A surreal underwater puzzle game by two new-comers from Bristol, U.K.
On this episode, Larry & Clinton speak with Tom Mead and Dom Clarke, co-founders of Spiral Circus Games, and creators of SILT. SILT is a surreal underwater puzzle-adventure game, available now on multiple platforms.
Tom and Dom talk about how their girlfriends 'matchmade' them to start their company, the difficulties of transitioning from their previous careers into being game developers, the dream-come-true trip to an accelerator in the woods of Sweden, and the struggle of getting their first project to completion.
Other games mentioned include: Ecco the Dolphin, LIMBO, Subnautica, and Tarsier Studios games.
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Find SILT Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325890/SILT/
Visit the Spiral Circus Games website: https://spiralcircusgames.com/
Follow SILT on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SILTGame
Follow Spiral Circus Games on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gamescircus
Transcript:
Larry Kilgore III:
Video games are an art form. From the bits and bytes of the old school arcade cabinets to the technological advancements of the modern era, video games have been a way for creators to tell stories in an interactive environment that can be shared the world over.
Clinton Bader:
Developers, designers, visionaries, and storytellers, like the artisans of old, it's their blood, sweat, and tears that go into crafting these unique and innovative experiences for players. But oftentimes, the independent artists get lost in the overwhelming space that is today's hectic gaming market. On PixelSmiths, it's our goal to be a platform for those artists to celebrate their drive, their vision, and the work it takes to create their art.
Larry Kilgore III:
On this episode, we'll speak with the Bristol, UK-based duo that created Silt, a surreal underwater puzzle adventure game out now on multiple platforms. This is PixelSmiths. Hello and welcome to PixelSmiths. I'm Larry Kilgore III, podcast creator and video game enthusiast.
Clinton Bader:
And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader, esports broadcaster and commentator. We here at PixelSmiths want to shine a spotlight on the processes, hard work, and dedication it takes to develop indie games.
Larry Kilgore III:
Today, we are talking with Tom Mead and Dom Clarke, founders of Spiral Circus Games and creators of Silt. Tom, Dom, thanks for joining us here on PixelSmiths.
Dom Clarke:
Thanks for having us. It's nice to be here.
Tom Mead:
Hey, thanks for having us.
Larry Kilgore III:
So, we always like to start out by finding out the background of our guests. So, can you two tell us a little bit about your background and what you were doing before you founded Spiral Games and what it was that brought the two of you together to make Silt?
Tom Mead:
Sure. So, I was a fine artist originally. For years, I was creating artwork and selling it for a living, doing gallery shows, basically, just drawing for a living. It got to a point in my career where I wanted to have my characters animated and it was, very fortuitously, at that time is when I met Dom at a party.
Dom Clarke:
So, I convinced Tom to make a game with me, basically. I was similarly out of the games industry, I was a scientist. I did a physics degree and then went into research science and biological physics and did a few years of that. That's where I learned to code, and then I guess the coding I was doing was dry and boring. Once I started learning to code, I really got excited about the possibility of making games, but I suck at art, so I was searching around looking for an artist at the same time, Tom was searching around looking for somebody to either animate his work or bring it into a new dimension, in some way, so I was like, "Let's do a game." We met each other, decided we were going to make a game that day, and then the next week, we were doing pre-production on it, basically.
Larry Kilgore III:
So, I heard you guys actually met through your girlfriends. What do they think about you guys working together?
Tom Mead:
I think they're very happy about the whole situation.
Dom Clarke:
My partner, Corienne, knew what I was looking for and then when her friend Adele started dating Tom, it was like, "Yeah, come over." I think they blind dated us without us knowing.
Tom Mead:
They're very pleased at the whole situation, definitely.
Clinton Bader:
So, let's talk a little bit about Silt. We think of it as this underwater horror exploration puzzle game. Where did the idea for the game come from? Was this a collaborative idea? Maybe, Dom, seemed like you were wanting to get into games? How did this originally come about?
Tom Mead:
So, I was actually doing a fine art personal project where I was just doing a watercolor series, because, previously, all my other work was based around my fear of anthropomorphic animals and people wearing animal suits. I'd been doing that for 10 years and I got to the stage where I wanted to experiment with my other biggest fear, which is thalassophobia, just the fear of deep underwater spaces, and so I was doing a watercolor series of that, and that's the time when I met Dom. Really, I just showed him what I was working on and we thought that it would be a cool subject matter to explore and it went from there, quite honestly.
Dom Clarke:
So, that painting was called Silt, which is where the game came from. So, that was the process, we didn't start with a predefined idea. What we really started doing is we mine Tom's past work and we got together and it was just like, "Show me what you've been working on. Let's look through some stuff." The idea of the atmosphere, when I saw that image, the atmosphere immediately felt like that would make a good game atmosphere if you were that character that was sinking in that abyss. It already felt like the vibes were right and we just went from there. The setting came first, the underwater, swimming, drowning, diving, whatever, and the game just grew out of that. Our work, it's visual first, usually. We usually work with Tom's visual ideas first and then we try to find the game in that.
Larry Kilgore III:
Are there any games that you can look at and say, as we were making things, these are games that inspired the game mechanics or the look or the feel?
Tom Mead:
I really hadn't played games in many, many years, so a lot of my influences were quite old-school. One of the main influences for me was Ecco the Dolphin, which was an incredible game on the Mega Drive. The more contemporary ones were Limbo was probably, obviously, an inspiration and anything by Tassier, as well, massively influential. Both of us have always been big horror fans, as well.
Dom Clarke:
I was playing a lot of Subnautica at the time when I first started and I think that's probably why the drowning image was really resonant straight away. It's like, "Oh yes, I'm already playing an underwater game. Let's make an underwater game." I think when Silt was starting out, we were probably imagining that it would be a lot more like Subnautica mechanically. We had oxygen gauges and you had to collect oxygen and you had to... There was a bunch of systems involved that we ended up designing out of the game, eventually, but I think that was where we started. When we were trying to think about what the player could do, we were thinking about crafting and survival and stuff like that. In the end, it became a puzzle game and we just didn't want the players to have to stop thinking about a puzzle because they have to go get air and things like that. It ended up being detrimental to the gameplay, so we just pulled it all out again and made what we made. But I was definitely thinking I might have made a Subnautica game.
Larry Kilgore III:
The possession mechanic for the puzzle solving is very unique. Where did that idea come from?
Tom Mead:
I think, again, at least initially, it was started by just some random thing that I'd drawn. I was drawing loads of pictures of people that were having souls coming out of their faces. It was making the soul a physical thing and I think that was a spark for the possession mechanic. But there was a technical aspect involved, wasn't there, as well, Dom?
Dom Clarke:
Yeah, we had a lot of... So my background before I started games, I was doing a lot of animal behavior simulation. One of the first proper systems from Silt that ended up being in the game that we made was the fish behavior simulation. So, those fish in Silt are actually running reasonably complex simulations, they have hunger and they have predator/prey relationships and they hunt each other down. We don't make a huge amount of mechanical use in it, but it was all there from when we first built the game and I was just building those systems. The possession was a really neat way to use those systems. You could go be one of those fish that we've just created a whole set of systems for, and that seemed like a cool idea at the time. But we had this huge technical challenge of the two of us really were making the game on our own at that time, and we didn't really have any full-time animation support.
Dom Clarke:
The animation we ended up having was our animator, Anton, working remotely out of Ukraine and we didn't have the hours we would need to have a really complicated set of animations. What the possession allows us to do is we don't ever have to have the character grab a switch or do all the things that a Limbo game they might have to do, where they pull a car along and you need all of these really nicely targeted animations that reach out and perfectly grab the other thing in the world, and that's really, really hard. Every time Tom proposed an idea where two animation rigs were interacting with each other, I was just like, "No, that's too hard. We can't do that." The possession just makes it so that we never really have to do that. The player doesn't have to throw a switch, they can possess the switch and then move the switch, so it solved a lot of our big technical problems.
Dom Clarke:
I'm all about those ideas that if they're good enough artistically for Tom and Tom's satisfied with the way they look visually and what the artistic purpose of it all is, and if I'm satisfied with the technical challenges that it solves and whether we can actually pull it off as a tiny studio, those are the ideas that we latch on, so possession was just a great solution to those problems.
Larry Kilgore III:
I think that's very interesting that it's a solution and a workaround for issues that you may have seen. It's cool little feature that had I not asked, I'm sure I wouldn't even have realized like, "Oh yeah, none of the animations interact and it was a good way for you to get that." But I think it's a very unique way to play the game.
Clinton Bader:
He beat me to a question I was lingering on. I was curious about what kind of inspirations you had from your time in academia. The fish and those kind of things, were there any other experiences that you had from your experience and your education that came out in the game?
Dom Clarke:
I think when we were first starting, I brought a lot of stuff from my academic work, because that's what I'd been doing. In fact, when we started working on the game initially, I was still at that job. I was coming to the end of a postdoc contract, which in science, we tend to work in these three-year, four-year blocks, and then you have to find your job all over again, so it was a natural place for me to stop and everything. But as we were just starting, I was in the midst of loads of behavior simulation modeling. I worked on bees and beehives. I was really interested in the idea of computer games simulations of complex, many, many animals interacting with each other and I guess fish shoals are another really good example of that sort of stuff.
Dom Clarke:
I think I really, really wanted to bring just hardcore simulation elements into all of this stuff. Honestly, as the game development progressed, I think it just became less and less relevant to the game we ended up trying to make. So, I think probably, this particular game is not super influenced by anything I did scientifically. It was more just dive headfirst into Tom's surreal world and try to keep up with it and try to make that look right on the screen and stuff.
Larry Kilgore III:
So, another thing that I really noticed about the game is there's no dialogue, it's all very atmospheric. The sound design is obviously very important in a situation like that. What made you guys decide on no dialogue, no voices, really relying on the sound design to set the scene and tell the story?
Tom Mead:
Both of us have been massive David Lynch fans for years, both of us are very influenced by ambiguous storytelling, that type of surrealist way of telling a story without having to actually narrate it or have a solid narrative. But also, as well as that, I think, again, it was we were a small team, we couldn't afford a writer. We couldn't have a big elaborate story, so we had to cut corners. That's another reason why we went that angle, because it was cheaper. I just like that kind of thing anyway, so it was a mixture of those two things.
Dom Clarke:
You have to design a game that you can actually make on the scale that you want to make it on. It would be no good for us to imagine that we were going to make, I don't know, a Destiny game or something, because that needs millions and millions of dollars and loads and loads of people. By the same reason, if we wanted to do voice acting in a game... All indie games are dealing with these calculations all the time, what can we actually given our budget? Because it's not an unlimited thing, you have to be very careful about the design choices you make. If you bring in an actual written story with, say, MPCs that talk to you or something, well, then you need to generate thousands of lines of dialogue and then you need to localize all that dialogue and then you need to... If you want a voice, well, do you only voice one character or do you now need a whole cast of voice actors?
Dom Clarke:
So, I think you do see indies that have taken a risk, stuff like Supergiant Bastion, Darkest Dungeon, I guess is the other one, you just have one killer voice actor that does all the lines. That's maybe doable on a really tiny indie shoestring budget, because you can budget for that and you can commit to it and stuff. But it's so quick to spiral out of control if you're not careful about what features you add, so really, what we try to do is play to our strengths as best as we can. Tom and I don't have a huge strength in narrative design and we don't have a huge strength in writing and dialogue and things like that. So, if we'd have really tried to do that, I don't think it would've been very good. But maybe in future projects, we would bring somebody on specifically with that specialty.
