[1:39:16] I don't know. I think there might have been a couple of ideas. But it felt really a logical thing to do, because these are linked so much. And you have the same characters appear in both of the games. And many people have said that, why don't you do Shadow over Innsmouth, for example, which might be Lovecraft's best. At least I think if I should recommend Lovecraft to somebody, I would say read Shadow over Innsmouth because it's so great. It's so kind of simple and perfect in a way, really exciting and scary and fun. But there's been already games made from that story. And the Dark Corners of the Earth game in early 2000s. It did the Innsmouth part perfectly, I would say. It was really, really good. So I feel that it has been done already. So it's more interesting to do something that hasn't been done yet.
Tyler:
[1:40:40] Mike wrote an article where he was kind of comparing all of the different video
Tyler:
[1:40:44] games that have done Lovecraft's adaptations. And I'm curious like aside from of course your own what are the ones that stick out to you as good adaptations.
Antti:
[1:40:58] Yeah well like I said the Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth is one of my favorites like the escape from the Gilman house the motel giving
Mike:
[1:41:14] Me flashbacks man
Antti:
[1:41:17] It's spot on it's perfect it's uh yeah it's you can't trust that like even with it's
Tyler:
[1:41:26] On sale for $1.64 right now holy shit.
Antti:
[1:41:30] Alright I've heard
Mike:
[1:41:32] Get it on GOG not Steam why is that it has some unresolved issues on Steam and I think the GOG version has like a community made patch that allows you to actually play the game
Tyler:
[1:41:46] Gotcha I'll put that on my list of things.
Antti:
[1:41:49] It would be great if the game would get like a nice remake like a little bit polished it doesn't have to be nothing fancy but just fix the box and maybe make it a little bit more pretty and it would be perfect yeah so that's one I really like the ending is a little bit more in full and there was some parts, but I still enjoyed the whole game. As a kid, I played the first Alone in the Dark, and I felt that was kind of Lovecraftian. There were some images.
Antti:
[1:42:37] I remember that the sky was full of ice or something. At least I had this kind of image in my head. It's really kind of powerful. I liked that. They were like newer. I bought the Call of Cthulhu game, which was more like based from the role-playing game, I think. Yeah. In, I don't know, five years ago or something. I think it was okay, but it was nothing special, I think. So I don't know. like many games just take elements from Lovecraft's thing there hasn't been that many straight adaptations and maybe I feel that because I have no I can do what I want because I have no money or like a big studio pressure or commercial pressure I think my advantage can be that I try to stay faithful to the original story because most of the big games can't do that because it might be bad business
Antti:
[1:43:58] Because they are difficult to adapt and yeah it's if there's a lot of money involved you try to avoid risks but yeah
Mike:
[1:44:11] Did you play The Sinking City?
Antti:
[1:44:14] Yes, I played that. I liked that quite a bit. Yes, I did finish it. I think it was solid. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a groundbreaking one.
Mike:
[1:44:32] Yeah, I thought it had a neat open-world detective thing that they did really well. And then there were other aspects of the game that were a little rougher they seemed unfinished almost you kind of feel the studio breaking apart at that point
Antti:
[1:44:51] But there's no second yeah absolutely, I'm excited about it yeah, looks good I hope that it's even better than the first one and then there is I started to play the Shadow of the Comet I didn't get very far when I kind of I don't know, lost interest or got stuck or something like that Maybe I would watch a playthrough of the game instead I
Tyler:
[1:45:30] Think that for me, it's called Against the Black Priory of recent stuff?
Antti:
[1:45:36] Yes, I have it.
Tyler:
[1:45:39] Yeah. He's like north of you in Norway, but on the part that's like Hammerfast area somewhere. Al, I love that guy. He's a really, really great guest and just a good dude in general. But that game...
Antti:
[1:45:53] He was your guest?
Tyler:
[1:45:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got into Skald probably, I don't know, 2021, 22. Whenever he announced it I got really it I was like oh yeah I definitely want to play that and talk to Al and, I'm going to have him on again later I know that he has new things going on that I'm probably not supposed to know about so I'll wait but yeah he's fantastic and that game blew my I think of the last year it was my favorite game period at least in the CRPG party based RPG area it's the best thing since Pillars of Paternity for me, but I'm a Baldur's Gate nerd I love that stuff yeah.
Antti:
[1:46:38] It's a good game and I guess it was quite successful I hope like the next game as well
Mike:
[1:46:51] Yeah are they working on another one
Tyler:
[1:46:54] I don't.
Antti:
[1:46:55] Know we don't know I have no idea but I would hope so certain
Mike:
[1:47:03] Okay yeah well
Tyler:
[1:47:05] Mike you've not played it right.
Mike:
[1:47:07] I've played it i played through the demo and i own the game and i i'm i played it enough to know that i want to make a game like it i
Tyler:
[1:47:18] Would love to come where i'm at on that.
Mike:
[1:47:20] Yeah i do want to get back into it but i want to finish my my
Antti:
[1:47:25] Game which is
Mike:
[1:47:25] Pretty heavily inspired by it um just because i played a lot of those old CRPGs. Just seeing it made me realize, oh, I have a whole library of games I could draw from, but I didn't think it was possible for some reason. I didn't see that opportunity, which I'm so glad that they did open that up.
Antti:
[1:47:52] I don't want to spoil it.
Tyler:
[1:47:53] I have so much to say about that game.
Mike:
[1:47:54] But I'll let you know. Yeah, I need to
Antti:
[1:47:56] Finish it at some
Mike:
[1:47:57] Point.
Tyler:
[1:47:58] It's got twists and turns.
Antti:
[1:48:00] Bro.
Tyler:
[1:48:00] It's an amazing story. It's so good. And... Go ahead.
Mike:
[1:48:06] I am playing through Ultima 4 right now.
Antti:
[1:48:09] Oh, wow.
Mike:
[1:48:10] Because I played Ultima 5 when I was very young. And I realized I never played any other Ultimas. And 4 is always considered kind of the breakthrough one. So I feel obligated to kind of... But it's amazing. But please continue about Skald.
Antti:
[1:48:26] I want to... I'm so kind of... Kind of jealous of Skalder and games like that because of the graphics you can you don't have to do animations for all the different things that you pick up a stick from the ground and it will take one day to make the animation and lots of work but when the In plays like that, maybe there is a sound effect, and bling, you pick it up. I'm so jealous that you can just do it and not lose your energy doing those animations. You can put more
Mike:
[1:49:18] Focus and energy in the story and the mechanics, and you don't have to make everything graphically.
Antti:
[1:49:26] Yeah, exactly. For most of my life i've been telling
Tyler:
[1:49:32] Other people like talking about what the best games ever are and i'm like you have to play balder's gate like hands down and i'm i thought it came out before i was even born i think you know i was just in love with it and then when balder's gate 3 came out so many of my friends were like this is the greatest game ever made bro and i was like okay but then i i would they were like well what what other games are even like it i'm like are you fucking retarded or something like what's wrong with you like there's so many games that like not that Baldur's Gate 3 is amazing it's really really good don't get me wrong it does some really impressive things but I mean in the world of party-based RPGs it's to me it's like it's the best one in a while but it's not like the best of all time and then I like I had a friend who had actually like been one of these people that was just telling me you got to play Baldur's Gate 3 you gotta play Baldur's Gate 3 and I played it and I'm like yeah it's one of the better, ones of these and I pointed him towards Skald I'm like you have to play this dude like this is the best one sent like pillars of eternity i think before it was probably the high water mark for me, but scald is like as you said it's so simple and then it lets you just get so immersed in the story it has all like almost a bite-sized version of every mechanic that you would see in in these bigger versions of.
Antti:
[1:50:45] The same thing where
Tyler:
[1:50:46] You you know you have these like subtle little side missions like finding a dog or whatever and then like this person in this village has you know some connection to another thing, but just more digestible and lets you focus on some of the more esoteric things that are in the storyline, and that's what I loved about it. You know, it's not overwhelming.
Antti:
[1:51:06] Some of those new games I have so little time to play anything so I would love to someday play the new Baldur's Gate but I know just that I can't can't like like right now I'm playing Stalker 2 I know that's Mike you are a big fan of the Stalker games have you played it yourself?
Mike:
[1:51:34] Oh, yeah, yeah, I got it.
Tyler:
[1:51:36] I bought it.
Mike:
[1:51:36] Two years ago or something before, you know, the clan.
Antti:
[1:51:41] Oh, wow. It's just, like, again, like maybe half an hour every couple of days.
Mike:
[1:51:49] Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of the same. I play it on the weekends.
Antti:
[1:51:53] Yeah, but the atmosphere when you are, like, walking there, it's amazing. and the graphics like desolation and ugliness has never looked so beautiful it's amazing I
Mike:
[1:52:15] Love it but not as much as the originals, the original games are better for a bunch of reasons I do love it, it's a different game though, I would say come and do it with an open open mind if you like the originals it's not
Antti:
[1:52:33] Exactly the same I felt like home so far I'm really pissed with the game
Tyler:
[1:52:46] To beat baller's gate before my my baby is born like that's that's my commitment i've made to myself and i'm 167 hours into the game.
