Shownotes
MK Schmidt is an indie game designer, fine artist, and father of 7 lovely children. Here we discuss his experience releasing his latest title Cyclopean: The Great Abyss coming off the the success of his previous title Islands of the Caliph. We also talk through his journey breaking into the world of fine art, learning to sell yourself, UAPs, spirituality, and everything in between. | In The Keep | Support In The Keep | Theme Song by Jon of the Shred | Books Mentioned: The Complete Fiction of HP Lovecraft | UFO of GOD by Chris Bledsoe | Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery by Rupert Sheldrake | The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley |
Transcripts
Music:
[0:00] Music
Mike:
[0:30] I think it's been my most solid release in terms of just functionality.
Mike:
[0:37] Like the game is working, more or less. Which I'm very happy about. So almost all the feedback has been gameplay stuff rather than bugs and things like that. There's been a few, but nothing major.
Tyler:
[0:57] Yeah.
Mike:
[0:58] So I'm happy about that.
Tyler:
[1:00] I remember, I think I was still in Tucson, so this would have been prior to October when you gave me a build of this to play, maybe even before that. I immediately fell in love with this game. I legitimately would wait for everyone to go to sleep and then stay up all night while playing this game for several days. Uh and it even it even got me to stop playing baldur's gate all night and i was just excited like interesting this is fun and addicting and and there's something here i mean it was still a little rough around the edges at the time yeah
Mike:
[1:40] And it all it always will be.
Tyler:
[1:42] Yeah that's kind of your thing it's a it wouldn't be escape it an authentic schmidt workshops game if there weren't some you know little little fun ui things that are like oh odd choice or whatever but yeah i mean hey that's that's what i like about indie games is that you can afford to take risks and do different things and you know like not you're not necessarily always going for like mass audience appeal what's the best thing for everybody but maybe what's what's uh you can do things you can do things that are not approved by some corporate guy or some uh marketing dude who's like no no no you should do the way that it works for most people or test audiences test audiences were uh were vetoing this one or right right
Mike:
[2:32] I think there's there's a i learned something really important from an art teacher i had once, uh who said basically you should have a vision and a strategy and the vision is all the things that are not negotiable about your art and the strategy is everything else so you know if it's user-friendly and it's, easy for people to understand unless that goes directly against the vision of the game I'm happy to do those things but I do have limits I'm an artist, I'm not so much a programmer I'll be the first to tell you, I do what I can and then I stop but.
Tyler:
[3:20] What has the inspiration for this game? When did the idea pop into your mind?
Mike:
jam, Dungeon Crawler Jam, in:Mike:
[4:23] And that was the original Cyclopean. It was a roguelike 3D dungeon crawler. You just had to escape the vaults of Ninh with the ghasts and the gugs. And you had to rescue as many cats as you could on the way out. And it was just a very simple idea. And I reused all of the assets from Mylands of the Caliph. And i just turned them green to to get the aesthetic of the apple 2 monitor that i grew up with and that was it it was very three days i did what i wanted to do i accomplished you know, my basic goal there and it did pretty well it got like 11th place in the game jam which i was happy with and uh.
Mike:
[5:08] It was when I saw that it got 11th place, I was like, okay, this had to become a game. I mean, 11th isn't the best, obviously, but that was high enough. It was like a couple hundred entries. Wow. That's actually surprising. Yeah. And I knew if I had spent more time on it, I might have ruined it. But three days was perfect because I knew I had to make it really simple. And each day i just posted the progression i was at and those three original games there's one per, day of development you can still play them but uh after i saw that it got 11th place i was like okay this is this is the idea that i've been thinking about and i can make this into something more you know more enjoyable and more uh sort of deeper uh in terms of the gameplay and the lore and the mechanics of it right.
Tyler:
[6:12] And this came from like the lovecraft's dreamland cycle
Mike:
[6:17] Yeah that's a big thing that keeps i i feel like people are not as familiar with the dreamlands, and the dream cycle as they are with his cthulhu mythos stuff and i kind of have to explain you know cthulhu's not in this there's no deep ones here in the dreamlands you know which is fine, uh because there's such it's such a different vibe than his other work i think there's a lot of stuff that kind of carries through, Some of the concepts are very similar. And you have some people like Pikmin. He exists in the Dreamlands and in the Waking World in the other story. So if Lovecraft was creating a single sort of Lovecraftian universe,
Mike:
[7:17] which had been argued about whether he was or wasn't, whether these were standalone stories or not uh.
Tyler:
[7:24] Definitely not i
Mike:
[7:27] I don't think so either um but some of them aren't 100 consistent you know like there's an in smith mentioned in cellophase i don't know if i'm pronouncing that correctly it's one of the dreamland stories yeah but it's.
Tyler:
[7:40] Anything that resembles the idea that he started with like i'm gonna make one whole universe is total retcon like that's there's no way but he
Mike:
[7:50] Ended up doing it whether whether it was fully intentional from the beginning or not is obviously a different story but yeah I think he ended up there you know.
Tyler:
[8:02] It's the same as yeah anything that's a retcon story like you know doom or whatever you know all the stuff that gets the we start off with an idea then we created iteratively over time and then later oh let's find a way to tie it all together I mean of course yeah that's did he create a consistent somewhat universe and do so consciously yes did he sit down at the age of 20 and say for the rest of my life I'm going to do one thing which will be to create this yeah I doubt it there's no way um
Mike:
[8:41] But yeah, the Dreamlands, I think it's a rich fantasy, sort of horror fantasy environment that hasn't really been explored a lot in video games that I've seen. If I can put enough caveats on there that I am aware of. So I felt like the time was ripe.
Tyler:
[9:03] I think it's really cool. I've had a lot of people comment to me even like, oh, wow, it's like set in the Dream Cycle stuff. It's like that's different you know you don't see that all the time um which is funny to me because i wonder how many people have literally read all of lovecraft and don't even realize that there are multiple different kind of like universes so to speak like because i just assumed for the longest time this is all tied together and unless you go looking at scholarly stuff about lovecraft it doesn't necessarily come up if you're just reading the books in order as they come in uh like said the compendium i have it doesn't say and here's where he changed it to the dream cycle or right what part of it it is just another story you
Mike:
[9:45] Can you can get sort of a different vibe though from the what what they now refer to as the dream cycle stories they're they're more obviously dreamy right um they're not usually as scary and and horrible uh for the protagonist, um and but yeah i think uh the dream quest is kind of the culmination of all of that in a way where he really made it.
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