PixelSmiths Ep. 13: Genesis Noir w/ Jeremy Abel & Evan Anthony of Feral Cat Den

An artistic duo from New York creates an interactive, narrative, noir experience.

On this episode, Larry & Clinton speak with Jeremy Abel & Evan Anthony, founders of Feral Cat Den, an artistic collective based in New York. Their first game, Genesis Noir, is a point-and-click adventure that spans time and space, telling a noir tale of The Big Bang.

They talk about the growth of Evan and Jeremy's friendship in college, their work together in interactive media and short form content, their inspirations for Genesis Noir, how they learned to adapt their skills to the gaming medium, and more.

Other media that is discussed includes: SILT, Vectorpark, Amanita Design, film noir, Buck Studios, Umbro Blackout, Italo Calvino, Radiolab, Sun Ra

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Find Genesis Noir on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/735290/Genesis_Noir/

Visit the Genesis Noir website: https://genesisnoirgame.com/

Visit the Feral Cat Den website: http://feralcatden.com/

Follow Genesis Noir on twitter: https://twitter.com/genesisnoirgame

Transcript:

Larry Kilgore III:

Video games are an art form. From the bits and bites of the old school arcade cabinets to the technological advancements of the modern era, video games have been a way for creators to tell stories in an interactive environment that can be shared the world over.

Clinton Bader:

Developers, designers, visionaries, and storytellers, like the artisans of old, it's their blood, sweat, and tears that go into crafting these unique and innovative experiences for players. But oftentimes, the independent artists get lost in the overwhelming space that is today's hectic gaming market. And on PixelSmiths, it's our goal to be a platform for those artists to celebrate their drive, their vision, and the work it takes to create their art.

Larry Kilgore III:

On this episode, we'll speak with the founding members of New York-based Feral Cat Den, creators of Genesis Noir, an adventure game with an emphasis on exploration, simple interactions, and generative art. This is PixelSmiths.

Hello and welcome to PixelSmiths. I'm Larry Kilgore III, podcast creator and video game enthusiast.

Clinton Bader:

And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader, an eSports broadcaster and commentator. And we here at PixelSmiths want to give indie game developers an avenue to showcase the process, grit, and dedication it takes to make their games.

Larry Kilgore III:

Today we are talking with the two founders of Feral Cat Den, creative lead, Evan Anthony and technical lead, Jeremy Abel. Feral Cat Den is an artistic collective based in New York and their first game, Genesis Noir, is a point and click adventure that tells a noir detective story centered around the Big Bang.

Evan and Jeremy, thank you for joining us today on PixelSmiths.

Jeremy Abel:

Thanks for having us.

Evan Anthony:

I'm super excited to talk with you guys. Thank you.

Larry Kilgore III:

So we always like to start with a little background here. Can you guys tell us about yourselves and what you were doing before you came together to found Feral Cat Den?

Evan Anthony:

Jeremy and I studied new media design at Rochester Institute of Technology. We did a couple projects together as students, but after school, we both moved to New York City and worked at separate studios and wanted to continue to collaborate together, so we would work on small little projects just on the weekends. We got 50 pounds of dry ice and made some weird little experiments and we made pixel art game with our friends, but we always kind of wanted to do something bigger. And after working in the interactive installation kind of industry for several years, Jeremy and I decided we'd go for it and try to make our own video game.

Clinton Bader:

Evan, your background is in design and graphic design and that kind of thing. Is that correct?

Evan Anthony:

Yep.

Jeremy Abel:

And animation.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah. So Genesis Noir was very much a learning experience. We had no idea what we were doing. We had some idea, but the projects we were making were-

Jeremy Abel:

Super short, right?

Evan Anthony:

Yeah. Web experiences-

Jeremy Abel:

That would only last for a month.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, They would be taken down after a while or a interactive installation that you might find at South by Southwest or a museum. So a short experience that doesn't have a long form narrative or mechanics that you kind of develop over the course of the experience. And we had never used Unreal before. So we tried to use that experience as a bit of outsiders into the world of games and make Genesis Noir something a little bit different.

Larry Kilgore III:

And I will agree that Genesis Noir is not like most games. I feel like it plays more like an interactive movie or art gallery and it's got a really unique style and look and uses minimal colors. There's really only three colors in it, black, white, and yellow. We've had some previous guests that made SILT and that's probably the only thing that I've seen that's similar, where it's kind of an interactive art gallery and there are puzzles and things like that. But outside of that, I can't really think of anything that I've played like that. What were some of your inspirations for the game and what made you decide to go with the look and feel that Genesis Noir has?

