Thomas Randall (Randy) // Cherno Podcast #2

anyway i think we can just start right here welcome back to the podcast guys there you go randy bringing it home what's up guys welcome back to the chernobyl podcast the podcast without a schedule for those of you wondering it's been four and a half months since the last episode and i don't know where the next episode will be because it's all about finding a good guess like a quality guest like who we have here today as well as finding the time to just sit down and have a meaningful conversation today we have randy tell us about yourself yo i'm randy um that's all you really need to know i guess and we just like finished the podcast here no that's it i think we're pretty much done so randy has a youtube channel uh in which he's making videos making devlogs about a game that he's working on called arcane so you can start i guess by just discussing what that's all about what your plan is for that game how how how's it going the difficulties associated with that i mean there's just so much to talk about when it comes to making a game because it's just such a difficult task yeah i feel like we we have quite a bit to talk about here um and we kind of use that as a jumping off point so i've been i've been making a game for about i don't know five years now um and i kind of went into it just complete just complete beginner like this is my first ever game um and yeah so i started out in unreal engine and it was just it was it was really just an act of me googling how to make a game right and that was honestly just the first thing that i stumbled across and then so i got into the whole um unreal engine thing i think i um took some udemy course on it and uh kind of just followed along with that um and that was really my first um kind of that's that's why i first learned how to program it was in unreal engine just like dragging and dropping blueprints around so it wasn't really programming but it was visual programming and it kind of it it's what wrapped me it's what wrapped my head around the entire um the entire kind of like yeah well i guess it's like learning a new language basically um that's what it is so so so what made you wake up one morning and decide that let's say i'm gonna make a game were you like playing a lot of games at the time and you wanted to tell a story or yeah i was actually playing uh daisy standalone um i don't i don't know if you've heard of it but um that happened yeah so it's basically just this really horrible game all right well it's it's not horrible it got off to a good start it's just one of those early access games that is just continuously in early access and so i really got quite into it and i was playing it one day and i was like man the devs are just really not updating this game whatsoever i reckon i could do a better job so then i was dead i was like i'm i'm gonna go make my own game um and and and don't better and faster than these guys and um that's really just not how it turned out to be and uh i kind of have a little bit of sympathy for the daisy devs uh they're still quite slow though but um wait wait wait wait that's kind of like the zombie game daisy like the mod for armor yeah yeah oh no i know that yeah you said desi sorry my bad yeah no no i actually used to play a bit of daisy like back in the day yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so it was yeah it was a standalone version of that yeah they made a whole uh standalone version just i haven't played just on steam and it was like an early access that's right it was the stories they basically launched it and just didn't really do anything with it at all and it kind of stagnated yeah um and then i think they switched engines at one point and um just all that kind of stuff and then you know it went backwards and that it's it's it's kind of nice to draw that parallel because that's pretty much exactly what i did so i started off in unreal engine kind of built out this um kind of like a nice little prototype i wouldn't call it nice but it was definitely something right it was uh you could walk around there were assets there was there was a scene that was all that kind of stuff um but it just got to a point where it was so um just so poorly done because i literally started programming and had just learned everything so just the entire game was built out using um the visual scripting blueprints that unreal engine has yeah and um yeah it was uh the performance was horrible and it was just if i had kept building out that game it would have just crumbled and just been a really really shitty game um so yeah um at that point i was kind of like all right well i have to start again it's eva i started grand it yeah it's either i start again in a new um just in another just blank unreal project and kind of try and do it a bit better this time except build in c plus plus and try and be a bit more i don't know wise and yeah careful i guess would uh be a good word for it um so yeah so then i um somewhere along the way i want cbos plus um so yeah and seatbelts plus with unreal engine um is kind of just a nightmare in itself i didn't really know it at the time i was i was just like yeah this is just how it goes i guess and you compile takes what like absolutely ages to compile and um yeah it was just quite a horrible workplace but that did get my foot in the door for running c bus plus and um i actually googled how to learn t-bus plus and um i don't know if you heard of him but there was this guy um i think his name was like the channel or something and so i basically weren't sipping from you right and um you're literally my teacher you are who taught me programming um honored um so yeah and then i uh and i i just kind of worked my way through that um i remember the biggest help was your video on pointers and that's what really wrapped my head around pointers filmed in my parents kitchen yeah yeah yeah while they were away in europe [Laughter] yeah so um so that was good and then i uh and then i got into seaports for us i was kind of using that with um unreal engine yeah then i got to a point where i was like all right well i need to rebuild this again why don't i just try and make my own engine so then i actually followed your sparky series oh man and um old school yeah yeah and then and then kind of just went like one for one with that um kind of just like replicated the sparky engine um up to a certain point where i kind of just like launched off and did my own thing like where i had enough knowledge to kind of like know how to google stuff and uh just kind of just uh yeah do it myself but um that turned out horribly it was uh it was just filled with memory leaks it was all one object oriented and it was just um it was yeah it was just really poor code um but it was it was another step um i wouldn't say it was a step up from unreal because i took you know an existing game that i kind of had you know it was relatively stable in that engine albeit quite messy um and then just made it even worse and then yeah so um that was that was another step and then um so my artist at the time i uh i used to have a pixel artist and um uh so he was working for another guy called ryan fleury and uh i actually um kind of just met ryan that way um throughout pixel artist and he was making a game from scratch with his own engine uh he seemed to be doing quite well and he was actually just doing it all on c um and i don't know if you've heard about the uh handmade community mm-hmm yep yeah yeah so um yeah so he's actually weed on that now um cool um but yeah so he's kind of just taken the handmade philosophy and applied it to just that entire telescope engine that he has and then eventually yeah i was um i was kind of just sitting in my uh in my siblings lost engine that i kind of just threw together really horribly um and yeah i was really lost and i was like all right well i like engine programming it's nice to uh kind of just be in full control that way um but it's not really what i want to do you know i kind of set out on this whole game dev journey to make a game and i do prefer game design um over um kind of just game engine programming yep um so i was like all right well i'm not gonna completely reinvent the wheel myself someone's already kind of done that for me um why don't i just kind of see if ryan uh would be keen on letting me uh use his telescope engine and uh he was kind enough to let me do so and uh kind of since then it's been about two years since then and i was thrust into sea and um yeah just basically had to one see it was uh it was very very jarring because you go from c square sound into c and you just don't have any of the uh of the simplest plus standard library so like no string no vector and it really forces you to actually learn um how to program properly um just without relying on any of those as a crutch yeah because when i was first starting out you know i would uh i would look at vector and string and whatnot and um just not really understand how they work but just use them and be like yeah well i know that string gives me a string of um just a string of text that i can use and then vector that's a weight that's that's always store multiple objects you know um so yeah and then being thrust down into c it's like well now you've just got flat arrays and um just normal c strings and i kind of had to wrap my head around that but uh that was uh that was really good and of course the whole um you're not object oriented anymore yeah which is another like thing that i was very kind of shocked about um but um two years down the line um it's definitely for the better and i've just learned so much as a programmer and ryan has been just such an amazing mentor and um you were an absolute you're an absolutely amazing mentor for um kind of just getting my foot in the door with uh all that kind of seatbelt stuff and uh yeah thanks for that i guess thanks for your uh nice educational content happy happy to serve um i was gonna say that yeah regarding like the the c standard library versus the c plus standard library yeah like a lot of people would definitely agree that that's a bit of a blessing there not having things like vector things like string because they are getting better these days you know now we have like context per strings and various other ways to kind of uh not necessarily let's just say bear the full performance penalty of using some of these tools without properly knowing how but i think that like i'm always torn between like when i'm teaching someone fresh whether or not i should mention like implementation details and dive a little bit deeper into what the computer is actually doing because whilst a lot of people deliberately don't teach that because it's like a way to overcomplicate things for some people it's a way to simplify things because it shows them what's actually happening and the thing is you open up the string header file like it's huge right there's so much stuff going on so much template magic but at its core like it is and it obviously has a has a few strategies as to how it allocates memory as well but at its core it's really quite simple it's just a series of bytes of memory with usually a null termination character that is fixed it's it's it's immutable you can't change it and so when you do start changing it for example it may need to reallocate memory same with vector as well it has a very clear kind of if you look at the implementation it is implementation specific but it's got a very clear kind of strategy for how it's like oh i don't have room to store this new element that you're pushing back so i will now allocate a new buffer and try and copy or in more recent times move that existing memory over into some other place so i think not having that in c you know in in many ways has probably i would say you know thrown you into the deep end and accelerated that kind of lower level programming ability in you that long term especially someone who's working on a game where you have to be conscious of performance like i think that's that's definitely benefited you a lot exactly yeah and i mean like you said it's actually not that um i would honestly say that it's more simple to learn about c-strings than to even just touch scd string in general um so from like a beginner learning perspective i think just the way that we're teaching in general is um isn't really that good because we're kind of just throwing all of these abstraction layers at beginners and being like yeah well you just kind of take this for granted and just go use it um but if you just take like the just just like a little bit more of a step um and it doesn't have to be too like much more difficult at all you can you can teach c strings and just normal um uh just normal arrays and everything um quite nicely and uh and it's pretty intuitive once you do um start to get the hang of it um so yeah and it's just beneficial not in the in in the long run because that's actually how um how it works so why uh why go through the process of learning scd string and scd vector when you're eventually just gonna have to unload it and learn how it actually works to begin with um in just normalcy so yeah yeah i mean it it is a bit of a trade-off of like how much um how much you want to kind of throw at a beginner and not scare them off i guess um but i feel like there's definitely ways we can mitigate that and um kind of have a better curriculum overall yeah yeah yeah and it's interesting because like in our industry where like again performance is quite critical like the c plus standard committee and the library is not necessarily prioritizing performance over things like usability and like maintainability although to be honest to be fair i don't know how their code is obviously like so for those of you who don't know every compiler actually has its own standard library so it's not like the committee decides this is the implementation for string this is the implementation for vector it's kind of like with rendering apis like opengl and falcon they're a specification and then it's up to the gpu manufacturer in that case to actually take the specification and write code for their drivers that fits that specification and fulfills it properly same with c plus plus library so the microsoft visual studio compiler's implementation is quite different from gcc or clang and so because of that like again they do prioritize different things and some implementations are faster than others and it's because we're in this kind of real-time performance situation things like memory allocations are way less desired desirable than if you were writing some kind of offline conversion tool where maybe like it didn't matter too much i mean i could i i would argue that optimization is important in pretty much every aspect of programming but uh the point being that a lot of game engines as i think it's less so recently because the the tools have become better but especially like 10 years ago and with different platforms like playstation xbox like those the game studios behind those games and they're kind of engine technology they write their own data structures a lot of the time right so