How India’s next Big Video Game is being made! with Varun Mayya

Speaker A: What is up, beautiful people? Welcome back to another episode of Bad Decision Podcast.

Speaker B: We missed you. We did. We truly missed you. You know, we come back to you every Tuesday and Friday bringing you the latest and the greatest in the world of technology. Now on, um, last Friday, we were missing. We didn't make a post about it.

Speaker A: Why did we miss?

Speaker B: We were working on the AI education program for you and we recorded for four days straight 16 hour days. And we were about to finish on Friday, but we couldn't. We had more recordings and to be able to stay true to our July release date, we had to cut the show on Friday. We apologize. We missed you so much.

Speaker A: But to make up for it. But to make up for it, we have an. Even though today we have a long episode, we have a special guest. Yes. On this show. Shall we get right into it?

Speaker C: We should.

Speaker B: So our topics today are very colorful with wide variety of topics. Uh, the first one is about a game called Unleash the Avatar. This is not the first time we're talking about this game on the show. If it is your first time hearing about it, let me give you a very brief background. This is a game made in India, uh, and it is also based in India. So the game is made by developers in India by a company called Ayas Games, which is run by our friend Varun Maya, which is, which you might have heard of. We've done a podcast with him in the past. Now this is their very first ambitious project of creating a story about an Indian protagonist which is named Vikram, uh, in a fictional world based off of fictional Indian mythology stories. Now they released their early Alpha trailer many months ago. This is their new trailer which shows us an extended gameplay with new final bosses, new environments. And, and we wanted to do a very quick reaction before we actually bring Varun on the show. So he's going to be joining us later and we're going to talk to him about the behind the scenes. Not only because such an interesting business model to talk about games to an actual person running a game development company, but also the fact that they're making it using Unreal Engine, which is our favorite tool in the world.

Speaker A: So Farhad, let's look at, uh, the gameplay together. I think it is very fascinating when you talk to Varun and we see his videos and you understand how big the team is, what is the budget that they put behind and what are the output that we are getting here. So if we look at the boss fight here, the cinematics, it has a really good quality.

Speaker B: I'm so interested in the fact that they decided to release this boss fight to showcase exactly how the combat system works. I remember one of the earliest comments, uh, or feedback about the previous traders was that people were really curious about how much of time and effort was put into creating a complicated combat system, which makes for a more interesting gameplay. And I believe this is the reason why they decided to start this new trailer with almost the entire boss fight. I assume it's longer, but based on the tweets that we've seen from them, this gameplay was created from one of the only people in the entire company who could actually properly dodge and parry.

Speaker A: This boss saw one of the dodges, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And apparently only 5 out of 200 people could finish this boss fight. So you can imagine the boss fight is incredibly complicated, uh, which is a true characteristic of a Dark Souls game, uh, or a bloodborne game. You would expect to be dying back to back and trying to figure out how to play the game. Right. And that when you figure out how to actually beat a boss, is what gives people satisfaction. Um, so this is one of the boss fights that they're sharing with us. Let's. Pratt, go ahead and take a look at some of the environments they're working on. That is in the second half of the trailer.

Speaker A: I really love the environment I saw. In one of the tweets, he mentioned that a lot of it was photogrammetry from actual locations in India.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: And they spend a lot of time on the cinematic as well. Not only on the game mechanics, but on the cinematics and, uh, you know, the camera work and all the VFX as well.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: I mean, look at this. Just the snowing environment. You got this cave, uh, scene. You got the temple scene.

Speaker A: Characters metahuman. Right?

Speaker B: Characters are metahumans. Got this dancing girl. We remember that boss from the boss from the previous trailer.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: This is the custom music made for the game. They also uploaded it separately. Uh, on.

Speaker A: They have voice actors too. Apparently they paid voice actors. One thing good about Varun and the team is I think they got a lot of feedback for the voice actors and the way they did the voiceovers previously in the previous trailer, he went on and started hiring people to actually do the voice acting.

Speaker B: And not just anybody. This is, uh, Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach, who voiced, uh, not voice. He's voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch and he's the voice actor for Vikram. Uh, now in, uh, this, uh, video game. Very cool thing to do, by the way. Now we recommend that you Guys, go out and check out the trailer for yourself with full audio so you get the entire experience. But what we're most excited about is the fact that we get to see him build this in public. And that's why we want to bring him on the show so that we can talk to him about the process, how he has built the team towards creating their very first game using a tool like Unreal Engine, what are the hardships that they're going through and what it feels like building in front of everyone. Because he's also a creator at the same time, Varun, and, uh, he's guiding this path of game development very much like a creator, like a company, like a startup. He literally, right before we go live today, has uploaded a video on his YouTube channel addressing all of the feedback that they've gotten for the video game, which is very rare from a game developer. Usually they will write a tweet or a post, but he's made, um, a video with, you know, um, many minutes of him just sitting in front of a webcam and just talking about the game and the trailer. Nonetheless, very exciting. Shall we go ahead and talk to Varun about the game?

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker B: What do you guys think? Shall we do it? Okay, let's get right into it. Let's go talk to Varun. Varun, welcome to the show.

Speaker C: I see we're all eating ice cream.

Speaker B: Um. What's that?

Speaker C: I see we're all eating ice cream.

Speaker A: Yeah, man. We're all into AI content. We had to have a way to prove that this video is not AI generated.

Speaker B: This is a real Farad, a real Pharaoh and a real.

Speaker C: I think they call you bad. They don't call you Bad Decision Studios for nothing. We're all, you know.

Speaker B: Exactly. I'm going to have to tell the truth. Varun, this is your second ice cream. You just had one before we started recording. I'm just going to tell.

Speaker C: Supposed to be between us.

Speaker B: Yeah, listen, this is not the, um, the first time that we're speaking. We've talked multiple times in the past. But it is surely one of the more interesting times for you because through our friendship and through the conversations we had in the past, we know your passion for building things, more specifically for building games, which has been a dream of yours for a very, very long time. Now, a couple of months ago, you, uh, guys shared with the world the early Alpha trailer of Unleash the Avatar, which is a soulslike game based in India. And the reaction to it was insane. I mean, not just what you would expect for people to go crazy about in India, but also in China, um, with, you know, millions of views and people's feedback. Now, just a few days ago, you guys released the third trailer of Unleash the Avatar with an extended gameplay trailer, fighting with the bosses, uh, and of course showing off more things like the environment and the combat system and, uh, new bosses, which was received with an overwhelmingly positive feedback from the crowd. But of course, as always, you have the ragers who would go ahead and say, hey, you know, you guys have to do this and do that.

Speaker A: That pixel was not perfect.

Speaker B: Yeah, like I saw the sword did this thing at this minute. I guess what I'm trying to get to is this. There's a lot of exciting things that you have talked about with the game and I want to, I want to share that with people in case they've missed it. And I wanted to come from your own, uh, your voice. But one thing I wanted to say before we even start and, and why we're having this conversation with you is because of how cool what you guys are doing is not the fact that you're making the game, but the fact that you're making it publicly. I mean, how often can you say that developers are sharing behind the scenes footage, releasing a fucking YouTube video an hour ago on YouTube, sitting down and saying, okay, so we read all of your comments. This is my response one by one, let's go through them. This is why we did, uh, this in the comments.

Speaker A: This is on purpose. This is not on purpose. Okay, we're gonna fix this.

Speaker B: That is the reason why I think we're living in such an interesting time, because social media allows us to be, uh, transparent. And I feel like it's the same case with applications and software that we're seeing that right now on X, with people building publicly as it is with video games. And you guys are leading that way. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about how the past few months have been for you guys at AOS Games?

Speaker C: Sure. I'll tell you how all of this started. I think, um, if people remember our last conversation. Even if they don't, I'll give them a quick summary. Uh, we run a content company. When I spoke to you, I think we were like 100 or 200 people or something like that. Um, we're now 560 people on the content side of the company. So that's grown a lot. Yeah, we work with everybody from, uh, you know, Coca Cola to the clear trips of the world to the nothing know the phone brands of the world. Like we have a wide range of customers now in India on the content side. And you know, I feel like just looking back right on the content business that we built, I think you know, there's so much, so many individual parts. Like we started with the video editing school. I don't know if you remember that. Yes, we were placing video editors, you know, with lots of creators all over the world, with lots of businesses all over the world. And then we, at some point we said, you know, we should not like be placing this talent, we should be doing services. Um, so we did well there and 2025 we had like a little bit of free cash flow and um, you know, we had a really good video team. Like I had like folks who were ex Netflix. Like I had some really good talent. So I said um, hey, this is, this is technique that Wukong used, right. Which is called photogrammetry. I'm sure you guys have heard of it. You know, we've spoken about it before and uh, actually I remember I reached out to you at that point.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: I remember this very clearly. I reached out to you, this is like three years ago or something like that. And I said hey, uh, you know, we started doing a lot of photogrammetry. We have all the equipment, all these cameras and I think you had done a video on photogrammetry if I'm not wrong.

Speaker B: Photogrammetry, Gaussian splats, all sorts of ways to get physical objects into 3D software.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think you've done it with a drone, uh, a mixture of a drone and cameras. Right. So we said uh, well let's just really get good at that. We're a video team, we understand video m. Let's just like get really good at photogrammetry. That's when I reached out to you because I think the idea was hey, do you want to do like a photogrammetry video in India if you ever plan to come? Uh, because we wanted to learn your technique as well.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker C: Like how you were doing things. But I guess we just got good at it. Uh, we first, you know, did a photogrammetry scan of like this new like, like this space right next to our office. And we made a quick demo, uh, that was in our first trailer. And then we said yo, uh, this technique works. The optimization on photogrammetry works as well. Like we can run this on 60fps. Um, but like maybe we need to do you know, a little more of like, you know, a different. We really need to think through the story. We need to think through the theme of the game that we're building. Which at that point, to be very honest, we had a rough idea of what we're going for. But then, you know, we realized the expectations are here. We can't really like, really just build like a quick eight hour game. We really need to think through everything. Um, and I had this cool story around what I wanted to tell. I've had that story for a while and I said, uh, maybe I need to rewrite the story a little bit to have some of these fantasy elements to really show like India and light. But at the same time, I think photogrammetry is not enough just to build a game. Uh, you need so many different parts. Uh, but the photogrammetry really led. There's a town in India called Chanderi, right? It's where like a bunch of movies in India are shot, right? It's like a film town.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So we got a line producer there and we said, hey, um, can you get us permission to shoot just like everything? So we wouldn't shot like everything. We shot like 13th century assets. Uh, I'm calling them assets, but like sculptures in the real world now they're assets, but like sculptures in the real world. Um, so we scanned so much, we, uh, sent I think a ten man team there. It was like a nine day shoot. Uh, and you have to shoot. As you know about photogrammetry, you can't shoot at any time in the day. Right. You have to shoot at overcast is

Speaker B: like the best because you get even lighting.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. We went when it was overcast, but you still have to shoot between 6 and 8am because, you know, in the afternoon, like by the time it's 12 o', clock, 1 o', clock, uh, there's too much harsh lighting on one side, which means you'll have to delight it later. So it just makes our life hell. So these guys were shooting for like two hours in the morning and two hours during dusk. Right. Uh, and believe it or not, we have like a thousand assets. Right. Out of which maybe like only like 100 were unusable. The rest were all like very usable, beautiful. And then we had to like optimize it. Uh, there's a cleanup process. I mean, of course, like, I'm not talking about decimating it, but I'm talking about like, you know, removing parts that are not needed. If there's foliage, like sometimes you'd capture grass as well. That's part of it. It just never looks good in photogrammetry. So we really had to like. And those parts we'd reconstruct manually, right? So I uh, would say there was like a six month period of just cleaning up those assets and reconstructing them such that they're in game assets and they'll run uh, uh, uh, if you have like 50 of them in a scene, they'll run at 60fps, right? That was the goal. Uh, but at the same time we started learning when we put up this trailer and to be very honest, we are the weirdest game devs because we've been shipping this totally startup style, which I don't think anyone's done. Every game dev is like, okay, so here's what I've learned, right? And this is all very new. And so from my perspective, so different people might have different opinions on this, but I think a lot of game devs who go into game dev are artists first. The engineers in game dev exist a very long time ago. If you look at um, um, uh, people like the uh, guys who built um, uh, the UDK in the first place, Unreal Dev Kit in the first place, those guys were really good engineers. M But I think over the years it shifted into more of an artist phenotype, which is a good thing, uh, for some sorts of games. But I think the engineer phenotype sort of stuck to games like GTA 6, right? Where they're like, hey, we'll do the best. Because I know some, some folks who work at GTA 6 at the senior levels and you know they're doing like hardcore assembly level optimization, right? So it's like GTA can still afford, because they're going to make a few billion dollars, they can afford to have those. Um, and what we realized was that um, you know, I have an audience of like 2 million people. Maybe like a million out of them are like engineers, maybe more are engineers. So I said if I had to guess out of this population of like 1.4 billion people that are in India, I'm sure there are like at least five outlier programmers. Like people who are really, really, really good.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Uh, so we looked for that and once we got some of those people we brought them in. Like I said, we were shipping startup style, right? So we put our trailer and to be honest, after the first trailer, um, we got a lot of feedback, right? Which was some people were like, this looks good because photogrammetry, right? It makes things look better but like everything else is shit. Mhm. Right. And to be very honest, we weren't even like we were still Experimenting. Right. Like we were still thinking about how do we do this, how do we build this? And we quickly reset the expectations. We're like, okay, we can't just make like an eight hour like walk around India type of game. Like with just, you know, basic combat. We'll really have to think things through. We'll have to make the souls. Like there is no. I keep saying this, right? If you make a third person game, there's no such thing as an indie game even if you're independent. Because any mistake you make, any small gap that's there between you and the billion dollar franchisees are just going to. People are just going to call it out.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And if they have the option to play that, why would they play your game?

Speaker B: It's also that it's very competitive.

Speaker C: Yeah. So you can't put your hand up and say, hey, we are, we have less money, therefore we can't, you know, do these three, four things. So we knew straight off the bat we had to do it. Which is why you know, I went and hired like the best engineers. We uh, also got like a bunch of good artists together. Right. Like Sujay who works with us, he's done, you know, he's contributed Ghost of Tsushima, uh, he's contributed to Hogwarts Legacy, a bunch of other uh, really cool games. Uh, we have, our animators are ah, like X Flash the movie. X Shazam the movie. Um, India had a lot of this outsourced talent and really nobody was like they were all going to more outsourcing firms to do the next thing. Like for example there's uh, a company in India called Little Red Zombies, right. They've done some really cool work for Alan Wake, uh, Split Fiction, bunch of games. Um, so we said this talent exists, these companies exist. But like all of this is very disparate. Right. And there's no one doing engineering first. So like we'll get the engineers first. Okay. We'll really start working on like we'll build our own combat system, we'll build our own enemy AI. Uh, we'll build everything from scratch.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: But at the same time we'll take the startup approach. We'll just keep shipping a trailer every six months. Okay. And this is like I get. That's why I said the artists are very careful about what they launch.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: The phenotype of the game dev today like very artists first. They're very careful. They're like hey no, we want to show specifically this because this is our vision and I Was like, I didn't think India was there because to be very honest and to be very realistic about this, like India is a few decades behind with game dev. Right. Like we're only now starting to catch up. And I was like if we do this, that route and we get feedback right before you know, the game is about to launch, if we do the wrong thing, if we build the wrong game or like people don't like this, it's waste. You just have built two years in silence. Right? So we're like, we're going to take the startup approach. We're going to start putting out trailers in public. We're going to do uncut, five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. Like as long as we can uncut footage.

Speaker B: Real time game capture footage.

Speaker C: Yes, real time game capture footage. Let people trash as they want to because m. All of this is very valuable feedback because you'd rather have this now than when the game goes live. Because when the game goes live, you can't do anything about it. You wasted two years. Yes, but it goes live now. You can really sift through the comments. And I actually, you know, before we spoke I have like this, this thing which again, uh, you know, Gemini can did a deep research of every single comment that's, that's you know, been on this trailer. We have very specific micro feedback on like what people want to see.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And you can get to this point where you know, you can fix things as you go along. And that's why I feel like uh, we put out three different trailers so far and I feel like we made three different games. Right? Because it's almost like after a trailer we're like okay, this is it. Uh, this should be good enough for an indie game. Like this is. Then people give you feedback and they're like no, no, it has to be this good. And then you put on another trailer. Like we're almost there. Uh, it's like no, no, no, it has to be perfect. So I guess that's that. But like without that, without that public, you know, shaping your direction like that, I don't think we would have gotten this good. Honestly. I would have shipped like something that's very subpar and said and I would have priced it at a low price point. I said look, we're in indie studio, you know, take pity on us. But I don't think the market cares about that. Right? The market just like they want to play good games and they, they want it to be as competitive as like everything else that they're playing. So I think we learned that over the fly. We're the only team to do it startup style. Um, and I get why the startup Silicon Valley Energy works, uh, to do some really hard things like this because like the public shapes your direction. The public shapes, uh, you know, there's something called the Pygmalion effect, right? Which is when you put something out in public and like people hold you to a high benchmark, you end up meeting that benchmark simply because your identity becomes. I need to prove that this works. I need to prove that we can do this. And it didn't just happen to me, it happened to all my devs. All of them woke up and like, listen, no. If people think that this is not good, we'll fix it. We'll figure it out.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. So like animations and stuff. We've gotten so much better, uh, vfx, to be very honest. We looked for Unreal Engine VFX artists in India. We could only find two or three in the entire country.

Speaker B: That's insane, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a super small number. Right. And maybe in all of India there might be like 20, 30 people who can do like high quality stuff. We found somebody who worked on Mortal Kombat and like a bunch of other games. Um, but apart from these two, three hero guys, um, we couldn't find anybody else. So it's like we hired regular programmers who uh, also had an artistic player. And we're like, we need to figure this out over time. We have eight months, we have till the next trailer. This is what I said maybe eight months ago. We have six to eight months for the next trailer. You guys have to be really good with vfx. And they uh. Is my Internet lagging?

Speaker B: No, no, no, no. We got you.

Speaker C: Okay, got it. So, um, so yeah, eight months. They watched Korean tutorials every single day. And I feel like at this point you could go to my team and like talk to them in Korean and the VFX team and they would respond. I would say the VFX team is two trailers behind the rest of the team. Like the animation team has gone really good. Remember these were animators from like, who have credits on Flash and Shazam, uh, who had to still pick up game animation was still different. And I tell you the difference. Movie animation, you only have to worry about where the camera angle is.

Speaker B: If you know what shots happened by the player. He's going to go everywhere around the game and he's going to find every freaking angle possible.

Speaker C: Correct. So there's no scope to say, hey, it only looks good from this angle. But I don't care what the left hand is doing because I'm looking at it from the right. You can't do that. So they had to learn everything they could. Um, and they've had time, they've had two years and they've been with us for two years now. Uh, but um, the VFX team is very new so they're picking up. But I feel like if we do another trailer, they'll be as good as the rest. The level of polish will have matched. But yeah, uh, to be very honest, I still see this as like a very, very large R and D project for us. Uh, we have a cool story. Like we're doing everything that a game studio should be doing. Uh, but I think the thing that would make us different. Right. Because I think a lot about differentiation. Right. And my worry with the last trailer was very different from everybody else's worry, which is that I think we've reached or almost reached the goal that we had of some of these other games and we've done it with like 100th the budget or something like that. But I feel now we're too similar to them.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: We need our own uniqueness. Right. We need to be similar. I think as a player, like, who gives a shit? Like as a player, do you ever care like what the budget? Like when you're playing the game, you don't care what the budget is. It's just like, hey, I want to play an amazing game, I want the graphics to be great. Which photogrammetry solves for us. Like it looks beautiful. Right? Good animation, good story, good animation, like, you know, cinematics, uh, world lore, being told to you, all of that stuff. They care about all of that and they really don't care like if you made it on a lower price or not. Like some people care about it, they talk about it, but like most gamers don't. They're just like, is this a good game? I want to play it. Did my friends tell me I should play this? I play. So I think when you look at it like that, I think you have to serve a very different experience. Mhm. Right. And um, but uh, but the last two years for me has been like a catch up. Right? Like, like can we get better enough to even earn the right to compete? Right. Because if we're going to be so far behind, what's the point of even doing this? So I feel like we've gone to a point now where I feel like getting To Parity looks closer than ever.

Speaker A: Mhm. Right.

Speaker C: Like I feel graphics wise, you can't really like you take some of the best games in terms of graphics to take us. Except I think I feel like the best games do a little bit like a God of War would do much better camera work than us. M. Right. And we have like our camera guy for example is uh, worked at Dneg on movies like Mickey 17. Mhm. So you still have like really good people, but it's like game cameras are slightly different. So he's picked that up over time. So he's picked that over time. Like when you dodge, like you want the camera to swing right, swing left. We're adding all that in. Right. So I just feel that uh, we've gotten good at all this, but like a payoff still cares about a unique differentiated experience. You know, things like combat and there we have crazy ideas. I'm just waiting to have reached Parity, which I feel like we're almost there to start implementing some of these crazy ideas. And I think you saw a fraction of it, like a sample of it in the first trailer where it's like there was just one animation we made custom. Everything else was in the first trailer we just picked up. But it was this thing where the guy walks past the enemy dodge.

Speaker B: The whole thing stood out, by the way.

Speaker C: Yeah. My team told me not to ship that. They were like, what is this? We're making this serious soulslike game and you have this guy showboating. And what is this? Like, why are you doing this on the perfect dodge, right? Or uh, the perfect, uh, counter. And I was just like, why not? Games are supposed to be fun. Why do we want to take it so seriously? And it turned out that went super viral. All of China really loved it and they were super hyped about it. I uh, didn't expect it to do so well. The number of memes that were created, it was all over the bilibili front page, uh, at some point. Uh, and then of course when we got better, uh, even between the first and second trailer, we did like better graphics, better, slightly better animations, better character art. We still kept that move Good. I just feel like. Yeah. And I just feel like we kept that move. And I just feel like it did well is my. What?

Speaker B: Yeah, you're going blurred out for a moment there.

Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. So we uh, just did that. Right. Like we kept that one move. That was the highlight that got like four and a half million views, uh, on IGN China. So we really learned that the world. And you know, I saw the comments, right? Like, and the comments were, I'll tell you what they were. They were a frustration about the current state of things. Like the Indian comments were very different from the Chinese comments. The Indian comments after trailer two was still like, oh, this isn't good, this isn't good. Like it's very frame by frame QA sort of comments. The Chinese comments was like, bro, this is so different. It's such a breath of fresh air to just play m a game where like not everything is serious. Like you know, every moment is like do or die and you're rolling around. Like there was one comment which I really appreciate, which is like dude, in every other souls like game I'm just rolling, rolling, panic rolling all the time and just hoping I survive. Which is cool. But like, maybe I'd like to feel like a hero once in a while.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And I didn't expect that. You know, our first idea was never to do a Bollywood sort of game. Right. Like, but like the fact that, that, that one move went super viral. Just like it taught me that the world cares about having fun in games. Not everything has to be super serious. Like I was playing Mafia the Old country the other day and like you shovel shit in the game.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And it's like I didn't know that by the way.

Speaker C: Yeah, you have to shovel shit in the game. Right. Like so it's like everything's getting.

Speaker B: What did you do last weekend, uh, at home playing games? I was shoveling shit for like a couple hours.

Speaker C: Inside the game. Inside the game, yes. But here's the thing, right? Like where do you end at realism? You keep like, keep like increasing the bar and we're like, oh, you're slightly close. Okay. Your animation is slightly better. Okay. This is slightly more fluid. Like there is no end to that. Right, Right. Like and it's like you reach this point where it all becomes the same game over and over again. And that's the thing that really stood out for me in the second trailer, which is, I think we have this opportunity to make like this really cool game where you have the experience of a souls like but you also have this entire new thing, uh, where Aura Farming is like now that was the name that, you know, people came up with. We didn't even know what it was called at that time. I mean I knew what Aura Farming was, but I didn't know the move was going to be an Aura Farming move.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And we're just like, maybe this makes a Lot of sense. So I think what I'm really excited about from here is like, how do we do a lot more aura farming in the game? And I have some crazy.

Speaker A: Do you have a list now? Okay, A list of aura farming actions for the animation.

Speaker B: And now you get a pass. Since the first time you came up with the idea, or at least you were pushing for it, the team now realizes based on people's feedback that it works. The aura farming is.

Speaker A: Do you have specific actors for the mocap of the aura farming actions or

Speaker B: you should do it yourself?

Speaker C: You know, the initial one was done by me. Now, uh, we have like a like, you know, person because, uh, you know, it's just I don't have the time on a day to day basis to do mocap anymore. But, um, I just like, if you look at trailer three, like the new trailer that came out, every move has a little bit of aura farming. Like people didn't notice because it's a little bit faster. But like when you do the leg thing where you, you know, get behind the opponent, he like pulls his shirt up a little bit, right? Like, it's just a very Indian thing, which is like, yo, um, you know, you can't see me, it's John Cena, but India. And then there's this other move where, you know, when he double dodges, right, you dodge to the right and then dodge to the left. He like puts his hand through his hair while dodging. It's very hard to tell, um, and stuff like that. But like, I have a slightly different idea. And you know, it's. It's an idea that I want to put out in public right now because it's like, this is one of those ideas. Either I get cancelled, right, because people like, what the hell are you doing? Or it's like, this is, this is amazing. This is so different, I think, and it's so hard to tell.

Speaker B: It's 100% worth the risk, in my opinion, the least. And the reason why I say that is because I've played many games in my life and I spent, uh, bulk of my early years in my career in the esports world. So I was dealing with video games every single day. The one thing, and the only thing that can trump any other, um, shortcoming in the game is a story and what happens in the game. You can have the best camera work, but if the story sucks, people won't care. You can have the best looking characters. If the story sucks, people don't care. You can have the best combat system, but if you don't have cool moments in the story that are memorable. People won't care. People will forget about the game. And what seems like is happening here is you guys are paying a lot of attention to making the game unique, making it different. Yes. It's a souls, like, in terms of the combat and how, um, the gameplay may feel, but you guys are bringing new characters, new ideas, and all of this aura farming that is going to make the game more memorable. And I, I would say this is the right approach.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Uh, it's because, like, I have to be careful, Right. Because I feel like now that we've gone slightly global, Right. It's like some things which land globally might not land in India. Sure. And some things that land in India, like, if I do a very serious game, uh, India will love it. Right. Um, but. But I don't think the rest of the globe are going to care. It's going to be one more out of the many games that they play. And that's like, that's a real risk. But if I do, like, if I put in too much aura farming, then, uh, Indians might be like, hey, this one game we got the opportunity to see, like, really good graphics and stuff, like how you like. Why did you. Why did you add so many of the funny parts? And I'll tell you, the middle ground I found. The middle ground I found was Bollywood, right? So I was like, I have an idea. Let's make. Let's make the story real. Let's make the stakes real. And we have a really good story. Like, nobody is going to expect the story of the game. It's a, it's a. It's a real story with real stakes, and it's written with a very cool philosophical undertone. I grew up with a specific philosophical story that I wanted to retell in this form. It's never been seen in a game before. Uh, but at the same time I was like, how do I bring in these funny parts? How do I bring in this dodge? How do I bring it with these fantasy elements? And I was like, bollywood's the right idea, right? So Bollywood plays a very, very critical role in the game. Several, uh, of the characters in the game are in this old. Like, there's a film theme in the game along with this, right? Like, so a lot of characters in that town. That town's known as a film town, right. In general, so a lot of the characters in the game are actors, right? So there's lots of stuff going on. I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. Uh, but at the same time, it's like, Bollywood does this superbly well. M. Some of the best Bollywood movies can have these funny parts and people doing all of this and then suddenly just raise the stakes.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: The stakes suddenly become real and we want to do sort of the same thing, which is you can do all the showboating, you can have a lot of fun, etc. Etc. But suddenly the stakes become real. But here's the thing, right? Like if you have someone aura farming when you know their girlfriend has been kidnapped, right? It. It doesn't settle. Well, people are like, why is he aura farming that? So you need a reason for all of that. Right. So what. What it is that we worked on, and I think from the story perspective, what we worked on is how do you put both of these without it feeling jarring, Right. And then how do you add more stuff to this? How do you add an aura farming mechanic when the stakes are real? Right. So that's, I guess like 90% of where I've spent my time. And it is possible in India because every Bollywood movie does this. The stakes in some of the best Bollywood movies are high. But you still have like a dance sequence somewhere in between.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's actually. I never really thought about it. You're absolutely right. I mean, this is some common theme we've seen in at least great Bollywood films. They can find that balance between the two. They can have fun with you as the audience, but they can also get serious about the story. That is really hard to get right. But I know you guys are on the path in all of this time where we've been having the conversation. Since you talk about releasing many trailers, the only question popping in my head is, when is the game going to be released?

Speaker C: Uh, I'll tell you when it's going to be done. Um, I think most of our development should be done like early 2027. I ideally should be done the end of this year. Right. Because we have GTA 6.

Speaker A: Calendar or real, uh, calendar.

Speaker C: What is the GTA 6?

Speaker A: Like delays? Like.

Speaker C: No, no, no, no, no. This, no, this is real. Right. So the idea was to be done by the end of 2026. Uh, but to be very honest, I feel like it takes a long time to also market again. It takes a lot of time to do qa. And remember, we're a small team, right? So, uh, big studios have people just walking into specific corridors to make sure it's fine. So we have to figure out a way to do qa and some games do uh, open betas and stuff like that. So I really need some time because we're doing this for the first time to do Q and A properly. Because I don't want to ship a game that's not perfect. One or two bugs across the entirety of the game are acceptable. Most new studios games that I played, one or two bugs here and there are acceptable, but that's the limit, right? You can't have random collisions, missing and stuff. And because of the span of the world that we're creating, stuff like this can happen. So I want to give myself six months to a year just to make sure that we've done our best homework on making sure the game is a great experience for 99% of people that are playing. Right. Um, and I think therefore I would say maybe sometime late 2027, um M. But no longer than that. I don't want to make this like, I don't want to stretch this into a three or four year saga. It's not about the money. I think we'll be able to afford it, but I think it's the morale, right. Like you just drag it out and people are tired and they're doing this last pass of polish on like you know that old boss that they worked on two years ago. It feels like a chore, right. Like right now I feel like the entire dev team is having so much fun. Like everything, right. Like people in the group will just be like guys, I have this concept, this idea.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And they'll just describe the idea and then we'll be like, should we put in the game? Should we not put in the game? The core story beats are done. Like we've frozen them. And I'll tell you how we, how we've done this, right? It's very startup first. It's less um, you know, the way other people are doing it and maybe like people have opinions on this, right? People are like no, no, no, you should do it that way. That's the purest way of doing things. I just feel like we've done it differently. We have a core story that we know spans around 10, 12 hours and then we're adding all these side beats. Now that I'm giving the devs some access to do. Of course I'm the filter. If I feel like something's rubbish, it doesn't go through. Um, so all these side pieces add length to the game. But the game's first priority is to finish the first 10 hours. Mhm. We'll have a complete 10 to 12 hour experience first and then add on 5, 6 hours of content. It's slightly different from how other people plan it because it's almost like the side stories have to be written up front. Mhm. But the actual story of the game will be like, of course this is if you beat all the bosses in one try, which is unlikely. So either way it'll be a slightly longish game. But some of the side quests we keep thinking of ideas and we keep adding, uh, because some of the storytelling is also environmental. Souls likes do this. Right. Uh, although I am doing a little more exposition than Soulslikes. There are going to be a lot more cinematics. Um, it's probably going to be an hour and 20 minutes of cinematics. Right. That's where we'll end up. So it's almost like. So it's almost like you're parallelly producing a 3D film.

Speaker A: Yeah. Not even short film, A feature film. An hour.

Speaker C: It's a feature film, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I'll tell you the problem. Like if you look at some of the feature films that India has done, like with on 3D recently, we've done um, uh, we did uh, this one. Right. Like we did a couple recently India. I still feel like the animation quality isn't there and if I put that level of animation quality in the game, I'd get called out.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: So it's like you have to win two parts at once. Make the best 3D animated film in India, um, with no jank visible and then also, you know, make like a really good game. So it's like a very hard challenge. Um, but I, but I do think we'll reach there because I just feel like there's so much of this talent in India. They're raring to go. They're just like providing their services to international companies. And I think, um, I'm glad we're giving them the opportunity and I'm glad they're saying yes to it because first trader, everybody said no, this is not going to work. Get out of my face. Second trailer, they're like maybe third trailer. It's like I got a few texts saying, sorry, I was wrong. Uh, how can we work together? And the thing about us is like I already knew something like this would happen. Like that people will like, you can win people's hearts over time. Right. And there's two ways to do it. One is you go out there. Like India is this place where you can go out there and you can do sob story. Oh you know, things are so hard, etc. Etc. Or you can just show proof. Mhm. I feel like smartest talent doesn't care about sob stories, they care about proof. So when you show three uncut trailers, two talent and they see it after the third one, the good ones will come and say, you know what, I see the gaps between you and where you can be like the 100% I know how to solve it. Mhm. I know exactly what you're missing. Let me come implement it for you. So we're able to attract really good talent. Um, and I think in general a lot of the things we learn, a lot of the things that you know, we are also like figuring out like VFX and stuff like that. We have people here which, who are non fungible. Right. Like I don't think people like that exist outside. So it's so much like density of like skill and passion that's going on inside. Like I want to do like an entire vlog of the team and what they do on a day to day basis. It's crazy. It's like.

Speaker A: Are you recording it, are you recording it now? Like you guys have been.

Speaker C: I haven't done it yet.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, I haven't done it yet. But like we have some BTs.

Speaker A: How many people in the team full time?

Speaker C: We have like the game, 40 people, something like that.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Uh, but this includes, but, but I'll tell you one thing, this 40 includes voice actors. Uh, this 40 includes um, you know, motion capture folks who come to the studio three days a week. They still have like a full time content. Like they still have a one year contract with us, but they're only expected to come to work for three hours. But I would say the core team, the core core team is like 20 people.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: These are most critical. It's mostly environmental art, programming and character art. It's divided among these three. Right. Um, and then there are a bunch of people who are extras who come in and help. Now of course in each of these teams we have leaders who do a lot more than they're supposed to do in any other game studio that contributing to story because again we're a small team. Right. Whatever resources we have, we're trying to get there. Uh, but what I want to do is I want to prove to the world when we started that we can make a really high caliber game with low, with not as many resources as the rest of the world.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And if we end up proving it, it changes the order of things. Now maybe there was like when we started off, there's a 1% chance I'd be correct, but today I'd peg that chance like 60, 70%. And I'm generally a pessimist about my own success, right? Like I'm always like when I start something new, I'm m always like this won't work. I am generally pessimistic about it. Right. But I feel like I put the number at 60, 70% now because I just feel like everything that people have given us feedback for and everything that I think we can improve, we already know how to do. But this is not financial success. This is just success that you'll make a good game.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. You'll be able to play it, you'll be able to have fun. We've done like we did a play test with 200 people on the, this recent boss fight. People loved it. Right. Like they, they also felt that difficulty curve over time. So I, I, I think what we intended to do and where we're getting is starting to get close. The vision and reality starting to get close. Whereas when we started the vision reality was very far away. Uh, but financial success, nobody knows. And I also believe, and I have so many opinions on this, which I know gamers will not be happy with, but I'm a gamer myself and I'll put on my gamer hat and say this. I do believe games are too expensive to make and that's not sustainable. Not just for uh, India for sure, but like I don't think it's sustainable for the west either. Mhm. Right. Like you can't keep spending $100 million on, on each game. You, you can do it if you're a gta. Six.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: But like, but that game has built their IP over decades now.

Speaker C: It's six games you need to do. You can do six games and then you can spend 100 like, like a billion dollars to make a game.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: And each of those games needs to be culturally relevant, get all the traction, etc. Etc. Um, today I think it's very competitive.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: You know, like if you go to Twitter and look for the number or if you look, there's a YouTube video recently that I think Infant Terrible put out which is like upcoming souls likes. We were number three and there were like 30 other souls likes for like, for like upcoming games. Nobody knows when they're going to release. But like this is the window. So like I feel like it's not sustainable if you say as a big studio, I'm going to spend $100 million. And I'm going to make animation slightly better. I want to make VFX slightly better that the incremental delta on that stopped mattering to the player. Mhm. Right. Um. Some games will still try to go for it and they will end up being the benchmark. But I'll tell you one thing. When something becomes the benchmark, eventually the other teams this, the first company that were figured it out would have spent time and energy on R and D to figure that out. The next company that's copying them or like learning from them is going to be able to do it much cheaper.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Because you're like, you can deconstruct it on screen right. When somebody's already figured it out. But doing it for the first time, play testing like our entire aura farming mechanics, like play testing it for the first time, figuring out if people really like it. It's all going to be expensive. It's going to burn a few months. But if we prove it, maybe other people will be like, hey, we should do this. But it's a very different mechanic. In fact, I'll run you through it. Right. You tell me live, what do you think of it? And maybe people in the comments can tell us as well.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker C: So here's the idea. We have a dedicated aura farming button. Okay. And we don't call it aura farming or any of that. I can see both of your eyes. Like.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I'm curious.

Speaker C: You guys seem okay. So have you seen that meme where you stand straight? Like there's two people standing together and there's one person standing straight and there's another person who's tilted. It's like a power dynamic meme.

Speaker B: I haven't seen that one. I haven't seen that one.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's power dynamic memes. It's there very often. Right. One second. Yeah. So it's a power dynamic meme, which is that standing straight means you're stronger.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Hunching or like tilting means it's slightly weaker. So we're going to have this system in our game where every character from Vikram, the main character to the enemies. But this is only going to apply to smaller enemies. Everyone has like an aura. Right. And aura is relative. Right. So if you are like stronger aura, you will stand straight and the opponent will cover a little bit, maybe put their hands out a little bit and it's always relative. Now how do you increase your aura? We're going to allow every minor enemy and this is not going to apply to bosses because it will kill the Seriousness of some of the big bosses, but, like, at least for the common enemies, they, uh, can taunt you as well. So we have this one animation that we shot, which is the same thing, which is an enemy does it and then laughs at you. The enemy does this is like you, like. So we shot a bunch of this, right, where anyone can taunt. You can taunt as well. You can taunt in between moves.

Speaker B: And then when you taunt, your aura

Speaker C: increases, your aura increases.

Speaker A: If you, like, steal the aura from the enemy. Can I steal?

Speaker C: Absolutely. If you kill, like the pack leader of any group, you steal their aura.

Speaker A: Steal the aura?

Speaker C: Yeah, you steal her aura, right? And you stand straighter. Like, it's all about your pose, right? Like, it's a very mean thing. I don't know if people will get it. We'll, uh, have to see how it's implemented the game. But it's this. And by the way, some mini bosses can taunt as well. It's usually going to be long. Like, we had this one boss smoking in the middle of that last trailer, if you remember. He just stands in the middle and starts smoking. Now here's the thing. If you attack him during this period, okay. It's disrespectful. And he counters you, okay. And his aura maxes out and you lose aura. Because, like, why did you do.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Like, yeah, you got to respect, like, a taunt, right? But in order to prevent his aura going up when he's smoking, you got to do it at the same time. You can taunt as well. And in fact, in that trailer, we had this where Vikram puts a sword behind his hands like this, and he just starts walking along with the boss.

Speaker B: Ah, uh, I see.

Speaker C: So you can jam his aura at the same level. Now, there's some things that make you lose aura. If you heal in front of an enemy, you lose aura. If you panic, dodge, you lose aura. It means you don't know what you're doing. Right.

Speaker A: So in the entire game. Yeah, yeah. Ah, yeah.

Speaker C: And of course, having higher auras is better because, like, you deal more damage and we can figure out the buffs and. And what nerfs there are if, you know, if. If you lose aura. But the idea is, I think this would be a cool secondary mechanic in the game. It allows us to have many different things, uh, you know, that allow us. That allow the main character to aura farm. It makes for a great streaming experience. If you're a gamer and you're streaming.

Speaker A: I was thinking. Actually, were you thinking about the streaming and clips when you were thinking about the entire aura thing.

Speaker C: I mean I'm a content creator.

Speaker A: Yeah, you are a content creator who's making games. Your brain automatically went into okay, this is a great viral moment, like short form or streaming. Nobody would think like that when they are making a game. Now you're building a system around it, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm just thinking deep dopamine, right? Like I'm just thinking like, like we think about this when we make videos, right? It's like well are we going to lose retention at this point? I don't think games are designed like that right now. I think games are more around person has bought the game. I don't care if the first boss was really hard. Like Kazan had this problem, right. For the first berserker Kazan, which a lot of like people who played the first boss and the second boss was so hard they just dropped off. Mhm. Right. So your completions were low. Uh, and I feel like that's okay if your goal is to make money because you're going to make money like the person has already bought the game. But I feel like I want to deliver a great experience and m, I feel like you think about it the same way you do as of a video, which is like how do you have maximum retention time? How do you also have clips that go viral? Right. And those clips should give you dopamine while you're playing and only then would your players get dopamine. So this is like a completely. That's what I'm saying. Like our entire approach to game dev is completely wrong. It's not how it's supposed to be done. It's not how it's supposed to be done. But at the same time there's a reason we're seeing the same kind of game appear again and again and again. Mhm right. Maybe that method of making games serves the people with like $100 billion, $1 billion who can keep going toe to toe with each other on like these micro improvements. But I think people who do this in new ways will end up doing slightly better. And I think we do need some hype content creator energy, some engineering energy into game dev because it's been a very art specific thing. Which is why I don't think we've innovated so much on the art. It's like we've done state of the art art and we're like okay, we'll keep it like this. We don't need to look for micro improvements here. But we will really figure out New experiences where you feel dopamine in the game, not just in combat but like in general. Right. So yeah, I would say it's just a very different mindset uh, that we're approaching this with. Uh now I think everybody in the comments and in general like people have the right to say and I'm sure I'll get clipped out of context in this video and people will say uh, maybe a real game. But I think that's the cool thing, right? Like we have no investors, we don't have a publisher yet. M. I know I'll probably have to self fund this if I'm anyway doing these three things. Why not have fun?

Speaker B: Yeah, why not? Because if I have, yeah, why not

Speaker C: have a blast doing it so that you feel some of that passion energy when you're playing it. It's not a like no one who's worked on unleashing the avatar has done a job.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Not a single one of the devs has gone there. And like I got to finish this because of my job and then I'll leave at 8. Absolutely not. But Ubisoft and many of the big studios, you can tell some people are doing a job here. It's like people have given their lives out. They're like we don't know what's going to happen in five years or when this game comes out but we want to give our best right now and see what happens. So I think that's what's going on now. Look, some of these ideas might not actually make it in the game in playtests people might just be like this looks bad. Right?

Speaker B: Don't remove the aura Farming man. Don't remove that.

Speaker A: Some of them, I think the concept would be there which one will end up in the final game that will be deciding the play test. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah, actually I'll just wait, I'll put a trailer around it and dude, that's the cool thing. If I put a trailer and everyone shits on me and says this sucks. Like remove this. Fine, we'll remove it. Right. But I'm like fairly sure that people will like it because it's just so different and it's just so like interesting to watch. And uh, I'm going to do a proper like voiceover around it and have this explained um, to people on how the system works and stuff. Uh, because I think we've done chakra mechanic for example. We have a very cool chakra mechanic. In fact the physics on how the chakra moves comes back to you. It's all pretty Complicated, but no one really cared that much. They're like, oh, cool. New mechanic where the thing goes to something, it bounces and comes back to you. And you can keep. It's like a boomerang that you can keep sending out and you got to catch it. You got to either jump or dodge in the direction that it returns. It runs at one of four directions. A nice minigame. It's kind of like Rocket League, but like a mini version of Rocket League, just there. But at the same time, like, no one cared about it that much. So we need to keep innovating. And, uh, I just wanted to reach parity with like global games before we innovate. Uh, so, yeah, and we're going to do all of this without sacrificing the story because these are all in different people's hands, right? Like, uh, the story and the cinematics made right now already have this nature of Vikram that's in the game, that's going to be, you know, displayed with this aura farming thing. It's already like that. So none of this deviates from the original story that we had. It's all in the in line. In fact, we're thinking of systems that would not ruin immersion by being like completely, you know, like random. Like, why is this happening? Uh, this is just made as a meme or whatever. Like we're trying to avoid that. Right. Has to fit in the story. But this is the idea. Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: First of all, based on everything you said, the thing that is the most evident is the amount of passion and love you, yourself and the team has. And if you look at any piece of art, the most important thing is what are the emotions that are poured into it by the creators of that piece of art? And game is 100% a medium of art. Right? You are conveying emotions through story, through the characters, and through the systems that you're building with your engineers. And the engineers are also certainly creating a sort of art, you know, in their own form. And one thing I just love the most about everything you said is it's so obvious that you guys are going into the studio every day thinking, how do we make people have fun? And unfortunately, with a lot of the Triple A titles, that's not the case right now. It's like, how do we just go and make the most amount of profit? How do we use the same fucking character, come up with some form of a new story which is not really new, it's not really that different, but it's the same character.

Speaker A: So it's going to Sell, but it sells.

Speaker B: Uh, it's going to sell and we'll just read.

Speaker C: But I know exactly why they do this. I can tell you why they do this. Like now that I have the like two years of audience feedback experience. I'll tell you what. Let's say you deviate a lot. Let's say you do something totally different. Do you know what happens? You run the risk of the audience saying, well, this is missing. Like for example, there's this really nice bleach game that came out recently, right? It's called Rebirth of Souls or something like that. Got a very different combat system. I don't know if it's called Rebirth of Souls, but it had a very different combat system. I have it on my PlayStation and it's like lots of people couldn't get into it because they're like, this is not a standard combat system. Very different. All the controls are very different. So people just didn't get into it.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Because it's too different. So it's like if you go too wide and you go do something totally different, people might not understand it. So believe it or not, the audience also wants same but different.

Speaker B: Yes. It's like, how do you explain Death stranding?

Speaker C: Yeah. So that's the thing, right? That's why Kojima is great. Because Kojima has such a strong fan base that even if you don't know what death staring is because you're a fan of him, you'll try out the game.

Speaker B: Yes. He knows how to cross the borders of being safe and being unsafe.

Speaker A: Because it's the same thing with movies, right? Why they go and make the sequel or prequel or why they go and make Fantastic Four five times. Because they know people are going to watch it because it's a Marvel movie. But then an indie director come, goes and create Back room backroom will become big. That's one out of thousands or obsession

Speaker B: right now, that is.

Speaker A: But that's one, one or two movie out of many movies that gets pitched or get funded. I mean, luckily Varun has the team and doesn't need the funding. But a lot of people who want to make a game like the one that Varun is making, they need the budget, they need a team and it's not easy to make it. And probably you cannot get the budget or the team if you are not following the trend.

Speaker C: And I think it's also like a risk, right? Because you're risking this thing that you know, there's a tried and tested stable formula where, you know, if you spend like $50 million, you'll make it back. Right. And now somebody's taking the decision to deviate from this. Mhm. And do something totally different from the tried and tested path. This sounds like a risk to anyone putting in money. Right. Because the thing is, when it comes to like $50 million or something like that, with some of these, like if you deviate too far, you could make zero. Um, right. So like someone putting money in the game will always be like, let's do the safer thing, the easier thing. It's the same way you'd like invest money, right. Like most people would invest money. If you're investing such sums of money, like what's the safest game I could like invest in? What, a franchise?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Well, you know, I know Assassin's Creed 7. Even if, like, you know, people are saying bad things about it. People know Assassin's Creed, they're figuring out what game to buy, they'll buy Assassin's Creed. But I have like a very long theory on where I think games are going to go. And this is what I said, right. I don't think gamers are going to agree with me on this. But here's my opinion. I think games are going to go subscription.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Like, I think like small amounts monthly rather than a lump sum up front.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think, I think Netflix. Netflix, right. It's like one. If you look at what. No, no, like for multiple games, like, I think you're going to pay a price every month and like some people don't like this. And a part of me doesn't like it because I'm like, I like ownership of games, I like owning the disc, I like keeping at home. Uh, but a part of me also says, like, you know, just the cost benefit that you're passing on to a player who's going to spend like $20 a month and get access to this huge library of games and then that platform starts, uh, putting a million dollars, $2 million, $5 million and starts like Netflix Originals starts putting together games. Right. Xbox is trying some version of this.

Speaker B: The Xbox Game Pass, right? Yeah, Xbox Game Pass.

Speaker C: Yeah, with Game Pass. And here's the thing, right again, I know there are lots of conversations on game ownership and stuff like that, but humanity doesn't care about what people think. I think. Ah. Or rather what I think. Right. Or what those gamers think. Humanity cares about what's most convenient.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Right. So if people feel like paying $20 a month and getting access to 100 games that they can just try and then play for 10 minutes and then leave. I think that's the world we're going to live in.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And if that happens, retention becomes very important.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: YouTube, open platform, anyone can make videos. Netflix, you can go. Of course it's a more gated platform. But like the way they figure out if you were the game that got them sales. Sorry, you were the movie that got them sales, or the way YouTube figures out if they should promote your movie is purely on retention. Yeah, yeah. How much of the video are you watching? So I think this, no one's really cared about how much of the game people are playing. It's never been a metric that anyone's discussed. Right. And I do believe that if we want to make better games, Right. You need to start like YouTube. Okay, so, so why does this happen? It's because of competition. Right. YouTube has so many videos. If you like watching videos of people eating ice cream, you have that. If you want to watch videos of like cats running around, you have that.

Speaker B: People traveling, shit in real life, you have that.

Speaker C: Yeah, you have that. So you have this wide variety of like, content that you can access on demand for free.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: So in order to break out, you really need to be thinking about audience satisfaction. Mhm. And I don't think games. Think about that. Right now I feel like games are like, how do I get somebody to buy? How do I get a publisher? How do I shift my risk onto a publisher so that the publisher, you know, is taking the risk of this? And I just get my, you know, as an artist, I just get to make what I love.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But you know what? What? The artists on YouTube and the reason that I believe that, you know, Obsession or backrooms are doing very well. Oops, sorry. Obsession or backroom? Have you watched Obsession like you guys watch Obsession?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Okay, I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it's got like a YouTube video. The guy understands retention. It's like there's never a dull moment.

Speaker B: Interesting.

Speaker C: There is no slow burn build up. There is no, oh, this, you know, we'll have like five seconds here where we show none of that. It's like every moment. Yeah, it's very fast paced. Like it didn't feel like what's the gold standard for YouTube? Like, I'm not talking about metrics, I'm just talking about how the audience feels about it. Hey, I felt like that video was three minutes long.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But actually it was 20 minutes. That's the feeling you want, right? You want your Game to be like 20 hours. But people played it and they're like, wait, where did time go? Right, right. That's what the backrooms guys, that's what the obsession guys have figured out. And I think game devs will need to figure this out because as competition increases, which is what's happening in game dev, everyone's able to make a game now. M. It's not as hard. Like the first time I tried to make a game was in 2007 or something like that. It was super hard back then and I was a kid of course. But it's like it's gotten much easier now. And it's only going to get easier.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: At some point somebody is going to say, hey, here's my combat system. It's open source.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Right. And people be like, okay, combat solved. Where is the other innovation? And you can build on top of

Speaker B: those metahumans now as well. You can create characters and animate them so easily. And with the latest update, with the state uh, of unreal, you can turn any characters into metahumans now, even stylized characters.

Speaker A: The fact that you can have MCP also to get code can come and

Speaker B: help you with some of.

Speaker C: You can do pcg. You can do pcg, right? You can do procedural trees.

Speaker B: Yes, yes.

Speaker C: Yeah. And you know, I think I just feel like it's getting easier. Just like YouTube.

Speaker B: Interesting. So the time entry to create is far less than before.

Speaker A: But the barrier to story, again, the value of story would be the highest now because now everybody can create.

Speaker B: Yes. And I guess what you're trying to say is that because of the fact that the new generation has been, uh, growing up with social media, the brain works very differently than the previous generation. Therefore, why movies like back rooms and obsession work really well because people are going from scrolling on Instagram to going to the cinema, watching the film and it almost feels like the same thing. It's like they're watching something on YouTube, but right now it's a film in the cinemas. The directors or the writers, they understand how humans consume content and now they just turned short form content into a film. And so what you're suggesting is that games are eventually going to become the same thing.

Speaker C: They were always going to get there. I'll tell you why they, why they haven't yet. If you look at 20 years ago, 30 years ago, making a one hour, uh, movie, how much would that cost you?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And getting distribution, getting like 100,000 eyeballs, how much would that cost you? A lot of money. Because you didn't have smartphones.

Speaker B: Right, right.

Speaker C: You couldn't just shoot it on your smartphone. You didn't have like easily available DSLRs. You had camcorders back then. Right. So like you really needed professional equipment. You needed professional celebrity actors to, you know, beyond wasn't globally available.

Speaker B: Probably only in the U.S. correct.

Speaker C: You needed sets. And then there was this entire, what I like to call the cartel. You're a cartel that you had to go through which is like theater distributors. Yes, right. Like you needed to launch in 30 theaters at once. You needed to know those people and you need to cut deals with them. And to be very honest, they were the guys making all the money. Mhm. Right. Because they won. Whether you won or not. They were the platform. Right. Like at that point we didn't have social platforms. But look at like last year, look at this. You are making a CNBC level talk show from wherever the hell you guys are. And it's probably like, you know, I'll tell you something very interesting about like old school media because like I said, we do content on the other side of the business. The cameras used in old school media, do you remember those newsroom cameras? The ones that swing, the big ones, they cost like a hundred thousand dollars. Okay. And then they're worse than the iPhones.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: The current iPhones. Because those cameras are dated, they're like 10 years old. But the newsroom has made an investment in it. They're not change it. This is going to be like, I spent 100k on this. Like why am I going to go back to a phone? Right. It's already set up. I don't want to change it. So their camera quality has been dipping year on year, even though it was great like 10 years ago. But it's just been like, you know, in free fall while all our camera qualities have been getting better.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Because of the tools and access and whatnot. The second thing that's changed is that there's finally new ways to monetize. One of the things I want to prove, uh, is that we can monetize this game in more ways than just publisher and investor and sales. Maybe get an advertiser in just to prove to the world that these new models will evolve. Because these platforms need these new models. If you're selling a show to Netflix today in India, one way is to make money from Netflix. The second way is to also get advertisers in.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: For example, there's this company, uh, called TVF in India that makes like full series Right. And they always get sponsors in. They're like, we'll show you a thing for like two seconds. We'll show this for like five seconds.

Speaker B: So you want to get sponsors in the game.

Speaker A: This is more like Fortnite, right? Like when you build Fortnite maps, you can have banners, you can have a killing game or a racing game. But when you're in a product placement. Product placement, Right. And you can make more money from sponsor rather than get money from Epic Games. Because the sponsor is like Coca Cola pays you to put their banner in the, in the game. You're going to make more money than what Epic Games pay you at the end.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think it would be really crazy if somebody in India gets like Coca Cola, one of the Coca Cola companies to come in and sponsor like in game signage. If that happens, it changes everything. Right. Because it changes the economics of how this, this industry works. It opens so many new avenues. Any kid can decide to be a game developer. But I'll tell you one thing, this is not, I'm not the only one thinking like this. It's not just the data that's pointing in this direction because competition is increasing. Look at everything that Unreal is doing. The entire UEFA. Um, you know what UEFA is, right? Unreal Engine for Fortnite, the entire economy that they're trying to build there. It's just this. They saw it with Fortnite, which is any kid can come and build their own map, build their own game mode. And Fortnite has like a bunch of licensed characters, right? You can play as Goku with a gun, you can play as Superman, uh, and whatever. So they have this bunch of licensed characters like Godzilla and whatever. And they're just saying that you have these licensed characters. We've licensed them for you make whatever game you want with them. Mhm. Right now most people can do the map. They'll figure it out. It's not too difficult. Like it's just like YouTube editing. Right? Like you could figure it out over the flight. But the engineering part is hard. And I think that's like the entire reason they put in MCP and the entire reason that Tim Sweeney has been very pro AI is this, which is that a lot of the kids will now be able to make quicker, smaller games. I still don't feel like AI is prime time yet, at least for Unreal Engine, because of the way Unreal works. The dependency between blueprints and the actual meshes and code on C. The dependency prevents AI from coming in and just writing code, it's not very readable to.

Speaker B: Not yet. Yes.

Speaker C: But that'll change the entire idea with Unreal. Uh, MCP is to try and help solve this. Uh, of course it only came out like one or two weeks ago. We haven't played with it yet. But it's like it is some while away. But the dream is this, which is you have a single platform or like multiple platforms, Netflix, Prime Video, etc. You get to pay a subscription. You play any game you want. You can play as much of it as you want. And the game developers get paid based on how much of the game you finish. This is the right model. It's best for everybody. But for some reason, like 90% of gamers hate this. For the simple reason that I don't own my games anymore.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: But it's the same argument.

Speaker B: It's the same thing that happened with music too, right? In the beginning, people hated the fact that they didn't own their music. But now everyone's using Spotify and YouTube Music and Apple music.

Speaker C: Dude. I came from the era of cassettes. I'm sure you guys remember cassettes. Walkman, right? Like, yeah, the Walkman. Right? And I was like, listen, I have this in my. I have this cassette of Backstreet Boys in my hand. This is mine. And I had like the small rack with like cassettes on top of each other.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Then we moved to discs. Yes, Right. And I was really upset the first time I found out somebody could like clone discs. Like you can put like you had a CD writer and then you could like copy the cd. And I was like, wait, wait, I paid for this? Like, why are you like ripping this off of me? Right. Um, so that was like very surprising to me. But look at where it's gone. Music has gone totally digital now.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: You don't pay, you pay one subscription. You have access to X number of tracks. And that's just because the number of tracks just increased. Right. Like everybody started putting out. There's. There's something for you. Right. Even if you're the guy who's listening to a track with just five things, five people, it's there for you. It's happened in movies. I remember I used to go, there was this, There was this shop at the end of my, uh, uh, you know how the road of my house where they used to sell DVDs, you could rent DVDs or you could sell DVDs, you could buy DVDs. And like the first time I bought a movie like, you know, and then eventually became Blu Ray Discs. M. Blu Ray Disc. And before that it was the VHS tapes. But look at movies now. It's very rare. You go to the theater and spend some money. It's very like, when is the last time you bought a Blu Ray Disc for a movie?

Speaker B: Oh, bought a Blu Ray disc. I can't even remember.

Speaker A: No, now you can buy or rent from Apple Movies. So sometimes you can buy a movie

Speaker B: to watch it for physical, but it's digital.

Speaker A: But does that change the fandom? Like, me and Faraz always have this conversation, right? When you bought that vhs, when you bought that cassette, I read an article.

Speaker B: You're more committed.

Speaker A: You're more committed. And when I was. Someone was talking about how cassette and CD and Spotify changed music. When you bought a cassette, you had to listen to the whole album. It was painful to fast forward to the last song. So you would listen in the order that the artist wanted you to listen.

Speaker B: And man, you fucking walk to the store to get that shit.

Speaker A: No, no, no walking away. Forget your dad bought it for you. If an artist designed an album from song one to eight, and this is the eighth song you had to listen in that order, it would be painful. Now Spotify, I scroll down, watch song, uh, listen to song number eight. Do you think that will happen to the games too? So if we have now a platform called gameflix, and now you have your gta, your FIFA, your Gears of War, everything there, even your game, do you think getting fans to be obsessed with your game would be harder? Just like music and films?

Speaker C: In my opinion, this is the reason that most gaming fans hate this idea. Because they've grown up with games and they feel like this little bit of reverence, this little bit of fandom that they were part of is being stolen from them. By just making it a platform where, like other games are invading the space, it almost feels like your personal connection with the game is gone. It's like the way you care about the last Netflix movie you watched. Ask me what the name of the last Netflix movie I watched was. I don't remember. It was some John Cena movie. I don't remember. So they don't want this to happen to games, right? They're like, I had some reverence for it. Like, I care about those Golden Era titles. I'll tell you what the solution to this is. The solution is, look, if you look at YouTube, okay, YouTube is the best example, who are the winners? It's people who manage to build crazy amount of fandom around them.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Like Hideo Kojima in games is not a new concept. This. We have a parallel in content. Right? We have. And of course, not everybody loves Mr. Beast, but he has his fandom. Not everybody loves MKBHD M but he has his fandom. Right. I feel like. And you guys have your fandom. Um, I have my fandom. And I feel like we're going to see the exact same thing in games. Right? You no longer need to like, see, the problem with games right now is exactly the same as what played movies 30 years ago, which is that if you want to make a game and you know, you invest three years of your life and millions of dollars and you might end up getting like 30 players. But YouTube lowers the risk of that. It says you can do that, but it doesn't cost you a million dollars. Uh, right. You can if you want to. You want to spend a million dollars. You can, you want to spend $100 million on YouTube, you can, you can make $100 million video. Mr. Beast does it all the time. Right. Spending millions of dollars per video. But you don't need to. Right? May the best man win. And I think in general, YouTube has dropped our reverence for specific pieces for like the general piece of content. But there's still specific pieces of content we go back to and like, this was great. Mhm. Right. So, and the thing is, this is inevitable. It's like we can fight it as gamers. There's a part of me, there's 50% of me is like, I hate this. It's like, I lose ownership of a game, I lose over games, I lose this reverence I had towards games, blah, blah, blah. But the other side of me is like, I know how humans work. This is the cheaper, more efficient solution. It's better for the game devs because they have to like invest less resources in making games. Uh, they have a free platform. They don't have to think about, oh, you know, how do I get a platform? Because just so you know, PlayStation did put out our trailer. Even though we're most likely going out for the PlayStation, they haven't put out a trailer. I don't know why they haven't like given me a specific response on why. And I think it was ESRB rating or something like that. But it's a black box. It's like the theater cartel of like, you know, 50 years ago. Which is why I'm really rooting for the Steam machine. Right. Like, even though we work with PlayStation and we're going to put out a uh, game on the PlayStation at some point. But it's like I'm still rooting for the Steam machine. This needs to be open. The platforms need to allow because you don't see it from the game devs. It's so hard for a game developer, of course to make the game is hard, but there's a secondary step now of getting through all these cartels and making sure it appears. Because it's two companies, it's Xbox and PlayStation.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And the third, which is Steam, is this Open Carnival. If you were to think that the Reverend Places should have won, why is Steam doing so well? The Open Carnival? Why is the Open Carnival doing well? Because humans gravitate towards open carnivals. Developers gravitate towards open carnivals. Right. And I feel like there's a reason that games come out on PC. The game dev does well. He spent like 100k on it. He's made a billion dollars. His next game is much better. Right. His third game is even better. Right? Maybe the second game. He makes like $5 million now he has $4 million to spend. He loves making games. Now he spends $4 million on a game, makes a really big game, then it goes on PlayStation, then he builds a network and connections, but staked three tries to do that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. If you could like reduce that time, it would be better, right? If you give everybody a free platform, it'd be better. And I also think for the consumer that $20 is going to go down to $10. It's going to go down to $5. You know, I see comments on Reddit sometimes about streaming, right? About Nvidia, G Force and stuff like that. And people compare it to stadia. If you remember Google stadia that took place like five, ten years ago where you could do streaming games and it was so bad. But look at where bandwidth is now.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Like bandwidth is so much better now. Right. There are people I know in India who are just like, bro, I stream games and I was so surprised I can play a multiplayer game without lag.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And I'm streaming it. So it's like I think the world is changing and you have to choose at this point whether you want to be one of those, you know, oh, this is how it was, you know, I don't want to let it go. But we've seen this with music, we've seen this with videos, we've seen this with images. Mhm, right. Like even images. This is true. And I just feel like it's Inevitable here. Got to adopt it. Which means I have to learn how to make a game cheap.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: So will many other developers across the world.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And they'll learn how to. They'll have to learn how to make it different.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. I just wanted to prove to myself that we can make what the world global standard is. And I think we're close in terms of combat, in terms of cinematics, etc. But it's like after that it's like I want to make my own thing.

Speaker A: Do you have a max budget in your head that you would say that I'm not going to pass this amount no matter what?

Speaker C: No, I don't, I don't. I'll tell you why.

Speaker B: Uh,

Speaker C: I've never like I see this game as like a monthly EMII pay. Right? Like it's like, okay, there's 40 people, whatever. I'm spending X amount of money every month. I made a one time investment. Mocap. We bought the OptiTrack. Yeah, uh, I think I told you about it last time. I was so excited when we got it. Uh, but I think I spoke to you about OptiTrack vs. Vicon and stuff like that. We had a conversation around. Yeah, sorry, we had a conversation around this. Right, about the OptiTrack versus Vicon and stuff. Um, we invest in that. We have office space already because of the content side of the business. But it's like mostly I see this as a monthly emi. I pay, it goes up some months if we need like music and we need to hire a freelancer and stuff like that. But mostly it's stable. I think I can afford it forever, to be honest.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. But then there's a secondary question of morale which is like, what if I move this to 4 years, 5 years, the devs will run out of steam. So while the momentum is there, you keep pushing because the most progress happens on momentum. Uh, but I do think it'll be one of the super affordable games. Uh, and I think people would be genuinely surprised when we come out with the expenses. But at the same time I also feel like some of the game expenses are kind of. It won't show in the game's PNL, but it'll show in AOS's PNL. Mhm. Because as AOS, the parent company, like the photogrammetry the game, there's no separate entity called a game thing back then that would happen from eos. All the video guys there were on my payroll from the content side of the business. They Had a few days free. They weren't doing a project. We were waiting for the next project. So I was like, hey, do you guys want to go do this and come back? Right? So a lot of this has happened cheaper. And I also feel like, uh, with most games, a lot of the budget goes into marketing. Somewhere between 50 to 75% of a AAA game budget goes into marketing. Uh, now, we're not AAA, but, like, marketing is marketing. You still need to get attention. And there I think, you know, I got to put on the content creator hat, uh, you know, pull out all the tricks in the book, like, what is something that will get me viral? And sometimes, you know, uh, you play that tightrope of cringe versus this thing.

Speaker A: You do what you got to do, right?

Speaker C: You got to do and then hope that you get, like, you know, we did math on this. Uh, we got like millions of dollars of free marketing budget. I haven't spent a dollar so far. Right. Uh, because of some of this, these shenanigans that we do. Uh, but it's necessary otherwise. Like, you know, I made a game before this called Overpowered the card game. I had like three players, and the total number of people that, that saw the game was like 100 or maybe thousand, I think. Right. Who, like, clicked the website. So it's crazy. It's just like, we understand marketing, uh, that marketing is important more than anybody else. So even if you're on platforms. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker B: No, no, no. Uh, what I wanted to add to that is this goes back to the whole obsession and backrooms things. Because of the fact that you're coming in from the creator mindset. You can actually pull off marketing very different than how traditional games are doing it. There are some examples that I see on Instagram right now. Indie developers.

Speaker C: This is, uh, the Chameleon game.

Speaker B: What is that?

Speaker C: The Chameleon game. There's a game where you paint.

Speaker B: There's the Chameleon game, but then there's other people. Uh, the grandpa one that you showed to me.

Speaker C: Oh, grandpa high on retro.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, Grandpa high on retro. I don't know. Like, some guys just make the most memeable content based on their game, and it just goes viral on Instagram. And then people go and vicious the game on Steam in like a day. So one good video can completely turn it around.

Speaker A: And we know the power of one good video. What can one good video do that.

Speaker B: So this is just like, you come from that background, which makes it even better.

Speaker C: I mean, but. But I'll tell you the problem is not this. I think the problem is with belief because like I told you, you still have to go through existing platforms. Uh, and I think the challenge here is like, people will not believe an outsider has a right to win. People want, like, they're used to a certain type of game dev. They're like, why is the content like, you know, some of the comments I saw was just like, I don't like the fact that a YouTuber is making a game. I can't pay.

Speaker B: I can't like the fact.

Speaker C: Yeah, like, I can't. A YouTuber is making a game.

Speaker A: But, but that applies to like, you know, they say the YouTuber cannot make film. The YouTuber shouldn't go and play sport. The YouTuber.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: That exists.

Speaker C: But it's true until it's proven. Yeah, right. Like it's, it's, it's almost like backrooms. If I went back in time, like, if I showed you the next backrooms and I said, I think this is the next backrooms, would you invest in it even? You'd be like, uh, I don't know, like some of the stuff, like, I don't. It's so hard to tell. Pre. Right. It's almost like it's easy to say in hindsight, oh yeah, Kari was like a great filmmaker and therefore he ended up making this, this amazing movie. But, uh, it's so hard to tell. And that's why I believe, like I have this very strong belief. I'm um, already seeing it in the US I see some of these creator panels in India. I think creators are going to own a lot more than movies and games. They're going to make a lot more than movies and games. I think they're going to be in all of business because all of business has a rate limiting factor, which is attention. If you want to sell salt or you want to sell candy, being a creator is the best way to do that today. Yeah, right. Look at Feastables.

Speaker B: Yeah, right.

Speaker C: It's the best part. Like Kylie Jenner. It's like, you know, beauty. It happens every, every two years. Like Kylie Jenner Road by, uh, Hailey Bieber it's like it happens every two years. And they were like, oh my God, this creator is making so much money in India. There's like now creator like fashion brands that are crushing it.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: They suddenly like, you know, they wake up one day and they make like $30 million a year. Mhm. Right. And they were nowhere like two years ago. So I think the creator company does well, not just because of the creator's face. Otherwise, like, celebrities will also work and they don't work as well. Like celebrity brands don't work as well as creator brands. And I would, I would put Kylie and Cayman stuff more in the creator camp because they know how to make videos. Yes, it is the, it is the understanding of how to make videos. It's not your face, it's just the understanding of, I think this clip is going to go viral.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: And all we optimize for is can this go viral? Even if sometimes you're bordering on the lines of like, I don't know, it's going to go negative viral or positive viral, but like, you know, can we make this go viral? And I think that's, if that's going to be the game, then everyone who's going to win are going to be people who figure out how to go viral. We have a name for that term, it's called creator. And therefore I believe, like creators are going to be the most important thing, uh, in most businesses. Uh, and this is not me as a creator saying this because I'm biased. It's like, I also like, we're content company, right? We do this for companies. And like, for example, we spoke about Coca Cola earlier. Like Coca Cola is a customer, right? And we've been doing channels for them. It's like, it's just like they're seeing this now. And uh, you know, Coca Cola was like, we love what you guys are doing with this and we would love to, you know, uh, you know, do more channels and learn more how to do YouTube. Because it's the new platform, it's the new, you know, way of doing things. So you can't exclude it, you can't, uh, create it. But at the same time, going back to everything that I said from day one, it's still got to be a labor of love. M. You cannot be a YouTuber and say, I have lots of distributions, so let me make them shit.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, uh, right.

Speaker C: Like, no.

Speaker B: We've had many failed creator products too. I mean, we only talk about the successful ones, but many failed ones only because, because they did it just to utilize their face and their brand. But if it is a labor of love, which is the first reason why I told you we wanted to talk to you because it's obvious from the videos you're creating about the game and what you're saying about the game, that's when it will be sustainable. Because you can release it once, people will buy it once because they trust your brand. But if it, if it flops, people don't trust you because they didn't put enough passion and efforts into it, then people are not going to buy the second one.

Speaker A: And I agree so much with what Warren said about being a creator and how much it impacts your business, whatever business you're in. Faro showed me a video of Ryan Serhan. He's a very successful real estate agent. Made millions, I think hundreds of millions

Speaker B: of the biggest deals in real estate.

Speaker A: When he was introducing himself, he said, we are a media company, not a real estate company. We are a media company that happens to do real estate. And Faros told me that we are not 3D company or AI company or a service company. We are also a media company that happens to do services. Happens.

Speaker B: We happen to be passionate about 3D.

Speaker A: We happen to be passionate about Unreal Engine. And I think it's so powerful because when you are focusing on the media side and the content side, everything else become easier to market. If I want to talk about Unreal Engine, I can't talk about Unreal Engine. If I want to talk about AI, I can talk about AI. If I want to go deliver this service, I can go and deliver this service because I have the proof and everybody believes you. Same thing goes with games. And I think that's really powerful.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a new world. And I think ultimately this is all great for the consumer. Yeah, it's all great for the player because you have more options.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Right. And you know, actually salts also not a good thing because like, I've also realized that some people just don't like too many options. It's like I want to like, just show me the top five. They want curation. So I think the platforms will have to do curation. Sony does such a good job, like PlayStation does such a good job of curation. Right. It's like there's so many tail end of games on PlayStation that you. There's like a 5% chance you'll make contact with all of that because the store is not going to show you that upfront. It's very hard to get there. Sometimes you have to search for those games. Um, so curation will be like the key thing. Trust is super important. But ultimately like, uh, you know, there's something I've learned about the world. The people having the most fun end up doing the best. It's like as long as you're having fun and doing your thing, like for the first three years, people are going to throw stones at you. Like, why are you not Doing this the other way and then suddenly like actually they're having fun. Right. Let me go see, Let me go see what, what is fun here. And it also ends up being fun for the people, you know, participating in the experience, which is what a game is. Uh, I think there's a shot. That's why I say, like, people ask me, what's the chance of financial success? I was like, I have no idea. Can we make a successful game? I have a number. It's like 60, 70% now. But it's like, uh, can we be financially successful?

Speaker B: I'm like, you know, I do want to say that this conversation has to happen again, specifically about the game. After you see, when you release the next trailer. I imagine that's going to be in about six months time.

Speaker C: Yeah, something like that.

Speaker B: Okay. And at this moment, people can go ahead and wish list the game on Steam. Is that right?

Speaker C: Yeah, you can go to Steam, Wishlist it. Um, we'll have a PlayStation page soon. But uh, yeah, go to Steam, Wishlist it. Tell uh, your friends about it. Watch, uh, the trailer, please. I would love if you could watch the trailer, uh, help us get better and yeah, like, like, thank you guys so much for doing this. Like, I'm, you know, you react to the last trailer, so, so important to me because it's like, this is a cool part, right? Like, I love other creators because like, especially guys like you who've been around who built stuff. Because there is now, like, you know, there are also a bunch of creators now who like, they're just making any sort of content. Like Twitter has become like this, just engagement farming. But creators like you built something and like that, you know, give a shit. It's such a breath of fresh air. So anytime you want me, I don't care where in the world I am, I'll find a spot. Might not be, you know, uh, it might be very different from this, but I'll, I'll jump on and I appreciate it.

Speaker B: Uh, I appreciate that, man. Uh, same goes out to you. The thing is, you're doing something really different and not many people would do that. You know, many people would in your situation, use the money to do something else. Just, you know, like anything but making

Speaker A: a game because you don't know what is the outcome.

Speaker B: One of the most riskiest endeavors you can take, uh, which proves to us that you're truly passionate about this. We're looking forward to seeing the game, we're looking forward to seeing the next trailer. And

Speaker A: you should go down to India when they Release the game. Play the game inside the office. No, no, before release the game. Before releasing the game.

Speaker B: Sure, I don't mind. But I'm not going to plan to stay in India for two months because you can't finish a game.

Speaker A: I know I said play, test the game.

Speaker C: How about this? I'll just send you a build. I'll just send you a build before, you know, we go live. You can just play wherever you are.

Speaker B: No, but the thing is, you said 5 out of 200 people only managed to kill the first boss. He's not going to be one of those five. So that's why, I mean the goal

Speaker C: with the game is to teach you. So the idea is like we thought a lot about should we make the game simpler? But it's like, no, we'll teach you, we'll hand hold you. We'll find a way to teach you through the game on how to get better. And the goal is like this thing that happens to a lot of players when they play Sekiro for the first time, which is that it's a rhythm game. Sekiro is like a rhythm game, but this feeling when you figure out the rhythm.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: It's like it just clicks. It's like, oh, right, I need that. I'm hoping for that. That's the magic moment. That's the moment, that's the retention moment in Sekiro because people who pass that point just stick and they finish the game and they become fans. Right. So we're trying to trigger something like that. It's very difficult. Um, so hopefully you don't, you know, leave the game midway. My job is a content creator to make sure that doesn't happen. I will send it across to you, uh, you know, whenever it's ready. And uh, yeah, thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker A: I love that. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you for coming on Varun.

Speaker C: See ya.

Speaker A: Uh, take care. So we just finished the uh, conversation with Varun and the cameras were still rolling. The conversation went somewhere that we think it is important for you guys to listen to it as well. So let's go back to it because

Speaker B: ultimately you said it yourself like this,

Speaker C: you know, you should, you should. Are we recording? You should keep this on this, on this.

Speaker B: It's still recording. Yeah, it's still recording. The only thing I've accepted is that ultimately considering the rapid growth of AI and how it truly does help many people, people still need education. Someone still got to teach people how to use it, how to make it better.

Speaker C: As an artist do you feel as an artist, AI is taking away a little bit of your agency 100%. Like how, how did you like got over it?

Speaker A: I have seen people, especially coming out of the, you know, Unreal Engine 3D industry, how much effort, how much sleepless night goes into creating something and then someone else will come and say, hey, I remade Dune with AI in 10 seconds. You can do it too. But when everybody does it, when everybody does it, I realize the emotion is lost. Yes. For that 10 second on social media you have that, you have the output. But the. I uh, think that the process is not only the output. The process is also really important. Right. For the person who tells the story. Especially if you are telling a story that is more than 60 seconds, there are a lot of elements that's going to impact the final pixel is not just the render. And I think with AI we are probably losing all the emotion in the process. That's, that's how I see.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the hybrid approach is the best. M. I think there is a hybrid approach here which is artist, uh, directed. You probably start with three. My, my biggest issue there. And the reason we haven't used AI in Unleashed Avatar is very simple. Right. There's a huge lack of controllability for the kind of experience that we're going for now. Hopefully. Like for example, um, pcg, which is not genai but like still AI. Right. Like it's still figuring out where trees should be at, where rock should be adjacent to trees, but you still make that graph yourself. PCG has been super useful. Right. But if I AI generate a 3d asset and put it in scene, it just looks bad.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: It just doesn't look like, like it still needs a lot of post processing and at which point it just makes more economical sense to scan the asset. You want to shoe, Just scan the shoe. We have a. So photogrammetry is the better technology right now. Um, which is why I feel like we haven't been too warm on the idea of like you know, putting too much AI in. But it is inevitable. But I still think it is going to be artist directed. I think there is going to be a very big difference between artist directed AI. You can see it like sometimes, right? Like I'm just saying that you know me as a content creator, right. Sometimes I'll just be like, okay, we need to put our video, we need to do visuals. Okay, fine, let's use AI. It just comes out like it looks like slop.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. Like you can tell like no effort's Been put in this. But then I did a video about chimpanzees. I don't know if you guys saw it. We did with AI I spent $8,500 on that video. But that was very artist directed. We shot some stuff in the real world. Like it's like a hybrid video. Yes, right. It was very, like, it's very like every, every word was written by me, myself.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. And then I was like, no, no, this needs to be changed a little bit. So it's like very directed because I cared about that video. So I think when people care about something, it will show AI or not. When people don't care about something. You can absolutely make sloppy 3D as well. Yes, you can absolutely make slop of 2D as well. It just takes longer.

Speaker A: So I think it's easier with AI and I realized it's faster. And I think we are getting to the trend, which I really dislike. And I think one of our visions and one of our goals. Faros coined the term make humans smarter. When I see people that hey, copy my prompt so you're able to do the same thing immediately, I think that kills creativity. That kills the entire effort that goes to create whatever that product is. Image, video code, website, poster, banner, whatever you want to call it. If you're just copying blindly someone else and not learning through the fundamentals and the basics and the struggle that needs to go through to create that piece of.

Speaker C: But I think all this stuff only makes for like viral videos. Like this stuff where someone is like, copy my prompt. Anyone copying the prompt, we see their outputs. Like they're not actually using it for anything. They watch the video, they feel cool about themselves, they move on. They're not actually using it for work and stuff like that because people use it for work, know there is no way to remove the human from the loop. So like one thing I can say as somebody who's done now, the content piece, we use a lot of genai there. The AI, the Unreal Engine piece, where unfortunately we can't use AI in a bunch of things. I just feel like art is directed over everything. Right. Like I think the amount of love, like the story behind the story, the amount of love you've put into something like the discipline. Like you know, there are people who construct a statue just because they can and they love doing it and they've done it with their hands. You can tool make something, but my grandma would still make like a sweater, a knitted sweater that meant more to me than the one machine, one Right. So I think the amount it means to you matters and if you use machine stitch, but the amounts like the effort, like you still put uh, in a lot of effort thinking about it and like figuring out what needs to go in it. It's okay if you use a machine stitched piece, uh, of clothing, right. If it means something to you. But nine or ten times clothing that means stuff to people after the machine stitch world is personalized clothing. Mhm. Right. Or like crazy brands. It's mhm. Like I really love this brand because I love the story behind the brand. Mhm. Right. And humans have like this need for identity. So we always look for, um, I want to fit into this group, I want to fit into this vegan group. So I'll start buying from this brand. Um, I want to fit in this, you know, high fashion lifestyle influence things. I want to fit into this brand and that's my brand. Mhm. So it's like we're looking for clubs all the time, right? And I know, and that's why it's so hard, right? You want to compete with like the big games. The problem is you're also competing with the clubs, right? Like you're shaking people's identity by saying, well, this game is not as special as it was because now, you know, even, you know, somebody from India with a low budget can, can make something similar. Right. Like so people are always looking for clubs. They care about the story behind the story. Like it is a storyteller's world through and through. In my opinion, Elon is the best storyteller in the world because he has the platform. Maybe not the best storyteller in the world, but the guy with the biggest platform for sure. Um, and of course this passion and hard work and ethic, you could see it behind the scenes and people can see that and so they're like, oh, then it makes sense. Uh, but the thing is within the storyteller's world. And that's why I believe when I meet you guys five, 10 years later, you guys will be running some huge empire. Uh, I'm very confident of it. And uh, yeah, just make sure you don't forget your little friends.

Speaker B: No, the same thing goes with you, man. The thing is, with everything that is changing, one thing that we noted is that it is inevitable. This is such a big shift. It concerns every single human on this planet and no one can run away from it. The only thing we can do is try to steer it and figure out how we can all work together to build something great. Because it can be great and it can be horrible at the same time. We are the ones who decide how it turns out to be. And so going back to your point, I love that you talked about artist driven or hybrid approach. That's exactly what we're doing. That's exactly what we're teaching as well, is we're trying to teach people to have taste to put in. You are using AI, but you're still spending the same amount of time working. You're just creating better work and more work. That's what we're trying to share. Not that, oh, now that AI is here, let's go on a beach and let's spend one hour, copy someone's prompt and make mediocre work. Because the truth is, whether you're talking about videos that you can make with C Dance right now or eventually 10 years down the line, maybe you can prompt to game. That's the problem. It's like some companies are saying, prompt to game in 10 years. Eventually, if everyone can do that, then everyone's going to have the exact same product, right? The ones who will stand out are the ones who come and somehow figure out how to add their own flavor to it to make it different. And the same thing is true for human work.

Speaker C: Honestly, with AI for art, I'm not too worried because I think the human brain, and we do like we have, like I said, we have like 400 video editors on the other side of the company. So like we work with artists every day, right? The one thing we have learned which I'm very, very sure of is like the minute something becomes very easy and everyone can do becomes worthless.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: Right. So if everyone's putting out the same kind of video on social media, maybe it gets views in the early days, then everyone moves on. Like my avatar content doesn't work as well as did one year ago.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: I still use it if I have news to break because I know the news will carry it. But otherwise people like, I put myself in the videos now because I'm just like, I know that everyone's doing AI generated AI avatar contents is like boring. So the human brain has a mechanism where we can see the sameness and then we break and then we say like we want something else we talked about.

Speaker A: You started it, everybody copied you. And then sometimes I just see, oh my God, same background.

Speaker B: We have a thing for Visa. Oh, another Varun V2.

Speaker A: What would be three? No, because again, again, when it goes to copying and tasteless copying, dude, just change the background. At least don't use the same background, like add something to what VARU did. Why are you copying the exact same thing?

Speaker C: Yes, but here's the thing. Like, I think I'm using myself.

Speaker A: Right. He started appearing himself in the videos. Yes.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's the world. Like, I think the algorithms are, um, unforgiving. They want different all the time. So if AI is able to make the same, you'll need the different. You can use it for the small stuff, you can use it for the transitions. You can use it if you want to do a little bit of like you want to generate a graphic and then you want to animate it later. You can use AI for a bunch of things behind the scenes in the process. But like, people will get tired of the sameness.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yes. Well, didn't expect to go there, but very interesting. I think, honestly speaking, we should have like another day proper discussion just about this second topic that we, uh, uh, unexpectedly steer towards. That's a massive thing. And I know people would appreciate your take on it as well. Especially now that you're building the content machine that you're building, but also building a game development company knowing, uh, that a lot of people have concerns about AI in games. Um, very specifically about this.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker B: I believe it's something that you add on the games, where they removed it, where the developers had to say if there was AI used in the game. I'm not sure if they still have it or not, but it caused a huge backlash.

Speaker A: Everybody's using it. And if you are with what kind

Speaker B: of AI, because AI is such a

Speaker A: massive, you can say for rigging, for mocap, for creating cleanup, like, is it gen AI? Is it for.

Speaker B: And then it would cause a massive drop in sales, just.

Speaker C: And then people would call it. People would call it slop.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Remember?

Speaker B: Yeah. And the thing is they would cause massive drops in sales. Whereas the game itself may be great. You know, they may have used clot code just for certain parts of the engineering.

Speaker A: Someone m from Pixar. Actually they were interviewing someone from Pixar for animation, not for games. He said, what's your opinion about AI? Should we promote AI in animation? He said, we've been using machine learning for years now. It's not new to Pixar. We had that in computer graphic. We were predicting frames in between, uh, tracks or animation. It's just that now that the generation of videos and photos came and people are giving backlash to it, for us it's still the same thing. Maybe we use it more in different areas, but that's no, but I think

Speaker C: the story, the consumer concern is with, you know, hey, this is like a bunch of other people's content. You know, you put it through this, this box, you've trained it, there's no transparency around where it's coming out. And like, you know, you're remixing somebody else's work and you're putting it out. But I feel like some of those arguments fall flat when you use something like Adobe Firefly, which licensed work, right? So it's like I just. And it's, it's a tool that's already there now. The problem with these kind of tools, right, they're like, it's kind of like a weapon, right? It's there now. Now that it's there, yeah, if, if, if you don't use it, you're really going to fall behind, right? Uh, but I think, like, I like this AB test. We have an A B test going on, right? Like, I have a company which uses a lot of genai for content. I have a game dev studio that doesn't use AI. To me, I feel more connected to the game dev studio, right? Because it's like I'm putting my heart and my soul and my love in it, right? So it's also pushing me to do a lot more M. Whereas if I used AI, it would be slightly different. But the content company, it's making a lot of money, it's doing very well. There's less of me in it. It's a machine now. It's a system that runs by itself. And this, the technology that helps, you know, go forward. That doesn't mean I like one more than the other. It just means this is where I'm pouring my soul in and this is where it's what keeps things running. And this is what's very useful, commercially valuable. But ultimately both companies fall down to the rate of ideas you're still in. Crazy ideas like social media is this place where just because you're using AI, like six months later, if the, if the meta changes, people want to see something new, you have to change.

Speaker B: You have no choice, dude, if everyone's going to have Hadrian avatars, then everybody's making content. And if everyone's script is written by Claude, everyone sounds the same. Some fucking guy has to come up and say something new. Somebody has to say something new, and that new will be the one that stands out. Again, if you're just. If you're a store selling ice cream or burgers, hadn't avatar and cloud scripts will do for a very Long time. Because all you're trying to do is get people to your store. If you can make a few good videos, market your product that you couldn't do before because you have no creative skills. You make burgers. Right. You're not a guy who likes to go on social media. You can use these tools and really help your business. But if we're talking about the people we're talking about, which is creatives, artists, storytellers, um, we are trying to actually spend all of our time to create something new, something unique. And so that's why it's very important to have that hybrid approach. And I think a lot of businesses will start to look like yours, where you have the machine that is running part of the business or one of your businesses, which helps you generate a lot of the cash flow. And then since you have all this time freed up, you'll start to pour your soul into something that you truly want to manually be controlling yourself because it actually adds a certain value that the machine cannot add.

Speaker A: And to add to that, like the video you made yesterday uploaded today, Right? Just sitting down, turn on the camera. Hey, these are the comments under the video that I made and I'm going to go through it. Yes, that could be AI generated avatar, but no, I'm sitting down and I'm going to go through.

Speaker B: May I say one more thing? No offense, but your shitty camera webcam quality made it so much better. I actually enjoyed it more because I was like, now I'm getting all these seat dance 4k videos which look fucking great with crisp detail. I know this shit is real. Like Varun just sat down and it's like, okay, this is the most casual thing. I'm just gonna talk about the comments. It feels so casual that I connect with it way more than if you put a 4K camera and recorded it with the best lens. That is the kind of video that I think I appreciate and I think people did as well because I was looking at the comments right before we went on with the show. So, yeah, it's a very crazy time

Speaker C: that we've been in.

Speaker B: Ten years ago, you would have wanted the best camera, the best lens, the best lighting. Now everyone's just like, just prove to me that what you're saying is not scripted with AI and that you're coming up with original ideas.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the world just wants different.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's like when we started doing the high production backgrounds, like very few people were doing it on YouTube. On every video, we're just like, this is Different. And now everyone's doing it. So we're like, well, what's uh, a, you know, one of those three GP cameras. It's like, I think the world loves different.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: I think, I think uh, you know, because we do so by the way. So we've gotten so good at games, right. And we've had like two years. I wouldn't say. Like, I still feel like we have lots of room for improvement, but we've been doing the same thing with content for four years.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And India already had like content know how and talent and whatnot. We're very good with content. Like absolutely. Like we're not slick to have. We do 70 channels for customers and all of them work.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Can you imagine like just this like having so many of them at the same time managing all that talent, like training that talent, you know, it's, it's, it's hectic. But I feel like, I just feel like what we've learned about content is all about the different. If you guys were on the show and he said screw the TBPN format, let's have us both sit together and we'll think of a new show where like both of us are drinking coffee and like, maybe, you know, you've seen those old talk shows where you have that spray come on top like, you know, like slime come on top when you say something wrong or someone says something stupid.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: Stuff like that. Right. Like you just really need to think through how can I make this different? How can I make this an experience for the user? Like the craziest ideas work like the craziest ideas. So it's like uh, so yeah, like I just found the absurd work really well on social media. So with everything we're just like, what's the most absurd thing you can do? It's like the most absurd thing I could do on YouTube was like take a webcam, just sit down, turn off all the lights, keep one light on and just be like, let me read your comments. Right. It's the most, it's the most antithetical thing. So at every given point we're actually looking for opportunities to zig when everybody else is zagging. Right. So yeah, but that's so cool. I love the mechanism in humans brains that make us seek the novel factor in the different. Because without that you'd have mega corporations who. We only watched the Disney's and we had that on TV for a while by the way. We had like this choice list of like 3, 4, 5 mega channels that controlled all of distribution, all of, like, which movies you saw, how you grew up, what kids watched, all of it. Right. And the only reasons our tastes change is because we got bored of the old stuff. We were new, we weren't authentic.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: So, uh, I'm glad that exists with humanity. Gives new people a shot. 100%.

Speaker B: 100%. Thank you again, Varun, for coming on. Shall we meet, uh, again soon after you guys have more news about the game.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Thank you guys for doing this. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker B: And that's it for the conversation with Varun Maya. We hope you guys enjoyed that little behind the scenes into how the game is being made. And we made sure it's hot because they just released the trailer and we brought him on to talk about everything that they've been working on. Now, without further ado, I think it's time for the next topic. What do you think, Farad?

Speaker A: Let's go.

Speaker B: Autodesk Flow Studio releases Lora training for character Consistency what are loras. What is Autodesk Flow Studio? We've talked about Autodesk Flow Studio in the past, but I assume some of you guys may be new, so we'll give you guys a little brief explanation as to what it is. Autodesk Flow Studio, which is a tool we've covered in the show before, it is a web based platform for creatives offering AI powered creative workflows. Now, with Autodesk Flow Studio, the promise has always been that you can bring VFX to life faster than ever before, while still staying in control, while still using the professional creative workflows that we're used to as artists, 3D artists. And while generating videos using video generation models may get you to results quickly, in this day and age, after having generated the pixels, you still really don't have much control over the output. If you want to alter something, it's incredibly complicated. And maybe for a quick social media video, that's fine, but. But when you're talking about professional tools and professional workflows, for serious work, you need to have control. Your client's going to come back to you a hundred times with reviews. Your director is going to come back to you with a hundred times with things they want to change. And that's why having control over every part of the workflow is important. But also speed is important, which is why Autodesk Flow Studio tries to and attempts to combine the two together. Now, there are many features that they've released over the past few months, uh, many of which we've covered on the show, but they have just released something new, which is Lora Training. Lora, uh, stands for low rank adaptation. And it sounds confusing for a lot of people who don't know what it is, but we'll get to that in a moment. Let's quickly start from the beginning of what you can actually do inside Autodesk Flow Studio, if this is your first time hearing about it.

Speaker A: For people who have watched the show previously. Ah. And watched our content, they've seen that we used it for our Samurai short film which we made with Unreal Engine. We used it for pre production. We used it in the early days of our vlog and YouTube when actually Autodesk Flu Studio was released to replace me with a 3D character.

Speaker B: It was the first time we used AI motion capture.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then we also used it.

Speaker B: And you were impressed.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we used it for replacing Deadpool in a music video, if you remember. So we did experimentation a lot of times with Autodesk Flow Studio. And I think the way we connected with it really well, among other AI tools, was that it would give us a control and also it will always give us the export option to Blender and Unreal Engine.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So we could use either the motion capture data, we could use the clean slate, we could use a camera movement, we could use different elements from the final result.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: That was one of the important parts, I think, that we used.

Speaker B: Shall, uh, we give people a little brief overview of how it works? Okay. So the very first thing that you can do is that you have a character concept in your mind for the show, for your, uh, film, for the short form content ad that you are

Speaker A: creating as a mascot.

Speaker B: For example, whatever it is that you want to create, you have the concept in your mind. You can go ahead and use Nano Banana's model, which is the Google Image generation model within Autodesk Flow Studio, to create the concept of the character. So this, for example, Prat, what did you write here for this character?

Speaker C: I, uh, just wrote, generate a simple looking cat, give it the look of a Fortnite character, and make it t pose.

Speaker B: Okay, great. So once you have that concept, then you can go ahead and turn this into a 3D model within minutes inside the same platform. So Pratt has already done that. Can we take a look at the 3D model? You're given four options to choose from before you go ahead and create the full mesh and texture it, which is the next point, because there's always going to be artifacts, Right. You never know which generation is going to be Perfect. So here you're given four options. You choose the one that you want to create, and then you go through these settings, which is like, uh, how much of the polygons do you want to allocate to your 3D match? Are you trying to go super optimized or you want to have full detail? You have options to change that here. Uh, quads, triangles, all those fancy stuff. Once you create the 3D model, you can immediately texture it also in the same platform. So we have the textured character here as well in t pose, in the exact pose that you asked for within the image. Now, up until here, pretty cool. Over the past year, we've seen, uh, models that allow you to create 3D characters and texture them, but very rarely did we see the same platform offer auto rigging solutions. So here you can go ahead and auto rig the character also within minutes. Um, especially if they are a human looking character, which is the most common form of characters that we'd be working with, you can go ahead and do that very much like Mixamo. So if you're a 3D artist, you're used to how this would work. And then the character is already rigged. We have the recharacter. Pratt, can you please go ahead and show us the recharacter here? By the way, we still haven't gotten to the good stuff yet, like, all this stuff we've already shown you guys on the show. But I'm getting to my point. Once you have the rig character, then you can say, okay, even up until now, there are models that offer it. You know, I can go ahead and create my 3D model and texture it and rig it. But here's where Autodesk Flow Studio actually wins. So one thing that they do is because of what they actually started with, which was, can we bring in live action footage, the real footage that you've shot, and be able to drop these characters into those worlds, match the lighting conditions, and be able to bring in the animation from your characters in the real world and apply it to these characters. So export the mocap and apply it to these characters. But that's not the only thing. Once you do that, then, as Farhad mentioned earlier, you have access to all of the different options that Autodesk Flow Studio offers for control. You can go ahead and export the rendered footage. You can go ahead and export a clean plate without the character there, so it will remove you from the shot. You have the ability to export the animation only. So just the motion capture data. You, uh, have the option to export the camera Animation separately. So you can alter that and you have the ability to export the entire thing into your favorite 3D software, Blender Cinema 40, um, Unreal Engine, and then make any sort of alterations that you may want to do to the shot. Great.

Speaker A: This is the normal Rendell, though.

Speaker B: Yes, it's great. But, hey, in this video where I actually shot the video with Farhad outside here in Dubai, uh, it's good. The lighting is there. The character feels like it kind of belongs to the scene, but it's still not perfect. Of course, if we're trying to be, uh, nitpicking and the face, uh, is not moving. Although I am talking in the shot, they went ahead and added something called the neural layer. The neural layer is an AI enhancement layer that alters the pixels to enhance the material quality. And you see that immediately. Pratt, quickly go back and forth, please. Enhance the lighting to match the scene. Enhance serial quality.

Speaker A: The realism.

Speaker B: The realism. And my favorite part, it also adds facial animations where applicable. So it uses AI to enhance multiple layers of the footage. But then there's a problem that arises with that. If AI is coming into the picture, then technically there is room for hallucination because the AI is generating every pixel. And if you have the concept of the character and you're working on multiple shots, different angles, how do you ensure consistency in facial proportions, in body proportions, in material textures? Uh, especially when there's text. That is where Lora training comes in handy. And this is actually the newest update to Autodesk Flow Studio. At the very bottom left, Pratt is showing you right now. Once you create your character, you can go ahead and train Elora, which is a low rank adaptation, a, uh, fine tuning of the model, which allows the model to understand your character's visual identity so that the next time you're going to create any shots with that character, it understands exactly the proportions of the eyes, to the eyebrows, to, to the face, the colors, et cetera. And it ensures consistency much more than if you were just to use the neural layer on its own.

Speaker A: I think that one of the best example is actually the demo by Autodesk Flow Studio itself. For example, in the example that they created, right, the character is wearing a jersey which has the word wolves written at the back. If you use neural layer, and if you have multiple shots, different camera angle, as we all know, text could get morphed or smooshed when you are generating different frames. When they turn on Lora, you can see that the word wolves is consistent throughout every single frame. Uh, Pratt, can we Go back a little. Yes. So this is the part so you can see they even zoom in on wolves 88 and turning on Lora. Make sure it is consistent in between every single shot.

Speaker B: I'm excited to see these new features being added in. I guess one of the biggest challenges with having AI alter pixels is this exact problem, which is how can we ensure consistency per frame. Especially if you're working with characters that are complicated, complex characters. The moment your character looks slightly different from m a different angle, it wouldn't work, right? It wouldn't work. You wouldn't be able to use the. The benefits of the neural layer.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And I do like the neural layer. There's a massive difference in how it looks. It looks a lot more realistic. And so if the neural layer worked really well but wasn't consistent, you couldn't use it.

Speaker A: We will put the link for Flow Studio in the comments. Uh, there are free plans that you guys can give it a try. It is a great tool for pre production. I think if you want to show something quick, if you have a client project or if you are having an idea that you want to present, that's a great tool that it can help. And what I like is when they bring everything into one location. So I have to go out like I have Nana Banana, I have the 3D image generation, I have rigging all in one place. And prad. We have the option of uploading our own character. Right. As well.

Speaker B: You can upload your own characters and

Speaker C: make a clean slate.

Speaker B: For example, the Deadpool video that you did.

Speaker A: Yeah, that 3D model that we did.

Speaker B: So how it works basically is you upload a video, uh, and you have some kind of, uh, not animation. Like you record your own self or you put any sample video. And what Flow Studio does is it removes you or that person, whoever is in the video and it replaces that with a 3D character. So you can do, uh, pre visualization. For example, we did it for our Samurai course. Uh, you have some kind of animation. You're running, you're boxing. You want to see your character in that specific scene.

Speaker C: Scene. And you can just do that. And it's magical.

Speaker B: Wonderful.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: I would recommend. If you guys haven't tried it out, just check it out. The link is in the description below. Uh, so is the link for the trailer for the game that we reviewed today. Uh, and also the Steam link to Wishlist, the game. We got all the links as per usual in the description. And we just wanted to say thank you once again for tuning into the show.

Speaker A: Have they subscribed to the show on YouTube?

Speaker B: I don't know.

Speaker A: Do you think?

Speaker C: Have you?

Speaker B: Do you guys follow us on Spotify? Come on.

Speaker A: Have you left five star review? If you haven't, we are at episode 121 now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If you haven't so far, I don't know what you're waiting for because we have bigger plans for the show. The show is gonna get better, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any episode. All right, see you guys on Friday.

Speaker B: Thank you for watching. We will definitely see you guys on Friday. We don't have any recordings this week, so we'll see you guys on Friday. Until then, ciao.