Antti:
[1:52:54] On one campaign
Tyler:
[1:52:57] Like just it's such a like i said overwhelming game is so much you can do um and i'm one of these people that just when i start playing an rpg 12 hours go by and yeah i i know that the days of that are numbered or at least going to be shortened down to just like weekends when, my wife and baby are gone or something like that. But yeah, I'm trying to do that. It is tremendous though. It has so much to offer. But talking about Stalker, which is still something I have never played. I really need to do that. But Mike says I should play the vanilla version with no modifications. What do you think?
Antti:
[1:53:38] Yeah, probably. I went before playing this new game, I looked at some of the mods. I guess there's now a completely free Stalker game that has some kind of crazy big mod that you can just download. Is it called Anomaly?
Mike:
[1:54:01] Anomaly, yeah.
Antti:
[1:54:06] I tested it and I died instantly. really a rough time, so I'm happy that the new one is more... Bit casual, more casual. The first one's definitely only a couple of times the game has given me so strong kind of atmosphere and vibes than the Stalker games. I remember that in I can't remember which game it was, but I guess there was some kind of acid rain coming and And I crawled inside a pipe, and I saw that it was night, moon was out, and there was a hill. I was looking, I saw the silhouette of the hill and a pack of mutated wild dogs running on the hill in the moonlight. And I was just like, wow, this is something else.
Antti:
[1:55:09] And it was like an unscripted event. and just perfect little moment that nobody probably else didn't see but it was amazing so yeah that has left a big impact I like those like I tried to make
Antti:
[1:55:35] Have some of that you said emergent storytelling is it like that in English like that not scripted but when there's enough things happening at the same time it kind of
Antti:
[1:55:53] Tells the story in a way that was it's random so I tried to have a little bit of that in the dreams in the witch house as well but some events might happen in certain order that it would make a kind of strange and interesting combination.
Mike:
[1:56:17] That's one of the difficult-to-achieve things in game this year. I'm also trying to do that with my current project, but I don't know from there yet.
Antti:
[1:56:34] I wanted to have some random stuff in the game, but it can't be completely random, because it might be that one player has an amazing experience, but the other one has some like really lousy nothing happens so so there has to be really rules to the randomness that and and restriction how random it can be so yeah that requires a lot of work
Tyler:
[1:57:00] You got any ambitions of putting dreams in the witch house on consoles at all.
Antti:
[1:57:12] Of course it would be great but I guess I have a publisher for the game and I think it's not I don't think it's not a priority right now
Antti:
[1:57:33] And I could of course start to campaign in it myself and start to look into it or pay somebody money to make it but I don't know there's so many hours in a day that I don't want to I want to do something else than to focus putting it on consoles I want to do new stuff than to maybe someday when these both games are ready maybe then I would make a really kind of special editions or try to get them in many possible formats as possible but now I don't have energy to do that Like I know that some people, when you announce a game, there's always somebody who says that, will it be on Mac or will it be on Linux? And it's like, that's usually the first comment when you announce a game. Will it be on Mac?
Antti:
[1:58:42] And somebody told me that, okay, they made a game. Because people were asking about the Mac thing and they made the version, paid money for it and then maybe five persons bought it on Mac.
Antti:
[1:59:07] Making the game is so slow and you have only so little time you really have to decide where you put the time. Personally I'm in a perfect world it would be in every kind of machine the game but it requires resources or studio or money basically you'll
Tyler:
[1:59:35] Surely sell a lot more copies on the Nintendo Switch than you will on the Mac, Linux yeah sheer number of people using them there's a lot of like vocal minorities in the game audience that are just like, is it going to be on GOG is it going to be on Mac, on Linux on this or that and I'm like who gives a fuck like go buy a Windows PC if it's that big of a deal to you, because as you said you could put all this effort in and then only sell like five copies and that's ridiculous but people have Can I.
Mike:
[2:00:06] Ask the game tool that you used? I forgot what it was called
Antti:
[2:00:12] Adventure Game Studio
Mike:
[2:00:15] Do they have an easy-to-port system for these things?
Antti:
[2:00:21] No, I think you can port it into Linux. The demo was on Linux as well. It worked. But I guess that nowadays, if the game is on Steam, people with Linux and play it as well through Proton or something. I don't have the Linux myself, but I've heard that it should play without problems. So it's not so simple just to push a button and get... I think the Mac version would require a lot of effort and I'm not sure if I have energy to do it
Mike:
[2:01:12] Pretty much in the same boat as a solo developer. My bandwidth is not there for something like that. But if a game succeeds a lot and lots of money comes in, then that would become possible. You could pay someone to port it.
Antti:
[2:01:29] You know.