a good example is uh because i worked at ea eastl right that's kind of their standard template library that is actually on github for anyone to use that is specifically kind of created with optimization performance games in mind compared to something like the normal standard template library and the fact that if you are working in c you're forced to kind of create a lot of your own tools you could just use a library obviously like some other person's library and but i'm sure that telescope has so many things built in they probably have something for like strings they probably have something for like dynamic arrays maybe uh there's actually none of that um there you go it it it turns out that when you actually start thinking about this you don't even really need any of that i've like in my whole two years i've not once needed a dynamic array yep um you just allocate all your memory at the beginning of the program and you don't have to worry about freeing or just doing any of that um if you kind of just allocate everything at the start then you should be fine uh if things do need to get bigger it's either you change the fixed size that you do at the start because you run out of room and you know you're expanding your game or something or if you do truly need something dynamic it's really not that hard to yeah like you said just write your own tools for it but um yeah we don't actually have any of that in at the moment because we just haven't yet um all of the uh of the c string operations um just like the normal c standard for that um is really quite nice um yeah there's just plenty of stuff um yeah that that's actually an excellent point that's a step further than i thought um we were at but yeah absolutely pre-allocating like memory at the start of the program and then kind of diving into that pre-allocated chunk and doing whatever allocations you need sub-allocations i guess yeah that's that's an even better strategy and the thing is for most people i guess using c plus plus and using those tools available they wouldn't even be thinking about that i mean in hazel in my answer like we don't we've done zero like custom memory allocation and it's not necessarily like i'm aware a lot of people are like oh did you know that this is far yes i know that that's fast i know that's proper but it's also about kind of well for us it's about priorities and about like you know let's maybe do the optimization when we actually know the environment that we're optimizing because it's more or less complete but um you know the thing is if i was using c and if i was doing that i may have paid closer attention to that which maybe would have shifted my kind of priorities in my roadmap a little bit so like it's i don't know it's interesting because these tools like having them available like to me a lot of the stuff that i've been using from the c plus standard library has been temporary in my mind but maybe that's a bad thing maybe that's that's kind of that's almost like it's encouraging me to just slack off a little bit and be like i'll get but i'll get back to that later you know let me just use these as a crutch to just get stuff done which again is it's it is a good thing but it can also be a bad thing yeah exactly like that's um that's pretty much just exactly what i've gone through like it was um yeah and it is really all right so if you look at it from this perspective like just that entire kind of mindset can be wrapped up in if you go look at my first video arcane dev vlog number one um it's a whole lot more complete than my way to step or complete right um in terms of just features like it looks like an actual game yeah but um compared to like the skeletal mesh you have at the moment yeah yeah yeah but it was like i was leaning on just a whole just i was just standing on top of just all these abstraction layers that i did not understand and um you know it's either you sh you ship a game like that and you get something like um i don't know what's uh what's a really nice um example of a um of a really poorly performing game um i currently think of anything off the top of my head what is something that isn't stable yeah right um yeah so um really cyber cyber trunk comes to mind exactly yeah yeah unlike certainly the old gen consoles yeah yeah um yeah it's really you have to ask yourself this question when am i going to actually learn this and online what i'm currently doing and actually just like learn how to do it properly um down at this low level at how you know the computer actually thinks and um yeah you're really kind of just stripping away all the layers that you're kind of leaning on as a crotch yeah um and it's really just a matter of time i guess i mean you can go your entire career sure just making games in um you know unity and unreal engine all that kind of stuff and that's that's more than fine like a lot of people do that um for example like danny he's um he's just making he's just pumping out games in unity and um it's great but um kind of have to ask yourself a question of um do i want to make games and do them um i don't really know how to word this but right this very second do i want to just pump out games you know or do i want to invest the time in learning all the tools for like a good couple years all the tools necessary for me to go down into such a low level and have such a deep understanding of how everything actually works but then later on be a whole lot better off and like reach a much higher ceiling than what um someone currently using unity for example would uh would be doing so i've kind of taken the long haul approach and as a result it looks like i've taken just like a million steps back and uh my way this video is um like very um bare bones and like lackluster compared to what i was doing a couple years ago but uh in the long run uh that's kind of what i mean that's kind of what i'm in it for um if i see if i see a problem pop up like that and i recognize that i'm winning on it as a crutch i'll it's a bit self-destructive but i'll just purposely knock that crotch out and learn how to use it properly um so i feel like that's my biggest strength but also my biggest weakness is yeah is is that that's that's really interesting that's actually something that i've noticed with your videos recently is like every time i see them i'm like man he's still on that on that like you know kind of mesh of a person trying to do animation and like the thing is to me i'm almost like that's amazing like that in a good way you know i'm not like oh man he needs to speed up because i know the work involved in stuff like this and the fact that you're able to publish videos and not kind of take that pressure from your audience necessarily to see the game evolve faster because i feel like that i don't know why i feel like that to be honest it's self-inflicted because i no one in my audience is like man you're still doing this everyone in my comments is like dude this engine is turning out amazing like i can't believe how much work has been done on it but in my mind i'm like no no gotta have literally like huge engine features every week or every couple weeks and that i know in my mind that this is a cute like a bunch of tech that is just growing and growing and growing and then it's gonna crash first of all but also like you know i it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily real life this isn't really what like if i was in if i was a tech director on like an actual uh in an actual big company working on this engine i would not be producing this would not be the roadmap right we would be doing things a lot differently and i think that if anything your latest videos have inspired me to make more boring videos that are more true to what it's like to actually develop this properly yeah because having this fake image having this like almost like a mask is i think gonna hurt me like in the long run yeah and that's that's that's really a really good jumping off point to um to another topic um is like just you kind of creating um you just as as a content creator that's also making um a game making an engine um just developing something uh you just feel this constant pressure to um go faster and um just show all these cool shiny new features to your audience and that way you know you can title thumbnail videos better and you can bring in more viewers and all that kind of stuff um and i have definitely fallen into that trap before where i'll um i'll just go implement features for the sake of implementing features knowing full well that i'm going to completely scrap this and do it um the proper way in the future and recently i've kind of just i had a bit of a break for a while and um i got really deep i got really demotivated um for making dev vlogs just mainly because of that reason and um but then i came back and i'm like screw it i i don't care what content i'm making i'm just gonna do what i i'm just gonna do what needs to be done yeah i'm gonna wrap it up into a video i don't care about how how like how that video looks like structurally from like a click-through perspective like what i'm gonna title what i'm gonna thumbnail it um like i don't i don't create features for videos now i make features that i know need to get done and then try and wrap that up into a video so and then oftentimes you'll be watching a video and it'll just abruptly end because i just have not you know wrapped it up and you know it'll just you know and it'll and it'll just continue on so nice yeah i i go to bed without with i go to bed with the engine not compiling sometimes it's not like you know it's not like everything's just rainbows and butterflies all the time exactly yeah this entire podcast isn't gonna be about programming like we're not gonna just blabble on about um kind of just this niche chat between two programmers but i mean like a good portion of the people clicking on this video are gonna be programs themselves but that's not really like we can't just talk for two hours straight about programming so um yeah there's definitely gonna be more to this um than just that and i feel like we've kind of just gotten through that um nice little programming segment and we can kind of just wait goodbye to it all right mister no programming chat what should we talk about well we are always gonna circle back to programming um but um i don't know what's uh what's what's like the most exciting thing going on in your life at the moment um the most exciting thing going on in my life at the moment to be honest programming well to be honest like not much i mean i'm sitting here in lockdown in melbourne um so how much excitement can one have true very true yeah i mean um a bit of a downer bit of a downer question that's an amazing thing no i've got something exciting i've got some exciting things going on which i will reveal um eventually when the time comes uh yeah there are some exciting things definitely coming um but to be honest like i'm just i'm i'm happy to kind of be in the space that i'm at right now like when i first quit my job um which was like a bit over two years ago actually so i used to work for ea for those who don't know um on like game engine stuff so when i quit that i was it was interesting because like i think that at that point in time like i just got married like i work was kind of the last thing on my mind like we we actually did this was in 2019 like my wife and i traveled so much so we went to like japan for our honeymoon we went to europe later we went to like norway germany ever we did we did a lot of stuff and it was almost as if we knew that like the following year everything is going to be closed because of kovith so um it was a really nice kind of time and so one of the things that i did and that was actually one of the reasons why i decided that okay i want to take a break from work like we'll see how this like youtube and me making like my own stuff goes if anything like you know i can always find a job i don't think that's a huge always go back to it yeah exactly yeah yeah they they told me that if i if i change my mind come back so i knew that like i had a bit of a a safety net but i just wanted to try and live like a little bit differently and in the beginning like if you go back to like the second half of 2019 like hazel and what i was working on it was kind of in its in its early stages and because of that like i think that it's so discouraging when you look at a big project in front of you and you see just just how complicated it is like if you were to like begin working on this huge complex game or this huge complex game engine or any piece of software really you know even even stuff outside of software like i don't know you want to do some woodworking and build this like enormous old-school wardrobe i don't know um you know there's just it's so the task can be so daunting and trying to plan it trying to just it can give you anxiety and overwhelm you so much but yeah it's it's it's almost like you look at um say there's like 100 steps in the whole process instead of focusing on like the very first step you need to take you look at steps 2 to 100 yeah you look at the other 99 steps you have to take and you kind of just but you really just need to kind of just put the blinders on and just look at that first step and just take it and kind of just ignore everything else um yeah absolutely just just i think that just doing doing the work just just shut up and do the work just sit down and start writing the code like that is that just like stop over planning everything just just yeah just go and the thing is the thing is it happens it doesn't just happen with indie programmers or developers who have to like be their own boss and set their own schedule and all of that like i think maybe it's it's a bit more kind of of a problem there um because some days i just like wake up at like i get up at like 12 because i'm like dude what's the point like i'm never gonna never gonna achieve anything like this is ridiculous you know it's kind of like depending on it it depends on my mood a lot of the time but like in the professional industry as well like you know we had game teams over at ea who would have meetings to figure out like why they were behind and those meetings would sometimes go for the whole day and it's like it's like guys like i think we had to like as a kind of core team at the time we had to step in and be like you know you guys should really like you know not to tell you how to do your jobs but maybe if you stopped having meetings and actually told your engineers to start writing the code you would get more stuff done and i think that like that's you know whenever i feel like that i'm like okay i don't care what's to come i don't care that like oh no someone sent me a link to all this cool stuff that unreal engine is doing that i'll probably never achieve like i don't care about any of that let's put that out of the way because what i'm gonna do is just focus on the thing that i'm actually working on the thing that i'm actually doing and then i'll cross that bridge when i get there and you know now now looking back at it like the the whole reason i kind of