From f7b2a1a6f2d02e2f0fb57ee289d6215f3235dbf6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: dklassic Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:48:57 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Generated transcript for en --- static/src/transcript/D9glo1vLS-I.txt | 719 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ static/src/transcript/P0iluGzYGpY.txt | 680 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ static/src/transcript/RspwD7uVRDE.txt | 383 ++++++++++++++ static/src/transcript/shXiIlgJnec.txt | 291 +++++++++++ 4 files changed, 2073 insertions(+) create mode 100644 static/src/transcript/D9glo1vLS-I.txt create mode 100644 static/src/transcript/P0iluGzYGpY.txt create mode 100644 static/src/transcript/RspwD7uVRDE.txt create mode 100644 static/src/transcript/shXiIlgJnec.txt diff --git a/static/src/transcript/D9glo1vLS-I.txt b/static/src/transcript/D9glo1vLS-I.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b30d5d --- /dev/null +++ b/static/src/transcript/D9glo1vLS-I.txt @@ -0,0 +1,719 @@ +My name is Becca Saltzman, um, and yeah, it's better to be friends, marketing ass, than the reality of game production. +Uh, I am the CEO and co-founder of Finji, which is, uh, both a publishing partner or a publisher and also an independent development team. +So we kind of run both. +We're kind of, we're very weird in the industry and we've been doing it for a while. +Um, my partner is Adam Saltzman, who is our creative director. +Um, he runs our development team. +Um, and if you recognize his name, um, online, his name is Adam Atomics. +We, was Overland. +And we're based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, so we're also in a weird part of the world. +Um, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, We make a bunch of games, um, I mentioned two already, Overland and Canabalt. +Um, we also publish games like Tunic, I was a teenage exo-colonist, Chicory, A Colorful Tale, and Night in the Woods, among a lot of others. +Um, our studio is roughly, I'm giving you some context so you understand how small we are, um, which is important at something like GDC. +Our studio is roughly divided in half. +um there are approximately 4 biz dev and marketing um community management and launch operations staff and then kind of everyone else is on either QA or development um and that's about like 12 people. +Um we also have a few like floaters as far as like contract workers who pop in and out on various mostly engineering tasks. +Um We also work with a marketing studio out of the UK called ICO or ICO. +And they help roll out our PR and marketing plans. +And we've done this since 2021. +Our launches have kind of gotten too big for just the four of us. +I specifically run the biz side of Finji. +I'm also a core creative team member on both community and marketing initiatives that we produce. +And I'm also a member of the creative team on our internal development. +our game that we're making internally. +It's a really big job and I sometimes wonder what I got myself into when I go to work every morning. +I am also, and this is very important, I'm always the first to know when my studio and my games are being considered for high profile marketing events. +Those emails come to me directly and it's my job to ensure that our teams are prepared to support both external marketing initiatives and internal marketing plans. +And we have been involved in a lot of them. +So that's who I am, just some context. +And I have a question. +Oh, it is doing this. +Okay, so fun bug in PowerPoint, and I'm just gonna point this out so you understand why I'm going back and forth, is that it's supposed to say marketing. +and now it does. +So, if I go back and forth, I apologize. +I don't know what's going on with PowerPoint right now. +Um, so, the schedule problem. +We are just mining our own business. +We're like running our development, um, milestones. +We're like getting our dev teams all together and then marketing comes in and is like, marketing initiative! +You need to make a trailer in six weeks and you're like, yeah, F you! +Are you insane? +We can't do that. +And that's our schedule problem. +A team comes in, drops a massive project change onto your team without notice and you're left scrambling to figure out how to deliver the project and also make a game. +Because the, to deliver the project, the outcome requires that you pull development resources off the current milestones and this will often halt the bottle, or basically halt everything, bottleneck development in a pretty serious way. +And we've all done this. +Um, so are there any marketing folks here in the room? +Yeah! +Hi! +you're, you're team marketing uh everyone else is production and I know for a fact that right now you're like thinking in your head we hate each other so much because marketing comes in it's like I need this thing because we do. +It came in our email and production's like how dare you come and ask me for this asset. +We don't have time for this or the budget and both realities are valid. +It's just how it is and this talk is like well how, can we never have that conversation where we hate each other and we're cursing at each other and we act like preschoolers in our own offices and roll our eyes and continue to have poor collaborative communication practices. +So I want you to know it doesn't have to be this way, at least not the way you experience it now. +You shouldn't have to delay marketing assets until a request comes in. +You can plan for these in your development schedule. +and it's going to do it again because PowerPoint hates me. +So external opportunities, this is the thing that we call all of these emails that come in, which is our polite way of saying thank you, Sony, for this external opportunity. +Thank you, Nintendo, I appreciate that external opportunity. +Because as a marketing person, we also hate these e-mails and love them. +Because we know what it's going to do to everybody on the team to support it. +They're really big projects. +They're also really good for studios and for your team. +Anyone who can amplify your message, like, you should do that. +It's very noisy out there. +So these are self-directed or externally directed times, these external marketing opportunities. +When you are going to publicly participate in some kind of marketing event, we're at one right now. +There are a lot of teams right now that are also flying to PAX East. +My team is there right now. +There are teams who have been working for months and months to participate at these events with trailers, demos, and other assets. +And the events are great, but they're also a nightmare to support for any size of team. +So, because these events usually start outside, um, of the studio, they have the potential to seriously disrupt the development and schedule of the game. +Um, and I don't know about you, but I could do without the additional stress. +Um, the sprints, crunch, frustration, and burnout, um, and there should be another way forward. +So, I'm going to give you some context as kind of, I'm trying to think of, the kind of external opportunities that we, just in the last five years, that I have supported with my studio. +And we'll see if this works. +So, a quick disclaimer, um, we've supported both PlayStation State of Play and PlayStation Indies. +Um, I've done a Nintendo Direct and a Nintendo Indie World, um, the Xbox E3 press conference, plus their Twitch events. +uh, the game awards, that's a fun one, and very weird. +Uh, Apple keynotes and product launches, um, also additional partner events, conventions, uh, old PSX, PlayStation experience for example, demo events, plus the online develop, uh, demo events, et cetera, uh, and more, and more, and more. +It's like endless, these are endless events. +Um, and as I mentioned, we are a very, very small studio. +and we are in these all the time, and it should destroy us. +So, the collaborative marketing process. +I'm gonna talk about the process that Finji uses to plan, prep, and produce marketing assets alongside our internal development schedules across our separate teams, of which there are many, because we do publish as well. +it went up. +Uh so first planning. +Uh we plan as early as possible and this seems really obvious um and I'll get to this in a second. +This is the type of marketing strategy that focuses on when a marketing team is considering how to use events around the industry as external megaphones and how those types of partnerships require deadlines that are externally enforced. +And we literally spend the bulk of our time in this phase. +Because as long as we plan We are able to prepare all of our things in advance, and I'm going to explain how this is possible. +These are the things that we do to anticipate future marketing asks, and we are given possible outcomes in collaboration with our marketing teams. +to identify the marketing needs sort of externally with our business partners. +And then when we get to produce, we usually only spend about 10% of our time on this because we've done so much planning and prep work that everything is there, everything is ready for us to put together the asset and get it out as soon as possible. +In most cases, we're only at a polish phase when we finally get to this. +So, I mentioned this already. +Oh no, it's gonna do it again. +The thing we're gonna talk about the most today is how to plan for these things as early as possible. +And a lot of this is going to be about communications, the questions that you can ask, and the things that you can prepare and build into your development schedules. +Okay, so questions for production teams, and there's a lot of marketers here. +They're also for you as well. +So, we are going to talk about a lot of stuff. +Um, since we're all sitting here right now, I don't have a very good idea of what kind of studios you come from. +I don't know if you're a studio of one or a studio of a thousand. +So, these are going to be kind of high level things that you can take back and use to create a process within your studio. +Um, I'm going to do my best to define things that you may not know and point out things that you might want to research later. +Um, I know that I'm speaking to both marketing and production professionals, um, and I know that some of this might be unknown territory between those two, um, like aspects of game development. +So, things are gonna be working together today. +Why is there a disconnect between the discipline schedules and priority? +How does this limit good collaborative communication? +How can external marketing asks affect development teams? +Uh, your anticip- anticipatory pipelines, um, what, how can you build those? +I love that. +I would like to talk to somebody about this bug. +How can you control for these timelines? +What kind of milestones and test, tasks can you build into your production schedules to address the needs of all of your team? +And what kind of, uh, anticip, anticipatory pipelines can you build? +Um, so, we're gonna plan as early as possible. +Do you know what information you need? +And the answer is, maybe. +So when I was asked to give this talk, I was in a group of production professionals, and someone I look up to said, it would be incredible if there was a talk at GDC that talked about how we can plan for the things for our marketing teams to ask. +Supporting those just kills our development schedules, and it's awful. +And I was like, damn, that's like my whole job. +It's my wheelhouse. +I can talk about this. +And when this came up, I was a few days from participating in our first Nintendo Directs. +This was last fall, which took months of preparation for our team, completely over the timeline of when we were launching I Was a Teenage Exo-Colonist on PC, Storefriends, also PS4, 5, and Switch. +We were also optimizing and developing Tunet for PlayStation 4, 5, and Nintendo Switch, and also running patches on the original Xbox builds of the game. +We were really, really busy. +And Nintendo coming in and being like, how about a direct, which is like a really big event in our industry, was very scary. +but we planned for this across our small teams for years before we got to September 2022. +This was a possibility and an outcome that might have come up and we did a lot of work in advance for it. +So do you know what information you need to support a marketing initiative? +Possibly. +Do you know what questions you need to ask? +Do you know how to get that information? +And this is what we're going to be chatting about first. +So dev production. +There is a misunderstanding about timelines. +When we talked about marketing timelines and dev timelines, we are like in different universes. +Dev timelines, we're talking about weeks, months, years. +I love them. +They're so comfortable for me. +When we talk about marketing timelines, The email I got this morning may not even exist tomorrow. +Whatever they asked for is no longer even a project. +It was on fire and now it's gone. +Our task and projects list just for this week will change completely often. +We don't have the luxury of weeks and months and years, even though we really would like that to exist. +And when you're talking to each other as production, dev production and marketing, this is where the disconnect often happens. +Because we're like, well, why can't you just give this to me? +Marketing. +And dev is like, are you insane? +That doesn't exist. +It's not going to exist until next year because we're on different schedules. +So, we need to control for the unknown. +We need to integrate our marketing team into the development process, which is a lot of education and I'm not going to sugar coat that. +It is a lot of like, no, that's a misunderstanding. +Like, no, that's not how that actually works. +I love you very much, let's go out to lunch and talk about how the holistic process of the studio actually flows together. +But since your marketing team's goals may change at a moment's notice, it's easy to think, well, let's ignore them until they really need something. +which, I mean, been there, been ignored before, but the opposite is actually a healthier approach, because your marketing team is going to need the same assets no matter what. +I was talking to somebody earlier, I was like, can you imagine going up to a dev team and being like, I'm going to need a trailer, and the dev team is like, what? +A trailer? +I'm going to have to launch this game someday? +And the answer is yes. +you're gonna have to launch, these are things you're going to have to make, no matter what, it has to exist. +So the idea that this could possibly ever just drop into your scope is baffling. +So marketing, gotta remind them a little bit earlier. +So not just the trailer, but like you're gonna have to have key art, you're gonna have to have B-roll, you're gonna probably need a behind closed doors demo. +These are all things that are so normal to game marketing and we just throw them on the dev team kind of last minute. +So instead of ignoring them, we should be bringing the dev team in. +We should be educating them on the future assets that they're going to need and we're going to integrate them into your team so you can never be ambushed again, but on both sides. +So how do you integrate this? +How do you sort of take a marketing lead into a development process? +And what is the purpose and goal of this relationship? +So we have knowledge on the game design that's happening outside the game, and I'll explain that in one second. +We have knowledge on the game design that's happening inside the game. +Producers know what's happening inside the game, and marketing leads know what's happening outside the game. +and you can have a meeting about these two things. +I want to, not necessarily back up exactly, but I am going to tell you a little bit about marketing design in just one second. +You're going to want to structure the meetings that you have between these two types of design. +to get at the goals of your team and what ideas that you have and what timelines that they're planning for. +How do you want to talk about your project to the outside world? +And these are all going to feed back into what you should be working on internally. +So sitting down with your marketing team means that you can do the following. +Marketing can play the game and ask questions. +They can review design documents like story bibles, not to make the game more marketable, but to ask them what ideas they have about future marketing angles. +production can ask what types of marketing materials the marketing team would like to access. +And when they think, they might need those assets. +And then they can continue to circle with regular meetings closer and closer and closer, um, to launch, um, because development is going to continue and continue to hone in on like the exact marketing, the exact marketing message, um, outside of this. +Um, outside of like internal from the studio. +The communication needs to happen outside. +So, the more you know. +uh we need to document the possibilities. +And this relationship requires a give and take from the design team and the marketing team. +So you're going to need to sort of dig down and talk about like how would these possible initiatives, these marketing initiatives, overlap future external deliverable schedules. +So, what does that mean? +These are words that I'm spouting at you. +Imagine that you're like I'm going to be in a state of play in, when do state of plays happen? +Out February? +October? +those two dates. +February, October, sometimes the middle of the year one. +I'm going to be in a state of play in October of this year. +Or I want to work towards that. +That's going to require a trailer. +It's going to require a blog post. +If a marketing team knows that they would like to make some kind of announcement like that, they would have that information probably at least, at least a year in advance. +That that's what they're going to be working towards. +And if you as a production team don't ask that question, when would you like to announce a thing, you cannot develop something to support it. +So how do these possible initiatives fit into partner expectations? +So we partner with a lot of people, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Apple. +What expectations do they have about this? +Has the marketing team, who talks to these partners, expressed the goals to you, the dev team? +Because otherwise you're going to be making two different things. +And then how do these things that they're asking for impact development at a glance? +Can you see where you're going to fall short on the expectations that people outside of your development structure have? +So to answer these questions, you should be looking at your development schedule. +You need to ask, are you building the right parts of the game to support future marketing assets? +You should be able to answer that. +If marketing comes back and like, I'm pretty certain I'm going to need to put a boss fight in a trailer next year, and boss fights take a little while, you should probably be like, I need to push some stuff around. +like we're going to have to build a boss fight. +Um, if your publisher or partner wants to see, um, like a different angle working towards a marketing asset or they have an angle that they want to work towards, if you don't know what that is, you can't build for it. +Um, so yeah, there's, you need to be able to take your marketing team, um, that like there are two true things. +Like, here's an update and give good parameters and boundaries on what is settled content and what is not. +And then talk about external schedules and partner expectations that might change and morph on long development schedules. +And then you need to follow up again and again and again in all of your meetings. +So the more the dev team knows, in order to get your development team to understand the things that you're going to be working for, you're going to need to communicate future marketing opportunities to the creative leadership. +So, marketing teams, we're just going to sort of bounce outside of this for a second. +Marketing teams have, internally we call them a marketing beat schedule. +Other teams might call it something else where they might look at the two years in front of you and be like, I, based on the development schedule that's been expressed to me, we're going to probably want to announce a title here, we're going to need to do these certain things in between our next big beat, which might be a demo or another content drive. +and that's going to be sort of mapped out over the course of like a couple of years. +It's going to have like social media, it's going to have advertising, it's going to be a lot of stuff in a marketing beat schedule. +Anytime you have one of those things, a marketing team should be able to take that to your creative leadership and to the production schedule and sort of talk about the range and scope of what's going on inside of that particular document. +Because marketing is able to see opportunities here and here and here. +And we need to be able to put together the most important and interesting parts of the game in order to support those particular marketing initiatives. +As part of that, as a production team, you're going to sort of, with the marketing team, identify the sort of parameters around this. +basing this on an evaluation of what is possible versus what is desirable. +So you're filling in the boundaries of the full scope of the development schedule sitting out in front of you. +And you're probably going to say, but Becca, my creative team is really difficult. +My marketing team is really difficult. +But as a producer, it's your job to be able to go into a meeting between a creative team and a marketing team. +identify the problems that marketing is saying that they need to solve, and the creative team the assets and the development that can solve them. +Like, it's your job to sort of put those two pieces together. +In order to communicate future marketing opportunities to the creative leadership If the people who make the creative decisions don't know what the future expectations likely might be, you're not actually going to be able to make well-intentioned decisions to be able to support them. +which involves identifying the overlap between marketing and what you're building. +Because what you're building is so huge and what marketing is building is so huge and there's only a very small overlap in the middle of identifying the marketing needs from development. +And it's like, what part of the game that you're making fulfills this in the coolest way? +So, there's some examples of things that you can do kind of during this particular time. +If you've had the conversations, if you're able to identify the problems that the marketing team is intending to solve, there are lots of parts that you can plan for in advance. +So, for example, you're gonna have to build a trailer, an announced trailer, title announced trailer. +Are you able to storyboard this in advance? +Are you able to sit down with your marketing team, identify the talking points that marketing team is going to have to prepare materials around. +It's going to be an action RPG with X amount of combat and this sort of main character fulfilling these genre requirements. +with the assets that you have and the development, like sort of vertical slice, the game that you have available, can you storyboard out what is possible in that exact moment and how does that adapt throughout the next possibly up to a year before you actually have to make that trailer? +You're already sitting on the plans before you have to go into actually developing that asset. +A thing that we do often is we build our vertical slices to also accommodate different types of demos. +Um, so when we go into pre-production and then early production, we're already sitting on at least 45 up to like 90 minutes of a game that we developed intentionally to support early marketing asks like a 15 minute show demo that we can cut very quickly out of it. +Um, it's all, all been highly polished or um, uh gone through like all the VFX treatments um and we can also cut that into a longer sort of online steam demo. +That's early early assets and sometimes we have that done upwards of a year in advance. +Um we also do this because this can also be cut into a trailer as well. +We're sitting on at least 90 minutes of a game, we cut that into a trailer and then we are not asking for additional assets when that does come in. +So this is all done because this is all these are all assets that are going to be needed and we can front load them and then sit on those for as long as possible. +Because they're going to be marketing needs that would ordinarily destroy our studio. +We didn't used to do this. +The first tunic trailer that came out at the E3 showcase in 20 some time in the past. +I don't know if years have passed since then, but it was 2018. +We didn't have any of this sitting around, and we had to do whole, like, boss designs for it, which is why the librarian looks very different than it does now in the final game. +That was designed in about four weeks before the trailers put together. +And it was a huge problem when we were going to launch the game, like, would somebody actually notice? +The answer is no. +So we prepare in advance. +This is sort of what came out of that particular experience, which was we had to stop Tunic development entirely in 2018 in order to build a trailer. +We have stopped doing that. +We prepare almost everything that we do in advance, and we schedule this into production itself. +If we know we have a trailer, everyone has a trailer. +Everyone in this room, you're making games, you have a trailer. +The thing that you should be thinking of right now is what the hell in the build that you're making can be used in a trailer. +What story are you trying to tell? +And your marketing team does know that information. +So another Finji example. +Tunic needed a new demo as we were sprinting towards launch to address an issue that we had with future players thinking that the game was more Zelda than Dark Souls. +Which if you saw early Tunic stuff, it was like a fox running around a dappled forest with a sword and wearing a tunic. +the name has nothing to do with that but uh wearing a little green shirt and like looks like a Zelda clone and we were very aware of it um but the game also has tricky combat and a lot of secrets it really isn't a puzzle game um but we knew this back in 2019 and 2020 that this was going to be a massive problem with launch um and we communicated this um specifically because we identified it in marketing we identified it across a lot of axes that this was absolutely going to challenge the expectations that our players had when we did launch the game. +And on the development side, when we talked about this, they started to sketch out how a new marketing asset could be made to identify what was wrong with this. +And then we overlapped this specifically with the development schedule to make sure that it was going to be done in advance, that we had a demo that identified the fact that Tunic needed sort of a rework on making people understand that the game had pretty tricky combat. +The pieces of this were complete in September of 2020. +We did not launch this until June of 2021. +We built it into the production schedule. +We aligned it alongside TUNIT getting finished up. +We cut it and we sat on it for seven months waiting for the appropriate marketing timeline to be basically given to us. +Xbox was running a demo event, we pulled the demo, sent it off to our porting studio, two weeks later we had a demo that had gone through certification. +That was all planned in advance and sort of sitting in the wings for as soon as somebody had it ready to go. +And yeah, we planned it, we prepared for it well in advance, pulled the asset together and we already had the full marketing buy in from everybody, every stakeholder before it happened. +Because it did happen over the course of a year. +So where are you going to schedule this in production? +These are all obvious assets. +And that was, this was one of the hardest things when I was making this talk. +It's like this seems, these are obvious things that have obvious game assets, like they have things that come out of the build. +You can't make a gameplay trailer without a game. +So why is it that when we come in and say we need a trailer, it's like a new idea that has happened before? +And it's because we don't have these conversations. +We're not coming in and saying in a year we're probably going to need a gameplay trailer. +Or we're saying nobody's listening and I can't do anything about that. +So what, I say that these are obvious assets, and then I realize that they're not, because what do marketing teams need? +What are some of the things? +There's probably gonna be a lot more, because there might be like, well I need all these like advertising assets, and I didn't include those, because most of them overlap with a bunch of this other stuff. +So we sometimes need show floor demos. +If you still travel to things like PAX or can handle doing those. +Or, I mean, they're here. +Like if you just walk out here on second and third floor, there's a bunch of show floor demos. +They're down at the day of the dive. +So it's a show floor demo. +Usually like a 15 minute demo that self restarts. +It's been locked off in some ways. +So if somebody wants to come up and steal it, they can't. +like that's a thing that has to come from the game itself. +We also need trailers, they come in a variety of lengths, 45, 60, 90 seconds or longer. +There's also screen shots, usually without UI, depending on who you're working with. +There's B-roll, we have online demos which have different constraints than a show floor demo, usually a little bit longer, because it's going to be on like a steam online event, or it can be replayed. +You also have the GIFs, social media assets, We also have interviews. +I'm including this because this is a deliverable. +You have to do PR training. +You have to be up on talking points. +What does marketing, what did they identify has been a problem? +And you can talk to that. +Oops. +And then there's also store texts and blog posts. +All of these are the sort of things that you can prepare for. +You can do all of these things in advance. +We do our PR and marketing training like months in advance. +Sometimes we even do like practice interviews. +Um, because it's good to do if you're going to put devs out in front of people. +You should probably train them how to talk to people. +Because interviews are weird. +So what are you making now to support marketing? +So we have our marketing plan. +We have your game. +What part of your in-development game can double as your future marketing needs from development? +Internally, we're like, what can you make now that is cool enough for later? +And we do front load lots of cool stuff. +So I brought up this example earlier just because we literally rely on this all the time. +Vertical slice is a weird like sort of terminology here in the industry um because it can be everything, sometimes it's just like uh it's like your pretty corner, some people call it that. +Um it can be like 15 minutes, it can also be like a huge portion of your game, it can be like upwards of 3 hours. +However you define that, it's kind of up to you. +But in general, whenever we start a project and we get, I mean currently, it's usually about two-ish years into something. +We usually have a very, very pretty, very, very set, very polished and ready to go vertical slice. +We always, always cut that up into two different things. +We have our show floor demo and we have our online demo. +And that usually is like about a 45 minute experience. +Meant to be replayed again and has good game loops. +The vertical slice is always also cut into a trailer, so it needs to include the full scope of the game. +So if you have a narrative and an action component and a boss battle, if you have a magical system and you have the things that are important, all of these things are present. +Because they get cut into the trailer, even though it's only going to be like a snippet of it, it is a thing that you are going to want to include to tell a story. +Because every single one of the frames of your trailer will be screenshotted individually. +So people will be like, whoa, what is that? +It's a marketing tool. +So the more things you add, as far as gameplay, gives more conversations for your future players to talk about. +Those also, that same trailer gets cut up into your screenshots. +You can use the same asset to make your screenshots. +It also gets cut up, or it uses the key art. +as part of the start and finish of it. +All of our trailers get cut up into our social media GIFs. +We use the exact same asset for this, and that includes everything that goes up on social media. +This is one thing that we built early on in development, and it supports all of our initial launch assets. +There we go. +So responsive assets. +responsive assets is sort of like the term that I have for So when development knows what marketing needs to address, the development can work on parts of the game that respond to that need. +That's what I refer to as responsive assets. +You're working together with the team who's tasked with communicating to the public about your game, and you are building a development process, understanding what might be needed in the future to address that asset, or to address that need. +If you aren't making a responsive asset, you're just making an asset that doesn't have a plan behind it. +If you're not talking to your marketing team, it's not responsive. +You're just making stuff. +And you have no concept or understanding of what people are saying or what people are needing, or possibly even the cultural implications of what you're putting out there. +There's also business development needs. +In the Tunic example, if we didn't manage our partner's expectations, we would have like sort of missed the boat on reviews and player expectations and support cues. +Specifically, if we didn't tell people that there was combat alongside Zelda, like we would not have managed those expectations, it would not have responded to the things we knew that were happening out in public. +and your marketing team kind of knows all of this stuff. +If they're asking the right questions, they know that there are problems. +They're out there listening to culture. +Their whole job is to design a place out in the world for your game to exist. +If you're not utilizing them and asking them the things that they're seeing, you're kind of missing the boat on being able to design and implement responsive assets. +and it's kind of on you to work with them to build the best version of this communication structure of understanding what they see and how that feeds back into your development process. +Because what we prepare is going to change how it's positioned sort of out in the world. +And it's just, it's going to feed back constantly. +So, I have a second example of sort of a weird responsive asset, um, and it's a very, very small piece of a Tunic trailer, um, and I didn't actually put it in here, uh, because you can, you can just check it online because it would take slightly too long to show it, but we needed to put together a launch trailer for Tunic that showed a lot more of the game than we had showed in the past. +Um, previously we'd only ever shown the forest and the caves and various assets that we had, but we needed to hint at sort of the larger bosses, the scarier parts, the combat, the secrets, the manual that was, in some of the assets that were out there, but not in the way that they launched. +The trailer had a lot of things to communicate. +And the first trailer, the drafts that we had of it, went hard at all the things, but it felt really wrong. +Like, there was just something off about it, and we were pitching different ways to sort of fix the issues, and the problem was that the opening was wrong. +And the opening, what ended up in the final trailer, actually came out of marketing. +and the need was this, we needed a trailer that would remind the player who the main character of the fox is. +Everyone kind of recognized the fox. +So we had a trailer that would remind the player who the main character of the fox is. +Everyone kind of recognized the fox. +So we but the game had been in development for a very, very long time. +Things go in and out of like common knowledge and we needed to kind of acknowledge that directly to the player. +So what we did was we made a trailer that basically was like, this was like the sentence that came up in the conversation. +It was like, oh hey, it's the little fox. +I remember him. +Oh, he waved at me. +I played that demo once. +Oh shit! +That's a huge boss! +Like that's literally how we opened that trailer. +And that was like the marketing sentence. +Uh that was the marketing need that we had. +It's like we need to bring them back in. +We need to cheekily wave at them. +Which maybe we can pull off, maybe we can't. +And then like yeah and there's a big effin spider tank. +What's the spider tank's actual name? +I don't know. +I call it the spider tank. +The big stompy monster. +And he screams. +And then it goes into the hard trailer. +And it was like, look at all the places. +This is how big the scope of this game is. +It was one tiny asset, but it was an asset that responded to a need that we saw in the community. +So, part of this is we develop 90 percent assets. +And I've talked about this concept before at other GDC talks. +But if you have an understanding of the future deliverable and the constraints of this, you can prep your 90 percent assets. +This is so that when you get that request, you are at the polish phase already. +And you can only make a 90 percent asset if you know what your marketing team needs. +You need a trailer. +It needs to respond to a need. +You've put the development pieces of that into your development schedule well in advance so you can build your marketing asset when it is convenient to you. +We rely on this 100 percent of the time because a 90 percent asset for a trailer is we are mastering a trailer. +We are putting on the uh branding, the mnemonics on the side. +We are porting a demo that already exists. +That is a 90 percent asset because we are able to do that on a timeline that doesn't hurt people. +It also allows for a more collaborative approach to marketing. +We're able to involve the development team in designing these assets in a way that is conducive to the talent and brilliant minds that are on your development teams. +Because they know the game and you know the market. +because we have to produce these things on better timelines. +I work with very small teams and every single one of these initiatives that we've been involved with could hurt people and have hurt people. +And your goal at the end of the day is to not burn out your brilliant collaborators that you work with. +Because you've planned and you have prepped and you've done the design work and you've started building the asset well before, it's due because we work in games and everyone has to deliver the same assets. +So, things that I mentioned, we master things in that last 10 percent. +We, um, sometimes have storyboards and placeholders, um, for a trailer and we put it into full production. +Because if you know the beats, you can pull the clips. +Um, and it kinda, it goes real fast if you know what you're building. +Um, for store assets, if you have your key art and your identity done in advance, it's easier to pull the store assets. +You can also take final screen shots from your current builds. +The tasks are easier to get full stakeholder buy in if you're already sitting on them and they've already been approved. +Because we polish when we have the final info. +It is possible because marketing asks change regularly, you might be like I'm developing a trailer and next week you're not because the event is gone, it has been cancelled. +If you are always ready to participate. +It's not a big deal if it's canceled because you have not moved whole development schedules to support it. +You just change the final 10 percent. +Because it's so easier. +So, I'm going to talk a little bit about the are so much easier if you do it that way. +Because for external opportunities, it's always going to be a timeline crunch. +There's no way out of it. +It just is. +They're going to hold on to that news and they're like, okay, we need a trailer in two weeks. +We want a sample of it in 12 days. +I've had worse than that. +I need B-roll. +in 36 hours in some format they've never seen before. +This is the crap that comes in and I'm trying to be positive about it but it's just how marketing requests work. +It's just what my email inbox looks like. +It's always going to be a timeline crunch. +So if it's going to be a damn timeline crunch, we have to fix our timeline because there's no, that piece is immovable. +So we have to do our things in advance. +We have to talk to our dev teams. +So, how am I doing on time? +I'm good, right? +Okay, good. +Uh, polish less ten percent. +I have three examples, um, that I just want to run through. +So, chicory trailer number two. +Uh, we launched this thing in February of 2021. +And I'm just going to, I'm just going to tell you when we actually did this asset. +because I think it's interesting. +We had our 90% asset done in spring of 2020. +We had a trailer literally done, it hadn't been mastered and it needed to be cut a little bit, slightly too long. +Done in spring of 2020, we just sat on it waiting. +We negotiated to put this in at least four different marketing events between spring of 2020 and when it finally was on like the PlayStation blog in 2021. +And we just held onto it. +until we found the right spot. +The tunic combat demo, same thing, with the 90 percent asset done in September of 2020. +We did not launch it until June of 2021. +Because we had this done, we were able to negotiate an IGN exclusive look at the PC demo. +If we had gone too far, we would never have been able to do that. +The IGN exclusive look, that code went out in February of 2021. +That's how early they had access to it. +And if we hadn't Considered that that was a possibility, it would not have been possible. +Same thing with the TUNIC launch trailer. +We started planning and negotiating all of that in January of 2021. +We got Derek Liu, who's done a bunch of, like, GDC, like, he's awesome. +He had the builds of that by the summer, and he was already playing through the builds and pulling things. +And then we were working on storyboards through that whole fall. +This is just, we have to do it this way. +We have to build all this stuff in when we're actually doing the work for it. +And right now I'm doing the same thing on my two unannounced projects. +We are ramping up all of these early marketing assets to make sure that we don't just stop development. +Because we can't do that. +If we stop development, the game doesn't get made on time. +So the questions for your team, why is there a disconnect between your discipline schedules and priorities? +Part of it might be an attitude adjustment. +I mean, it was for us. +Like, if I go in, I'm like, I just need, like, one, don't say just. +But I need this thing, and I need it tomorrow. +It's like, yeah, well, put it on a damn schedule, man. +Like, that sucks. +You know these things are going to be made. +So how do we communicate better and have better timelines, even from marketing? +We know what we're going to need, so let's tell our production teams about it early. +and as production teams you know marketing's gonna need stuff so ask them what they need. +When do they think they're gonna need it? +And if they're like, I don't know, be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. +Give me some sample timelines. +What do you think could happen? +Because you can work with that. +How does this limit team good, team collaborative communication? +Like, obviously you hate each other and that's like just kind of a miserable environment to work in. +How does your external marketing ask affect your development team's anticipatory pipelines? +You don't have them. +If you don't know what's coming, if you don't know what's possible, if you don't know what the marketing team is planning for, or what they're hoping for, what they're dreaming for, you can't build anything to help support it. +How can you control for timelines? +You can't control for external timelines. +You can only control for your internal timelines. +What kind of milestones and tasks will you build into your production schedules to address the needs of all of your team? +Find out what the needs are for all of your team. +And that has to include marketing. +They are designers. +They are designing how your team and how your game is going to be presented to the public. +And build the pipelines for that. +So plan as early as possible. +We spend all of our time in planning. +I don't have a game announced for quite a long time, and we are already building all the assets for it. +This was the same thing for all of our previous projects, because we learned from experience that we're going to hurt people otherwise. +We prepare way in advance. +As long as we have slightly too much information, as long as we focus on the things marketing thinks we might need on our development schedules, we build those things. +Then we're sitting on the assets before we need them. +then we produce some better timelines because we are already sitting on everything we need. +Because we ask the questions that need to be there. +And this is me. +Eventually that power point will show up. +And I think we do have a few minutes for questions. +And apologies for my power point. +It's been doing some wild things. +There's some slides out of order and I don't know why. +Because they weren't an hour ago. +Oh, sorry. +I will repeat this after you say it. +Great, thank you. +So we talked about production and marketing timelines aligning and I think it's really great. +First question is, do you have dashboards globally across the company that have those two timelines visible? +Okay, so we were just actually talking about this because my husband was giving me a bunch of Oh yeah, Apollo, shut up. +So do we have global dashboards? +So we work in a small company and the answer is yes, but the small version, small company version of this. +We keep most of our information on Notion specifically for our company. +and it works slightly different depending on if it's an internal project or an external project. +So within marketing we do have sort of a like overall look at everything that's going on and then it's actually broken out so for external we usually keep this kind of over in something that they can actually work with. +And then internal, on our internal project, they can see or see all of the pieces of it. +But yes, the important piece of that though is because it is flexible and it has to be adaptable, things move around a lot. +team. +I can't expect him, if I change something, to know that I changed it. +He's not going to get that updated. +so if I'm like radically moving lots of things around or some console just emails me and I'm adding a new important highlight for one of our projects it is super important for me to raise that red flag right away because it is going to radically change development and that will come up almost instantly into our every single Monday we do our sort of creative team stand up, where we do high level discipline breakdowns in all of our creative teams. +And we actually have a whole section that is biz dev and marketing. +So anything that changes gets highlighted right there. +Usually kind of high, if it's really high up and it needs to change anything radically, it gets just higher priority. +But usually at the bottom, anything that I'm gonna bring into that meeting is four to 10 weeks in advance minimum. +because I bring it up immediately. +As soon as I know something, I come in like, I'm pretty certain I'm gonna have to do this. +Here is the breakdown of what I think I'm going to need. +What are we lacking from this? +And usually we have the majority of it sitting around. +But yeah, there's a lot of, nothing gets ignored. +As soon as there's a flag, we raise it. +Because otherwise it's never gonna get done. +You're just, yeah, you can't drop stuff like that into people's laps. +talk talk talk talk talk talk talk Oh, I mean the rest of everything. +So what are the other timelines that should be fitting into this? +Like, we have our marketing and production timelines. +We should be talking, like, where is advertising fitting into this? +Like, where is our events and logistics fitting into this? +Like, how is the QA process also on top of this? +We rely on our QA to help us get sort of our final screenshots even at the end of a game. +Like, that's not all on marketing. +Because they know the, by the time a game launches, our QA team knows the game better than anyone else on the planet, and they're like, I found something really cool, and they will be raising that flag. +Like, everything by the end of this, understand, in our QA stand-ups, we have a whole space for marketing initiatives and, like, biz dev things that need to be highlighted. +It has to, if you're going to have a collaborative communication process, it's holistic and they're working across all of our teams. +You have to be able to have everyone kind of on the same page to raise the important issues, to answer important questions and know when things are going to be due. +if you have a demo, an Xbox demo for example, going live, your QA team needs to know when the hell that needs to go into certification. +Because they're the ones that are overlapping with your porting studio or the engineering team internally who are doing that port. +Like, it has to be there. +Thank you. +Yeah, of course. +I'll be back in a minute. +whatever. +Hi, great talk, Rebecca. +First of all, is your studio based in Grand Rapids? +It is. +Small world. +I'm from Hastings, Michigan. +Oh, no kidding. +Yeah. +Great. +I'm from Fallerville, Michigan. +Can I say that out loud? +The wildest, smallest town in Michigan. +Great. +One question for you. +I'm working on a team that is just about to move into pre-production. +And we're just starting to set up some rituals with our marketing team and our production team to make sure that we're just aligned in our goals and that we're setting up milestones that reflect a shared vision instead of separate goals on separate tracks. +What sort of rituals did you find to be successful for your team to ensure solid, cohesive communication between the two groups? +Oh, that's a good question. +Okay, so one caveat, I run biz marketing and my husband runs creative, but we do work with external teams. +Adam and I have a really, just a really good communication process because he got so sick of me coming in with marketing things and because we obviously have a very close relationship, he was like, this effing sucks, we need to have a better process for this. +The main thing, one of the main things we did right away is like we, one, we never bash marketing. +We can be upset about the fact that we have to do something on a timeline. +We can be frustrated by the fact that somebody has external requests of us. +Um, but the people who are answering those emails and making those requests out of line to go after them. +Uh, and that sort of, like that alone builds a lot of trust. +So if somebody's like I need to do this and it is on a tight timeline and I need you development team to help me with this. +It's like I understand that you have an external request because you're on a different timeline than I am on. +And like that baseline respect for each other's disciplines has gone a long way, thank you, a long way to sort of alleviate a lot of the issues. +And it is done by example. +But in doing so we've also included like in our marketing teams we talk about development. +in our development creative teams, we talk about marketing. +We raise the important things that each team is doing to make sure that people are understanding that we are on different schedules regularly, but also that we are working towards the same thing together. +Because marketing is designing how your game is going to land, and the game designers are designing the game. +And they don't have access to the end user the way a marketing team does. +Thank you so much. +Does that answer your question? +It does. +OK, cool. +Hi. +You almost answered my question. +Is you have any tip on how you deal with, I mean, when the development team is too much involved on the marketing decisions. +So it's not the same an in-game, Yeah, no, I know this. +Or that a trailer is not the same. +Here, in-game, you want a lot of new screen data. +Marketing here, so the good thing of, you know, probably this year, the marketing, that everyone knows about marketing. +So we are so lucky that we receive advice from everyone. +So how do you deal with that, say, like you were saying, I have knowledge and I have numbers that you probably don't know. +How do you handle that? +How do you manage that? +Yeah, so the question is, when somebody is kind of outside their lane, basically. +Like when you have a dev team who is like, I know more about the way a trailer should be than you do, or I know more about the, honestly, for the marketing team in here, Be real careful going in and having opinions on mechanics. +Do you know more about that than the people who do this every day? +And the answer is yes, sometimes you do. +That is true. +You are often, you should be part of that conversation. +I had a really funny, sorry, real quick tangent. +A friend was giving a talk at GDC this week and their marketing team came in to try to change their stuff to have a bunch of talking points in it and it's just like, stay in your lane, you can't do that to a GDC talk. +the, where's your actual expertise at? +But, very specifically, how do we ensure that development doesn't change the actual, like, sort of design work and the needs from marketing team? +And this comes out in the planning process. +The second that we try to do this too fast, now we are in, we're in a situation where we cannot solve things with time and discussion, and we have to make a decision based on ego and, I don't know, fury. +talk. +The longer that you have to discuss this, to plan, to identify, to share research, the better able you are to build a thing that actually identifies the needs of the market, to be responsive of a thing. +you have more time to build your case. +And nobody's coming into something stressed and hot and mad because you've already imploded a development schedule. +Which is another reason why we do this early. +Because building something on a tight timeline is going to introduce those, they're just ego decisions. +I know best. +It's my game. +I know best. +It's my game. +I know the lore better. +And it's sort of like when you get a pitch and it's all lore. +You're like, no, no, no, baby. +You're just too close. +You've got the blinders on. +You've got to take a step back and tell me what's actually cool about your game, because it's not that. +It's the same very human feeling, is to take a step back. +You probably don't know best. +And you do need to look at it with really calm, sensible eyes. +But yeah, time. +Time and planning. +Thank you. +You're welcome. +I think I have one question. +Can I do one more question? +OK. +Hi, Rebecca. +Thank you so much for the talk. +My background's in development, but I work in marketing now, so I feel very seen by this. +My question for you is, for our team, we've been focusing a lot on tool development for my marketing team for how we can capture the build or take some of the work off the dev team and do that. +And I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about how you've handled that at Fingy. +For tool development, well we're small enough they don't have a ton of it. +However, we do have a lot of discussions sort of at like a top level of we are going to have to support this thing and who is available to help support it. +Because there are people who are infinitely qualified especially for capturing builds. +or they have to like run things in unity or I'm going to have to run it on device so I'm like capture carding with the QA team to pull that because like my marketing team doesn't have a damn dev kit sitting around and I have to run this off of a PS5 in the office and that's off a capture card. +We plan this stuff so far in advance that like we don't we put it into pockets and that's our way around these legitimate bottleneck moments. +But we do have to get buy-in from everybody. +I can't just go into QA and be like, I need fill in the blank. +I can't have that. +It does need to be like this scheduled thing. +And because it's not their main job, it might be they spend a couple hours capturing something very exact. +Because we usually map out, we need this exact thing. +We would like it to look like this. +And can you provide a couple of options of this? +Can you go through this boss scene like three times? +and for them, they're like, hell yeah, I can definitely do that because I can do that boss scene with my eyes closed. +We also will use like internal to the build itself, we have a whole bunch of depending on what we're doing, we'll script out whole scenes of things. +If we have to capture it on device, we'll like push that into the build for marketing itself, because it has to be run on device. +So like Fox Waving, for example, that was a scripted scene that Andrew put together that we pushed through and then captured off. +And we do a lot of that. +But we do have to, we spell out, we would like to do this. +We would like the camera to pan like this. +And we spec that out, scope it out, and then talk to our dev teams to see when in the schedule can that be available, and what debug menu can we access to be able to pull that. +but usually done pretty far in advance. +And oftentimes, especially in some of our past stuff, both chicory and tunic especially, A lot of it was already being thought about, of like, it would look real cool like this, it would be cool if we could spin it like this. +And they were already asking those questions, kind of, of us for future marketing asks, because they knew, I'm going to have to make a trailer of this eventually, and I don't want to be ambushed with weird camera cuts or something. +Does that answer your question? +It does. +Thank you. +Yeah, of course. +Okay, I think that's all we have time for. +I can go over to wrap up if anyone wants to pick my brain about whatever. +I'm cool with that. +Um, and wrap up is windows on that side of the building. +Um, but yeah, thanks. diff --git a/static/src/transcript/P0iluGzYGpY.txt b/static/src/transcript/P0iluGzYGpY.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a2510c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/static/src/transcript/P0iluGzYGpY.txt @@ -0,0 +1,680 @@ +Okay, so So in physics, there's this idea, this idea that reality is like two different things happening at the same time. +On the one hand, it's a world of particles, and objects, and events, basically the everyday phenomenal world that we live in. +But at the quantum level, of course, it behaves more like a wave function, a field of possibilities, or overlapping potential realities, or what any Marvel fan knows as the multiverse. +Now, Dr. Strange might have his own definition, but for our purposes, a multiverse is a good way to think about the nature of interactive story design. +Because in a branching narrative game, we use logic and structure to create a sort of multiversal story tree that defines all the many possible paths through a narrative. +But the story can only ever be experienced along a single path at a time, and it's these individual story branches where we give meaning, emotion, and value to the audience and to the players. +So this talk is about how we do both of those things together. +Using the left brain to create meaningful narrative structures, while using the right brain to tell a powerful and emotionally resonant story that satisfies players, no matter what branches they pick through the game. +And I'm going to do that in the context of six principles that we followed when we were making As Dusk Falls, along with examples of how they show up in the game. +Six principles for growing a tree in the multiverse. +OK, so before we dive in, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about me and about the studio. +I'm Brad Kane. +I got started in the late 90s as a journalist covering what were then called story games. +I worked as a producer at Pixar Animation Studios, as a screenwriter, designer, and narrative director on a bunch of different games, including some of the former Telltale, a few AAA titles, some live action projects at Netflix. +And I spent over four years creating As Dusk Falls along with the talented team at Interior Night in London. +The company, for those who don't know, was founded in 2017 by CEO and creative director Caroline Marchal as an independent studio dedicated to making cinematic narrative games. +And our first game, As Dusk Falls, is a six-chapter original interactive drama about two families from different backgrounds whose paths cross at a motel in Arizona in 1998 and the events leading up to and in the aftermath of that one fateful night. +Now, it's specifically a branching multi-protagonist story where player choice and player action determine how the narrative unfolds. +It's what some people would call a choose-your-own-adventure game, where players can't see everything in one or even three or five playthroughs because there's just a lot of different paths to take through the story. +Here's our launch trailer just to give you a sense of the tone and the look of the game. +The thing about shadows, you can't escape them. +You just learn to keep them behind you and look toward the light. +I represent some business acquaintances of your father's. +You help me take care of my family, I'll help you take care of yours. +You swear it won't happen again? +We can make it through this. +On the ground, now! +You're making a huge mistake! +Daddy, don't go! +All you had to do was keep your mouth shut. +What are you doing? +Improvising. +I'm not just gonna abandon you. +Family means sacrifice. +All right, so we developed It's a great trailer So we developed the game with Xbox Game Studios, and we released day one on Game Pass last July. +And the reviews were generally pretty positive. +We won Games for Impact at the Game Awards. +We've had writing nominations at several of the other award shows, along with various noms for directing, acting, music, and so on. +So now when we started working on this game in 2017, we had a very specific goal in mind, which was to move the medium, the narrative game medium, away from like adapted games, adapted IP games and adventure games, towards something closer to prestige television. +We were inspired by, and we're still inspired by, shows like these. +These are shows defined by great writing, great storytelling, great characters especially. +A lot of them are crime dramas like our game, but really it's about a certain creative bar. +Our goal with this game was a TV-style experience for every player, whatever choices they made along the way. +And that meant we needed to focus on things such as the inevitable technical glitch. +such as having a great screenplay, priority number one. +Choices that actually matter, not just the illusion of choice. +Original stories, original IP, consistent pacing. +Narrative game design is traditionally quite slow, and like I said, we were going for something closer to a season of television. +Manageable production complexity, which for us would mean we could offer a wider choice field and have more flexibility for iteration and rewrites. +An experience where all playthrough paths are valid and good, which is really important to us and I'll talk more about soon. +And we also have a major multiplayer component in the game that I'll touch back on toward the end of the talk. +So why does any of this matter? +Well, at Interior Knight, we believe that branching storytelling is not a gimmick, but it's actually a medium. +And that when we create these games in a deep and approachable way, they can have mass appeal for gamers and especially for non-gamers, because people everywhere love good stories, they love games. +People really like experiencing these things together socially, and they really enjoy learning about themselves and each other in the process, which is something that we offer through our games. +So that was our starting point. +Let's dive now into the creative process that led to the game we shipped last summer. +And I just want to give you guys a spoiler warning. +I'm going to be giving out a lot of them. +So if you haven't played the game and you're really excited to experience the story firsthand, you can leave now, and I won't be offended. +There goes Carolyn, creative director. +All right, so like I said, there's these six principles. +And the first is what I like to call no McKee, break McKee. +Be a master of story structure so you can destroy it. +Who is Robert McKee? +For those who don't know, McKee is probably the best-known teacher of story structure, specifically cinematic story structure, meaning for movies and TV. +People tend to either love him or hate him. +He's very polarizing. +But he knows his stuff, and a lot of screenwriters, especially when they're starting out, will take his three-day workshop or read his book, Story. +It's kind of like a fundamental one. +And there's lots of other great screenwriting teachers out there, too. +This is just a sample of them. +But what they all teach in one form or another is story, and specifically the art of story structure. +So when we talk about structure, what do we actually mean? +Well, it's this thing we all learned about in school that most people in this room probably understand, that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that we can divide them into three acts, that there are inflection points like the inciting incident, the midpoint, the lowpoint, the climax. +And the reason that story has this, looks like this, this shape, is that the shape itself is what creates emotional engagement. +It's something that comes from deep within our psyche. +Shape is like how we understand and make greater relevance of an emotional experience. +It's why entertainment tends to look like this. +And yet, it's really common for trained screenwriters to come into this medium of branching games. +And they're ready to exercise their structure muscles that they learned in Hollywood. +And they're surprised to hear narrative designers tell them, hey, your outline doesn't work, or that story is ignoring the player, or you're putting the story on rails, all these ideas. +And everything they've been trained to do kind of fails. +Spanner in the works, of course, is player agency. +The need for the player to be at the center of the experience. +So writers will then think, OK, well, I'll just create a screenplay, but then I'll insert some choices in between the turning points and kind of choice-ify my script. +But these are the moments that don't really matter, the ones in between the turning points. +And so you get choices that don't feel like they matter either. +You get the illusion of agency. +Players can see through that, especially these days. +We've had a lot of good branching games, and so there's kind of some knowledge around that. +And everyone sort of throws rocks at the game. +So what do we do? +How do we solve this? +Well, we have to break McKee. +But not all the way, right? +We have to know classical structure well enough to know what you need to honor and what you can adapt in a game like this, what you can afford to lose. +It won't work to skip an inciting incident or have a story without a climax. +That would never feel good. +It won't have the engagement we're looking for. +But if the instinct is, in story terms, Jane starts the story lonely, and she begins to trust Clara at the midpoint. +They face a final problem as a team, and they wind up friends for life. +That kind of model of things might be a little too rigid for what we do in these games. +We have to break that a little bit. +So let's look at an example of how we do this in As Dusk Falls. +This is Vince. +He is a former airline mechanic who, in book one of the game, is moving cross-country with his wife, his daughter, his father, to start a new life when they have to stop for the night at a motel in Arizona on Route 66. +And that road trip is the starting point of the story. +We can represent it as the first point on a story graph like this. +It's the little yellow dot in the bottom left, if you guys can see that from back there. +Now, if this were a movie, the inciting incident would typically happen at about the 10-minute mark. +That's what the numbers are along the bottom. +They're a reference point for film. +And in this case, it's when Vince, who we now understand has problems fighting for what he cares about. +It's like his character flaw. +He gets taken hostage with his family at the motel by the three Holt brothers. +Now, in the movie, the story might continue something like this. +At the 30-minute mark, which is usually the start of Act 2 in traditional structure, Vince's worst fears are realized when his wife, Michelle, gets shot. +And at the midpoint, when he can only send one hostage to safety, he kind of gets to be the one to decide who, he insists on sending her out, of course, but it means his impressionable young daughter, Zoe, is left inside with the gunmen. +At 75 minutes, which is often a sort of false ending moment in story structure theory, it seems they're about to get rescued, But then the corrupt sheriff recklessly assaults the motel, putting everyone inside in danger. +At our crisis or low point, Vince and his daughter get trapped in the burning motel. +Things could get no worse for them. +But at the climax, Vince finds his courage, fights off the bad guys, and ultimately sacrifices his life to save his daughters. +Now that's a nice shape to the story. +This curve looks nice and curvy. +And it's going to feel pretty good if it's well written. +But in a narrative game, it's not enough. +We also need the choices. +And just as we can't offer meaningless choice, we also can't offer choices that do this to the story shape. +Because in that blue path especially, what's happening is the choices mattered. +They've really changed the shape. +But the story doesn't have really a recognizable shape anymore. +It's not going to feel engaging or satisfying in the way you want it to be. +So instead, what we have to do is we have to map the choices onto the inflection points of the story in a way that preserves enough of the structure to keep it meaningful. +In the Vince example, it's going to be things like whether his wife gets shot or not. +That's a variable in our game. +She might never get hurt at all. +And in that case, their story becomes more about how they work together in a crisis with the kind of marital problems that they have going on. +which hostage he sends to safety. +Like I said, that's actually a choice. +He might choose his father or his daughter. +And the back half of the story takes on a whole different context, depending on what he picks. +Instead of fighting the Holt brothers at the climax, he can choose to be their ally, fighting against the corrupt sheriff instead. +Whole different path into the climax there. +And there's lots of ways that book one can end. +Vince can be dead or alive. +He can be free or kidnapped, and so on and so forth. +So here's a second curve, story curve, made from those same choice moments we just looked at. +And it looks kind of similar to the shape of the first yellow one that I put up. +But if you superimpose them, they're different enough that the choices matter, but the experience and the shape still remain meaningful and engaging. +It's still a story. +Now, a classically trained writer might argue that there's always going to be one set of curves that's a little more perfect, a little more McKee. +I think McKee would probably say that. +And he's right in the context of a film. +But what we get in the bargain here is player agency. +And that is the compromise we have to make and that we're happy to make for a good branching game. +Sip of water. +OK, so principle number two, characters as questions. +That title is a little misleading, because most characters in most stories are questions, actually. +What will Walter White sacrifice in his quest to take control of his own life? +Can Elizabeth II preserve tradition as the world around her modernizes? +Can John Snow, a bastard from the North, save a world that doesn't care about him and hardly wants to be saved? +These are all central story questions, which is to say they not only drive plot, but they also convey theme. +And themes, as we know, are often binary. +Things like fate and free will, nature versus nurture, the good of the many versus the needs of the few. +Binaries lend themselves well to narrative games, of course. +And in most movies and shows, the exploration of theme is closely tied to how characters arc. +So this is a character arc example, rags to riches. +We're all familiar with character arcs, I assume. +Usually a character starts with one value. +In this case, it would be rags and ends up somewhere different, riches. +But that could be anything, selfish to selfless or shy to confident. +The key is that they're diametric. +They form two poles. +They're not always super diametric, but there's a change implied in the character arc. +Now, in a branching drama, we have character arcs also. +But we tend to need to start our characters not at the initial point of a journey, like with the whole arc ahead of them, because agency. +So instead, it's more like in the middle there, beginning in the center of the curve. +So the story can kind of go either way, rags or riches. +And therefore, so can the meaning. +In this example, maybe it means the protagonist starts out with a low-level corporate employee job, boring but stable salary. +And the question is, will she make millions or will she lose everything over the course of whatever that story is? +And here's the key. +Each answer implies a very different thing about what that story meant. +after you've seen it. +So like in A Breaking Bad Game, for example, Walter White might have turned himself in and worked with his cousin Hank to take down the cartel, making it a sort of redemption story for him. +Or in The Crown, the queen might choose to abdicate in the 90s, making hers a story about the triumph of modernity. +And Jon Snow might have chosen to rule in tyranny with Daenerys, or even taken the Iron Throne for himself, turning his story into a tale of corruption and probably a better ending. +So how about As Dusk Falls? +We're going to look now at how we built a story tree for the second main character, Jay, that took into account the variability of theme. +Now Jay, for those who haven't played and didn't want to leave after the spoiler warning, is the youngest of three brothers who try to solve their family's debt problem by robbing the corrupt sheriff of Turok. +But it all goes to hell when they get holed up at this motel with half a dozen hostages and the sheriff outside basically trying to kill them for various reasons. +His theme question is, can Jay escape his toxic family without becoming just like them? +Here's a short clip just introducing the three Holt brothers. +You're always out skulking in the woods, climbing trees and all that. +We all know you're good at it. +And you want to help the family, right? +You know I do. +Then here's your chance. +Okay, so those are the Holtz. +And each episode typically has one or two major branching moments that relate to Jay's theme about his family identity, how he feels about that. +Chapter one starts off pretty low stakes, because we're early in the story arc. +And the question is just, does he get that money from the safe that they're talking about, or does he fail and disappoint his brothers? +In chapter two, he's not actually playable in this one, but his story is still evolving and the stakes are still rising for him. +Thematically, it's about whether his family is scraping by through a difficult night or are they kind of shooting hostages, making things a lot worse. +It's kind of building toward where his story is going to go. +In chapter three, Jay either sides with Vince or with his own family in a certain dilemma, further testing everything he believes about himself and his relationship to them. +And then in chapter four, which in our game is the beginning of book two, and it properly kind of becomes Jay's story at that point, now the stakes kick into high gear. +Does Jay fight with his family until the bitter end, or does he abandon them and run for it on his own? +In chapter five, his story is mostly about his relationship with his close friend Vanessa as he's kind of trying to get to the border and escape. +But thematically, the stakes are getting huge for him because she represents his last best chance at personal redemption. +So does he lie about his identity knowing that he could be putting her at terrible risk, or does he tell her the truth and face losing his only friend and ally? +And finally, in chapter six, the stakes could be no higher, the font no bigger. +Does Jay escape to Canada at the expense of another person's life, or does he surrender to save his own soul? +So those are the questions behind the story tree. +And there's, of course, a lot of ways to cut out a branch that answers them. +In this path here, Jay's journey is mostly one of safety and loyalty, you could say. +He's staying loyal to his family. +He's loyal to his friend. +But in a final twist, he actually kills an innocent person. +to gain his freedom. +And so the answer to his theme question could be said to be something like, you might escape a toxic family, but the toxicity lives on inside you. +Whereas, in this version, totally different path, his journey is a lot more turbulent along the way. +He abandons his family. +He deceives his friend. +But in the end, he makes a very noble choice, and the answer to the theme question becomes that real freedom is about personal integrity. +And of course, there's other paths, too. +It's not always black or white. +But you always get the experience of exploring a theme and deciding how that character resolves, how that arc will go for you. +And again, McKee would probably say that characters have one right ending because it's intrinsic to what their flaw is, who they are, must determine how they resolve. +And again, maybe he's right. +But for us, it's more interesting to let players explore that and figure out what it means to have that flaw and decide for themselves how it resolves and whether it resolves. +Okay, on to principle number three, agency and consequence. +So we talked about major inflection points and how you can manage choices so that you keep an overall dramatic structure. +But in any given scene, there's still always this push and pull between story and design. +It's kind of like the inherent conflict of these games. +Story wants to tell a good tale. +Design wants every choice to matter. +Sometimes we have to find a balance, somehow. +Somehow we have to find a balance. +Now, not every choice can be world-shaking. +Sometimes it's going to be more about probing the different sides of a character or adding flavor to an interesting moment. +But at least once per scene in this game, we wanted a piece of meaningful, impactful agency that would really matter. +And we called these, in our game, crossroads choices. +In real life, when you reach a crossroads, your choices have ripple effects. +Sometimes those are short term, sometimes they're long term. +In episode two, for instance, chapter two, Vince has that key decision I mentioned about which hostage gets sent out of the motel to safety. +He's got his wife, his father, his daughter. +They're all inside. +They all, for different reasons, need to get out. +And depending on previous choices, the game presents the two best options for who that could be. +It's a binary, determined by other things that have come before it. +and that choice has consequences. +Consequences that are immediate, consequences that are delayed, you could say, and then consequences that are quite long term. +So immediately after the choice, there's three different scenes that play out depending on who Vince is escorting outside for the hostage exchange. +For instance, if it's his wife, then the act of saying farewell forces them to kind of face this issue they've had in their marriage. +And they either kind of decide they're going to work on it and try to heal it, or that they're going to dissolve it and that this is probably a kind of goodbye for them. +Then there's delayed consequences, consequences where the ripple effects are felt in later scenes or even into the next episode, say. +So if Michelle was shot and not rescued in that scene, she actually, spoiler, dies at the beginning of the next episode. +Whether that's a painful death or peaceful death is still variable, depending on agency on the player's part. +And if Zoe also wasn't rescued, meaning if Jim was the one who was sent out, then Zoe witnesses that, and it's hugely traumatizing for her. +And then in our game, there's actually these kind of longer term consequences. +For example, 14 years later, our story kind of spans quite a long period of time. +Michelle, if she lived, can be married or divorced. +And Zoe, who is now 20, she has either lost Vince, or she's lost Michelle, or she's lost both of them, or she's lost neither of them. +A lot of different states for her. +And Jim, too, the father, he has his own set of immediate, delayed, and long-term consequences. +So it all kind of like ripples out. +And all of it, in this case, links back to that one choice from Chapter 2. +Now, the key to all this is that even as you accrue different levels of consequence, you still want to keep things interesting by layering on new crossroad choices, even as your consequences build up. +This is Vanessa. +She's that friend that Jay makes during his escape to the border. +And a lot of how his story plays out toward the end depends on how his crossroad choices kind of intersect with her fate. +This is not the most exciting visual aid you'll ever see, but it's super useful. +We do a lot of these. +It's like a two-by-two story matrix. +It shows how two earlier sets of choices combine into a later scene. +So along the top, it's this moment at the end of chapter 5 where Vanessa either stays with Jay for the duration of his story, or she's going to go her own way on player choice. +And down the left-hand column there, it's a moment from the start of the next episode when Jay either bluffs his way past a police roadblock, or he kind of fails to bluff and he ends up being essentially chased by the cops on his journey north toward the border, toward Glacier National Park, in fact. +And the one there with the blue, this one is subdivided again by another slightly minor variable. +So there's really five states going into the final act of his story in that episode, which is cool. +It's cool to have five states. +But that's still all consequence. +We still need to have agency. +So each of those five ranches has its own crossroad choice in the game, which further subdivides into a total of 10 outcomes, which is the light blue boxes there. +So even though not every choice can matter, you just can't make a game where every choice matters. +It's not going to probably be affordable and run into problems. +But even though that's the case, if you keep on introducing important choices into your consequences that you're building up, you get a sort of layering effect where the choices constantly feel like they matter and players feel ownership over the story, which is really the goal. +All right. +Principle number four, A story and B story. +So we wanted from the beginning with this game to do something a little different with points of view and non-linear storytelling. +Almost all TV shows and films use some kind of A-B or A-B-C structure, with usually one main story intercut with one or more side stories. +For instance, in Better Call Saul, it's definitely Jimmy McGill as the main character. +But almost every episode, we spend a good chunk with Mike and his dealings with the cartel. +It's the structure of that show. +House of the Dragon uses an ensemble. +The Wire cut back and forth between the cops and the criminals. +And I put Lost up here, even though it's old, because their AB structure was usually the same character at different points in time, kind of jumping back and forward, which is kind of close to what we did in this game. +Our idea was that every episode would have an A story and a B story where the B story takes place at some point in the past and affects the future as seen in the A story. +Now sometimes that B story would be an hour in the past, sometimes a few days, sometimes months, and in that one episode it's 14 years. +What's cool about that is it's much more epic and responsive and you get a real sense of scope out of the story. +The challenge is the logic. +because we see parts of the future before we get to parts of the past. +So we can't, for instance, conditionally kill a character that we know is going to turn up later. +We have to know what we can affect and when we can affect it. +So let's look at how a story tree can shape up, factoring in everything we've talked about so far, including this time dynamic. +So, okay, Chapter 6 starts in 2012, in the future, as it were, with Zoe, who was a kid at the motel, and now she's a 20-year-old woman. +And we know she's tormented by her past. +We set that up in the episode. +And she's paranoid about a mysterious something that we don't yet understand in the present day. +She's got some problem. +And like we said earlier, she has multiple substates, depending on things that happened earlier, whether her parents are alive or dead, and so on. +But essentially, she's a young woman dealing with years of varied trauma. +So we tell a bit of that story, and then we cut back to 1998. +And now we're with Jay again. +And it's late in his story. +He's on the run. +He's trying to get to Canada. +It's that scene from the blue story matrix. +And this is basically just a visual version of that without the fifth case, two by two matrix. +He's got those two main variables in play. +He's either pursued by the cops or not. +And he's either with Vanessa or he's alone. +Now, cutting back to 2012 again, at the end of a subplot between Zoe and her grandfather, we discover that Zoe has been receiving letters from Jay. +And she's been hiding them in a box up on a shelf. +And we see the letter. +And the letter is worded in such a way that we know Jay must survive his story to be able to send it, but not whether he'll escape or get caught. +We can't reveal that yet, because the player hasn't determined it yet. +So back in 98, we have the climactic scene of Jay approaching the Canadian border over the mountains. +And again, that part of the scene is really modular. +There were four ways up the mountain. +There are three or four totally different kind of climactic scenes based on different variables. +There's multiple outcomes for what happens to Vanessa. +And ultimately, it all funnels into this one key variable for Jay, which is, does he get caught or does he jump to freedom? +So now, back in 2012, this is where that's all finally going to come together and all pays off. +We learn that the reason Zoe has been struggling in recent days is because she's been debating whether to go see Jay face-to-face. +And for the final scene, they have this long-fated encounter, one-on-one meeting together. +But the nature of it is radically different, depending on what happened in the previous scene from 1998. +If Jay escaped to Canada, Zoe's visiting him at his hidden cabin in the Canadian wilderness. +The central question of the scene is, does she agree with his feeling that he didn't deserve his freedom? +Now players decide that, and it leads to multiple endings for Jay and Zoe. +They can reconcile, or she can finally turn him into the authorities, and so on and so forth. +But if Jay was captured, then the 2012 scene is very different. +Zoe is visiting him on Death Row in Arizona prior to his execution. +And the final question now is, in light of everything that's happened, will she be the friend he needs and be there for him on the day of his death? +Players again decide that, which leads to further endings for Jay, either redeeming him, condemning him, and so on. +And that's about our maximum branching complexity, by the way. +So there's two major branches times two variables. +Each with a crossroads choice leads to roughly eight to 10 outcomes. +It sounds like the same structure from the other scene we talked about. +That's because that's kind of a natural limit for us. +We find that if we get much more subdivided than that, what you've got is complexity for the sake of complexity. +Players don't feel it. +It's kind of not worth doing it. +So that's typically where we cap it. +And part of why that's true is because of principle number five, which is no game overs or bad branches. +That any branch we make, any story we tell, we're committed to making it feel like that's the best branch you could have gotten. +Again, this is like a prestige TV experience. +You want all playthroughs to feel like a great piece of content. +Now, not all games take that approach. +In, like, The Walking Dead, the zombies can get you, you die, and that makes sense for that IP, right? +Or in Hidden Agenda from Supermassive, it's possible to finish that game without ever solving the mystery. +And again, that's kind of by design. +Or in some of the Netflix shows, including ones I've worked on, you can just pick the wrong path and fail, and it tells you you have to rewind and try again or else you turn off your TV. +Those are your options. +But our model was Prestige TV. +And there's no Prestige show where this happens. +So for us, the show always goes on. +If you fail a QTE or you make a terrible choice, there will be a consequence. +But that consequence doesn't affect the format of your experience. +It just changes the story. +So early in the game, we're more forgiving about what that means. +The most damage you can do in episode one, for instance, is you get a sheriff's deputy killed when he swings by for a seven. +Make it sound like it's not a big deal, but poor guy, right? +But once we get to episode two, choices start leaving a more permanent mark on the game. +And from there forward, major characters can die in almost every episode. +And when that happens, the story has to adapt. +Partly, we do that with an ensemble cast, like I talked about, like allowing the POV character to swap over. +Partly, it's just how we structure the episode when we allow consequences to happen. +But it's not trickery. +We don't write a dead character out of the story. +The fact of their death becomes a defining theme for the survivors and the people who love them. +And that story just kind of adapts from there. +Now, not every major event is life or death either, by the way, especially in a game like this. +Again, maybe in The Walking Dead. +But at a couple points in the middle of the game, it's possible for Jay to get arrested. +and his journey doesn't end there. +That wouldn't have felt good. +It would just feel like a bad branch. +And we also didn't want to tell a story from inside the prison system for three episodes. +We could have, but it wasn't the story we wanted to tell. +So we needed a way to adapt the story to be responsive to what happens without tying our hands creatively. +And we knew Jay would have to escape custody, so we didn't focus the agency on that. +It's not about what clever way do you get out of the office, because ultimately it wouldn't have mattered. +He always escapes. +So instead, it's about what happens during that arrest. +And there's this conditional scene that plays out where he's being interrogated by an FBI agent pretending to be on his side, played by the wonderful Brian Bovell. +And whether players figure out that he's kind of playing him when he's not on their side determines whether Jay sort of confesses on tape. +Let's watch it. +My son's a linebacker. +Got himself a full ride to ASU. +Do you like football? +Not really. +Well, he does. +He's out there pursuing his dreams. +That's what I want for you, too, son. +But here's the problem. +Forensics has you at the sheriff's house. +Witnesses have you at the motel. +To get a deal, a way out, you need to give up something the DA doesn't already know. +There's only one thing big enough, and that's who made you do what you did that night. +See, we had a lot of bodies inside that motel. +Four police officers dead at the scene. +Another two on life support. +You weren't just a witness. +You were part of it. +So tell me, who put you up to it? +Tyler. +He gave the orders. +I just did what he said. +Make a note. +Suspect has confessed to multiple murders at the Desert Dream Motel. +And to being an accessory in the murder of Victor Gray. +Wait. +That's not what I... You can discuss the finer points with the judge. +You said... You said you'd help me. +I am helping you. +You're gonna feel a lot better now. +What about pursuing my dreams? +Like your son? +That isn't my son. +This isn't even my office. +Yeah. +So Jay's always going to escape this room. +But that confession variable gets stored. +And much later, if he's on death row and if he didn't confess in this scene, he can't actually get a reprieve. +So it's a small touch. +It's just an example of how even a failure, in this case the failure of getting arrested in a different scene, can be used to tailor the narrative. +OK, so I started the talk on the idea of trees and branches and left brains and right brains. +And a lot of what we've covered so far has been the left brain, really, the design. +But the moment-to-moment quality of any story comes down to the writing, which means, as a writer, you have to know how to take all these branching principles and just sort of completely forget them and flatten yourself down into a single branch as you write. +So in terms of our writing process, we used all the same tools that a writing team in television would use. +From the beginning, we got together in TV-style writer's rooms. +We worked out the story on boards and post-its with a lot of fidget toys. +We created a pretty extensive story bible with characters, locations, world building, elements, which we regularly updated throughout the project. +We also like working with character maps. +This game is about relationships between characters and between families of characters. +And especially with the AB structure, we needed to understand how everyone was connected to each other. +In fact, for all the branching complexity of the game, and it is complex, this character map came before any of that, before any of the branching got figured out. +Now where it starts to get unique to this format is that we use specialized tools to outline and write in a way that lets us focus on the story while also still paying attention to the considerations of branching structure. +We looked at a lot of branching dialogue tools before we kind of got into the meat of this. +But we decided to go with a modified version of Microsoft Word, which sort of shocks people, especially writers, when they hear that. +But it's actually a really customizable tool. +It's especially good for collaboration. +There are other custom tools out there with various strengths and weaknesses. +I could talk about more afterward in the wrap-up if anyone's interested. +I'd strongly recommend against trying to write in a flowchart tool like Articy, Romero, or ArcWeave. +Those are great tools, but they're not so great for writing. +But it's ultimately up to what works for your team and for you. +And then it's just about writing pages. +I think our final script was about 1,200 pages long, writing them and trying to make them as good as possible. +And the thing with the writing is it's just this tricky balance where you need to bring in all the skills you have as a screenwriter, focusing on character and emotional authenticity and the flow of the scene, and write as if there's only one branch, the branch that you're in at the moment that you're writing it. +while at the same time remembering that moments can sort of weave in and out of each other in a very non-linear and tricky way in this format, and that there's things like feeders and choice responses and moments where the dialogue dovetails back to mainline, which do have special status within the screenplay, and they have to be written with the tree in mind. +Which is why it's really a cross-brain exercise, bringing it back to this image. +Some writers work with a separate narrative designer. +Some studios are set up for writers to work with a separate narrative designer. +And they communicate back and forth a lot. +They have to work very closely together. +Otherwise, you just have to get very good at moving back and forth across your own corpus callosum and kind of doing both. +But in either case, this is where I'd say the two sides of the process really collide. +It's all about this weirdly zen idea of having to remember the tree and forget the tree at the same time. +And then even when we think we're done, we're definitely not done. +We went through multiple rounds of UR feedback on this game, and sometimes they radically changed the story, too. +For a long time, Vanessa always came with Jay at the end of into Chapter 6 in one of three different emotional states. +But we got feedback that some people wanted to leave her behind in Chapter 5 for her own sake. +So we got into the truth of that. +It was a good note. +And we came up with a pretty last minute storyline for what happens if Jay is approaching the border by himself and without the cops on his tail. +Because prior to that, that was the source of the drama. +So we had to kind of figure out something else. +Which is how we ended up at this character of the park ranger that Jay meets, who's sort of like a much older version of himself, like a reflection of who he could become if he goes the right way in his journey. +I'll just play you one last snippet here so we can see it. +You know, I've seen a lot of crazy things up here. +Forest fires, avalanches. +But I always wondered, is it really necessary that we carry these? +But we are border patrol. +In the rare event some criminal makes a run for it, we need to be prepared. +Look, you seem like a nice kid, but we got a stolen car down at the trailhead, which State PD says belongs to an 18-year-old who shot up a motel in Arizona, and was last seen headed north. +Now, you got no water bottle, no headlamp, and I sure didn't see a campsite further down the trail. +So, what's the deal here? +Michael? +Please, let me keep hiking. +Oh, son. +I can't do that. +I've got a responsibility. +Can't you just help me? +Look, it's no kind of life running from the law. +You'll be living with that shadow over you forever. +Let me take you down the hill. +I've never once fired this thing, and I sure don't want to start now. +So I'm going to let it hang there. +But out of curiosity, who would have surrendered? +Nice. +And run. +Interesting. +So yeah, that was a scene born out of necessity. +But in the end, it gave us a really nice piece of character-based storytelling. +So, let's get back to why all of this matters, why any of it matters. +So, branching narrative games, they let us tell these, like, fractalized, multiversal stories that are both emotionally deep and approachable, where players have a major role in shaping the journey. +This is one of the insight screens from our game, which sort of collates the player's choices and play style into a personality assessment. +I show it because these games can also reveal something about players in a way that linear TV can't do. +They're a kind of mirror. +They show us what we value and how we respond under pressure and how we differ from other people in that regard. +I mentioned multiplayer. +At Interior Night, we do believe these experiences can be shared. +And a big part of the game was seeing how people respond to these problems as a group. +You can actually play with up to eight people locally, and there's a network mode, too. +This is an area where the design team really pushed the medium and tried to figure out how we could offer something brand new and different for players. +Now, another reason why this all matters is what the future of content looks like. +We've seen explosions of original prestige shows across the streaming services. +I mean, we've seen the streaming services themselves explode too, of course. +And those same streamers are now getting more and more involved in funding and distributing games. +It's all kind of converging. +And pretty much every game IP is now considered a possible transmedia property from almost the second it comes into being, which all points to a future where really good stories told in unusual ways will have an audience. +And like I said, branching stories aren't just a niche or a moment. +They're another type of entertainment, and that factors into the publishing equation. +So there's a lot of opportunity out there if we take the medium seriously and let it really be about that creative bar, which has been our take on it. +So as designers, we do that by learning to see the tree, the multiverse, by being everything everywhere all at once. +Well, as writers, we have to be completely in the moment and in the truth of the characters, because that's where a great story comes from, and that's what ultimately makes your audience care. +So, thank you very much. +I think we have time, so let's open it up to questions. +Hey, I have like a million questions, but I'll try to just pick one. +On a practical level, when you have so many different states and so many different scenes, how do you keep the entire team engaged with this multiverse? +Whereas the writer can have the multiverse living in their head, but the rest of the team, they're building individual scenes. +So how do you make sure that everyone is aimed at the right vision for a given scene amongst, you know, 14 other options. +Yeah, so I'm going to repeat the questions for the camera. +The question is how do you kind of keep the whole team kind of in the vision of the branching game, because it's quite complex. +And it's true that as writers we have more of that in our head, like as designers. +I'd say that for us a big part of that is that we have a pretty small team. +I'm We work in Word, but then we also use Articy. +So there's a visual representation of the game for design and production teams. +And we also do things like table reads. +We continually work with the team on it. +So the short answer, I think, is that we do it by doing it. +It has to happen. +Everyone needs to be in the loop. +If someone doesn't know what's going on, they're going to get on Slack and ask a question or talk to their director or something and kind of make sure they have that knowledge. +Great. +Great talk. +Thank you. +Thank you. +Hello, thank you for an amazing talk. +I'm super interested, because you mentioned that you wouldn't recommend using RTC as a tool for writing, right? +And we actually did that on a game called Game Deck, which also involved a lot of branching narrative. +And we also weren't happy with it. +So I would be super interested to learn a little bit more about your writing pipeline, because you mentioned that you approach writing as a normal screenplay writing, right? +So how does that pipeline of writing and then using RDC work at your company? +Yeah, it's tricky. +I mean, it's first worth saying that we developed our format having previously worked in proprietary branching tools. +Like we all came from different companies that did this type of thing. +So there was already some internal knowledge on like what we would need to do in a in a Microsoft Word format. +It could be very complicated otherwise. +So we figured out how to organize it in Word. +And then it's definitely a pain point for us getting into Articy, and especially with revision and iteration, because those tools don't speak that well together. +If we make a change, there needs to be this kind of manual update process, and it's something we've been looking at. +talk here. +And it's something that we're also exploring tools and trying to figure out how we want to improve that. +But having people there to navigate that bridge was just a big piece of that for us, and it let us kind of get the creative. +We'd love a speech on that someday. +Interesting. +OK. +Note taken. +Hello. +Thank you for the excellent talk. +I'm curious, for people who are looking to do smaller, maybe solo branching narratives, or just who wouldn't be working in a team, how would you recommend estimating the scope that you can feasibly accomplish? +And kind of following on the last question, What software would you recommend when you're not writing across a team? +I assume proprietary software is easier to use in that circumstance, but I'm not actually sure. +Something like Twine? +Yeah, so let me repeat the question. +I forgot to do that on this one. +So it's about firstly managing scope on a solo project. +And I wanted to just ask, when you say manage scope, do you mean for yourself as a writer, or do you mean like the complexity going into production from the script? +I'd say just like the complexity of the actual script, like how much can I, like if I'm writing my own branching narrative and it's just me, how do you do a reality check on like this is how much I can feasibly accomplish as one person? +Yeah, I mean, so on the writing side that's going to come down to how, I don't know, how prolific you are I guess, you know, I mean, be ambitious So yeah, you kind of just have to, I think, try it a bit. +The other side of that question, which is what can you produce, I think is a whole other matter. +It's useful to know what your ratio is. +There's usually a ratio of how much material you've written versus what a playthrough is. +These games are often something like 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 in terms of how much gets produced versus how much gets seen by the player. +There's a whole bunch of different ways to look at that. +Yeah, budget's going to factor into that, and time. +If you're doing it on your own time, maybe you want to take bite-sized chunks and make sure you can accomplish something. +Versus if you're out to be the Brandon Sanderson of game writing, and you've got 15 volumes in you or something, then more power to you. +And then what sort of software would you recommend for an independent? +Yeah, software for independent. +I'm probably not the best person to answer that. +I know people use Twine. +But are you talking cinematic or interactive fiction? +Interactive fiction. +Yeah. +I mean, I think Twine's what they use, but there's probably other people who know that better because we're very specifically focused on cinematic. +So it's very much like screenplay style for us. +But we could chat about it more in the wrap-up area after if you like. +OK. +Sounds great. +Thank you. +Thank you. +Hey Brad, great talk. +I got two questions for you. +As you were in the midst of pre-production and production, how often did you play test as a team and have to go back to the story bible and realize, oh we need to refine this or flesh out this detail. +How often did your team review the story as it was developing? +Yeah, well the team is constantly in the game. +How often the writing team saw the game, I think that the answer to that is we need to do more of it. +We were, you know, there was a lot of exploration and experimentation and figuring out the, you know, we have a unique art style and understanding how that was going to work in the format was a long process. +And so there was a period where it was like better for the team to kind of work that out without us being like, you're not You know, facial expression doesn't, you know, there's a lot that we could have, like, been obstructive on. +As we got further along, we played it more, and I think that we definitely, it's something we've talked about, we want to keep increasing that, because you, there's, like, the, it's super valuable to always be playing the game. +It's just about knowing when your notes are useful, because, like, there's a point at which the cinematics are just bad. +Like, it's just their first pass, and everyone knows it, and the last thing you need is a writer coming in and being like, I feel like you're not accomplishing my, Did you notice any sort of communication tools or strategies that really helped working between the narrative and the other disciplines on the project? +on you know, just shooting a message to each other, jumping on a call, but communication always, you know, a quick call solves things better than 100 slacks, if you know what I mean. +So that's my five minute warning. +Yeah, okay, so one or two more questions. +Hi, I had a question about the crossroads decision points. +I know that in the game those decision points require player alignment, but I'm wondering, like, what was the rationale behind revealing that those were, like, major choice points to the player versus obscuring that? +It makes me think of, like, In Telltale, when it's like, so-and-so will remember this, or Intel Dawn, where there's like the little butterfly, what do you think is the value of saying this is a big choice versus not letting the player know when that's occurring? +Yeah, it's a good question about how, about why and when you make big choices transparent in these games. +And I think there's a reason that these games all seem to land on, like you're saying, different ways of communicating it. +at You play the Netflix stories and you don't see a tree. +You don't typically know. +And that's fine. +But I think we just feel that it's a value add for people to know that this is an important moment. +And it helps convey that certain moments are going to be impactful, and especially in a multiplayer setting. +It adds stakes, like you just feel in the moment the tension of that, and we're all sitting there going like, oh god, what's going to happen? +And it's also part of the maxim that choices should matter. +We're saying your choices matter, and this choice is especially going to matter. +We're being upfront about that, so please take your time and think about it. +Our timer mechanic actually works differently on crossroads choices. +They're typically untimed, because we want people to just sit and talk to each other and figure out, honestly, what's the right move here? +Because there's going to be consequences. +So it's a design decision, and I'm definitely interested to see a game that goes either way with it that was the one we made for this game. +Thank you. +Thank you. +Do we have time for one more? +Yeah. +While he's looking at the time, go for it. +Thank you for the fascinating talk. +My question, naively, if you have a branch, every time the players make a choice, you end up with your branches doubling each choice. +So I recognize that you need to recollect them into a limited number of branches, such as he's in Canada or he's on death row. +However, funneling players into one of two branches might reduce the feeling of agency and make them feel railroaded. +How do you prevent combinatorial explosion while at the same time preserving players' feelings of agency? +Yes, so the question is how do you prevent combinatorial or exponential branching and keep agency? +And I think the brief answer is like I was talking about the 10 rule, like how we didn't go past that level of nuance. +And it's for that reason. +You can't go bigger than that without spending more than you want to spend on these games. +But if you go less, it does feel railroaded. +So it's a balance, honestly. +That question you're asking is kind of one of the central questions that we face in designing these games. +Because like you say, you do want people to feel like their choices are mattering, but you can't do a sub-choice on a sub-choice on a sub-choice, or you quickly, you know, you really do have a tree at that point. +And maybe in the text adventure game of that, you can afford to do it if all you're spending is writing time. +But when you're shooting, and you've got actors, and you've got voice, and you've got an art team, there's got to be production constraints. +So that balance is a big part of the process, honestly. +And that's kind of the art and science of it. +And that's a good question, by the way. +I'm happy to talk about that and other topics at the Alcove. +I think they're going to kick us out right now. +I just have a post-mortem question. +Did you use telemetry to analyze how many players took which path or if there are branches which was maybe taken by really few players to learn from it to see for the next game maybe this was a bad decision or something? +Yeah, good question about telemetry. +The answer is yes, we get telemetry. +Before release, there's like UR feedback telemetry, so we could see what people were doing in playtests, and we did make some tweaks based on that. +And then after the fact, we also get telemetry. +We don't do post-launch updates or anything. +We're not changing the balance, but we do see that stuff. +We'll do that for the next game. +Yeah, it's good to know. +I think even if it's just for the pleasure of being like, oh, the choice was balanced, or whoops, everyone chose to run, whatever it is. +But yeah, it's nice to be able to know what people are picking. +Thank you. +So thank you, everyone. +I'm supposed to remind you to fill out your thingy that you're going to get emailed. +And if you want to talk more, there's a little alcove that way. +I'm happy to chat with people during lunch. diff --git a/static/src/transcript/RspwD7uVRDE.txt b/static/src/transcript/RspwD7uVRDE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ba1027b --- /dev/null +++ b/static/src/transcript/RspwD7uVRDE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,383 @@ +Welcome to our talk. +We will talk about farming simulator today. +I'm Christian Amann from China Software. +This is Stefan Geiger. +We will split the talk in the middle. +And before we talk, this will be recorded, so please mute your cell phone. +OK. +We will start with a little introduction. +For myself, as I said, I'm Christian Amann. +I have a master's in computer science. +I worked a bit in the video games industry some years for Sony PlayStation and also for NVIDIA as a software engineer. +Before, I founded China Software together with Stefan Geiger. +This is a short intro of Stefan. +Stefan also has a master's degree in computer science. +He worked shortly at the Sensory Motor Lab before co-founding Giant Software in 2008 together with me. +A short slide about Giant Software. +We are developer, publisher of the Farming Simulator series. +We have offices in Zurich, in Germany, in the Czech Republic, and in the US. +And we develop games for pretty much all platforms that make sense, from consoles to mobile, also PC. +Sorry. +Okay, let's just start. +the history of Farming Simulator. +Both of us, Stefan and me, we share the passion for video games and programming. +And we dreamt of developing a game engine and creating video games in Switzerland. +And that's a fun fact. +Almost 20 years ago, we visited together the GDC here in San Francisco. +And that was the point where we decided to bring this dream into reality. +So in 2007, a friend, Martin Beowulf, suggested us to create a farming simulator. +So he had this idea. +He was pretty much obsessed by this idea to create this game because he loved such a game to play. +And so what we did, we concluded a bit of research, and we also launched a web forum with a small prototype of a farming simulator game. +And through that feedback we got, and also through market research, we were convinced that there's a potential and also demand for such a game in the market. +So this was pretty much the start. +2007, long time ago. +There were a lot of challenges in 2007 to enter the games market as a fresh developer, indie developer so to say. +Self-publishing a video game was a major challenge in the past. +The dominant way of selling games was back then still physical retail distribution. +So that was difficult. +And digital platforms that are available nowadays are very accessible, were close to indie developers. +So Steam was only open for indie developers 2012. +So that was also not possible to go that route. +And there's another big, major obstacle to take. +It was the game engine itself. +So game engines like Unity and Unreal, they were not accessible at that point. +Unity didn't really exist, and Unreal Engine was too expensive at that point for us to license. +So those were the challenges we had to overcome. +What did we do? +We tried to search a publisher, really traditional way of doing a video games project. +And we actually found a small publisher. +in Germany that we could do a contract, a distribution deal, that we also got a small minimum guarantee for the contract. +But the guarantee was so small we could barely upgrade our Maya licenses to commercial We used Maya for pretty much all the assets of the game, so that was necessary of course. +So that was it, that was the start of the development of Farming Simulator. +It was a true independent game development to say, so we lived in a shared apartment to save costs. +and we did everything beside our day jobs. +So I was still working for NVIDIA at that point, part-time, and Stefan was at university finishing his master degree. +So it took us about nine months of development time and we could release the first version April 14th, 2008, and it really sold a lot. +So we sold, for the first version, which was only pretty much sold physical and only in Europe, 250,000 units. +And this was really crazy. +What happened at that time is there was, a trend of simulation games became popular again. +So in the 90s there was quite a big genre and then around 2008 it was kind of a resurgence in popularity in the simulation genre, which is also nice. +could have helped us to sell units. +I will now talk a bit about the game design, the ideas we had behind the game. +Of course, Farming Slater is a simulation game, so the primary objective is to simulate a farming experience, per se. +So the players are tasked to planting and harvesting corpse. +crops. +So this also involves managing livestock, buying and selling agricultural equipment. +And what we also did from the start, we licensed farm brands to put into the game like John Deere and other brands to make the game as authentic as possible. +So, next slide. +To create a simulation game, we had to choose between entertainment and realism or authenticity and it was crucial I think to have a good balance because on the other hand you want a lot of realism to make the game as real as possible but we also want to keep the game as fun as possible and that's very important for us to find the right balance also to make the game successful in the market. +We tried very hard and we think we were not bad at that. +In most cases we favored entertainment, so fun was always more important than realism. +And I think that was also something which we did a bit different to other simulation games at the same time that were on the market. +We really favored entertainment and not realism. +Influences. +Yeah, we got influences, of course, by a lot of great games of that time. +Maybe to mention here is Grand Theft Auto and also Battlefield. +There are open world games, that was of course for us important to create an open world game. +What we also got from those games was this concept, which was pretty much new to simulation games, that you can enter and exit the vehicle at any time. +It's important for us that you can then also move around independently of a vehicle and also interact a bit with the environment. +And this gives you this kind of control of an immersion in the world that you are, as the simulation is. +I think this also helped to make the game interesting to a younger audience, and that's also a huge difference we see compared to traditional simulation titles like Flight Simulator, Train and Truck Simulator. +We have a much younger audience that plays our games, and I think one of the reasons is that we added newer features, for example that. +A bit more about the balance between entertainment and realism. +So easy to play game design was a huge priority for us. +What we did is certain automation to simplify certain gameplay mechanics. +So we tried to reduce the number of buttons that were used. +and we also introduced a context sensitive help system so in all situations all the buttons that make sense to use were showed on the upper left screen because we had this experience from those simulation games. +They were great, like I just remember Falcon 3, a flight simulation game, but you had to remember like 100 keys to use it, and that was just not so practical. +So that's something we came up and thought, yeah, that could be cool, that you don't need to remember all the buttons. +OK, what we also did is we, of course, also added advanced gameplay mechanics, because we need to have a certain depth in the gameplay. +And what we did is we add that optionally. +So it was not, for a lot of things, it's not mandatory. +But you still can have that gameplay if you want to. +And this is something we did a lot in the sequels. +We added more and more complex gameplay, but it was optional. +So you're not obliged to use them. +It's free. +Of course, yeah, we released the game. +And there was a lot of feedback. +Some feedback was the game is too simplistic. +So there were hardcore fans in the community of the game that said, yeah, you can't make such a shit. +It's a toy game. +It's not a real simulation game. +So for example, the attachment of the combine header, so this bar in the front of the combine harvester, it was just one button. +You attach, lower, and turn it on. +And this was too simple. +And then we went back and made it a bit more complex. +And there were other elements that we also had to change or adapt. +In the end, user feedback was always very, very crucial and still is today for us to develop the game further and to decide which is important, which is not for the game. +That was from the start. +Even before the first version was released, we got feedback and were able to even with the first videos we released, we could incorporate feedback from the community into the game, which is quite cool. +Yeah, so to say. +So the rest of the talk, we will talk about the three defining features of a farm insulator, career mode, modding, and also multiplayer. +Career mode, we introduced pretty much from the beginning of the series in 2008. +The ability to mod was in the first iteration. +We enhanced it quite substantially with the second version. +And multiplayer was introduced in the third iteration in 2010. +Let's talk about career mode. +The career mode in Farming Simulator adds progression and challenge. +So the player can start with basic farm equipment with a small amount of money and then gradually build his farm and earn more money to purchase larger and more powerful farming tools and so on. +The mode was at that time quite unique among simulation games. +And I think the important part is that it adds a level of progression and goal setting that was not present in other games at that time, simulation games at that time. +So that was, I think, an important part of the success. +What was the inspiration of the career mode? +So there are two things that inspired us. +First, RPG games. +that have this kind of leveling up or experience points and skill trees. +But also, like in sports management games, you see economy management that is also an inspiration to us. +And those elements, they're kind of a natural addition to the whole theme of this game in farming. +I think it adds a lot of engagement and realism, because farmers, they need to manage their equipment and their farm. +And there's also, of course, financial management. +So they need to see if they have enough money to buy certain equipment or exchange certain equipment to bigger equipment. +That's just the natural part of a farmer's daily life. +So for us, this was important to get this full spectrum of farming into the game. +and as I said this was not found in other simulation titles at that point. +Another element that is really interesting to talk about is the micro gameplay of the game. +So the micro gameplay is really when you work on the field, the lanes of the field go up and down to cultivate, to plow, to seed, or to harvest. +Or there's also, like if you sell goods, you have to drive to a selling point. +and then sell the goods. +This is something we quite early we added so called AI workers that will do those jobs because driving up and down the field for hours is maybe a bit boring as a game in the long term. +So we added automation mechanisms into the game. +so that you don't have to do that yourself. +So you can hire workers and then they will do the work for you. +It costs a bit of money, of course, but they will do the job for you. +So this is interesting in contrast to the macro gameplay. +So if you have the micro gameplay, so to say, automated, you can concentrate on the macro level. +And this is something that you see. +A good example is Factorio, where you have a low-level gameplay mechanics layer. +And then as soon as you have figured it out, you can concentrate on a more higher level of the gameplay and play there. +So this is very, very similar to those construction and management simulation games like Factorio and others. +So that's quite an interesting This is already the end of my part. +We will switch over to Stefan. +Yeah, so let's get into another very important aspect of the game which is modding. +So basically we kind of grew up around some of the biggest modding successes like Counter-Strike and Fans of the Asians and other big titles that were pretty popular with modding like Battlefield and Honor Tournament. +So for us it was kind of natural that modding needs to be part of the game as well. +because we also see kind of all the benefits from it that kind of gives the players that long-term playability and having the options to fully customize their game to what they like it. +And also it kind of gives a lot of free content for us because we've not been able to or probably no company is able to produce that much content that the community is able to. +To give you a short view what kind of the modding is in Farming Simulator, I have a short video that kind of shows a couple mods. +Like, of course, there's a lot of kind of realistic mods that try to model new vehicles that add kind of that realistic side of the game. +There's also completely new maps that people can create. +Mostly they're kind of dedicated to a specific area that they live in. +Like here is one in the US, in Michigan. +And also completely new gameplay features, like here where you have a very dedicated tool to fully optimize all the gameplay with very specific features. +Some other stuff like police and search and rescue vehicles that kind of completely change the game away from farming. +Also some fun elements as well. +They also added excavators in the game and some very fun stuff as well. +Also like yeah content very kind of dedicated to kids as well with like very colorful stuff. +So, well, how did we achieve that? +So with the first version of Farming Slater in 2008, we didn't really have time to implement a lot of modding specific features. +But we very focused on being as modding friendly as possible. +So we've chosen open formats, XML based and also used kind of industry standard formats like DDS for textures. +So the tools already exist to author them. +And also we released our internal development tools like DCC exporters for our mesh formats and also our level designers that people could create new maps with primarily. +And also we wrote most of the gameplay code in Lua. +So that was fully accessible for the modders to change and adjust and also add new gameplay features. +Well with Farming Simulator 2009 we've had more time to actually improve that system. +So what we introduced was kind of a modular mod system where people or modders would put their mods into a zip file and people would simply put them in a known folder. +So they no longer have to change the game installation and kind of manually merge different mods and whatever. +So that made it very much simpler for the users. +And also, the maps are now automatically detected and shown in the selection. +And the vehicles and equipment would be shown in the in-game farming shop. +So you can just buy them directly with no actual manual adjustments. +But we also restricted the access to the Lua scripts. +The reason for that was With the previous open concept, it was very, very hard to have multiple mobs installed side by side. +People would have had to kind of manually merge those Lua scripts. +And so what we instead did is kind of provide a couple dedicated APIs to the modders that they can use to extend and change the script, so to hopefully reduce those conflicts between the mods. +With Farming Simulator 2011, we introduced multiplayer in the game, which I'm coming to in a second as well, but it also meant that we wanted to add mod support in multiplayer as well. +So one key aspect for us was to make sure that the matchmaking is not compromised by the mods so other players couldn't destroy the experience of others. +So what we made sure is that the clients need to have installed the same mods as the ones on the server. +And also, the mods would only be activated when you would join a game. +So only at that point, when the server already said, OK, I'm using those mods. +I'm sure those are fine for me. +That's also when the clients would actually activate them. +And of course it also meant that all the mods had to be multiplayer aware, especially the script code that introduced new states had to be adjusted so the states is properly synced to multiplayer as well. +One big issue we kind of always faced so far at that point was the mod distribution. +So by then we didn't have any solution on our side so we left that up to the modders to distribute those mods. +to the players and that often resulted in kind of very un-user friendly download sites kind of covered with ads and where you can barely see where you actually need to click to download. +There's also been fake download sites that distributed malware and stuff. +And also one big issue was that people started to download other people's modders mods and re-uploaded them to a different site so they could earn a bit of money and that was always a big issue in the community. +And from the user perspective as well is of course the quality insurance that wasn't guaranteed at all, right? +So you would download the mod and you have no idea if it's even going to work or completely destroy your save game. +So the solution we came up was the official mod hop that we introduced in 2012. +So the idea about that was to really kind of have one source of quality mods. +But modders were still hesitant to actually use that system because To kind of guarantee the quality, we had to introduce a couple restrictions in terms of quality. +And also, because it's kind of an official thing from our side, we also had to guarantee that there's no licensing issues, there's no age restriction issues, etc. +So, not all mods are actually possible to be submitted to the modhub. +And also one big factor was the potential loss of that ant revenue from others. +So it wasn't really that much used, but we really have seen a big shift in farming simulator 17. +mainly due to kind of three changes that we made. +So the first is that we integrated the mod hub into the game directly. +So before, people had to go to our website and download the mod there and install it manually. +And with Farming Simulator 17, it is now directly possible to download from within the game with basically one button click. +Also we introduced the rewards program. +So we do pay the modders based on the popularity of their mods. +So that's actually going to be a couple thousand bucks a month. +for the most popular mods so there's even some teams that kind of work almost professionally for those mods now also kind of interesting now that with the talk from Wednesday that Unreal Epic also introduced that for their Fortnite Creators Mode kind of a similar concept so And then the last thing was the mod support that we've been able to finally introduce to our PlayStation and Xbox versions. +We're kind of really proud to to be one of the very first game to actually support that, but of course there's a couple technical restrictions as well on that, like there's no option to compile shaders on those platforms and also we're not allowed to ship custom scripts there. +Also one big restriction is that all the content on those platforms need to be created. +So the only option to actually get mods on the consoles is to go through the mod hub. +But it's also very important for us to kind of keep the external mod support on the platforms where it is kind of possible. +Because yeah, there's still a ton of mods that will never go through the mod hop restrictions that we have. +So to kind of show the progression on the success of the mod hub, there's a couple numbers. +So with Farming Simulator 15, where we first introduced it, we kind of got around 300 mods with around 1 million downloads. +And with Farming Simulator 17, we reached about 2,000 mods with over 500 million downloads. +And then with Farming Simulator 19, now have around 6,000 mods with more than 1 billion downloads in total. +And Farming Simulator 22, even though it's just out for about a year, already reached similar numbers to Farming Simulator 19 as well. +Some other kind of considerations for the mod support is that it's very important to kind of keep the modding as simple as possible. +So we spend a lot of time on documenting our systems and writing tutorials. +We've also been able to partner with Wiley to produce a farming simulator for modding book. +Also, it's important to kind of keep the amount of changes from version to version as small as possible so people are not forced to kind of relearn everything every couple years. +And also to kind of keep the amount of mods as large as possible because it's always a bit of a hassle for players to lose all their content when they switch to a new version. +So for the changes that we had to make, we tried to kind of keep a fallback support for old mods still. +Or in the cases where that was not possible, we also wrote converted tools, like when we restructured some XML files or when we changed our binary formats, texture formats, et cetera, so that there's as little work needed by the modders as possible. +And of course having our own engine was also a very huge benefit for that because we're able to really plan the changes we're doing and also kind of time them perfectly with new releases. +So especially when we're doing updates from one version within the game would be a very big issue if suddenly more formats would change as well. +Also it's kind of very important to keep kind of avoid any kind of locked in third party solutions like you would go with a Steam-only solution or so. +That would really prevent providing mod support on consoles. +And also, it's very important to have a very optimized QA and submission process in a mod hub, because we've now QA'd more than 6,000 mods within a year to ship them to the players. +Another thing we did to kind of enforce people to create more moths we uh... we had multiple mock audits and tests in the past as well so here is an example in twenty seventeen we we had uh... total price pool of fifty thousand moths uh... fifty thousand uh... euros so uh... with uh... couple nice uh... uh... cheap use and and also like the winner of the contest uh... +would have the option to partner with us to create a paid commercial DLC so where they would get a share from that as well. +These mods are free so there's no direct revenue except for the reward but the DLCs that we sell obviously get an even better reward. +Let's get to another topic, which is the multiplayer mode. +So the first two versions were single player only, but we've seen a very big potential in multiplayer. +So farming in real life is also a very big teamwork effort. +There's even processes that are now possible to do on your own, like chopping mice which is where you have like the chopper is not able to basically capture all the chaff so you need to have a tractor with a trailer next to you driving all the time where it can immediately unload that. +Also we've seen a lot of requests from the community that really would have liked to see that in a game and We've also seen a very big competitive advantage as well, because most of the simulation games at that time didn't have multiplayer. +So with Farming Simulator 2011, we implemented a cooperative farming mode with up to eight players. +So you would manage one farm together on one map. +And we chose kind of a server client model where one of the players would host the game and others could join directly. +Also, the mode was played mostly with rents. +I mean, technically, it's also possible to just have random people playing together. +But yeah, with cooperative playing, it's always a bit tricky to have random people. +So one other thing we introduced in 2013 was a dedicated server support. +So with that self-hosted system, that has always been kind of an issue with network performance. +And back then, like even one megabits of upload was kind of a luxury. +So that was always a bit tricky for the player experience. +So having a server in a data center obviously helped a lot for that. +But it also gave several kind of gameplay benefits as well. +So now with a server running all the time, you could also have kind of a continuously simulated world. +So you're no longer tied to one of the players hosting the game, and then it would only be running at that point. +And also you could now have multiple admins for the game, because before only the host would be kind of the admin of the game and would have all the permissions to give rights to the players and kick and ban them. +And now, with the dedicated servers, you could have multiple of those, which also allowed kind of more public play as well. +So you could kind of create a bigger community of people that would just randomly play on one world and share kind of the same experience. +With Farming Simulator 19 we also introduced a new concept of having multiple farms on one map. +So you could have up to eight farms and each player would be assigned to one of those farms. +And each of those farms would own their own land, their own vehicles and would be kind of playing against the other farms. +That kind of introduced also a more competitive play as well, because You kind of compete with those other farms for resources like land. +So you probably want to buy the best land first before the others can. +And also there's a concept of kind of variable sell prices for your crops. +So the more you sell, the less you get for it. +So you probably want to sell the stuff first before the other farm can. +Also, cross-play is something we introduced with Farming Simulator 22 as one of the biggest features in multiplayer. +So now you're no longer restricted to just play with people on the same platform. +But that also had the restriction that we now had to provide the same mods on all platforms. +So before we've been able to just have a set of mods only on the consoles and maybe similar but slightly adjusted mods on PC because of the restrictions on consoles. +But now we're forced to really guarantee that the mods are really the same as much as possible. +Also, it's kind of very important to not have any platform-specific APIs, like for networking or matchmaking. +Also, before we only had voice chat on the console versions. +Now with cross-play, for the console players to be able to really communicate with the PC players, it was also an important thing to actually introduce voice chat as a feature on PC as well. +And also there's a kind of a restriction that we're not allowed to have any direct connections from the consoles to the PC. +So, but we still wanted to kind of keep that self-hosted concept. +So we didn't want to force everyone to to go through the dedicated server concept. +So what we did is we introduced a relay server concept. +So instead of connecting directly from PC to consoles, we would connect, both would connect to that relay server and all the traffic would be routed through those. +Another part that is kind of tied to the multiplayer mode, but it is not directly part of the game, is our eSports mode. +So 2017 we kind of experimented with some competitive modes. +And we've seen a very huge advantage in that because most of the big eSport titles are not family friendly. +So we've seen kind of a big potential in that. +And also the feedback we got from those early experiments were very positive, that kind of encouraged us to continue with that and develop a full-featured eSports mode. +So in 2019, we had our first Farming Simulator League season with a prize pool of over $250,000. +And so I've got a short video to show a couple of impressions of how that looks. +So yeah, we also work together with the big manufacturer brands. +So they have their own teams that compete in the league. +And the mode is kind of a three by three mode. +which is covering kind of the three concepts of harvesting, baling, and then selling those bales, kind of as efficiently as possible. +So that brings us to the conclusion of the talk. +The franchise has evolved quite a lot over the years. +Our basic strategy hasn't really changed. +we're still trying to kind of be as casual as possible but kind of give a kind of still give kind of a realistic simulation and also like the modding helps as well to kind of solve the balancing act as well because there's a lot of very realistic farming mods out there. +So the core simulation fans can also work with those mods and kind of get their very realistic experience if they like to. +And also the listening to the community feedback helped us a lot to improve the game over the years as well. +But it's also very important to know that not all of the feedback is really good feedback as well. +And also a lot of the feedback you hear is coming only kind of a portion of of the game, of the players, especially like more kind of the core simulation audience is kind of more audible in that feedback than the casual players. +So we also implemented features into the game where we later realized that it's actually not really a feedback that kind of the casual player liked. +So later on in updates of the game, we also added options kind of to disable those features again. +So that it works better with the play style of those more casual players. +For the future, we have a lot of ideas that we want to want to do, but there's like a couple key points I want to mention here. +Like the immersion that we want to achieve is not where we would like it to see yet, so we would definitely see more interactive worlds and also kind of see more story elements with NPCs and stuff to interact with. +And also the eSports mode right now is still kind of separate from the game and it kind of limits the amount of players that actually use it. +And that's definitely something we would love to see more integrated into the game to get a bigger audience. +And also one thing that is always tricky with War Thinks Simulator is the onboarding and also kind of the The open world style of the game kind of doesn't give a lot of guidance to the players. +So people are often kind of left in a situation where they don't know what they should do next. +Because yeah, it's an open world game, sandbox style, where you can do whatever you want. +It would definitely be beneficial to those to kind of give some guidance what they could maybe try next. +So that fits better to some of those players. +So yeah, that's Farming Slater. +Thank you for your attendance. +And don't forget to fill out the review forms. +And yeah, we're open for questions. +Hi, I'm Frank Carey from Fable Studio. +We're working on an AI theme park builder game. +And since I saw this title, I've always been curious, like, why farming, right? +Like, what is it about farming? +What other options did you guys consider at the time? +And yeah, what was farming checking the boxes of that maybe those other options didn't? +Well, I mean, before Farming Simulator, we actually worked more on like an RPG title. +But kind of what convinced us about farming was kind of the broad array of activities you can do in farming. +There's so many things that you can do and gives us the option to kind of really create a big game. +Quick follow-up. +Is there a demographic that seems to like the game? +Is it more rural folks that enjoy it or is it you don't see that? +Well, not really. +If you compare it to flight simulators or truck simulators or whatever, kids also like those topics as well. +So that's not very specific to farming. +But I think one big part of the success is also how we kind of tackled the simulation genre and kind of tried to give those casual elements as well. +Thank you. +I enjoyed the talk a great deal. +I was actually surprised in the beginning to hear that one of your main design pillars was entertainment over accuracy, because I usually think of Farming Simulator as a simulator. +It's not a Harvest Moon. +It's very much a simulation game in terms of its branding compared to other titles on the shelf at a GameStop or something like that. +So I'm wondering, given that entertainment over realism is one of your pillars, How has Farming Simulator maintained its identity over these years and not branched into things like, say, having players fall from a flying school bus or zombies walking through your farm? +How have you maintained that focus while also prioritizing entertainment? +Well, I mean, kind of the realism is kind of still kind of the core concept, right? +So basically, what we do is we look at reality and try to I'm to still be fun, right? +It's not the other way around where we say, well, maybe that could be a cool thing that's completely unrealistic and let's build that in, right? +It's still coming from the realistic side. +Hey, OK. +Thank you so much for the talk to start with. +It was super insightful in so many ways. +I had a question about when you actually started right at the beginning, how did you build up the knowledge base? +I mean, coming up with a farming simulator, there must be so much knowledge that you need to gather. +And then, of course, you keep talking about the entertainment. +So there's the vulgarization of all of that and make it digestible. +I'm quite intrigued on how you approached it and if you had any background in farming before. +Well, I mean, it was really tricky, definitely. +I mean, we kind of both kind of grew up on the countryside, so farming was not completely foreign to us. +But, yeah, most of the knowledge in the beginning came from the community. +So we had a forum from the very beginning where we had a lot of feedback as well. +and also a lot of like wikipedia etc so to really figure out how stuff is done but uh but later on we also hired several people that actually have a farming background as well that that could help on that side that makes sense thanks a lot Thank you for the talk. +In terms of your community feedback and also your future, what's the, can you speak to the work you're doing to understand their buying habits, their retention year to year, because it's a yearly, an annual product you have, is there a demand to go to more of a true perennial and evergreen gas where you just have a core product and you support it on DLC only? +So the question is how kind of the update style of the game is, right? +Yeah, like what's the demand there from your user base in terms of, like, are they happy with the yearly model or is there a growing... Yeah, so with... +We always hear feedback from people that they would like to see a model where we kind of keep the same game and just continuously update it, which kind of would help for the modding to some degree. +But it's also kind of the modding that kind of prevents it as well. +Because if we would just continuously update, eventually we need to introduce new features like, for example, with Farming Simulator 15 or so, we switched from old school textures to BBR textures. +And that switch would have been a big issue if it was within the same version, right? +So suddenly there's not really a clearly new version but every mod would be broken and kind of having that new version cycle also helps to kind of clearly dictate, okay, until that point the mods are mostly compatible but at that point now you need to make sure that the mods are compatible again. +Hi, I'm the release engineer for Sony platforms at Jackbox Games and I'm very curious as to how you approach your modding. +I guess your strategy. +The one thing about TRC, like the TRC is for Sony is that UGC has to be created on the platform, on a Sony platform specifically. +So I'm curious as to how you guys solved that problem where mods that were developed on a Steam or a different console were also being played on a Sony platform. +I run into this issue constantly which is why I'm so curious as to how you guys solved this. +Yeah, so the question is how we would kind of solve the TRC issues on the Sony platform for the UGC, that it would have to be created on a platform, not externally. +So yeah, actually that was a big discussion we've had with Microsoft and Sony for a long time. +We've been able to kind of convince them with Pharmacylometer 17 that we're actually allowed to do the way we're doing it right now. +And I think a lot of that also probably helped that Skyrim was working on a similar concept at the same time. +But yeah, that's why we have those limitations as well. +So all the content that goes on the consoles is going to be created on our side. +and there's no options for players just to freely install content from anywhere. +That doesn't go through the mod hop. +Okay, gotcha. +Thank you. +Yeah, so thank you. diff --git a/static/src/transcript/shXiIlgJnec.txt b/static/src/transcript/shXiIlgJnec.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..12f2d27 --- /dev/null +++ b/static/src/transcript/shXiIlgJnec.txt @@ -0,0 +1,291 @@ +So this is The Art of Thirsty Suitors. +I'm Chandanayak Anayaka. +I'm the co-founder and creative director of Outerloop Games. +been making games for a long time. +I started Bethesda when I was 19. +I was a baby. +And I've been making games in various roles, art design, narrative production, biz. +And then we started Outerloop Games in 2017. +The game we're talking about today is Thirsty Suitors. +It's our second game. +The first game we did as a team was called Falcon Age. +And Thirsty is a game about fighting your exes and disappointing your parents while skateboarding and cooking. +I kind of call it a baby Yakuza game if you've played Yakuza games. +Not that it has anything to do with Yakuza, but it's a narrative RPG with turn-based combat. +And it's a short version. +It's a baby version of it. +Here's a little snippet of it. +As you can see, it's very stylized. +So today we're going to talk about how we combine 2D and 3D techniques to create a compelling illustrative look. +Leveraging 2D, which we've learned the hard way a lot of times on this project. +Sometimes less is more, which also we've learned the hard way on this project. +Designing around the strengths of our art team, looking for scalable solutions, specificities universal, and cultural experience and inspiration. +The last two points are related because this game is really built on experiences and the fantasies of the folks on the team and myself. +of and she is coming off of a bad break and she has really pissed off all her exes and her parents. +So the game is about you coming home and trying to reconcile all those relationships. +And that's where the turn-based combat comes into play with the exes and then cooking through trying to talk to your parents through cooking. +And the skateboarding ties into the narrative as well. +So there's definitely some surreal elements which we'll get into. +of the game. +And I think we're, yeah, we're at 18 or so. +We're at 16 right now, but it varies from how on the production. +And this has been about three years on this project. +Of those folks, nine is the art team. +But before I get to the art team, I want to say Justin and Anna are two main programmers. +None of this stuff is possible without them. +So artists, be best buds with your programmers. +Vijay did art direction concepts in 2D. +Emma is our 3D character in skinning. +Ong does, we have an animation team of one, which I know it's a lot of stuff, but he's a beast. +Alicia and Lisa are environment artists. +Darren does environments concepts in 2D. +Wade here, visual effects. +Ben, visual effects and tech art. +And myself, I'm still doing too many jobs, but I'm trying to do less. +with each project. +So we're fully remote, spread across four continents and seven cities. +So a lot of Slack and Miro. +We do all of our art meetings and design work on Miro these days, so for the async communication. +So this was the first, we had multiple iterations, but this was the first key piece of art that Vijay worked on to really set the style. +And we were trying to figure out how to build the demo and what we were going to do. +This is an early version of Jala that changed, and a version of Sergio, which is, if you played the, there's a demo on Steam. +It's her first ex, her ex from third grade that still have feelings for her, and your parents watching. +So this is gonna really set the stage for what the style is gonna be, the color choices, the texture ideas and lighting. +And then this is another concept art Vijay did to showcase what the end of a fight could look like, and some of the elements that could come to life. +So Jala went through multiple iterations. +The first piece that actually we ever did for a pitch was the image on the left. +And so, you know, it had a little more realistic art style. +And then the second version is what you saw in the key piece of art. +And then as the story developed, you know, she's in her mid-20s. +We thought that she looked too young for the type of relationship drama that she had gone through. +We did the third version, still felt, didn't quite translate well to 3D and then the current version is on the right side. +One of the early things we did was figuring out how many Xs there were and what all the color palettes were, so we did some initial color keys for each of the characters to try to set sort of a mood, because each of the characters also has their own world. +As you get into a battle, it's in the real world, but it goes into what we call their fantastical inner worlds, and each of those has a local color palette. +Some of these names have changed, and we changed color palettes along the way. +So from that color palette, we developed the ideas for the various Xs. +And they all have kind of a range of color values that we picked from. +And this took a while to iterate on. +And this is like three or four iterations on some of them. +And really, the art direction and the art design evolved with the narrative as we figured out the story, because we really didn't know what the story was initially. +We knew Jella just has the worst luck with her relationships, but what that meant and what odor and who she battles, that came all through development. +So as we got into each of the exes' battles, there's a key color for each of the exes to design their world around. +And so these are some of the elements and some of the world ideas and kind of key pieces of art to define what those worlds look like. +Same with the costumes. +Each of the X's has a big wardrobe change as the battles start and they all tie into their key colors and personalities. +And each battle is a little different based on when Jaller dated them and what problems they had together and they're trying to resolve that through. +It's weird because the battles aren't, they don't really hit each other. +It's like all these fantastical holograms and things like that. +So it's really the personification of them have an argument shown through a turn-based combat. +And in between the combat, there's narrative choices and dialogue choices, and some lines do emotional damage. +And so there's a lot of mixture of sort of the physical movements as well as the dialogue choices. +And this is one of the early design process for Dia, one of the earlier exes that you meet. +The whole theme for this is around the idea that in her world, she's a queen, and her palace looks like a 90s Hype Williams music video. +So there's a lot of 90s music video inspirations for some of these sets. +And again, keying off her colors to get the look that matches her outfit as well as the environment. +And then she has three minions or crystals that support everything she says. +I tend to come in on narrative design and then blocking. +So we'll block out the levels once we have the fighting system figured out. +And then this is Alicia's work. +She came in over after the concept work to do some initial geo. +And then this is geo lighting effects and some shader work. +And so by the time we go through the process, a bunch of us have touched the levels. +I'll come back and do a final lighting pass and rim lighting. +So we have a custom-tuned shader. +This is all done in Unity. +Custom-tuned shader and standard lighting. +And this is Dia's intro as we start her battle. +So there's a little sample of the battle. +It's a fully voiced game. +We're just in the middle of doing that right now. +So the way the battle system works in the game, which also affects the art and design, is you have to figure out your opponent's weaknesses. +So Dia has three question marks up there on her UI there. +And so Jala has to use various taunts and figure out her weakness, and then you can follow up with an attack that matches. +So you see we do, we mix a lot of 2D and 3D, you know, for every time Jala taunts or Dia taunts, there's a lot of sprite work. +And these are all just, you know, sprites we put together in Photoshop and then we lay it out in the world. +And they have sorting changes so that they don't conflict with the environment. +They always draw behind the characters, but on top of the environment. +And then when you put somebody in a mood, there's, you know, obviously very, very over the top effects. +So cooking is a way to build your relationship back up with your parents. +The game is laid out in chapters, and each chapter you can start the morning with cooking with your mom or dad. +You can go skate around in town, and there's random suitors that are trying to win your heart that your grandma's sending from India. +And then one of your exes will call you, and then really the big thing for that day is battling with your ex. +So there's a good example of how we set up our environments. +The top is the concept art, and the bottom is what a screenshot looks like in Unity. +So you can see it's very similar. +We bake in a lot of the lighting, sometimes into the texture, and a mixture of directional light and some point lights. +It's not very accurate, but we don't really care so much about that. +It's more for getting the look that we want. +So this was built by Lisa and Alicia came in to do some props and Ben does our shader work. +So we have one custom shader that we share for the environments as well as the characters. +And I came in and did a final lighting pass and post-processing. +So this is Jala's home. +You can come in, there's a cookbook. +There's different recipes that unlock. +And the cookbook is just frame animation. +So that's just the painting straight to the frame. +We did this the hard way. +We tried to model it out and tried to do lighting. +It just didn't look as good at all. +So when your mom eats, there's a memory of her. +This is her and your dad and their first date. +She'll never tell you she liked it though, so it's just, you know, that's what she's saying. +Again, we try to use 2D as much as possible where it made sense. +It's a lot faster for our concept artists to draw this than it is for us to build it, you know, the model out. +UI, there's a ton of UI in this game as an RPG and all the different systems. +Yeah, as well as game directing, I did all the UI work with Vijay. +So I'll do all the layouts in Miro and really white box it out and then sketch it out in Photoshop and lay everything out with Unity. +And then Vijay came and did some illustration work on top of that. +But yeah, I'm still working on UI. +And for each chapter, there's a chapter card that we layer together and animate in. +There's a plugin called DoTween in Unity. +I use that everywhere. +Every piece of UI that's moving or any piece of 2D element that's moving, it's a kind of procedural animation system. +It's really easy to keyframe. +And it makes it a lot quicker than just using traditional animation support in Unity. +So any 2D element in the game, I just use DoTween. +The cookbook was, I think it was four frames that was due tweened together and cross fading between it as it opens and closes. +In between the chapters, you can go to the Timber Hills map, and on the map is where Jalop, you know, decides where she wants to go skating or go back home cooking and go to the skate park, which is run by Soundy, a mascot bear. +There's a whole thread for that. +And this is what it looks like in game. +So concept to... +in-game version. +You also get notifications from each of the suitors, so you can do extra favors for them. +And again, it's a combination of 2D and 3D. +3D model for Jala and a bunch of 2D sprites layered with some polygons as well. +And these are little 3D models, flight models. +Official setup, because it's, I think we have 21 speaking characters, 18 actors that we're about to record. +We wanted to make sure, again, with one animator, how do we animate all these characters? +And we ended up doing blend shapes and a real basic set of phonemes. +I think there's eight shapes plus some extra smile, pout, teeth clench. +And we created an automated process to do a base pass where we can feed in the script. +to a spreadsheet, and then the WAV files, and it generates, and then we can go and hand clean up as we need it, but mostly it's animated, I mean automated, and it works out pretty well. +Speaking of animation, this is Eizo, our animation department. +He also does weird tricks when he's not animating, and a lot of that translates to, everything's keyframed in the game, Yeah, he's a very prolific animator. +When we design the suitors, it's always fun to, you know, it's a combination of narrative and animation and, you know, everybody gets involved. +Being on a small team, I think that's what I really treasure, is that when we're designing these characters in these battles, everyone gets a chance to add to it. +It's been a fun project. +I think we're almost done. +So sometime this year we'll be out with it. +So that's Thirsty Suitors. +Thank you. +I know there's a lot to cover. +I just wanted to save some room for any questions if anybody had any questions about anything in the game. +Thanks for the insightful talk. +It's a really stunning vision with a really small art team that you have. +How long is your production cycle and how is it segmented? +Yeah, so we typically figure out what the game is in the beginning, so the first thing we did was prototype a suitor battle, and then that really went through a bunch of iterations until we figured out the current sort of combat, where it's like, okay, how much conversation, how much fighting moves, and what the elements are. +Once we had that down, we usually spent about, some of the levels, probably about two to three months. +There's a whole skate park that was in the first part of the video and that was like probably one of the biggest scenes and that took probably six months, a couple artists. +And then most of the sets are by one to two months. +And then characters, it varies depending on how many costume changes and effects, but those are probably In a we have like monthly milestones that we kind of figure out what we're going to do. +So from design to Completion, it's probably two months per section of an area How long has it taken altogether so far? +Oh three years. +Okay. +Yeah three years and we started with a pretty full crew Well, maybe 12 and ramp up to 16. +Yeah. +Yeah. +Cool. +Thank you. +Yeah Hey, looks great. +Um, I was wondering you at the beginning of the talk had cultural like inspiration stuff as the last two points. +And I'm wondering if you could go into more of that and how that's played into the different characters in the game and the setting. +Yeah, I mean, each of the exes is based on someone from the team or multiple stories that we talk a lot about. +There's a lot of immigrants on the team and we share a lot of shared trauma. +So, yeah, a lot of it's just based on our personal stories of people we know. +I mean, some of it's definitely, like, fantastical. +There are things in the game that I would never say to my mom, but we let the player decide if they want to or not. +Yeah, so it was interesting. +One of the exes is South African, our producer is South African, so we did a lot of, you know, she talked to her parents and we did a lot of research about like what's the region of South Africa we want to derive the visual look from. +And then we're casting. +Casting's been kind of difficult. +It's a very specific game and I wanted to, for each of the exes or characters, I want to be very specific about who we cast. +Yeah, so everything in the game is very culturally represented and it comes from the team. +The game actually started, when I first pitched it, it was a game about arranged marriage. +But we decided not to do that because none of us on the team had direct experience with arranged marriage and we didn't think we could speak to it. +well. +So that's when we turned it from Arranged Marriage to JALA and her personal relationships. +Thank you. +So I'm obsessed with this. +I feel so seen by this character, first of all, like literally attacked in every single slide in a good way. +But what I want to ask is about, you know, some challenges around designing a character like her, because as an Indian gamer musician, like in that type of vibe, age group, et cetera, I also recognize that even though it's like, oh, my God, a win, I feel seen. +At the same time, we have so many different experiences because like this. +Yeah, we know we're not going to please everybody, right? +And that was, from the beginning, we're like, that's not a thing we're trying to do. +So Jala is half Sri Lankan, half Indian. +Meghna, our main writer, she's Indian, and I'm Sri Lankan. +And that's sort of like, we took our inspirations from that. +The colorism is also, you're familiar, in South Asia is a big thing. +So we were very mindful about like, Jala and her ex, Tyler, that's in the cover. +You know, seeing two You don't typically see two dark-skinned women on any cover. +And we also made sure some of the men characters were lighter-skinned than the women, because typically it's the other way around. +So a lot of it is very specific, and we're not trying to really attract all South Asians. +So we thought if we focused on the character's journey, then we could be more specific about Jala. +And that's how we approach it. +And we're still going to get people that are probably not going to be happy with it. +talk a little bit more about how you decide between choosing 2D or 3D for a particular asset? +Yeah, a lot of the times we did it, let's build it 3D, and then we spent months doing it and realized that's like the bad approach. +And then we go, let's just paint it. +So for the cooking, there's at the end where she's showcasing the food to her parents. +We made that sure the camera never changes. +So it's like it's animated and it's fixed. +And then we painted something just for that. +And then for the map, and when that worked out, then we're like, oh, let's do the map that way, let's do the memories that way, let's do some of the UI that way, let's do some of the moods that way, and it just kind of expanded, just added a little more, and there wasn't really much tech to it, it's just standard Unity sprites, and sorting was the only issue, and then that kind of extends to the effects, the look of the effects as well. +So there was no master plan. +It's just, hey, our concept artist is really good at doing this versus what we can do in 3D. +And let's try to utilize the special powers of people on the team more. +Yeah, that's awesome. +Thanks. +Hello, sorry. +I think the art looks really good, although I'm curious about some of the game design decisions, mainly pertaining to the different gameplay styles and how they play into the narrative, because you see in the RPG moments, it's like QTEs and turn-based combat, while there's more action-y stuff when you're not in conflict, so I was curious on why you decided to go that direction. +Just for pacing and it worked out for the narrative we wanted to do. +So the cooking is very action-y cooking, like the combat. +But instead of battling somebody else, you're trying to win your mom's approval. +There's an approval meter. +And she'll comment on every time when you do something. +She'll never say you did well. +And then some recipes are harder or less hard, depending on... When you're cooking with your dad, it's a whole different vibe. +in the game. +And then when, I think in the video, when you fall in battle, there's a giant version of your dad that picks you up and then throws you back into battle. +Yeah, so we'd really try to key in on each of the characters and you can summon your auntie when you need to buff up and things like that. +There's a bunch of different summons that are like folks that you, might be some exes or your mom or Whatever how it works out in terms of the mechanics We started with the idea of doing turn-based combat because we thought it lends itself to really for these narrative moments where we can have conversations Combat and conversations instead of doing like at the beginning as more of like a cutscene approach That's really a decision because the again the the conversational moments and decisions are as important as the the action that you do All right. +Thank you. +Yep A bit of a specific tech question here. +With those 2D assets, were those lit or unlit, or just default Unity sprites, or how did you end up matching the lighting of a 2D asset with the 3D world? +They're completely unlit. +So there's just like straight PSDs in a texture sheet brought into Unity. +And then they're painted with general lighting and shadows. +Again, our lighting isn't so strong that you, I mean, if you've stared at it, you probably noticed the lighting directions, not exact, but for the moment it works. +Sure. +Thank you. +Anything else? +Okay. +Hi. +You mentioned that you have a lot of remote team and team all over the place. +How would you say, because it seems like there's a lot of interconnection between the art and the programming and the design, more so than most games. +I was wondering how you found success in making sure everybody's on the same page when not even in the same time zone. +Yeah, so we do, Mondays we do stand-ups at 4 p.m. +West Coast time. +That's when Beijing's waking up and Brisbane is waking up. +And so everyone's almost like either end of their day or beginning of their day. +So we do a lot of like what we're going to do for the week and any issues to talk about live. +And then I do my narrative mornings like 8 in the morning. +And then sometimes I'll go over stuff with the Australians when they wake up. +So I'm kind of doing on both ends, but we do a four day work week. +We've been four days for two years. +So Thursday afternoons at 4 p.m. +we'll do a play test with the whole team with wherever the build is. +And all those notes go into Notion and gets assigned to a different task. +And then after the play test we all hang out and just chat and check out games. +So that's how we kind of build a culture for over three years. +I have a giant beatmap that is the story for the game and what happens when, so everyone knows where things are and it gets updated as we change for narrative. +And then we have reference for each of the characters and each of the environments. +We have art meetings every two weeks, I think on Wednesdays. +And there's a giant mural that has all the art meetings from the last three years. +So we try to not do too many meetings, but there's like the three we try to sync up on. +Everything else is on Slack, or notes on mural to each other, or notion tasks. +Thank you. +Yep. +Anybody else? +Awesome. +I think that's it. +So thank you so much.