Chris: Joining me today are the two lead devs of Nitro Brew Games. They're working on Cosmic Latte, a dating sim-style space adventure. Would you two like to introduce yourself?
Canni: Yeah. So, I'm CannibalBlue. I have no previous video game creating experience at all. But, um, I decided one day that I wanted to make a dating sim, and I knew that Eric was pretty good with coding. And so, I reached out to him to see if he wanted to work on it with me and it kind of just took off from there.
Eric. Yeah! And, hi guys. I'm LeifEricson, a.k.a. Eric. I've been doing programming on and off for, you know, like maybe eight-ish years or so. And uh, Canni has been my friend for a while, and they they approached me one day and said, "Hey I have this idea for a really ambitious project. It's a dating sim. Would you like to help out?" And I said, "Absolutely I would." And it's all started from there for me.
Chris: I know you have had this idea in your mind for a while. What actually inspired you to go through with making this game, Canni?
Canni: So, I saw someone on Twitter who was working on a visual novel, and they were showing updates of what it looked like. And, you know... I thought to myself, I was like, "Well I can make 2D art." And it just seemed easy enough. I really love story writing. I run a lot of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. So I'm all on board with world building, and you know, character development and everything. So I was like, you know, this is definitely something that I could do. I've always wanted to make a game, that's kind of just where it took off.
Chris: I mean it's actually quite amazing that you actually went through with starting to work on it, and getting Eric involved. And not just letting it sit in your head. I have a feeling, like every single person in the world just has this idea for some type of story. But never takes the initiative type thing, you know what I mean?
Canni: Yeah. And honestly, Eric is kind of the mastermind behind all of it too. I'll come with him with a really ambitious idea and I'll just be like, "Hey Eric, is this possible?" And he's like, "Well, I'm not sure, but let me try." And then he gets in there and does his coding stuff, and it works. And I'm just, it's like magic.
Chris: Speaking about all the different ideas he comes up with, I know that the game is primarily a visual novel. I guess this is for a question for both of you. What would you say the game is actually about? With all these different systems... like you mentioned crafting, and traveling to different universes, and all that sorts of stuff. Do you just label it as a visual novel, a dating sim, or something else?
Eric: I mean, I think when you primarily think of it the first thought is definitely that it's a dating sim. But you know, it has a lot of RPG elements too. Like you mentioned, we do have a crafting system. There's a currency and shop system. You can build up stats, in relation to your strength and the affection that you build towards the different characters. So it is a dating sim, but it has a lot of elements of, you know, things like RPGs and other games that we love to play. Just different elements of different genres.
Canni: Yeah, we definitely wanted to make it as interactive as we possibly could. I know that a lot of people, myself included, when I'm playing visual novels or dating sims I'm just like... "Okay. Click, click." It's a lot of dialogue. It's a lot of clicking. And we wanted to add in a couple of elements that break that up a little bit, so that you feel like you're doing something. And so that you feel like you've actually got to put a little bit of work into, you know, building a relationship with these characters.
Chris: When you say it's a RPG... I know this probably isn't the case, but all that comes to mind is like there's gonna be some sort of secret, hidden boss with ten faces. And I just can't get the idea out of my mind, even though I know it's more of a dating sim.
Eric: I would say, like, RPG elements. But maybe the the whole battling mechanic of RPGs, not so much.
Chris: Darn, I can't use mana and all that stuff? Okay. Canni, why did you decide on a dating sim, versus any other genre? Was that just the style of game you knew you wanted to have made, or was it something you decided over time?
Canni: So initially, that was actually right out the gate. I was like, I want to make a dating sim. I really love Monster Prom. I really loved Doki Doki [Literature Club], there's so many that I could go on about that I really like to play. And when I saw other people working on their dating sims I was like, "This seems like something that I could do." I really love building characters in a way that makes them feel very well-rounded. And like, you understand who they are. That comes with the territory of working on Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. So I really wanted to take that element of my writing and put that into a dating sim.
Canni: You know, building off of that a little bit... I have, from the very beginning of working on Cosmic Latte, been very passionate and very vocal about wanting these characters to not just be very 2D in how they feel when you interact with them. I wanted them to have flaws. I wanted them to have ambitions, I wanted them to have fears. They're gonna have character traits that the player might not even like very much. But it makes them feel like a more real character, rather than just a cookie-cutter romance character.
Chris: When you say character traits people won't like... what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean like, "oh this type of food," like many other dating games? Or, what do you mean?
Canni: No, it goes a little bit deeper than that. We have characters that have trauma. We have characters that have flaws in terms of how they interact socially and emotionally. Some characters are a lot more off-putting and a lot more cold because of their past, and we have these backstories that we're writing for them that really reflect why they act the way that they do. But, yeah, it goes more than just that they like they like a food, or they dislike a food, or something. They are real, with raw character traits and character flaws. We have a whole roster. I believe we have nine romance characters, all with very different traits, very different sexualities, very different identities. We wanted to be as inclusive as we possibly could. We've got bisexual characters, we have an ace character. We have two trans characters. One of them isn't romanceable. But we did want to put, you know, as much inclusivity as we possibly could in there. Our dev team is an array of different people with different stories, and so we wanted to reflect that in the game that we were making.
Chris: Would you say a lot of the characters you guys designed, you can sort of see yourselves in?
Canni: Oh, absolutely. We have several developers that are working on it that identify as ace, or trans. Bisexual, myself. Non-binary. So I wanted to make sure that as we write these stories, we get their input on what would be the best way to write them, so that it came from their experiences. Granted, we are still in the infancy of the writing process. We have the characters laid out and outlined, but we're still working through that. But as we continue the writing process, we are getting a lot of input from these different people with different experiences so that we can have an accurate depiction of these different walks of life.
Chris: When did you guys actually start working on this? It sounds like there's been a lot of time and consideration put into it. When did you guys actually start?
Eric: I think it was about a year ago that I joined. I think that was pretty early on, when Canni was just coming up with the initial ideas for it. So I would say it's been about a year of development so far, on and off. There's been periods where, you know, our lives are busy and we haven't been able to work on it as much. Every once in a while we get back together and we push and add some more things to the game. It's just been a cycle of on and off development over the past year.
Chris: Well I will say, it does look very polished. And on the better side of really early game development type stuff. I'm sort of surprised to only hear that it's been only a year.
Canni: It has been very on and off. It's been snippets of like, three months of working on it, and then three months of not working on it. Like Eric was saying, we get really busy. We've also been very transparent with each other, about how we have no expectations of how quickly we work on this. So everybody is kind of just working at their own pace and working on what they can, when they can.
Chris: It's only been about a year since you started the process of making the game. I guess you had to decide on the setting and all that. What made you decide to do a space adventure in a café? And, what made you decide on the name Cosmic Latte?
Canni: I could take this question. So, the game itself doesn't actually take place in a coffee shop. There are coffee shop elements, like, just a very cozy coffee shop-type vibe. I don't know if you've ever played the game "Coffee Talk", but I love that atmosphere. So it's sprinkled in a little bit, but the game actually takes place on a the first ever Intergalactic College space station. So, the space station i anchored just outside of a solar system that we have completely made up ourselves. It's called S19, Solar System 19, and the spaceship is called Elysium. So the actual setting of the game is more of a college, school-type setting. But, as far as the space theme, I guess it was just something that I hadn't seen done yet. And I really love space. It also has a cyberpunk kind of aesthetic as well. We've got a lot of characters with really cool, grungy-looking cybernetics. So it kind of teeters between sci-fi and cyberpunk in terms of the aesthetic.
Canni: The reason that I chose the name Cosmic latte it's kind of cheesy um but I had a boyfriend a couple years back who we were like talking about space and existence and everything and he ended up saying something really cute to me that was like it was like we're floating specks in a cosmic latte and um so yeah a it was like this really cute little like romantic line that he had said to me and I had this idea of adding that line into the game and so from there I was like well actually if we're gonna put the line of the game we should totally like name it Cosmic latte just to kind of like tie everything together also to answer your question from earlier I I have played coffee talk it's been a while though but that's pretty cool and the the name's not that cheesy actually craziest like thing I've ever heard someone say like out of the blue if I heard what you heard to come up with Cosmic latte so I know you've been like the lead on the coding side things how how has that been just taking on a whole bunch of the coding for this whole game and just tell me about your process sure yeah it's it's been actually a lot of fun because we uh I hadn't had much experience with the the game engine we're using which by the way is renpai uh it's a visual novel oriented like scripting language based on python um so it makes it really easy to do a lot of the I guess you would say basic visual novel interactions like you know the dialogue and scene transitions things like is are all pretty straightforward to implement so um it's been a lot of fun learning that and learning all the features of that and also learning on how to expand on it because it's based in Python A lot of it is very easy to you know extend and add features to so a lot of the stuff that you know as candies was saying earlier when they would come to me and be like can this thing possibly be done in in this engine and I I go back to them like yeah I don't know maybe let me look into it but a lot of the times it is possible because internally it's just python so it's been a lot of fun trying to work out these little problems of how to add you know specific features when our team like brainstorms new ideas and things like is python like like your main language you've learned over the years or I know it's the base language ever everyone usually starts off with but would you say it's your main language you like to use overall definitely it's definitely the easiest for me to quickly you know write stuff when I need to test things it is a scripting language which makes it very easy to do you know basic little little scripts and things like that so it's probably my default although a lot of um a lot of uh of the the classes I took in school were on C and C plus plus which is let's say a lot more fun to use than python a lot more challenging but yeah I'd say C plus plus what I learned it with Visual Studio hurts me to this day why did you decide on the engine you chose I think I know somewhat because I had this discussion with Kenny a little earlier but is is there any specific reasons why uh okay did you want and or did you want me to answer this one um yeah yeah so um we chose rampai well mostly Eric chose rampai I told him I had this idea but I had no idea how to execute it and he he had brought it up to me that rempi was a pretty commonly used engine for visual novels and dating Sims and was actually mentioned that the creators of Doki Doki used and so he had already like he had already known what it was and kind of just like threw the idea my way and you you guys have posted on Twitter in the past pictures of you testing the game on mobile Okay so said that might have some stuff to do with rampai as well or um I'll let Eric here handle that question we uh we we had started this not really even thinking about you know porting to to mobile or to consult or anything like that um but it's as we got more familiar with run by I started to look into it just sort of out of curiosity and uh out of the box Brent pie supports you know uh building games for for iOS for Android for PC Mac and Linux so it's pretty cross-platform out of the box so so it is a possibility down the road that we could release a mobile version uh potentially eventually like a console version things like that it's always an option to us if we want to you know pursue that if you did do a mobile version do you think you guys would have to cut anything out from all the different aspects that you have going on in the game due to like control interface wise or do you think it would be on fire with a computer version of the game I would try my best not to cut out any features but it would probably need its own control like control scheme yeah you probably have to work around the touch screen and things like that I mean renby does have functions uh to deal with with you know mobile specific like touch screen things like that but it would have to be a separate development for that what are you guys favorite development things that have happened so far like stories or anything like that okay so so one of my favorites and I and I keep bringing it up um there was uh there was a moment where we Eric has an OC that he has made her name is Isme and we were testing DLC characters because we would like to make DLC down the road and he ended up putting in the code um Isme is the test DLC character a few months down the road we ended up um actually adding Isme as an NPC because we love her and I