Kiln: The Pottery Brawler About Creation and Destruction | Official Xbox Podcast

LINA MADRID: Games in this podcast range from E to M. [ Music ] Hey everybody, welcome to the Official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox. I'm Lina, and today we're diving deep into an incredibly unique game from one of the most creative and innovative studios in gaming. We are talking about -- and hold on because this might take me a couple of takes but we'll fix it in post. We're talking about the online multiplayer potter [beep] -- the online multiplayer pottery potter- -- [beep] online multiplayer pottery, pottery, pottery part -- Jesus, help me. [Laughter] The online multiplayer pottery party brawler, Kiln, from Double Fine Studios. I did it. All right. Joining us from Double Fine, we have the Project Lead for the game, Derek Brand, the Lead Designer, Lauren Scott, and Lead Character Artist, Jared Mills. Hey, guys, thanks for joining us.

LAUREN SCOTT: Hi, thank you.

DEREK BRAND: Thanks for having us.

LINA MADRID: As we said, Kiln is a very unique game. It's pottery making, and then you take the pottery and then you go and you beat up other pottery, and you're smashing some plates and some bowls. I made a tornado looking thing that is undefined by humankind right now. I mean, that was -- I think I nailed that description, but you can probably describe it a little better than I can. For someone who's interacting with Kiln for the very first time, what is it, and what can they expect when they jump in?

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, Kiln is a game where you play as a little spirit, like a little tiny spirit, and you can manipulate clay. You have this special ability to manipulate clay on a pottery wheel and smoosh your little body into the clay and your shape. You can turn your little spirit body into a bunch of different tools and make whatever you want on the pottery wheel. Then you put that pot into the kiln, and it becomes a vessel for your spirit, basically. Then you -- depending on what kind of shape you made, whether it's big or small, or if it's tapered, it's going to determine what you can do and what your personality is and what kind of special moves you have. You're going to use that pot to go smash other pots. Yeah, it's a game about creation and destruction and the joy in both of those things.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, it's something you've never seen before. How many pottery games are out there? How many games do you have this very expressive, analog, mushy, satisfying, character creation tool, but then we take that weird thing that you make and map mechanics and gameplay significance onto it? You're kind of going back and forth from this creative mode to this combat destruction mode and going back and forth between those things, and yeah, it's cool. It's a good time. That's what it is.

DEREK BRAND: Along the way, you unlock more decorations and more clay sizes. Like you can unlock a little bit of clay or a large amount of clay, and that unlocks like a whole new group of pot shapes that you can explore.

LINA MADRID: Your actual shape matters, right? That's really important.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, super deeply, actually. There are multiple things that contribute to what you can do that have gameplay implications. You pick your size, so that's small, medium, or large. It's the amount of clay that you're going to use for this pot that you're going to build. Then the shape that you mold that clay into is going to determine your special ability and the way that you move and, kind of, your personality as well. There's eight of those per size that you can discover. They're all very different from each other. Then even deeper, the more clay, the more you stretch out that clay, the less health you have, but the more capacity you get. You can really fine-tune the shape that you want. One thing I really love doing -- maybe it's a tip -- is you make a large plate but then tune it for health. You're not good at splashing the kiln, but you're really good at defending. You can just take a bunch of damage because you have like a ton of health, but you can barely hold any water. You can do that across any of the shapes in the game. They all have their own range that you can tune between.

LAUREN SCOTT: You can kind of think about it as levels of granularity, right? When you pick your clay size, you're picking the macro stats that you have. You're picking your movement speed and also the minimum and maximum that that size can have. Then when you pick your shape, you're kind of fine-tuning within that min and max how much health, how much capacity you actually want, and then further customizing by grabbing which special ability that you want. Then even further down, even within the shapes, you're even further fine tuning those specific health and capacity values. It's kind of like funneling into your own unique, perfect creation, and your shape matters.

JARED MILLS: Yeah, even the character itself, you choose a small lump of clay, and you'll only have two little legs and a head. Your character is completely different than if you make a large pot, you have four legs and you're like this quadruped lumbering around the level. Every shape that you make has a different personality. When you make a large face on the wheel, it has a completely different personality than like a medium bottle. You'll find out that they just walk completely differently when you get into the level.

DEREK BRAND: Really, there's just a ton of decorations that you can put spouts and handles on.

JARED MILLS: Yeah, it's like a world-class pottery simulator that's also a combat game. [ Laughter ] Yeah, we were all about being in the clay studio, throwing pots, decorating them, and then smashing your friends. Just like a good old time, and the decorations I was obsessed with. I made a little bit of an abomination by throwing as many decals and all the different glazes. Yeah, but I loved the freedom of expression. Then I could take it out on the other teams because it's like a 4v4 brawler, right? You're teaming up with three other people to fight against four others.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, so you take this cool pot that you've made and you're like, oh, I want to show this off. You can jump in with your friends, and they all have their pots. Then our main game mode is called Quench. The objective is to go out into the battlefield, collect water into your pot body, and then try to get to the enemy's kiln and extinguish their kiln, but the other team is trying to stop you and do the same thing to you. There's a bit of strategy involved, and also, just fun goofy little pot guys running around.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, that combo of art and the art of combat, such an interesting idea. Testing has finished and release is not very far off, April 23rd. What can players expect when they get their hands on Kiln?

DEREK BRAND: We've been working really hard on clarity in the game. We got really great feedback in the last few tests about our camera. We had all these things sticking up in the world. We're like, oh, this is cool because it's parallax, and you can see your character in the world more, but it just got in the way of the camera. We've been going through each map and trimming all the high spots down. The nice clean playing fields, you can see your character more. We're just going through a bunch of the VFX and making sure that those are reading clearly, because there's a lot happening on screen at once. It's an action game.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, and in the testing that we've done, we've gotten lots of feedback from players. It bubbles up and aggregates into specific areas that we should focus on, so if people played in the earlier tests, they probably noticed some things about combat that were rough edges still. One of the big things that we're trying to address is this general feeling of being a bit locked down in combat. We found that a lot of it had to do with this. We're very generously applying hit-stun and stuns to a lot of components of combat. We've been trying to dial that back and make sure that players' sense of agency and being able to move around is maintained a lot more. There are reasons to have hits done, but ultimately, we were finding that we were maybe laying it on a little thick. We're trying to judiciously figure out where should we be applying these combat components and where should we be scaling back, so that there's a good flow in combat? Generally, people are having fun and not even really thinking about it too much in the way of friction or anything like that.

JARED MILLS: Having people joining the game, they'll see that we've built a very robust and detailed decoration system that feels really physical and tactile. There's a lot of options that they'll have to decorate their pot with, but we've been getting a lot of feedback about new decoration ideas. I think we can comb through all of that and come up with an awesome set of stuff to release as the game launches and as it goes into post-launch to make it even more robust and more interesting for people.

DEREK BRAND: I had someone suggest the cactus set. I'm so mad at ourselves, myself and you, that we didn't come up with that. Well, yeah, we didn't come up with a cactus. Why didn't we do cactuses?

JARED MILLS: I don't know.

LAUREN SCOTT: Well, at least they'll get a cactus. They'll get one cactus. If you make a large vessel, you'll at least be able to grow a cactus as your special ability, so all you cactus lovers, fear not; there's hope.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, and we're also always working on our roadmap, and player feedback is going to be a huge part of how we're going forward, even after ship. We've been taking a bunch of feedback from the betas, and we're going to continue to do that post-launch and we'll have more to share with that soon.

LAUREN SCOTT: So yeah, testing is invaluable, and we do it a lot, take all of the feedback, and try to incorporate it to make the best game we can.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, and the pottery wheel, being in the lobby, being able to make your own top shelf of pots has really opened up opportunities for people to decorate them. From the beta, seeing all the different creative ways people have decorated pots has been really inspiring, and seeing all the weird creations. There was a swan that somebody made.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah.

DEREK BRAND: I was, like, that's not even a pot, but it looks amazing.

JARED MILLS: I love that one. There was -- someone made a Simpsons-style toxic barrel.

LINA MADRID: Oh, yeah. Wow.

JARED MILLS: It even had the green drip of toxic goo coming out the top.

LINA MADRID: That's amazing.

JARED MILLS: You never know how they're going to use any of the decorations.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, I mean, the pots, you can get so creative when designing your own pot. When I got a chance to play, I was using the default pots to just jump in and start battling. When they got smashed, it was like, oh, man, but as soon as they started smashing my tornado pot, I needed revenge right away. It's the psychology behind that. I'm sure there's something there, but love that little tidbit.

DEREK BRAND: That's great to hear. That's the feeling we're going for. We discovered really early on, you're still attached to it, especially if you do something weird. You can also share pots. There's a lobby in the game, and in the lobby, there are these pillars. You can place a pot on the pillar to make everyone in the lobby see the pot that you made, and you can go inhabit that pot and take it for your own if it's someone else's that you really like. We've also just discovered that it's really fun, especially seeing somebody else using your pot is a very satisfying feeling. It's, like, oh, I made that, and oh, man, they're doing so well, or I'm sorry, you're not doing well, but at least you're using my pot.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, I like possessing people's pots and then just jumping in front of them, being like, hey, I have your pot. I love your pot. It's like my favorite thing.

LINA MADRID: Just the bonding over the pots.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, it's real.

LINA MADRID: Have there been any trends that have popped up that you've seen people kind of shift towards when it comes to designing the pots?

DEREK BRAND: Pizza, pizza items.

LAUREN SCOTT: Butts.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, the butt sticker.

LINA MADRID: Oh, the butt sticker.

DEREK BRAND: It's going to define this game, I think. Branding-wise, I think it's just going to be a butt.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, that's the legacy we're going for.

JARED MILLS: I think, one thing we found a lot from the different play tests was that people really wanted to make faces on their pots. At first, we didn't really have any eyes or facial features at all. They would use random stickers, like a bird set against, like, a white backdrop to make an eye. We kind of leaned into that and concepted more faces. One of my favorites is the frog attachment set. It has eyes and a frowny face so that you can kind of make your pot into a character.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, oh, I didn't even know that came from seeing what players were trying to do and iterating towards that. That's cool.

DEREK BRAND: I love the frog one because it could be literally any shape. As long as it's green and it has a face on it, it looks like a frog. You can put little frog arms on it.

JARED MILLS: Gigi concepted it. It had this wizard hat on it. It wasn't really part of the same theme, but we do have a wizard hat in the game, so you can make a wizard frog.

LINA MADRID: Oh, that's -- I mean, that's going to be my next goal for sure. You kind of briefly mentioned how different pot shapes come with different abilities and everything. Have you seen some emerging gameplay metas from the testing. I personally bought a bunch of team jackets for when I go pro, so I need every single tip that you have for me. I need to make my money back.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, immediately when we loaded into the closed beta, which is all we've had, I just got completely wrecked by a team of -- it was a whole team of medium bowls, and they were all tornadoing around. They just completely wrecked -- immediately destroyed us. Then I immediately asked to have those in there, but it was cool to see that, oh, they went in with a plan, clearly, and they're exploiting the game, but this is what a closed beta is for

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, with all of our tests, big and small, what we tend to see is people try out -- we have the three different sizes, the small, medium, large, and then we have the eight shapes across those sizes. What we tend to see is people start off with the medium pots, which is the standard size. They figure out, oh, you know, I like this pot best. I think, you know, this one is the most overpowered, and that sort of becomes their favorite until they unlock the next size, which I think is smalls. Then the smalls become, like, the new meta, and the new favorite. Okay, no, actually, mediums are trash. The smalls are faster, and they can hit harder if you do it right. Then that becomes the favorite until the large is unlocked, and then everyone's like, they can carry so much water. People gravitate towards the new thing, and then playing with it more, you learn, oh, okay, the smalls are more fragile, so that's the trade-off there. Oh, the larges are slower, so that's the trade-off there. Then people start settling into what's their favorite shape and size combination, and what special abilities do they like the best? That's kind of, I feel like, the flow that I've seen in the meta in the tests that we've done so far.

LINA MADRID: Even just team dynamic, when I played my first couple matches, I got absolutely destroyed because my focus was getting water, going to the enemy's kiln, and quenching that. But then, I realized everyone on my team was doing that, so we left ours completely undefended. From that moment, I shifted on, kind of, like, soccer strategy. I became the goalie, and my main job was just to smash the people incoming.

DEREK BRAND: That's a great strategy. That's like --

LINA MADRID: So I'm already pro, you're telling me?

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, exactly, but then it gets -- you can go even deeper. If you can find a way to distract the enemy goalie, that is, I think, the key to winning.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, and the goalie strategy is actually another thing that real players do more than we do. For the longest time we didn't even -- we still kind of don't defend the kilns. I feel like, as devs, we'd sort of just rush in, but when new players come in, there's always somebody who thinks of it, thinks of, oh, I should stay here and defend. It's a role people seem to enjoy a lot, because it's very useful.

JARED MILLS: Yeah, I've started doing that more.

LAUREN SCOTT: Oh, okay, okay.

JARED MILLS: Ever since the playtest.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah?

DEREK BRAND: Ever since you saw people doing it?

JARED MILLS: Especially that -- I think Farhad mentioned that large, like, base-shaped pot has the planets that spin around, so you can take up, like, a huge amount of space where it's, like, a no-fly zone, and nobody can get in there to deliver their water.

LINA MADRID: Wow, I need to make that pot, and if y'all are looking for a goalie, I'm here. There's four of us, so --

LAUREN SCOTT: Okay. We can draft you.

LINA MADRID: We can team up. I've got the jackets ready to go, yeah. All right. Well, we're actually running out of time here, so we'll finish up with this question for each of you. What's the thing you're most excited for players to get to experience when they play Kiln for the first time? It could be something as specific as a particular part of a level, or maybe broad as a feeling or a mechanic that you think people are going to love. For you, personally, what is that?

LAUREN SCOTT: I'm excited for people to experience the wheel and the flow between the wheel and this weird, unique creation tool that they've made and main Quench gameplay. It's kind of this unique superstar of our game, the pottery wheel, we've put a lot of thought into how to balance both the, like, analog, expressive, creative nature of it with a set of very approachable and understandable mechanics, so much iteration done on that over the years. I'm just really excited for people to try that out, feel the creative expression, and feel how that sort of feeds into the match experience and just going back and forth between those two and how people feel about that.

DEREK BRAND: The pottery power fantasy.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, the pottery power fantasy of it all.

LINA MADRID: Oh, I love that. That's also hard to say, but I like that a lot.

DEREK BRAND: Yeah, you have a few of those gems like that.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, yeah.

DEREK BRAND: I throw that in as much as I can, but similarly, I'm really excited for people to experience, like, the creative community that you're basically forced into in the game. Like, the creation and the match aspects of the game are both multiplayer, and they're multiplayer all the time. You're immediately, when you play the game, thrown into a lobby where there are people making things around you, and they're going to have some weird stuff. They're going to have some cool stuff, and I just can't wait for people to be able to see that and contribute.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, welcome to the pottery studio.

LINA MADRID: Welcome to the pottery studio, you've got to say it like that.

DEREK BRAND: Oh, yeah.

JARED MILLS: I've been very focused on the creation side of the creation and destruction of Kulm, building, the character building, the decoration, all of the little attachments and stuff, so I'm just really excited to see what people are going to make with it and how creative they can be and what interesting things will come off of that, yeah.

LAUREN SCOTT: I'm also excited to see what metas arise in Quench. Even down to the last test we did, people are finding new ways to use the pots in Quench. I'm just very curious what they're going to do.

LINA MADRID: We don't have to wait too long.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah.

LINA MADRID: It's going to be launching April 23rd. That's soon. How exciting.

DEREK BRAND: It's so soon. Yeah, we're ready. Yeah, of course.

LINA MADRID: You're all fired up? That was my attempt at pottery.

DEREK BRAND: No, and it was a good one --

LINA MADRID: Thank you.

DEREK BRAND: -- but I just -- it just goes over my head now.

LINA MADRID: You've heard them all at this point.

DEREK BRAND: The pottery puns, yeah, they just -- I was born in them.

LINA MADRID: Yeah, you're a million pottery puns in a trench coat. Lucky for you, that was my one and only one that I know, so I had to throw that in. All right. Well, Derek, Lauren, Jared, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Do you have any final thoughts before we leave?

DEREK BRAND: See you in the pottery studio.

LAUREN SCOTT: Yeah, see you in the pottery studio.

LINA MADRID: There we go. That was the greatest. That was great. Y'all nailed that. All right. Thank you all for joining us. We're so excited to get our hands on Kiln on April 23rd, but that's going to wrap it up for this episode of the Official Xbox Podcast. Thank you all for watching and listening, and we'll see you next episode. Bye.

LAUREN SCOTT: Bye. [ Xbox Sound ]