Dom Clarke:
Just to your point of the sound design, we knew sound was going to be really important, but again, we just got a great sound designer in. So, Nick Diamond, our sound designer, is just brilliant and he got to know us and what we wanted to do. Tom had done a little bit of work with him before, as well, I think, so there was a relationship there already. He just listened with us and got the vibes of the project and stuff. And then by the end, we didn't really have to direct him or anything, it was just his baby. He got to choose how he wanted the game to sound. It was really him that was pushing for loads of space. I think I was constantly asking him to fill the sound up and put more stuff in, there's sounds here that I feel like I should be hearing but I can't, and a lot of the time, he was just, "Trust me, by the time we're through with this, there will be enough sound in this level."
Dom Clarke:
He was really careful about making sure that any big sound had a lot of silence before it, so making sure that we had space to really calm the sound down if we wanted to have a big moment so it was really impactful. It was all about that space leaving and then it meant if we ever needed to do anything with a bit more impact, we had room to do it, it was just there was space for it. I think that was a great choice.
Clinton Bader:
So, we talked about, a little bit earlier, some of the games that inspired you, like Limbo and Ecco the Dolphin and things like that, but what, to you guys, make Silt different from the games that inspired you? We talked about the possession mechanic and things like that, but is there anything else, in particular, that strikes you as being unique or interesting?
Tom Mead:
It's a very strange game, I'm very proud of that. I think it's quite hard to pin down. I was very happy with how close the game got to all my concepts at the beginning. Not that I was wanting it to be exactly like that anyway, but it was really great to see that it was sticking as close to the artwork as possible, which was the original idea, really. I think the sound was absolutely phenomenal.
Dom Clarke:
I think the unique thing about Silt is the way it looks and really, it's built around the world that Tom's created and Tom spent... There's not many people in the world that have this one idea in their head about a particular style or a particular way of making art and then just commit to it and just do it. If you look around Tom's studio, you'll just see all of these examples of these characters and places and things all in this very, very distinctive style. I think what we get as a company, when I met Tom, was 10 years of a style that he developed. That will be different to anybody else's style because it was never trying to copy anything, it was just something he was working on.
Dom Clarke:
As a company, if we want to do a narrative game, I would really want to hire a writer that had the same kind of thing, that was just writing on their own for 10 years, that wasn't trying to have a wide-ranged portfolio of all the different styles that they could do. I want people that have developed something of their own. And then I think when you work with that, you can't help but come out unique, because the original source material was all unique. No one else has Tom, they can't have him, he's mine.
Larry Kilgore III:
It's interesting, too, because knowing that it was a very art-first project, that almost seems like it's a interactive art gallery for Tom's work.
Dom Clarke:
My job was exactly that, it was to get Tom's artwork, in a way that did it justice, into the game. And then the rest of my job was like, "How do we get players to have something to do while they're sitting in this beautiful artwork?" A lot of the game design is from that way around. The puzzles are really there just so that you have more time in this world, that you have stuff to do, that you have reasons to poke and product the world a little bit and see what it does. But really, it's supposed to be a piece of visual art or whatever. It sounds so pretentious when you say it out loud, my god.
Tom Mead:
It feels strange for me. I always try and direct it to anyone else when anyone asks this type of question. I feel that everyone else's work that makes it unique for me. I almost like it not to be the forefront of what makes Silt good. When I was hearing the puzzle design get complimented and things like that, that made me really happy, as well, because it is really strong, as well, and really interesting and strange puzzle designs. So, maybe I'm just so weirdly humble.
Dom Clarke:
You're just bad at taking compliments.
Larry Kilgore III:
Well, Tom and Dom, it has been fun, so far, talking to you guys about how Silt brought you together and the fun you had creating it. We'd like to dive a little bit more into the details of the development of the game, but first, we need to take a quick break. We'll be back in a moment with more from the creators of Silt, here on PixelSmiths. This is PixelSmiths, the podcast that gives a voice to today's indie game developers. I'm Larry Kilgore III.