Jeremy Abel:

So both Evan and I kind of started in college. We were taught flash animation and these nice joyful, interactive toy interactions. And Vectorpark was a really big inspiration. He made a game called Windowsill with Adobe Flash back in early 2000s, I think. And it just had these really nice joyful discovery kind of tactile interactions that both really kind of struck us. And that was, I think the starting point for the kinds of interactions that we wanted to have in Genesis Noir where it wasn't really narrative. The interactions weren't a skill based difficult kind of thing. They were more just about figuring out what the system is and kind of playing around with it. So that was kind of where we started inspiration-wise, along with stuff from Amanita Design. Just like wordless storytelling kind of things.

Evan Anthony:

Interactions that really depend on a lot of animation and delight as opposed to really fine tuned mechanics because that's something that we haven't done before. And we wanted to really leverage the skills that we had experience that we had.

Clinton Bader:

Larry talked about the colors and I find that I minimalistic kind of stuff myself. And so how did you guys settle on that style and on that color palette, where did that idea and that inspiration come from?

Evan Anthony:

Well, we're making a film noir, so black and white is very natural. And also as an indie team, a small budget project, you really have to select some constraints to be able to produce something. So limiting ourselves to black and white just made it so that we didn't have to color all our characters. We're working with color now on our next project and oh my God-

Jeremy Abel:

Yeah, it's so much harder.

Evan Anthony:

It's so much harder to try to introduce color and balance it and have things be legible from an interaction standpoint. So really taking that out of the mix enabled us to be more ambitious with our animation and introduce different interaction types and mechanics without having to establish new rules for what the color means. The one addition that we made was gold, which became generally our this is an interactive thing or this is special, this is something that we should look at. And we weren't using that as a hard and fast.... It's only interactive... We also use that in an art direction kind of way as well. But the limitations definitely just helped us so much.

Jeremy Abel:

And in terms of where that idea originally came from, I guess was our background in motion graphics and that kind of stuff where each animation was very graphical and kind of sparse and minimal, but really expressive.

Evan Anthony:

One of our favorite studios here in New York, it's called Buck. And they made this really cool advertisement for a soccer shoe brand called Umbro, this cool little short film called Umbro Blackout. And they managed to balance this very simple white line work with juxtaposing scale and character with graphic elements. And that was a huge inspiration of, well, what would that be if it wasn't just a passive experience, if you could make it interactive. So that was definitely kind of a-

Jeremy Abel:

A seed, at that point. Yeah.

Larry Kilgore III:

I read somewhere that some of your inspiration came from a specific episode of Radiolab that was narrated by Liev Schreiber. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, so the story of Genesis Noir is pretty much ripped off directly from collection of short stories by the writer Italo Calvino called Cosmic Comics. And I was introduced to this on an episode of Radiolab where Liev Schreiber read one of the stories, which I highly recommend. The episode I believe is called Distance of the Moon, where they read one of these stories from Calvino's work. And what I was really drawn to was the mix of science fiction and magical realism and scientific fact that these stories that Calvino wrote [inaudible 00:07:47]. So each story begins with a concept or theory, and then he uses that as a springboard. Not to educate you about the intricacies of that theory, but just as a way to tell really interesting stories. For instance, the Distance of the Moon begins with a caption that talks about how the earth's moon was created after a collision between the early earth and another celestial body.

And this collision produced a debris field that orbited the earth for millions of years or whatever. I'm not sure exactly on the details, but all that debris eventually accumulated into the moon. And it took a while for the moon to settle into its current distance and current form. So Calvino imagines a story about these kind of cosmic beings that live on this early earth and they're witnessing the creation of the moon and it's getting further and further away from the surface of the planet. So yeah, that was just hugely inspirational. And one day I was walking to work and walking across the Williamsburg Bridge here in New York and kind of thinking about just more stories in that vein and just the idea or realization that the Big Bang sounded immediately like a film noir was just like, Oh, that's a story and here's kind of a style or a genre that I could take inspiration from and to tell a story in this Calvino way.

Clinton Bader:

That's awesome. That's actually really cool. I want to ask about the music because personally I'm a huge jazz fan. I played jazz band in high school, I played the alto saxophone, love Cowboy Bebop, all these kind of things. So I want to know about the music. Where did it come from? Were there any specific inspirations, some artists that you're fans of that you brought to the table for this game? Because frankly, the music in this game is absolutely gorgeous.

Jeremy Abel:

Well, thanks. So Evan and I both have liked jazz music and I've also played in jazz band all throughout middle school and high school and college and all that. I played drums. So obviously jazz and noir go hand in hand. So that was kind of an obvious choice. But for specifics of artists, we were both really inspired by Sun Ra and kind of the more accessible side of free jazz kind of stuff. Ornette Coleman, et cetera. And there was this German record label that we found on Bandcamp called Destination Out, I think that had a whole bunch of just reissues of old weird European free jazz stuff. So we would go through that and just try and find bits that were interesting and kind of collected that into a spreadsheet or whatever. And we had hooked up with Skillbard, which we kind of did that in a weird way.

In that I had originally went on Twitter and been like, hey, I'm making this game, check it out. Here's some gifs and whatnot, just to drum up initial attention to see if the idea was worth pursuing. And there was a guy on Twitter who was always like, hey, if you need music, we'll do music for your game. And he always struck me as, oh he sounds pretty thirsty. I don't know, And I didn't really pay him much attention. And eventually we were like, okay, we're going to make this game. And I remember sitting in Evan's apartment and we were like, okay, we need to find someone who can do audio because we don't know audio stuff.

So we started gathering like a list of all of our favorite animations over the years, or rather animations that had our favorite sound design from blogs and Vimeo and websites and stuff. And basically half of them were, the sound was done by Skillbard, so we looked up Skillbard and I was like, wait, one of these guys names that, that's the guy that's been bugging me on Twitter for the past year. Well, problem solved. So we just reached out to them and they were like, yeah, we found this project on Twitter. We're like, yeah, they really were up for doing it.

Clinton Bader:

It was fated.

Jeremy Abel:

Yeah. Which was super great. Yeah, fantastic to work with.

Larry Kilgore III:

It's really funny that you were like, oh, he's thirsty. And it turns out to be exactly who you wanted.

Jeremy Abel:

We get solicited just random emails from graduates and people who are just looking for work and a lot of the time it's not super interesting or rather it's not relevant for the kind of work that we're doing. So it's kind of been ingrained in my brain to just kind of ignore a lot of that stuff. But yeah, this was way more of a good pick I think.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, they were perfect and they worked so hard and you should buy the official soundtrack because they added tons of new tracks and bonus stuff and the music's the best part of the game.

Larry Kilgore III:

Is that part of a DLC package?

Jeremy Abel:

Yeah. The Cosmic Collection on Steam will come with DLC.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah.

Jeremy Abel:

It's on Bandcamp too.

Evan Anthony:

They're releasing a double LP with iam8bit

Larry Kilgore III:

That's really cool. So I know that we have shared the ways that we think this game is unique. What do you guys think makes Genesis Noir different from the media that inspired you or other games in its genre?

Jeremy Abel:

So one of the hard things was that we didn't really have a lot of reference points for games that are longer experiences. So Windowsill is a 30 minute sort of situation. So it can just bombard you with these cool interactions for 30 minutes and then you're done, Genesis Noir is like a three or four hour kind of thing. So it was difficult to find references to other games that do similar stuff in terms of like, oh, is this a good decision versus a bad decision gameplay wise because oh well this other game that has been really successful has done this, therefore you players will be accustomed to this concept. We didn't really have much of that to go on. Right.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, I definitely think the kind of key difference between Genesis Noir and a lot of games is Genesis Noir isn't a game. Genesis Noir I think is more interactive fiction. The emphasis isn't on developing mechanical skill, developing intrinsic goals for how you interact with this game is very much we provide you a really interesting world to explore and some toys that you can interact with but you don't get better at... There are little instruments-

Jeremy Abel:

One and done kind of things.

Evan Anthony:

So I think that's something that we struggled with and that probably a lot of other developers struggle with is just the term game, which encompasses such a wide range of interactive possibilities and so much about how someone enjoys an experience is how you set up and frame their expectations. So it's very difficult to set the expectations that okay, you're going to play something that's a bit Noir-y, but it's a cosmic thing and the way you interact with it is a little bit different than maybe some other adventure games that you've played.

Jeremy Abel:

It was super hard to try and sell the game and write up what to describe it to other people. And especially with the trailer because our trailer, it's like 99% gameplay, but it looks like cut scenes. So it's really hard to be like, no, this is the playing part. In our trailer, we make the cursor much bigger than it is in the actual games. You can see it so you're moving the mouse and you're clicking things. We went through so many different rounds of iterating on the trailer just to try and show people what we're making. That was definitely a big challenge.

Larry Kilgore III:

Well Jeremy and Evan, we've certainly learned a lot about you guys and what inspired you to make Genesis Noir. After the break. I'd like to get into the details of the development of the game and what challenge you may have faced while making it. We'll be back in a moment with more from the creators of Genesis Noir here on PixelSmiths.

This is PixelSmiths, the podcast that gives a voice to today's indie game developers. I'm Larry Kilgore III.

Clinton Bader:

And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader. And we're talking to Jeremy Abel and Evan Anthony of Feral Cat Den, creators of Genesis Noir. So earlier guys, we talked very briefly about the timeline of things where you guys kind of worked together in your spare time around 2013. And then you started working on this project full-time around 2016. Can you give us a little bit of indication of how this all started? What were the ideas that really led to this becoming a full-time endeavor? How did you guys come to that point?

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, so it was very iterative. We spent a couple years tinkering with this idea, making concept art.

Jeremy Abel:

Get together on the weekends with a big piece of newsprint and just doodle in charcoal and stuff.

Evan Anthony:

While we were working and freelancing in New York City. And we would show this to our coworkers and kind of get their feedback and develop a little pitch deck. And then we got to a point where, okay, let's take a month off or a couple weeks off.

Jeremy Abel:

It was two weeks, yeah.

Evan Anthony:

And make a little demo to try to establish the mood, see how the workflow of trying to build this out could be.

Jeremy Abel:

We started it in Unity and we just wanted to like, okay, does this line art style work and can we do some of the visual effects kind of stuff that we wanted to do? And we tested a lot at Unity. We have this little tiny demo where you walk through a little scene and then you click on a character and you pressed a button, I think. I forget exactly what it was. And we shared that around to some friends and we're like, oh hey, this is actually really cool. I don't know if I put that publicly up on Twitter or anything.

Evan Anthony:

We posted that level two [inaudible 00:16:54]

Jeremy Abel:

Yeah. We put it on TIGsource.

Evan Anthony:

A Indie game developer forum called TIG. And then people said some nice things about it and-

Jeremy Abel:

eventually we got attention from another indie game studio called KO_OP Mode who did Gnog and we're working on some new stuff. And they were like, you guys need to make this. And eventually we just kept talking back and forth about, okay, what's the process of actually making this? How does this work? They kind of helped us get our feet wet and eventually they were like, it's GDC in two weeks. We have two spare beds in the hostel thing that we're renting. You can have them, come and pitch your game to places, send emails out to publishers to help set up some meetings because they'll want to talk to you about this thing. And this was after we had made a much larger kind of demo, right?

Evan Anthony:

Yeah. We were building what's called a vertical slice. It's 15 minute chunk of the game. And at that point it was so terrible. We were really still figuring everything out.

Jeremy Abel:

We still had the apartment scene with the [inaudible 00:18:01], with the dialing phone.

Evan Anthony:

Well I just mean it in the sense that it changed so much since then.

Jeremy Abel:

Oh yeah, sure.

Evan Anthony:

But it was enough to show the kinds of interactions, the kinds of art direction and animation. We met Fellow Traveller who was called Surprise Attack at that time, and they kind of saw the potential in it even though we had no idea what we were doing. They felt like they could mentor us and kind of guide us into developing skills and learning how to communicate your game and share it with the world. And then we had a great conversation with them and continued to work on our build and decided to do a Kickstarter and partner with Fellow Traveller to help us do that Kickstarter. We really wanted to do a Kickstarter just because we had no idea what the scope of the game should be.

Jeremy Abel:

Or what the audience interest was.

Evan Anthony:

Or what the audience would really respond to or think about the game because of the concept of the game. It's like, okay, the big bang, there's a gunshot. The whole universe we could fill out as much or as little as of this story as we could. Because the maximum vision is like, okay, you go through every moment in the history, in every setting and see every human culture and civilization and go into the science fiction future. And it's like, okay, do people want that or... So yeah, we did the Kickstarter and got a really positive response and successfully funded it and decided, okay, let's go for the full vision.

Larry Kilgore III:

I feel like yeah, definitely a lot of people in your positions, a Kickstarter's a good place to be for A, the funding and the feedback too, to understand what people are really looking for when it comes to your project. So I think that was a good idea. So throughout this show, I've learned a lot about what it takes to make a game and take it from concept to release. Sticking to your scope, being able to grow and scale and being aware of your capabilities and limitations are important, especially as an indie dev team. Can you guys tell me about your experience developing Genesis Noir and what sort of challenges you faced bringing it to completion?

Jeremy Abel:

One of the toughest things was doing the console ports. We had never done that before and we kind of started doing that midway through development. So originally the game was all just mouse. You just click on stuff, and that still is the case. However, we then had to add controller support in halfway through and that was pretty painful to figure out. I didn't realize how difficult that would be at the time, but we eventually managed it. And also just the performance limitations of especially Switch and Mac and just lower end PCs in general. Because we just built stuff really willy-nilly without much thought as to oh it runs great on everything, I'm sure it's fine. That was certainly a big challenge just to figure out how to do that in the first place. And I kind of had some of that background from the web work because you had to make your website run well. So I kind of knew the general idea, but especially you I think had some growing pains in that department. Right?

Evan Anthony:

Yeah. My experience was doing more animation motion graphics where it's like, okay, you got the render, it works and you just hit play and you don't have to worry so much about it working on every different piece of hardware or the graphics cards. So yeah, that was a huge kind of learning experience for us. Just the realities of making a product that is going to work on different machines and-

Jeremy Abel:

Bugs that are a 1% chance of occurring. If you have 2000 players, then suddenly you got 20 people [inaudible 00:21:17] a bug. So stuff that was like oh, I don't have to worry about this. It only happens once a week when I'm playing through this thing. It's not a problem. It is a problem because just player volume and it will ding your review scores.

Clinton Bader:

I think it's a pretty common theme here that porting to consoles is a challenge, is something that often comes up. So yeah, you're not alone in that. You kind of talked about something interesting here with you ran into these bugs and then you didn't think they were as big of a deal as later on realized they were. Were there other types of feedback you guys were receiving, whether it be external feedback from a publisher or something like that? Were there any other people involved in keeping you on track?

Evan Anthony:

We would share our progress with friends and our publisher. That was very necessary just to be like, okay, is this interaction clear? Do you have enough context? And what are the simple solutions to communicate the things that the player needs to know for this interaction or scene? But we definitely didn't do as much play testing as we should have. As a small team, it was very, very challenging to show someone work in progress, get a ton of feedback, and then to implement that feedback on top of the work in progress. And then once that feedback is implemented, then there's a whole another round of feedback. And even just sitting down and play testing something is very time consuming and-

Jeremy Abel:

Mentally exhausting.

Evan Anthony:

It's very mentally exhausting to see someone experience your really unpolished stuff. It's like, okay, the audio isn't in here. We know there are these bugs. And watching someone kind of fumble through that is it's a skill that you have to develop that kind of... Maybe thick skin isn't the right word, but-

Larry Kilgore III:

Patience.

Evan Anthony:

Patience and detachment. Yeah, detachment. There we go. To be able to see, okay, this person is a patient person and they're a kind person and they can understand that this isn't representative of what your final work is going to be.

Larry Kilgore III:

I'm always curious, especially with the fact that COVID is still affecting the world, but did the COVID shut down at the beginning of 2020 affect your workflow at all? I know you guys are in the same city, but there was a point where pretty much every city was in quarantine.

Jeremy Abel:

So Evan, you stayed home for three months or something and I kept working in the studio because I didn't really have a very good computer to use at home. But you had a nice computer at home, so you were home for a bit. And I worked in the studio, but once everything kind of calmed down a bit, we got back. Yeah, I mean the work slowed down but it wasn't ever stopped.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, exactly. I'm definitely a big believer in working in the same space, especially for a game where it was like we need to debug or optimize something and it's such a collaborative process.

Jeremy Abel:

Because he'll build something and then I'll have to ask how it works or whatever.

Evan Anthony:

So yeah, we were fortunate in that it didn't slow us down too much.

Clinton Bader:

So obviously the game's released, it's out there, you can get it across many different platforms. This being your first game, you guys received a lot of positive feedback, numerous festival selections and nominations for Genesis Noir, while it was even in development. In 2021, that's the year you guys released the game, you've received even more accolades. For example, you won Best Sound and the innovation award at the Brazilian Indie Game festival. You won excellence in audio and excellence in visual art at the Independent Games Festival. So with all this feedback, how do you guys feel about the final product and what's it been receiving that kind of attention for your first project?

Evan Anthony:

Oh, I think they're all wrong. I'm proud of what we made, but also I'm not satisfied with what we made. Making a piece of art is such a journey of compromises and running into the realities of the constraints... Especially a production where this concept where it could encompass every single interesting thing that we want to make and explore. This idea of a story set across the entire span of time and space. So there's things that we wanted to put in that we didn't get to. There's things that we wanted to execute that didn't execute as well as we would like.

And also the reality of making this very art directed and linear experience. We had to play test everything like a thousand times. So I remember concepting a scene and being like, that would be cool. You stumble upon this, cosmic God-like figure standing in a primordial ocean, it's so dramatic. But play testing that a thousand times, you kind of lose the magic of it. So our experience is very different than what I think any player's experience will be. And I remember having the confidence in it, but then going over and making the thing you kind of like, oh are any of these ideas interesting? So we're super obviously grateful and thankful for all the reception that we've had.

Jeremy Abel:

It's really just hard to internalize any of that.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Abel:

Especially after just once you release it, there was just six months I guess, of just debugging and the first three weeks felt like three months. So just jumping into the world and then dealing with the fact that now everybody is touching this thing that previously only we were touching is terrifying and just so exhausting.

Evan Anthony:

So it's a very strange experience to work so hard on it and I'm very thankful because of how much personal growth that I underwent as a result of this. But yeah, I just can't see it with the same eyes that a jury might. It's super gratifying and beautiful when people share kind words about a project and stumbling upon people saying like, oh, this is one of their favorite games of last year. It's really so nice when people share that. And it was a huge lesson for me as an audience too, to go out of my way and try to share my feelings with artists who have been struggling so hard to finish something because it was very meaningful for me.

Larry Kilgore III:

So I know you said that there were times that you came up with a cool idea and then you weren't sure if you could figure out how to work it. If there was one thing that you could add or change about the game, now that it's released, what do you think it would be?

Jeremy Abel:

More checkpoints.

Evan Anthony:

Yeah, a lot of technical things.

Jeremy Abel:

Yeah, it's mostly technical stuff.

Evan Anthony:

More save points because there's like expectations that people have for modern games about being able to exit and resume.

Jeremy Abel:

We didn't launch with checkpoints. It was just each level you had to finish it, otherwise you'd start back at the beginning and there were so many bugs at the beginning that people would get at the very end of something and then it'd crash and they had to start all the way at the beginning again and it was just super frustrating for so many people. So that was a lot of work, just adding that in later. I do not recommend doing that.

Clinton Bader:

Yeah. So you guys obviously released Genesis Noir last year. What's next for Feral Cat Den? Are you guys working on a new game? Is it in a similar medium genre? What can you tell us about it?

Evan Anthony:

Well, we're working on a new game. We haven't announced it yet, but we're excited to. And yeah, I guess we could say it's definitely in the same territory of Genesis Noir, but we're trying to develop ourselves and try new things as well. Genesis Noir was a very kind of linear experience for each level. Is maybe a 20 minute, half an hour experience and progression through that for every player is going to be pretty much the same. Our new game, we want to try to create a little bit more ability for the player to approach the story from their own pace, get lost a bit, have more secret things or all those delightful things about narrative in a game space where it doesn't have to be just authorial. The player is involved. So we're trying to balance that with the same kind of transitions and art direction and interaction style that we had in the first game.

Larry Kilgore III:

Well, Evan and Jeremy, it has been fun learning about your inspirations and what it took you guys to get Genesis Noir to the finish line. You have created something that I think deserves all the positive feedback that it's received, and I look forward to your next project and seeing what else you guys can do. Thank you again for taking time to tell us your story here on PixelSmiths.

Clinton Bader:

Thanks, guys.

Jeremy Abel:

Thanks for having us.

Evan Anthony:

Thanks. Yeah.

Larry Kilgore III:

The music in this episode was written and performed by Skillbard and it's from the Genesis Noir soundtrack. Genesis Noir is available now on PC, Mac, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Learn more about Genesis Noir at the games website, genesisnoirgame.com and follow it on Twitter @genesisnoirgame. You can also visit the feral cat den website, feralcatden.com. PixelSmiths is brought to you by Podcamp Media where we provide branded podcast production services for businesses, podcampmedia.com. Executive producer is Dusty Weis and I oversee editing and production.

Clinton Bader:

And you can follow me, Clinton Bader on social media @paperthinhere and on twitch.tv/paperthinhere.

Larry Kilgore III:

Thanks for tuning in to PixelSmiths. I'm Larry Kilgore III.

Clinton Bader:

And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader.