Gaming hosts Josh and John are joined by Luke and Scott from Milky Tea studios to chat about Grit and Valor - 1949. Releasing TODAY, Grit and Valor is a dieselpunk, real-time roguelike set in an alt-history WWII where you command insane mechs against overwhelming odds. We get an inside look into the development, art, learn what game jams are and a whole lot more. It’s an incredible video game packed episode that’s a ton of fun! All the gaming news you need, each and every week from the Video Gamers Podcast! Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Ol’ Jake, Disratory and Gaius Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/ Follow us on X: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Grit and Valor - 1949 about?
Today, we're going to be taking a look at the very soon to release Grit and Valor 1949 with two of the people that helped create it. But first, some introductions are in order. I am your host, Josh. And joining me, if he had a grit level, it would be fine because he's a softie. It's John.
It's too early to reply to that. I don't even know what you mean by that.
A little sandpaper humor early in the morning? Come on, man.
Okay, I'll take the sandpaper. I'm not sure what to do with the softy part of it. John, there were four people that understood that reference, man.
Love it. And joining us from Milky Tea Studios, they're faster than a dragon, more durable than a thunderhead, smarter than the command vehicle. It's the ironclad duo of Luke and Scott.
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Chapter 2: Who are the creators behind Grit and Valor?
Hello, everyone.
Little grit and valor mech, you know, references there.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Yeah, you did a great job, man. I think you plugged every possible reference from the demo into that intro. I've done my work. I've done my work, boys.
Luke, Scott, how are you guys doing this morning?
Very, very well, honey.
Thank you guys for joining us, man. You know, we got to play your demo. We actually talked about this game in, we did an episode on some of the Steam Next Fest games that we came across. And Grit and Valor 1949 was absolutely one of those games. We started talking about it. We mentioned it in the episode. A lot of people from our community tried it out.
We got some very positive feedback from them as well. And so we thought, man, this is one of those games that's absolutely on our radar. We really would like to know a little bit more about. John reached out to you guys, and you both graciously agreed to come on this podcast and talk about it a little bit more. So we're going to get into that here in just a second. But I got to start off, guys.
Grin Fowler releases in five days from the date that we're recording this. First of all, congratulations. Second of all, how are the nerves holding up?
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Chapter 3: What is the gameplay style of Grit and Valor?
You know, you've got Gundams, which are a bit more sleek and sci-fi looking. And we wanted to go down that road of having something that felt more... Chunkier. Yeah, chunkier and smoggier and a bit grimmer. So that's where that whole kind of World War II theme came in as well, which was another big thing for us because I think we were all very interested in that side of things historically and...
this initially it started as a bit of a world war ii game and then we weren't really finding anything too unique about that that we were too excited by so we eventually stemmed into what if we had mechs to it what would the world look like if world war ii continued with mechs and it just went from there really so how long have you guys both been with milky tea if you don't mind me asking uh for me it's almost nine years now it's been a little while
And Luke? Yeah, I think I'm about a year. So I'm relatively, comparatively a new addition.
So did you guys, like, how long... How do I phrase this? You mentioned that this game was intended to be a, just sort of like a World War II game and it evolved into this more mech kind of like, you know, gritty pseudo sci-fi sort of setting. Did you guys have influence in pushing it in that direction? Or how does, how does that work?
How does a game evolve from sort of like one genre and style to another like this?
So for us, all of our previous games have come from game jams, something that we do occasionally, especially in between projects. We'll spend a week or two doing some game jams. It's very much just focused on what is a cool idea in terms of gameplay, but also some visuals that we could push.
um so yeah this game started where we tried to make some sort of real-time quite small scale strategy game and i think naturally we lent into the world war ii side of things just because it sounded interesting it was something that we thought was quite cool um but we're always flexible so we're always testing the game and i think everyone on the team has a decent say in what that game is going to become
And maybe in those early stages, it wasn't quite exciting everyone enough. We weren't really seeing where it was going and you compare it to other World War II games and we were a bit like, hmm, don't know. So I don't know exactly where the idea came from, but at some point it was like, hey, what if there's mechs in this world?
um and what if we control those mechs and maybe the enemy have them and yeah things just went kind of crazy from there so it was just a case of trying out really and it it started getting a lot more exciting quite quickly so we just went into it after that i think once you become a mech fan you're kind of forever a mech fan there's never enough mech based content that you can get your hands on i think um
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Chapter 4: How did the concept of Grit and Valor evolve?
Even after the missions where you go back to your home base and you see the layout for all the different buildings and stuff, the vibe of this game is absolutely just spot on. So, I mean, kudos. Scott, you said as a designer, this is one of those things you kind of try to keep everything cohesive and kind of together.
And Luke being an artist on this and actually being the person that helps create these visuals and stuff like that, too. I got to tap into this artist thing one more time, man, because I view art as somebody that doesn't have any creativity at all. Musicians are like artists, right?
And it's like, but if I went to a musician that prefers playing classical music and said, hey, man, I need you to come up with this heavy metal riff for me kind of thing, like, That guy might be like, that's not really my style. Maybe I can, but I don't know, man. Is it the same with an artist?
With Diesel Punk, for instance, if they come up to you and say, hey, we want you to design this Diesel Punk and make sure that you keep this vibe together, if that's not really your thing, is that more of a challenge? Yeah.
I'm getting the feeling this is Luke's thing. Luke was probably pushing for this from the beginning. They're like, World War II, and he was like, oh, well, how about mechs, guys? I mean... It's probably a mix of both.
This is probably, yeah. I mean, a lot of my background's in mobile stuff, so...
probably going very uh i mean like classic mobile style so being able to work on something like grip is much closer to probably my more personal tastes and preferences and that kind of thing as well but i'm sort of my bowtown army they're brightly colored but they're still in this grim dark future which kind of mixes these two things together um but yeah yeah i'm so to your point uh trying to make the visuals all consistent as well um
Yeah, I think it is. Everyone on the project, because it came from a game jam, everyone's very sort of
bought in and they've got a lot of skill in the game in terms of like how much they care about this project so from the ui feeling kind of clunky in that same way even though it's all sort of hand painted that feeling sort of tactile and like you're pushing metal plates in place to sort of trying to keep the clarity on those small maps and everything like that i think everyone's been really invested in sort of trying to preserve that and you know scott you can speak to trying to
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Chapter 5: What makes the mechs in Grit and Valor unique?
Well, can you explain what that is?
I guess the idea comes from like if you're in a band and you were jamming to figure out what your next track was going to be or what your album was going to be and it's kind of you almost throw a lot of the ideas and pressures out of the window a little bit, start from scratch.
And just in our case, we'll usually do a few game jams together and we split off into really small teams where there might just be, say, a designer, a coder, and an artist. And we'll just be given some random themes. So it could be a dieselpunk theme. It might not even be...
a theme it might be a genre like a racing game or something and then you've just got two days to make a project with that sort of theme or setting in mind um so it just creates the scenario where you really focus on what is a cool gameplay loop or what is an interesting unique setting um and a lot of those game jams obviously we might not get something that quite works it might be a bit too silly or it might just not have those hooks but i think because of
that nature of just thinking well it's it's not it's not a big problem if we fail this it's just two days that we've spent doing this so the game gem we might learn a lot from it um so i think we generally get some really cool and you learn what doesn't work too exactly and that's just as important so yeah we've done tons of game gems where it's not quite worked but you'll you then learn okay well that mechanic's a bit weird or
are these playable or is it just the idea? Is this like the concept of a game or you actually have something like interactive that, that comes out of these two days?
Yeah, it's playable. That's kind of the crucial thing is like, that's impressive. In two days. I mean, it's, I mean, they're not necessarily always the prettiest, but, uh, right. Yeah. I mean, I get it.
You're probably, these are probably just polygons or, you know, uh, you know, maps of something maybe, but that's incredible, man.
I think it's like trying to find the fun. Yeah, like, for example, with this game, I can't remember what the very first Game Jam version looked like, but let's say you take away a lot of the art because we don't have time to do much of that in two days. So it's this very rudimentary kind of square environment that you can control some units and some of the units come in.
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Chapter 6: What is a game jam and how does it influence game development?
Chapter 7: How does Grit and Valor integrate player feedback?
Yeah, I think it is. Everyone on the project, because it came from a game jam, everyone's very sort of
bought in and they've got a lot of skill in the game in terms of like how much they care about this project so from the ui feeling kind of clunky in that same way even though it's all sort of hand painted that feeling sort of tactile and like you're pushing metal plates in place to sort of trying to keep the clarity on those small maps and everything like that i think everyone's been really invested in sort of trying to preserve that and you know scott you can speak to trying to
balance things looking visually impressive enough but also on those little maps clear enough you can tell when everything starts exploding what's going on yeah so all right so scott i have to i have to kind of toss this to you because one of the things that we always do is when we play a game or especially if we review a game and we're talking about it we always like to point out like every game has that kind of special something to it
We call it the hook, right? And, you know, in some recent games that we've talked about, like Astro Bot. So, you know, last year, amazing game. We played it. We loved it. It kind of took the world by storm. But the one thing that stood out kind of over and above everything else was the sound in Astro Bot. I mean, again, incredible game. The gameplay was awesome. The graphics were awesome.
But it was like the sound was the thing that you were just like, oh, my goodness. Split Fiction recently, we played that. The variety in Split Fiction, just that constant pacing of changing the way that these games fell, and it felt like 30 different games pulled into one.
So when we talk about what's that hook, that thing that stands out over and above everything else, and it doesn't mean that everything else is bad. It just means this is the thing that when you think about it, you go, man, I don't know why, but that's the first thing I think about. What's the hook for Grit and Valor to you?
I think it's definitely a mixture of things, but some of the key elements, I think we spoke about that real-time tactics gameplay. We've got quite a unique take on it in that we've got these small levels that take...
three four or five minutes to complete and that's a pretty intense challenge that you've got to focus on for those few minutes but then you come out of that and you think okay well what's the next one going to be and um the demo obviously covers the first region which is british isles and that kind of introduces you to some of those mechanics and the style of gameplay
But then we go into other regions and each one is completely unique. It's got a totally different look, of course, but we tried to add different challenges in there and different things for the player to get to grips with and master as well.
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Chapter 8: What is the hook that makes Grit and Valor stand out?
Like you guys first, that sounds good. I think the, the jump jet ability, or it was called the map jump in the demo, I think. So you, you basically launch through the air, like a hundred, 200 foot in the air, leap down onto a chosen tile, and then you deal a load of damage to everyone around that tile. Um, and that's, you got to do that with the ironclad and the demo.
Yeah.
Yeah. It just feels so cool. And. it sounds cool the vfx are cool yeah it's pretty impactful yeah it's also quite good impactful you can use it offensively as i said to take to deal damage to enemies but also you can use it to get out of scenarios quite nicely as well if you get a little bit trapped or some mortars are going off you can escape with it which is cool Yeah. What about you, Luke?
Yeah, I think this is something that you'll maybe find in the further release, but we've got one of the future pilots
uh i think like a little rc car with a with a bomb on it um oh nice i love it yeah i i found myself using the mines more often than not because i like the ability to just say like here's a choke point you know like you're not getting through here uh i'm with you scott that the the jump jets were the fun like oh man
Like, there's nothing like a 4,000-pound mech just leaping down on somebody and crushing a little squad of guys or something that's coming up. So satisfying. Yeah.
I think we've got a slow mech as well to get out of dodge when you're just in a bad situation to leap out of there as well.
Yep.
So. So, do you... A lot of times you were saying that when you're doing these game jams, for instance, that nothing really comes out of it because whatever ideas just turn out to be insolvent or whatever. Is there a ridiculous idea that almost made it into the game that you guys ended up scrapping? Something that just was hilariously not workable?
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