Black Hole Havoc

Christa Mrgan: Black holes are suddenly appearing all over the galaxy. It’s up to you to cancel them out by hitting them with your own black holes of the same size! Aim your cannon, scale your ammo, and void the voids while steering clear of other obstacles to save all of humanity.

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. And today I am talking with the Cosmic Bros: Drew Loebach, Antony Saillard, and Karim Chair, the team behind Black Hole Havoc, part of Playdate Season Two.

Heads up that we’ll talk about gameplay, mechanics, different game modes, and some of the world’s and obstacles you’ll encounter in Black Hole Havoc. But there are no major story spoilers in this episode.

Okay! Let’s meet Drew, Antony, and Kareem!

Drew Loebach: My name is Drew Loebach. I am the programmer and I guess you could say co-designer, for Black Hole Havoc. So there’s three of us. I do the programming and the level design, and then sort of like the game design, we collaborate on.

Antony Saillard: My name is Antony Saillard. I made some project management and am the lead artist of Black Hole Havoc.

Karim Chair: My name is Karim Chair. I’m working, as a cinematic animator, but actually we are just three in the group, and we are doing many things. You see, uh, Antony is a project manager, but he’s also uh, animator and things like that. Drew is level designer and he’s also a developer. And I’m doing cinematics, but also working on music and uh, sound design.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. So what is Black Hole Havoc?

Antony Saillard: If I had to describe it to you very quickly it’s a Puzzle Bobble- like game. You have play with the crank to to match the size of holes on the screen to destroy them.

Drew Loebach: So you have these different size black holes on the screen and you need to match the shape of the black hole the best you can and hit it.

Antony really liked Puzzle Bobble , as did I. It was an immediate bonding moment. And Puzzle Bobble, if you don’t know, is you shoot these bubbles out of a cannon or these little round circles. And you have to match it with the other ones of the same color. And Black Hole Havoc takes that basic premise, but instead of colors, you’re matching shapes.

It started off as, I don’t know, bubbles or whatever, and then landed on black holes because you have a black and white screen. It really, it’s something you can display really, really nicely on the Playdate screen. And so that’s the core gameplay. And then we add all sorts of fun little things like, uh space tourists and ice blocks and whatever else. Aliens, all sorts of little obstacles that you need to navigate around, to rid the world of those pesky black holes.

Antony Saillard: The idea of black holes was fun because it implied a sort of space universe, a lot of different planets, a lot of different people that the heroes will encounter.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. There’s really a lot more going on in this game than just matching the sizes of black holes. But where did this idea to create a Puzzle-Bobble-type game for Playdate come from?

Antony Saillard: So, first I bought a Playdate. That’s starting point. And I really liked the the diversity of all the concepts we can find on this console. The crank the, the design, uh, the black and white system.

And I really, really wanted to make a puzzle game. I was a developer twenty years ago. and I wanted at the beginning to make it myself. So, uh I beginning to go on Playdate developer forums. And I, I asked the question, " I want to make a Puzzle Bobble -like game in Pulp. Can somebody help me?" And Drew answered.

Drew Loebach: He reached out to me on Discord. I had like made this legally distinct falling pill puzzle game in Pulp called Dr. Panic, and he uh, said, “Hey, would it be possible to make this sort of puzzle game in Pulp?” And I was like, “sorta!”

Christa Mrgan: Pulp is a browser-based, click and place game maker for Playdate. You don’t even need to know how to code to make a little adventure game with Pulp.

But there is a scripting language called PulpScript that you can use to make games that are more elaborate, like falling block style games, or even a faithful recreation of the classic point-and-click adventure game, Shadowgate. But anyway, given his own experience with both Pulp and the Playdate SDK, Drew wasn’t sure that Pulp would be the best fit for creating a Puzzle-Bobble-type game.

Drew Loebach: It works well for something like a Dr. Mario or whatever that’s like tile based. But he had this idea of making something that was similar to Puzzle Bobble. Also, in the West, had this terrible name, uh, what’s it called? Bust-A-Move. They need to fire that marketing guy. But yeah, if they could make something like that in Pulp and it’s well, you need like angles and… not really. You’re better off just like doing that in the SDK. Then we got to chatting. He was like " well, would you be be interested in making a game with me?" And I was like, “well, uh. do you do art?” My artwork is not great. So if he can like, make the art and make all the assets, I can program it and we can like cook it up. He told me that he can develop the game and I can make uh, the rest. So we discussed we discussed and, uh, I spoke with him and I told him one of my favorite game on the Playdate is a game called Jolly Chimp Champ. And was starting to laugh it told me "I am the developer of this game. So I was, I was really surprised!

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Jolly Chimp Chimp is an action puzzle game that Drew made where you control a sedentary chimp on a conveyor belt using only the crank. There’s a link in the show notes.

Drew Loebach: Wanted to make something that was just completely controlled by the crank and nothing else. Uh, because why not? And what I wanted to do is create a game that had a really simple premise. All you can do is like crank forward or crank back and that’s it. And then add like a lot of depth to this. Can I really make interesting puzzles, given how like limited that control is? So that was my goal and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I cranked that game out in like three months maybe. Yeah, pun intended.

Christa Mrgan: Crankfully, I love a good Playdate pun. And I wanted to mention here that Drew is also the lead programmer of Comet, a beautiful and lighthearted puzzle adventure that’s coming soon to Playdate, that a lot of us are really looking forward to.

But so Antoni was really excited to team up with the creator of his favorite puzzle game for Playdate!

Antony Saillard: Perfect. I found my perfect match, so let’s go.

Drew Loebach: Then we just started. In a couple weeks we had like a prototype going. So yeah, then it just grew from there.

Antony Saillard: I told Drew that the main thing I wanted for the game is something very generous in term of universe, generous in terms of music, of unlockables, of features. So we, we started with that, with an arcade mode, very simple. And, we quickly came to the conclusion that a story mode could be very insane. So, I started to make a cinematic.

Drew Loebach: Yeah, so we, we started making this game and Antony makes all these like, cool animations. I really love his, his style and it looks really, really dope. And I think in generals how it works, like I. I’m, good at managing it, giving it structure, and like making the stuff happen. And he makes it like nice and cool and colorful. Not in a literal sense if we’re talking about the Playdate, but in the figurative sense, he makes everything very colorful and full of, uh, pizazz.

Antony Saillard: It was really fun. In fact, I was starting to to draw on a sheet of papers. And when I started to animate things um, it was very difficult. So one sheet of paper for one frame of animation, you can imagine uh, very quickly the difficulty of that. so I don’t know why I remembered I had an iPad. So I said, “uh, Antony, you are very silly. Now take your iPad and open your software.” And I ended a software called procreate to make the animations on the art quicker.

Not really pixel art, but my specialty is black and white, so it wasn’t very difficult to adapt it to the system. That’s why also I wanted to make a game on the Playdate. It’s black and white so it fits perfectly.

I wanted to make things very easy to draw so we can focus on a good animation. Within the game there are a lot of very cool little movies to see story mode all the game modes.

Drew Loebach: And then at some point he like threw something else at me that looked like crazy and cool. He’s like, “oh yeah, my friend made this, and my friend’s an animator.” Like, okay. And then next thing I know, like he dropped this animated cutscene. It’s like a really nice looking animated cutscene on me. And he was like, yeah, my friend would like to get involved. So, I wasn’t gonna say no, like the, the animations are amazing.

Antony Saillard: I called Karim who I knew since twenty- five years and I asked him can you make us an introduction for the game, a very cool cinematic.

Karim Chair: When Antony came with the project, it was like opening an old chest with how fast that we take out our costume of animator and we are back.

Drew Loebach: So, he’s the animator and also does most of the music in the game as well.

Karim Chair: What I like the most in the video games before was the music, the soundtrack of the different games I played on Famicom and other consoles. It brings a mood, a special mood. So when I was working on the cinematic animations, in my head I had the type of music I wanted, always. I started by the animation and then I adapt the music to it. And also the, the level. It’s really weird because uh, I like metal music. I like really operatic music, but it would not fit the game. So I had to adapt something and I wanted something really like, with the eighties and nineties vibe, bring good mood to the funny things we are playing in. For me, everything is about emotion. If it’s funny or sad or I want really to give the players such emotion. So I was, uh, thinking at that time if the scene is epic, I want, to put uh, yes, put on the max. I wanted to give a melancholic time sometimes. With such character, everything is stupid, but suddenly I like to, to put such ingredient this in cinematic, but also in music. I don’t think the cinematic can work without the music, and the music can’t work without the, the cinematic. That’s how I’m working with animation globally.

Antony Saillard: And I have to say that after twenty five years of friendship with Karim, i just discovered that he makes music for his projects. It’s really fun. I discovered this huge skill of making music and I was astonished.

I think there are twenty tracks on the game. A lot of work involved, les twenty tracks may be more I don’t remember. You made everything, so. [ Laughs]

Karim Chair: I was still working just before the interview, but after that, will go to sleep really, I’m dying.

Christa Mrgan: There ended up being 33 tracks on the soundtrack with a creator called Ronin_XX, contributing a few as well. There’s a link to the full soundtrack in the show notes. And of course, Karim did the sound design as well.

Karim Chair: I really wanted each action you could feel in your hand and in your eyes. So it really, it fits together. And we noticed that because we, we progressed quickly in the development of the game, that when we had the sound design implemented in the game, it was really different. It was getting alive. So this is really gave us a strength to progress and then to work till 5:00 AM. We wanted to see next part with sound design.

Antony Saillard: It’s as important as the gameplay and the cinematic, I would say.

We created together a little team called Cosmic Bros. We created a Discord channel to speak every day, every time, day and night on the game. And Karim is an old friend. So, we call each morning and and brainstorm about the game.

Karim Chair: Yes. Just before going to work were calling each other and talking, brainstorming every morning almost, talking about what we wanted to do and uh, how fun it would be for Drew to discover that idea, but also for players, of course, too. It was fun.

Drew Loebach: I’ve actually never met Antony or Karim. Not in real life. So, hopefully we’ll have met by the time this, podcast airs. We’ll see, because we’re not so far away, but we are in different countries, so they’re over in France and I’m here in Germany. Just need to like find a little bit of time to go and meet them. But basically we have our, Discord chat and it’s just a, it’s lots of nonsense as you imagine. So Antony loves memes and just stupid stuff. You’ll find lots of stupid little tidbits in the game. Almost all the dialogue I wrote, but, all the funny little animations and some of the sillier ideas, if it’s really off the wall, it probably came from Antony. But it’s always fun with those two. They’re characters.

Christa Mrgan: One silly element that I really enjoyed were the game hints, which are a mix of actual hints and tips about how to play the game, some space facts, and then just goofy stuff, like “never pet a burning dog.”

Drew Loebach: So I stole that one from Warcraft II. Back in the day, would always have these game hints and the game hints, they were like 80% serious, actual game hints. And then 20% were completely ridiculous. And the one was “never pet a burning dog,” I thought was the funniest thing. So that was an homage to Warcraft II, actually. And so I think the mix we have with Black Hole Havoc is 50% game hints. And some of them will be like hints on how to play, hints on the unlockables and stuff. And some of them are fun facts, actual like facts about astrophysics and stuff. And then a good handful are just ridiculous, of course, because we’re, we’re just ridiculous.

I have to say collaborating was really great. I think we have a really nice chemistry, so, we complement each other quite well.

Antony Saillard: We really had a lot of crazy ideas, and we brainstormed with Karim. And after that I’m waiting to Drew, to [say], “so you can’t have this uh, or that.” Drew: "I’m not sure.

See? Yes. Yes. It’ll be a good idea." So. it was really fun to have everything we had in mind get integrated.

Drew Loebach: It started off the very first mode was I guess what we would call arcade mode. So that’s, your basic sort of score chaser. You need to clear all the black holes on the level. If the size of the black holes isn’t just perfectly matched, you take some damage and if you uh, run out of health, that’s it, and the game’s over and you try to make it as far as you can.

So that’s the most core mode of it. But I’d say most players will dive into the story mode, 'cause that one has the most like content to it. It’s got the cutscenes, it’s got a story. So you have these story in different worlds in each world has its own like unique mechanic.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Each world gets its own big cinematic cutscene introduction, Which explains the new mechanic and how it fits the narrative.

Karim Chair: Every morning we were really brainstorming and talking about many, many ideas, but each time in every introduction there is something that’s showing you what is the point behind everything you see. So of course we put funny things in it. We were really influenced by, by a nineties action movie, American movie of course. And um, Japanese Anime ,of the nineties. And very funny ones like Dr. Slump, Osomatsu-san. I don’t know if you are watching anime…

Christa Mrgan: Not really, but I put links in the show notes.

Drew Loebach: For me as the one who did the level design, I would say another game I really enjoyed was Pick, Pack, Pup.

Christa Mrgan: Pick Pack Pup is a match three puzzle game from Playdate Season One, where you play as an adorable dog who works at a fulfillment center. New challenges arrive in the game as you level up and a narrative unfolds that ties everything together.

Drew Loebach: And it’s got really simple premise, right? And you’d think you’d get bored of it. Nic does such a great job of making sure that it never gets like dull.

Christa Mrgan: That’s Nic Magnier, the developer of Pick Pack Pup.

Drew Loebach: He always like mixes up just enough to keep you really like interested and want to keep playing. So that’s what I aspire to do in the story mode, is every 10 levels that you clear, you get to a new world, you’re treated with a new cutscene, and you get a new game mechanic to figure out and navigate.

Christa Mrgan: And they ended up with one more game mode: Not Chill!

Drew Loebach: So originally Antony was like, we need another game mode. And we had like a sort of endless mode or marathon mode, but just wasn’t any fun, like you just shoot at these black holes until you like die slow, slow, boring death. And I dunno, I just didn’t like it. And like, okay, what about a chill mode? And I don’t know, I just wasn’t about, I, I couldn’t imagine it being really enjoyable. And I’m like, well, what if we make a Not Chill mode, just like something different?

That’s just like really, just ramps up your blood pressure and Yeah. I thought that it being like the anti chill mode, that’s where the, the silly name comes from.

I grew up with the original NES when games were like Nintendo hard, so my threshold for difficult games I think is much higher than your average video game consumer. So that’s something I always struggle with, like and it’s very difficult when you’re designing the game because you’re already an expert at this thing that you’ve created yourself.

You know exactly how it works. Played it to death. So it’s hard to put yourself in the headspace of someone who like, doesn’t know how it works and has never played it before. You introduce a new mechanic. Uh, you always wanna have a learning element. So that first level is usually a sort of like a layup, right?

That anybody can beat and, ideally forces them to understand how that mechanic works. And then I tried to just slowly ratchet it up. And then my, goal is to make it always challenging, but I want it to be at that sweet spot where your average gamer will be able to beat it. But I, not gonna lose any sleep if someone who’s never like picked up a game before can’t beat it. It still needs to have a certain challenge for it to feel satisfying for me. So that’s what I, what I aim for.

Christa Mrgan: And Drew has had some good learning experiences when it comes to making effective tutorials.

Drew Loebach: You’ll put like you know how it works, what the main goal is. You’ll put it in some text boxes and you read it and it’s really clear. And then when you just hand it to people and don’t say anything, don’t uh, give them hints.

Don’t walk them through it. Just see what they do with it. And nine out of ten people like, it doesn’t matter if they’re kids or adults, they pick it up the text box and they just mash the a button to like get the text box. off the screen as quickly as possible because they wanna get to the action. And then you realize you can’t rely on it. You need to make it engaging. You need to make it engaging and intuitive, the way that you teach the player how the game is. And that’s much easier said than done. So that was a big learning for me. Like you assume that the player’s gonna read everything in the text boxes because, now more than ever, I think after the pandemic, everybody’s of attention span have like dropped. You really need to make sure that the way you teach the mechanics is fun and engaging. So that’s just part of the process. When it came to pitching the game for Season Two, the team had a good time putting together their pitch deck.

Antony Saillard: We spoke together and we said let’s make a silly PowerPoint as crazy as the game.

Drew Loebach: You know, writing everything by hand and just giving it like a lot of personality.

Antony Saillard: We made something on a sheet of papers, with hand-drawn graphics and a comic to show the game to Panic.

Drew Loebach: So we had that, I thought we had a pretty strong demo to submit for the Season Two pitch. And then I think that was punctuated by Karim who, who was, I dunno, I guess our secret weapon because it’s a nice game, but a lot of people make nice games, you know?

But when you have these like really dope animations, it really gives it like a layer of polish that sets it apart, I think. I hope.

Christa Mrgan: I mean it must have worked, right? Black Hole Havoc is a part of Playdate Season Two, and Drew is still making Playdate games.

Drew Loebach: There’s so much I love about the Playdate, but one of my favorite things is how the SDK is just open for anybody. And it’s so accessible that just anybody can make a game for it. And I just love that like, first for me personally, and second for everything else that’s out there, that there’s so many games that are just a labor of love and not just, like Zynga trying to make a, a buck off of somebody, you know. I love that. So I got into game dev and just, you don’t start trying to make your like magnum opus and you are just trying stuff out. And Jolly Chimp Champ was the first, I would say, “real” game that I released and I just learned so much every time I start a new game, so I learned tons.

I couldn’t point out any like specifics, but like from the technical side, just coding and coding games, scene management and all that stuff like really comes together and it’s pretty nice. You don’t have the feeling you’re learning a ton.

It happens just I don’t know, like kids growing, you know, like they grow a little bit every day, but you don’t notice. But if you look at a picture of your kids like two years ago, you’re like, whoa, what happened? It’s a bit that way with like, um, all this knowledge that you go to do something you can just like crank it out.

Something that really, two years ago was, I dunno, like a struggle.

We had a really nice pace for the game. Like I said, like we collaborate really well, the three of us. So when there’s something to do, it gets thrown out there and everyone’s super motivated. So it’s just everybody like does their part and just like keeps it working because we, I think we started talking about making a game in April, and now it’s December and the game’s pretty much finished.

It needs a little bit of polish. but we’ll take a couple months, but really, like, we turned it out. So I’m, I’m happy. I hope everybody enjoys it. Our goal is to make a game the Playdate that everybody would enjoy. So I’m hoping there’s something in there for everybody.

Karim Chair: We wanted to be as generous as if it was the only game we would make in our life. So we were really, really putting everything in there. Secret things in, in it. Yes, you have find it.

Antony Saillard: Yes. it’s an advice: you have to clear all the trophies of the game. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Karim Chair: There is trophies!?!

Antony Saillard: So yes. We wanted to put everything into this game like like if it was the only one. We can’t wait to see thereaction. We can’t wait.

Drew Loebach: Thanks everybody, for playing. Thanks everybody for supporting. I hope everybody really enjoys the game as much as I’ve enjoyed playing everybody else’s Playdate games.

Antony Saillard: we want to make a pick-up-and-play game. I really hope they will be utterly surprised by the cinematics. And by everything they will discover by surprise. Something will pop on the screen, say, “oh!” We’re really excited.

Karim Chair: That game was a, I think, an opportunity to show of course what we have to propose, but also to make some kind of synchronicity with the Playdate that really, I don’t think that game we could make it on a other spot.

Antony Saillard: It’s a game that can’t be released on another system. It’s really linked to the Playdate, the cranking mechanic. There are other little things that, are driven by the crank, but it’s a Playdate game. And we are really proud to offer this game. And we thank you to have accepted us in Season Two. It’s really great for us and we can’t wait to see all the reaction for the game. Our goal is really to make a really fun puzzle game that everybody wants to take and play.

We fought for our ideas, and it was really cool because the final project is really the best mix of the three of us. And it’s really something very original and fun for us. We hope you you will like it.

Drew Loebach: It’s been a awesome experience that I’ve really enjoyed and thanks for playing!

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. I hope you have a lot of fun shooting black holes and finding silly secrets and saving the day in Black Hole Havoc! And remember: never pet a burning dog?

You can learn more about the Cosmic Bros Black Hole Havoc, and a bunch of other things we talked about in this episode via the links in the show notes. There’s even a link to the team’s pitch deck!

Thanks so much for listening, and stay tuned for one more official episode about Playdate Season Two, coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Antony Saillard: Thanks for listening and bye. See you soon.

Drew Loebach: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real honor.

Karim Chair: Bye. Ciao.

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 Karim Chair, and comes from Black Hole Havoc.

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, 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. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Antony Saillard: Let’s make a six-hours-long special episode to speak about our experience.

Karim Chair: Sorry for the French accent.