started this chat was because you know where hazel is at right now like that's it that's so much like if i i i back then two years ago i did not think i would be here and the fact that i'm already at this space where like you know people have started actually making games with it like we have some pretty cool demos coming like it's got so many features so many so many contributors have joined the team as well like it's it's growing so much and now it's a completely different like game right like the motivation i feel now is a lot more than two years ago when i had just started so a lot of it i think is pushing through those first stages like again whether it be a game you're working on or an engine or anything and then when you start to see the product form like the first time you can kind of drop into your game world run around with the character interact with something and it just it feels like you're actually playing something like that's an amazing feeling and that you kind of keep you keep making progress and the progress that you've just made motivates you to make more and more progress and that's just something that you can only achieve if you shut everything else out and you just actually start working exactly yeah yeah you can kind of just get paralyzed by um yeah just having these unnecessary meetings i guess but just gonna get cracking and you know the uh motivation i guess will come from um once you actually start getting the ball wrong and speaking of getting the ball rolling um this is something i've kind of struggled with um this is something that i am struggling with um at the moment with uh with the monthly videos oh uh so the reason i do monthly is because um i have sponsors on each video and with like sponsors you have to set like an actual deadline and get the video out on time so that's been really good for um for me structurally um because i've gone from you know uploading you know just whenever to i now have to upload one video every month yeah i don't have to like i could for i could full guilt but i would just be forgoing my paycheck basically um so yeah it's been really good structurally to kind of have that but also it's i'll get to the oh i'll get to the end of the month and it'll take me about probably about a week all in all to um to organize all the footage together edit it up and um yeah just kind of have it ready to publish yeah i mean i already yeah i'm in exactly the same boat as that i've like also got like a a sponsor like i my sponsorship's a little bit all over the place and i'm very kind of selective about them not because i don't necessarily like the companies but because well first of all i i'll only do it if i do like the company but also because like time because i know that that's me committing to a video being out on a particular date and i do have like a monthly one with skillshare but like that what you said there is so relatable because that's literally me that's literally me being like oh man i'm gonna actually have to make a video yeah like let's sit down and do this but i also use it as an excuse to be like all right let's make a slightly better video than i would otherwise you know let's put a little bit more effort into this let because you know obviously i want to get as many views as possible not just for myself but for the sponsor um yeah and yeah that having those deadlines and structure is actually so good exactly and if you can figure out a way to um kind of just impose a structure on your own work like whatever it be um try and find a way to set deadlines because they are just so unbelievably powerful yeah because without deadlines without clear goals it's pretty easy to foil around and kind of just get trapped in this yeah paralysis of over planning and overthinking things and um you're just not motivated to really show up and actually get the work in yeah but especially if you transition from having a boss to being your own boss oh god yeah yeah i think that's difficult yeah yeah just going um going independent and all of a sudden you're you've like kind of knocked out that structure from above you you know you're not working down to five anymore um that was definitely something that i struggled with as well like just just just waking up and trying to figure out how to structure things like when i when i first started i was just in constant grammar like i would just every like waking hour would be dedicated to work and i'd be like all right i've got to be focused on this just 24 7. partly because um my circumstances of me actually going full time um i'll just like tell this story now but i was uh i was working as a barista um just at a just at a coffee shop that's secretly my dream job yeah you know it's it's it's uh it's good fun making coffees it's actually quite therapeutic just you know yeah pulling shots and especially when um so it was uh so it's called the raffles coffee i don't think it's down in melbourne um but it is up in queensland and it's uh basically this coffee franchise it's kind of similar to starbucks right and you've got like a drive-through and it's really quite busy um yeah just like kind of getting into a good flow with that you just like sit in that like just stamping in shots and like pulling everything out you're like a whole assembly line of people and you know just like cars are just zooming up like just like time just slips away from you and you just like all of a sudden it's under your shift and it's quite nice but um yeah yeah so i um i just come out of high school um and i moved to brisbane so i uh i i grew up in a place called townsville and um so as soon as i turned 18 i um like i just finished high school and i uh did a road trip down to brisbane with my friends and we just moved here and um i had to get a job because i had to you know pay rent so um when i was 14 i actually got a job at zarathus and started working as a business for a couple years um but then when i got here i was like all right well i need to get a job um the only thing i'm really qualified to do is be a barista so i'm just gonna keep doing that um and originally the plan was when i came to brisbane i was um it was actually a startup uni so i did go to uni and i uh i did a bachelor of science for about one week and then dropped out and um yeah i mean like all all in the meanwhile so this is like 18 so i'm i'm already pretty much balls deep in game development at this point as well um like at this point in time i think i just uh dropped down and see bus boss and started following your sparky series um so i still kind of had that constant in the back of my mind like i really want to do game development but i'm not quite sure how to turn it into a career because um yeah i mean i i only had about a thousand subscribers at the time i um yeah that was like i just wasn't making any money off of them um so then yeah for about eight months i kind of just dropped out of uni and uh worked on the game a bit more and just worked as rapids for about eight months and then um excuse me and then at one point i got my tax return and it was about two thousand dollars and i was like wow this could last me like two months or so if i really stretched it like three months even so i just walked into my job i was like all right peace i quit and uh and then and then got home and kind of was just in this mode of all right i've only got a thousand subscribers but i'm gonna make videos and i'm gonna try and make this work um so i was just in constant grind mode from there that's kind of like waking back to the point is i was in grind mode out of kind of just a um kind of just because i had to like i had that deadline of well i've got three months worth of runway but once this runs out i'm gonna have to go back to my job or just like go find another job you know as like a barista or something somewhere else um but there's yeah like there was there's always that backbone of like if this doesn't work out um i'm just gonna have to go back and find another job and yeah you know it's it's like yes it's a risk but it's not the end of the world exactly it's really not the end of the world if you've got the means to do it and pursue your passion yeah and try and make it work go for it um because you can really just be doing job interviews if you fail and go back and you've got that structure again um yeah especially if you're not like supporting a family you know exactly just you then you know go for it basically yeah if you're young yeah send it and um yeah i'm 20 years old for those of you who don't know you're probably going to be shocked to hear that because i look like a 30 year old man but um yeah so that runway eventually ran out and i still didn't have a job like like i still didn't have a career out of uh out of youtube like i'd made some progress but uh not really too much um and then luckily my um my dad he actually agreed to fund me for uh for a few months i was like all right just give me like a few more months i know i can make this work and uh he was he was he was kind enough to fund me i uh did up like a whole business powerpoint of uh of like my uh my plan for you know like the next quarter or so and in that situation you know that's that's that's where you want to do planning you know to like communicate your goals to other people but yeah um yeah so i did that and uh he was on board and by the end of three months i um i got my first video that uh actually hit the algorithm and blew up it was um it was yeah conveniently in the middle of all this i realized how shitty my c plus boss game engine was and moved into c and telescope and that was just like another stress it was like yeah i was down in this new this new language had absolutely no idea my my um std strings and std vectors were completely gone and i was just sitting there just like what do i do this is this is horrible um uh but yeah so yeah and then i kind of let it just learn um when i told it that way and the first video that blew up was i think was titled switching my game to a new engine in one week and i had a pretty nice thumbnail of like before and after and i slapped on some of telescopes um pixel art uh shadow stuff and bloom that um that ryan had going on and it looked quite nice um so yeah and that was uh that was kind of like my foot in the door and that's what sparked everything and um yeah kind of just been going there since and uh cool yeah so this is those first videos those first like arcane videos like the very first devlog for example that was in your sequels plus game engine uh no so the first i would say i think it was about six that was in uh unreal engine okay so i would have been about 15 16 um and then probably from like i think it was yeah that was just it was it was just at one point it was like seven to thirteen or something like that that was in the seatboss boss game engine yeah right um in the sparky clone and uh yeah and then yeah eventually i hit a turning point where i moved down into sea and uh oddly enough that was the video that launched my um entire youtube channel as well so it's kind of poetic in that regard as well um yeah cool yeah yeah i guess that's uh that's all there is to my life story so far um right now i'm kind of just chugging along and uh i've gone into a pretty nice routine where i'll um i'll wake up and i'll go for a work session and all my work sessions are recorded live on twitch um and so yeah i'll usually just go for about one and a half hours that's about my limit that i've found um like anything past that yes i can technically still get it done but um not as like cognitively sharp and yeah will most likely make more mistakes than actual progress so i'll kind of just stop um relax a bit uh go have some lunch uh chill out and you know go for a walk and then come back and do um a second session if i'm on a roll right so if i'm if i'm like right in the middle of um of the month it's not the beginning of the month after i've just edited the video and i've had like kind of like some time off um that'll usually be a bit of a slow start or you should only do like one session a day uh that's what i've been doing for about you know the past five days or so um then once i get into a good groove i'll usually do about two sessions a day maybe sometimes three sessions a day of just one and a half hour work sessions right um and this is like serious work it's not like i have twitch chat up and i'm kind of like you know browsing twitch chat and kind of like half in half out it's like most of the time i'm sitting there in silence just programming and for some reason people are still sitting there watching that um yeah it's pretty obvious you don't have twitch shut up during the uh yeah the switch to smooth shading yeah yeah and then and then at some points when i do get like um really stuck i'll just you know bring up chat and it's kind of just like a good way of um instead of googling something i'll just say what i'm struggling with and you know maybe some people will have answers to that um yeah so in uh in those situations it it's it's great but i would say about 95 percent of the time i'm if i'm doing a serious work session um chat just won't be up um yeah which is really quite good because you'll go in the science and tech category no it's called um what software and games development now we've uh just switched a new category um on twitch yeah it's it's uh yeah it's just software and game dev which is quite nice we've got our own little own little home separated from uh the people in science and tech who yeah have streams of their docs which is lab coats doing bunsen burner experiments or whatever yeah yeah yeah exactly um yeah so you'll just like browse um software and game dev and you'll just see everyone they'll just you just like watch their eyes for a little bit and you'll just see them every like 10 seconds or so just go yeah and then just like constantly checking chat yeah and it's oh you have no idea how much flow that breaks you can it's it's almost like you can never get into a good groove of programming and go really really deep on a problem for a good hour and just get lost in it because that's constantly being broken you know questions are coming at you all that kind of stuff um well you know it's it's it's great looking at chat and um interacting with people but you kind of just have to strike that balance of all right am i here to get work done or am i here to um you know talk to people and kind of just um be a bit more shallow in um in my whole approach to everything so um yeah yeah i mostly like i don't know when i i try and live stream often and every time i do a stream like i genuinely enjoy it and i want to do it again but looking back on the amount of work that i've achieved during a live stream it's just so it's it's not like it's very insignificant because apart from when i do like i had like a um a year ago i had like a vulcan week where i basically tried to move the whole engine from open shell to vulcan um that was like i had a very clear goal i was streaming like six to eight hours a day like that was i had to actually get work done and so i didn't really care about chat too much but like usually when i do a live stream you know i'm a pretty social person so i i like to talk to people i like to answer questions i like to just have a conversation going one of the reasons why i started this podcast so like ultimately it's that's why i i come back to streaming so infrequently like once every couple weeks maybe i'll do a stream because i know that like in the long run this isn't really gonna bring me as much like i it's not gonna progress my tasks and build this engine like the bulk of the work happens when i'm got my headphones in listening maybe to some nice calm music or whatever yeah and i'm just got my head down i'm just working you know literally yeah yeah and um yeah so that's the exact realization that i came to and so then i started doing that and i just stopped and i just stopped live streaming um for like months and i was just sitting there working but then one day i'm like all right what if i were to just hit the go live button but just not even act like i'm live streaming and just continue working so then i started kind of doing that um now it's a little bit more integrated with chat and i do treat it a bit more like a live stream so i've kind of gone back to my old ways of um like the stream highlights but for the most part i've just i just hit the go live button and i just work and then i just stop and i'm done and um well then that brings up the question well what's the whole benefit to live streaming if you're not going to interact with chat and you're just rocking up to do work um but there's there's a couple of things it's like well people are still watching this which is kind of odd i have like an average of about 200 viewers and i'm just kind of sitting there um i'll be thinking out loud and you know just doing my whole thought process that way um and yeah i mean some people do enjoy it but then the other thing is um i've actually started just making stream highlights on the second channel and just wrapping up um so i'll probably do about three sessions of one and a half hours and that would make a second channel video um and what that is is it's a way for me to constantly um try and improve my um well it's just like a constant you know like two three videos a week over there and that's new people coming into the channel learning about you wanting about your entire project yeah and it's kind of just constant advertising basically and then through throughout that so i've um so this is this can kind of lead into the funding a little bit um so one of the main plugs i do is like you know if you've got an amazon prime account you can drop a prime gaming on twitch and uh you can go to my website and like link your account and just get a free membership um that way and so i'll just plug that in each and every video and it's just like just like a constant growth of primes and um just like a constant revenue stream so that's my incentive for streaming on twitch is that um it is actually an income source even though i'm sitting there in silence most of the time and um i've just figured out a way to make that work and uh you know it plays in nicely with my work schedule and uh yeah i really don't sacrifice um the whole getting caught up in you know like a distracted streaming kind of mindset um i'm kind of just like sitting there working so yeah yeah i mean it's quite nice yeah i was gonna say that um the schedule aspect of it is definitely cool you know setting up an actual twitch schedule and then you're like oh guess i'm getting up at eight a.m tomorrow to get to work by nine you know it kind of it simulates a more active kind of office environment which i think is very beneficial to people working from home on their own stuff um definitely yeah just like finding any way to um put in some sort of structure some sort of routine so that you've got something to fall back on every day and get into some kind of groove um it's definitely probably just yeah just step one in any kind of independent journey when you're um trying to work on your own passions just whatever it be like it like it doesn't have to apply to programming or game development or anything like you said it could be woodworking it could be um just anything um one of my hobbies at the moment um is actually djing so i've so i bought like a a um a dj jack and kind of just weren't um learned how to do that and i was getting just so into it so unbelievably excited about learning all that and um starting like playing clubs and everything and i was kind of just neglecting my game dev so it was like well i kind of really want to go do this now but um then i was kind of um interfering with you know my current job and like my current source of income and everything yeah so i've kind of had to just take that deck and just like walk it away in a cupboard and now i just don't touch it because i know if i do i'm just kind of gonna go ham on it um yeah i'm not very good at multi-threading i can only kind of just focus on one task at a time right um even when it comes to hobbies it's like i'll try and find a way to make my hobbies a career and that's kind of what happened with that whole dj thing yeah yeah but i mean it's not that i'm not gonna come back to it i've um i've been reading a book recently called deep work and um the author was describing uh some kind of um um scheduling i guess to your work and it's like it's gonna be a whole lot better for you to focus on one thing for an extended period of time then focus on two things for an equally you know lengthy period of time yeah because you're switching from one task to another uh it's called it's called context switching yeah and you leave residue like attention residue from the previous task and then it kind of like it it stays around and you struggle to switch into the new task and it's and it kind of just like breaks your flow that way so what i've thought about this entire thing is well if i am serious about becoming a dj at one point i'm just gonna dedicate like a good couple of months to doing that and then just take a break off the game yeah um so now i'm just like working on the game constantly and then at one point so in december of this year i'm actually gonna just dedicate a whole month to it uh because you know it's like my birthday month and christmas and all that i figured it'd be a good time to do it um and yeah so kind of just splitting up work into that um yeah i think the the contact switching thing is um [Music] that's definitely important like so when i worked at ea like i worked full time so five days a week and then what would happen is i would come home like six seven pm and then i would do youtube stuff and so kind of during the day i was kind of thinking about okay what video am i gonna make tonight and how am i gonna you know how am i gonna have time to cook myself dinner and uh this is before i was married said you know no uh no dinner prepared for me when i come home but um you know how am i gonna fit in all of that stuff and then also plan and shoot and edit a video like on c plus pluses while i was doing the c plus plus series and so what i did is i went up to my manager and i was like listen so this is what my day looks like i get to work i you know work and then i get home and i do all of this stuff could i possibly work for 10 hours a day here in the office at ea instead of eight hours and then have one day per week off um and he he was happy with that so monday monday and then wednesday thursday friday i was in the office and then tuesday i just had one day dedicated to like um to making videos and all that kind of stuff and so that was really that was beneficial to both things because i was getting into the office at like 8 a.m leaving at like six and i was able to that that was it that was an ea day you know that was i all the time i was just plugged into like just doing ea work i didn't have to worry about anything else and i think that that definitely showed improvements in both kind of the youtube stuff that i was doing and also my work at ea so yeah trying to context switch less but i i always like struggle with that because i really like diversity i don't like doing the same stuff over and over again and i think that if you just do one thing in a day that's not too bad but if every day i wake up and do the same thing over and over and over again that really wears me out i like to do different things and um with my hobbies as well like i have a lot of things i'm interested in aside from just programming and fitting that in like how what's your work life balance like when you're not you know allocating a month to do say djing um so at the moment um pretty much um i would say at like five o'clock so at at sunset um just like everything before that is usually i'm thinking about game development or i'm actively in a work session um or you know even when i'm on my breaks taking a walk i'll be you know just thinking about it and whatnot um and just trying to like solve problems um but then after five o'clock that's usually when i kind of just say all right shut off done just like absolutely nothing after that um uh yes so then in that kind of like recreational time oh um usually what will happen is i'll just lay on the couch and just kind of zone out and just watch netflix or something um recently i've been getting into some skillshare courses which has been quite nice um um yes so that's kind of what my recreational life looks like um and then occasionally when um when my mates want to hang out i'll kind of just like take a whole day off which is what i'm gonna do thursdays tomorrow i think yeah yeah so um yeah that's kind of what my um work-life balance looks like um i don't really take weekends off i just kind of work every single day i genuinely enjoy it um like you said with um you kind of get bored of just focusing on like the one thing over and over again uh the way i kind of work around that is i'll have multiple things um that i really enjoy surrounding game development yeah yeah so if i get sick of one thing so say i'm stuck on um i've been kind of bad with this lately but say i'm stuck on um just that massive problem that i had last video with um vertex skinning um that kind of really just threw me off but let's say in a perfect world i was stuck on a problem um technically in the game engine um i would then maybe just like switch to game design and then um just do some research on game design uh try and pat out the story um just like constantly just approach the um just the entire task of game development from multiple angles so you kind of just have like subcategories that you work on throughout the day so that's how it kind of like stays fresh to me and um yeah kind of constantly motivates me because sometimes i'll be really just demotivated with um with like the programming side of like game engine things um but then i'll be like really excited about you know this new um gameplay idea or story idea that i came up with and um that would kind of just like keep me hooked in constantly so i'm kind of fine with working every day um yeah i mean like i would say probably like once a week once every two weeks i'll just have like a full day off and um hang out with friends like usually i like to keep it once a week having like a full day off yeah but um recently especially um i've actually got to get this video out by the 25th instead of the third instead of the 30th this month because i'm actually um going to be flying to um the northern territory to spend time with my dad and we're going to do like a road trip can't talk we're going to do a road trip across the um simpson desert and just kind of like drive back to brisbane yeah so that's going to be pretty fun yeah so right now i'm in full grind mode um yeah obviously kind of just taking a bit of break to talk to you and have a nice little conversation today um but i would like to get a work session in today um yeah yeah so that's kind of what my work life balance looks like um [Music] it is a lot more work than um some people would be comfortable with but to that i say i don't actually do much work each day i do like two sessions on average like one and a half hours like that's three hours of work each day yeah but the fact that i do it so intensely and so like concentrated like yeah it's it's better to do that yeah than to say rock up till nine to five and work for those whole like how many hours is that eight yeah yes so like it's better to like kind of chunk it up into um into these sessions i find instead of just sitting at your desk for eight hours you know maybe having a lunch break but you know if you're sitting there working on an issue for like four hours at a time there's gonna be like a drop-off point for proficiency at some point and um it's like are you really working or are you just you know kind of surfing the internet checking your phone every 10 seconds looking at email um all these kind of different things that um you know kind of just say to yourself like yeah sure i'm i'm working i'm getting stuff done i'm looking busy to my boss that's all that really matters yeah for sure that's like the whole four day work week thing and like even three day work work i think some people are proposing like yeah it's that can actually increase productivity because people are burning out less people are spending less time you know with their mind wandering they're more focused basically which is exactly what you're talking about so yeah i definitely totally get that what what what do you do when you wake up when when you wake up one morning and you know you've got this stuff lined up but for whatever reason you're just not motivated yesterday that was yesterday so um my alarm went off at like six i usually wake up at six and just go for a walk um but my alarm went off and i was like oh i i'm i'm just feeling tired and i of just turned off the alarm and just laid back in bed and then struggled to pull myself out of bed for the next three hours um but i did eventually um get up and get some work done but like for for for the days when i'm just completely demotivated so i'm working on like a really tricky problem and it's just like i have no idea what to do i'm just stumped um you know during those days you kind of just have to give yourself permission to like be you just have to make a decision you got to be like all right today's my day off i'm just going to have the day off and i'm just going to go do something that i genuinely enjoy i'm going to go hang out with friends i'm going to go surfing i'm going to you know go for a nice walk just treat yourself you know yeah wife's life's not all about just rocking up every single day and just being a productivity machine over and over again as like as much as i love doing that to myself and kind of just cracking the whip and trying to just see how much i can milk out of myself work-wise because i i don't know i'm just i derive some kind of enjoyment out of that i have no idea why but um it can kind of get out of hand and um i'll some like sometimes i'll just catch myself just beating myself up because i'm not working hard enough but in those moments you're kind of just gonna be like no let's go spend time with friends and kind of chill out and yeah there's there's there's more to life than just optimizing for productivity you know yeah not for sure yeah but there's also like i mean i think it's also it you need to strike a balance obviously with that because some somewhere i'll admit there's some some days it's like the third day and i'm like nah man just treat yourself you know just just just keep going and it's like i don't know i've been playing hollow knight recently um like on my on my switch like in bed like a lot um and i really like that game and i started playing that game actually believe it or not as like well because i wanted to first of all but also as a bit of a research task because i was like you know hazel like the game engine series um is going 2d only basically so there's like a hazel 2d is a thing now and i need to look at some good 2d games that aren't just you know some kind of like you know the the the normal like pixel art thing that a lot of people are doing um instead of that i wanted to look at something a bit more higher fidelity and and and hollandaise basically like these massive you know hand-drawn environments that are absolutely oh yeah yeah and they're layered super well yeah yeah really nicely and to be honest like even though i was kind of treating myself and i think i got a little bit addicted um to that game like for for a while there like the amount of the amount i think i've benefited from that has been like it's been huge and i think that one thing that i was doing because i don't know i was never really that into playing video games i would play them for an hour or two and then i would i would be like i don't want to do that i want to do something productive you know i want to make this or i want to i was always like that as a kid i wanted to make movies and i studied films like for a while and i did stuff like that kind of um on the side you know while i was still in high school i even did some freelance like film and video work we made an ad for tv you know i i did quite a lot of stuff before i was like no i actually want to go into software engineering and i want to do like i want to tell stories through games not through film basically and that was kind of the decision i made because i also really like the technical kind of inter interactive aspect of it and i think that you know that's why i've always loved games that are like works of art like i think and i think hollow knight is is absolutely beautiful and in that regard it's got a great look like a great story it's the environments are beautiful the music's amazing like it fits together really well but yeah at a certain point it's like okay let's stop doing this like i'll get angry at myself for doing that because i'll be like no no no stop playing holly night and it's it's not even me telling myself that it's just it's almost like it's just built into me it's like go and work on hazel because you know that that's like that is gonna make you happier in the long run yeah producing being productive you know producing stuff being creative that's going to make you more happier and longer in the long run than just sitting here playing hollow night and then getting up at the end of the day to make dinner and then it's like well i just feel bad about myself exactly yeah yeah i mean yeah like you said it's it's it's all about balance and um you'll kind of know that point when you hit it you know you'll just kind of feel a bit guilty about playing games like i um i had this recently with uh valheim so i started playing valham with my housemate and uh we were kind of just like going on that quite nicely and he he works like a night until uh nine to five throughout the weeks so um but on the weekends um he would kind of just have like free time and he would be playing bellheim and um i'd be like well i kind i kind of need to get some work done but at the same time let's play bethlehem so then yes i just like played belham all day um [Music] and uh you know there were a couple days where you you know like i'd just do that for like three days in a row and uh yeah but i got into bellheim for pretty much the exact same reason um it was like when i first booted it up i was like wow this is a really nice survival game because like my like my thing is survival games i i really enjoy that whole gameplay loop of like collection crafting and um you know playing with that and just kind of like upgrading just like constant kind of like um yeah just that entire gameplay loop right um so i was playing valheim and i was just getting kind of like really motivated to um like just to work on arcana and just like go back to it i would like i would just be mid like mid game playing with my housemate and be like all right well i'm gonna go dip and get some work done because i'm really just genuinely excited to go do that now yeah so yeah i mean it's like yeah um i don't really know what it is it's so important it's so important to to play games as well and like for me at times i i genuinely like at the moment i'm i'm having a blast all these games like but there's been times in the past where i've had to force myself pretty much to be like okay let's just let's just play a little bit of a game and then when i get well when i get into it it's like okay this is fun i'm enjoying myself and i'll get so many ideas and so much motivation to continue what i'm doing but it's like you know a lot of you know film directors they watch movies a lot like you know it's it's rare for them to be like okay i don't want to i want to be maybe for some special project there'll be like no contact with the outside world i don't want anything i'm going to try and produce something original you know like like artists will lock themselves up in a cabin in the woods to write an album but like you know a lot of the time if you're not actually you know consuming other people's work in your field in your medium i think it's really difficult to to kind of produce stuff i i really do i think that not just from the inspiration and motivation side but also like influence you know are there is there is there anything that like what would you say is influencing arcane like the most oh so many things so um the original mindset was so i was playing daisy i was like all right i'm gonna make a 3d zombie game um and it's going to be better than daisy but then i did a bit more research i'm like all right 3d is probably not the way to go let's turn it down a bit let's do a 2d game um and i was just looking at terraria i'm like all right i'm going to make a terraria clone and then i kind of set out to do that and then over time it kind of just like evolved from being into rare clone into just something completely of um like not um not like entirely original because you know at the end of the day your thoughts aren't original whatsoever you're just kind of like picking different areas of like yeah like content that you enjoy and kind of just like mashing them together like that's that's that's how creativity works i guess um so yeah there was things like the witcher i've kind of taken um it's like kind of uh just like the story kind of inspired me with that um it's like the overall vibe was quite like quite nice and then um yeah so minecraft was a pretty big influence terraria just kind of like the whole building mechanics and trying to build something up um yeah and then over time i'll uh i'll just tell you what the game is about right now because not many people actually know what uh what the game is about or like what my current kind of like um vision for it is is it's basically um it's gonna be like a 2d survival um almost horror like not like a jump scare kind of part but more like a psychological horror um so um you're gonna kind of start off in this area and there's gonna be walls to each side have you heard of a kingdom kingdom i don't think that's so it was this really nice uh pixel art game um it's it's it's that's that's where the entire art style came from basically um for my entire game is that's that's that's where i got the art style from because i just really enjoyed that um it's kind of like a almost realistic 2d um realistic 2d pixel art um so that's kind of what i'm like that's that's the vibe i'm going for visually yeah um yeah so but you've got these walls right and you're kind of just like in this um just like in this walled off environment and it feels safe and so that's what i kind of want to replicate with my game is uh you kind of start off in this area and you're safe and you have these two walls and you kind of just have like a home base but everything outside of that is just like you're venturing out into the unknown and you kind of just have to overcome challenge after challenge um the entire storyline is uh the seven deadly sins so you're gonna have to face seven different bosses and overcome each of the sins um in one form one another like they're not all gonna be physical bosses that you have to defeat some just gonna kind of be mental hurdles that you have to overcome yeah um but it's taken a lot more of a story driven approach so there is going to be a definitive story of um you going through those seven sins then eventually finishing the game um and i actually just figured out the ending yesterday for um just like the proper ending which you know of course i'm not gonna spoil but um yeah i'm really excited to kind of just um just develop that out and get it going um some of the inspirations i've taken survival um like just from the survival elements like i was talking about earlier with crafting um the original inspiration for that was the forest um so you like go down you like chop down a tree and you'll you know pick up those logs and go build like a log cabin or something that to me was just like there was something so beautiful and peaceful about you kind of just with your ex just chopping down trees collecting logs building a house it was just yeah something so primal and beautiful about that and i would love to and i would love to replicate that as well um yeah so just like a bunch of different little um games that i've played over the years kind of just i'm taking all my favorite parts of the games that i've played and kind of merging them into one um thing i didn't really like about minecraft but like this was kind of like the whole draw of it basically is it's um it didn't really have a story like you just go to the end you kill the ender dragon you like hop in and then you kind of just carry on with playing um so i did like the whole sandboxing environment um to it like that's obviously like the whole drawers you normally do anything but um it was kind of just infinite and you just there was no definitive ending it's just ongoing until you get bored basically so i'd like to improve upon that still kind of provide that similar kind of feeling of you have kind of like a sandbox in front of you but uh there will be just like a definitive story which i've kind of taken from um i think my inspiration for actually making it story driven in the first place was probably the witcher 3 right okay i did get into that at one point and that was quite nice very heavy story yeah um yeah so that's uh that's kind of how i've like drawn on inspirations and yeah yeah you know like you you collect enough inspirations out of everything and all of a sudden you're not copying just one game but you're copying like 100 and it makes its own thing entirely like it's completely emergent and unique yeah that way so and i think there's so many cases in which um you know you might play a game and it'll spark a completely unrelated thought to what you're actually playing you know so a lot of the times like i've been playing holiday night and i've hadn't like instead of being like oh i like this element of it which has definitely happened but it's almost like oh what if this was like this instead you know and you'll kind of branch off into almost the opposite of what you're actually playing while you're singing so like i think that yeah games definitely or any medium really it stimulates the brain to think you know and it kind of gets those creative juices flowing yeah you need that downtime of um i watched this veritas video the other day and it was um it was on the topic of boredom and why boredom is actually good for you and you yeah you just need that down time to be able to just make new connections and think about things in certain ways and it'll just spark like just connections in your brain and you just think about these completely different things and um you need to be bored like you need to just put the phone away like just throw it away 100 go for a walk or something play your favorite video game um i mean to be fair you're not really bored when you're playing a video game but um it's still on like the topic of um you spark new ideas from it you like generate new ideas from it but like just being completely bored like just going for a walk or just sitting with just being alone with your thoughts um yeah that's how ideas are generated man yeah yeah and you know like people these days rob themselves of that so much you know with the infinite like scrolling on instagram or whatever on reddit it's it's i think that definitely as as a society like we've become way less bored overall and i think that's i think that's super negative like i think that in my in my childhood my parents um like they up until i was maybe 14 or 15 and i had to get like a laptop for school you know i was allowed basically half an hour per week on the computer when i was like eight nine ten years old right half an hour per week and so i would almost like i love what i love doing is back in the day when games came with like manuals i would just study the game and i'll be like oh man half an hour to play lego races or like whatever other game i was playing you know i would just start because i would pre and my mind like i was imagining myself like playing these games and how much i wanted to get back to that and like yeah i think that that made me such a creative person overall and i almost missed that because now like no one's going to be like oh you can't you know do this you can't play this game you can't watch this movie you can't scroll on your phone i really want to do anything yeah i'm responsible for myself but like deliberately depriving my brain of stimulation and you know getting all of this stuff as well like i love doing that because oh like definitely yeah even like i mean what's amazing as well is that i might be working on something i'd be like i don't like programming anymore this is like you know i hate this this is this is dumb it's not working it's so much work i can't be bothered doing it i'm gonna play a game instead if i deprive myself of everything and i just like sit down or like i go for a walk like literally five minutes later it's like i'm jumping at the opportunity to do something and i want to do the programming again i'm like dude just let me have a computer i'm going to fix that problem it's super weird it's super interesting yeah but i love it and yeah i think that's that's so important that's yeah that's that's that's exactly how it works that's that's spot on it's like um instead of doing that so say you're like stuck in this problem and you kind of just get bored of programming you're like oh man i hate programming but then you'll just kind of whip out your phone and go away on the couch and like scroll instagram or yeah twitter or something if you do that you're still at the end of that gonna have the thought of like man i hate programming as opposed to if you want to just like walk out the door and go for a walk or something or just kind of just let yourself be bored um you have that opportunity to recognize the spark and then you know get back into it but whereas if you're kind of spending your um your attention on things that don't really matter like doom scrolling uh twitter instagram or tick tock or whatever it is right then you kind of you're you're essentially just robbing yourself off that attention and of that effort of that energy that you could be spending doing something that you genuinely enjoy yeah um yeah so yeah i mean and that's why that's why i unfollowed everyone on twitter like i like i just i was at a point where i would be working and then you know just like it's just like muscle memory you just like brewed up in your web browser you type in twitter.com and then it's just there and it's just like oh yay free free distraction just like an infinite timeline that you scroll down yeah um yeah so i mean now that i've just unfollowed everyone like it was i was i was kind of like trying to justify it i was like oh well i got to make connections i got to meet new people through it um i don't want to unfold everyone because everyone will think i'm mean and just unfollowed them um so i was kind of like trying to justify it that way but then eventually i gave them like you know what none this matters i'm just gonna follow everyone and like yeah if people really need to reach out to me they can like i still have my twitter dms open which is how you reached out and yeah after waiting yeah um but like usually it'll just be like email or something and like there's like you don't need twitter like you don't yeah i don't have i don't have instagram installed on my phone anymore um i was hooked on twitch on tech talk for a while but then kind of recognized like tick tock is like just the the pinnacle of distraction over just like all the it's like the final boss of all the social media apps dude just do yourself a favor and don't worry it is like crack like a lot of people post youtube shorts though which are from tick tock and i've kind of like i kind of scrolled through yeah yeah yeah i need to stop kinda get the idea of um of that with like the youtube shorts so you like hop on your phone you like see the shorts yeah like kind of like scroll through that it's kind of a little bit of what tic toc is like but imagine there's way more outward than behind it yeah and it's like you scroll tick tock for like you know enough time and it'll give you exactly what you want yeah and it's it's it's scary and then you just and then all of a sudden like it that's that's just the next thing you default to and you're just scrolling take talk and it's like you kind of have to make the decision it's like well is this content genuinely meaningful to me or am i going to forget it in the next 10 seconds and not care yeah most of the time you just don't remember any of it at all it's all just complete dog like you know sometimes um you'll come across some gems and you'll be like wow this is this is quite nice this is you know maybe like a funny meme or something you share with your friends but um yeah so maybe sometimes you will get actual kind of good informational content out of tech talk um and you know various other social media maps i like various other social media apps that was my justification for keeping them in the first place it's like well on my twitter timeline i eventually i occasionally see um you know something that is worthwhile and valuable to me yeah um be like a blog post that i'm interested in or something like that if you follow like game developers or technical people or whatever exactly but then you just kind of have to be like well i can do that intentionally from a different perspective so i'm still on youtube right but i have this app um this chrome extension which is distraction for youtube so you just kind of enable that it blocks out all the recommended all the comments so you kind of purposefully watch youtube but then after five o'clock each time like yeah when i um when i sit down to kind of relax for the day i'll uh unblock it and i'll just browse yeah and um and intentionally and when i do find myself in the workday um kind of just like turning off that blocker and kind of walking at that um even now like i've kind of gone pretty good recently because i'll see like a video that i that i want to watch i'm like well all right i'll just add it to the watch later and then watch it at the end of the day yeah so you kind of just get in this mindset of you have to purposefully consume content yeah instead of kind of passively just consuming everything that comes your way like just bookmark things um i've recently installed this app what's it called um pocket it's called pocket and you and you um say you find like an article or something um you just like hit a button and it just saves it to your like pocket thing and then you can just like watch it later or just like read it later on um any device it just sinks across everything yes um yeah so that's kind of like a save like like a watch later for articles and yeah anything else that you want to consume um but yeah kind of getting into that mindset of purposefully consuming things as opposed to passively through social media and like scrolling timelines because as soon as you have an app with an infinite timeline it's like it's just you're not really just asking for trouble you know like yeah yeah so i've i've kind of caught all those out of my life and it's just like it's just so much better like i'm just i'll just purposefully consume stuff and enjoy and just not feel like for doing scrolling you know um yeah yeah that's yeah there's two things there that that recommends you know first of all yeah the whole like clearing um you know your twitter and all that like reminds me of ed sheeran and how he just got rid of his phone like for like a year i think i don't know if he's still doing that but he literally had an ipad and an email address that was it that's the only way you reach him then no phone literally like that i think that's that's a really cool experiment like i don't think i could ever do that but i could definitely get rid of social media on my phone that's the one like text and phone calls but that's that's a really cool thing to do i think um and i'm sure that it has so many benefits but also um what you were saying about uh what was it about yeah the the whole like adding to watch later and then pocket for watch later for articles a lot of people these days they they're so impatient they need it now you know it's like oh i see an interesting video i have to watch that now like delaying that kind of gratification i guess you know learning to put stuff you know on hold for a little bit and not just jump to it you know even like answering a phone call while you're working i've just started being like dude like text me if it's an emergency i can maybe glance at it but i'm not gonna not even gonna answer phone calls unless they're important you know during drawing stuff i'll call you back later you know doing stuff like that um not only trains you and lets you be more okay with priorities which i think is just an important life skill but also you know as i'm working i'm looking forward to the fact that man five o'clock six months i can get back to my game i can watch that video i can't wait to watch that video it just makes you happier i think and being able to kind of you know work with the motivation of getting that reward at the end at the end of the day so i think that's exactly yeah um that reminds me of this uh blog post that i read the other day it was um see if i can find it because it's a really good read on this topic um oh wait i'll let you know if i can find it hang on let me just like put this to do um fine is this podcast just purely going up on youtube are you putting up on spotify and whatnot yeah spotify and it all get distributed to basically every podcast okay okay gotcha cool all right um for the youtube folks right now though um uh there's this article it's called uh why procrastinates procrastinate and it's on a blog called wait but y um i'm sure you can put it like in the in the description as well if people want to go if you want to read this um i'll explain to all your audio people right now though um the analogy is basically we have um it's this little dude called the instant gratification monkey in our brain now you might have seen like this ted talk on youtube about this guy kind of like just going over this blog post but there's just this instant gratification monkey that just wants to kind of just take over and you know say you've just glanced over at youtube and now you see this youtube video and it's like well we have to go watch that right now we we have to stop everything we're doing and go watch that right now um so that's kind of what the instant gratification monkey does but then when going back to what we were talking about earlier is um i think in a sec when um when we were talking about uh kind of just like taking that youtube video and putting it as like a watch later like an article or just whatever you're essentially getting the instant gratification monkey to work for you because instead of you being motivated to go do that right now you kind of say all right let's get our work done and then we can watch that afterwards and it's like the the monkey isn't as happy about that idea but he's still happy about it because we do get to go you know play around and have fun at the end of the day and then as you like get to the end of the work session you can probably um you can probably um also what i'm looking for i can't find it relate to this a little bit is like when you're at school and it's like the last like hour of school i was like 15 minutes or something and you're like watching that clock tick down you're like well i can't wait to get home and play video games with the boys or something like that or like you're just at work or something right and you just like can't wait to get home and um go relax and do whatever it is you kind of like want to do like video games um you know watch youtube whatever it's just like that feeling of like well i can't wait to get my work over and done with so i can then go do that like that's what this entire kind of like thing is and if you can kind of leverage that then you know you can yeah you can just you don't have to constantly beat the mercy of the instant gratification monkey yeah and uh him kind of steering the ship and leading you into watching a um three-hour podcast which is probably what a good chunk of you are doing right now on this video instead of hitting the watch later but that's okay you know you can you you've already made it you may as well finish the video hopefully yeah yeah hopefully but what you really should have done is you should have seen this video save this to the watch later and then watch it after 5 pm today but better look next time all right or you should be listening to it on spotify while doing some exercises or doing something productive like cleaning the house that's what i do so much fun yeah yeah just like popped in a good old podcast you're like going around doing some vacuuming or something and going to the gym um yeah it's like you're just kind of gaining back that time that otherwise would have been spent doing some um you know some meaningless tasks not meaningless but you get what i mean less meaningful yeah less meaningful yeah i think that um uh definitely like delaying that gratification that pleasure if you will is also it's just i think it will it it it increases it you know like i i think that yeah i think that if you're able to be like you know this i tonight i'm gonna do this amazing thing like if you do it during the day you know if you're doing it all the time then it's not special anymore you know this is meaningful i used here's a great story i used to well i still do i really love dumplings like i just love dumplings man getting some chinese dumplings oh my gosh my one of my favorite fruits right and there was a time when i just started having it like every week and then after a while it's like well i this isn't special anymore like i used to with the boys we used to just like literally once a month we had a dumpling run and it was just so good but then when i was like well actually i can just ubereats or whatever this dumplings just come to me you know i started doing a lot more often and i'd be like well you know i was working all day i don't have time to make dinner or whatever i'll just order dumplings but then it loses that like it becomes worse like the experience of what used to be so fun and so nice and so good you know whether it be playing a video game or you know watching this this you know your latest content cr your latest favorite content creator has like released a video you know delaying that and then saving it it just makes it so much better and it doesn't lose its charm so i think that's awesome people just you just you get used to anything you know i think like another big thing is monetization yeah people struggle with this a lot with money for example you know they're like okay well if i could only make this much per month or if i could only have this much money i'd be happy but then you get used to making that much money and it's like well i i want this much money and i want more and you just get used to it and it's not special anymore and i think that with some things you can't control it but with with other things you can definitely be like no i'm gonna continue having this schedule even though i am now my own boss i'm gonna continue you know structuring my days properly and getting up at a reasonable time every single day as if i did have to rock up in the into the office at a particular time because that's going to just make me a better person basically exactly yeah i mean you could binge watch netflix you could go watch all the seasons right now or you could have one episode a day and make it something special that you walk for exactly yeah 100 um and it's it's really hard to build up that circuit in your brain because you just like you just want to just go do it now but once you kind of build that up and uh kind of just practice it a little bit more it kind of becomes a habit um that's when you know it kind of turns into something special and yeah you're just looking forward to your reward at the end of the day or whatever it is and you're not um just constantly in a state of desensitization where you're just exactly stumbling around and consuming everything you know um yeah for sure you know we we were talking about balance earlier and i think that another thing that i just remembered as well was you know because you're kind of in the same boat as i am in the sense that you're both developing software and making a game but then you're also making videos about it and so you said that like one of the things that helps you i guess balance that is the fact that if you are streaming that produces video content that you can then take and make it to your videos but other than that like how to because i'm still struggling with this like i'm still struggling to find the balance between like you know i want to make videos and not just devlogs and not just like hey this is what i did today but also like i like education and i like to produce you know obviously i have like the c plus plus series and like i made a video about bloom recently and how that works and that took me so much time and it but it was so much fun and i love doing stuff like that but i'm still struggling to be like okay but i have to make this game engine and like i have to make this game engine series and i have to make this like a c plus plus video and i have this how do you how do you find the balance between that have have you ever thought about just cutting some of it out like some of the like at the end of the day like yeah sure you can do all these like different things and kind of juggle them all but wouldn't maybe you prefer to do one or two things really really well than doing five things kind of mediocrity not mediocre but like less quality than what if you were just focusing on them because then you kind of like like it's not like you can't get the other things done you just put them in the future you kind of just prioritize one thing over the next so i think at the moment you're doing so you're working on hazel and you have um a game engine series like the gaming series hazel which is like a different version of hazel it's like a 2d version i think i watched that video the other day and um have you ever thought about just completely discontinuing that 2d version of hazel and then kind of just switching completely to the new hazel and making devlogs around that and kind of just like you still make educational content but on the 3d stuff i think what you said was it's more technical it's more in-depth it's like kind of hard to do educational stuff on it yeah but maybe you just do like yeah yeah like more just um i don't know maybe like devloggy stuff relating to that like educational content has its place but i think it has its place when you sit down and you say instead of like um um how do you do your educational stuff at the moment is it like pre-plans and you have like a structure or is it you just sitting down trying to figure things out yourself and like going with the flow it kind of depends on what particular educational kind of content i'm making like you could call the game engine series educational that's pretty much like i i very loosely planned that it's kind of live people people i've tried kind of rewriting the code ahead of time or like writing the code i should say ahead of time then kind of merging it in or whatever and explaining it people don't like that as much as the live coding stuff so i've tried to keep it as live as possible people like to see me debug issues and have unexpected things happen so that kind of requires no planning but c plus plus series and like when i did the opengl series and stuff like the bloom video like that is um that can range anywhere from dot points where it's like okay don't forget about don't forget to mention this but the actual dialogue is all live and on the spot yeah yeah but then the bloom video was like entirely scripted basically apart from the kind of some of the screen sharing kind of if we look at this it's that and all of that yeah yeah okay um yeah i mean it just sounds like you have a lot on your plate at the moment um yeah especially with like the with the hazel you've kind of just like split that into two um the way that i justify that though as well because like yeah i've definitely thought about discontinuing the game engine series but the way that i justify it is if we're working on the 2d version of the engine like 2d is something that i want big cases right and i'm not working on 2d in fact i'm not even working on ui like hey the proper hazel doesn't have any kind of in-game ui that you can create either yeah those are all systems that i'm going to develop as well as as good as possible like to the highest standard possible in hazel 2d and then merge them in just like with like a lot of the stuff that we already have like the scripting runtime for c sharp and everything in hazel and big hazel that can also kind of make its way like i'll know what i'm doing when i start live coding that so i've tried to not do the same thing i was pretty upfront about this like a couple of years ago i was like guys i'm just not gonna do this like i'm not gonna write the same engine twice like there are other things to do not to mention that like the game engine series because it's got like over 100 videos which people kind of have to watch if they want to still benefit you know a lot from the latest videos like the viewer base for those videos is quite small because who's going to watch 100 videos specifically on this and want to watch someone live coding for 45 minutes unless they're either really invested or it's just for fun for entertainment like hey let's watch that that kind of draws parallels to have you heard of a handmade hero yeah yeah yeah so um that's uh i don't know how to pronounce his last name casey [Music] yeah yeah yeah so he's kind of been doing a similar thing to you in that regard where he's kind of just um he's taking a game engine just like completely from scratch and kind of just like coding it live and doing everything like that um but if you look at that he's he's he's been doing that for years and yeah you see this entire 600 massive episodes massive body of work exactly and it's like there's way too much yeah of an upfront investment in order to get started with that exactly so i really struggle to um i have people come on stream or just like just like in the comments and be like alright i really want to get started doing what you're doing how do you do it and i don't really have a a good place to direct people to because um you know the way i've taken certainly isn't the most efficient one i took a udemy course on cbosplus blueprints and um and then like stumbled across your content and then i was mentored by ryan with c and that's been my entire last two years and it's like we need a nice place to kind of just direct people to so you can just like sit down like all right take this course and you'll be good yeah and like from there you'll learn how to problem solve yourself you learn how to google you learn how to do everything and um i don't have a place to recommend people that at the moment um really so i mean um going back to you like with your current sibling stuff um how how big is that like how many how many episodes do you have in your whole c plus series i want to say it's around 80 but i have no idea to be honest yeah so i mean from that perspective i guess if i like if i were in your shoes um what i would really want to do would be try and figure out how to condense that more and more and strip away all the unnecessary stuff and try and like like it's like you just keep making the same tutorial series over and over and over again until you've just got its complete essence and yeah that's like really nice for beginners to look at and do um as opposed to kind of just like doing it once and leaving it up and then being like yeah you like here you go but there's just like a lot of work with that and i don't think it's um it's kind of just something you have to keep iterating on so maybe maybe you could do like a um a partnership with skillshare or something and then like do up like a uh like a new c course or something or yeah well what i've what i've wanted to do for a long time actually is make some courses and i looked into making them for you um you to me but man i i don't know i still don't quite understand their revenue split but apparently if someone if if someone buys your course not off of your link your special link but they just find it on you to me they take like 70 percent of the money or something and i was like i was like that's ridiculous right yeah and so what i decided to do and what i'm kind of currently working on which i haven't talked about too much as well is like i want to basically make my own website and then have courses there that people can buy and yeah like i'm currently working on one for rendering because i just want to make the best rendering course like the internet has ever seen like that's great yeah almost almost all of them out there are like okay guys let's learn open gls learn falcon and then what you get is you just learn the graphics api like you just learn like this is how we draw a mesh like none of that i want to start with like a beautiful 3d scene that you would be proud to print and hang up on your wall as a piece of art that's what we're making that is that's the goal of this series that'd be such a good hook not just like showing that exactly that's exactly what's gonna happen and then along the way it's gonna be like we might even start with a bass kind of we probably will start with a bass kind of application framework that already has a game loop and like all the kind of stuff so that we can focus on like specifically like the graphics programming part not even not even to do with say opengl or vulkan that much i mean it will use one of those apis and we will talk about that but it's more about like you know exactly like the actual algorithms that go into this how to achieve these techniques how to render that beautiful thing you know and uh that's something that because it's not going it's not going to be on youtube like first of all i can spend more time on that because it's such an it's kind of a niche thing but if people are paying for it i can make it better because i can spend my time on that yeah exactly but also i can update it over time if i decide that my explanation for that was rubbish or something has changed because it's now the year 2025 i can update that i can open up that video add a little segment or like change it even or re-record the entire segment whatever you know i can keep it going over time which is not something you can do like what you were talking about with the seepless plus kind of essence series like i take the best but i could keep condensing it i could ultimately maybe not to that degree but like i could continue updating that over time and making sure that it is just the best resource available so that's something that i would be super excited about yeah yeah that is awesome yeah and then just like developing your own website forward and kind of just yeah you just you just take like a hundred percent of everything exactly like that would like that just be great um yeah and then all you'd have to do is just post the introduction video up on youtube and that's how you lead people into it you know yeah and uh then you know finn like the um the only uh what's the word um the only benefits to using udemy or skillshare is that existing ecosystem yeah if you don't already have good weights exactly so like then there's just no point in using them if you've got your own kind of way of marketing it and um you know just bringing it to people so um yeah that's like the same thing with like steam and everything um like i actually plan on i just plan on releasing the game for free on my website once it's done like i mean i'll like i'll still probably put it up on steam or something and i'm sure it'll still get distributed while like switch and everything and we'll have like a price point but the main meat of it you like i don't really care about the money at the end of the day like i'm earning enough to just keep doing this indefinitely through like through my current website fund yeah and to me that's just amazing like the fact that i can just work on this and not have to worry about paying the bills and then all that's just covered um i i don't really care about making millions of dollars off of like a game release like i'm just gonna i feel like just popping it up on the website and just giving it to like for free for people and it's like if you enjoy it sure donate like that kind of like itch.io model how you um yeah kind of pay whatever you think it's worth um that really resonates with me and um to to the point where i'm actually thinking about um so right now i um i run everything as a sole trader um do you do that as well yep yeah so um i've gone to a point where um i'm like earning um so much money that um i'm hitting like some pretty big tax thresholds yeah so it would make sense to uncover that feeling and yeah yeah and it would and it would um and it just like makes sense to incorporate um yeah actually like a company it's like flat 30 tax for the company i think it's 25 even oh really has it gone down yeah i thought it was 30. i don't know that was that was um maybe i might be just remembering the discussion but for those of you who don't know who aren't in australia the last tax bracket is like 45 percent so it gets pretty high yeah yeah i mean like the one i mean at the moment is about 30 um but yeah that's just obviously just just with like no growth over this next year which is already i'm off to just like a walking start like yeah um so the way i earn most of my money at the moment is through um the sponsorships on the video so monthly i've been kind of doing that then recently i've um just developed out a whole um a whole font on my website so it's kind of just like patreon but it's just like all yeah um just like built from the ground up basically um so i've got that over there and um yeah like that's like that's starting to pull pulling quite a bit of money now like we're at about 3 400 a month just off of that and um yeah like it just keeps going up and we kind of just like have like just keep setting goals for everything and it's not like i'm just um trying to get more money for the sake of getting more money i want more money so i can like put it into more resources hire a team like get more development going all that kind of good stuff yeah and um so i thought well if i don't actually want to make a profit at the end of the day there's no real point incorporating and doing any of that why don't i just become a not-for-profit oh okay and do that so i've actually got to go in 20 minutes and talk to my accountant about that that's that's that's why i have to go at midday because i'm actually gonna like walk into that a little bit more oh cool um so yeah i mean just yeah i think that could be a pretty viable option i don't know because i think that would just get rid of all the tax concerns yeah because what i was gonna say actually when you mentioned that you're not making a game to make millions of dollars i was going to mention that i kind of hopefully am hoping to do that but the reason being that i can then spend that money on creating a game studio you know and actually yeah exactly actually doing what i enjoy because like i feel like that's why like a lot a lot of people you know look at money as like this negative thing but it entirely obviously depends on what you use it for like i don't think i would ever be like oh yeah i'm happy with this and i never want to grow beyond this kind of amount of money that i'm making because the more i grow the more i can start hiring people you know um and the more i can expand um and that's such an exciting thing exactly yeah yeah and that was that was my exact reason for starting this out to begin with i was like i really want to make a game studio i want to make a game i want to hire all these people i want to get offices i want to do all this cool stuff um yeah and and so that was my whole reason for kind of earning a profit at the end of the day and making millions and you know that's still something i'm gonna do it's just it's gonna hopefully be enough for profit and you know like it's like it's like it's not like you can't make a profit uh in enough of profit you can still earn money but you just have to allocate that money towards the mission and not run at a profit if that makes sense so how much are you allowed to pay yourself from from that i guess um so it's work and yeah i'm not too sure but um currently um what i would do is i would only pay myself a max of 700 a week right because that's i think i think like my math might be wrong but i think that was the threshold for the 25 okay tax bracket right um and like at the end of the day i don't really need anything over that like at the moment i pay myself about i think it's about 400 a week um and i can kind of just like live off of that quite comfortably um so yeah i mean yeah i can't remember where i was going with that but um yeah i yeah i think 700 max maybe i'm not exactly sure the number but um i'll just take whatever i need basically yeah that's an interesting concept i've never thought of that yeah and then like i mean you're still kind of in it for that whole idea of making a studio and everything yeah it's just you're kind of doubling down on the idea that that's what it's for like you're setting admission and you're doubling down on it and you're saying to everyone i'm not here to make a profit yeah i think that's that's the whole vibe that's going on because right now i've got quite a few people just um just just just coming to me and be like i really want to help making the game um but right now to get access to my source code well first of all you have to become a member on the website so you have to give me money to get access to the source code and then people are then saying i want to help contribute to this and it's like i don't feel comfortable with that whatsoever because you're giving me money for the opportunity to contribute and i mean like everyone's fine with that like i've talked to them about it and they're like you know it's all good man i just really like what you're doing and yeah that's great but i just don't feel comfortable with that you know uh because i'm a for-profit company and it's like i feel like i'm kind of um um kind of word this taking advantage kind of taking advantage of people yeah yeah literally yes sir but if i'm a if i'm not for profit that kind of goes away and it's like well we are really building a community here and you know i'm kind of just doubling down that whole idea so so the way that i got past that because i'm in a similar boat as well right people people subscribe on patreon and then they get access to big hazel and then they want to also help me with it so um the way that i okay so first of all some of the there's about eight people on the hazel team about half of them are patrons right and i don't again i i have never been like yeah you need to keep paying this otherwise i'm going to take away the code that you wrote essentially [Laughter] um half of them are not half of them have come up to me and they've pitched me just amazing like just they've they've been like look i really want to contribute to hazel and this is what i want to do and then they had they've never been patreons but i've obviously given them source code access and i've kind of put them onto the team and the reason is the reason that i consider that kind of okay is because first of all like making a game engine there's so many different systems right so if someone just loves audio programming and they want to program audio for an engine they're not going to make the rest of the engine you know where are they going to be able to practice their craft right i think coming in like that we have some networking guys as well who are who are hoping to hopefully take hazel and make it multiplayer as well and kind of architect all of that they just love network code and they want to contribute that to a game engine but they also and they started off there i had a conversation with them recently they started off making their own engine and they're like i don't care about rendering i don't care about all this why don't we find a good kind of project that's out there and then we can we can work on our stuff and we can get better at working on networking code which we care about and we can also contribute to something right that's amazing so i think that experience is really good but also some of these people like uh some of them have had professional experience some of them haven't but they're just really good programming i'm shocked at the level of quality from some of these people like when i found out that like some of them have never had a programming job i'm like are you joking you're better than half the people on the team at ea like literally like it's amazing because it's just raw passion that goes into it yeah and the thing is what what i'm kind of offering them i guess is a lot of mentorship because i spent time on discord you know having calls with these guys and they're like look i want to do this system i've never done it before can you help me out and like in a way it's like you know i'm they're kind of under my mentorship obviously i've had professional experience working on game engines at ea like i kind of more or less know what i'm doing although i would say that there's obviously a lot that i don't know um but like i know what i'm doing i can kind of direct this project and they have the benefit of also adding me as like a reference you know if they want to get a job they can be like look i worked on hazel i did the physics system i did the audio system whatever you can check it out it's a real project it's got a website it's got youtube videos you can you can look at this so i that's the way i kind of see that but also overwhelmingly they just want to they just love it you know it's just their passion they want to work on this like you know i only have one employee who's actually on payroll a software engineer right and i and as the patreon expands as everything expands i plan on hopefully being able to you know pay some of these volunteers and basically get them to allocate more time onto this and make it more than just a hobby for them right that's the plan overall but like them being there i think is it's just you know it's just something they're so passionate about and that's such a great little team and community that i've built up oh yeah and i've come together yeah if you just stitch together a bunch of people from dis from different disciplines that are genuinely passionate about what they do yeah it's like that's exactly why i sold out ryan because he's really passionate about like the game engine side of things and i like it like i can do it but i'm really really passionate about game design so um that's kind of where i come from and it's like that's what i want to spend most of my time doing um so it's just to have these people who are also passionate about what they do and we all kind of just like fit together like a jigsaw like you know yeah that would be really amazing i was gonna i was gonna ask you what your favorite like part of the whole game development process was so designed yeah it's way around yeah it would it would definitely be game design and like i do still really like programming but um just in terms of like just game design like just figuring out loops like trying to give the player a nice experience um i really enjoy that yeah obviously i haven't done much of it because i've just dedicated like the last what five years to learning how to program properly yeah i've done a little bit of game design and i'm kind of just you know quietly sitting here crafting an entire story an entire game um just in my notebooks but um so originally i um i hired a pixel artist just when i was first starting out yeah i didn't really hire him i was i was like 15 at the time and i just promised him royalties and yeah and i was just like yeah that's just like all right bet and then um so then i got pixelated that way and i also met ryan through him as well right yeah um but yeah and then er and then over the years i was like all right well um i need to just hire a pixel artist to just get him to do all the art for me um but then i was like all right why don't i just do it myself and then i just want my pixel out myself yeah and that kind of just did everything um you know like it doesn't look as good but um you know it's getting there and it's definitely like i wouldn't real i like i don't really enjoy pixelate that much but yeah um i think i would probably hire an artist to do it like once we do actually start kind of well yeah if you have to do it anymore then yeah exactly yeah like at like at scale what i want to be doing is sitting back and kind of just um making sure everyone's working together nicely and yeah i really like the whole concept of um just all just orchestrating like an entire team and um just trying to optimize that the um just the process of everyone commuting communicating together nicely um yeah and yeah i mean that's that's that's really nice and that's kind of what i'm doing at the moment so i've got two web developers working on payroll uh on the website at the moment um and then i've got so i've got two editors just for the second channel um and they just help me like pump out the stream highlights yep um and yeah that's that's pretty much it at the moment um but i like it like i like i do want to expand that and um definitely include the people who um just generally want to do it and just like volunteer but yeah like i said i just haven't really been comfortable doing that because i'm yeah just earning money off it but at the same time i should just not be a and just you know let him do it because it's like like it's that it's their choice at the end of the day like yeah and i'm sure it'll transform them i'm doing it as well exactly yeah so but yeah i think with the game it's also like a little different um yeah um last thing i wanted to uh ask you to wrap this up is if you could go back like five years or maybe even three years to when you really started programming like what would you tell yourself and how has the experience i guess changed for you what piece of advice would you tell your younger self i don't know i think if i could go back in time and i could just give my give my younger self some advice i would probably say stop working so hard um it's it's really not the end of the day if you crank out more hours like just just just try and be smart about it right and i would if i could i would just would we just slap him down into sea like straight away and be like just focus on this and just learn this right away because you're going down that path it's just i took so many different steps to get there that if i would have a mentor that would just start me off in that spot to begin with that would be great so i mean i like but i can't do that to people at the moment like i can't give people the resources to go and do that because there just isn't really any good ones at the moment like i like i can say all i want you know sure go and see make a game engine and do all that kind of stuff if that's what you really enjoy doing um but i just can't lead any people to any good resources and it's kind of a bit annoying but um you know like it it it varies from person to person um just like in general like you can't just provide this blanket statement of like oh everyone should be making a game engine and doing their own stuff and see and all that kind of stuff because yeah at the end day it's like what do you really want to do you know what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning what do you want to go pursue go do that don't let anyone tell you otherwise you know yeah c is just a tool um exactly like you you you learn how to use the tools actually i think this is a this is a good wittle and let me see if i can find the court if but i came across this um hindu problem the other day and it was quite lovely quite applicable to this situation um it is there are hundreds of paths off the mountain all weeding in the same direction so it doesn't matter which path you take the only one wasting time is the one who runs around the mountain telling everyone that his or her path is wrong that's great so doesn't matter how you do at the end of the day all that matters is that say you you've got this massive oz mountain that you want to overcome this is big hurdle and you're worried about all these other steps like steps 2 through to 100 just ignore them just focus on the first step take it get it done once you've done the first one then you can think about the next one so just don't get overwhelmed and just start just start what whatever it is you want to do just get going all right tell us this podcast right now get going brilliant fantastic words randy thank you so much for being here on the podcast where can people find you just search randy and youtube i guess um it's a pretty competitive search term randy like it was i've been typing in randy gamedev yeah yeah or if you type um aussie bold gamedev that oh really that works as well um yeah so you can just find me over there um i'll leave links in there in the description for those of you watching on youtube yeah cheers and i mean hey it's it's it's been an absolute pleasure coming in this podcast like thank you so much for having me like you know starting out when i had just no subscribers i was just like looking up to you and watching your seatbelt spots tutorials and to kind of just come on here it's kind of just like a full circle and like yeah yeah it's amazing just it's it's it's quite special so um glad glad to be of help to you thanks for that's why i make videos like that you know i just i love i love that i love being able to help people all right thank you guys keep it up catch you later have a good day bye bye [Music]

Channel: The Cherno

Views: 37,865

Rating: 4.9819226 out of 5

Keywords: cherno, cherno podcast, the cherno podcast, chernopodcast, programming podcast, dev podcast, game dev podcast, game engine dev podcast, c++, c++ podcast, game engines, programming, thomas randall, randy, randy gamedev, arcane

Id: izFHFYgRo1o

Length: 126min 23sec (7583 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021