Fulcrum Defender

Christa Mrgan: At the center of a storm of lethal enemies, your job is to spin and fire your turret gun to hold them off for as long as possible. The enemies keep leveling up in both strength and numbers, but fortunately, you keep leveling up too.

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan.

Today I’m talking with game designer and developer Jay Ma, creator of Fulcrum Defender, part of Play Date, season two. Jay is a co-founder of Subset Games, creators of FTL: Faster Than Light and Into the Breach. I was so excited to hear that she was working on a game for Season Two, and I couldn’t wait to hear all about it.

And just so you know, there are no major spoilers in this episode. We talk about the mechanics of the game and the weapons upgrades you can get, but that’s about it. So let’s say hi to Jay and let her tell us about her game.

Jay Ma: Hi, I am, Jay Ma. I am the primary developer of Fulcrum Defender. I haven’t actually talked about this game publicly that much, so I don’t have a good speech ready. Essentially it’s an arcade experience that I’m trying to focus on, just how fun it is to use the crank to do something very unique to this console. So the game is wave after wave of simple shape enemies and you are stationary in the center, and so you’re acting essentially as a turret to aim and prevent them from reaching the center of the screen.

And it has a bit of a rogue-lite influence or Survivor’s game influence, that as you survive and defeat them, you get to level up and pick up various upgrades and new weapons, which gradually complicates what you’re doing as the enemies also get weirder and you need to juggle more things to be able to hold them all back.

But at its core, it’s just a high score chasing, survive as long as possible, little arcade game.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, it’s an action game that gradually becomes more and more frantic as you try to survive compounding threats. Fulcrum Defender is Jay’s first game for Playdate, and I wondered what made her want to make a game for Playdate, and where the idea came from!

Jay Ma: I immediately was drawn to it because I love any sort of device that has unique input and the opportunities it allows for unique game design. But the Playdate especially, which just seemed like such a adorable designed, compact little device that it immediately drew me in. I only started actually messing with it and working on it last year, 2024.

When I think about games and coming up with ideas, I start from the bottom up rather than top down. So I might enter a project thinking, what is something unique that can be done with this device? And then I might think backwards to be like, what feels good when you’re using it

I was a while ago trying to deconstruct what I felt made the survivors genre of games really interesting, that is like Vampire Survivors, a pretty simple game where you can only move around your character on the screen, and meanwhile, you gradually get stronger and stronger until you’re fighting off thousands of enemies with nonsense, screen- filling numbers. And so for me what was so interesting and compelling about that game was how the input that you’re using is so minimal, but still you can get this crazy complexity, whether it’s just in the perceived complexity of just how crazy it is or the actual complexity of making builds and everything like that.

And so this commitment to a really simple input method that, when you start the game, is just really smooth and almost relaxing and calm, for me at least, and gradually can become just nonsense. I was trying to figure out what’s another framework for creating that loop and that feeling that isn’t moving a character around on the screen dodging things?

So that got me to the point where I was like, all right, what if you can’t move at all and you’re just simply aiming? And you can entirely focus on timing your shots and slow moving enemies, almost like a missile command type of experience where you are really focused on one thing and one thing only, and then just see what kind of nonsense I could keep adding to it. So that’s where the genesis of this game came from.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. So the basic gameplay starts out simple, but quickly becomes overwhelming, and your enemies are always changing, but fortunately so are your upgrades.

Jay Ma: So there’s two types of upgrades generally. One is to improve the basic gun that you have to make it shoot more or have various effects. And then the other is to add two additional weapons that you can get that function very differently from your main gun and have a pretty long cool down. When I was designing the weapons, I basically was trying to come up with things that were unique and interesting that one could do with the crank. So like starting from the foundation of what is a motion with your hand or what is a way to interact with the screen that is satisfying and then coming up with a weapon to fit that.

My goal was to essentially have the core game of the shooting just be this sort of plate spinning manage your ammo, choose your targets effectively, type of gameplay while what secondary weapons you get function more as little fun play things with the ability to use the crank and also to save you in particularly dire situations or help you during like a specific configuration or type of enemies to make it basically feel like each time you play your ability to respond to threats and the things that you’re good at defeating are different. That was the priority, ’ cause otherwise there’s no real necessity to add upgrades in my mind, if it all ends up being relatively similar. Granted, I gave myself some pretty heavy restrictions on quantity of items that one could find in the game. There’s a little achievement screen with simple checks and discovering each of the upgrades of the weapons. And I basically let that dictate how many things I could add to the game. Once I ran outta space on that screen, I’m like, perfect game done.

I feel like there’s a lot more that one could do with adding fun little silly weapons to this, but I was really trying to keep this like a bite-sized game, both as a player and as a developer.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Jay wanted to keep the game manageable for players, but also for herself because this was really her way of getting back into game development after struggling with chronic illness.

Jay Ma: The story of Fulcrum Defender is directly linked to my experience with long Covid. 2023, in the fall, I got covid again, and this time the long covid was so bad, it’s basically disabling me. Even now, I can’t really walk 10 minutes without needing to sit down and catch my breath. I can’t climb stairs without the same.

If I am in a loud environment where I talk with people a lot, my brain shuts down after about an hour and I can’t think or focus. And so I couldn’t work for a long time, at all. And at some point, I guess it was relatively early 2024, I was thinking this might not go away. So I need to find some way to find a new balance where I can get enjoyment out of life and I can achieve some minor goals, even if I have to change what those goals are.

Before Fulcrum, I was working on a different little Playdate prototype that I was really trying to see if I could still make games, because every time I would work on or to attempt to think about the main project that we were working on, my brain would just lock up.

Like suddenly it was frozen and then I get a headache in five minutes and I’d have to go lie down. So I was trying to figure out how could I approach thinking about game design such that it doesn’t trigger this complete shutdown. And so working on the Playdate ended up being perfect for me because it was super small. My scope was super small, there was so few assets I need to make. I could do everything, you know, via code and it took a day to get a prototype like in my hands, and that process just felt so relieving rather than these things that might take weeks or a month to like even see a feature working.

So just being able to be like in an afternoon I add a feature-- that felt actually doable to me, 'cause normal game development is just a web of interconnected issues. So if you touch one thing, it’s gonna touch 20 others. And with a project this small, I could just break everything down into a single task list and it felt achievable.

And so it was actually fun to work on, and I was able to focus and not get overwhelmed or shut down. So that’s why it I call it a form of self therapy because I was trying to get myself used to being in front of a computer again and sitting up and, and thinking.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Something that I hear from a lot of developers is that the ability to get something working and then up and running on an actual Playdate is just so much faster than developing a typical game for PC or consoles, that it’s really satisfying.

So, I’m so glad it worked for Jay to be able to create an action game like this with that kind of quick feedback loop, and that it’s helped her get back into game development. This kind of quick turnaround is sort of the opposite of the way that Subset Games typically operates, where development is more complex, and they just spend a lot more time exploring different avenues.

Jay Ma: Like just simply the question of, " what is this game that we should be making? What is our goal in this?" Is so hard to figure out sometimes, ’ cause like as you work on it, you won’t really know what works or doesn’t until you actually make something and that might take months. And we’re constantly ending up throwing out three, four months worth of work on our projects.

So I started Subset Games with Matthew Davis a long time ago at this point, like 13 years, 14 years, something like that. Our first game was called FTL: Faster Than Light, and it blew up well beyond any of our expectations, and that allowed us to essentially just make games at our own pace and the type of games that we want and not worry about a publisher and not worry about deadlines.

So that’s great for our mental health, but not so great for deadlines. So we work pretty slow and iterate on games very slowly. And so it took us a while to get our second game, Into the Breach, out. And our studio hasn’t really grown. We’ve got a third employee now and part-timers who help consistently, but we try to stay small and we try to just focus on what’s fun about making games. 'Cause I feel like once you lose that spark of why you enjoy it, not only is the work harder, but the games suffer. So we try not to put ourselves in situations where we end up hating what we’re doing. At least that’s the goal.

Christa Mrgan: That seems like a good goal! And it does sound like she’s been able to have fun while making this game and keeping the whole process manageable while dealing with long COVID. But with an action game like Fulcrum Defender that escalates so quickly, I wondered how she balanced the gameplay in order to keep it challenging, but not too challenging, and the answer turned out to be: creating different levels of difficulty.

Jay Ma: I did basically zero play testing other than myself. My partner helped a lot and she played here and there, and I got some good insight, but in general, with any of our games I end up designing for me, which means that it just gets harder and I’m trying to make a game that I feel like is balanced and then take those lessons and then scale it back to something that keeps those same principles, and that same sort of arc of challenge, but for an easier, more accessible experience. And there’s obviously downsides to that approach as I’m really good at designing for myself, but it’s very hard designing for someone else’s experience. 'cause you don’t get to iterate and test small things as much especially when it comes down to skill.

'cause the more you use a person, the more they are getting better and you won’t get that early opinion anymore. So I generally just work for me first and pray and then put in front of people and see if it’s okay when it comes to the easier stuff.

At 10 minutes, I basically say you win, but you can keep going after that and it’ll just scale infinitely and I can survive to almost 20 minutes on the hardest difficulty. But at that point, there’s so many enemies that the slowdown is pretty intense and it feels pretty unsurvivable, but it’s pretty entertaining to watch everything just the whole system gets overwhelmed with how ridiculous it ends up being at that point. But I don’t really expect that to be like the primary play state once you get to that silliness, because it gets pretty overwhelming after 10 or 15 minutes.

There’s a cap on the enemy, so it shouldn’t like crash or something. But it does start to chug if you get far enough.

Christa Mrgan: And, so what are the differences between the difficulty modes?

Jay Ma: Essentially it’s just the speed and density of enemies that come at you, that’s like pretty easy to balance with. But then there’s a bunch of other subtle things like the ability to level up quickly is reliant on keeping up a multiplier, which means consistently defeating enemies and not getting hurt.

And so that multiplier decays at a rate faster in harder mode. So you gotta keep up that combo. But also on the easiest mode, I remove about half of the enemy’s complexity, so you just don’t get overwhelmed with like variety as much. 'cause I want the game to be a really short experience, which is why 10 minutes I call it over.

You see pretty much all the content in 10 minutes. And so if you’re just starting and getting used to the controls, I wouldn’t want you to be overwhelmed with these little funny shapes that end up acting weird.

Christa Mrgan: So yes, maybe it starts out simple, but the action quickly ratchets up. Fortunately, Jay found the constraints of Playdate and its one bit screen to be freeing-- another thing that helped ease the way back into game development.

Jay Ma: Yeah. Even just the screen size and the one bit nature of the art just removes so many things that, that you’d have to think about and you could just focus on the gameplay or the fun.

So I’m not a particularly great programmer. I don’t program for our main games. I generally do all the art and focus on the design. But with this one in particular, I just had no desire to try and create some sort of unique art style and a lot of art assets or anything my goal was really to do everything as or at least as much as possible in the code.

So it’s just using a lot of primitives of circles and squares and trying to see what I can do with that. Mostly because I was too lazy to open an image editor. I just wanted to see what I could do with this. So some of the challenges for me are like. Especially with such a small screen in one bit, is how maintaining readability of the key info while creating a coherence and a nice atmosphere with like very minimalistic amounts of, tools and everything.

And so like the balance of how do you keep something visible but not obtrusive. Was a fun puzzle for me to work out. Like for example, rather than having an experienced bar crawl across the screen, I grow this circle out of the middle. So you, at any point you can just have a general vibe of how close you are to leveling, but like it also obstructs everything into a small degree.

So those sort of challenges were interesting with this.

It’s, I’ve never worked in one bit especially for a actual full prototype and. I don’t know. It’s freeing. I spend so much of my time thinking about pallets and readability that removing all of those factors from decision making was very relaxing to a degree. Of course, it hass own issues and problems like, using dithering and various other tricks you can get your eye to focus on something more than another, but it’s a lot harder than like just simply having g radiation or alpha or color or anything. But in the end it was a fun puzzle for me.

Christa Mrgan: And of course the music and the sound design add a lot to the overall feel of the game.

Jay Ma: Pardon my butchering of his name, but Aaron Cheroff was someone that I knew through indie games channels. He worked on, two games, both of which I just love the music for Sunshine Heavy Industries and Cobalt Core. And he has such a specific tone and vibe to his music that I just thought it would match really well with this sort of experience that I was going for.

So I just cold reached out and to see if he wanted to do it, and he was totally down. So I really appreciated that. But um, I really just wanted something that is almost calm and relaxing and meditative but can convey a little bit and not really clash when there is intensity on the screen.

So something that fits both with the slow portions of the game as well as the more high intensity ones. And on top of that I knew from pretty early on that I wanted to play with different, like a drum kit effects for all the different enemies being popped because I just love subtle uses of that sort of thing.

Like Rez is one of my favorite games. And being able to create rhythms and, add to the music by how you’re playing in a way that isn’t obstructive or reducing your enjoyment of the music. That’s something that I always looked up to, aspired to. I’m not really super focused on sound when it comes to game development, and so it’s not something that I particularly excel at, but it’s something that I aspire to perhaps.

More than anything, I think I just wanted the sound effects to create this atmosphere, this playful, reactive atmosphere. Like it’s a call and response from your actions. The way, oh, if you remember the old DS game, Electro Plankton, just Turning a game into a little bit of a soundscape toy was a goal of mine.

Granted, it’s pretty minimal. I didn’t really focus too much on that with this game, but it’s there, and it adds an extra little vibe difference. While the waves of enemies change over time, you get a different little soundscape that corresponds with the enemies that you’re facing.

And so that aids this feeling of progressing over time and getting to a new area and that, that type of thing in a very minimal and efficient way.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, I think you really need that extra element of different sound effects from the different enemies, even if it is subtle. It helps differentiate them, and like she said, creates this reactive, rhythmic aspect to the game.

Jay Ma: I think for me the most important thing with action games is just the feel, the vibe, the kinesthetic enjoyment of moving and using and that sort of flow state that you can get into when you just turn your brain off and let your eyes connect directly to, your hands essentially. That I feel like is the highest goal with action games. Granted, to get to that point, you need a fun challenge that makes you feel like you can get better each time you play, or, you know that you have certain goals that you can work towards. But beyond all that I think just having the moment to moment just feel good is maybe the most important thing.

Because then that’s the reason why you might go back to a game that you loved as a kid or something. Like for me, the arcade slash video game Raiden II is a shmup,

Christa Mrgan: You know, a shoot 'em up type game!

Jay Ma: And it has this one weapon, this purple blazer beam that if you keep pressing the button at a rhythm, it gets stronger and connects between all the enemies and that one weapon alone just the feeling of it just made me play that game over and over again, and I will happily play it again. So I feel like that can carry action games.

The one subtle design element that I thought about a lot was essentially how punishing should the game be? And you can take a number of hits in this game and you have health, but gradually, if you survive long enough, it just automatically recovers. So really the threat is simply you need to not take too much damage in a short period of time or take a bunch of hits, but then you recover and you stabilize and you’re straight back to a sort of balance state where you’re feeling comfortable. And so I guess I’m tired of a lot of games that just slowly chip away at your health so that in the first one minute of a game, you might take one hit and that’s gonna have ramifications, far down the line, whether it’s most rogue lights and deck builders and all that sort of games these days. And so I just wanted to play with this sort of less punishing feeling, just letting you basically recover pretty simply and easily.

Christa Mrgan: mm, I still find it to be pretty punishing. I’m not gonna tell you what my high score is. I’ve only played on normal mode so far, but maybe I should try easy! Or maybe I should just play another round! Right now. But regardless of my own abilities, Fulcrum Defender is a really solid action game and a great addition to Playdate Season Two.

Jay Ma: To me it was pretty interesting that this game was eventually invited into the the Season Two bundle. I got to a point where I was happy with in a couple months, like in two, three months I was basically done. I showed it to some people who were visiting Kyoto for Bit Summit indie game event and they ended up contacting you guys and then you reached out to contact me about trying the game and seeing if it was a good fit. And so all of it was very painless on my front. And so one thing that was like a bit of a shock back to reality is you guys connected us with the other developers of the bundles games. And when I joined that Slack group and saw how much everyone was working hard, it was just like, “oh yeah, I forgot this is a real thing, that it’s not just some whim that I was doing for fun!”

I actually have to finish this and make marketing materials and do everything. And it’s been a while since I had like an actual deadline or serious things. And so, it’s been interesting trying to work around my long covid with that in mind. Like I find myself having to do things before, like weeks before deadlines because I just can’t assume that I’ll be healthy and able to work at any given time, so it’s, I feel like I’ve been learning a lot during this process.

Christa Mrgan: That sounds so intense.

Jay Ma: Yeah. It is what it is.

Christa Mrgan: But the game has turned out great, and I really hope you enjoy it. And of course Jay does, too.

Jay Ma: I hope that they feel like it’s a calm and relaxing good time, and then when they finish a round, they’re like, yeah, maybe I’ll do one more. That’s the vibe that I’m going for. And before you know it, you’ve gotten good at the game and you’ve learned how to use all the weapons and all that.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. It definitely has that addictive quality of like, “oh, I bet I could make it just a little longer. Next time, I’ll do one more.” I hope that you love it and that you survive longer than me.

You can learn more about Jay, Subset Games, and other games and topics she mentioned via the links in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes of Season Two coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Jay Ma: Thank you all for listening.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Additional Music was composed by Aaron Cheroff, and comes from Fulcrum Defender.

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 Paydate audio extraction app, Kayleigh Stegman for handling social media and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, play date consoles are available at play.date.

Jay Ma: I got my Playdate way late. I Think I am, I emailed just the general email contact, saying, “hi, I’m at subset games, um, can I get a dev kit?” And I didn’t, and I just sort of let that slide until there was a more public, purchasable one that I got, I don’t know, two years later maybe.

Something like that. I dunno, it wasn’t a super high priority. I figured I could do it later.