Playdate Podcast

Christa Mrgan: Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game developers, designers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. And this week’s episode has a special format.

Oom and Pullfrog are two standout games that launched in Catalog last year, and I really wanted to get the stories on both. But instead of creating an episode for each of the games, I decided to have both games’ creators play each other’s games and then interview each other about them. This conversation was recorded back in May of 2024, and I mostly tried to stay out of it, but you know me: I did edit it a bit to tighten it up and remove filler words.

And spoiler alert: this episode does contain spoilers for Pullfrog, Oom, and Omaze, and Doom Eternal. Okay. Not really, but it does get mentioned and I thought it’d be funny to throw it in there. Okay. I’m gonna turn it over to them now and let them introduce themselves and their games. Enjoy.

JP Riebling: Hi, my name is JP and I am half of Amano games my friend Mario Carballo. And I I am in charge

mostly of art and animation. I do a little bit of

audio and music. and I also co-design games with Mario.

Mario Carballo: Hello, I’m Mario I’m the other half of Amano games. I’m the programmer

Gregory Kogos: also designer of our games and I mostly do that. I also took charge of the website.

Hi, I’m Gregory. I’m a solo developer. I made this game, Oom which is spiritual successor to Omaze, which is a season game. It’s a very unconventional game, I think. It’s a kind of a dungeon crawler where you move and shoot on a beat. So

Gregory Kogos: it’s It’s kind of a dungeon crawler, but not really.

It’s a kind of a rhythm game, but not really. So something in between of the genres. it’s definitely a puzzle because there are puzzle elements, but, also it’s, I know that it’s good to describe the game, “something, something meets something, something.” So if we are talking about Oom, it’s um, Crypt of the Necrodancer meets Osmos.

JP Riebling: . Hmm. That’s a good way to put it.

Yeah.

Frog is a twist on a classic block falling puzzle game where you take control of a little frog that uses its tongue to move the

JP Riebling: pieces around and try to clear lines. it has power ups and some hidden secrets in it. And if you’re a fan of falling puzzle like games,

I think you’re gonna like it.

Gregory Kogos: I have many questions.

Mario Carballo: I have many questions. as well.

Gregory Kogos: first of

all, you are based

in Mexico, right?

JP Riebling: Yes.

Gregory Kogos: You are the first game developers that I know from Mexico, and, I would like to know like any of your gaming background, but I prepared like, question for that, which is connected to your game:

do you remember, how did you play Tetris for the first time?

Christa Mrgan: If you’re listening to this podcast, I probably don’t need to tell you what Tetris is, but just in case, Tetris Is the OG falling blok game, created by Soviet developer Alexey Pajitnov, where you move and rotate falling blocks called tetrominoes to complete rows and score points. The version created for Nintendo’s Game Boy was one of the bestselling video games of all time. Okay.

JP Riebling: I can answer that. I was probably five years old. My parents gave me a Game Boy and it had Tetris I was

fairly new to video games. I think I had NES

and I only had Mario. So Tetris I think was the second game I played but yeah, I think I was five,

six years old when I played Tetris for the first time. It was a, a present from, my parents.

Gregory Kogos: Nice. So youu acually had Nintendo-- like real Nintendo consoles in Mexico?

JP Riebling: Yeah, we got a lot of that. We got some bootleg Nintendo. It was like a Famicom, we called it the Family. It was called the Family. And a lot of people had that.

But also we got being so close to the US we got a lot of Nintendo, like classic NES and Super Nintendo a little bit down the line.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. Nintendo’s original game console was called the Family Computer or Famicom, it was redesigned and released a few years later as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES.

Mario Carballo: I do remember my first time playing Tetris was in one of those large displays that had like 99 games inside of one.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah. Same for me.

Mario Carballo: Yeah, .

I mean, because they were cheap and easy to get, and also because my parents didn’t like me playing video games. Uh, so they were like, I don’t know, everything that was handheld was not a video game for them. I dunno how the rules worked, but something along those lines or, or maybe

because the battery didn’t last long and then I couldn’t play for too long, but they allowed me to play those kind of games. And that was the first time that I played Tetris. Actually didn’t play on the, on the Game Boy until like twenties or something.

Gregory Kogos: Mm-hmm. Everything in handheld is a toy. It’s

Mario Carballo: Yeah, exactly.

Gregory Kogos: not a game.

Mario Carballo: Yeah, I think it was also because then like when we were in a party or

something, then I would just be the kid in the corner playing his Gameboy or his,his little toy,

And, then I wouldn’t be disturbing the, the adults.

JP Riebling: What about you? like, what, what’s your background?

Making games.

Gregory Kogos: If we are talking about my childhood, I was born and raised in Ukraine and we absolutely

didn’t have Nintendos or something like that. We had the only knockoffs and we even had this Soviet arcade knockoffs, and actually the Pong version on Soviet arcades is much better than the

original, I think. So if we talk about Tetris, yeah, I also, the only way how I played it is this cheap 99 -in- one games. They had Tetris. They had some race cars, but they looked like Tetris, too. So if we’re talking about my gaming habits my first proper console was Nintendo Switch.

I started very late. Before that, it was only PC gaming for me. And we also had the computer

clubs, where you can go and games. Not many people

had actual PC at home, so we had a play date after school.

Christa Mrgan: We all see what you did there.

JP Riebling: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Mario Carballo: For me it was something similar. Because, yeah, we didn’t have consoles at home. I was allowed to play on the computer for a while, and then on the recesses on school, I was also like, if you answer the question correctly uh, you get a credit. And if you got 10 credits, then you can spend them on the library to play In the computer. So I played a lot of flash games and it happened to me a lot that sometimes, like later on I would play a classic game like Zelda or Metroid and, I would be like, oh, this is like the flash game that I used to play.

And that was my original like reference of some genres, like the flash game

JP Riebling: bootleg.

Gregory Kogos: And could you imagine when you were five years old,

when you were playing Tetris that you’ll make your own Tetris at some point?

JP Riebling: Growing up I always wanted to make

games. And I very clearly remember thinking that watching cartoons and stuff, I had an idea of how animation was made. So I thought that video games were made just like that. They would like draw every possibility, you know, kind of like the way a Mr.

Game and Watch works. So the, the makers of the game would

draw every single possibility, and then you would have to choose one, so it, seemed to me like an overwhelming amount of work. and throughout my life I always played games, but I had no idea

about development. It wasn’t until after I became like a full grown adult that I got

into games and, and even then, it was kind of hobby-like. So I didn’t

really think I would make a, game similar to Tetris that felt fun and that didn’t feel like

I was just copying Tetris.

So yeah. Uh, Making Pullfrog was a fantastic experience. I’m very glad we could do like a twist on the genre.

That felt good.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah, and I’ve seen the first version of Pullfrog was made in PICO-8

Christa Mrgan: PICO-8 is an emulator and game engine created by Lexaloffle Games that mimics the limited sound and graphics capabilities of eighties game consoles, without being tied to any specific hardware-- it a "fantasy console."

Gregory Kogos: and I find a lot of similarities between  PICO-8, a fantasy console and Playdate, the real console, because it has lots of limitations.

It also uses Lua. I’m not sure if you actually made it in Lua, but it is a possibility for  PICO-8. So can you expand a little bit? How is it like to develop it for PICO-8 and then porting it to Playdate?

Mario Carballo: I was actually thinking about that today, because I was remembering one podcast that I used to listen, which

is in Spanish and they talked a lot about how it was developing for, consoles and how that is kind

of lost. Because before you had some technical limitations that made the game in a certain way. And I never understood that really, because like I didn’t have that experience where I didn’t have the technical knowledge to understand how a game could different, based on like, A CPU or resources that you had in the console. And like when we started doing PICO-8 games, I started to understand it. Like, oh, we have this color palette and that’s why the PICO-8 games all look cohesive. And it’s like they all belong to this fantasy console. And the same thing is happening on the Playdate, where obviously you have the screen, so everything is one-bit.

but also you have like the tools like the SDK, and then you have a bunch of games that used, the tools that are provided by the Playdate, make their game. So you have a nice effects, you know, like the dithering patterns and all the tools that are provided by the SDK. And it’s really fun. I didn’t expect to ever make a game in that way.

And even like listening to that podcast, I remember they were complaining about how that was not possible anymore. So I’m really happy that we have experienced that. The games that we’re doing, they are driven and the design is really based on the platform. And that gives them a really unique feeling And you can, the difference in Pullfrog, because it’s like , the limitations of the PICO-8 are really different from the limitations from the Playdate. And you can see that conversion I have really liked working that way.

Gregory Kogos: I was playing your PICO-8 version and I have to say the

Playdate version is much, much better. Like you can tell that you invested a lot in that.

JP Riebling: yeah, we put a lot of special care into the feel and the controls in the play date version because the PICO-8, it was our first game we made together just the two of us. I mean, the context of Amano, maybe. we were also kind of like learning the ropes on the PICO-8 system, which for that system, the limitations are that you don’t have a lot of texture space, but you have a lot you can do like with computing. And with the Playdate, it’s a little bit backwards. You you have limitations in terms of performance and you have to be careful with that, but you have all the textures and sound and memory. you can use, can make it as big as you want. You might try it and not do that 'cause like the limited storage on the, on device, but we could go all out in making it feel good and adding cut scenes and adding extra like graphical details and that was important for us.

Mario Carballo: I have a question kind, of relative to this. So I’m wondering, like you are one of the first

ones to make a second game on the Playdate. And I want, to know how different is that, like from working in a Season One game where you, you don’t share a lot of stuff and there’s not a lot of people that know even what the Playdate is or how games are in the Playdate to working on a second game where you already have

the Catalog and have this, not like massive, but you now, we now have like 100 games

in the Catalog or, or something. So how did that change your process or how was it different working on the second game?

Gregory Kogos: I didn’t change my actual process that much, because that’s the only way how I know how to make games. But I definitely was trying to fix some uh, mistakes or problems that I encountered on

Omaze, for example, I’m making crank centric games. That’s what fires me

up about Playdate, the

crank. Uh, I love alternative controls and for me, Playdate is like alternative control console

of the crank.

So, with the crank I realized that it is much better to control, your character if absolute position of the crank, corresponds to the player’s position.

I couldn’t have that on Omaze, that’s why sometimes people they don’t know which

directions they will go. They think in terms of left and

right, but not clockwise and counter clockwise. So when you are in a down position, like,

180 degrees, you are not really sure where you will go if you rotate it clockwise, for

example. And it’s kind of cool that people can rewire their brain in the end and

in the end they have this cool skill to think in terms of clockwise, country

clockwise. But for some people I guess it’s, too hard. So I uh, learned a lot from.

Hyper Meteor.

Christa Mrgan: Hyper Meteor is another Season One Playdate game. There’s a link in the show notes.

Gregory Kogos: and one more game, Star Sled by Greg Maletic.

Christa Mrgan: Star Sled is also a Season One Playdate game, created by Panic’s own Head of Playdate and Special Projects, Greg Maletic.

Gregory Kogos: And actually Greg added that absolute position after he encountered the same stuff that I, encountered as as far as I understood. So yeah, That’s one of the main takeaways that I fixed on Oom. But in regards of the process, it’s absolutely the same. I generate everything with the code,

both sound and visuals. I don’t have any sprites, besides some, you know, launch card animations or something like that.

And I have this weird technique where uh, I’m solo developer and I’m not finishing a lot

of games various reasons, but mostly because I’m lazy.

JP Riebling: Happens.

Gregory Kogos: So all of my games that I’ve actually finished had the same pattern. I’m actively developing

them for the first period of development, and I put some very important groundwork for them, like pillars, and then they kind of develop themselves. I just need to show up

and see what the game wants to be.

And it might sound artsy or pretentious, but actually it’s very practical

JP Riebling: because in the end, it’s easier for me to finish the game because it kind develops itself and I’m just showing up for work and it’s done at some point.

I, can relate to that a lot. I feel like a kind of archeology, like you have to lay down the groundwork. I don’t know that it happened so much that way with us, with Pullfrog, but the game

JP Riebling: we’re currently developing,

It’s rules based, Once you start setting up

base and the rules, a lot of things just start like it feels like they’re happening on their

own, even though you’re actively directing them to happen, but it’s like that feeling of discovering the game once you have the base.

I don’t know. It’s, I don’t think it’s

pretentious or weird at all. I think it’s very relatable to what a lot of developers go through while

discovering their game, even though they’re making it. Sounds

funny.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah. but it feels like magic at some point. Like you are the vessel that the game transcends through. It’s kind of cool.

Christa Mrgan: yeah, for sure.

And for both teams, part of discovering what the games wanted to be happened through play testing.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah. For me it’s happening in a different ways. It’s happening during the play test where I see, yeah, that something doesn’t click with people or something does, but sometimes you just sit in front of computer and it’s just the next day and you play one level and it’s like obvious what the next level will be.

Mario Carballo: For us, I think it depends on the game. Like for example, in Pullfrog one of the things that I think is like the cranking to speed up the game which is something that we did right at the end, and that was because we play tested it and it was like, oh, it’s really slow at some point.

Like when you already know how to play, first pieces are really slow and it can get boring at the beginning. we tried a couple of things, like in the settings you can change the initial level or

whatever, but we have thing that the crank that we always wanted to use. We just didn’t knew how. And I think it was JP who had the idea that it was like what if we speed up the pieces falling with the crank and it was completely because of people playing it and us playing it as well, it was too slow at the beginning, but we can’t speed it up because the game is already hard. So if we make it faster at the beginning uh, for people who haven’t played for hours and hours, it’s gonna be too hard.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah, speeding up with the crank on your game, it actually feels really nice because at some point when you are already at that level of skill that game is too slow for you,

you feel like, yeah, I’m good. I, I’m already speeding up the game. It feels very satisfying, I have to say.

JP Riebling: Oh, nice.

Mario Carballo: in the Game that we’re making now, one thing that happens to us, is that sometimes I would make a system and put it out there, and then I will wake up the next day and see what JP did with it, which is really nice. Sometimes it’s like, I had no idea that you could do this with the thing that I just did, but JP Found a way of doing what he wanted with this new rule set that he has in our tool belt.

and that has been really nice with this latest game and also happened with another game that we were doing where already have like a level editor. So sometimes I would just get like, a GitHub notification of the other person pushed something and the, the title was like, on new level or something. And then it was like, I was excited just to see what new thing is there in the game to the next day. So that’s, that’s a really nice experience.

Gregory Kogos: So I’m curious, the inception of the Pullfrog, specifically did it come to you, "we’re gonna make

a Tetris game with the thing running around," or "we gonna make a game about the frog the Tetris."

JP Riebling: So I think if I remember correctly, the origin ofPullfrog we are part of a PICO-8 development club where there was a monthly theme and we would work on the game for a month. And so for that month, the theme was frogs and cactus, I believe. we were like, okay, we’re gonna make a game with the frog. And this is like my first attempt at programming. I’d been watching some lazy dev tutorials to learn PICO-8. So I started doing the basis for the platforming. I was just like learning the ropes, right? I wanted to do like a very basic platformer and I started coding first part. And then Mario was like helping me out and teaching me.

In the end he took hold of the whole programming part, and I focused on the art. The idea was to have some falling cactus blocks. You were controlling a little frog, and the cacti would squish you. I played this game called Super Puzzle Platformer at one point where it’s kind of the same thing. You’re like controlling a character and blocks are falling. It’s similar. The concept is a little bit based on that. I always loved that game and I wanted to do something that was similar in spirit.

JP Riebling: But yeah, the themeing comes from the group thing. And, idea of having a falling blocks game came from, I think since everything in Pico eight is kind of like blocky. It was just kind of a no brainer. It kind of guided itself as we were talking before. It kind of guided itself into, into being that.

Mario Carballo: Also, what happened was that we wanted to do a platformer. I think that was the main idea. we had done other games before, but this was like uh, our first attempt at doing like

movement and that, felt good. So we were researching a lot about like, platforming and, you know, like reading the Celeste code

Christa Mrgan: Celeste is a platformer that’s now available on a variety of consoles, but which was originally created for PICO-8 as part of a game jam by developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry.

Mario Carballo: And doing a bunch of iteration on the movement. And the falling block pieces idea was also, if I remember, there were the eyes, the idea of the eyes. The cacti were falling down and you had to collect the eyes with the tongue at them hurting you. it was kind of a complicated idea. And then when we were working on PICO-8 it has like an integrated map editor, and that made really easy to lay out the blocks. And I think just like normally we would go to that direction that the blocks were in the Tetris shapes What’s the name of the, of the

JP Riebling: Tetrominoes, yeah.

Christa Mrgan: I love that those shapes have a special name and that we all know that special name. Okay.

Mario Carballo: And it was just like, you know, uh, it’s fun to do them. So we were doing it and they were falling, and that’s one day it was like, what if you pulled the, the blocks and arranged them in the, scenario? And we didn’t even knew if it that was a good idea. We just were, ah, let’s try it and see

how it goes. And then, yeah, everything exploded after that in that direction.

Gregory Kogos: That’s great because I have to say that I’m a jealous of your character because it fits so well into the gameplay and uh, my process is always I start with the gameplay and then I come up with the character. That’s why all my characters are kind of a geometric shapes.

JP Riebling: Mm-hmm

Gregory Kogos: And you guys, you just came up with the perfect character because I was thinking first it was the game with the guy running around the Tetris and, he has a slingshot something like that. But then you came up with this perfect character because the frog, first of all, It jumps and then it eats the flies with pulling its tongue. And it’s kind of perfect for Playdate. And while we are talking about the characters, can I go into the little spoilers for your game?

Mario Carballo: sure. I mean,

JP Riebling: Uh, Yeah.

Gregory Kogos: Okay. So basically your game it’s not only Pullfrog, but you have many different characters. Not only frog. and you have this chameleon, you have this weird triangular guy. But

then, and I’m not gonna be spoiling it more, but only one more character. You have a bird.

JP Riebling: Yes.

Gregory Kogos: And then your Pullfrog becomes Pushbird and it transforms the gameplay completely.

How did you

come up with that? And I didn’t unlock any other characters, so don’t spoil it for me.

JP Riebling: Sure. So when we made Pullfrog, everybody complained, " why isn’t it push frog? Why aren’t you pushing the pieces? I don’t like to pull the pieces. It feels weird." not everybody, but a lot of people. We, got complaints and we were very, very obstinate, very decided that we were not gonna change that? We like Pullfrog, we like how the mechanic works. It’s a little bit weird reaching the edges, like pulling the pieces into a corner. It makes it a little bit hard. And that’s, I think, where were coming from. we liked that gameplay. So one of our first ideas was one of the power ups in the game was gonna turn you into Push Frog and you were gonna be able to push pieces around for a while or maybe switch around the gameplay. But that kind of felt weird changing it on the fly, like mid- game. So once we started adding characters, and first, since the original PICO-8 version um, have the first three characters you mentioned: the chameleon, the pyramid guy, and the Pullfrog. Those guys control kind of exactly the same as the PICO-8 version. We had slight changes in the variables. So that one is a little bit more floaty in the jumps, and then other one has a faster tongue, so it makes the gameplay a little bit different, but not radically.

So once we started adding more characters or the idea of having more characters, we thought, well, maybe we could turn, push frog into push bird. So yeah, the character of

burb is actually our response to, to push frog squad

Mario Carballo: Friction.

JP Riebling: there.

Mario Carballo: Yeah. And it was, it was that, and also, like Pullfrog because we think it feels better to pull the pieces. It’s hard to explain, but I do believe that, that the feeling of pulling for some reason feels better that the, feeling of pushing, at least in, in the context of Pullfrog.But at the end of the day we also wanted to know like what would happen, right? It’s a question that we wanted to answer and it wasn’t that hard to implement once we had everything out. So I remember the moment, like that I told JP, “this means we can have Push Frog!” And, then, which it was a matter of looking like what

character would be the best one to do it. And that’s why we did it there. And we have said this in other places, and I think it’s always like people, once they know it, they appreciate it a little bit more, but we do a lot of things in the game to make sure that more pieces fall the side. So even though that it’s harder to get the pieces to the complete limits of the, board, the logic is weighted So that more pieces spawn in the, in the sites. But even like all the things that we have done, and still the feeling is that it’s, unfair because it’s harder to get the pieces on the sides.

I don’t know if there’s a better solution to the ways that we have done it, but it has always been a way of designers, maybe like our job is finding a way to, to not have that question in the game.

I don’t know the players prefer, but yeah, it was mainly because we wanted to answer that question, like, what would happen if instead of pulling is pushing, for our sake and for other people’s sake as well.

Gregory Kogos: This design is very in the spirit with the original Tetris, because in original Tetris, when you play it on the high skill level, you also waiting for this l block to fall some point.

JP Riebling: Mm-hmm

Gregory Kogos: and that’s something you cannot influence. You just wait for that and build on the side. I’m

just waiting for the side blocks to fall and I’m building in between. So it, uh, natural to the tetris game, I think.

JP Riebling: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. It has a very close similarity to that for sure. like, while we’re in the, in theme of like controls and difficulty and balancing, I wanted to ask you, Gregory, about ’ cause I feel like I played Omaze and I played Oom and I find Oom a difficult game, a very rewarding game, but difficult in its controls, which I think it’s at the core of the gameplay. I think it’s, it’s there and it’s quite balanced, but did you have any issues play testing or

like getting feedback like may maybe it’s too hard or this is difficult, or, or or what has been your, your experience with Like player feedback from, the controls in Oom?

Gregory Kogos: It’s very controversial because my girlfriend and her sister, they cannot play Oom at all. They don’t go past the first room. I was so in love with this idea of movement and first time when I show it to them, I was so scared. because doesn’t click for some people, I dunno. Uh, but then I showed it to other players it was flawless. So, I don’t know, just pick your audience, I guess. I always think about my games: what would I like to play? and that’s what I would do. and I hope if I’ll do it well enough, other people will find the game and play it and enjoy it but in terms of difficulty curve, I think it’s very balanced because I was bothering many people to play-test the game,

but in

terms of basic controls,

they’re very unconventional. And they might to get some

time to use

to.

JP Riebling: Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I can relate to that.

Mario Carballo: But I think it’s worth it. Like, I dunno, I love both games. and they’re definitely one of my favorites on the Playdate. The movement of Oom,Is like the moment when you understand it, it’s just like oh, this is so elegant. Like the, first 10 seconds of the gameplay, I just think it’s, some people find it harder or, or easier, but everybody appreciates like the elegance of the game and the design. I really enjoyed like, playing even the, the crank docking and un-docking. I was listening to the other of the podcast and you talked a little bit about it and it was like, yeah, I really like that, this game uses the, the crank, docking and un-docking as one of the inputs of the game and one of the main inputs of the game. So I, I wanted to ask that like,are you thinking of those things since the beginning? For example, the map and how you were gonna draw it in this, like the UI in general of the game, or was that something that came up at the end of the development?

Gregory Kogos: The map was the breakthrough actually because before that was without map and that’s why it didn’t have a scope. But once I realized that it’ll be a map nine by 9, 89 level and 81 rooms. and then everything fell into place, I knew that there will be like three pickups, and that’s when the magic started to happen. That one we were talking about. This was the final piece, the final pillar

when the game manifested itself. And it said after that I didn’t work.

JP Riebling: How long did you work on oom?

Gregory Kogos: I am not sure. From the very first idea, “oh, that’s what I wanna do!” Maybe year or

something, but I had lots of break in between. So I don’t know, net of time, probably

eight months, nine months?

Like that.

JP Riebling: Well, That’s impressive. It feels like such an, as Mario said, an elegant game. the, way you design the backtracking and the, navigation through the maps and stuff, I don’t think my brain can even like work on making a game like that. So yeah, it’s a great job.

Gregory Kogos: As I said, it just happened. Lots of the, best stuff with this game just happened in the shower to be. honest. It is just shower thoughts. the inception of the Oom, is very

intertwined. It first started with this idea of the rhythm game where you a decisive action. Not on the beat, but before the beat happens, And I made a alt control rhythm game with LED strip it is called Skeeper and it was, I think it’s really good game. It just had unfortunate uh, destiny because I made it right before the pandemic, so it didn’t, go to all the, festivals and

events, but the groundwork in terms of design philosophy is a Skeeper. and then I was playing Doom Eternal I noticed that I am, moving rhythmically. It’s very fast paced game. And every weapon in Doom Eternal has kind of a rhythm to it connected to its reloading time. I noticed that I’m just reloading on the beat, on the rhythm, and just controlling my direction where I

look and where I shoot, basically. I started to play, Doom Eternal like a rhythm game. So I thought, oh, can make this only in 2D and you do everything automatically and all you do is you just control

your direction and that’s it. And it would

be the same game basically.

JP Riebling: Oh, I was gonna ask about the origin of the name actually. Now you just answered that. That’s brilliant. Like that, that’s the thing with rhythm games. Rhythm games Require precision. Right. there’s a lot of instances where people play games that aren’t quite optimal for rhythm games, which makes 'em especially difficult to enjoy if you don’t have the adequate conditions, for example, like input lag on a monitor or on a tV screen or whatever. So a lot of people might get deterred from playing them because

of those circumstances. And in the case of making a rhythm, a rhythm ish game for Playdate, it’s brilliant because the hardware is right there, there’s no variance. Like everybody’s gonna have the same experience. So yeah, it’s kind of genius.

Gregory Kogos: Haha, Thanks.

Mario Carballo: another thing that I wanted to ask is that I know that Omaze and Oom are related somehow in thematically or, like in the universe or something. Was that the idea since the beginning? Or also was that something that at the end was like, why not do this?

Gregory Kogos: I really wanted to make a successor to Omaze because even most of The people don’t notice it, but there is the very clear if not story then message in Omaze. because in the end

of Omaze-- spoilers-- in the end of Omaze, you are becoming the eye that you were fighting all along, all the game, you were fighting this evil eye and in the end you’re become one.

And wanted to make a game with the happy ending this time. and in my head, the universe, this 81 Rooms is the one that the main character of Omaze built.

And in the end you are actually fighting the corrupted version Omaze Guy.

And you can tell it by some similarities, but you have to be very attentive to how bosses look in Omaze and how the Final Boss and its phases look in

Oom, it’s pretty obvious they’re connected.

JP Riebling: Well, that’s so well thought

out.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah, it is very obscure, but I did it mostly for me, so I know

what I’m doing. actually.

Mario Carballo: I really enjoy that part as well. one of the things that I really like about making Playdate games is the community. And I was wondering like, what was the response to your game and like, if you have received any, like, encouraging messages. Also, I guess you have like fans from Omaze and then

it’s like launching Oom, it’s like a continuity of

that, I guess?

Gregory Kogos: Yeah, I’m sneaking in this discord group Playdate Squad. I’m usually very quiet there because I also want to hear honest feedback. And yeah, I feel like if I will show up there people will

be, more kind than they should be. And yeah, in that, Discord group, people really liked it.

I was uh, paranoid that I will let some people down because it feels like so many people liked

Omaze and they had some kind of level of expectations for the new game, and it’s scary.

But in the end, I think it’s, Fans of Omaze really liked Oom, yeah, that’s all I heard. And some people on Twitter reached out. they said like, yeah, it’s a good game. But we don’t have this uh, response with Playdate so much like with conventional games. Not many people,

you know, streaming Playdate games or reviewing Playdate games. That’s why I, look at this small group of people that played the game

and that’s how I made up my mind that, yeah, people liked the game, but what’s the reality is I’m, I’m not sure.

JP Riebling: yeah, No, it’s, it’s exciting to be a part of a, like a small and growing community you might not get a bunch of streamers playing it or like, making big waves, I guess. But I like the, the close-knit community that is slowly building up and, everybody’s making amazing stuff.

Like everybody in the Playdate Squad Discord server is making things that I wanna play now I love it.

Gregory Kogos: but I think with your game you, have much more direct feedback because you have scores,

leaderboards. So you can actually see how are people doing.

Mario Carballo: It’s crazy to me that people broke the barrier of like three-digit scores and now there are some people doing 300 lines, and I just can’t,

Gregory Kogos: so people are playing your game better than you?

Mario Carballo: Yeah,

definitely. That

JP Riebling: for sure.

Undoubtedly.

Gregory Kogos: Wow.

Christa Mrgan: And given Playdate’s tight-knit community, I wondered how much feedback they got, not just after the game was released, but also during development itself.

Mario Carballo: With Pullfrog we had like a dev log that we posted, but that felt not so much as a conversation or like a feedback, it was just like us sending things and we don’t have any analytics or anything, so we dunno how many people actually read those.

We had two stages of development, one was like before Catalog and before the Playdate was with a lot of people. So now that there’s more people uh, with the and more people doing things for Playdate. We had more like an opportunity to talk to other developers, but at that point we didn’t have a lot of issues that we wanted solve. like there wasn’t a lot to talk about because we werelike finishing stuff and publishing stuff. But with the new game, definitely we’re trying to be more inside of the community of developers as well, inside of uh, just to, yeah, share what we have done and to feedback as well.

JP Riebling: It also comes back a little bit to what we were talking about before in terms of play testing. So Mario and I being like a duo of developers, there’s a lot of stuff that we get to bounce off each other. So for the development of Pullfrog, a lot of it was just us coming up with the ideas and giving each other feedback. And it wasn’t until the very end of development that we started like, reaching out to some people and mostly post-release. We got a lot of feedback and a lot of bugs. It helped us a lot to get some debug, well, some bug reports so that we could fix um, things that

were kind of, if either, but yeah, we are hoping to be more open this time around.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah. Speaking of developer stuff after release I also released my tool that I made

for uh, Oom. It is audio tool. And it ended up being a sequencer but frame based sequencer, because Oom’s Rhythm is not time-based, but frame based. So every eight frames happens,

JP Riebling: Mm-hmm

Gregory Kogos: and everything is generated with the internal synthesizers and sometimes four tracks are playing. And for that I build the. external tool where I basically can hear how the

synthesizers work in four tracks and it ended up being a sequencer. So if you want to try it out, it’s free. It’s on a dev forum, it is called sec, SEQ. And I’m hoping I will work a little bit more on that. And I’m hoping it might be an actual music thingy that people might use for their music compositions.

JP Riebling: Well, that’s amazing. Obviously it seems very intricate, like the the rhythm, and, the music aspect of, like entwined with the gameplay. Was that also like into the game from the very beginning, or did you have any like difficulties or like hurdles developing that?

Gregory Kogos: Yeah, this is something that I out on the Skeeper my alt control game. I figured out How I want the rhythm to workand I, no, this time I didn’t have any, any problems with the actual rhythm.

I just knew that I wanted to make it a frame based, not the time based, because it’s more accurate. But for that, you have to have your game running

consistent, 30 frames per second

JP Riebling: Mm-hmm.

Christa Mrgan: This seemed like a good time to ask JP about the music he created for Pullfrog.

JP Riebling: So I’m not a musician or anything of the sort. I have like some basic musical education from when I was young and I played a little bit of piano and I was maybe in a band. And then now that I’m saying it it sounds like I have a lot of musical experience. .But , I dunno. It feels like

that’s not like where my Thing is I’m more of an art person. So like the music, it all also like comes back to the PICO-8 version. PICO eight has a little sequencer, like a tracker way to

make music and you can do some basics like sine wave, instruments.

So I composed the the theme for Pullfrog and that version. And for this version I wanted to maybe

like an updated version that sounded a little bit better. So I started getting into different tools. I used like GarageBand, like very basic stuff. I tried to make like an enhanced version of the theme for Pullfrog. as I started I made that very straight up in, in Garage Band. For the sound effects and all the other music in the game I bought a little device called the Dirty Wave Mate

Christa Mrgan: Oh, here’s some play date music trivia: Lucas Pope also used the M8 to create the music for Mars After Midnight.

JP Riebling: it’s a tracker style portable music tool and it’s so elegant and beautiful as a piece of industrial design and as a music creation tool is amazing. I never used anything like it. It’s based on the LS dj software, uh, which is like a game boy cartridge that people use to make beautiful and awesome chip tune music. This is like an enhanced version of that and it plays like a game boy. It only has like the, the four d-pad keys and an A B equivalent and a start and select and a screen. And I made everything else using that and I really enjoyed it. I learned how to use it from scratch. It, it’s a different way of thinking 'cause it doesn’t work like a usual like audio tool where you maybe connect like a MIDI input and maybe compose your tracks and arrange them around. This works like on a, timed basis. So, you have to program in your music and, program in your instruments, and it’s very fun to use and I love making the sound effects for Pullfrog, using that and some of the alternate tunes for the game. I’m not being a huge audio person. I don’t know a lot of terms, and I don’t know a lot of like technical stuff, but it worked out and it’s in the game, so I’m very happy how everything came out in the end.

Christa Mrgan: Lucas said it was like composing music using a spreadsheet, but in a good way.

JP Riebling: That’s exactly what it’s like. Yeah.

Gregory Kogos: I have, not a question, but like a comment. Maybe you can expand on that. It’s about how your

death in the Pullfrog works. It is actually very satisfying because after you die, you get

some kind of phrase like uh, cookie, maybe you unlock new character, maybe you had a

good run and you’re, you beat your leaderboard. So lots of good stuff happening when you die in your game, do you have to say something to that?

Mario Carballo: I think one is that the game is hard. And It’s harder for some people. So giving of these things is make it easier, but to make it easier to not feel bad about, about dying, you know? so I think one of the messages was like " make sure not to be dying just to read these messages"

or something like that. yeah, it’s one of the, of the fun parts of the game had since the, since the PICO-8 version. And it was just one of those things that we want to make it , nicer for people you’re gonna be frustrated because you lose you know, like you got killed uh, in some way. that doesn’t feel great all of the time. And this is a way to, make it feel a little bit better. We also we have a sense of humor, uh, the two of us, and like between ourselves, we do a lot of jokes internally, and it was just so funny to think about like these things that were there just for comedic effect. And I think we do that a lot. like something that would be fun for us and we try to put them in places and the messages was a nice place to put it. And a lot of people have, commented on them like, oh, I really enjoyed this message that showed up. Especially I think the favorite of everyone is uh, dessert recipe that is there. but yeah. that’s the main thing, like how to make it easier when you lose to feel Better or not feel so bad about it.

Gregory Kogos: That’s great Touch. When we launched our games, we launched at the same day. It definitely felt for me, like a season week for sure, because our games while very different, mine is very crank centric. Your is like, using only d-pad and your is uh, Score chaser. Mine is quite linear and it has an end. and that’s it. Still, we have lots of similarities. speaking of similarities, in your game, basically you have different charactersto play y the game differently. In my game, it’s like you have pickups that changes The, mechanics of your character, but. even with the general art, we have a thing for the eyes. Did you notice it?

JP Riebling: Yes.

Gregory Kogos: Like in in my game, eye is the main character and the the bad guy. And you collect the ice. the eyes are appearing when you are unlocking the new character. And even on your logo, there is an eye.

what’s up with The eyes

JP Riebling: I

I have a proclivity to add eyes in my aesthetic to most of the things I draw, I think is like the very basic answer. Um. The, the logo of Amano is, because when we were coming up with the idea of the studio or like coming up with names and then like, a, a look for it, at the time we were mid pandemic, very obsessed with making handmade tortillas. and the, the actual logo of the hand is a hand with a, the little white thing is supposed to be a tortilla, but it didn’t really read that well. That’s why there’s a little fire below the hand because it’s like the fire of cooking the tortilla. But we added an a little eye. Then we turned the tortilla into an eye kind of make it, more visually impactful and 'cause I tend to do that with a lot of the things I do in my artwork. But yeah, in the games we make, you’ll tend to see eye-themed situations. Our upcoming game has a little bit of that. Actually, a theme of the game is not even eyeballs, but it just has a lot of that inside.

I don’t have a very philosophical reason as to why that is, but I, I, enjoy it.

I enjoy it. I Things that have become sentient in a way, right? Like when you add eyes to something, it becomes no longer an object. It becomes a person, a character maybe. So I think that’s maybe why I enjoy adding eyes to things.

Gregory Kogos: My games are very geometric and it is the easiest way to add the character. Just to make it an eye. and there is also this about the evil old looking, like everything, looking eyes, something like that. And it worked well with the

I, I, I’m glad we cleared that up.

JP Riebling: I really like in Oom, how the character starts out with two eyes. so he looks a little derpy and cute, and as he starts getting more eyes, it starts becoming more Eldritch-like, and like, maybe not unhuman because it’s never a human, but it loses a little bit of that cuteness and

starts becoming more dangerous or more fierce.

Gregory Kogos: Yeah.

JP Riebling: pretty great.

Mario Carballo: yeah, like one of the great things with launching amongst Oom I remember when Panic uh, pitched us the idea and we were like, yeah, that sounds perfect. Um, just felt like best companion because the games were so different, as you said but once they were launched, I think it appealed to those two parts of the, of the fun ways of the Playdate, right? Like people who wanted one. game and people who wanted the other one. and it just felt like a great party to launch uh, the games at the same time, we were really happy about it.

JP Riebling: And a stronger launch altogether. like when we were approached with the idea, we’re like, yeah, this is way better than just launching our game. separate.

Like just it’s out there. Yeah. That was a great launch.

Christa Mrgan: It was a great launch, and now a year later, both Oom and Pullfrog are on sale for a limited time, so be sure to pick them both up, if you haven’t already-- and enjoy two very different types of action-y, puzzle-y games.

I’m so glad I got to chat with these guys.

JP Riebling: This was super fun. you Christa and thank you Gregory and thank you Mario for your time

Mario Carballo: Thank you. all uh, I had a really great time.

Yeah, thank you guys. It was really interesting chatting with I cleared lots of questions for myself.

Gregory Kogos: I’m gonna go unlock the fifth character, maybe sixth?

Christa Mrgan: That’s the spirit! Thanks so much for listening, and stay tuned for an all-new season of the Playdate Podcast, will launch alongside Playdate Season Two. See you next time!

Mario Carballo: Bye-bye. Bye bye.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced and edited by me, Christa Mrgan. Cabel Sasser and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Playdate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design.

and thanks as always to everyone at Panic.

Christa Mrgan: Learn more about the creators of Oom and Pullfrog via the links in the show notes. And of course, find out everything you need to know about Playdate, including how to buy one for your very own, at play.date.

Mario Carballo: When you were talking in this episode about describing it, I actually was gonna say, “it’s Metroidvania!”

Gregory Kogos: Okay. I’m glad I tricked you thinking that it is Metroidvania, because it is absolutely not.