Tyler:
[2:01:30] Do a revenue split on the port.
Antti:
[2:01:32] Yeah.
Tyler:
[2:01:34] Be done with it. If it doesn't do super well on PC, it's probably not going to do super well. It's magic.
Antti:
[2:01:43] But I think Dreams
Tyler:
[2:01:45] Of the Witch House would do really well on something like the Nintendo.
Antti:
[2:01:48] For sure it's possible to even to get it running on your smartphone an Android phone with a little bit of trickery you can do it and the Adventure Game Studio has a kind of plugin for that so you can I think you can get running on Android as well I think in adventure games I think many have
Antti:
[2:02:23] Classically there is the two click interface that left click is the interaction right click is the look like when I was adventure games like that and of the 90s I think that was the basic system, or you had the verb interface that has had all the open talk to different commands. But now I see that many have switched to one-click interface because it's easier to port to smartphones and iPads and so on, so that you can just one click on your finger to the screen, it works well. Left click is a little bit difficult to implement.
Antti:
[2:03:20] But I think I have still... If I would adapt it to switch, it probably would need interface. I should redo the interface to one click interface.
Tyler:
[2:03:38] Yeah it can be done a lot of point and click games when they go onto consoles it has like a sort of instead of moving the cursor around it's just like jumping from usable item to usable item the downside of that is when you have something that you're supposed to find you know like you need to find this key that's under a ledge or whatever if you just click around and then it lands on the thing that you're supposed to find that that could be depressing but okay I don't know. There's got to be ways around it.
Mike:
[2:04:06] Either way, man. There's limitations. Anytime you incorporate a new interface, the game I'm making, I decided early on, I'm going to have mouse interactions, I'm going to have keyboard interactions, I'm going to also allow for controllers. But because I allowed for mouse, and specifically controllers, there's things I thought I might want to add to the game, but I can't now because it would require keyboard entry of things like solving riddles and stuff. You're always going to give and take a little bit whenever you make these decisions.
Tyler:
[2:04:46] Yeah, you've got to let people play Wheel of Fortune instead of typing. In Call of Surin, we have those riddle boxes where you have a limited amount of letters on there so you're not scrolling through 27 characters. Sure.
Mike:
[2:05:04] That's an approach well Antti,
Tyler:
[2:05:09] This has been really cool man I really appreciate your time and I love your game, I can't wait till Dunwich comes out you've been a tremendous game thanks.
Antti:
[2:05:19] This was fun yeah you probably need to wait a year or two or three or I promise it won't take long as the dreams in the witch house took but there's still A lot of stuff to do. Let's just make a deal.
Tyler:
[2:05:35] When you're ready to talk about it more in depth, you come back on the show.
Antti:
[2:05:39] We'll do this again. Yeah, why not? Yeah, sure. Maybe when I finally get the Steam page done and all your listeners can go and wishlist it and so on. That would be ideal.
Tyler:
[2:05:54] But for now, go buy Dreams in the Witch House and play the crap out of it.
Antti:
[2:05:58] And while you're at it, buy Cyclopean. It was very nice to see you, Tyler, and Mike as well, because I have talked with you on...
Music:
[2:06:08] Music
Antti:
[2:06:24] You so much
Tyler:
[2:06:24] To auntie and to mike for coming on the show i uh really can't recommend you go buy, dreams in the witch house and play it as much as i did already in the episode i guess but you should it's amazing it's really really really really really good uh in the world of love crafting and horror point and click adventures and survival games all together um also while you're at it grab Cyclopea in the Great Abyss by Mike.
Tyler:
[2:06:55] It's a great game. I also have nice things to say about that, but I did that in another podcast, so I won't waste your time here. Thank you to our Patreon supporters. Shannon, Ant, Michael, Fred, Brad, you guys rule. Could not do this without your loving support all these years. If you're out there and you want to become one of them, you can. InTheKeep.com support page. Join the Patreon. Or support in one of the other ways that you can. You can buy.
Antti:
[2:07:21] Me a book. you can leave us a
Tyler:
[2:07:23] Tip you can purchase some merchandise off of our merch store you can do all kinds of stuff there will be new merch very soon i swear i know i've been saying that for like months now but it's actually happening i hand to god might even be done by the time this comes out might not we'll see uh but it is being done jonathan shred is the person who composed this amazing theme song you're listening to you you should show him some love as well go check out Scythe dev team and all their amazing games and.
Antti:
[2:07:52] Buy all of his albums
Tyler:
[2:07:53] And tell him.
Antti:
[2:07:54] I sent you.
Tyler:
[2:07:55] Until next time, I love you.
Music:
[2:07:58] Music