Clinton Bader:
And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader. We're talking to Tom Mead and Dom Clarke, creators of the game Silt. So, guys, we've been talking about the game itself. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the actual formation of the company. So, you guys didn't have a ton of experience, it was a long development cycle. Can we talk about your journey from when you guys met and the conception of the game to the finished product itself?
Dom Clarke:
So, once we met and started putting ideas down, again, it's hard to stress enough how inexperienced we were. My games programming background consisted of me doing Unity tutorials and making not great little prototypes, maybe a half dozen little prototypes, where I would work on it for a while to learn one specific part of game dev or something like that, a pathfinder or had to do some AI thing or something like that, and then I would abandon the project and make something else. I was guess just building out the game until it got to the point where I just wasn't able to scale it anymore, because I didn't really know what I was doing. The code became a horrible mess and adding a new feature was really, really shaky, and then I would abandon it and move on.
Dom Clarke:
I think I just failed enough times, by the time I met Tom, that I had just about enough information for how to build a whole game and be able to make some allowances for the stuff you do at the end of development, at the beginning, and not build this really shaky mess. So, I think we met just about the right time where I had just about enough knowledge that I could take a stab at it, but we still really didn't know what we were doing. Same with Tom, tom doesn't have a game art background, so Tom wasn't used to having to deliver assets in really specific ways and deal with all the layering and transparency and all of the complicated stuff you have to do to get a piece of art into the game.
Dom Clarke:
So, when we first started, we were really, really naively just scanning big massive pen and ink drawings into the thing, and then trying to split them up by hand later. We basically just beat our heads around the idea of how do we get this game to look good and how do we get Tom's art into the game? That was basically most of the first year, was developing tools and things like that. That's why it took four years to make, because the first year was building a set of tools that we could get Tom's art straight from his drawing programs into the game and make it look right and all of that kind of stuff.
Tom Mead:
I felt like I had to very quickly learn how to become a digital artist, as well. I used Photoshop a lot, but I was entirely traditional, so I was about as far removed from a game artist as you could have been at the beginning of our process. So, it was very much I had to really figure it out, as quickly as I could, without changing the style of what I did, which was very tough, but it worked out. Now, I actually do digital art much more than traditional art, which is ironic.
Dom Clarke:
I think at first, I tried to make Tom just build a library of sprites and things like that. There was this big separation between Tom, correct me if I'm wrong, but you like to draw in a way that you are in control of the whole image, you can compose the entire thing. It was that kept being the sticking point, because a lot of games you make by building tiny, small pieces and then having a little level designer or whatever put them together later. Tom really wanted to just be able to draw what the camera sees, essentially, and have almost total control over all of that. The other side of it was that he had this method of working that produced these really great-looking images and the more we tried to force him off of that into a traditional, quote unquote, game dev pipeline, the quality of the work just dropped and Tom was miserable and we were fighting these tools, so we just decided to commit fully to let's make a pipeline that works for both of us here.
Dom Clarke:
So, what we ended up doing was deciding that Tom never has to go out of Photoshop to create any kind of art, so he never has to go into Unity. We basically built a suite of tools that takes really detailed Photoshop documents, every single level in Silt is a big Photoshop file, many, many layers, all the 3D offset stuff are just layers in Photoshop, and by naming the layers correctly and doing a bunch of stuff, our scripts can churn all of that out and turn it into things that the game engine can process and just lay it all out, do the level design in Photoshop, basically.
Dom Clarke:
By the time Silt was in full production, we had tools that Tom could just do level design in Photoshop and you never really felt like you had to fight against Unity or any other stuff like that. We just had these one button scripts that could convert it from Photoshop to Unity, and then it was in the game and we could play through the level. It was great, but that took a really long time to narrow that process in, because we were basically reinventing the wheel with everything.