go into the game to like test some stuff and I see that the new test character's name is test May and it's just like a little it's just a little joke between us that I I thought that was really fun yeah I love putting little jokes in there like that um I I probably need a second to think about what my my answer to that would be though there is another spot in the game where we're testing um like add-ons and there's like a whole add-on menu and Eric had put in because we're both really big Twilight fans and I just opened up the game had no idea that he put it in there and like the dialogue for one of the for one of the buttons is the opening to Twilight oh no and I just loved that yeah Kenny and I because um because when you add the dialogue and script for the game you have to go into the code Kenny and I do sometimes sneak in little little jokes inside jokes between us uh or we put them you know in little messages when they get when things get added to GitHub or just places that one of us will find it and just not expect to see some joke there and it's just the funny thing we do back and forth I really love it so just a whole bunch of inside jokes going on all the time without being known yeah like I sent a commit I sent a commit the other day to our GitHub and I just titled it Bello where the hell have you been Loca recently Kenny I've seen you online on Discord or and do not disturb on Discord playing Cosmic latte is is it in the early test phases or would you say it's getting closer to a finished product because I see it more and more commonly happening so so it's kind of a it's kind of a double double reason there's two reasons why you'll see me playing it so the main reason why you'll see it like open like that is because I am testing things um I'm writing in a lot of dialogue and stuff and then I'm going through and and actually like playing through the dialogue and making sure that the pacing feels comfortable and not rushed or not really sluggish um so you'll see me doing that but I also sometimes will just leave it up because I I kind of want other people to be like Cosmic latte what is that what is candy playing and so I just thought it would be like a little fun thing that people can see that I'm playing that it gets the name out there a little bit so it's kind of two reasons as far as how polished and like done the game is um I would say that a really large portion of the game mechanically is done um we have all the like all the inner workings of the stats and the characters in all of the character art is done um several of the backgrounds definitely still have a lot more to go um what what we're really working on now is the writing um which is coming with more like mechanics and things that we need to put in but um at face value it looks done we just have to finish the story which is huge for um having nine different characters with with nine different stories and branches it's gonna take us quite a while to finish the the story writing aspect of it I I would assume a visual novel would require a lot of variety oh absolutely and then you have to take that writing you know I'll write it in one note or Google Docs and then I've got to take that writing and put it into renpai um I use the atom editor I don't think that's the one Eric uses but that's the one I use and then I've got to put it in there I did not know a single lick of python prior to this literally nothing um and Eric has been really patient with me and he's gotten several calls with me and and basically showed me how to add different um mostly lines of just lines of dialogue but how to change scenes how to add pauses um labels like there there's so much that I've learned over the last last year when it comes to like just coding this visual novel dating Sim it sounds like it's been quite The Learning Experience uh for both of you I'm assuming But Eric what what has it been like teaching candy how to use some basic python see it's really fun for me I love like I just love programming so I love like being able to show other people how to do little things and I can see candy getting better you know every week and it's just been a lot of fun for me to learn how to use Bren pie and then be able to pass on how to do some of the more fancy advanced stuff to candy and and see them their knowledge on it grow as well so it's been fun we have a bug report Channel where like if one of us launches the game and we get hit with an error we can like we can basically copy the markdown for Discord and post it in there and um it's it's at least once a week where I'm like Eric I broke it what did I do and it's always something really silly that I just had glanced over and I think that's the that's the biggest thing that I've learned from learning python with Eric is like most of it is just like just some really small thing that you would think is very insignificant that the game just gets hung up on you forgot the semicolon you forgot this parenthesis exactly exactly yes you do I think the main thing you've learned is that computers are not forgiving in that way they're not understanding of your needs yeah it can't interpret it's it's very exact in in how it reads the code and so I've got to make sure that I'm very exact and how like I'm writing it syntax can never be everyone's worst nightmare when it comes to that type of stuff I know this isn't a very set in stone thing at the moment but Kenny when were you looking to have this game out I I know it's not very set in stone thing but oh man it is such a um it's such a hard to tell kind of thing because because we do keep taking such big frequent breaks um it's hard to tell and it's really hard to tell how much progress we've made and how much more we have to go um but looking at the game where it is now um I truly and genuinely think that if we were to buckle down on the writing um we've taken on a couple of new writers recently if we were to really buckle down on this writing um I think we could have it out by next year I would love to see it out by 2023 I'm not I'm not crossing my fingers or anything because it can change at any moment when it comes out but it would be amazing to see yeah and we've also talked about like a patreon um demo of the game as well um or just like we both are in The Gaming Community and twitch community so we have friends that stream and we've talked about having a mostly finished version and you know having a couple of our friends like beta tested um like a closed beta on stream or something prior to it coming out so you said there's a whole bunch of other people working on this game have has there been anyone on the project as long as the two of you um starting out it was pretty just pretty much just me and um Eric um Logan did come on pretty early and say that he wanted to help work out the writing um however his like position on that has changed because he's like super busy with work so he's mostly just been like an idea guy um and he wanted to help with putting some dialogue in and stuff um but for the most part everybody else kind of trickled in over the last year I mean everyone needs an idea that's Logan a little to it these are great yeah really ambitious sometimes sometimes it's a good idea sometimes it's something like you should uh make it a strand time he's like we should we should add combat into the game and I was like Logan it's a cozy game only blood makes me cozy yeah it's like needs more guns so you're gonna be the one to come up with an idea for you know an epic final boss like you were saying yeah absolutely um but we um we also have a Discord for it with a few people in the Discord who aren't actually working on the game um a couple of really close friends are in the Discord and um we're just kind of giving them like little sneak peeks and updates on the game um as well as um having an open suggestions Channel and in that suggestions Channel we've also talked about um Easter eggs and stuff like that so we plan to add quite a few Easter eggs even um some that are like really special to each of the developers that'll be kind of hidden in the game I I heard you talk about a whole bunch of extra features like the Easter eggs and DLC would you say that after the game initially releases you plan on adding more content not frequently but semi-frequently type thing or only every once in a while or not at all I guess that's what I'm trying to get at I personally would love to see us add more content to the game it really is going to depend on like what launch looks like and um how how the game ends up turning out once it's finished um but I we've bounced ideas off of each other about DLCs there are a lot of NPCs that are in the game right now that we were like okay you know we could do a DLC later down the road where they're romanceables we've also talked about um in-game content for cosmetics um we have a Cosmetic System for the characters and so that's at at the at the very least we do want to add like some cosmetics and stuff but um depending on how it turns out I would love to see like some DLC and stuff and um you know we've talked about you know depending on how it turns out if we want to make other games or you know try something else it's you know it's just a passion project in yeah let's see where it goes uh we also as far as the add-on system and the DLC system uh I'm trying my best to design it in a way that it would be very easy for uh you know people in the community to add uh like their own mods and things too so it's it's it's designed in such a way that it's sort of like a file like a DLC slash mod loader system so so community members could make all kinds of content for it too hopefully yeah we love mods so we would love to see people mod and add their own characters uh my mods are always great one of the little Classics like Thomas the Tank Engine I love mods uh but you guys heard you guys did not we want to see Thomas the Tank Engine and Cosmic latte I want to date Thomas the Tank Engine there make it happen the goal was that that should be possible will there be achievements time to it I need to know yes yes we've talked about it we plan to have steam achievements um both silly and more serious ones as well as um some hidden achievements in the game um that could change how the game looks a little bit I don't want to give too much away because I think it'd be really exciting to discover this so sort of like cuphead where when you complete everything on pacifist or S rank it adds like a filter or new audio option type deal along those lines yeah it'll it'll definitely add things into the game um once you you've passed certain achievements if the launch does well could you guys see yourself working on more games in the future or other projects or would you just stick to this one I I definitely for me I I love working in games I love programming I love tinkering so as long as it's a project that I'm passionate about and that you know the rest of the team is postured about I would I would definitely be open to making more stuff after this it's just coming up with ideas that we would all be passionate about I think yeah absolutely I've always really like I you know I've thought about this a lot because I'm like what's what's after once we finish this um I would really love to see us work on like an RPG or something like a pixel RPG I love that stuff and I think we totally could one of my favorite games of all time actually is a pixel RPG it's uh it's a Nintendo property that a lot of people know about it's a Golden Sun so I love pixel RPGs and that would be awesome to see yeah well yeah we'll just kind of have to see where where it goes with it and how we're feeling once it's done so enough questions about the game okay I have a question about your guy's name how did you end up with Nitro blue games as your Game Dev Group Company whatever you want to call it as your name uh I think that Eric you were the one who came up with that right yeah I think so um initially we were gonna just call ourselves Cosmic latte games but I believe that that name had already been taken so we just started brainstorming related ideas to Cosmic latte all kinds of ideas and I think it just Nitro Brew it just kind of came to me I suggested it and everybody seemed to really like it so that's what we went with honestly it's a great name I won't lie it kind of rolls off the tongue a little bit I really like it other than the game what what are some side projects you guys have been wanting to work on and look forward to I guess um for me um mostly you know Cosmic latte has kind of been my passion project I'm also working on a um Tarot deck um that I'm really close to finishing and that's been kind of my other like passion project but other than that it's it's mostly been really I've been really hyper focused on concert holiday what about you Eric I've been super into Retro Computing lately so uh on the uh in the danger of getting too nerdy about this I have a small little uh circuit board basically with a tiny computer roughly from the 80s era that I've been messing with so a lot of my extra spare time I've been and making little programs for that and and tinkering with the hardware on that so that's been my main side project lately you don't have to be worried about getting too nerdy about stuff like that I I love hearing about all sorts of computer work or anything like that and it sounds like a lot of fun yeah the name of the uh the the board is the the CPU Bill z80 single board computer if anybody is interested in looking into that if anybody out there is into Retro Computing I've had a lot of fun with this board so definitely uh look into that I'm gonna have to look into that out there at this interview is all done with see see what it's all about I I haven't gotten into a lot of retro stuff I'm I'm more software side than the hardware side I'll put it that way but yeah other than that do you guys have anything else you want to say any other things you'd like to talk about um I just wanted to give a shout out to everybody else who's working on the game really quickly if that's okay that's completely fine awesome um so I'm the I'm the writing spectrum of things we have a really awesome group of writers including celestio Cali um Lex Vapor Han Solo um as well as XI Moonstone um I know that she's like kind of away right now but she's also been helping us with that um and then on the art end of things um kanamochi did reui ended an absolute wonderful job at it and then we just brought on a new artist um her name is Coda and she's going to be drawing all of our items and stuff in game and then um Revere heart who is going to be doing uh adding dialogue they've been kind of helping us with ideas and stuff as well so they're kind of helping with the writing as well um story building but they're going to be adding our dialogue actually into the into the rimpai engine and then of course Logan who's doing kind of a little bit of everything um his username is oysters but shout out to all of them for helping us with this project well it sounds like quite the good sized team I I honestly didn't know it was that big but that's a decent amount of people working on it yeah what about you Eric I'm just really excited to keep working on this it's been a real something I've been like super super passionate about so I hope that we can you know keep working on it I hope that maybe uh next year this gamer release or at least we can release a demo and yeah I'm just really excited that uh we got uh to talk about the game a little bit yeah thank you for hosting this handy it's it's been amazing I've I've been really excited for this and looking forward to talking to you guys about it because get game development's fun uh I'll put it that way it said it's challenging and it's a lot of work but it is a lot of fun once again I just want to thank everyone for watching and especially a big thank you to the devs Eric and Kenny for actually coming on I know it's been a while since I've uploaded anything you'll see something about it in tomorrow's video type thing but I just want to apologize for it taking forever to you guys and to my Trope uh but I hope you enjoyed the interview once again thank you Eric Kenny and everyone involved in the game because I'm very excited for it and yeah have a great day uh maybe maybe like maybe subscribe because big brain