User:BreGee/Miah Interview Transcript

This is a WIP Transcript for the 2020 Miah Interview. So far it only contains the first 11 minutes. Some words may also have been misinterpreted.

If you want to edit/add to the transcript, please feel free to edit this page.

The Drawn to Life Fanbase Interviews Jeremiah Slaczka

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Intro On January 24th, 2020, a small contingent of the Drawn to Life fanbase (said contingent being primarily comprised of speedrunners), interviewed the director of the franchise, Jeremiah Slaczka (AKA, Miah). Conducted over Discord, the interview was truly exciting for fans in every way. For archival purposes, it is being uploaded here. Without further ado, enjoy the full interview. Start of Interview (In the VC are DylanDude, iliekchez, just bag, Miah, and SuperDonavanbros) SuperDonavanbros: There he is. DylanDude: Hello, Jeremiah. just bag: Hello Jeremiah. Miah: Hi. SuperDonavanbros: It's Jeremiah himself. The man. just bag: This is cool. Miah: Yeah. SuperDonavanbros: This is great. Miah: ...Can you hear me just fine? DylanDude: Yes. SuperDonavanbros: Yeah. just bag: Yeah! Miah: Cool. Cool. SuperDonavanbros: Oh my gosh, this amazing. I cannot believe this. Umm... DylanDude: Neither can I. SuperDonavanbros: Yeah, I'm so thankful that you were able to respond and do this with us. Miah: Yeah, it's no issue. SuperDonavanbros: Yeah hopefully we could do this more. Miah: Uh, sure! Glitches SuperDonavanbros: Yeah. Um, originally I wanted to like talk to you about this weird glitch we found. Um, that happens in Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter for the DS. Miah: Oh yeah? Yeah? SuperDonavanbros: That in the spider form, if you stun like a... an enemy, I think it was a firefly, and crawled on top of it... Miah: Uh huh. SuperDonavanbros: You can change back... if you're quick enough you can change back to the human form, um and like the game like glitches out and like freezes. Miah: Oh! SuperDonavanbros: We haven't really found anything with that. Miah: Oh, I uh wasn't uh... aware of that. SuperDonavanbros: Huh. Yeah um... Miah: That's news to me! SuperDonavanbros: Yeah. We also found this weird thing that you can double jump off of a dog... (BakiDance joins the VC) SuperDonavanbros: ...to skip a part... BakiDance: Hello! SuperDonavanbros: ...of a easel area. And we just call it 'dog jump'. (Booslus joins the VC) Miah: Oh. Oh. Yeah. SuperDonavanbros: That's like the only one credit I have... The Flower that Saves The Mayor just bag: Hey Donavan? I'm getting like a bunch of echo from you. SuperDonavanbros: Oh! Uh... DylanDude: Um, Jeremiah, I... I have a very important question for you that I think we would all like answered. Miah: Sure. DylanDude: Where is the flower to save The Mayor? Miah: Uh.. (Laughter) SuperDonavanbros: Oh my gosh... Miah: There... (interrupted by laughter) There... (interrupted by laughter) There is no flower! I'm sorry! just bag: Okay. DylanDude: Noooo!!! :( (Laughter) SuperDonavanbros: Nice. ...Is the echo worse? ...I think it was just because I was in a corner of my room. just bag: Uh, possibly. I dunno. Sometimes it does things... SuperDonavanbros: It’s gone? just bag: Uhh... I’m still kind of hearing me through you. SuperDonavanbros: Oh probably cuz my volume is way up. just bag: Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. SuperDonavanbros: Is it better? just bag: Um? Yeah I can’t hear me. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. SuperDonavanbros: Yep. So yeah that's something that the fan servers can uh like to know that there is no myth- there is no flower. Miah: Nope. But uh, y’know Joe- but Joe did say that uh... y’know, I forget what his text line was. But it was basically something like ‘don’t believe him’ or something like that. DylanDude: Yeah it says ‘don’t listen to Jeremiah’. just bag: Oh yeah, I remember that! DylanDude: We've also cracked both games... just bag: I remember when... Development of Drawn to Life: SpongeBob Squarepants Edition SuperDonavanbros: I got a question! So between when you were developing Drawn to Life and then Drawn to Life 2... Miah: Mmhm? SuperDonavanbros: Um... The SpongeBob game came out. How did that, um, start? How did you guys like get that idea? Miah: Uhh... Well that's actually more THQ than us. SuperDonavanbros: Hmm. Miah: Uhh... So... Yeah, I think they they had the licence already, they had like a multi-game license. (Sid (Critical) joins the VC) Miah: Uh.. So THQ did a bunch of Drawn to Life games, even prior to our... Oh not Drawn to Life, sorry. Uh.. Spon-Spongebob games prior to us and uh... they had Drawn to Life because they had the IP. And uh, they just had Spongebob and then there was a Japanese developer called Altron that they worked with and they kinda picked it up. And I think Altron did some like porting for us? Um, so yeah basically they just took our engine and just kinda re-skinned it and did their own version. So we had very little to that. We don't typically do uh.. licenced content so that was mostly THQ. Development of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (Wii) SuperDonavanbros: And then, with the Wii version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, uh... Miah: Yeah? SuperDonavanbros: I believe on the wiki it says you're not credited with that. Miah: No, we didn't make- we didn't touch that. I didn't do anything about that. DylanDude: Did you have any opinions on it? Miah: Uhhh... Yeah. It's... It's not canon! (Laughter) DylanDude: Good! SuperDonavanbros: Oh really?! just bag: Really? SuperDonavanbros: Oh yeah, because if if it was canon, um.. what I would say is basically it's Mike never wakes up and he dies in the coma... just bag: Ohh... Miah: (Laughter) SuperDonavanbros: ...Which is pretty dark. How long of a gap was between the two canon games? DylanDude: There is actually one question I want to ask. H- How... BakiDance: That was a big question... DylanDude: H- How long of a time gap is there between