Larry Kilgore III:
So, I did hear that you guys spent some time in an accelerator in Sweden called Stugan. Can you tell us a bit about that and what that was like and at what point you guys were there during your development process?
Tom Mead:
So, that was 2018. I think that was literally half a year into us initially meeting and doing pre-pre-production. Really, it came along because whenever I'm bored, I endlessly search for funding, just because as an artist, I just know that you're always going to need extra money, extra pots of money here and there, and I literally just found it through that. It sounded really too good to be true when I first found it. We get to go to a forest in the middle of Sweden for two months, all expenses paid, and it was like, "There's something dodgy about this, this is too great, but let's apply for it anyway." We did and we luckily got in. Once we were there, it was just a bit of a magical experience, really, because surrounded by loads of other incredibly talented indie dev teams from around the world and an amazing network of people. Really, I know it sounds like really cheesy to say when it is an accelerator, but it genuinely accelerated the production of Silt pretty dramatically. It went from being a little pet project between us to suddenly feeling it was a real thing.
Dom Clarke:
The other side of it, as well, apart from it being this beautiful place where we got to make the game and meet awesome people, the big thing for us was that, as we've said before, we were total outsiders and we had no idea that we had any right to call ourselves game developers or want to be game developers or anything. When we got there, we were just immediately treated as peers by all of these other people who, to us, looked like amazing game developers. There were 15 other dev teams there and we had Swedish games industry people coming, so CEOs and people who make games you've heard of, coming over and sharing their knowledge and stuff like that. We never once got treated like inexperienced students or something, we got treated like we were peers of everyone. We left that place feeling like we were game devs now and not just imposters, and I think that was really, really important.
Clinton Bader:
How did you find out about it in the first place? How did you come across this being a thing so that maybe other people can look for these types of opportunities?
Tom Mead:
I literally was looking for indie game funding. I think it just came up through Google, through that, it was that simple. It just sounded like such an amazing experience that we couldn't not apply.
Clinton Bader:
Your Google foo is strong, got it.
Dom Clarke:
I think that's a lifetime of Tom having to subsist off of being an artist, because you've spent a lot of your life going on residencies for a few months like, "Just come and live in my house in the mountains in Montenegro for a while and paint." Anything like that where you just don't have to pay rent for a little while is amazing, because you can just work on your thing without having to make money. That's really useful at the beginning, because you never make any money.
Tom Mead:
Plus, I was used to looking for this type of money with the fine art world and the illustration world and it's really hard to find. There is money out there, but you have to really, really hunt. Jumping into this game industry was like, "There's so many opportunities, really," and it was really surprising to me. I'm not going to say it's easy to find them, but there's a lot of decent opportunities out there.
Dom Clarke:
I guess video games are just a way bigger economy than art was at the time. You're getting to tap into an industry that it's worth people's while to throw a bit of money into it, because it turns into loads of taxable revenue later or something. Every country wants a bit of game dev in it. It's just a place where people still spend money to buy the art and I don't think that was easy to find as just a fine artist or something.
Larry Kilgore III:
Some of the other guests that we've interviewed, too, it does seem that some of the European countries have been putting some funding behind things like the development of indie games and really recognizing that that's a cultural aspect that they want to grow.
Dom Clarke:
The Nordics in Europe are amazing for that, Sweden and Norway and Denmark.
Larry Kilgore III:
So, I know we talked a bit about that first year and the growing pains you had. Would you say that that first year was the biggest challenge you guys had or what would be the biggest challenge you guys had in getting the game across the finish line?
Dom Clarke:
It just got harder and harder, to be honest. So, Stugan was lovely, it was like a summer camp, but we worked really, really hard there. Everybody was working until midnight, 1:00, 2:00 on their projects. But it was nice, because we were in a nice place and we well taken care of and stuff. And then when we signed, when we met Fireshine and we had some talks and we signed, and we went onto an actual production time schedule with milestones and stuff, the amount of work in that schedule was really, really crazy. It was like nothing else we'd ever experienced. We were really inexperienced in terms of time management. We basically told the publisher how much we would make in what time, we didn't really know what we were going to build at that point. We pitched to the publisher with this two-year plan of breaking down everything we were going to make and it was insane. We had no way of knowing how it was going to work, no experience, we'd never done it before, and so we guessed.
Dom Clarke:
Fireshine were lovely with us, they never forced us into anything. When we did scale stuff back, they were totally open to it. They didn't hold us to this crazy timescale, but we held ourselves to it as best as we could. I think that involved, at least Tom and I, crunching quite a lot. So, that was just production, that was meeting the milestones where it was like, "We've got to build..." Our milestone, you know how Silt is four biomes and then a fifth middle area and stuff? We were delivering one of those each milestone, every three months or something, in rubbish alpha state. So, we were working really hard to meet those milestones at the end. Content in Silt is really slow to make, because Tom draws every single level separately. We're not reusing anything from level to level, we're not getting any efficiencies. None of the bosses share any of the same code with one another. It's a very stupid and inefficient way to make a game, but it was somehow what we decided to make, so all the way through that, we were scrambling.
Dom Clarke:
And then once we'd finished content, it switched over to porting and the release stuff, and again, Fireshine were amazing. They got us loads and loads of support with all of that, we had QA people and everything like that, but it was a lot, man. We released on five console platforms and three PC storefronts all on the same day, and I had one porting engineer part-time working with me and that was it. I'd never done any of it before, I didn't know what I was doing, so it was super duper difficult. But I think maybe next time round, we've learned a few lessons that, hopefully, we won't run into that same insanity. It was a real trial by fire the first game, for sure.
Clinton Bader:
Real quick, I want to... I know you guys aren't big on brag about yourselves, but I want to brag a little bit for you, if that's okay. You guys have gotten some really nice accolades about the game in 2022 on the Nintendo Indie World showcase, you were on the cover of Wireframe Magazine, and you had an official selection in the London Games Festival. Truly, you guys have gotten a lot of well-deserved accolades, but I think the big question on our minds now is what's next for you guys? What's next for Spiral Circus Games? Do you have any projects on the horizon that you could possibly share with us?
Dom Clarke:
Basically, we finally, just maybe a week ago, I wrapped the last commitments that we had with our publisher in terms of post-release support and everything like that. So, we've got our final round of patches out for Silt, did all of that kind of stuff, and over the last week, I was mothballing the Silt project, which is really nice, just backing everything up. Tom and I are back in the design room now and we're working on the new thing, but we haven't got anything to say about it yet.
Clinton Bader:
Got it. Top secret.
Larry Kilgore III:
Tom Mead and Dom Clarke, it's been a pleasure talking to you guys about Silt. It's a unique and fun game and I think it deserves all of the positive reactions and responses that it's gotten. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us your story and taking the time to join us here on PixelSmiths.
Tom Mead:
Nice chatting to you guys. Thank you very much for having us.
Dom Clarke:
Thanks, it's been really nice.
Larry Kilgore III:
The music in this episode is from the game Silt and is performed and composed by Nick Dymond. Silt is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox and PlayStation platforms. You can find out more about the company and the game at their website, spiralcircusgames.com. You can also follow Silt on Twitter @siltgame and Spiral Circus Games at @gamecircus. PixelSmiths is brought to you by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production services for businesses, podcampmedia.com. Executive producers Dusty Weiss and I oversee editing and production.
Clinton Bader:
You can follow me, Clinton Bader, on social media @paperthinhere and on twitch.tv/paperthinhere.
Larry Kilgore III:
Thanks for tuning into PixelSmiths, I'm Larry Kilgore IIL.
Clinton Bader:
And I'm Clinton Paperthin Bader.
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