The /v/GAs THANKS, LIGHT. Interview at Gamescom 2025

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F4cemeltor: Hello there. So I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about both your game development studio as well as your new game, “Thanks, Light.” Thanks, Light. Would you like to give an introduction of yourself?

Hui-Beom Jung: Let me show you my name card. It can be easy to explain.

Here is the normal hexagon here and if you light it, it becomes a cube. Yes, that’s cool isn’t it?

F4CEMELTOR: Absolutely. That’s mainly the gameplay inside the game. We’ve just spent a little while playing the demo and the concept is as far as I understand it, it is that you are inside a supposed testing facility or a game?

JUNG: Yeah, in a game.

F4CEMELTOR: The game presents itself as a game. You’re right. With the guy with the light bulb head, right? And in this world the guy says he’s got the perfect game but apparently, it’s already broken.

JUNG: You know, you know our game, right?!

F4CEMELTOR: Yes, and the game largely plays as a puzzle pla-not platformer… but puzzle game, right?

JUNG: We are… actually.. the Portal… you know, Portal series, they’re a…

F4CEMELTOR: Big inspiration?

JUNG: And their “tag”, they “tag” themselves as a puzzle platformer, yes so everybody everybody like Portal they take the puzzle platformer, as I think it’s fine

F4CEMELTOR: But, I can already see from the gameplay you’ve moved a lot beyond that. It’s very interesting.

JUNG: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

F4CEMELTOR: The one thing, basically, the gameplay more or less involves shapes that are dark. If you illuminate them with your flashlight, they turn from just a two-dimensional shape into a three-dimensional object. So for example, the interesting part about this is, we all know 3D models, right? If you look at the cube from this side, but you turn it into the silhouette, you have a hexagon. But if you turn the cube basically if you just rotate it you could get a square.

And if you then turn this into the Appropriate shape you can slot it into the key holds in order to open the gate into the next level. I find it very interesting because there’s multiple levels where you get a single shape and have to rotate it and Reinsert it into multiple slots to progress and you have to carry this thing with you the entire time. Right, I find it very interesting.

JUNG: Right, you know you know my game better than me! laughs

Yeah, yeah, so that that’s the geometry geometry thing in our game, geometric puzzle. But we have also the physical, physics things in our puzzle, right? So before the light, it has no gravity and no weight. You cannot touch it, but after the light, it has, yeah, it’s physical. It has, it has a weight, it has gravity. So, for example, you have seesaw and if you light it, it has gravity. So, it controls the seesaw by the weight.

F4CEMELTOR: A little bit into the game after the first level you get the dark flashlight.

JUNG: Right. Yeah.

F4CEMELTOR: So if you have a shape that is already manifested as an object, you can use the dark flashlight to make it transparent into a 2D shape again. So then suddenly it doesn’t have any weight. So like with the seesaw, if it’s tilted to one side and there’s an object there and you make it dark, it’s not weighted anymore, it tilts over to the other side. It’s quite a nice system. But you said that later on in further levels after that you get mirrors for example.

JUNG: Right. Mirrors can copy the object, like same thing. There is a lens also. The lenses, you know, there is — there’s two kinds of lens, right? One is making it bigger and smaller.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course. Oh, it’s convex and concave. The lenses you mostly use in glasses, they’re shaped like this, right?

JUNG: Right.

F4CEMELTOR: And the other one is shaped like this. gesturing

JUNG: Yes, yeah. So the convex lens makes it bigger, right?

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, okay.

JUNG: In Korean, it’s “볼록 렌즈”, “오목 렌즈”.

F4CEMELTOR: Okay.

JUNG: Yeah. So one of the lens makes it bigger and the other lens makes it smaller. So you can do whatever you want, many possible ways to solve the puzzles. So it’s getting more challenging after the chapters going.

F4CEMELTOR: I wanted to ask in terms of the dev team, you said you are the leader of the team. Did you start it also?

JUNG: I started a team. It was a team, just a student team. We were students. We have only two guys, including me.

F4CEMELTOR: I think I’ve met your other colleague.

JUNG: Yeah, his name is Seohyeon Lee. About a year and a half after, After, Jeongtae Go, one of my colleagues also joined the team and another one (Taewook Koh), joined the team. The four guys made the whole team and we can make a company with them.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course. I assume around that time you started getting support by the government.

JUNG: Right. We support it by government, especially Department of… No, it’s Ministry of Culture…

F4CEMELTOR: (It’s okay, it’s okay.) (Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it.)

JUNG: … and Tourism! Hahaha.

F4CEMELTOR: I was just going to bring up, right — here at the con, we have managed to find that in recent years, many indie developers from all over the world have been starting getting government support. We’re going to record a short segment in the back where we see the… I mean maybe you’ve seen it, a lot of the German groups are getting support by different German states. A couple of them are marked Bavaria, a couple of marked Baden-Württemberg, North-Rand-Palatinate. It’s all small support groups because well, here at the Gamescom we’ve seen that But very big game publisher groups like EA and Activision have been buying out half of a giant haul just for themselves. And these developers that are fairly unknown, recently started, just like you here, have been getting a little bit sidelined. But the government support, I feel, has been growing and it’s good for the small developers. Very helpful.

JUNG: Right.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course.

JUNG: If we don’t have any support from government, it’s KOCCA in short way. Without KOCCA, we couldn’t even come here.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course.

JUNG: Yeah, we don’t have any opportunity to have a booth at Gamescom because it’s so expensive.

F4CEMELTOR: Absolutely.

JUNG: Yeah, it’s so far away and we don’t know about German.

F4CEMELTOR: Yes, of course.

JUNG: Yeah.

F4CEMELTOR: So how did you get the ideas for this game?

JUNG: Actually, I’ve been studying 3D computing. So there is an equation for the lighting reflection.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, you mean like, what’s it called? Ray tracing?

JUNG: It’s more basic thing, basic lighting reflection. So have you heard about Render Monkey?

Jung’s discovery using AMD’s RenderMonkey served as the inspiration for THANKS, LGIHT.

F4CEMELTOR: Render Monkey.

JUNG: Render Monkey.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, yes.

JUNG: Yeah. I was trying to run about 3D shader with the RenderMonkey. And I delete — eventually — no, not eventually.

F4CEMELTOR: Accidentally.

JUNG: Accidentally.

F4CEMELTOR: Thank you.

JUNG: I accidentally delete the light reflection equation. Oh, that the cube became a hexagon.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, I get it.

JUNG: So now I got the idea that if there is no light, we can see the true shape, only the silhouette.

F4CEMELTOR: I get it. Yeah. That’s very nice.

JUNG: That’s our — the next light is started. And we love our genre, Portal, Superliminal, Viewfinder, Antichamber, the Talos Principle, Manifold Garden, yeah, like those games.

F4CEMELTOR: Did you try, there’s a booth there in the indie section, it’s called ChromaGun 2.

JUNG: Okay.

F4CEMELTOR: Have you seen that?

JUNG: Yeah.

F4CEMELTOR: Yes.

JUNG: I have played ChromaGun 1, but not 2.

F4CEMELTOR: Okay. But you know how it works then.

JUNG: Yeah. It’s also interesting.

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah.

JUNG: Actually, he’s my competitor now. Yeah, so from that idea, we started the game. I started the game.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course.

JUNG: And we loved that genre. We loved it.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh.

JUNG: So we can make it. We thought it was easy to make, but it was very, very hard.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh. Like a… That’s how it usually starts, right?

JUNG: Yeah.

F4CMELTOR: Oh, it’s no problem. and then you die.

JUNG: It’s been really about three years from the start. And one of the hard thing was controlling the physics. If you grab the cube, and you move the camera this fast, And keep just go and go space.

Jung mentions keeping the physics consistent with camera motion was challenging.

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah, of course.

JUNG: We should control that. And grabbing something in the game was so hard, making naturally so that user can control the cube and rotate it naturally. It was very hard and difficult journey.

F4CEMELTOR: I can understand that. Just wanted to ask, since you came up with the idea of the game, from what you mentioned earlier, do you do then mostly engine work or lighting work or modeling maybe?

JUNG: Actually, we are using the Unreal Engine.

F4CEMELTOR: Five?

JUNG: Unreal Engine 5, yeah. So that engine helps us a lot. So we are using so many blueprints and plugins, assets from the Fab. It was megascan, actually, as we started. But with those helps, we can build the levels, easily — not easily — actually, it was hard.

F4CEMELTOR: It’s always easier to work with these pre-built segments, I would know, from my workplace. But, in… so, what I know also notice is that you’re got quite an emphasis on the story. Is there something going on there? What’s the story about?

JUNG: So…

F4CEMELTOR: Wait, before you start, are you also the story writer?

JUNG: I am a CEO and the producer, director, designer, artist, and programmer. Whatever I can do is my position. Especially in the small indie game. Your character is a girl and with that girl you’re trying to escape the room. As the bulb guy is explaining you we made a perfect perfect game without imperfection even imperfection so just go and try to escape the room and be fun with the puzzle. But there is something something black blacky thing is disturbing you.

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah it seems like it’s a glitch maybe?

JUNG: Yeah it kind of I think it’s kind of glitch but it says definitely you must leave the game. So why? Why should I leave the game? And then not in demo But in the full game, you got to communicate with the glitch more and more times. And that makes the bulb guy, we call him the admin accelerator.

F4CEMELTOR: The admin, alright.

Not to be concerned with Cameraman from 2023 sensation Skibidi Toilet, the administrator is the entity whi made the puzzle game of all time — and your protagonist just stepped out of its bounds.

JUNG: Yeah, admin, yeah. That makes him angry. So that angry make puzzles more, make games and worlds more like glitchy and destroying. So with that angry admin and mysterious glitch, you should find who I am and what’s the problem with this world and how the game is going, destroying, or we can save the game. That kind of story is going.

F4CEMELTOR: Interesting. I like that very much. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. And in the, well, I guess asking for the ending would be, that’s unfair right now.

JUNG: That can be a spoiler.

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah, it would be too much of a spoiler. But yeah, it sounds very interesting. But which one of the two is the bad guy? The administrator or the glitch guy? Or both a little bit?

JUNG: I don’t know. I can explain that. You know, my idea starts with if there is no light, you cannot see the true shape, right? So in industry, it’s the same. It has the same message. So there’s so many in the world, there’s so many occasions or people, person, but you cannot judge by them only by the silhouette, only by the appearance.

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah. That’s good.

JUNG: You should like them and be careful… what? How can I say it?

F4CEMELTOR: Be attentive.

JUNG: Yeah, attentive.

F4CEMELTOR: Okay.

JUNG: Be attentive.

F4CEMELTOR: And of course, you should look at them from all sides.

JUNG: Yeah, yeah, yes. Look at them from all sides, not just a single side.

F4CEMELTOR: The shape, not just the outside shape. That’s very good.

JUNG: Yeah, you should look at them very attentive. And that’s our message to — we want to show to our users. So the story is basically finding the true shape of the girl’s…

F4CEMELTOR: Soul?

JUNG: Soul, maybe.

F4CEMELTOR: Very interesting. That’s of course the biggest mystery. “Who is this girl?”

JUNG: Right.

F4CEMELTOR: That’s the biggest mystery.

JUNG: Of course.

F4CEMELTOR: That’s going to be interesting. Thank you very much for this information. If your game would be a food, what food would it be like?

JUNG: That’s really a hard question to answer. I guess it’s not hamburger. Yeah, it’s not the whole restaurant courses cause… but we are making very very “pointy” game, right?

F4CEMELTOR: Yeah, that is true. I understand what you mean.

JUNG: Okay, so it’s like kind of weird made french fries. Yeah, kind of.

F4CEMELTOR: But I mean, it’s like… it would be a food if you could bite into it from one side, it would be tasty, but if you turn it to the other side and bite, it would hurt your mouth, right? That would kind of be the thing, right?

JUNG: laughs Right. It can… first, it’s to eat… right? French fries, but you cannot stop it.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course.

JUNG: And there’s ketchup or mayonnaise and chilies. There are so many kinds of combinations. So I think that’s our game.

F4CEMELTOR: That’s right. I like it. In that case, I would like to thank you very much. This was a wonderful interview. And I hope to see you again at any other event.

JUNG: Maybe, are you guys coming TGS? Tokyo Game Show?

F4CEMELTOR: Tokyo Game. It would be great. When?

BEATSTAR: Yeah, next year.

F4CEMELTOR: Next year? Not this year.

JUNG: Not this year.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, sadly. He’s going to be at PAX East?

BEATSTAR: PAX West.

F4CEMELTOR: PAX West in a couple of days.

JUNG: Oh, okay. We are not planning to go there.

F4CEMELTOR: Oh, sadly.

JUNG: We are actually, we’ve been selected as TGS selected “INDIE80”.

F4CEMELTOR: Awesome.

JUNG: That is, yes, I’m so proud of myself.

F4CEMELTOR: That’s great to hear.

JUNG: Yeah, so maybe after the video uploaded, maybe TGS has been started or not. Maybe if you see the video, you can come to Tokyo and visit us. “I saw the video… was so… not that good English.”

F4CEMELTOR: Don’t worry about it.

BEATSTAR: We make cuts anyway.

JUNG: So you can come visit us anywhere and please be my guest, be my friend.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course, we would love to.

JUNG: We are really trying to make good games. Really hard.

F4CEMELTOR: And we are trying to get the message out about good games that are being worked on hard.

JUNG: Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity.

F4CEMELTOR: Of course. That’s what we’re here for, right? So again, thank you very much.

JUNG: Thank you very much.

BEATSTAR: Thank you.