uh the first and second game? Miah: Uh.. Not that long. No, not that long. like um... y'know, days. The Two Endings of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (DS) just bag: Well I mean it kinda depends on which ending. Did you get the patched or the like original? Cuz like in the original, Mike could have been in the hospital for like a week, and then in the patched ending he's just there for like two seconds on the ground. Miah: Yeah, the patched- the patched ending that replaced it, I had nothing to do with the patched ending. That was THQ as well. So... DylanDude: Was that... Miah: So we didn't do an ounce... DylanDude: Sorry. just bag: Not a fan of big companies. BakiDance: Not canon. DylanDude: Was that the DS's ending? Miah: Yes. BakiDance: So the first ending would be the canon ending. Miah: Yeah, so what happened was uh.. So typically the way distributing works and the way um.. uh submission works is you go to uh.. your game publisher, they look over the whole game, they play through the whole game, and you know, like the the golden path right? Sort of the typical game. Uh... they don't have to worry about side quests and stuff like that unless you want to talk about on and all this side quest has a very specific thing with a piece that you should see. Uh... And so they play through the golden path, they approve it, then they send videos to ESRB, the ESRB then watches the golden path and then they have a document that goes through stuff. So both the ESRB and THQ saw the ending and had no problem with it, so we shipped the game and then um.. I guess some some parents complained. They didn't like it uh... and so the ESRB was like okay we should rewrite this game. And um.. so basically THQ was like well we're just gonna put this new ending in and I was like didn't you guys already approve this? And everyone's seen this? And they said yeah but we're gonna change it. And I was like okay, well good luck with that so... Super Scribblenauts Rating SuperDolanbros: ...Another thing is in... kind of off the path of Drawn to Life, with um Scribblenauts, so.. Super Scribblenauts is rated by the ESRB 'E10+', um is that from its like difficulty with the uh puzzle aspect? Or is that because it's all of the material in it? Miah: No, it's always the material. ESRB doesn't care about uhh.. difficulty... SuperDolanbros: Difficulty? Miah: They only care about contity- content. So I'm sure the script for Scribblenauts might have had something. There's.. I don't remember- I don't know what- what changed what but um uh there's different things like if something has alcohol or references to alcohol or blood there's stuff like that or bodily fluids or vomit or something like that so stuff like that depends. "Miah + Kaori" Patch of Grass SuperDolanbros: I believe your wife was a wordsmith on the Scribblenauts games? Miah: Yeah! DylanDude: Speaking of- Speaking of, near the observatory in Drawn to Life 1, there is a uh patch of grass which reads 'Miah ♥ Kaori' (Repeats Kaori's name a few times, unsure how to pronounce it.) Miah: Kaori, yeah. Kaori is Japanese, yeah. DylanDude: Yeah. SuperDolanbros: Yeah. DylanDude: How did that get out in there? Miah: Uh, I was the one that built the uh village. So I was the tile editor. So I just put it in there. (Laughter) Developer's Grove for Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (DS) SuperDolanbros: Um, so yeah also in the original Drawn to Life, there's the developer's grove. Miah: Mhm? SuperDolanbros: Was there ever any, like, thing that was gonna be put into The Next Chapter like that? Miah: Uh, I think we just ran out of time. The Next Chapter was really ambitious, and we were also shipping Scribblenauts at the same time, so uh, we had stuff we wanted to do but it was just... y'know. I mean, The Next Chapter in the DS is... y'know. I'm sure with how much you guys played it. It's way bigger in scope. So yeah we just ran out of time to do stuff like that. But we usually like to do stuff like that. 3rd Page of Lavasteam DylanDude: Speaking of cut content from TNC, the whole third page of Lavasteam was cut. Can you tell us anything about that? Miah: Um... Not at the top of my head. I don't remember what it was, but it was again probably levels. Like, we usually are just getting all the levels in, and the story content, we just y'know. Like... As... when you- when you design games or develop games, you like, you kinda go out to start with blue sky and then you get tighter and tighter and this kinda goes on and y'know you have to start on stuff, and so sometimes you have to cut content. Like, y'know, whole pages of stuff. So yeah, but I dunno the specifics of what was cut there. Sorry about that. DylanDude: Well I know that there was this giant color well. Well also there was a lot of levels in Lavasteam for the game that was never used. Miah: I see. just bag: Oh yeah that's really good. 5th Cell Layoffs and Warner Brothers just bag: So like, a lot of things get cut, right? I was wondering a long while back I wanted to email 5th Cell to see 'Yo what does it take to become a game dev?' But then I learned at that time you guys had to lay off a lot of people because 'Fighting Words' for Scribblenauts didn't work out too well. What happened there? Miah: Uh, Yeah. WBs' president at the time. He was let go and some of their senior staff left so basically they had a whole regime change at kind of the executive level at Warner Brothers. And then new executives came in and the executives were no longer interested in original IP. They wanted to focus on the IPs that they owned. Which is like, you know, Batman or other stuff like that. And so they're like: 'Hey! We don't wanna do that kinda work anymore, that's our new direction.' Which is, that's what happens with game companies. So that's why we were in a spot where we had to let people go. Anchors in the Drift just bag: And uh, how's Anchors in the Drift tying in with like- Do you have any other bigger companies helping you there with that? Miah: