 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel, and SteelSeries. Hey guys, we're here at the Indie Mega booth with Life Goes On. And this game, as far as I can tell, is about dying to progress. Is there any more you can tell me about it? Sure, yeah. Well, Life Goes On originally started as a global game jam project in 2012. The theme for the year was about the Ouroboros, and that's a symbol of life, death, and rebirth. So what we wanted to do is we really wanted to create a theme that fit with that. So we figured death and reincarnation was the perfect idea. So in what way does that actually make sense? We figured making a puzzle game where your deaths are actually meaningful and alter the state of the game is something that we really wanted to explore and that's something that we were really interested in. Because generally speaking, death in games is really bad, you know. It's a very common trope. It's been like that way since the very beginning. And we really wanted to take a look at it and see how we could do it differently and show people that maybe innovating on traditional mechanics is a very good idea and it can actually sell some great games. Yeah, and it's cool how you took a, like you said, traditional mechanic of death, but then just completely destroyed the idea of it, which is my favorite part. Because you just murdered the classic idea of death, where you go back to a checkpoint and you're like, no, to get to a checkpoint you must die, which is my favorite part of the whole game. I love the art style. I love the different elements. That's all awesome. Is there anything else you can add about the game? Like, is there any little story elements or anything like that? Sure, well, you know, we have a knight and he's searching for a grail because isn't that what knights do? The problem is that none of the grails are really the right ones, so they keep going through to get through all these traps and puzzles to find the right grail. You know, they just keep finding stuff that isn't really right for them, so they just keep on going. Your grail's in another castle? Something like that, yeah. Yeah. That sounds like that. I didn't want to say it, but yeah, generally. Maybe we'll make a joke where someone comes out and says, your grail is in another castle. I don't know. That's going to take some localization though, so. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. All right, how can people get this game? Sure, well, first off, we have the demo available for download off our website. We have on our website, it's available for PC, Mac and Linux. We also just put it up on Steam this week. Currently on Steam, it is PC only, because we were coming to PAX, things got really busy and all that stuff. So, after PAX is over, we're going to throw up the Mac and the Linux builds, and we're going to make sure people can play it on those platforms as well. We really want to support all the platforms and spread the gaming love and make sure that it's not just PC users that are getting all the great games. Now, speaking of different platforms and all that kind of stuff, you guys, as far as I've heard, are a giant group of programmers that you met at Games Jam. How exactly did that work out, all of you being programmers? All right, well, that was a bit interesting when we were delegating roles. You know, we were talking around and it's like, what can you do? Oh, I have a programming degree. Oh, I have a programming degree in engineering. Oh, I'm doing my master's in computing science. Oh, I did a math degree. It's like, all right, well, what can we do with that? So, it's like, okay, well, do you have experience making any art? Yeah, I took like a course and we're like, oh, great, you're our artist. They were like, we need a sound guy. I'm like, well, I made sound effects once. They're like, great, you're the sound guy. You know, and Susan was like, well, really, I'm just a programmer. We're like, great, you're now the code monkey. You're only going to be programming for the rest of the project. So, that's kind of how we delegated roles. Eric is kind of our jack of all trades. So, we just get him to do whatever we need him to do. And, you know, he's been great. He just goes and gets it done. And, you know, we need people like that because we're four people. We're a really small company. You know, we're bootstrapping it ourselves. And, you know, everybody has to contribute in every way. So, you know, we all contribute to design. We all contribute to the levels. We give our feedback on the art style. You know, it's not always what our artist is looking for because he's like, hey, give me some feedback. We're like, yeah, looks good. Ship it. He's like, no, but what about this? And we're like, yeah, I guess so. But, yeah, so sometimes it can be a bit frustrating when you're trying to get feedback on very specific things. But other than that, you know, we we got to help out with everybody in every way we can. So. That's awesome. And one little thing that they have here is, as he was saying, he's done some sound effects work. So he is the sound effects guy. Instead of just having his voice dying in the game repeatedly, he has decided to allow other people to have their voices dying in the game repeatedly. So if you're here at PAX, you can come down and check out their yellow box and do your own little death sound into it. I know I'm going to do one of mine. And then you can have your little part in the game. Is there anything else you have going on like that? Sure. We also have a mailing list signup sheet. And if you sign up for our mailing list, all of our knights have unique individual names. So if you sign up for our mailing list, you can suggest a name that we that we're going to put in the game. But the way our names work is they're all randomly generated. So we picked bits and pieces from every name in order to randomly generate our names. So when you come and you can give us a name, you're actually giving us 20 or 30 different names based on how many names we have. So that's that's I think that's pretty cool. That's really cool. It's awesome that people can contribute to the game that they might like. Hey, guys, so I'm doing my death sound animation right now. So hopefully the mic picks this up well. My voice is a little bit hoarse, but I'm going to go for it anyways. Oh, man, hopefully that picked up well. I almost felt like I was going to throw up, but that worked. All right. So if you're here, come down, put in your email, shout into the box. 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