Bryce Clark, game director of Poppy Playtime, has played 23,000 hours of Steam games: 'I'm a bit obsessed with learning the market'

Disk Cleanup

Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

Bryce Clark, game director on Poppy Playtime, grew up playing DOS games on his family PC. His favourite childhood game was the 1994 fantasy RTS Dominus, which had unfortunate ramifications for his father. "It was nearly impossible to get working," Clark recalls. "My poor dad ended up spending so many hours on the hard line trying to call tech support. 'Why is this video game not working for my son?' It was a lot about troubleshooting way back."

A game developer for 20 years, Clark has worked at studios like 343 Industries and Blizzard. He joined Mob Entertainment in 2023 as its lead technical artist, and last year became Game Director for Poppy Playtime: Chapter 5, which released in February.

"Our goals were to find ways to improve the gameplay flow," Clark says. "What are the ways we can try and make chases more compelling? What can we do to make the puzzles harder in places where you do not have to complete them and easier in places where you do… and just generally trying to find ways to better integrate the narrative into the gameplay experience."

Clark took a break from mascot horror to show me around the digital toy factory of his PC. And, as you will soon discover, there are a lot of toys in Clark's factory, so many that he struggled to pick just one for most of the questions posed.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm a bit of an oddball in that I'm always playing somewhere between three and six games at a time. I'm a bit obsessive with learning the market, learning different genres. I love trying new and unique things as well.

I'll try to be brief about them, but most recently I've been playing a few. One's called Aethus, which is an inspiringly well-executed solo developer project that's focussed around base building, crafting, mining. But it carries, to me, a lot of Subnautica energy with the way the narrative is playing out, the exploration works with the oxygen system, delving into the depths of—instead of [an] ocean, it's caverns—learning the greater mystery.

But also, [I was] trying out most recently on Steam Strange Antiquities, the sequel to Strange Horticulture. Great mix of narrative, discovery, puzzle, mystery. Have a lot of fun with that one.

The super niche one I'm exploring right now is Prosperous Universe, which is, I would say, it's a real-time economic MMO set in an 'interstellar corporations' kind of setting, and all the players are companies that are producing products and shipping, and they're working together to complete production lines, and it's a whole system of politics and economics.

But it's run in real time, so you'll put an order in at one of your production facilities, and in like eight hours it'll be done. I treat it like an incremental game, because it fits into the gaps in my life.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Most recently I played a little $5 experience called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! This is a game about being in an arcane library, and 3,000 books that are stacked in this library have been scattered all over thanks to some nefarious little imp … so it's all about categorising them in the correct places.

It captures that PowerWash Simulator energy, where there's a soothing element to this rote process, but also [there's] something I find fascinating about representing a gigantic problem. Like, here's this incredible mess of 3,000 books, get it done, and you have to develop your own process for tackling that problem.

I think the most compelling [game] as an art piece, was Cairn, which is one of the most soulful climbing games I've played in recent years. Beautifully well executed, fantastic, thoughtful story, some of the best climbing mechanics I've seen that represent how actual climbing can feel in practice.

I'm still working through Forza Horizon 6. I'm no stranger to the less niche products out there, and Forza [6] has just been a phenomenal entry to the series. I'm not even that big of a car or racing person, but I've just been having a great time.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I have a 2016 game and a 2017 game installed right now, and these are No Man's Sky and The Hunter: Call of The Wild. I occasionally boot up older games, but these two have been hard for me to keep uninstalled.

I find that a lot of what draws me into games is the learning and discovery and the novelty, and at a certain point, once I feel like I've fully understood what the game has to offer and where the game is going, I'm not always very compelled to actually finish it … I'm like 'okay, I'm done here', which is a bad habit. I've been trying to get better at it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Well, I have about 20 games that are over 250 hours each, just on Steam. I have about 23,000 hours on my Steam account in 18 years, so I actually have quite a lot of games with a lot of time in them. That's not including secondary platforms or consoles and all that.

My top games are Rocket League at 745 hours, Ark: Survival Evolved at 651 hours, 7 Days to Die at 538, and it just kind of keeps going. There's a lot of competitive stuff in there. There's also a lot of survival craft and exploration games.

We used to say the first 500 hours of Rocket League are learning how to hit the ball, and the next 500 hours are learning when not to hit the ball. There's just so much that goes into it. I love the purity of the game experience. But as a competitive game, of course, it's super engaging. There's always somebody out there that's going to be better than you. You can always get better at Rocket League. The skill ceiling is so far up that you can always get better at it. It's hard to feel like you've mastered Rocket League when there's something yet more crazy you can learn.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are two experiences that I keep coming back to … because they're my comfort game[s]. When everything else is challenging in life, one of these games will bring me some peace and joy, and it's between The Hunter: Call of the Wild and Subnautica.

The Hunter: Call of the Wild is a funny one to talk about … it seems like an odd one to some folks, and I'm not actually in support of modern sport hunting … for me it's a gorgeous walking simulator. It's getting a little long in the tooth now, years down the road, but still, you're going to these beautifully rendered environments, these park locations, and you get to just hike, and I let myself be immersed in the environment and listen to the sounds.

When I do stumble on some quarry to hunt, the experience transitions from calm, peaceful, immersive exploration to now you're stalking, now you're hunting, now you're like 'Okay, how do I get the position to get the right shot.' And then there's this moment of skill expression that all comes down to your bullet choice, your position of how you fire.

Subnautica carries a similar energy … that combination of tension with also the calm exploration that I just find very soothing, so I always come back to that.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I'm torn between Snagit and WinDirStat. Snagit is an enhanced screenshot and video recording tool. It just overrides your print screen button, gives you some enhanced lineup features for sampling a section of your screen, and all that's fine. But what I really love about it is that when you take a screenshot, it'll pop up in the editor, and it's a real lightweight fast launch, and it has markups so I can write on it or I can draw text on it.

WinDirStat is a super lightweight, no-nonsense tool for inspecting what's eating up all your hard drive space. It'll go through and analyse basically your entire folder structure and categorise it based on how much memory it's taking off your disk …. For me, when I'm having to juggle a bunch of different games and art tools, disk space can be super important and valuable.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

I used to be one of these people that had so much on the desktop because I'd have categorised caches of desktop shortcuts. But I think over the years, as some of the operating system features for Windows [has] caught up to other places, most of the time I just search fore the apps that I need now, and all my notes are in one place.

All my daily use applications I have pinned on my taskbar, and I can just launch them straight to the taskbar, and then anything else I just search through the search bar now. So these days I have almost nothing on my desktop, which is very different from what I used to be.