BLACKSMITH BAY

Brotuzak: What is the game you’re working on and what do you do? 

Weiler: So we’re making a slice of life, cozy crafting RPG. Imagine if you took Stardew Valley, but then made it about managing a shop and being a blacksmith for the cute little town of Port Pleasant. That’s the basic idea of what we’re working on right now. 

Brotuzak: Cool. And then I guess you could just give us a small summary, maybe a different synopsis of—you know, you kind you answered already, but... 

Weiler: Yeah, so it’s basically we’re trying to accomplish all of those things that made it really, really fun to play Stardew Valley and really, really fun to play Graveyard Keeper, where you’re able to go out and go fishing, or you’ve got somebody on your team that really wants to do enchanting or be the one that goes and raids the dungeon. So trying to deliver a lot of the identity that those games allow people to have, but also putting in kind of the new wrapper of like, oh, you’re a blacksmith in a blacksmith game, powered by Unreal Engine with ridiculous graphics, full 3D and up to four-player co-op. So it’s kind of like the new generation, I hope, of this cozy, fun game that everybody can be at home with and everybody can kind of fall in love with. 

Brotuzak: I mean, I’d be really into something like that. That sounds really cool. I got to get in line and play it, but the line’s been capped like, all day, it’s crazy. 

Weiler: We actually capped our line three minutes after open today. 

Brotuzak: That’s obnoxious. 

Weiler: Apparently, according to the enforcers, the only two people—the only two booths in the convention that have been capped for literally the entire thing so far is us and Bandai. 

Brotuzak: That’s crazy. 

Weiler: It’s pretty wild, it’s pretty insane.  

Brotuzak: So I know you talked about Stardew Valley, and that kind of answers my next question about what’s going to be the most, like, thing that inspired you. Were there maybe any other games that inspired you at all in the developmental process? 

Weiler: I mean My Time at Portia had a really, really beautiful art style. It was able to deliver on that colorful, lovely, spectacular world. World of Warcraft also has a similar feel of that painterly aesthetic. 

And it feels like moving this style of game, this genre of game, from 2D with Stardew Valley, to 3D where we can deliver more of a wild experience with crazy cities with amazing verticality, it can expand that entire cozy aesthetic to a place that it hadn’t necessarily seen before, or had seen, but seen to a lesser extent with My Time at Portia or projects like that. So there’s loads of stuff that’s really, really exciting. 

One of the weirder things that was really interesting to us was a game called Heroes of Hammerwatch. It’s like a huge 2D game, dungeon-crawler, and it delivered this spectacular dungeon-crawling experience. Like end to end, it was the most interesting [way] I’ve seen a dungeon done, and it was a roguelike so it was replayable. So we’re actually looking to take a lot of the design hints for our dungeons based on that game too, because it’s like...they just nailed the head of exactly the type of experience that we are trying to accomplish with our game. But yeah, it’s exciting to look at all of the different ones inside the cozy genre, and then outside of the cozy game genre, and kind of steal the fun things that we can find from everybody. I think hopefully that’s one of the things that’s going to make Blacksmith Bay kind of a fun addition to everything. 

Brotuzak: I mean, you’re already going to get a lot of people with the Stardew Valley, kind of like, niche in there, but like all those other games, that’s what’s going to bring me in. ’Cause I remember playing Heroes of Hammerwatch for the first time. A buddy got it for me—at like 5:00 AM, ’cause he’s in Australia—and so he’s like, “Dude, let’s play this game, I got an extra copy”... and it was such a great experience. So I’m excited to see what you guys have in store.

Weiler: It’s wild, right? It surprised us. We walked into it and we all played it. We all get together, the whole dev team, to play games like once a week, and that was just one of the ones that we just had lined up and we didn’t expect anything from it. And then what we got was this thing that had the multi-access progression that we wanted to deliver [to] people, and the dungeons that were just so engaging. Every single time we hit a new boss, every single time we hit a new puzzle system that they had thought of, they were always so enlightened. So it was jaw-droppingly beautiful, the way that they had executed everything. We hope that we can do something that’s like, tangentially even, even like a part of maybe as good as that is. But we’ll see. 

Brotuzak: Awesome, cool. So, my favorite question I ask in these interviews is: if you could go back and redo the game, would you do it? And if so what would you change? 

Weiler: We did go back and redo the game. 

Brotuzak: [laughs]

Weiler: Yeah, this is the second pass of this project. 

Brotuzak: OK. 

Weiler: This game started as a game jam. It started as a game called Smelt Down, and it was a frenetic party game where you threw pizza across the room and you know, it was like one of those Overcooked-type style games, where it was about making weapons as people came in and ordered them. It was a fun game, it was a fun experience. But in the heart of it, 562 Interactive is really about making really, really accessible, cozy, fun games. And this didn’t—that experience didn’t lend itself very well to that, and I felt like we could do so much more making it something that the user got to be a little bit more involved with, like they can decorate their shop, and they can go on these adventures, and we could tell longer stories and we could do more of the multi-access progression we wanted to do. So we ended up going back and rebuilding a lot of the game. Maybe not rebuilding, but like building in a different direction than we had initially intended to. We also changed from single player to multiplayer. So that was a pretty huge transition for our dev team to be able to move and expand into something that like, no, you don’t just have to play by yourself, but you can invite your friends in to play with you. And we changed perspective, we were top-down for a while, like more of a Diablo-type camera, but then we started getting all of our level design done, and we realized over and over and over again, that when we were a top-down game, we were limiting ourselves in a lot of the same ways that Stardew Valley was limited in their level design. 

We couldn’t do these insane, huge, verticality-driven levels. We couldn’t do some of these really interesting experiences that we wanted to deliver to players that we were going to be able to because we were 3D, but otherwise were limited by being top-down still. So we went third-person over-the-shoulder and redesigned our whole town. And that’s where you get the dwarven artifact town that we’re in now, and it’s just such a better, more spectacular experience that we had before. So we’re going to keep on like, every time we see an opportunity to be like, oh maybe this isn’t working exactly the way that it wants to, we’re totally cool to throw stuff away and start over with stuff. And we’re kind of in it for the long haul with however long that takes for this project to get out the door. 

Brotuzak: Right. 

Weiler: Yeah, it’s going to be an interesting one. 

Brotuzak: That’s why I love that question—you had so much to talk about, it’s perfect. And I guess, you know, last final two here: what’s been your favorite part in the developmental process? 

Weiler:  So we had an interesting development process with this one. Typically when you’re building a game you do pre-production and then you basically figure out what the game is going to be, and then you do production. But at 562 we have a somewhat different philosophy. So we did, on this newest iteration of the game, we did a pre-production phase where we were building it out. Everybody got to be really, really creative with the initial ideas for everything that we wanted to do. We got to do production for about three months, four months, and then we went back into another pre-production phase where we trimmed down the experience. We figured out exactly what we wanted everything to look like, but we were able to do that under the guise of understanding what the game had already been for those first three months. We got to do that with understanding how people played it in those first three months. So that was the most exciting part of our development process, because we were able to look at the quests that people really, really engaged with, the experiences that people really, really engaged with. And the things that really, really didn’t work. But we got to be creative about a project after we’d already been working on a project, which is something that you don’t always get to do, and that’s something that’s somewhat unique to indie games. But we make a special point of making sure that we’re doing that at set intervals, or where literally—I mean we took like a month and we didn’t produce anything for the game. We did no production on the game for a month and we just looked at redefining what the game was going to be in its end state. But yeah, it was very, very valuable for us to do, and it was so fun to be able to be part of it. 

Brotuzak: Awesome. 

Weiler: Yeah. 

Brotuzak: I mean, that sounds like a blast, honestly, but a lot of work. A lot of work, but a blast.   

Weiler: It’s a good time. Very long Google Docs. Very very long Google Docs. 

Brotuzak: [laughs]

Weiler: Like, 800-page Google Docs sometimes, like all of the puzzles that we want to do and how they’re all going to interact to one another, and... we’ve got like this master map of how all of the dungeon space is all linked together, so you get to kind of, get to go on these journeys where you get to be super super creative, but you don’t necessarily have to build it yet, but you understand how hard it’s going to be to build it, because you built part of it. So it’s like, it is a perfect timing. It is a perfect time and you get to check in and do that kind of thing. 

Brotuzak: Awesome! I guess finally, is there anything you want to shout out? Is there anything else that you want to tell us about the game? 

Weiler:  Yeah, so on-site, unfortunately we haven’t really been able to get everybody that’s come by. We’ve kind of disappointed most of the people by not being able to have them stand in line and play the game. Definitely the response has been a little bit larger than we anticipated by several fold, if I’m honest with you. So we’re going to end up doing a beta for everybody on the Discord, coming in about two months or so. So all the people that missed out here, that weren’t able to play it on-site because we just didn’t have enough time to get people through the booth or folks that weren’t able to travel or didn’t feel comfortable coming out to a PAX, we want to make sure that we have that check-in with those people as well. So if you join the discord—discord.gg/bsb—or one of the cute little verified ones, so literally if you just join BSB, just join straight in. We’re gonna have a little bot that’s gonna hand out steam beta keys for everybody that’s in there to come get to play, so they’ll get the chance to play it as well. 

Brotuzak: Awesome, well you’ll find me in that discord. ’Cause I’m going to get a beta key. It’s going to be awesome. 

Weiler: Wonderful! Thank you very much. 

Brotuzak: Yeah, absolutely. Cool cool. 

Weiler: Thanks a lot, man. Thanks for talking.

Brotuzak: Yeah, absolutely.