Exclusive Interview With The Creative Director of MythWalker - PAX West 2024

hey everybody Eric schwizer here at Pax West in Seattle I'm talking with Jesse Snider from n games about myth Walker how are you Jesse great U thanks for having me yeah um so I just got to see a little bit of the game um first of all it's a GPS game right so can you talk about what what's interesting to you about that Jour why make it why make a GPS game yeah oh that's a great question um I'm a big big fan of GPS games in general like I do lot of Geocaching like I have geocaches like hidden out in the in the world already um I just like games I like the idea of just being able to move around the world and having like a gameplay layer that just exists that you know you're almost in like on a kind of like a secret Club you know what I mean like it's like you and then like the people that are also playing it kind of like oh hey like um so I always wanted to make a game like that um my my background funny enough is actually in tripa games I worked on a bunch of Call of Duty games I worked on Halo games um if you ever played Nazi zombies I created that for Call of Duty back on World of War yeah so I was like lead designer on World of War so this is like a big passion project for me um this is something I've been waned to make for a long time we able to assemble a great team to put it together um we got a lot of other geolocation Gamers that are super into this and we really want to take an Innovative kind of like unique spin on on the genre so yeah cool talk to me a little bit about the studio uh yeah so we're um we're about 50 people we're in Indie startup we're you know self-funded Indie startup studio um we're based out of San Diego um but we are a full remote studio so oh a lot of our team is located in San Diego because that's where we started but uh we we've fired people from all over the US and so um yeah we've got great people from all across different uh you know AAA games but some people that are completely out of games and we just thought hey they're super talented and they're into geolocation games so we brought them on and yeah they've been great yeah kind of on brand for a GPS game too to have a studio that's decentralized of course yeah it works really well yeah and then what's what's wild too is um covid happened while we were doing this too and so you know some of the features in the game that maybe we'll talk about with like uh like the tap to move stuff was kind of a little bit influenced by that right of being able to like get away more and like not have to be so like locked into your house and all that kind of stuff so how long has this been in development um it's actually it's funny because the studio really started about five years ago and when we started with some of the ideation around the game was was around then but I'd say it's really been about three years of like full development of this game there's been some R&D and prototype stuff that happened before that but I'd say like full development about about three years yeah Okay cool so uh before we get into the gameplay can you talk a little bit about the world of the story yeah sure so uh game's called myth Walker right um usually what I like to say is uh the Walker part is is is pretty obvious right it's like the GPS the moving around the world and all that kind of stuff um but the myth component is really um all about the the new IP that we built um and it's a it's a fantasy based IP but it's all based on world mythology right so we took a lot of references and inspiration from just wherever we could find it in terms of like folklore Legends um mythology so you know obviously like everyone knows about well not everyone but a lot of people know about Greek and Egyptian mythology and that's pretty like common right but then there's there's stuff like I'll talk about like like the wolven characters like our dog folk are based on like a Scottish mythology um called the wolverin or the wolver so so we're kind of like trying to pull inspiration from wherever we could find it um and try to make like a really cohesive um you know kind of like inclusive all all World mythology kind of game so yeah cool and um so in in terms of the gameplay you know when we talk about GPS games uh it's kind of like how there's platform Fighters but every platform Fighters compared to smash like we there's a game that sort of currently owns a genre yeah um so can you talk about some of the ways that myth Walker is different from oh yeah Pokemon go yeah okay sure right yeah I mean that's that's a really interesting way to put it too because uh when we sat down to design this game um you know again we're like we we come from a very varied background of designers and you know we're we're looking at it going um really like how can we map an RPG game onto a geolocation game we didn't look at it so much like oh what's this other game doing or like how did they do it um it was more like you know there's this we feel like we felt like there was this like whole like like a hole basically in the genre of like why why hasn't someone mapped a really good RPG game think of like an like your favorite MMO right of how you're like moving around the world and you're doing various activities in in like a big world that they've created well why couldn't Earth just be that world and why can't I just like walk down the street and fight mobs and why can't I go collect resources further down the street right so that that was kind of like the original inspiration a of how we wanted to like build the game and then from that point on it was like Hey I've never built an RPG before but I always wanted to build one and we've had some other people that kind of were in the same boat and some other people that had done it wanted to do it again and so we kind of learned a lot from each other in that way but we wanted to build an RPG with a lot of depth in it um you know and it's not just like a surface level RPG where you know it's just like really really kind of like basic input I mean this has like full abilities like craftables like like all kinds of different weapons and all kinds of great stuff so it's like a it's a full RPG with depth and you know like I like I was talking to you a little bit you know before it was like it's got Co-op right so it's you want to be able to like synergize with your friends and play together and and work together so yeah it's it's all there yeah yeah that that was the sense I had too as we were playing through it and I was asking you questions and it was like does it have you know uh craftable weapons yep classes new spells like it's just the the checklist of what makes us a good RPG but in a GPS game awesome yeah yeah no that's that's exactly like how we approached it it was like how can we build the RPG sandbox in a way that it's like satisfying for people just to play like it just feels good to play um and then we'll start to figure out how to like stack in the more complex elements as we go because the other challenge is it's like we are making an RPG for a geolocation game that's really not a thing that gets done you know and so there's all these kind of like wild challenges like uh you know when we're were playing it earlier of like when you play an MMO you tend to move through zones and so you kind of have that like early like 1 through 10 level stuff and I'm fighting like rats and wolves and stuff but then as I scale out of that fighting cooler monsters and more difficult monsters and they drop better loot but you you know obviously everyone's going to be wherever they are in the world we can't put people in zones and make them fight through that kind of thing so um we had some design challenges that we had to overcome there but we you know we we found some ways to do some difficulty scaling kind of put put mobs in different groups um and you know I think it's a uh an interesting way to approach the problem that hasn't been done before so yeah yeah and then I I think the other thing myth Walker is doing that's currently absent from this genre is is in the strategic depth of the combat can you talk about that yeah yeah sure so um there's a lot there uh so there's there's basically like there's five different abilities and you unlock abilities as you go up in level right um so you get your passive um and that just you know obviously it's like as you're playing the game uh you're doing your there's an auto attack component to it so you tap on an enemy and you just start doing like an auto attack right and your passive feeds into that so you unlock more passives you can kind of swap out what those passives do for example like the the priest class like is a support class one of the passives has a uh like every third hit gives a heal to you right and so you can kind of use that in coordination with some other abilities too but but then then it's like then there's a damage trade-off right so you're doing less damage but you're healing yourself um but then there's also abilities like instance um so those are just like one-offs you just fire them and they go there's Dragon drop abilities so you actually like hold down on your screen and drag it and let like release it into the field and it do has some effect um there's tap and hold abilities you hold down on a button and then you wait and then you let go at its most powerful form and then there's the ultimate abilities right so all these other abil feed into your ultimate and then like that's kind of like you get out a jail free card right so you you hit your ultimate it does something you know super powerful um and that that's just the abilities right so um then we get into weapons each class has uh two weapon sets so like for example the warrior has um what is it sword and shield and a great sword um the Spells Slinger has a staff and like a dual wands and uh the priest has a great hammer and a a Mason a shield right and based on which one you select then you unlock or you have access to different abilities so some some like you know like the uh typically the for example for the priest the great hammer abilities will give you like your your heel type spells right um and so all that stuff kind of works together like we mentioned there's like a crafting system and all that kind of stuff but then again like when you're playing with your friends you're in a co-op situation you kind of want to strategize like make sure to pick this load out use this ability with this weapon um and just to say you're not locked to like a weapon class you have access to both weapon classes you can just kind of like pick whatever weapon that you want and that kind of makes sense for what your play style is and what your what the situation is right so yeah cool I'm excited to dig deeper into that combat yeah uh another thing I thought was really neat is um it it's bringing elements of the real world into the game so things like weather and time of day but it's not just a it's not just a cosmetic experience there's actual gameplay ramification to that can you talk about that yeah sure so um yeah I mean it's a geog game so it's important to like make sure that the like the world itself kind of played a role in the gameplay right right so um so we did we took a lot of effort into doing things like uh like biomes right so um I think uh at launch we're going to have nine biomes um but there's different things like City biome there's the plains biome there's Forest there's Island there's like a dungeon biome there's all kinds of stuff so based on uh Real World um data we sort of we filter that in and we say oh well this should be a city biome like right now we're in downtown Seattle so there's a lot of City biome around downtown but the further out you go say if you go over to like Lake Washington you're going to start like Island and like water biome type stuff and based on what those biomes are they also uh kind of help decide like what the mobs that should spawn there yeah right so like if you're near the water you're going to get like Pirates you're going to get crabs and that kind of thing um and then um the other thing to to kind of consider is the time of day and the weather right so if it's raining outside it's going to be raining in game and it's not just raining at one part of the game it's like raining in the instances it's raining in the in the in the town Hub um so uh and then time of day as well right so if it's dark outside um you know it's going to be dark in game and that means that the you know the undead are going to come out and that sort of thing so yeah very cool uh when do you think people might get a chance to play the game yeah so uh right now if you're in Australia you get to be a lucky player you could sign up and and play today there's a the closed beta in Australia we're looking to expand the beta that's like kind of why we're here at PS we're trying to get people to sign up for um for the for expanding the beta into new regions um and then uh we still we're still going through some testing in the game obviously there's some bugs to work out and that kind of thing um we're looking to launch this year hopefully so we'll kind of see how it goes we're playing it by ear a little bit um but first we need to get the the beta expanded out work out some more Kinks and then see how it goes from there yeah so very cool thanks Jesse yeah yeah thank you stay tuned for more from PEX West [Music]