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+I am Teddy Deif, sometimes.
+Teddy Deif is the director, co-writer, and lead singer of the OFK project, co-designer of Hyper Light Drifter, co-founder of LA Indie Games Collective Glitch City, and someone on Twitter who you may follow or have muted.
+Sometimes I am my legal name.
+They live in LA.
+They lease a car.
+They need to cancel their Disney Plus subscription.
+They try very hard to get a good table when seated at restaurants because their grandmother taught them it was important for being a good host when dining out.
+But with my close friends, I'm just me, whoever that is.
+And I'm all those other things unfiltered.
+I'm going to do my best this morning to speak to you without filter.
+This talk is all about persona filters.
+You might know them better as virtual identities, VTubers, virtual bands, or gorillas.
+Let's step back for a second.
+Hi.
+I'm up here because I run the OFK project.
+And for those of you who are not familiar, I will now pitch our video game because that is my job.
+We Are OFK is a virtual band with an interactive TV series that tells their origin story.
+It's a heartfelt, vulnerable portrayal of what it costs to make art and what thrives for it.
+The virtual band are kinda like Gorillaz or KDA, but OFK's band characters are indie, not pop stars, just trying to make it happen like other artists.
+Let's watch the trailer!
+Help me up, tear me down Come apart, come around I miss my life, Carter.
+I take a piece of me that hurts I threw it away.
+Who's to say what will last?
+I thought you had integrity.
+I'm so jealous, man.
+To be able to just do the thing you want to be doing.
+um...
+Yeah, five years, there it is.
+Here they are.
+This is the band Clockwise producer Jay Zhang, keyboardist Itsumi Saito, vocalist Luca Le Fay, visual artist Carter Flores, and hologram audio plugin Debug the Cat.
+OFK are based in Los Angeles, where they played their first show on stage at the Game Awards in 2020.
+We released our game and EP last fall on Switch, PlayStation, PC.
+We released a holiday song and music video in December.
+And just last month, we played our first fully live show in LA.
+I play Luca Le Fay in the game and in our music.
+I act as him in the game, I sing as him in our music.
+Basically, I'm speaking on this topic today because I've been leading a team that's building and operating virtual identities now for five years.
+I'm going to try to impart what I've learned about virtual identities.
+Their history, how they're created, how they live and die.
+If there's a character you're considering bringing into virtual existence, consider how they resonate with you.
+what from my experience you'd emulate, what you'd do differently, what excites you, and what scares you.
+Bring that to the Q&A at the end, please.
+Part one, a brief history of virtual identity.
+Let's go.
+So you are already familiar with a lot of virtual identities, probably more than you realize.
+You probably know gorillas, which is gorillas, not the gorillas, which My life.
+A lot of people mistakenly think of them as the first virtual band.
+They were created in 1998 by artist Jamie Hewlett, known for his comic Tank Girl, and rock star Damon Albarn, who had risen to fame with his band Blur.
+Girl has released their first album in 2001 with a series of animated music videos that introduced the virtual band.
+I find gorillas really interesting because at first for live shows, they hid themselves behind a screen and then animated video projections of the characters played in front.
+They did this even though their creators were already famous and obviously not a secret.
+But as the years went on, they've transitioned to letting the musicians be out in front as themselves, less committed to the illusion during live shows.
+That flexible relationship between artists and virtual identity fascinates me.
+And I'll explain why in this talk.
+You probably also know KDA, created by Riot Games in 2018, and composed of four characters from their game, League of Legends, re-skinned as a pop group.
+From a business perspective, KDA was created to get Riot more involved in music, to promote League, and to sell League skins, but of course the band has a huge fan base of its own.
+They're a notable contrast to Gorillaz in that the performers do not own the virtual identities that they perform as.
+Kind of as a result of that, to date at least on US streaming platforms, KDA have released just six songs.
+But if you're interested in creating virtual identity, there are so many points of reference beyond these big current ones.
+The more you think of virtual identity as the broad and unexplored space it is, the richer of a history you'll find.
+To set the stage, I would describe virtual identity as this.
+A fictional character presented as if they exist in our reality, operated by a person or persons who have their own separate identities.
+Here are some of my favorites.
+So this is a starter pack of the lineage of virtual celebrity across television, music, and the internet.
+Alvin and the Chipmunks, 1958.
+Yeah, right?
+A trio of animated chipmunks first created for a children's song in which the creator, Ross Bagdasarian, pitch shifted his voice to sound like tiny, cute chipmunks.
+They actually started with just a song.
+And then the following year, they got a comic.
+which was then developed into a TV series that ran for one season and was cancelled.
+Then their original creator and voice died, but the chipmunks did not.
+They were resurrected in the early 80s for a new TV series, which is probably the one that you know, if you know them, that ran for eight seasons.
+So today they are zombie chipmunks with a dead creator and they have five Grammys.
+In 1966, The Monkees, which by the way has got to be a reference to, or Gorillaz has to be a reference to The Monkees, and I would love to ask them.
+This one is really weird, and it's my personal favorite point of reference for OFK.
+The Monkees were a band created in conjunction with a TV show, much like OFK.
+They were developed by an aspiring filmmaker, Bob Raffleson, who pitched the music and the series to Columbia Records and their TV division, respectively.
+Musically, they were meant to be kind of America's answer to the Beatles, and in a way they were.
+They were very, very popular.
+They only lasted a few years as a group, but they did well for themselves.
+They are, of course, they're not animated characters, and the band members go by their real names, but the Monkees started as fictional.
+They were assembled by a casting call for actors and musicians.
+Everything that they said and sang on TV was written for them and fiction, but they seem to exist in the real world.
+And in fact, the Monkees released albums and played concerts like any other band.
+What's really fascinating about this one is that at first, the band members were so busy filming the TV show and doing press and stuff that they were kept out of the music and writing and recording process.
+There was a lot of interesting public backlash and power struggle because of that, and the Monkees eventually took control of their own music, narrowing the gap between their ritual identities and their real ones.
+What makes this especially interesting to me is that most of their peers at the time, including the Beatles, used session musicians for recordings, so the line of how one-to-one any musician is to their band identity is already blurry.
+1994, Space Ghost, another virtual identity.
+Cartoon Network transformed Space Ghost, a superhero from a 1966 cartoon, into a talk show host in a show called Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
+It was a spoof on talk shows, kind of a precursor to things like Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns or the Eric Andre Show.
+Space Ghost was depicted using animation cells from the original show combined with video of real people that he would interview.
+Space Ghost didn't really step out of his world into theirs, and his guests were mostly transported to his show.
+But you know he'd be like a VTuber or something if they'd done this today.
+Interestingly, they also released music by Space Ghost, which is a great band name.
+2007, Hatsune Miku.
+So Miku is firstly a Vocaloid software voice bank, which means she's a virtual instrument that's created to simulate a human voice.
+that anyone can buy and use for their own music.
+The sound was designed based on the voice of Japanese voice actor Saki Fujita, but she has no formal attachment or ownership of it.
+I watched Miku perform live back in 2016, one month after we released Hyper Light Drifter, and she gave me the first idea for OFK.
+I saw this huge theater of people who were absolutely invested in a virtual idol and wanted to see something with that imagination on a more intimate scale, something more flawed.
+I wanted a virtual musician who would be making music in their bedroom, like a fan of Miku.
+Miku is the most fully fictional on this list, in my opinion.
+Her voice is computer generated.
+She's owned by a large company, so it's hard to draw any direct links to humans creatively involved in her identity.
+Bless you.
+This isn't inherently bad, but it is tricky, and I'll get to it later.
+2017 CodeMiko.
+Miko's a VTuber, Twitch streamer, and one of the biggest.
+She's voiced and engineered by a real person, Yuna Kang, who uses a motion capture rig to stream.
+I find this example interesting because, from the beginning, she has made her real self visible on streams, calling herself the Technician.
+She mostly interviews other streamers, sometimes plays games, sometimes does tech demos.
+She's at the forefront of this huge growth on Twitch of VTubers.
+and she has spoken about how hard the project has been on her mental health, which is another thing I'll get to later.
+You can always shout when I'm drinking water.
+or I'll show.
+Beyond media examples, I encourage you to think about how we all have experience constructing our identities for the consumption of others.
+Obviously, there's an important line between yourself and a fictional character, but social media does only show a sliver of your real personality, and most of us give some thought to what parts of ourselves we let visible online, or even what we let visible at, for example, this conference.
+That's a stretch of the notion of virtual identity, but it is connected.
+That's enough of me nerding out about virtual characters, so let's get into me nerding out about creating virtual characters.
+Before it was set to be a virtual band, OFK was simply going to be a story, set in LA, of indie artists trying to make something.
+So I knew from the start that I wanted it to feel small and honest, vulnerable, intimate.
+As a game, our goal with We Are OFK was to make a game experience that would welcome any fan of the music to experience the band in a deeper interactive way.
+But in designing the characters we knew would become virtual, we developed our pillars from what we wanted to avoid from references.
+With KDA, too big.
+We didn't want to pretend we were pop stars.
+We'd be new to this audience.
+And personally, I'm new to singing and pop music.
+So our characters would not be huge, famous, overtly glamorous like KDA.
+Gorillas, too, fantasy.
+We wanted to be relatable and genuine.
+And while it's tempting to go supernatural with a virtual character who can be anything, we wanted our characters to be human and feel honest.
+Gorillas feel honest to their creator's worldview, but they exist in a totally different reality by nature in that they are talking gorillas.
+It's gotta be a reference to the monkeys.
+And Miku's too disconnected.
+We wanted our characters' identities and backgrounds to relate to their creators.
+Not one-to-one, no member of OFK is exactly one member of our team, even my character.
+And the stories are fictional, though inspired by our lives.
+But we wanted to be honest, and that meant writing from personal experience.
+Miku and KDA feel strategically assembled, owned by a big company.
+We're small, and we wanted to take advantage of that.
+Also, the bigger your organization gets, the more pitfalls around representation and proper crediting.
+Before I dig into that, let's step forward into how we actually made all this.
+Character design.
+We wanted something that matched Jenny Yu's art style, the art director, with strong, straight lines, curved edges, not realistic, not overtly anime, not cartoony.
+We worked with our character designer, Nafisa Tang, to develop personal styles for each character that expressed their character.
+that came across as iconic, but not so high fashion that they were beyond relatable.
+Although they are, like, way stylish.
+Then for turning them into 3D models, Jenny and Efisa worked closely with our technical art director, Chelsea Hash, for a while to create beautiful models that matched style from all angles and handled lighting right.
+We knew we'd need beautiful models, not just for the game, but for hopefully the existence of the virtual characters for a long time to come.
+So we felt the extra scrutiny was worth it.
+MoCap.
+So our animators, Taylor Reynolds and Devon Beasley, created all the animations for the game itself, but we needed a MoCap motion capture setup to operate the 3D characters for live performance.
+We contracted a company called PolyWink.
+They create the 52 blend shapes you need for the iPhone X facial MoCap if you've used Animoji you've used this system.
+You upload your model and for like $300 per model, their turnaround time is like one day and they return it to you.
+It's incredible.
+So I made a clone of our main Unity project and I hacked away what I didn't need to build a bare bones project for Luca to stream from.
+I used the ARKit Foundations Unity plugin to connect the iPhone to ARKit and then connected it to some head IK that I'd set up so that it works with the upper body.
+And then I just run this in tandem with a companion app on my phone, which is installed by the plugin, and that's it.
+So when you see me running mocap in some examples, that's just common streaming software, OBS, that is screen capturing my Unity window.
+I'm about to invest in a full body mocap suit for live music shows, so pray for me and the tech setup for that, please.
+So, okay, operating it.
+Let's dig into the weird stuff.
+Let's talk about being a virtual character.
+I use this mocap setup for all kinds of appearances outside the game.
+Twitch streams, guest appearances, and now live music.
+About a year before release, I soft-launched the character by starting semi-regular Twitch streams.
+I played games, I sang songs, or just chatted.
+Here's a quick clip.
+Hey, this game is so thoughtful.
+Hey, cat.
+Yeah.
+I pet the cat.
+It's very relaxed with me.
+Oh, the cat gives me HP.
+The cat is the save point.
+Beyond live appearances, pre-recording the mocap became really useful for marketing opportunities where we didn't have the budget to create new animation.
+So, for example, when Dreams PS4's Impy Awards asked us to judge Song of the Year, I convinced them to let us say that OFK were judging the award, and then Luka sent in, like, a greeting message for their broadcast.
+Or, when we got some upsetting early feedback from the game, we needed to post an important disclaimer message very quickly.
+Hi, it's me, Luca.
+We hope you enjoyed episode one of We Are OFK.
+Itsu asked me to read off a few disclaimers here before we move on.
+Shoes in the house.
+We know that there are several scenes in this series depicting us wearing shoes inside, even on a bed.
+You may wear shoes in your house.
+We don't.
+And again, this is just a technical limitation of recreating our story in a video game.
+We're sorry.
+You gotta remake the model with shoes off.
+You can't just make a sock colored shoe.
+It looks horrifying.
+We tried.
+Mocap worked well for musical performances too.
+We did an acoustic performance of our first song, Follow and Follow, for Day of the Devs.
+You'll notice here we did some full body animation in addition to the face mocap.
+So for this we pre-animated the body and then I live performed the head and neck on top of animation.
+It was a really bizarre feeling to perform that way, but I think it works, so I'll play you a bit of that.
+Let it break, let it melt slowly Even take it a bit lonely Wide awake, it's just standing On the verge of tears, you're dancing On the verge of tears, you're dancing On the verge of tears, you're dancing On the verge of tears, you're dancing Every time I cancel, every time I cancel you I just wanna dance, oh I just wanna dance with you Is it falling apart or was it already broken?
+Am I back at the start?
+Can I let all the hope in?
+and that is our series composer OmniBoy on keys.
+So I got a whole year of training as Luka by doing these things.
+So by the time we released the game and the EP, I was comfortable enough with running the tech, playing Luka and singing live as Luka that I could do it in higher stakes situations.
+Here's one of my favorites.
+This is an interview with Rolling Stone where they virtually inserted Luka into their New York studio.
+So he's chatting here with our songwriters, Luna Shadows and Tom Powers from the Naked and Famous.
+And please welcome our first guest, the vocalist of OFK, Luka.
+Luka, welcome to the stream.
+What's up?
+It's so great to see you.
+Thanks for having me.
+How have you felt kind of seeing the story play out from week to week?
+And we're coming up on the finale very shortly.
+Uh, it's embarrassing.
+I mean, like, there's a lot of personal stuff in there for for all of us.
+And the the writing team did a good job of working with us to make sure that like, they weren't sharing anything that was too private or shit that we hadn't kind of dealt with.
+So it's a little weird.
+Do you think that this really opens the door for other artists to get their music out through a video game medium specifically?
+Yes, I would love to put all my music out through games only, but you know what that would mean.
+So I'm already old and sad.
+I don't need to wait longer to get sadder.
+If you're having trouble writing your game, just wait longer to get sadder.
+We did more elaborate productions too, the biggest being when we announced OFK at the Game Awards.
+For this, we worked with an animation studio, Art and Graft, to produce OFK's first stage performance.
+We spent So much money on this, so I'm going to make you watch some of it, because it only aired once.
+It's been a special night already, and now I get to share with you another Game Awards first, the world premiere of a new band.
+You heard me correctly.
+They're playing their debut single, Follow Unfollow.
+Please welcome, for the first time ever, OFK.
+I'm going to cut it before the chorus.
+So, I don't know, listen to the song, please.
+I know, I know, I know.
+Gamers were so mad.
+They were like, oh, I can't believe you're a new band and you just get to be on the Game Awards right away.
+Your parents probably paid Keeley.
+I'm like, no.
+I've been working on this for four years.
+I'm like, yeah.
+But we wanted to impress Keeley, so we made a big fancy thing.
+gamers.
+Let's take a moment.
+Recently we started doing actual live performances in the real world.
+It's always been a part of my hope for the project to see our band live beyond its video game.
+For fans to see that, like, no, we actually were a band outside of that game.
+And you will see us on a stage.
+So, hey, hire us to play your events if you run events such as this one.
+a little bit sad, or at least less fun.
+Operating like this was exhausting and rife with some dilemmas.
+Extra work.
+It's a tremendous gift for me as a performer type person to creative direct this game and give live performances, but it is a lot of extra jobs.
+When I was streaming regularly to get our Twitch account up to affiliate status, it meant working a whole workday and then refilling my water and sitting back down to the same desk to live stream.
+It's fun for me, but it is tiring and it's not sustainable.
+It also took extra work from our team so that they could interact with the band on social media.
+I had a lot of media training conversations with team members who were confused about how to discuss the project publicly, what was the secret and what wasn't, how to talk about their work, how to talk to the band on Twitter.
+You may have noticed a pattern with all these videos.
+It's the Luca show.
+But OFK has four band members, not one.
+Also, Luca is the only white one.
+and building a diverse team and story was so fundamental to how we built Team OFK.
+Whom we hired, who owns revenue share, full salary transparency.
+This is so important to the politics and ethics of our team.
+And we kind of backed ourselves into a corner.
+My character, Luca, is the only member of OFK who's played by a member of the dev team.
+The other incredible performers, and if you haven't played at OFK, I can't recommend it enough just for their performances alone.
+But the other performers are professional full-time actors.
+And in working with your actors professionally, you don't ask them to work for free.
+But we didn't have budget to go back into the video studio every time we got a promo opportunity.
+So time after time, the only character we could feature for these virtual identity appearances was Luca.
+We could feature other characters in behind-the-scenes art that Nafisa Tang, our co-art director, was making.
+and we write the Twitter from the voice of Itsumi, but it erects a big wall when only one actual voice is being heard.
+One exception was our feature in PlayStation State of Play.
+For this, I was able to chop up dialogue lines that we'd already recorded for the game, and by recording new lines as Luka, I recontextualized the other characters' lines to create a new interaction between the characters, which is very Frankenstein-y, but here's a bit of it.
+War.
+War sucks.
+In a world full of war, where warism just doesn't have anything to do with politics or race or imperialism.
+Out there, we look to each other and to our thick arms.
+You done?
+And you're like, how did they get them that thick?
+Is this like an alternate reality where arms are just that thick or are they robot arms?
+Our last hope.
+is ARMS.
+Hey you.
+Hi!
+We're still driving.
+Jay, I heard back from the mix engineer and she's cool with getting song stems on Sunday.
+Itsu!
+How's the PlayStation blog post going?
+Are hashtags too much?
+I want to reach more people, but I don't think I trust people who use hashtags.
+Ugh, Itsu, you're the best at this.
+I'm proud of you.
+I just do things.
+Carter!
+Whatcha working on?
+Just a little audio filter I cooked up for debug here.
+So it works well, it just takes a lot of extra time, my free time, and I have my limits, and we also had to pull animators to work on this as well.
+As I share all this, to me it kind of sounds like I'm making excuses for failures in planning, and I guess I am.
+The degree to which we leaned into creating virtual identities grew over time, and the time and budget for VO didn't.
+I put a huge chunk of my own savings into finishing OFK, and even with that, as indie games often are, at the end, we were tight on money.
+In hindsight, I would have reserved money to pay the actors for other appearances and set aside more time for me to develop the mocap rigs for the other characters.
+If we created more funded content, if we create it in the future, I know how to plan better, but we did set aside budget for marketing, and we ate into that with dev, which also often happens in indie games.
+We're doing live shows now, and those show budgets do not pay to bring actors along yet, but I hope they will, because as Luca, I miss my bandmates.
+We failed to keep the band evenly represented outside of the game.
+In the game, I'm proud of the way our team represents the characters you see on screen, their backgrounds and queerness and beliefs.
+But in virtual identity space, it's all Luca.
+Fortunately for now, the game and the music have the biggest audience impact by far, but for future OFK material, we'll have to be more diligent.
+One problem I would like to think we overcame was counterbalancing the Luca dilemma with team appearances.
+When we first started ideating the virtual band, I had this thought that we would be so secretive and pretend the band was fully real, create this huge mystery.
+But doing that meant hiding bits of the creative team's work.
+And sure enough, the very first day that we went public with We Are OFK at the Game Awards, this created interpersonal conflict.
+I thought I'd primed team members for the plan, we would acknowledge the dev team, but the characters would also get some credit for work.
+And I was wrong about this.
+Really quickly, I hurt members of our team.
+They felt hidden, they felt uncredited.
+And in cases where they fictionally shared credit with the virtual band, they still felt that loss of credit.
+So we pivoted, like very quickly.
+This one was fixable.
+And since then, we've tried to build a world around OFK where the virtual band coexists with the team.
+Um, here's a little clip of a panel, our team members, uh, talking with Luca for our Ludo Nerecon panel last year.
+You know, I'm not, I'm not even a musician and this, my friend, this, this similar thing happened to me recently where my friend was like, Claire, are you in a band?
+Music.
+And I was like, you know, I'm not.
+You know me, but I am.
+So I was like, I guess it's working, you know?
+People are getting what we're putting down.
+And I feel like it's more fun this way.
+So yeah, I guess like a bonus that you get to call your game studio a band, which is like, and whenever someone makes that joke, like, when's the band, when's the album dropping?
+You'd be like, November.
+Please stream it.
+Oh, and here's our lead developer, Jared Huntley, talking with Luca for our Nintendo Switch announcement.
+I really like this.
+Hey, everyone.
+I'm Jared Huntley, lead programmer on We Are OFK.
+And I'm Luca Le Fay, lead singer of the band OFK.
+We're super excited to announce that our music biopic game is coming to Nintendo Switch.
+Yes!
+Ooh, I can play it on a tour bus.
+Ugh, I can't wait to tour together.
+We haven't seen each other since that music video brainstorm at your place in LA in 2019?
+Yeah, wow, wow.
+And with the game on handheld, it'll be easy to play the new episodes that are coming out every single week, back to back to back.
+Can't wait to share OFK's story and music with y'all.
+Hey, Jared, can I get your opinion on tour outfits?
+Hey.
+And then that guy has to go like that or whatever.
+The Switch guy.
+Because I don't remember that guy.
+After that shift, our character designer, Naff, no longer had to pretend to just be the band's stylist or fashion designer.
+They can take credit for designing the characters.
+Does it break the fiction?
+I mean, yeah.
+But also, no one cares.
+No one cares.
+I think back to that Hatsune Miku show that inspired me, and I know no one believes she's real.
+And sure, we do sometimes confuse press when we tell them that the dev team are friends with the band, with like a straight face, but it's the more caring approach and it's more fun for all of us, so they'll figure it out.
+The only thing I haven't been able to do is figure out how to get me, Teddy, and me, Luca, into the room at the same time.
+So I'm gonna do that now.
+in a live motion capture demo at GDC running off of Unity.
+So... Nobody?
+Hi, Adriel!
+Great!
+Is anyone here a game developer?
+Yeah, applause!
+You didn't clap.
+I think it's literally everyone here, right?
+By definition, if you pay more than $100 to sit in a chair and listen to someone talk in San Francisco, you're a developer.
+Anyway, yeah, it's weird talking to you like this.
+We haven't done a lot of live shows, so usually I can't see the audience, and I can't whoop.
+Oh, wait.
+Oh, wait, did anyone here work on KDA?
+Just before I say anything?
+OK.
+Like, nothing but love for KDA, but we use their name a lot for this talk title, and we didn't ask for permission or whatever.
+Um, anyway, yeah, so I guess it's obvious I'm played by Teddy.
+We're similar enough that we have the same opinions about big stuff, similar backgrounds, but different lives for sure.
+Teddy's non-binary.
+They came out during production of the game and that's been interesting for the two of us to navigate.
+I don't know if I should change to be more like Teddy.
+I guess there wouldn't be any harm in that.
+Sometimes in interviews, Teddy will use some truths from their life, but not fully.
+It's important that we respect their privacy, but they have to write and perform as me live, and I know that in a pinch, it helps them if our lives converge a little bit.
+It's a work in progress.
+I don't know.
+The events from our video game take place in the near past for me, and in the distant past for Teddy.
+We don't share any stories directly, but we definitely share states of mind, struggles that we've both had, I don't know if I'm comfortable being this version of myself from five years ago.
+I'm not always proud of who I was five years ago.
+I was sometimes oblivious to my friends.
+I was a little dodgy, flighty.
+When you finish a project, I feel like most of us want to move on.
+Like we started it with different ideals or different priorities, and it feels weird to be stuck in that place.
+It's kind of like performing a song I wrote a while back.
+It's an old feeling, but I have to reconnect with it somehow, I guess.
+I'm proud of OFK and its worldview and its messages of hope and minor victories in the face of existential fears and imposter syndrome and trouble communicating with people we want to love.
+I think today Teddy is better at loving than I am, but I guess I can just fast forward, catch up to Teddy and see if we can move forward together.
+Okay, bye.
+Bye.
+It worked!
+Okay.
+Yeah, I'll speak up, thank you.
+Thanks, Carrie.
+It's caught, okay.
+Alright, smooth sailing.
+Really?
+They said my posture is flawless for the camera.
+Okay, so the future and dangers.
+I've touched on the difficulties and dilemmas we faced with OFK's virtual identities, but I want to revisit those as a focal point here.
+Because these days when it comes to technology, parasocial relationships, AI, game companies, especially for profit ones, especially publicly traded companies, they are by and large a lot more about what they can do with technology than what is right to do, what is healthy, what is caring.
+Scale.
+As a team grows, how you coalesce the values of that team into a single voice is hard.
+You could argue we already do that in games, but it is more pointed with virtual identities.
+You can't ask a game a question and get an answer, usually.
+A game can't make an appearance at a fundraiser.
+A game can't get in an argument.
+Brands.
+Brands are not identities.
+The Wendy's Twitter account is not a person.
+A game's publisher, Twitter, is not a person.
+Hell, most game studios' accounts are not a person, and neither is OFK.
+You have to keep that in mind.
+Virtual identities are the most unforgiving sieve of whether a group of people are aligned in their ideologies, because you have one voice speaking for everyone, often live, under pressure.
+talk about parasocial relationships if you're not familiar with this term it refers to the one-sided relationships that develop between fans and the artists they follow it's a very common practice among social media influencers today to encourage parasocial relationships by which the influencer will ask questions to their audience or encourage participation or affiliation through a discord you know like they'll they'll post a photo and be like out here eating chips.
+Like, what's your favorite flavor of chips?
+Let me know in the comments and then you know, comments.
+And many fans come to feel that they have a closer relationship with their idol than they do.
+When you operate a virtual character, this shit gets extra complicated.
+How to be genuine when you're not wholly real.
+When I play Luca, I do try to invent fiction on the fly to preserve my own privacy.
+I'll make up details about Luca hanging out with other members of the band earlier that day, maybe eating chips.
+Sometimes It's a great word.
+Sometimes I base those realities on my own reality, but only loosely, just to help me keep facts straight when I'm trying to make this stuff up live.
+What I refuse to be dishonest about is emotion.
+Getting on a Twitch stream and telling the chat that I'm feeling depressed when I'm not is asking for emotional labor for a fictional construct, and to me, that crosses an ethical line that I've drawn.
+On the flip side, if I am feeling sad or anxious, I will share that with the audience because it helps me feel that I'm speaking from the heart.
+Plus, they know that somewhere on the other side of Luca is a person.
+And if they do any homework, they know it's me.
+So in our case, I feel like it's okay to share to a certain degree.
+What I'm saying is that the dangers of parasocial relationships, of manipulating people's emotions and emotional investment in order to get them to buy a product is not okay.
+And you do have to be supremely careful when you're operating a virtual identity.
+I forgot I have glasses.
+Representation.
+I'm ending on this one because it's the most important.
+Arguably, OFK is even a half measure because I'm a white person up here with an undue amount of visibility from the rest of our team.
+OFK team friends, if there's any OFK, can you stand up?
+Is anyone in the crowd?
+Is Adriel still here?
+Shout out to Adriel.
+If you have questions after the talk, please ask me, but you're also welcome to talk to the team, too, because you've just heard a lot of what I have to say already.
+The games industry is paying better attention to the equitable representation of diverse stories and perspectives on screen, gradually.
+We're also seeing more diverse hiring, gradually, with studios being more careful to pay people whose stories they're telling.
+We are still failing miserably at the balance of power.
+And most game studios that push their BIPOC or queer employees to the front of the team photo, those photos are not the highest, those employees are not the highest paid or the most senior.
+And it's crucial to be asking more directly, who profits from the success of a game?
+Who profits?
+Diversity funds at consoles and publishers have to go beyond seeing a PowerPoint slide with diverse faces on it before they're giving money and actually ask, who owns revenue share?
+Who is empowered to make choices?
+We had a number of discussions about diversity funding with outside partners who didn't ask for any of that.
+And we were like, please, take our receipts.
+So should you create a virtual identity?
+In the interest of giving you the most information, and in the interest of you giving my talk a good review, here's a slide with some pros and cons.
+So fill out your survey at the end of the talk, please.
+They tell me you got to say that.
+It's part of the cons.
+You have to invent new story on the fly, but honestly I don't know if fans will hold you too closely to it and I got pretty good at dodging details during live streams by just like being charming and like being Winking if you got to make sure your mocap can wink By the time my co-writer Claire Gia and I finished all the scripts I had a pretty strong grasp of Lucas daily life and mannerisms.
+So this got easier There can be big representation issues if one virtual character is repping the whole team.
+But that happens already, I guess.
+Like, every GDC talk this week will be people representing their whole teams.
+But with virtual identity, the difficulty gets higher.
+Operating a virtual identity is essentially running a live service game, right?
+Except the live content is your social media and more content that you produce.
+I guess you could make your social media manager the virtual character if you have one and can afford like have that role, but that's not always the skill set or the project ownership of a social media manager inherently.
+team.
+I'm You get direct engagement.
+As game devs, we rarely get to engage directly with our fans.
+So this is pretty great, at least for me, an extrovert.
+Time to talk with fans and hear what they want to say to your characters is really special.
+Promotion.
+I've shared a lot of fun examples of what we got to do.
+It opens up a lot of creative avenues for spreading the word during an era where promoting your game is a thankless, endless, grim social media landscape.
+And TikTok is already tipping down on how it treats its users' attention.
+But it also helps you pitch stuff, right?
+We got Rolling Stone.
+We got to be on Rolling Stone because I was like, yo, we can do this virtual thing.
+And they were like, well, that's so cool.
+And it is so cool.
+Social values.
+If you can navigate a lot of the social and team dynamic pitfalls of running a virtual character, it's a great pointed vehicle for communicating your team's values to the world.
+A way for your team to speak to more current events that may not be touched on in your game's story.
+Virtual characters getting political is maybe a scary prospect to you, but games not being political is a more dangerous reality.
+Stand for something.
+You can't have a virtual identity without an identity.
+So, that's Luca and me.
+I have failed in a lot of ways building and running this character.
+Most pointedly, failing to get the other characters live the way Luca is.
+But, I've been up here to hopefully share that in an honest way.
+So I'll leave you with this.
+If you're gonna create a virtual character, find your way to be honest.
+Be genuine, be authentic through fiction.
+And the same really goes for any game you make.
+Please, stand for something.
+Thanks.
+Remember when people used to do this when people were clapping for them?
+Where did this go?
+There's microphones.
+I can't see anything.
+Does anyone have questions or want to challenge me to a game of Yu-Gi-Oh?
+Is it cool if you go to the mic?
+I'll repeat the question anyway, but just so everyone can hear.
+I can't believe the mocap worked.
+It's way too high.
+Oh no!
+I will just talk like this.
+It's a coincidence purely I'm wearing a Hatsune Miku jacket.
+What?
+I know, right?
+It's crazy.
+It's crazy.
+But anyway, it's happened a lot with mostly VTubers where sometimes they're under contract and their personality can sometimes blur a bit to Person to play them or is it too intrinsically tied and the band would cease like what would happen in the replacement?
+Yeah I was I was just looking at the seraphine Twitter this morning seraphine.
+Yeah, exactly.
+Yeah Seraphine was riots follow up to Katie and she's like an indie singer songwriter and she had a lot of she got a lot of criticism for being Manipulative with parasocial relationships because she was like I'm feeling depressed Um, I was looking at her Twitter cuz like her last tweet was just like I need to spend more time offline and everyone Yeah, good luck seraphine Yeah, also there was a Gorillaz livestream recently and I learned, I didn't know this, that the characters are now played by voice actors, or at least some of them are.
+Because I think Jamie Hewlett, the artist, didn't want to play his character anymore.
+He was just tired of doing it.
+And I think that's fine.
+I think replacing is interesting.
+I think if I just get tired of carrying it or we have no money or whatever, I just I think like this stopping operating a virtual character.
+Yeah, I guess the last thing I'll say is like, I touched on this a little bit, but just accepting that like, you're not fooling anybody is really important.
+I think for a lot of VTubers, that separation, they feel like a protection that they have their VTuber as a separate person.
+So they really want to believe that that wall is strong and impenetrable, but people know that there's a human being, right?
+So like, again, it's just, it's one of those moments of like being careful about what the... Okay, thank you very much.
+Thank you.
+Yeah?
+Hey, great session, by the way.
+Thank you.
+What would you say is the biggest difference between you and Luca, and why did you create that difference?
+So the question is, what's the biggest difference between me and Luca, and why did we create that difference?
+He also said, great session.
+It's just a camera nasty.
+It was, it was.
+Write your feedback.
+Take your reviews.
+This is the same thing I do on Twitch streams, which is I'm stalling while I think about the question.
+I mean, so for one, it's not like I started from me.
+Claire and I wrote the characters from the point of view of just writing any other characters.
+But I did have an idea that it was going to be a self-insert.
+So actually, there were elements of, for example, during the character design process, where NAF was pitching ideas.
+And I was like, oh, I don't think I can make my voice embody a certain design.
+Admittedly, I pulled the visual design closer to myself.
+Something that I know that at least I did in an exercise for all the characters was to take something, I learned this from like a writer who I really admire, it was like take something from yourself that you are the most critical of or ashamed of in your past or present and put that in a character and it's a helpful but you know risky way of being mean to your character.
+It can be hard when developing a character to give them real flaws that are really unforgivable.
+So Luca has some of that.
+His plot line has to do with being indecisive and being flaky.
+And these are things that I felt like I had let people down in my life.
+But beyond that, it's not exactly a process of starting from me and moving backwards.
+It was a little bit more of what you can seed into any character.
+So I think in that way, Hello.
+Cool.
+Hi, thank you so much for your talk.
+So confession, I'm a VTuber.
+I started being a VTuber before I became a game developer and then I became a game developer in software.
+But because I was an independent VTuber before developing software, a lot of my own personal identity has kind of become wrapped up in kind of my own brand because that's something that I managed for myself.
+So as I continue to navigate the game developer world, trying to figure out where that brand intersects with my game developer persona, and how to manifest that in public appearances, especially as somebody who is trans and non-binary, and trying my best to be visible, the world and whatever.
+So I was wondering like if you have any insights on what happens when the virtual identity so closely overlaps with your own personal identity and kind of like navigating that space.
+Some.
+Thank you for that question.
+Now I'm all nervous because you're like you know what you know how this goes.
+Probably better than I do.
+The question is, and forgive me for a bad recap, but what to do when your own personal brand or identity is getting closer to the characters and how to deal with that in terms of engaging with the community.
+I guess my specific experience is that, once again, for me, it was one of those things of like, I don't think people care as much as I felt like they did.
+was like, oh, how do I behave on my personal Twitter versus when I'm in control of the OFK Twitter or Lucas Twitter?
+How do I make sure those are separate?
+For me, at least, there's less overlap.
+There's a lot less overlap with who's following me as Teddy, the game developer or whatever, and who's following the band.
+And even when I started being less secretive about it, being like, okay, I'll talk about Teddy's existence.
+Still, it's not like I saw some... I wasn't pouring followers from OFK into Teddy.
+An interesting example of this is that some musician friends of mine who are in really big bands, like Coachella bands, nobody follows them and nobody cares.
+I mean, people care, but they're there to follow the project or the specific thing.
+And so it's already hard enough if you want to, to get people to cross over.
+So again, just in my experience, it's okay if they get closer and I worry less about, oh, I have to be super different in both.
+because no one's really watching as closely as I fear that they are, and certainly not in a critical way.
+I mean, people are always critical on the internet, but that's my anecdotal experience.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+We've got three more minutes.
+We've got time.
+Hi.
+Hello.
+Best GDC talk ever, by the way.
+Thank you.
+I'll speak up.
+Thank you.
+How did your relationship to making We Are OFK change by having a character that represented so much of yourself and your own issues in the game?
+Good question.
+What's funny for me, the question is how did my relationship with making We Are OFK change when there's a character who has so much of me in it, sort of.
+Also, they said best talk ever for the camera.
+Best talk ever.
+I'll maybe stop doing that.
+Yeah, so I guess as I was saying to an earlier question, for me, what's funny is I think the stuff that I put into the characters that I'm the most um... have struggled with or feel the most ashamed of in my life is actually not in luca lucas stuff is a little bit more like obvious lucas laws are are very obvious from the front uh... and he gets a vocal criticism from his friends so he's actually kind of easy one whereas i think that the other characters have some like deeper again like no one to one another you know like using real life stories but i don't know if that was intentional but it definitely is a convenience that this is a little bit like right in your face.
+And it's not as like, for me, like painful in the way some of the other stuff is.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Okay, um, I was just wondering if there's ever times where your belief or like Lucas beliefs kind of push you towards like compromising your own beliefs.
+And if that were to ever happen, would how would you kind of navigate that?
+Like, would you rein him in more?
+Or would you let him kind of let loose and in a way compromise your own, like your own self?
+Yeah, the question is, like, what do I do if Lucas beliefs separate from my beliefs?
+How do I handle that?
+Um, I mean, like, His beliefs are not going to diverge from mine on important social or political issues, right?
+And maybe that is another luxury and privilege for me as the person operating him.
+Our team is pretty aligned in political beliefs, or very aligned, I would hope, but even so, it's not like I'm checking with the team anytime he makes a political comment or something.
+That being said, the one thing I can think of, which is maybe not a belief, but a preference, is Luca is a little bit more hyper-confident than I am, or at least projects hyper-confidence, can be dismissive of criticism, can just gloat, or not gloat, but boast more.
+And as I age, I'm trying to be quieter as a person.
+quieter as a leader, softer touch in terms of trying to care for people.
+And Luca's like still kind of barreling through writing privilege and just having a grand old time.
+So that's a little awkward for me, like on live streams to do, but it's usually in a pretty safe environment.
+It's not like he's like making fun of people in the chat.
+He's not directing that towards real people.
+So that's about the most tension I felt so far, I think.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+We've got time for two more.
+We'll go here and then one at the mic.
+And then we'll talk to you afterwards for anything else.
+Hi, yeah.
+If we could actually take this to a wrap up room, it'll be in room 2014 and 2018 down the hall.
+Thank you.
+Cool.
+Thanks, everybody.
+so
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+All right.
+Looks like I'm live and we're ready to start talking about some RPGs and theft.
+See, I knew there were going to be fans of theft in this audience.
+So what are we talking about today?
+We're talking about role-playing games, the tabletop variety, not just the video game type, but specifically the wide and wondrous world of interesting mechanics and styles and books.
+And there are a lot of them.
+That's part of why I did this talk.
+There's just so much to wade through and so much to steal and put in our video games.
+I've heard it kind of has occasionally worked, so let's get into it.
+Who am I?
+So for those who don't know, my name's Evan Hill.
+I've been a level designer for about 10 years.
+I'm currently at Obsidian, making Outer Worlds 2.
+I also used to be a part of Naughty Dog, making The Last of Us Part 2.
+Also somewhat relevant, I've made Torment Tides of Numenera, Solar Ash, worked on a game called Palea, and very specifically, this one, inspired by a follow-up by Planescape Torment is really relevant to this talk because it's one of the few major games to adapt Monty Cook's cipher system.
+It's very different than D&D.
+It's rather complicated.
+We don't have time to get into it now.
+Got a lot of slides to get through, so let's just get to the stealing.
+So here's the plan.
+I'm going to walk you guys through each game.
+We're going to case the joint.
+We're going to study the mechanics, and then we're going to figure out how to steal it and fence, I mean, put it into our own video games.
+And then we're going to learn from others.
+So here are the targets.
+I've broken this down into six simple steps, targets, areas.
+We're going to talk about characters and time, basically character stats, interesting things like that.
+Weird resolutions, which is bonkers ways that you can play games instead of rolling dice.
+Short and sweet, one-page RPGs and the absolute territory of strange, interesting things that come out of there.
+Ancient knowledge, where we're going to start talking about people reviving the more Gygaxian days of tabletop RPGs.
+And I'm not going to explain Disco Myst Apocalypse yet.
+You can get there when we get there.
+First, let's do characters and time.
+How could I start a talk about stealing without first talking about Blades in the Dark by John Harper?
+There's a reason for the hoots.
+This game is phenomenal.
+And one of the first things we're gonna dive into is, other than it's just basically greatness, it's basically a tabletop Dishonored, for those who don't know.
+That's all we really need to jump into the best first mechanic, which is flashbacks.
+Like any good heist movie, this game allows us to meet an obstacle.
+And instead of actively trying to solve it in the moment, we can jump backwards in time and say, fix it before we even got there.
+Say you see a guard around a corner.
+In Blades in the Dark, instead of stealthing behind him or trying to take him out non-lethally, you can say, I jumped back to a week ago where I threatened his life with a gun or bribed him.
+And then we actively make that roll to see whether or not you succeeded.
+Already we can see the opportunities this provides.
+And a lot of games have started to do this rather successfully, where we take an obstacle and instead of just letting the player figure it out with their tools at hand, we get this rich cornucopia of options.
+We can do a lot more social gameplay.
+We can interject and incorporate skills that aren't necessarily your stunning, your stealthing, or immediate on-hand gear into the gameplay loop.
+I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunities.
+We've got a lot to cover, but say, like, with Assassin's Creed, the RPGification of that series is going further and further, and can you imagine if, like, we go back to being Ezio and I can bribe a guard just as easily as I can stab him in the neck?
+I kind of want to play that game.
+But you might be asking, this is a really powerful ability.
+How does Blades in the Dark balance this idea of time travel.
+Pretty well I'd say.
+It uses a system called stress.
+So stress in Blades of the Dark is kind of like this expendable resource that also is a measure of your mental health.
+So anytime you do a flashback, push yourself on a roll, or try to undo something bad happening to you immediately, you can take a stress it's tangibly taxing my body and character beyond their normal limits.
+What's the consequence of that?
+I think Darkest Dungeon demonstrates a really good example of this, even though I would say this kind of leans much more into that second health bar territory, where it's, you know, your mental health points.
+But, more than that, it's long-term consequences, I think, are just something phenomenal to learn from.
+As I said, stress focuses on something that's more than a second health bar.
+But now, I think everybody who did the Woo is probably going to love this next one.
+We're gonna talk about clocks.
+So, the way Blades in the Darks works is really special.
+Instead of a normal quest log, instead of, you know, tracking inventory or hit points, you also track all of the myriad threads and events that are going on with really simple circles and note cards.
+And quickly, it starts looking like this.
+To explain it simply, a progress clock is just what it says.
+It can represent anything.
+It can be a measure of the guard's alertness.
+It can be your vampire investigation.
+It could be time until the werewolf uprising.
+It is this flexible, tangible tool, and any time a player does a flashback, spends some stress, or nearly fails something, the GM is given the opportunity to advance one of these various clocks as a response.
+And it creates this very winding clockwork experience where every little action is pushing and pulling on this wide variety of intricate threads and stories and states that would be nightmarish to write all the rules out for.
+Like a guard alert system is already complex enough that we have an entire stealth game genre.
+So this just lets us condense that all down and focus it.
+so far.
+Has some vibes of this though.
+It uses a real-world clock, but we'll talk about that in a bit Now we're gonna move on from Blades in the Dark because again, we've got a lot to cover Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard So this is a very beloved RPG series, this is one of my favorites by far So, initially built by Luke Crane as this kind of obscure, fantasy-focused role-playing system, it then partnered with David Peterson to make Mouseguard, which is a distillation and evolution of everything Burning Wheel was.
+It is this very character-driven, nuanced experience.
+all of your stats incrementally change over time.
+Your characters have very defined characteristics, identities, and those too, most startlingly of all, change over time.
+And the way it does this is through beliefs and instincts.
+So we're gonna just focus on MouseGuard for a second.
+In MouseGuard, you're basically in a medieval society, but you're made of tiny little guys.
+look at them.
+You're part mouse, part human, and as a result, there's this giant tapestry of roles, professions, identities, ideologies, all at play.
+And you get to roleplay that as a part of this intricate little society.
+How the game defines it, both in Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, is with beliefs and instincts.
+A belief is something kind of tangible.
+It is a concrete understanding of the world that the character has.
+And it is meant to be a stance.
+It is not just a wishy-washy, like, oh, I believe hope should save the world.
+It is something like, you're a peasant farmer, and you get to write down on your character sheet, I am the true king of this land.
+It is, for example, in Burning Wheel, this orc here, riding this wolf, has beliefs like, I must interrogate an elf, a dwarf, and a human to discover if they have minds like my own.
+Also, fuck the Legion, I will forge my own path.
+And then the little mouse on the side has an interesting little belief of a guard mouse needs to think with their head and feel with their heart.
+They can be simple little character threads.
+But where this then comes back into the mechanical is any time that you operate in accordance with these beliefs, you get rewarded.
+You're given persona points, you're given resources to further drive the story and push on a future role.
+And now an instinct is like, a baby version of it.
+They are the automatic behaviors your character is expected to do.
+And these are really interesting because they are things that the GM is allowed to say that you do without you saying you do it.
+So an example of a good instinct is like, I always draw my sword at the sign of trouble.
+That's great.
+You can play it where you might get the equivalent of initiative role anytime something pops out at you.
+It's less great in a courthouse And now all of a sudden, you're being presented with these very character-driven trade-offs that can be often helpful, sometimes harmful.
+But even more interestingly, none of these are meant to be static.
+The player and the character kind of weave over time.
+You're able to level up and alter these things.
+If, say, your belief is, I will always guard the prince and the prince dies, what happens now?
+And again, this tangible reward is always there.
+Going back to the instincts, any time that an instinct negatively affects you, the game design is explicit in that the player then gets that same resource if they opt into it.
+You can decide to not draw your sword in the courthouse, but that extra XP is really good.
+So it drives the story forward.
+And some of you might have noticed that this is very similar to the cop types and thought cabinets in Disco Elysium because these people are very smart and they stole very good things.
+But I want you to think further on though.
+Like if we started implementing that in our RPGs closer to Mass Effect, we could demonstrate interesting character arcs like Commander Shepard's trust in Earth Authority or where they sit on the various relations between the different species.
+it would be one thing to decide whether the arachnid queen lives or dies, it'd be another knowing that your bonuses matter towards it.
+Blowing it up versus sacrificing maybe like a half level worth of experience to change your beliefs now or otherwise adjust against it.
+I said, I'm not you.
+You can take this and run with it however you want.
+But the one, this is the reason I made the talk though.
+This next set, vice and nature stats.
+So, in Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, there are these unique categories of skills.
+They are not basket weaving, they are not sword fighting, they are these emotional aspects of your character.
+And they have massive trade-offs.
+So, to start with, in Burning Wheel, I think they're still a bit rough, but still very interesting to talk about.
+The examples in Burning Wheel are greed, grief, and anger.
+They work just like your other stats.
+If you use them on a roll, you take your number and you roll that many dice.
+Or you can combine them with like sword fighting and athletics.
+They're usually very good.
+They give you the option to substitute on any roll a relatively high number.
+The catch is, you need to demonstrably show that it aligns with the vice.
+So let's take an example.
+If you have a four in greed, and there is an object that you want to bargain for, instead of using your charisma check, you can decide to use your greed stat and potentially get four times of an effective chance of getting it.
+The negative though, is like other stats in Burning Wheel, the more you use it, the more it levels up.
+And the more a vice stat levels up, the further your character is restricted from certain actions.
+Greed is another really good example.
+I believe if you get past rank three in it, anytime you are divvying things up, even something as simple as a pie, you are not allowed to divvy it up evenly and fairly with other people.
+You always, always have to take an edge.
+You always, always have to behave in a certain way.
+And right there, the player is given this arc, this option that's more than just, what's even a step better.
+Like, this is the truly refined version of it, and it's dead simple.
+Like, if you pause this, you'll be able to read this really quickly.
+The way MouseGuard works is, because you're just a cute little guy, if you do things that a tiny little mouse thing would do, you can substitute your nature stat.
+Basically, anything that's like climbing, escaping, hiding, foraging, you just get natural ability at doing that thing.
+Now, where it gets interesting is you can also use it to act against your nature.
+Standing up and fighting, guarding, running through fire, anything that's against your nature, you can then substitute this stat that ranges usually from 1 to 7 in a game where 7 is like level 15, to do anything.
+But anytime you act against your nature, it taxes it.
+Meaning the next time you use it for any reason, it's one less rank.
+If you deplete it, you're going to lose an entire pip in it until you recover, possibly taking multiple sessions.
+So you're presenting the player with this easy road of good bonuses moving towards an alignment or a style or a class that you see as valuable and helpful, but they're not limited to that.
+They are constantly given this choice to nitro boost their roles to try and succeed.
+But with that balancing consequence of the cost later, the character impact.
+If you deplete your nature all the way, your character gets described as either obsessive or odd.
+If you let your nature get too high, your character kind of settles and doesn't want to go out and adventure anymore, and they get negatives on both ends of the spectrum.
+And the game itself then suddenly demonstrates that it has this tension between these two different essences that the character has, both as a mouse and as a warrior or a craftsman or, you know, somebody who will go out and fight an owl face to face But yeah, what I really love about this, and again, the whole reason I built this talk, was because what we're seeing is something that is a resource and a stat all at once.
+You're able to spend this, stockpile it, utilize it however you want to shape the story, and how you use it naturally creates a dynamic character.
+Even with this just singular access, you're showing a character's ups and downs, confronting with not only how they perceive the world or act in it, but their own internal landscape gets shifted one way or another depending on how this action goes out.
+And I can't think of a game where this wouldn't be interesting.
+and yeah that's what we're here to do is just I think there's a ton of these tools that can just be put nearly anywhere but let's just keep going into the simple easy to steal stuff one of my favorite rules in burning wheel which is a game that's normally very complex is just roll versus bloody it's dead simple Two people fight, they just roll die and see who gets the bigger number and they get the damage.
+No checking against AC, no maneuvering.
+It's meant to be just like, oh, we can do a bar brawl.
+We're about the same strength, what happens?
+Some of you might notice that another favorite cop of ours also uses this mechanic because again, these people are very smart and I like them.
+But now we're on to part two, weird resolutions.
+So who here's played Jenga?
+So the games we're about to talk about are wonderful bits of design on completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
+In Dread, it is a survival horror game where every time you take a risky action, you need to take a block out of the Jenga tower.
+And if the Jenga tower falls over, everyone dies.
+And then in StarCrossed, you're playing a romantic scene between two StarCrossed lovers.
+And every time you take an action, you take a block out of the Jenga tower.
+And when it falls over, you have to make out now.
+That is the complete breaking point of the tension.
+And yeah, so the whole Jenga of it all, already we're seeing that like, when we talk about RPGs, when we talk about storytelling games, we don't need to be limited to just die and paper.
+We can produce the same kind of emerging behavior and engaging stuff with radically different tools and Well, I think this is like a fun example.
+I think there is even more unexplored territory here.
+So some of you might already be thinking, how do I put this in a video game?
+Oh, do I just model the physics of a Jenga tower?
+You might then realize that that's not necessarily the most compelling thing.
+It's also still just randomness and variety.
+But I think we're also missing another aspect of it.
+If I have something like this, and I'm in a scene where there is a cataclysmic or critical event that happens when I knock it over, you're constantly giving your player the option to just flip the table over.
+If you're playing this in a negotiating game, instead of it being necessarily like, oh, when the Jenga tower falls, I fail, it's, I can decide to knock this over, walk out of here, maybe with my dignity intact, and certainly a lot of negative reputation, but some other way.
+This is also basically what happens in stealth games.
+So for my work in Last of Us, and my love of Metal Gear, One of the best ways to describe failing stealth is knocking the Jenga tower over.
+Sometimes you're going to deliberately try to pick it apart, move through paths, naturally just accidentally tip it over and things get loud.
+And other days, you're just gonna bust the door open with a shotgun and start screaming.
+And both of these are these valid, interesting, narratively relevant ways of approaching something.
+So, I think there's something there.
+but moving on still, roll and write.
+This one might be slightly unfamiliar to some people.
+It's a new kind of emerging genre, it's getting quite popular, where it's almost a solo game.
+You sit down with some friends, you roll some dice, you allocate those numbers onto a table, and you do things like build railroads or condominiums.
+If you're thinking it sounds like Yahtzee, it essentially is, but there is this massive diversity of genre and style and mechanics And some people are already starting to use it.
+Many of you have probably heard of Citizen Sleeper, and basically that's all this game is.
+At the beginning of the day, you're given a pool of dice of varying values, and the game and the story evolve depending on where you allocate them.
+Like, this was one of the most compelling games of last year, and it's essentially cyberpunk Yahtzee.
+and it doesn't end there.
+There's this survival space sim called Tharsis, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, that again, uses this same really simple mechanic to tell deep complicated stories about survival and resource allocation and just the risk of attempting risky maneuvers in the vacuum of space.
+And this doesn't have to state, like, in the survival main.
+Like, Dicey Dungeons came out, like, four years ago.
+I want to see more combat, more interaction mechanics that have the kind of pop and depth as this game.
+And I think it's not a hard sell.
+Some people are very smart.
+But let's keep moving.
+So we also have one-page RPGs.
+So often people think RPGs are these massive tomes that just require a master's degree to even approach, much less fully comprehend.
+No.
+Sometimes you just have a game like Honey Heist where you are a bunch of bear criminals with two stats, bear and criminal.
+And you can play this in an afternoon and just have a wonderful time with your friends.
+Or Sexy Battle Wizards, which just has sexy, battle, and wizard as stats.
+Or John is Everyone, where three of you get to play as John.
+and the voices inside of his head.
+They're simple and cool, and I'm going to leave it at that because they're simple and cool.
+And now we're going to get into something a bit interesting.
+The OSR.
+For people who don't know, there's this trend among Dungeons & Dragons aficionados of the old school revival.
+It's kind of an attempt to return to the traditional ways of like AD&D.
+There are some caveats.
+A lot of these people sometimes maybe go for the aesthetic of the 1980s a little too hard and end up coming off a little crusty.
+But I think the core of this thing is still very good and wholesome and really demonstrates some of the things that we're lacking in a lot of modern game design.
+Focuses on player agency.
+They tend to be rules light.
+One of my favorite systems in it is just about 10 pages as a pamphlet.
+It's usually highly fatally and low power.
+So, you know, everybody's played a level one campaign or at least seen people try to stream it and die very quickly on it.
+And it's usually very focused on resource management.
+Credit to...
+Credit to Lines for writing the article I got all that from.
+But some of the most standout people in this are Ben Milton.
+He's the one who wrote that small 10-page pamphlet I just mentioned called Knave, which you can just pick up and play.
+It is really approachable, really easy to play, and hits all the things that we're talking about.
+Even more importantly, he wrote one of my favorite dungeons of all time called The Waking of Willoughby Halls, where you are stuck in a haunted mansion, where another adventuring party runs in with a stolen goose from an angry giant.
+So you're dealing with this just lasagna of problems that turns into the tabletop equivalent of a Hitman level on acid.
+Can't sell that better than I just did.
+He also has an even shorter, even more condensed version called Maze Rats.
+This is just a couple pages.
+There are no classes and even when it comes to spell casting, you get one spell a day and you randomly roll it.
+It is just meant to be raw, immediate, quick, fun, that captures all of the beauty and all of the just intricacy of improv-ing with your friends.
+Another major standout that is always worth looking at is Chris McDonald's Into the Odd.
+So, its follow-up is even more stunning, and this is the one we're going to focus on here.
+It's called Electric Bastionland.
+As a setting, as a piece of art, check it out for just that.
+There is an entire racial category for Muppets.
+I did not stutter.
+But one of the most interesting things of this and Knave is you can make a character in this game in less than five minutes.
+You just have three stats, you roll them, and then you figure out what failed career your character is.
+There is no quibbling over what color belt buckle do I need, but there is a random table for it if you really want to dig that far.
+And you can be everything from a science mystic, a prize breeder, a machine whisperer, there's a hundred plus of these things.
+And you are just meant to be thrown into this wild, strange world and all of these mechanics facilitate that.
+They facilitate you jumping into this setting with no need to be on ramp, no need to again sit down and do three hours of studying or session zero.
+You're just able to go.
+Hitman, anything with emergent sims or roguelike design, really finds its roots in these things.
+And even still, we're finding more to look back on and kind of harvest from this era of game design.
+There's just so much to be said about simplifying, about removing complexity and letting you just kind of get to the meat of the story, of the narrative, by getting out of the player's way and just letting them roll some numbers.
+And now for my favorite part of this talk.
+The Disco Mist Apocalypse.
+This is the big score.
+This is the thing that during my research I kind of came across and absolutely fell in love with.
+There's this system called Apocalypse World.
+It's brilliant.
+It kind of came out and was a bit obscure, but since then it's been continually licensed.
+There are multiple games that utilize this.
+Dungeon World, Monster Hearts, and I think most poignantly and the best example is City of Mist.
+What makes this thing special?
+Unlike all of these other settings, unlike all of these other systems, this is built story logic first.
+It's not coming from the ground up and trying to establish complex systems.
+It is, I want to take a story action.
+What's the result?
+And one of the benefits of this is it lets you have really simple characters, just like with the OSR.
+Here we have somebody who's based off Little Red Riding Hood.
+Her abilities are not complicated rules text.
+They are literally bulletproof red hood, arsenal of hunting weapons, high school rumors.
+Those are the things she's good at.
+If you can justify her using any of those things, you get a bonus to your role.
+If you mess up on that role, you're going to take some consequences or partially accomplish your goal.
+uh we're running out of time a little bit so i'm just going to kind of speed through this but overall this system is wonderful you need to check it out we it's flexible it's able to render tons of characters of any variety and style and really all you need is what you see on this table.
+Dice?
+You don't even need these note cards.
+But the real reason I found this so compelling was very quickly I realized this is what Disco Elysium utilizes.
+Not just, oh hey, we're rolling 2D6, or oh hey, we're using tags, but this very fundamental approach of story logic first, systems first, not even tertiary.
+You're being presented with a game that focused on articulating the attributes of its character and seeing what happened.
+Failure being one of the most interesting parts about that equation.
+There's such things as near misses and interesting funny fuck-ups in this game and I really think it holds itself a lot of credit to the apocalypse system, whether or not this was conscious or unconscious, it wound up kind of blossoming out and it's what separates it from other games of its era, I think.
+and also why it's very difficult to just look at Disco Elysium, copy its stats, copy its systems, and attempt to get the same results because it's just so fundamentally about this top-down approach.
+That's why the Tribunal is so effective.
+There is no combat system in this game because it never needed one.
+It has a system for resolving story conflict, and it just presents any fight like a story conflict.
+And yeah, no, this talk might have kind of always secretly been a little bit of a love letter to Disco Elysium, and I'm unabashedly okay with that because they're very good.
+But we're running out of time, so we're going to skip through some of this bonus stuff that I was hopefully going to cram into the end.
+But you need to check these out.
+Pathologic 2.
+This is off the table.
+This is not a tabletop game.
+It's very good.
+You all need to use this quest system that they have.
+It is a mind map.
+It is not a quest log.
+It is not just a list of things you can do.
+It is wonderful and great, and I don't have time to gush about it now, but absolute credit to its designer.
+She's an absolute genius.
+Also, Notia.
+This is an odd one.
+This is a single-player visual novel, Among Us-like, where you are deciding and figuring out who to cold sleep because some of you are aliens.
+It also has a porpoise in a pressure chute.
+You need to play this game.
+But anyway, if you take anything away from this talk, it's learn and steal from the best.
+Don't feel ashamed of this.
+Game design, just like any other discipline, is something that is collaborative and evolving, and we stand on the shoulders of giants.
+And that's all we can really hope for.
+Even if a heist like this, like this talk that I gave, may have been a little less Mission Impossible and a little more Fish Called Wanda.
+Thank you for listening.
+You can also all follow me on Twitter, please rate the talk, and then hopefully I'll also have a little bit more to share of this little thing that's not a video game that will be coming soon.
+But yeah, everyone have a wonderful GDC.
+I hope to see most of you all soon.
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+Thank you everyone for coming today This is why care about wholesome games anyway Before we get started.
+I was asked to ask everyone to silence your phones I'm very clumsy so if something goes off.
+I'll probably be startled and fall off the stage, so please keep that in mind and Today we're talking about wholesome games.
+It's a genre of games that's grown a lot in the past few years, but maybe isn't the most clearly defined or best understood yet.
+So we're going to be trying to shine some light on both of those things today.
+My name's James Tellman.
+I've been working in games for about eight years.
+Currently I'm working on a game where you run a sushi restaurant and you play as a cute little robot.
+It's called Rolling Hills, and I'll be the moderator for today's discussion.
+Our first panelist is Jenny Wendham.
+She's from Portland, Oregon.
+She's a producer at Soft Knot Week, a senior influencer manager at Kepler Interactive, and she's a streamer who some of you may recognize as the host of the annual Wholesome Direct Showcase.
+Next up, we have the very beautiful and very talented Matthew Taylor.
+He's the founder of the Wholesome Games organization.
+He started the Wholesome Direct Showcase, and currently he's the creative director at Catch & Release, working with me on Rolling Hills.
+He gets it, too.
+And finally, this one will need no applause cue.
+This is, on the end here, is Victoria Tran.
+She's the community director at InnerSloth.
+She's worked on hit games like Among Us and Unpacking.
+She was part of the Forbes 30 Under 30.
+You've seen her as a co-host of Wholesome Direct.
+And she's, most importantly, the only member of this panel who's ever appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
+Now, one thing that I wanted to mention before we get started is you probably noticed from the introductions that all of us are involved with an organization called Wholesome Games.
+And today we're talking about a genre called Wholesome Games.
+We're not here to promote Wholesome Games or Wholesome Direct or anything like that.
+We just have had the benefit of front row seats to this genre because of our work with Wholesome Direct.
+and we want to share some of the data we've gleaned from that and let you draw your own conclusions about it.
+So with that in mind, any time today that I'm talking about Wholesome Games, the organization, the capital W Wholesome Games, I will do my best to call that out and draw attention to that distinction.
+Otherwise, you can assume we're talking about the genre.
+Finally, I'm going to slip into the shadows very soon so we can keep the spotlight on our panelists.
+Sorry if I hit you today, Jenny.
+But I just wanted to mention my role as moderator, I feel, is to be your voice on this stage.
+Not everyone here is an expert on Wholesome Games already.
+I've been involved with the organization for a while now, so I like to think that I am.
+But I'm going to try to forget everything I know about that and approach this as someone who maybe came here because they just saw it on the schedule and thought it was interesting or has heard about Wholesome Games in a tweet or something like that.
+And with that in mind, I think the best place to begin is, what are Wholesome Games?
+That's a lovely and big question to kick it off with.
+I think there are three words and concepts I usually go back to every time I refer to wholesome games.
+They're titles that often offer compassion, comfort, and coziness to player through elements like the narrative, the gameplay mechanics, art and sound, and so on.
+And what's really interesting to me personally is while some of these can be really more clearly defined and articulated.
+A lot of what's cool about wholesome games to me is the amount of subjectivity that it provides because these same things aren't cozy for everybody.
+And I did want to say there's a sort of a synonym that we're using between cozy and wholesome.
+I think if you really want to nerd out with me, I will go into why I think there are differences between the concepts of coziness and the concept of wholesomeness, partially because I think wholesome games can address sometimes uncozy topics in a really gentle and compassionate manner, but we can talk about that later.
+But we'll use it pretty synonymously, I feel like, for this panel.
+Matthew, a lot of the discussion of wholesome games comes from or traces back to a Twitter account that you started.
+Could you give us any, well here are a few of the games that you've curated on that Twitter account.
+Could you give us a little insight into why you choose games like these?
+First of all, pardon the earthquake happening next door.
+Well, they're great games.
+I mean, first and foremost, there's not a game up here I wouldn't recommend just as a game.
+The mechanics are all very different, but I think they're united by a feeling, right?
+They allow players to do good and feel good.
+And being united by a feeling is really the core of what Wholesome Games has always been about.
+It's like a genre that's not about a particular mechanic, but it's about a feeling.
+So I think all these games are united by a feeling.
+And if you play them, I think you'll feel that.
+How do you think your curation has impacted how other people think about wholesome games?
+If you look at the Wholesome Games Twitter or watch Wholesome Direct or something like that, you're going to have like a vocabulary instantly, I think, to talk about this kind of stuff.
+So I hope at the very least it's giving people a baseline.
+Jenny mentioned Cozy Games as a term.
+Did you consider any other names when you were creating that Twitter account that started it?
+Is Cozy Games something that entered your mind?
+It didn't at the time.
+I know a lot of people are using that term really well and really descriptively now, but I feel like at the time I just thought wholesome was a little more inclusive.
+Like I feel like cozy is one type of feeling that I'm describing.
+And I think wholesome can contain a lot more than that.
+Like I know it's not a perfect term.
+I know, um, there are a lot of people who have feelings about it, but I feel like it's really simple and evocative, which is what you need when you're creating something like this.
+Victoria, you've been a professional in the games industry for a while now, and you're the newest member of Wholesome Games, the organization.
+So I just wanted to ask you, what was your first impression of Wholesome Games?
+Like, when you encountered this term, what went through your mind?
+Yeah, I thought it was really cool and I'm not going to lie, one of the first things I saw was the absolute discourse behind Wholesome Games, so that was really interesting.
+What do you mean by the discourse?
+Yeah, I think, and I totally get it, and for a lot of reasons, I think I've seen that there have been a lot of critique of the word wholesome and kind of its use to maybe skirt around accountability and or deeper subjects kind of embedded within the game space.
+So is toxic positivity a concern when dealing with something like a term like wholesome?
+Yeah, I really think so.
+I think terms like wholesome have to be treated with a lot of respect as a creator and honestly as a marketer because it does risk losing a lot of like trust and goodwill with the kind of genre that comes with it.
+So especially with the audience, right, like they're usually expecting some sort of manner and some sort of values, I think, behind it.
+And I think kind of similar to how you can see an oil company that uses like, you know, like, oh, it's green and here's a leaf.
+and talk something offensive and really seeks to use the wholesome branding to I think skirt criticism and exploit an audience and I think it is really difficult though because as we've all talked about like we're not here to really define what wholesome is and wholesome is a more subjecting and like feelings-based term rather than something like racing or FPS where it has to be a very certain thing before you are like okay like yeah that's definitely a racing game So yeah, I think that's just something that we need to keep in mind when we talk about Wholesome, and kind of where I think a lot of critique comes from.
+Yeah, that question of what makes a game wholesome comes up again and again, and there are themes that emerge, and like I said, if you engage with the Wholesome Direct and stuff like that, you'll probably see some things, but I just think it devalues the conversation to think that there's going to be this algorithmic answer to what is a wholesome game.
+I just don't think that's coming, and even if it were, I don't know that I'm interested in it.
+it's I feel like coming to and You know, as a developer, I just do what I would want, which is like really simple and honest feedback.
+Sometimes you see a game that's great, it's not ready yet for a spotlight.
+And sometimes you see something that is just awesome, but it's not a good fit for our audience or what I think our audience is.
+of the game.
+I want to seize on a word that you used, which is audience.
+When we talk about the Wholesome Games community or the audience for Wholesome Games, who exactly are we talking about?
+Is that something you can go into a little more detail for us?
+Yeah.
+What's really cool is seeing just, first of all, the expanse and the increase of people who are showing an interest in this type of game, whether it's players, influencers, developers, publishers.
+It's been wonderful to see We see people across platforms like Twitch, Discord, YouTube, TikTok.
+I have a few numbers I'm just going to throw out to you all.
+When looking at TikTok you can see the hashtag CozyGames has over 753.4 million views current like as of two weeks ago.
+WholesomeGames hashtag has 195.1 million views and what's great is we see streamers and influencers taking on This as the genre of choice that they are completely dedicated to featuring these types of games and fostering a community with this sort of shared sense of value.
+What's also really exciting is that demographically, we've found that just looking at the types of streamers and creators and players who engage with these games represent a wider swath of demographics, typically not seen and thought of as traditional gamer.
+So if you look at like the top 50 creators on Twitch or YouTube, they are predominantly white and male presenting.
+But if you look at the top cozy and wholesome creators, they represent a wider variety of underrepresented groups, which is really cool.
+Yeah, for sure.
+And just to build off of Jenny's demographic data, I did want to caveat that I don't think the lack of participation in more violent games is not a direct product of gender or anything.
+It's not like, oh, boy, Shooting Game and I don't really want to like preach to the choir necessarily since I'm sure if you're listening to this you have like some sort of interest in wholesome games and all that kind of thing and you probably have some sort of open mind towards it but in general especially I think with the public and like outside of the Twitter sphere outside of like the social media bubble we can see a lot of misconceptions when it comes to what's cool or acceptable or real games that gamers play and I feel like we've had this discussion numerous times and things like the Financial Times wrote an article called why gamers are hugging animals rather than fragging enemies that talks about how wholesome games that avoid violence are rising in popularity and reaching new audiences and then gamesindustry.biz themselves wrote about how E3 2021 the 33% of games at E3 2021 and summer games fests were actually non-violent thanks to a lot of indies so good job indies yay Now thinking about those social media numbers and the views for Wholesome Games, the discussion around Wholesome Games, I have to ask, like, the numbers can be impressive, but people don't always vote with their wallets.
+Are Wholesome Games actually financially viable, or is this just a feel-good fad?
+Well, I think you're going to have to define success, right?
+Because everybody in this room knows Animal Crossing and Stardew, games that kind of changed the world and changed the industry in a lot of ways.
+But if we define success as less than a mega hit, which I don't know how many of us are expecting that kind of success, I'm ready.
+Yeah, definitely.
+And there are so many that aren't, I think, just farming sims.
+I think like a lot of us, when we talk about wholesome games, a lot of the times, like the first successful game we can think of is a farming sim, which is great.
+I personally love farming sims.
+But I do want to kind of highlight other games that aren't necessarily farming sims that have done really well, just to kind of give you a breadth of the genres that are successful within wholesome games.
+There's beer and breakfast, obviously, a short hike, Dorfromantik.
+And then, because I know we all love numbers and being read out numbers, I have a list of numbers I'm going to give you right now.
+All right.
+I know.
+Just prepare yourselves.
+It's going to blow you away.
+I tried to pitch that.
+OK.
+But first, we have Unpacking, an organizational puzzle game that sold 100K units in the first 10 days and within a year hit one million units sold worldwide.
+Very exciting.
+Second is Spiritfarer, a management game about dying.
+This also sort of has farming in it, I suppose, but it also has a lot of other things, so I'm adding this in.
+It came out in August 2020 and then they hit 1 million sales in December 2021.
+Coffee Talk, a visual novel, made 550k USD in gross revenue in less than a month following its release.
+We have Slime Rancher, a first-person sandbox game.
+This sold over 5 million units and has spawned an incredibly successful sequel, Slime Rancher 2, which I'm obsessed with.
+This sold over 100k copies in 24 hours in early access.
+And the last thing I will throw at you is The Wandering Village, which is a city-building sim, and this sold over 150k copies within one month in early access.
+So the entire point of me listing this off is to just be like, wow it sells amazing so there are numerous examples of commercial and critical success to be had in the game genre and still a lot of content and themes to be explored and the audience is honestly really hungry for it i am also really hungry for it i'm just saying if you want to make a really nice cooking game i'm lining up i'm right there yeah you've already got one sale it's Now a lot of the games that you mentioned were featured in Wholesome Direct.
+We're not here to plug that showcase, but is there anything you can tell me about the impact of these targeted showcases on Wholesome Games and their financial success?
+Yeah, definitely.
+I think what's really cool is that showcases just in general provide this ability for developers and publishers to kind of get a gauge of success and sort of start seeing what reception is like for their title in specific moments in time.
+And so, as Victoria said, moments like E3, Summer Game Fest, they are proving points for games to be able to get in front of those audiences.
+And what's interesting is a lot of the more traditional game shows have been catered towards the traditional quote, gamer.
+And so what's been exciting is just through showcases like the Wholesome Direct, as well as there's a Paper Mario showcase, a Mother Direct, a, you know, PS1 horror title showcase.
+There's so many that are cropping up that address specific hungers and needs and desires of audiences.
+And so to answer your question, the Wholesome Direct is a showcase that cropped up to meet the needs of a specific audience looking for a specific type of game and for context we've gotten over 3 million views excluding co-streamers and what's really exciting is there has been a dramatic wishlist increase for participating titles so in 2021 22% of games saw at least a 10K wishlist increase.
+And this was regardless of whether they had maybe a 15 second spot in like a sizzle reel or they had a larger feature.
+And so it was really exciting just from just us seeing the showcase and seeing the impact is it's not necessarily the duration, but it's just finding the audience that really resonates with what you want to show them.
+And that was really exciting.
+I'm They had, the mix is wonderful.
+The Nintendo Indie Directs do an incredible job of showcasing wholesome titles.
+Day of the Devs, which is also here, so you can check out some really great games there.
+So what's neat is seeing again, it's not just us doing it, but it's all of these showcases finding the right games and the right audience for it.
+I feel like we've answered a lot of technical questions.
+We've listed a lot of numbers.
+More numbers.
+We've talked about who's talking about wholesome games, who's playing wholesome games.
+Beyond that, why should we care?
+Like, money isn't... I'm sorry for saying this at GDC, but money isn't the only thing, right?
+I'm out.
+What?
+Bye.
+Sorry, Victoria's just finding this out for the first time.
+I'm revoking your badge.
+Why should we care?
+I mean, what I love personally is that we talked a little bit about how it's expanded the definition of what it even means to be in this industry as a player, as a developer.
+It's really exciting to see people more and more consider themselves as, I feel like it's a dirty word, but like, I play games or I'm a gamer.
+It's becoming more and more acceptable for more people.
+forgot to say this earlier, I did say one more number.
+I want to say one more.
+What's interesting is like with the wholesome director, we've seen about like 77% of our audience is identifies as women.
+And that's a little bit out of the norm, I would say for a lot of traditional again, showcases.
+And so it's really exciting to see just a more nuanced demographic of players, a new nuanced industry where more people are creating games and more stories are being told.
+And like unpacking boxes or guiding people into the afterlife.
+It's great.
+In addition to the more diverse player base, could you talk about the diversity of the developers?
+Yeah, so what's really interesting, I am the numbers person.
+Let's pull out the calculator.
+About half of the teams in the Wholesome Direct, we take surveys after the direct to just see how we're doing and what sort of the makeup is.
+Half of the teams in the direct included at least one BIPOC core developer, not including contractors or interns, 79% included at least one women core developer, and 37% included at least one non-binary developer.
+Did you, were you aware, like, when curating games for the Direct, were you aware that you were picking these diverse teams and their games for this, or was that a consideration coming into it?
+I think it came about naturally, kind of, due to the kinds of games that we curated, but also due to the specific rules that we have protecting a lot of marginalized individuals and banning hatred and bigotry from the Direct itself.
+And that care kind of follows through I think in the diversity of the developers who submit their game and were showcased in the direct.
+I know many of the games are quite vulnerable when it comes to wholesome games like a lot of it is tied to identity and that is really important and knowing kind of what you're getting into is a really important thing that you want.
+to even able to submit.
+And as someone who has seen a lot of showcases and been a part of them, sometimes you do actually just need to know someone in order to even be considered or to have your email read, which is sad, I will say.
+And you don't need a publisher or third party platform, like you don't need that one contact to somehow get to us or whatever.
+So whether you're just straight out of college, an established indie or AAA group, there is a chance to be featured in Wholesome Direct, which explains, I think, why a lot of underrepresented groups show up in our numbers.
+So money, network, and geography, especially, can be a huge gatekeeper.
+So I'm glad that there are other showcases as well who allow for this more free submission process, which is really nice.
+And again, this isn't an advertisement for our showcase.
+It's just something to consider, I think, as an industry of who we let in and who actually gets the opportunities to do these kinds of things.
+I want to switch gears a little bit, but I think this still falls under the umbrella of, why care about wholesome games?
+But a question I hear a lot about games as escapism in general, but especially with wholesome games, I think, is the world we live in is a violent and scary and dangerous place.
+With that in mind, are wholesome stories dishonest?
+Like, is this something that we need, or is it um deflecting or hiding from some of the darker realities of the world As a person whose day job is to promote a game about murder and gaslighting, I did want to say that there is a lot of positivity and reflection in wholesome games that we need in the world.
+I know the industry, and I do this 100% all the time, we talk about spite fueling us, which is valid, and I respect that.
+Honestly, I do think that it can make us run out of fumes quite quickly If we aren't also like caring and loving the art form and the developers that we work with So the wholesome games team has said this before but I'm stealing it.
+So that's not real smart, but Sometimes it's a radical act to make dark or upsetting art and sometimes it's radical to make hopeful art in times of adversity Met I wanted to creative limitations like that can force a lot of creativity right and it always goes back to that feeling first versus mechanic first kind of idea like if you're writing a song and you start with lyrics you're going to end up with a different song than if you start with chords or something so like it gets you to a different place um Ooblets is a really great example.
+I always love to use them because they start making a game that's really cute about farming these cute creatures and then the default verb that they kind of land on is we'll make it like Pokemon so these creatures are going to fight each other and then they find their audience and start like interacting with those people a little bit and everyone starts to realize all this doesn't make much sense like why would we want these cute creatures that we've literally plucked from the earth you know to fight each other that doesn't make much sense so then they go back to the drawing board they come back with dance battles where the Ooblets are like cutely battling against each other in a dance battle and see who has more hype from their moves and that got them something like infinitely more creative I think so like that's an example of the genre or at least kind of listening to your audience working for you and giving you something more unique that's better suited to your game Is that unique to wholesome games as a genre?
+some limitations are bad some like we don't want to be limited by you know our budget or whatever but i don't think it's a bad thing to say i want to evoke this feeling out of the player how do i get there like that's a different path to walk than saying what's a cool mechanic to play with so you're just going to end up with a different game and i think that can spur a lot of creativity What's kind of cool, we talk about this a lot because again, we just talk about this topic a lot.
+But what I really love about this, this sort of genre and designing for it is it does allow and encourage folks who are creating these games to find sort of almost the simple things in life and really expand upon them.
+So, so many of the games that were listed up on the slide earlier, they all took really mundane tasks or very slice of life, everyday activities and turn them into something magical and wondrous and needed to be captured in a full game and I think that's what's really cool about talk I will say, unfortunately, as moderator, I think one of my jobs is to, in the sake of being unbiased, dump a bucket of cold water on everyone when they talk about how cool and freeing it is to make wholesome games.
+So with that in mind, we're coming up on our question segment soon, but before that I wanted to I wanted to ask about the challenges of making wholesome games.
+You've said that they're financially viable, they give creative opportunities, there are people playing and talking about them.
+If everything's great, why isn't everyone doing it?
+I think drawing back on the kind of socialization point I made before, and I think I touched upon it a bit too, I do think one of the biggest challenges to wholesome games is the industry itself.
+Can we create diverse games and support developers and keep a diverse audience if other elements of the industry, like discrimination in work, funding, power, stay stacked against developers?
+Can we remove the stigma of cozy games not being as prestigious and still get key visibility in places like storefronts, third-party platforms, or showcases, especially when the people potentially making the decisions aren't the people who have maybe wholesome games like best interests at heart?
+Yeah, and just to hop on that, I think what's really interesting, I agree with all of that, a major struggle for a lot of wholesome games is they tend to be smaller, they tend to want to be bite-sized experiences, right?
+Unpacking is a game about unpacking rooms, but that's not going to be a 60-hour I mean, it could be.
+I wouldn't be mad.
+But generally, if you're designing a wholesome game, they tend to be smaller experiences in scope and funding request.
+And so finding a viable source of funding, a publisher who's willing to put that money in for an unproven concept can be really difficult.
+Often you'll see, perhaps if you're pitching it If a publisher doesn't understand, oh, I want to make a game about guiding spirits into the afterlife and giving them hugs, that's harder conceptually than I want to make another roguelike, which I love roguelikes, but it's not as tested, it's unproven.
+It's interesting because, like, you were talking earlier about finding these, like, small mundane things and, like, on the developer side I really like the idea of finding something smaller and, like, easier to scale than, like, a farming game that has a bajillion systems that I have to get working.
+From a funding standpoint, like, because you've looked for funding with your games and your developer, like, is it hard to find smaller funding?
+Because I would think that that would be easier and yet it doesn't seem that way.
+It's very strange.
+There is a weird, I feel like there's a weird gap between very small funds that would not sustain a studio, a development beyond, you know, just a hobby project almost.
+And the larger funds that need big teams, you know, a big office space, more multi-million.
+Like, um, for context, I also participate and I'm an advisor for Colin Knights, which is an indie game fund.
+And what I've noticed, not just with Kowloon or a lot of other publishers, they're looking for titles that commercially are a larger success than what some may anticipate from a bite-sized game.
+So half a million, million, five million plus.
+and a lot a lot And that's not really a point So I think a lot of the complications that come with trying to make a bigger game to add systems to a game that You already have planned out and you have a design doc for and you're like this is the game I want to make I don't want to owe you even more money and take right have you take more of the rev share of my game just so that I can hopefully hit like the the 2 million mark right and when they just want the 250k and Well, that idea of scope is really interesting, too, because if you are wanting to make a bite-sized game and that's sustainable for you, making the next Stardew Valley is probably not.
+As a producer, I'm saying, look at scope, cut it down.
+And so I think that's exactly it, where we don't, at least we collectively, I feel like, We don't want to push developers to create these larger games to compete on a scale that they don't necessarily want to.
+But how can we create space then for these bite-sized, really wonderful projects that should exist, but there just is not really a space for sometimes?
+If you could give one piece of advice to improve things, to help developers, to help our industry, what would that be?
+Um, just because again of my perspective, having been on both the developer side as well as the funding side, I think I would genuinely like to call out folks who have the power at places like funds, publishers, people who have the money to invest in these kind of experiences.
+This is a rhetorical question you don't have to answer out loud, but if you're in that role right now, what are you doing to meet the needs of an increasingly non-traditional audience?
+Like Victoria was saying, how are you creating spaces for this type of game to even happen?
+And just who is even in the room making these calls?
+Just who's helping these games be seen in the first place?
+And with that, I think we have some time for questions.
+If you would make your way to the microphone if you want to ask something, and we'll get it started.
+Hi guys, I'm Emily.
+I'm the founder of Sondring Studio.
+I make narrative games with heart with a focus on Asian American representation.
+I wanted to touch on something that you said earlier, Jenny, about how a game can be wholesome but deal with uncozy topics.
+That's kind of my next game.
+It's wholesome but can deal with uncozy topics like talk marketing campaign.
+that bittersweet that's so lovely where you have these very tender moments but mixed in with that are these really heart-wrenching experiences as well and these really tough concepts that you know we deal with in daily life and so I think being gentle but honest with your audience is really important and I think very appreciated especially in our experience when we communicate with our folks you know an audience on places like TikTok and Twitter one of my favorite words to describe wholesome games is uplifting because it implies that you're gonna deal with really tough topics But it's like your trailer even can show hey, we're gonna dive into this But we're going to say something about it and have you know some optimism about it I think spirit fear does such a great job with that.
+So that's the kind of the direction I would go in is focus on those like uplifting elements, but don't shy away from you know the struggles that you're talking about and Yeah, I'll do a quick jump in.
+Agreed, look into those things.
+One of the things I actually think you could explore is actually to see which horror games that use wholesome elements display their horror bits because you can draw a lot of inspiration from that and looking outside of the genre usually helps quite a bit to kind of inspire how you can present these kinds of things.
+Thank you.
+I actually never thought of that before.
+Thank you.
+Thank you for your question.
+Hello.
+I'm Meg from One More Multiverse.
+I have a question about marketing.
+So you have to convey a game at a glance.
+I'd recommend wholesome games almost always as a first entry point to gaming for people who may not identify as gamers.
+But how do you hit a more mainstream audience that may see these games as juvenile at first glance?
+What meaning does wholesome really carry to casual gamers?
+It's a good question.
+Like I remember James telling me about when we started wholesome games, like his core thing was like, I don't want the last of us to be the only thing that gets like critical acclaim and kind of considered like a real experience.
+And I do think even though we're kind of in this bubble, that's still a big part of the struggle.
+So I'm glad you brought it up because people still inherently think of a lot of these games as like Nintendo slash kid games.
+And that's a real like, you know, something to overcome.
+I don't have the perfect answer but certainly in our work we're trying to like reach those people more than ever and get those games and spaces where they're seen by more traditional players.
+Cool, thank you.
+Hi, my name is Sharif.
+I do a lot of work in citizen science games, games where players contribute to scientific research by solving puzzles.
+I'm curious if you would consider those wholesome games.
+We get a lot of educational game pitches, I would say, and it's interesting to find that balance because, you know, it's one of those things that's absolutely wholesome in a general sense, right?
+Does it fit the capital W wholesome games?
+I don't know.
+But that doesn't mean you can't market it that way, right?
+Like, if you think it's relevant to that audience, and frankly, if it's a relevant keyword to that audience, then you should use it.
+Thanks.
+Hello, my name is Ryan.
+I made a game called Blood and City.
+It's very pastel-y and cute.
+And the reason I bring this up is because something that I noticed with a lot of wholesome games, they're extremely...
+of I think so.
+I think it's one of those things again where it's not like we can necessarily define wholesome in itself, but I think of a lot of the ways in which I'll use Among Us, for example.
+Among Us is not supposed to be a cute game, it's not supposed to be wholesome, but a lot of fan art and a lot of creations, a lot of marketing that we get, they think it's really cute.
+We didn't expect it to be.
+So I think the aesthetics doesn't necessarily have to be uwu, pastel, whatever.
+And I'm sure there's examples of games like that, I just can't think of it off the top of my head, that do exist in that space.
+Yeah and when we're reviewing games for wholesome direct or something I care more about the theme than I do the style like success on social media that's a different thing but like my definition it absolutely includes it.
+Yeah I would definitely just agree with everything said and also the fact that like what's really interesting just as a tangent is this element of looking at coziness as elements within non-cozy spaces I think is really interesting and so like your example of a Junji Ito like comic which to One that always made me really happy was talking about the wholesome elements in Death Stranding, which is a game you wouldn't consider for that, but you're making deliveries that save people's lives, they're thanking you for it, there's this theme of connection.
+So I think it's very fruitful, even if you're not making a game that you think is 100% wholesome, to consider those elements.
+Thank you, great question.
+Hi, my name's Anna.
+Thank you for your talk.
+I was just wondering where you see the future of cozy games going.
+I know there's a cozy MMO in the works.
+I was just wondering if you see that kind of progression, like a cozy MOBA, or where you see it going, really.
+Cozy esports.
+I don't know.
+Here we go.
+Yeah, I don't know.
+I think right now all you can do is ride the wave and see where it's heading.
+But I definitely think and am actively concerned about giant companies attaching it to games that mechanically and thematically are not wholesome.
+That's why the aesthetics of it are the least of my concern.
+I'm sure it'll happen like you look at a game like in the aftermath of something like Animal Crossing so many things like implemented elements of that So I'm sure that'll happen I think everything kind of progresses at two different speeds and like the Indies are kind of the testbed for all this stuff So I think a little delayed you will see like big studios like you're describing attach it to all kinds of genres And hopefully there's really fruitful stuff from that experimentation I agree with that.
+I think also what's really interesting is gaming is such a young industry, and so when we, you know, back when we started making games I feel like a lot of the, there were some really prominent verbs that we were engaging with, and they were all very like kind of active maybe a bit more aggressive in a lot of ways and it's almost this pendulum swing where we've now said okay well what's almost the opposite we can do and I think what I what I would love to see is a continue almost a meet in the middle where people are experimenting with these genres with these verbs and finding ways to just make games that are more nuanced and a little bit more continue to reimagine what it's like to create and design games in general.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Hey, my name's Cooper.
+I'm a student journalist from OU, the University of Oklahoma.
+My question was just about kind of like how, so you guys talked about starting this Twitter account that started getting a huge following.
+I guess my question would be like, how did you, how and why did you start that?
+And then how did everyone just like join on after that popped off?
+Yeah it was, I mean I started it because I saw two main games, Maneco's Night Market and Ooblets were the two games that I saw and I was like it seems like there's a groundswell of like indie developers kind of getting the power to make the games they want to make and then they're making some really like experiences that resonated with me.
+So then you just start a Twitter account just to literally like catalog as many of those games as you can and I think it's a testament to the hunger that was there that people did start following it, right?
+Like I could have made that account and nobody cared but apparently people wanted more experiences like this and you wanted people if you were interested in this game you might not yet know about this game and all of a sudden that connection proved really valuable for people so That's something I would love to see happen with other genres.
+I just think curation is at the heart.
+We have so many indie games that people need to play, and as a result we need more and more curators to make sure the best ones get attention and find their niche.
+When you were tweeting about how much you like Pikmin, did you think it would lead to the GDC stage?
+No, absolutely not.
+Chibi-Robo, I never thought you'd get me here.
+Thank you for your question.
+Hi, my name's Ariana.
+I had a question about, like, we've talked about, like, marketing your game as a wholesome game, but I've had an experience where a game that I've worked on, one that was more about dealing with some tough topics like sex and bodies and objectification, had a review, a small review, and somebody described the game as very wholesome.
+I was very confused by that.
+So, like, I want to ask you, what can we, I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but I guess just to talk about what it means when somebody else, either positively or negatively, experiences your game and considers it wholesome or cozy or something like that, in ways that you may not have intended, and how do you work with that audience, talk with them and understand their perspectives and things like that.
+Yeah, it's a great question.
+I think ultimately with any art form, right, you put it in front of an audience and it's going to be up to them to interpret it however they want to.
+It's a great example of something where we control the capital W and not the lowercase w wholesome games.
+We're really keen on the idea that like these progressive themes are wholesome and we want to make sure those are included in the conversation.
+So in a way, it kind of makes me happy that your experience, your game was described that way.
+What do you guys think?
+Yeah, I think what's really difficult is if you intended for the game to be interpreted in a certain way.
+It can be difficult when others take it and make it their own.
+And so I think that's just an internal artist struggle.
+Just from a marketing perspective, I think if that is feedback that you're getting about your game and you want to reframe the way folks are thinking about it, I think team.
+convey what you're hoping to get across.
+So a very vague answer, but I hope it fits somewhat.
+It's so important to find the people that you want to speak to.
+So it's another example of marketing being like super important.
+Yeah, I will say one of the things is sometimes, especially with the interpretation of a game or art or whatever, people will interpret it however they want, no matter how much you try to push back against it sometimes, which is maybe unfortunate, maybe cool, depending on what you want from your game.
+So an example is, I know the Descenders folks, this is not a wholesome game, maybe it is, I don't know.
+The Descenders folks from No More Robots wanted their mountain biking game to be like, they wanted to talk all about the really specific things and how cool it was, and anything they tried, all people would talk about was go downhill fast.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Hello, thank you for the great panel.
+My name is Indrani.
+I'm the marketing and communications director at Pariah Interactive.
+We're an indie studio based out of Mumbai and Brooklyn.
+All that context because back in India where I'm from, TikTok is banned.
+And TikTok seems to be like the platform if you want to find, you know, critical and commercial success as an indie, especially working with like wholesome games.
+Do you have any recommendations specifically directed to marketing?
+to reach similar critical mass when you don't have access to the platform as a game dev as well as consumers.
+Yeah, this one is really difficult.
+It kind of ties into what I was talking about.
+Geography and network and money are huge factors on what games usually find success and things.
+And that's why we need less gates, I think, when it comes to these sorts of things.
+But even then, that's really difficult, right?
+We're all speaking in English right now.
+And I think for places that often can't access different talks.
+talk any other sort of like social media platform hopefully you can access and honestly working within your local community I found a lot of people have found a lot of success in that like really harnessing like you know what like this is my community this is like things I'm going to play really closely to that can have a lot of resonance especially for people overseas who like you know might come from India right they might be like oh my goodness this is amazing that sort of thing but I don't know if anyone else has No, I think that's pretty good.
+Yeah.
+Good luck.
+Thank you so much.
+Thank you.
+Hi, great talk.
+Thank you.
+My name is Celeste Bean, hardware engineer at PlayStation.
+You talked about the kind of commonality of wholesome games and maybe that there is no kind of core thing that is wholesome.
+When I think about them for myself, I think of games that lack a time pressure, you know, where I'm not like, oh God, if I don't do something, someone's going to shoot at me.
+Like, oh God, I can like build my flowers at my own pace.
+Would you say, or do you have any counter examples to that where there is kind of this mechanic or lack of mechanic where you have to do something with a time pressure?
+I think, well, this is not the entire point of Little Gator Game, but there are time challenges, I would say.
+I think there are a lot of games with time challenges.
+Yeah, I feel like the time challenge itself isn't as much of a big deal as the high stakes of, if you don't do this, it's game over right now.
+So, yeah, nothing springs to mind for me immediately, but I feel like that's not an unwholesome thing on its own as long as the stakes are low.
+Yeah, I would agree with that.
+I think what is interesting is the context in which these mechanics are happening.
+If you feel like you have the opportunity to try again, if you know that there's no punishment for failing that first time around and you can go back and retry the race or whatever you're doing, that's really important.
+Yeah, there's a really, it's maybe like a decade old at this point, but there was a really interesting paper written by Tanya Short and a bunch of folks about designing for coziness and kindness, I think was the title, just coziness.
+And it discusses and dives into the ways in which mechanically I'm maybe in experimenting with things or going deeper into themes that are hard.
+I think Celeste is a really great, I personally find Celeste very wholesome because it's a difficult game, it's really hard, but the way that accessibility allows you to toggle on and off the different scaffolds, it allowed me as a player to feel like I could try and practice and get better each time and gradually add or remove scaffolds as I needed and it felt very wholesome.
+for me, personally.
+And I would add, too, that it's not all or nothing in the same way that we talk about how dark games or horror games can have wholesome elements.
+You can certainly have wholesome games that have elements that are stressful or anything like that, like cooking games, for instance, always have a lot of time or usually have a lot of time pressure.
+But yeah, great question.
+Great question.
+Thanks so much.
+Hello there.
+Hi, I'm Kendrick.
+I'm a producer with quite a few different drafts for Wholesome Games, including a Coded King game.
+So this is kind of a follow-up question.
+In your perspectives, is there a line in the sand where there's too many horror or dramatic moments to the story that really turns away the target demographic?
+It's a great question.
+I mean, I think in some instances you might need like a trigger warning, right?
+Like if you create a game that's really dark in some way, that might not appeal to the majority of Wholesome Games players, but I don't think there's this clear line so long as it is uplifting, so long as you have something to say about those difficult topics as opposed to just kind of wallowing in them.
+I don't think there's necessarily a line in the sand.
+It is about context, at least for me as a player.
+If I'm informed and I know ahead of time what I'm getting into, I can mentally prep for that, right?
+So I could have a game with maybe, I don't know, one scary moment, and if I don't know, that will completely change my experience as a player versus if I know something is coming up.
+That's a great point.
+Thank you.
+Okay, thank you.
+Yes, please.
+Hello, my name is Darren Kearney.
+I make games in my spare time.
+I came over from Ireland and thank you very much.
+It's been really nice to hear the panel here.
+Earlier on when you were talking about why we should care about wholesome games, and there was talk about the composition of teams being more diverse and wanting to kind of change the industry to be better and that's something that really hit home with me.
+and has been a part of the approach that I've taken as an indie game developer.
+Like, why am I doing this my way?
+Because I don't like the way the industry is just kind of this tire fire mess and I want to do it my way.
+So one of the questions I'd like to ask is, there's lots of these tensions when you're making a computer game and deciding what you want to make deciding like what you can make and with the team that you work with and so those are tensions that are common to every game but there's this additional thing with wholesome games I think where you're also trying to do it with maybe a principled approach.
+And I was wondering because we'll all come across periods of time when we're making a game where we're kind of under a lot of pressure.
+What?
+Yeah, I know, right?
+That was a surprise for me somehow.
+But I had a kind of rough time when we gave ourselves this kind of arbitrary deadline where we wanted to release our game and we kind of got into this crunchy thing because we're all very passionate about what we do.
+So I was wondering if you have advice for people who are making wholesome games, who are passionate about what they do, but don't want to let that passion turn into crunch.
+Yeah.
+I mean, that's another question that I feel like is inherent to all art forms.
+Like if you become really, really passionate about something and we have a lot of examples and I think a lot of them are really unhealthy examples of great artists throwing themselves at something to you know create something bigger than themselves and I think that I don't know I imagine you apply the same techniques you would apply to any crunch but you have to be a lot more stern with yourself when you're working on something that is a passion project something that you feel is important I would just remind you that you're not the only person on that you know side of the world you know there are other people trying their best to make important things and make things that can make our industry a better place so it doesn't all fall on your shoulders.
+And with that, that's our time for today, sadly.
+Thank you very much.
+We will be in the wrap up room.
+Yeah, we'll be in the wrap up room.
+Before we go, I just want to say really quick, a big thank you to our other panelists who couldn't be here as may.
+Thank you to our Wholesome Games moderators who make our lives much easier.
+That's Jacob, Julia, Celine, Vex, Mai, Crystal, Angela and Toma.
+Thank you so much to the AV and tech folks here, all of the CAs and GDC people who've been helping us out throughout the week, our advisor.
+Helen and Violet, our interpreters, James and Jenny.
+And just a reminder to please rank this session.
+Not only does that feedback help us improve, it lets GDC know that people are interested in things like this.
+And with that, thank you so much.
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+How many of you here have personally witnessed a total eclipse of the sun?
+To stand one day in the shadow of the moon is one of my humble goals in life.
+The closest I ever came was years ago, the last time the path of the eclipse had crossed the continental United States.
+Of course, I form no memory of this event as I crawled around in the grass with my pacifier and my sippy cup.
+How could I have?
+I was only 22 years old at the time.
+But fortunately, history has a way of repeating itself.
+And if you are patient and put yourself in the right place at the right time, you may just get a chance to do it all over again.
+In June of last year, I released a game called The Looker.
+It was a direct parody of 2016's The Witness.
+The Looker was well-received, and it garnered the attention of hundreds of thousands of players who have given it over 97% overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
+Like its inspiration, it's a first-person puzzle-solving game set on an enigmatic island full of mystery.
+But unlike its inspiration, it is chock-full of novelty puzzles, on-the-nose intertextual references, and tastefully constructed wiener jokes.
+As I released the game, I wondered idly why video game parodies were typically so rare.
+Little did I know, all of this had happened before.
+In 1996, developer Parity Interactive released a point-and-click parody of Myst, the famous contemplative puzzle game that was itself a direct inspiration for The Witness.
+The game was called Pissed.
+Pissed was a proper, full-blown parody, with all the big-budget bells and whistles, and incorporating a decent amount of full-motion video.
+Remember full-motion video?
+The development studio boasted an experienced team of writers and actors, all under the auspices of the Grammy Award-nominated parodist and comedian Peter Bergman.
+The parody is a slippery slope down which many a fine mind has slid to its doom.
+The clip I am about to show you is from that game.
+If you value your peace of mind, cover your ears now.
+Yes, I am the king of the game, and I have many secrets.
+Wee!
+Wee!
+Wee!
+Are you still here?
+Can't you see that I'm brushing my kiddies?
+A man, no, no, a king needs his privacy.
+Therefore, we, I mean, I declare myself private.
+No, private!
+Your eyes do not deceive you.
+This is John Goodman.
+Needless to say, Pissed has enjoyed a very mixed reception in the sense that some reviews are negative while other reviews are devastating.
+PC Gamer calls it, quote, as funny as a wire pipe cleaner up the penis tube, end quote.
+How can such a promising project leave behind such a disappointing legacy in a world where The Looker, a game with no budget and little experience, receives the highest honor that Metacritic's users have to offer?
+A 7.7 out of 10.
+The problem with Pissed wasn't lack of budget, it wasn't lack of experience, and as any big Lebowski fan can tell you, it wasn't lack of talent either.
+The problems of Pissed, along with a lot of other recent comedy games, are actually very concrete and mostly structural.
+As such, I will do my best to tell you what I've learned about comedy and parody through the process of developing The Looker and highlight some of the core appeals and fundamental pitfalls that determine whether parody resonates with players or ultimately falls flat.
+To begin with, parody is a form of scripted humor that delivers content for the player to engage with.
+This is to say its content comes from a definite authorial voice and not from emergent gameplay.
+A game with emergent humor like QWOP is funny, but what emerges from the gameplay mechanics generally cannot serve as parody because it doesn't have any plausible authorial intent.
+parody, and its evil twin satire, both primarily function by subverting expectations in one way or another.
+There are two ways of doing this, exaggeration and inversion.
+Exaggeration involves taking a distinctive element of the source material and exaggerating it to comical proportions.
+Inversion, on the other hand, involves taking a distinctive element of the source material and switching it out for its opposite.
+Between these forms of subverting expectations, exaggeration tends to seem more critical than inversion.
+After all, isn't it bad if something is ridiculous when it's missing?
+And isn't it, sorry, isn't it bad if it's ridiculous when it's taken to its logical conclusion?
+And isn't it good if it's ridiculous when it's missing?
+Looking at parity this way can provide a pretty decent heuristic for understanding what might be critical and what might be flattering You can even use this lens to very neatly categorize satire as a special case of parody in which expectations are consistently exaggerated rather than inverted.
+But this breakdown is a little too neat, and it's not very reliable.
+Ultimately, I think the real difference between parody and satire is its function, its objective, which is a lot harder to nail down, and it can seem very different to different people.
+In my view, satire is the use of humor for the sake of commentary, whereas parody is commentary for the sake of humor.
+When I released The Looker, the most surprising thing about its reception, other than the fact that there was one, was that people's enjoyment of The Looker seemed to be independent of whether or not they liked The Witness.
+I found this confusing.
+Why would the witness's critics show up for a rousing tribute to something that they didn't like?
+Or, on the other hand, why would its admirers show up for a blistering, biting satire of something that they hold so dear?
+The answer I found was this, that the central appeal of parody is not the endorsement of a positive or a negative view of the source material, but rather the feeling of validation that the player gets from realizing that they were not alone in seeing it.
+That for better or worse, somebody else saw what they saw too.
+And when I would see a Twitch streamer laugh at a joke in the Looker, they would often throw back their head and say, that's so true.
+Most of the really impactful moments in the game tend to come from these references to under-noticed or under-discussed characteristics in the source material.
+These moments offer the player a chance to relive that experience and to relieve some of the tension that they've been carrying around for so long.
+These moments actually wouldn't even necessarily get the kinds of big, bodacious belly laughs that some of the more absurd jokes might get, but making people laugh isn't the only thing that parody is good for.
+As Norm Macdonald put it, it's one thing to make people laugh, it's another to make people smile.
+If you look carefully at The Looker, you will find that the majority of the humor comes from one specific type of expectation subversion, bathos, the sudden juxtaposition of the lofty and profound with the commonplace and completely pointless.
+This is what made The Witness such a good subject for parody.
+The Witness is a very reserved and contemplative game.
+Every time you solve a puzzle or learn something about what it has to say, the game draws you further into a state of unresolved reflection, encouraging you to think ever more deeply about what its themes and its design imply.
+Most of the conversation around The Witness also uses this tone, which is only served to ratchet up the tension even further.
+Popular online video essays about it have tense and enigmatic titles like The Unbearable Now and A great game that you shouldn't play.
+To me, The Witness and its surrounding discourse was like the first half of a roller coaster.
+Even the title of The Witness has several interpretations, each of which intimates a piece of its deeper meaning.
+The title of The Looker, on the other hand, barely even has one interpretation.
+And it is so indecently literal that you must avert your eyes in the dread of awe.
+This sense of bathos is the main engine of humor throughout the looker, and it wouldn't work if the witness weren't so distinctive.
+People like the witness because it brings them to such singular heights, and people like the looker because it drops them so pointlessly to such depths.
+Consider the following quotation for a moment.
+The journey is more important than the destination, but without a destination, there can be no journey.
+These words may have been written hundreds of years ago by William Shakespeare, but I found that the same is true of parody.
+When creating a parody, it is poisonous to treat humor as the goal in and of itself.
+This is a major misconception that will completely sink a parody, because humor is not the goal.
+The goal is to relate to the audience over the source material, and humor is what naturally arises from that process.
+This confusion is kind of like an is a versus has a confusion in software engineering.
+Developers go amiss by thinking that parody is a form of humor that has references to the source material.
+This is backwards.
+Really, parody is a creative take on the source material that has jokes in it.
+For example, you should never think the evil thought to yourself, I've come up with a joke.
+How can I slot in references to the original game or genre?
+A much better thought would be something like, I noticed something interesting about the original game or genre.
+I'll bet other people did too.
+How can I represent that in a funny way?
+Another major confusion that developers run into when trying to make a good parody is leaning on the shallow trappings of parodies that have gone before.
+I'm trying to imitate them.
+This is probably best illustrated at the end of Pissed.
+Pissed ends with a big theatrical musical number called I'm Pissed.
+The lyrics contain a few shallow references to Missed, but it's mostly just John Goodman listing off the reasons why he's pissed.
+Dead-end jobs, consumerism, his girlfriend smashing his hoochie-coochie lamp, etc.
+You start to figure out pretty quickly that the point is not to parallel Myst, but to follow in the footsteps of broad, burlesque, vaudevillian parodies or farces with over-the-top blowout musical numbers at the end, like Blazing Saddles or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
+Pist's creator, Peter Bergman, had his roots in the theatrical comedy world.
+And obviously he had a firm handle on what parody meant there.
+But as a result, the game ended up seeming a lot more steeped in show business than in gaming.
+And this did not seem to resonate with players.
+It seems to be a common complaint with Pist.
+PC Gamer writes, it's not actually a game.
+It's simply a series of rendered slides in sequence.
+The director, Quentin Tarantino, has said that when you are trying to present a new twist on something familiar, whether it's a stock character or a movie genre, it's still necessary to, quote, deliver the goods that fans of the original text or genre enjoy and expect.
+When I mentioned this to my older sister, she rolled her eyes New Yorkily and told me that all film students have already heard this a million times.
+But it bears repeating one more time, because the same applies to games.
+In keeping with this rule, The Looker needed to succeed not only as a funny comedy game, but also as an interesting puzzle game in its own right.
+During development, I never stopped looking for gameplay ideas that I thought were interesting given the design constraints.
+Since the core appeal of The Witness was the creative reframing of its puzzle mechanics, it was important for The Looker to reframe its own puzzle mechanics in as many ways as possible.
+It had to tell its jokes through the gameplay itself and not just through animations or novelty multimedia assets or cutscenes.
+As I mentioned earlier, the main tool of parody is the subversion of expectations.
+This is something that is easy to do once, but it's very difficult to do over and over again.
+For a joke to land, there has to be a sense of contrast.
+Let me tell you a story.
+One time, when I was very small, my older sister and I were watching a movie.
+It was a kids movie, so the main character got out of quite a few scrapes by tickling his assailant until he was incapacitated.
+This went on until he came across a hired bodyguard who was completely unfazed by the tickling.
+I turned to my sister and asked why he wasn't laughing.
+She paused the movie and explained to me that bodyguards, secret service, and all other manner of security professionals all had to undergo a secret training exercise.
+They take them into a room and tickle them, and they laugh.
+This is what you do when you put a bunch of jokes all in a row.
+The player shouldn't see the punchline coming a mile away.
+Ideally, they shouldn't even see that a punchline is coming a mile away.
+If a player can be sure that a joke will come, it will have a lot less impact when it does.
+So you have to remain unpredictable and break up the flow in order to bring the player's expectations closer back to baseline.
+Recent comedy games have been falling short in this regard due to some overly simplistic assumptions.
+On one hand, I've seen a lot of forum posts and advice from experienced game developers telling new developers that comedy games should be wacky, the graphics should be cartoony, and the gameplay should be fun and frivolous.
+On the other hand, there's also a counterculture of games that employ poorly drawn or out-of-place elements to play up the shitpost factor.
+But funny or intentionally low effort content still requires contrast to be effective.
+Quote, where this is not kept in mind, there is no true humor, but only an infernal clamor and ranting.
+Sir Francis Bacon.
+The looker has been called a shit post, but it can only get away with having janky elements by supporting them structurally with other elements that provide a sense of contrast.
+For example, The Witness has very elegant and forgiving-feeling puzzle screens with a pleasing, minimalistic visual design.
+The Looker inverts this by having drastically inelegant, bare-bones, scribbling-around-on-Microsoft-paint-looking puzzle screens.
+And instead of having an original, abstract puzzle design, they are all mazes that follow the same gameplay rules as a Chili's Kids Menu or a Field of Corn.
+However, these crummy-looking puzzle screens are couched within a world that is relatively high fidelity and does actually somewhat resemble The Witness.
+This helps to remind the player of some of the original game's gravitas and reset some of the player's expectations closer to baseline.
+If The Looker hadn't included some high-effort content to offset the low-effort nonsense, it would have gone stale like a bad stick of gum and fallen dead, slain by the tireless armies of goofiness.
+There's also a major general principle that I need to mention, not because it's unique to parody, it isn't, but because it is extremely tempting in a work of parody to violate this principle by accident.
+You should always respect the player's time under all circumstances, and maintain a decent payoffs per minute average, whether those payoffs come in the form of jokes, genuine challenges, or just chill exploration and reflection time.
+It's easy to violate this principle by trying to make a certain point or strike a certain tone, like one of exasperation.
+For example, in The Witness, there are several laser cubes.
+When one is activated, it turns on, orients its laser toward the target, and then turns it on.
+It does all of this really, really slowly.
+I hadn't heard anyone talk about this before, so I decided to put a laser cube of my own in the looker.
+You may notice a couple of extra steps.
+Obviously the Looker exaggerates the slowness of the laser, but instead of subjecting the player to a full minute and a half of uneventful animation to make its point, the Looker still finds a way to hold the player's interest by presenting several gratuitous steps in the activation process.
+So it still is actually delivering payoffs and respecting the player's time, even when it's pretending to waste it.
+It is important to keep player motivation in mind, too.
+Parodies are based on scripted content, and if players like your game, they won't want to miss anything.
+Fear of missing out and completionism can become major factors.
+Soren Johnson famously observed that, given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
+Some of you may be tempted to roll your eyes San Francisco-ly and tell me that every game designer has already heard this a million times.
+But it's completely true and not completely obvious that this observation still applies when the object of the game is to take in all of the interesting content that the game has to show you.
+If players are led to believe that they might find morsels of good content by hunting around everywhere, their trust that you know what you're doing will lead them to waste a ton of unfun time hunting for it.
+And it's not their fault for wasting their time.
+It's the designer's fault for teaching them to.
+In parity, your license to subvert expectations is very far-reaching, and it will become tempting to subvert some expectations that are actually load-bearing and indispensable to the game's structural integrity.
+The most important set of expectations that is typically not suitable for subversion is the input-output grammar of the game.
+In order to maintain clear input expectations from the player, their action space should always be clear.
+while developing The Looker, I thought about making certain objects in the world secretly interactable by clicking on them in an homage to older point and click type games.
+This would have subverted the expectation that only puzzle screens are interactable.
+It might even have made for a funny joke.
+However, It would have accounted for very little payoff relative to the immense structural damage it would have caused the game, making the player suspect that it might be useful to spend time hunting for more interactable objects.
+The player's FOMO will compel them to interrogate literally every object for a good payoff.
+The same goes for an idea like including a false wall with an Easter egg behind it.
+The player will instantly start to slam into every wall in the game, scrabbling around in the dirt for one last desperate scrap of content.
+It's also important to uphold certain output expectations from the player.
+If the player does something that they're supposed to do, they will expect something to happen in order to tell them that it's time to move on to the next thing.
+If this is not communicated, they will feel like they're missing something, and they will waste time looking around before supposing that it is time to move on.
+The looker never tries to subvert this output expectation, but unfortunately, it did still manage to break this rule.
+After finishing all the puzzle pages in a particular book in the labyrinth, an achievement pops up and the player is now supposed to be armed with the knowledge that they need to finish a similar puzzle elsewhere in the game.
+Because the purpose of this book is to teach the player a puzzle rule through trial and error, when it's completed, it just starts over again from the beginning, in case the player wants to test their conclusion further.
+But this also deprives the player of the feedback that they've come to expect from the game.
+so they persist in trying to look for more clues.
+Sometimes they solve the first few puzzle pages again to see if something's changed, but eventually they give up and move on, feeling unsatisfied.
+Hopefully, by now I have demonstrated that parity relies on structural elements to support its fundamental appeal.
+Good parody makes use of humor that grows organically from a central relationship with the source material.
+It does not start with humor and then attempt to justify it with references from the source material.
+Good parody is a creative twist on a worker genre that still has to, as Tarantino put it, deliver the goods that fans show up for in the first place and make good on its core promises.
+Good parody remains unpredictable and takes the time and effort needed to regrow the game's sense of tension and contrast before harvesting it for a joke.
+And good parody respects the player's time.
+It is careful not to, in a fit of giddy exuberance, damage the input-output grammar of the gameplay.
+And it is careful not to hide content in such a way that players will feel compelled to waste time looking for more.
+For those of you who may want to make a parody yourselves, I have one more piece of advice.
+Parody something that you have strong feelings about, and make a game that you would love to play.
+Make yourself laugh.
+Don't appeal to the multitudes by jumping on a hot trend, but appeal to someone who is just as interested in the source material as you are.
+If the stupid joke that you spent 10 months on lands with them, then all of it was worth it.
+One more thing before I go.
+In April of 2024, there will be a total eclipse of the sun visible over the continental United States.
+At that time, I will make the journey to its path in order to see nature's greatest work of parody.
+Our moon will perform the ultimate subversion of human expectations, the ultimate act of inversion, as the shining disk of our only sun becomes the darkest spot in the sky.
+It is safe to look directly at the sun in that moment of totality, and at the same time to wander hopelessly at the dark side of the moon.
+Maybe for the first time, you can be sure that everyone around you is seeing what you're seeing.
+That you are not alone, as you, awestruck, cast your clear eyes heavenward toward the world's most magnificent pair of balls.
+I have, do I have time for Q&A?
+Okay, we have a little bit of time for Q&A.
+Here?
+Okay.
+So I just wanted to say, I've been telling my co-workers that my office has heard the shipboat joke like at least five times, because since I heard it, I knew that was the best joke I ever heard.
+I was about to read it here, but I'm going to spare you from that.
+So I wanted to ask, how did that particular joke come to be?
+Because the setup is so good.
+The punchline is so good.
+I love that joke so much.
+Without spoiling it, which joke was it again?
+The one that starts talking about the ship owner.
+Oh my god, oh yeah.
+So that's what I'm talking about with like under-noticed or under-appreciated parts of the source material.
+That was a particularly distinctive audio message from the witness that really stuck in my mind for a long time.
+So it was kind of natural that it would come out in the looker just in some form.
+So I found like a hook where it started going on for a while and I kind of like lost the train of thought with my metaphor.
+So the way that you would approach like turning your observation into a joke like that is what's the central thing that's like distinctive about what I found so interesting about the source material which was like this ship owner parable and I thought like what's the dumb version of that parable that I can tell for a joke so that's kind of what my thinking was.
+Thanks.
+Hi, is this on?
+One of my favorite jokes in The Looker is the first person shooter reference.
+I think it comes out of nowhere and always makes me laugh.
+And my favorite part of The Witness was also the first person shooter section.
+I wanted to know how far can you go pulling in joke mechanics from other games before you get too far off of the source material, if that makes sense.
+So that was actually not really meant to be apart from the source material.
+There's another part that is similar that was that I'll touch on.
+But the actual motivation for that was Jonathan Blow mentioned that a lot of players, this was feedback he didn't expect from players, they kept expecting like a jump scare.
+Like they kept expecting this like silent island with nothing going on to like suddenly there was going to be a jump or a monster or like something like there was an eerie feeling on the island.
+So I tried to just like satisfy that with like a ghost comes out of nowhere, like all that stuff.
+So that was actually the motivation behind that joke.
+There's another part earlier on which was, it was kind of just a reference to, I'm talking about like the pickup boxes.
+That was kind of just a joke of like, what's the opposite of a puzzle game?
+It's like a boomer shooter where you're like picking up like weapons and ammo.
+You never use it for anything but like you got it and it's floating there and you're ready.
+Thank you.
+Two more questions.
+Hi.
+Amazing talk.
+It's finally great to find someone who likes dick jokes almost as much as I do.
+Thank you.
+I wanted to ask, just how much did you study The Witness?
+Because clearly there is just so many references.
+What is your hourly play time?
+I'm so curious.
+a lot just having it percolate in my mind a while that it was very natural for me to make these references and to try and like express some of these observations that I wasn't necessarily seeing observed elsewhere.
+Like it wasn't really part of the conversation but it was like an elephant in the room in my mind at least.
+Yeah, there were some particular parts, especially the art style, where I had to do a lot of side-by-side comparison and really try and nail that in order to get the contrast between we're in the witness, but also things are going in a very non-witness direction.
+So yeah, I had to do all kinds of stuff of just tabbing into the witness and then tabbing into the unity editor.
+Hi.
+I was wondering, based on your portfolio, which I just Googled, most of your work is pretty, like, your previous work is pretty straight-laced and, like, serious from what I could tell.
+So I was wondering what kind of pushed you to jump into the comedic cesspool?
+Great question.
+It's a very comfortable cesspool.
+what inspired me to do that was actually I was making like a GDC.
+I've seen like all these people who are presenting their five years, seven years, I put my whole self into that game.
+Like this is the ultimate game and I'm going to start it right off the bat.
+And sometimes that works and sometimes you realize that level design takes a really long time and you start to run into some realities of how much bandwidth you actually have as a human.
+That's what happened with me.
+I was working on Skyrim and Dishonored, and it's going to be all these things in one, and then I'm going to put Mass Effect on it.
+And you can turn back time with Braid.
+It was going to be all those things.
+And then I was like, I kind of got some of the mechanics working, and then I was like, oh, I have to do level design?
+I have to do audio design?
+I have to make a game?
+So it got ridiculous, and I started thinking of other ideas, like, what's the dumbest idea I can think of?
+It's like, well, the answer is the Looker.
+That was the dumbest idea I could think of.
+So I kind of, like, had these ideas that, like, a few things made me laugh.
+And then they just, like, started accumulating in my mind until I was like, oh, I think I should make a prototype of this.
+And then I got to kind of, like, cheat on my main project with this, like, other project that was more fun and interesting.
+It ended up holding my attention a lot better.
+Thank you.
+Alright, I think that's all the questions we have.
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+Two years ago, the Fortnite Quest team was in crisis.
+We knew Quests in Battle Royale had a very direct impact on player engagement.
+When you've finished your quests, there's a feeling that you're done with the season.
+Checked the boxes, wrapped it up, what game's next?
+Even if players were still enjoying the game, finishing their quests was a natural jumping off point.
+But despite being, oh, let me show you my slides too.
+But despite being one of the larger design teams on Fortnite, we couldn't create enough quests to keep all our players busy for the whole season.
+We were relying too much on cheap-to-produce quests like get five shotgun kills.
+We didn't have time to reframe the system or to make better quests within the system, and we certainly didn't have time to make more quests than we were currently making.
+My boss asked me to solve this crisis.
+My name is Eric Carter, and I'm a Principal Technical Designer at Epic.
+Though I have a background in computer science, I spend all of my time structuring content and using Unreal's designer-facing tools to help Fortnite's design team work faster and better.
+Prior to working at Epic, I was a tools and source control product owner at Bungie.
+So I have experience designing and leading tools teams, but I'm not a tools engineer.
+I'm a game designer, and I use that context and expertise to help game design teams succeed.
+As a game designer, the first thing I did when I joined the quest team was to start building quests.
+If you remember the Naruto quests from chapter two, season seven, that was me.
+I made those and I'm infinitely proud of being able to contribute to the legend of one of the coolest ninjas ever.
+I watched a lot of Naruto to capture the right themes and tone.
+I read brand documents and poured over partner guidance and IP rules.
+Viz Media is very particular about how Naruto characters are depicted.
+I also absorbed a lot of wisdom and nomenclature from other designers about how quests work in Fortnite.
+And I worked within the design processes that Epic uses to keep our designs consistent with the rest of the game.
+But I didn't write a single line of C++.
+I tell you all of that just to make it clear that I'm not a programmer in disguise.
+I live and work as a designer.
+A rather technical one, but a designer nonetheless.
+And my design content creation experience is the crux of how we solved our crisis.
+As someone who was working in the middle of it, the crisis had a few very obvious causes, but one large cause stood out.
+Making quests was fucking hard.
+Very few people had the knowledge to do it at all.
+There were hundreds of ways to break a quest and only one way to do it right.
+The iteration loop from a completed idea to a quest asset to testing was literally days long.
+And our workflow led to overlapping work, loss changes, and tons of unnecessary production and testing overhead.
+I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but despite being the company that makes the most sophisticated game engine in the world, we were making our quests in a very impressive set of visual basic scripts running in Microsoft Excel.
+This is it, actually.
+This is actually the version of the spreadsheet that outputted the Nerudo quests.
+This GIF won't loop while I'm talking.
+This is just me tabbing through all of the required subsheets.
+There wasn't any error checking here.
+You just had to know what to put into each field and not make any typos.
+Our quest team grew out of our systems design team.
+And system designers really like Excel.
+And so at some point, the spreadsheets they were using just evolved into this whole quest editor thing.
+And the result still hurts me to think about a little bit.
+The sheet is pretty complicated because quests are, by their nature, pretty complicated.
+After five years of dailies, weeklies, seasonal narrative quests, event quests, web quests, MTX quest bundles, and Twitch quests, there's just a whole lot of configurations that are available.
+This spreadsheet exported all of these configuration options to an asset that Unreal Engine could use.
+And the length and complexity of that asset can give you a sense of why this is irreducible complexity.
+This is the configuration for just one quest in Chapter 2, Season 7.
+Only one person on the team, the marvelously knowledgeable embedded tester, Hunter Kent, knew what all of these did.
+I'm deeply in his debt for his help explaining all of this nonsense.
+It's important to point out four dangers in all of these quest features.
+First, in some configurations, there are many features that are irrelevant.
+For example, daily quests are granted by the lobby.
+So the field that specifies what NPC grants the quest has no effect regardless of its value.
+Second, some values like the server backend name are auto-generated and had to match a specific schema and should never be tweaked by designers.
+But they still needed to be stored in the same asset file the designers were working in.
+Third, some of these options were incompatible.
+A daily quest can't be in a quest bundle.
+A quest can't have both a reward array and a post-match reward box.
+And finally, in some configurations, there may only be one correct answer among several choices.
+Weekly quests must have a gameplay tag specifying their week number.
+A transient quest that gets handed out must also be marked as repeatable.
+Now, I've just given you a pretty conventional argument for a situation where a design or art team needs a bespoke tool for editing a specific type of content.
+I'm sure many of you are familiar with this kind of proposal being placed on a tools team's roadmap and the very long wait for that tools team's availability.
+Believe it or not, Tools team availability at Epic is just as rare as at your studio.
+This is an aspect of the crisis that I needed to solve.
+With the help of only two already overbooked Quest engineers.
+So how's a single tech designer going to solve a tooling problem like this?
+Remember how I told you earlier, that my design content creation experience was the crux of the solution to this crisis?
+The first important takeaway I want you to get from my talk is that doing hands-on game design work actually gives a game designer a few advantages over a conventional tools team when it comes to optimizing workflows.
+In my case, I knew the ins and outs of our quest tooling problem firsthand because I lived it for four months.
+I didn't need to do any user studies.
+I didn't need to collect feature wishlists or shadow content creators.
+These problems were just my daily life and the daily lives of my neighbors.
+The usual techniques that tools teams would use to collect requirements for a new quest editor were unnecessary.
+If you're a member of a tools team at a game studio, I'm sure you've had the experience of listening to a designer rattle through a long list of pain points in a familiar tool, or been emailed pages of modification requests.
+Communication over these points is very difficult.
+It takes a lot of thought to prioritize and flesh out each desire from a designer's brain into a programmer's brain and figure out how and when to make that a reality.
+Being able to skip this usually important step in tool development is the first advantage I had over a tools team.
+Even after that requirements communication was finished, design teams are constantly evolving their vision of the game and iterating on the intent behind the content they're creating.
+there will always be a lag communicating this evolving intent to a tools team.
+And deciding how to match tools maintenance work to this evolution is one of the hardest problems in software development.
+As a game designer, being completely tapped into the evolving context of where our game is headed is my second advantage over a tools team.
+There is also an inescapable difference in how content creators are tasked and how a tools team is tasked.
+Tools teams, by their nature, move slowly because they require approval, scheduling, and strong justification for their direction.
+In every studio, there are many competing desires for tools work.
+coming from every discipline.
+I've even seen tools requests coming from other tools engineers.
+The production process for this represents a very significant overhead.
+And no matter how many Agile trainings I do, I've not found a way to make that overhead go away.
+But the expectation for content creators is that by the time the game ships, they will produce a certain amount of content.
+Whether it's a hundred quests a season, five new skins each milestone, two levels a month, there's no oversight, approval, or objection when a content creator spends one hour working on something that will save them two hours creating content.
+VFX libraries, shared textures, reusable blueprint libraries, and kitbash sets are all examples of workflow optimizations that did not require approval or scheduling.
+Being able to avoid the overhead of team scheduling is the third advantage I had over a tools team.
+The unfortunate reality is that content creators are always in a state of being held back by tools development.
+The more advantages we can use to decouple content creator workflows from needing tools engineering support, the more fun, engaging, beautiful, lovable game they'll be able to create.
+It's for that reason that we as tools leaders need to find ways to utilize the advantages that game designers have in creating their own tools.
+That's why a desire to capitalize on those advantages is the first important belief I want you to take from my talk.
+If we find ways to capitalize on those advantages, our jobs will be much easier and our games will be much better.
+You might be thinking, okay, that's great, Eric, but we've seen that spreadsheet quest editor that some systems designers built, and that's just part of the problem.
+But I think we should understand insufficient tools, like the quest editor spreadsheet, as a product of designers that are not empowered to create their own tools.
+A few clever designers scratched together the best thing they could, given the limited resources they had.
+They had Excel, and so they made an editor in Excel.
+Today, let's contrast that with some of the results that highly empowered designers can make in Unreal.
+During my time on the Fortnite quest design team, after I made quests for four months, I switched gears to focusing primarily on creating a quest editor that addressed the most important aspects of the quest design workflow.
+We knew the tools team wouldn't be able to create a quest editor from scratch fast enough to resolve our crisis in that moment.
+But a friend of a friend in the tech design department, Bryce Lumpkin, told us we should take a look at Editor Utility Widgets, which turned out to be the most effective designer tools empowerment I have ever encountered.
+Unreal has a pretty robust UI tool called UMG, or Unreal Motion Graphics.
+Pretty much every game in Unreal uses UMG to create their in-game UI.
+So it's a very robust system that many people know how to use.
+It's a WYSIWYG editor, so UI designers are often building the UI themselves.
+And fairly non-technical people can make really valuable contributions without support from engineers.
+Behind every UMG widget, there's a fully functional blueprint graph, which allows designers to write UI behavior using the same blueprints they use to make the rest of the game.
+Editor utility widgets are actually built on top of UMG, with the key difference that they aren't UI that runs in the game, they're actually UI that runs in the editor.
+When I heard this, I was blown away.
+I've made UI in UMG, so adoption of editor utility widgets was almost instant for me.
+I needed to learn a few lessons about asset manipulation and some of the editor paradigms around CDOs and asset metadata.
+But that was basically API memorization I did along the way.
+With UMG, Epic has leveraged a well-developed, excellently documented, robust tool, which many people are already trained on, to create rapid, easy-to-use frameworks that designers and other non-technical people can immediately begin to use creative tools.
+Anyone who can create UI in Unreal has the skills to create powerful asset editing and management tools.
+That means UI designers, technical designers, indie devs, and honestly, anybody who can use Game Dev YouTube can begin making tools.
+Without hiring a single tools engineer, these people can solve tools inefficiencies in their own workflows.
+In three months of less than full-time work, two people went from this to this.
+Our new quest editor took a quest from six pages of tightly packed properties to about two pages.
+Not only was it shorter, but it's also organized in a much more user-friendly way.
+Moreover, most of this space is used by convenience features that allow designers to make quests with less effort than before.
+Things that the previous layout didn't do at all.
+Let's dig in to how we made the quick jump into a tool that exceeded quest designers' imaginations.
+Earlier we talked about four dangers that I could clearly see from my work as a content creator.
+We addressed each one of those four with a solve that was fairly simple in Editor Utility Widgets.
+In our new workflow, a quest designer first selects what kind of quest they're making.
+A daily, weekly, store, narrative, or bespoke quest.
+With that information, we instantiated a different UI with a different set of properties filtered out.
+Store quests never expire.
+So all the calendar and removal properties are always blank.
+The store quest editor just doesn't show those properties at all.
+Just getting rid of irrelevant properties like this, honestly, might have hidden half of all prep properties for every quest.
+Similarly, it was easy to use a few blueprint string operations to generate the values of properties that must follow a specific schema to be correct.
+Like the server backend name, which was just a combination of the release number, the quest name, and objective index.
+And on the rare occasion that that schema changes, like when design creates a whole new category of quests, designed to be completely capable of updating the blueprints that generate new values across all quests.
+So we can hide those properties from day-to-day work in the editor as well.
+This didn't save as much work as the other areas, but boy did it prevent a lot of bugs.
+It might have been a bigger gift to our server engineers than it was to our designers.
+To solve the last two dangers, we needed something slightly more complex.
+Let's look at a specific example.
+We knew that daily quests will only ever reward a seasonal daily quest token and XP.
+So we didn't want to expose any of the reward properties in the daily quest editor.
+That's like five properties right there that we don't need to show.
+But XP values that are rewarded are constantly being tuned.
+And seasonal tokens cycle out every three months.
+So we couldn't just build that straight into the auto generation that the tool does.
+We needed a template system that designers could very easily modify for each release.
+In our workflow, after picking the type of quest in the quest editor, you picked a quest template.
+Quest designers could edit that template themselves, and the values in that template were copied over to each quest when the editor was open.
+Instead of maintaining some kind of template asset, we actually used a quest itself for the templates.
+A quest designer can edit the quest template directly using the exact same methods they use to edit any quest.
+This also allowed for very fine-grained control.
+My Naruto quests were weekly quests, but they also rewarded a special ninja event token that tracked event participation.
+I just created a Naruto template by copying the weekly template and added a ninja event token to the rewards.
+Then that bit of extra work was done automatically for me in every quest I created.
+Quest templates also solve the incompatible configurations problem.
+As long as the templates had the right set of options picked, all our resulting quests had them selected as well.
+And quest designers didn't need to worry about which needed to be set.
+When the quest editors had more or less settled into their final form, another quest designer, Greg Metzler, took a visual design pass on them.
+The fruit of his work is obvious in readability and general ease of use.
+Greg has a lot of experience as a UI designer in Unreal, so he was able to make all of his changes directly in the tool and check them in the same day because of his familiarity with UMG.
+It didn't require mockups or translation to XAML.
+He just put his existing skills to use between branch locks.
+And this amazing improvement came about with no impact on our dev schedule.
+The second important belief I want you to take away from my talk is that tooling frameworks that rapidly create tools using familiar content systems, which are already maintained by the gameplay and engine teams, can solve big problems for small costs.
+This was not the end of our work either.
+The Quest editors were our flagship tools, but we created a bunch of messy, hacky, smaller tools really quickly to solve lower value problems.
+Bulk importers, seasonal update tools, specialized string replacement, and migration tools came from start to finish in a single day and saved a few days of work.
+These small, ugly tools bred more designer-created tools.
+One of our quest designers, Raf Koonin, made an entirely new daily quest bulk updater on his own by copy-pasting an existing bulk updater tool that I had authored.
+And today, other people are using his quick fix and thinking of making their own tools for other problems.
+These tools are cheap, require almost no maintenance because of their reliance on game systems, and pay for themselves almost every time they're used.
+At this point in my talk, I was going to say, there are probably low-cost editor utility widgets solving small problems at Epic that no tools engine even knows about.
+But after my talk was written, somebody heard about a problem I was working on, and they forwarded me an editor utility widget.
+And they said I could quickly copy and modify this into a tool that addressed my problem.
+When I saw it, it turned out to be a modification of a tool that I had built months prior.
+It was like tools karma coming back around to help me.
+All right, I've been talking for about 20 minutes, so it's time to go on a quest.
+I want you to think about a problem at your studios that wastes content creator time, but is probably small enough that it will never get on a tools engineer's plate to solve.
+If you're an engineer, find someone who has one of these tiny problems and have them describe it to you.
+You have about five minutes to do this.
+You can talk to each other.
+Yeah, okay, all right, quest complete.
+The point of my talk is not about quest designers or any kind of designer going off and building tools on their own.
+The point of my talk is about engineers empowering designers to build great tools with lightweight support.
+Throughout the Quest editor process, I had a lot of empowerment from folks in other disciplines in order to make these improvements happen.
+They are great examples of how a studio can empower content creators to build their own tools.
+Chief among them was the support that I got from Jay Nakai, a generalist programmer on the Quest team.
+As I came to understand the complexity of Quest setup, Jay cleaned it up at the source and made sure that the editor utility widgets had access to the native types that Quest used in their definitions.
+I also had endless questions defining the space of what was possible, what was valid, and what half of these things even did.
+Beyond Quest systems, Jay empowered me with improved editor utility widget filtering and drove many of the improvements to the underlying editor utility tech that's been available to the public since UE 5.1.
+Because these tools are at their core UMG widgets, they naturally have access to the robust asset ecosystem that underlies all Unreal games.
+We easily used Quest assets as templates for other Quest assets, and those templates never got out of date or required their own upkeep.
+But we also leveraged other data types that designers were familiar with to help them maintain their own tools' features.
+You might have noticed these buttons that allow quest designers to easily fill in complex tag sets.
+These tag sets evolve as fast as Fortnite does, and it's the designers themselves who are making the decisions about how they should change and when.
+These buttons are actually populated by a standard Unreal data table.
+Designers are already familiar with working with these data tables, and each row of the table becomes its own button.
+Quest designers can add their own buttons or update existing buttons just by editing that table.
+Documentation exists directly within the tool on how to do this, and designers can never leave the editor they're working in to make these instantaneous tool updates.
+Their changes can be checked in via their normal Perforce workflow, and they become the new canonical functionality instantly.
+Quest designers like Errol Hanham and Kyle Phillips make valuable contributions without ever changing an editor utility widget by updating and maintaining these data assets.
+Earlier, I mentioned Greg's awesome contribution to visual design as well.
+Artists and visual designers will surprise you with the ways they can support these efforts when they're excited about them and realize how easily they can contribute.
+Two of our UI engineers also made very significant improvements once the editors were stood up.
+Marshall Beachy used his deep familiarity with UMG design patterns to optimize the sustainability and performance of our editor.
+This was a larger engineering investment that was easy to justify once the Quest editor had become a core part of designer workflows and proved that it was going to be an enduring part of our process.
+Vlad Golovan made many of his own improvements and extended the underlying Quest technologies with the editor in mind.
+One example of that is the Quest map marker custom widget that he created.
+Adding map markers, tests, and specific objectives on those Quests has a lot of irreducible complexity in the data.
+Vlad used Slate and C++ to create a custom widget that essentially functions as a wizard to guide designers through the available choices.
+The custom widget can't be edited by designers, but it makes up for that by being highly specialized and efficient at this particular task.
+Our native map marker code has evolved over time, and the native widget has been able to hide those changes from designers, keeping their process the same.
+Vlad also added better support for native data type usability, so those data types function better everywhere they exist, including in editor utility widgets.
+One great example of that is how we expanded copy-paste for tag containers, so you can copy just a single tag out of a container instead of copying the entire contents of that container.
+He also did a much more complex copy and paste improvement, which allows designers to copy an entire quest event from out of our native quest debugger and paste directly into the quest editor.
+What this meant is designers are essentially copy pasting an event out of Fortnite into our authoring tools to create complex quests.
+All of these contributions empowered a small, efficient and focused team to nail a fantastic tool and immediately pay dividends to content creators.
+Our quest quality went up and the number of quests we could produce with the same team increased.
+We also subjectively improved the quality of life for our designers.
+Improving these tools and offloading some of the maintenance to quest designers also freed our quest engineers to focus more on technology and gameplay features.
+Now we're using a similar approach for tooling in areas adjacent to quest design, like battle pass creation and blueprint reviews.
+I think I copy pasted my notes some weird way, so I'm trying to get caught up.
+It's the slides that are wrong.
+And the results loudly announce the value of these methods.
+We dramatically increased our quest output numerically, drove quests to be one of the most praised aspects of Fortnite, and were able to refocus our design energy on creating new, deluxe native content.
+deluxe narrative content, because we had time to invent stronger and more unique approaches to motivating and rewarding players.
+Our ability to produce quests has gone up so much that we've actually been able to create so many quests that we experimented with expiring quests on a weekly instead of seasonal basis.
+Strategically, This space to evolve and experiment has helped us recognize the value of quests and the right way to deploy them in service to Epic's goal of building the metaverse.
+Today, I'm more excited than ever about the future of Fortnite.
+The third important belief I want you to take away from my talk is that by empowering designers with effective tool building frameworks, we can free our game teams to focus on new gameplay, better outcomes, and core technologies.
+That includes more complex tool initiatives that can't be built in those frameworks.
+The bright future of quests in Fortnite that I just described is a strong contrast to the crisis we were in two years ago.
+From my perspective, that contrast is in large part because of the principles and takeaways that I've been talking to you about today.
+So let's recap.
+Because hopefully some of these principles can cause a similar degree of change on your teams.
+The first important takeaway is that doing hands-on game design work actually gives content creators a few advantages over a conventional tools team when it comes to optimizing workflows.
+Hands-on content creators, and game designers in particular, intuitively understand their own requirements.
+They have much deeper insight into the future and intent behind their designs, and they have open scheduling.
+Tools teams should empower game designers to use those advantages to create, maintain, and adapt their own tools.
+To empower them, we should invest in robust, designer-focused frameworks like editor utility widgets.
+And think about those aspects of the game editor as first-class citizens in our game's tooling ecosystem.
+The second important belief I want you to take away from my talk is that tooling frameworks that are powered by game content types and use familiar game systems have small costs but are still capable of solving big or small problems.
+Hopefully, by going into some of the expedient choices the Fortnite team made to leverage existing assets in the creation of asset editing tools, helps you to see some of the ways that these close-to-the-content tooling frameworks can help your team make the same efficiency gains.
+The third important takeaway is that by empowering designers with effective tool building frameworks, we can free our engineering teams from overhead and maintenance to end up with superior tech solutions instead.
+So here are a few practical action items.
+If you use Unreal, invest in training your tech designers, tech artists, and tools teams on how to build and support editor utility widgets.
+Create tools that rely on familiar game asset types to dynamically and maintenance-free populate tools features, so content creators can expand the tool with their growing needs.
+And finally, whether or not you're using Unreal, prioritize developing and supporting frameworks that encourage content creators to make their own tools and help them adopt maintenance problems on their own.
+Thank you so much for attending my talk.
+This is my first time speaking at GDC, so please leave a review in the survey that they send out to you.
+That's how they decide whether to invite me back.
+And next we have some time for Q&A, so feel free to come up to either one of the microphones when you're ready.
+Someone asked me a question earlier, how are these checked?
+Do they have source control?
+Where do these things go?
+Editor utility widgets are actually an asset in Unreal.
+Just like a UMG widget that is open in the Editor, you can edit them and run them in real-time and check them into Perforce.
+Let's go here on the left.
+Hi, Eric.
+Thank you for your talk.
+It's really great to hear how, you know, the teams at Fortnite and at Epic are really, they seem very interdisciplinary, and there's a lot of, you talked a lot about mentioning your coworkers and how you've worked together with them.
+So, that's just really good to hear, just a comment.
+I would kind of like to pass your quest to us back on you and kind of hear a little bit about what's perhaps a process or another tool or something on your team that seems out of reach that, you know, you would love to change if it were possible.
+One thing that the question was, what is out of reach for our team?
+A lot of it for me is just sort of scheduling stuff.
+Like, I mean, I talked about how tools teams are limited in their scheduling, but that's reality for everybody.
+So there's a NPC creation problem right now where it just takes a lot of work to make NPCs.
+And I would love to build a tool that just spits out all the right data assets and like you check a few boxes, but it's just something I haven't gotten around to yet.
+Hey, so I really love the workflow and the process that you've described in this talk and I wondered if there's been any interest from any other game teams within Epic and have you thought much about can you transfer this between projects?
+Yeah, so almost all of Epic is working in the Fortnite project.
+If you're not working on, like, an engine or MetaHumans, you're in Fortnite.
+So, the tools we create just seem to kind of seep around to different people.
+I mentioned that tool that came back around to me.
+That was on the AI team.
+So, like, I didn't even know that they were working on that.
+It's just one of my customers had taken that tool and said, can you make something like this?
+And then they just started like pulling widgets out and building their own thing.
+So it definitely kind of flows naturally to other disciplines.
+But one of the strange things about Editor Utility Widgets is they've been around since I think 2018, but almost nobody knows what they exist or why.
+And so they haven't been adopted even at Epic very widely.
+And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this talk was just to say like, hey, there's an amazing thing that you can do.
+All you have to do is just start using it.
+Let's go on the left.
+Thank you.
+Yeah, I got a real important question.
+Is Jay Nakai here?
+Where's Jay?
+Jay is in North Carolina.
+Sorry.
+He was going to be really embarrassed when I called him out to answer questions, so he just didn't come to the conference.
+All right, real question.
+How often did you guys run into problems where the editor functionality that you had wasn't enough to do what you wanted?
+Often.
+Jay was actually a big... What's that?
+Oh yeah, the question was, how many times did we end up with something Editor Utility Widgets couldn't do?
+And my answer is often.
+There were a lot of things where, like, so native data assets were a big thing for us, where, like, Blueprints just didn't have access to, like, a struct that I needed to be able to set.
+And the cool thing was I would ask Jay, like, hey, I just need this struct, and he, like, adds some metadata to it and make it read-only, and it was done.
+So there was a lot of times when Jay and I were on a Zoom call for, like, four hours in a row, and I'm building stuff in the editor utility widget and just, like, sending requests to him.
+immediately and then he's checking in and I'm syncing and we're ready to go and One of the great things is like you can edit the editor utility widget like instantly.
+It's like playing a blueprint It's like play an editor And so I would just move to something else and keep working and he checks in these native changes which for him you know, he's got to get through our like check-in gauntlet and make sure it compiles and I don't have to wait for any of that every time I edit, but those native changes do go through that slower process.
+So that's why it's really important to have people supporting this effort.
+Right now, and I think this is true of any tech stack at any point in time, it's not possible to just go do this on your own for a lot of stuff.
+You do need these quick five-minute changes, add a meta tag, make it read-only, something like that.
+Yeah, question.
+For some of your bigger tools, like Quest Designer, are you all putting those in their own plugins, or does that all just sort of live in a folder structure in your project?
+Man, I wish I had better advice about plugins.
+The question was, do they live in plugins?
+Where do these things go?
+Editor utility widgets as assets can kind of go anywhere, and we are figuring that out on Fortnite as part of a larger project.
+What is our strategy for plugins in Unreal?
+I think the answer is just use the architectural experience and wisdom you have to decide where these things go.
+I am starting to think a lot about how can I organize these in a way that they do not cook or ship, and we can make smart choices around that.
+But it is still very much a thing that I am figuring out.
+Plugins in Unreal are evolving every day.
+Hi, since you're using data assets to drive your quest system, did you ever consider taking any sort of approach where you would, at runtime, like reload your data assets instead of having to come out of Pi and going back in, sort of to speed your workflow up?
+Yeah, so the question was, have we considered using these data assets at runtime to kind of update our quests?
+And that's actually one of the things that I'm most excited about to be working on now is essentially authoring quests.
+We have a quest debugger, which essentially just says every single gameplay message that could be a quest objective just spews there constantly.
+And then you can filter that.
+And the model of quest authoring that I want to move towards is actually quest designers playing Fortnite and doing the thing they want players to do and then just grabbing that event and pasting in the editor and being done.
+And so we're actually like authoring those quests essentially at runtime.
+And I think the next step after that is putting those kind of runtime capabilities in players' hands in creative mode so they can author quests like running Fortnite without any of the editor tools.
+Hi there.
+I'm a programmer who loves the idea of designers making their own tools.
+But how do you prevent them from, you know, making the architectural mistakes, you know, programmers make early on?
+A lot of engineers ask me, like, well, I want better architectural skills in the tools from the beginning.
+And I think that A really smart person talked to me about how designers making essentially leaf tools, is what he called it, is fine.
+They can make messes.
+It doesn't really matter.
+But trunk tools, things that are really core to how tools in our game are built, are much better in the hands of people who are great programmers, people who are great at architecture.
+and some of the contributions, so we actually went through that transition where I had made a lot of Editor Utility Widgets and I'm kind of a special case because I studied software architecture in college but you can build a messy, ugly tool in Editor Utility Widgets and when it becomes an important tool like the Quest Editor did You go to somebody like Marshall Beachy and you say, we have a mess that works really well.
+Can you just make this not a mess?
+Some of our tools, actually, the Blueprint review tool was in Editor Utility Widgets.
+And then pretty much the day I released it, the engine team was like, that's really cool.
+We like that.
+We're going to start building it in Slate.
+I was like, I feel bad because I sort of wasted all my work.
+But at the other end of the spectrum, that was like the fastest accepted prototype that I have ever done.
+That actually ships in Unreal Engine 5.2, which is in preview right now, so you can see that tool.
+It allows you to look at a Swarm changelist, like a Swarm review or a Perforce changelist, paste that into the Asset tool, and then you get a list of all of the changes in that CL, and you can diff them right there.
+which was a huge speed up for us, and I don't know, maybe made a mess of the editor utility widget, but then a brilliant tools engineer made it into a slate widget.
+So I think the short answer is like, some editor utility widgets are better authored by engineers, people who are great at architecture and programming, but you shouldn't let that stop you because one of the strengths of doing it in this little walled garden of Editor Utility Widgets is you're never going to spill that mess out somewhere else.
+Hi, I work with Bryce Lumpkin, so I'm glad you mentioned him.
+And I'm also talking tomorrow about Editor Utility Widgets just across the hall.
+So I'd like to ask, what do you think are the biggest stumbling blocks for people coming new to Editor Utility Widgets?
+Oh, what are the biggest stumbling blocks to people coming new to editor utility widgets?
+I think, so one of the things that took me a really long time to learn was like, how to go from a class to the asset metadata and then to, so there's a concept in Unreal, which is a CDO, a class default object.
+And so you have like an asset living on disk and that, talk understanding how the asset system operates on assets because you've never done any of that in blueprints that you're familiar with or UI that you're familiar with.
+And so for me, like one of the tricks is the Python documentation is like auto-generated.
+And so you can go to Unreal's Python documentation and see every single function that the asset system has with really good descriptions.
+And then you, take that knowledge to the blueprint search thing and you just blah, blah, blah, blah.
+And you don't really know, like it's ugly and hard to lay out there.
+But if you start in Python, move to there, then you can have a much easier time understanding how asset manipulation works in Unreal.
+Which, like I said, if you're a designer, you've never even looked at before.
+I wanted to go back to the tools karma and the widget from the AI team that seems like a potential problem space of like with individual teams making their own tools that duplication and reinventing the wheel.
+Are you doing anything to solve around that?
+Is it a problem that tools are duplicated across other teams?
+I think mostly no.
+So Epic has a huge, there's a huge team on Fortnite, I don't know, more than a thousand people.
+And so we do have people like me and Bryce who are constantly building like underlying widget tools.
+So Bryce built a really great file selector.
+So when you need a path, you can say like, I want a content relative path or an absolute path or a relative path.
+And it's very important to maintain those as like, when I said it's important to see these tools as first-class citizens of your asset ecosystem, that's sort of what it means.
+Like you need a good file selector that meets those needs in your project.
+And if you're not doing that kind of stuff, yeah, you do end up with 500 different file selectors and they all suck but Replicating an individual tool across multiple teams.
+I think is fine.
+Like it's sort of messy but develop Like I don't know you made Month later, so Matter that much Solves that problem having good staff like tech designers and tech artists Resolves that quickly because they recognize the areas that are being used a lot We have a editor utility widget scripting channel in slack and that's sort of a nexus of where a lot of those decisions are being made Hi, I'm wondering how much the workload is for the designer to maintain the tool after it's created.
+So, for example, when you add new types of requests, maybe you need to update, and whether that would take too much of the designer's time, as opposed to putting them among the content creation, which they're probably more accustomed to.
+Yeah, that's a great question.
+They're asking, like, what is the maintenance of one of these tools?
+And I think that it's hard to describe that in a talk, but it is unbelievably low because so much of what powers these tools are gameplay systems that are already being maintained by like the gameplay engineers.
+And so the additional burden of like, how did I keep this tool working is like, oh, we needed a new button or we needed to move this stuff around.
+And it's much more about just like, It's sort of the initial cost of authoring it.
+Well, we have a new need for that tool, so we authored that again.
+There's very little upkeep on these tools because they are so close to systems that are already working in the engine.
+Quite a few of the things you mentioned, the downsides there, is something you could also solve with asset validation.
+And I think you can do that in Blueprints, and it stops you from saving the assets if there's a conflict, like mutually exclusive properties and stuff.
+Did you think about using asset validation instead, or start with that and then move on to editor utility widgets afterwards?
+Or what's your thoughts about using that?
+Yeah, so about asset validation in like pre-save asset validation, we have a really robust content validation system on Fortnite that does a whole lot of error checking beyond just like, is this asset in a valid state?
+We make sure that we can export it to our online servers.
+We make sure that it's not going to break the build later.
+And we did a lot of that hand in hand as we were figuring out what are the complexities of the Quest system and what are the invalid states.
+we were also adding those to our content check scripts.
+We have two steps of that.
+One is like at save time where it's like, hey, this is really broken, you shouldn't even save it.
+And then also at check-in time where it's like, hey, you know, maybe this was valid alone, but when we start looking at all the rest of the content, it doesn't work, like you're missing references or something.
+And so I think that was a really important step.
+The problem with that comes in with like, you know technically it is valid for content to be transient but not repeatable like we could imagine a time where that could happen so we don't want to like prevent you from saving it but like you you dig in put your fingers in the mud and set it that way if that's what you actually want so we don't offer that in the editor One important part of this whole process was like, you can still go in and edit that huge list of quest assets.
+And sometimes in our like prototyping phase, people will just go do that and it's fine and we'll update the editors later.
+But we didn't want to like rule out those valid but very uncommon cases with the content validation.
+But that was a big important part of our strategy in general.
+All right, so that's the last questions.
+I'm going to go over there.
+If you want to talk and have more of a personal conversation, you just turn right, go to the end of the hall.
+I'm going to hang out there.
+Again, thank you very much for coming to my talk.
+Please fill out the surveys.
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+Hello and welcome everybody.
+I really appreciate that you're all coming out to this talk and really climbing the stairs to the third floor.
+This is Building the UI for a AAA Single.
+And I'm incredibly honored to be speaking because generally there's one, maybe two UI talks even given a year.
+So this is your quick reminder to silence some cell phones and to fill out the evaluation forms at the end, because it really helps to ensure that our specific discipline continues to be represented at GDC.
+Finding UI talks in the vault can be a little difficult sometimes.
+This is my first GDC presentation.
+So it's a little surreal for me to be on stage, because just about 10 years ago or so, I was just a game development student sitting in an audience like this.
+So it's kind of crazy to think that I'm standing here right now.
+Today, we're going to be broadly discussing what it took at Santa Monica for our team to create the UI for God of War Ragnarok, the AAA sequel to the award-winning God of War, which came out in 2018.
+And the goal today is to go in-depth on the plan and process for how we tackled this enormous project, specifically from a UI perspective.
+To do that, we're gonna talk about three topics.
+Number one, how do we build UI at Santa Monica?
+Number two, we're gonna step through specific screens and interfaces to better understand what it took to create them.
+And then lastly, as we dive into the pause menu in particular, we're gonna take a look back on 2018 and see what some of the lessons we had that we learned from.
+But before we do all of that, let me introduce myself.
+My name is Zach Bone, and I'm a senior staff technical designer responsible for building and maintaining the UI architecture, as well as implementing nearly every UI element that you saw in-game.
+I worked on a lot of different types of games in my career, first on indie teams, and then mid-sized studios in the mobile space.
+But over the last seven years, I've specifically worked as a user interface designer on these large AAA open world RPGs, starting with Spider-Man as a UI designer back in 2018, then onto Cyberpunk, and now with God of War Ragnarok.
+So this is your early warning that I may spoil some aspects of Ragnarok to better provide examples of the UI development process.
+So let's break down how we build UI at Santa Monica by taking a quick look at the team that did this.
+At the height of production, we had 11 people working on the UI.
+And for some of you, I'm sure that number sounds totally absurd.
+11 people just to work on the UI.
+That's kind of like a mini studio in and of itself.
+But that's actually the reality of working on these colossal projects.
+It's just a bunch of independent teams all working and collaborating together.
+And I honestly have no idea how many people worked on Ragnarok.
+Just before the pandemic, we had about 300 people and we were beginning to put desks in the aisles.
+But back to our team.
+It's got a pretty wide range of talents with a team that's split evenly between senior and junior developers.
+So this is me.
+I'm the senior technical designer for the team.
+And for as long as I've worked in UI, it's generally been true that it takes about two people to build UI.
+In our case, it's a combination of TD support on the implementation end and 3D art support, those who create the majority of our assets.
+And at studios of this scale, we actually need redundancy, just because there is so much going on.
+We have a couple of 2D artists on our team, and they act as concept artists, and they end up generating a lot of the initial assets that then get transitioned into a 3D workflow or a 3D environment.
+We had a single UX designer who we stole from Naughty Dog, and they came about midway through production to specifically help supporting all of our wide range of accessibility options.
+And then lastly, we have a gameplay engineer who acts as kind of this conduit between the UI script and then the rest of the game logic.
+And this team was roughly the right size for Ragnarok's four-year development.
+In truth, we really could have used one more technical designer, specifically at the very end of the project, only because there was so much going on.
+So I'm going to get technical just for a quick minute.
+This is the 60-second explanation of how our engine works.
+In short, everything in our game is pre-allocated, that nothing gets created at runtime dynamically.
+So we do this for performance and stability reasons.
+As a result, everything in our game is owned by something called a WOD def, which you can think of as just a container of things.
+Like, for instance, a level can be a WAD.
+There's a ton of levels in the game.
+We don't support all of them simultaneously, but we have the slots for a couple of levels to be loaded at any one time.
+And if a level ends up getting too large, like some of our huge XBL areas, like the crater, it can be split up into two or more WADs in order for them to be loaded properly.
+But some kinds of memory always need to be on.
+These are permanent wads.
+They manage progression and core systems.
+And the UI is one of these permanent wads.
+So everything we do has to fit really neatly into a specific memory budget.
+And when the UI breaks, the entire game breaks.
+Like, full stop.
+It's a P1 assert, and that's never fun.
+At Santa Monica, while nearly all of our assets are 2D, we utilize a 3D workflow through Maya.
+In game, it's just all drawn in a screen space position relative to the camera.
+Prior to this, every UI pipeline I had ever worked on was in 2D, so this was new and really weird.
+And there's naturally some big difficulties in trying to author UI in Maya, which it was never really built to do.
+Like, we have to hand author every layout in the entire game.
+But we do take advantage of the materials and effect systems that are already really optimized for the game, which unleashes the creative potential for a lot of our artists.
+Often, specifically with 2D workflows, you end up running into limitations when you hit the polish phase, when you want to start adding particles or you want to have specifically supported blend modes.
+Now, we're able to access and manipulate individual Maya groups by just marking them as game objects through a Santa Monica tool.
+And then on the scripting end, we have an API that allows us to globally search within a given WAD for a specifically named Maya object.
+Our tech workflow is entirely run on Lua, which is a typeless scripting system that Santa Monica has been using for ages.
+For Ragnarok, there was a major shift for a lot of other departments to start using a new visual scripting system.
+And if you're interested in learning more, Sam Sternklar's talk, which unfortunately was earlier today, but you'll find it on the vault, is specifically on this subject.
+But both the camera and the UI teams continue to use Lua for the entire duration of Ragnarok.
+Now, for any students that are in the audience or those watching, I want to take a quick moment to touch on how the process for data is managed in AAA games.
+Because as a student, you're probably familiar with Unity, and you're generally storing data inside of an inspector window, directly associating it with a particular script.
+They're essentially runtime-associated script variables.
+But in the AAA space, this data is often stored as static data.
+This is quest, equipment, journal data, and it never changes throughout the whole game.
+It's always static.
+For designers, it's often authored in JSON or some simple markup language in a text file or maybe in Excel.
+Now, the major difference is that in a text file, you can have multiple people editing it, and then it merges and diffs really nicely as it comes back together again.
+What's also nice about static data is in a lot of instances, it can be changed on the fly while the game is running, which gives designers this lightning fast iteration period.
+That static data gets interpreted by the game engine or the code that you're running on.
+This is often written in C++, especially if you're on the AAA side, but it does require the game to be recompiled.
+And the downside is this can take a really long time.
+For the UI team, we're actively working on a layer above that, which gives us the flexibility as if we're acting like data.
+The UI logic can either be updated on the fly or just rebuilt by rerunning the game.
+And then we access all of the static data through APIs from C++, such as just give me all the quests, that's all I need at the end of the day, and then I'm gonna be the one managing how that looks on a particular screen.
+But before we dig into the UI, I want to take a moment to step back and do a little bit of comparison.
+Ragnarok ended up being this huge undertaking for every department.
+Everything was expanded to give the Norse saga this big, epic, proper conclusion.
+And on the UI side, that came in the form of maps, skills, and HUD elements.
+The tech design team, which is just me and one other guy, oversees a code base that is about twice the size of the previous game.
+And the crazy thing is, our memory budget never changed.
+We had to do all of that in the exact same space, which was a real challenge.
+But it was also a huge accomplishment, because over the last four years, we've added and rebuilt a staggering number of features, which we're going to dive into now.
+To do so, we're going to cover three distinct areas.
+We're going to talk a lot about various utilities.
+We're going to talk a little bit about the HUD.
+And then we're going to dive into the menus.
+And that's when we're going to look back on the previous title and have a little critique about it.
+So first up are utilities, which is what our out-of-box experience, or UBI for short, is part of.
+This is the very first screen that players are going to encounter prior to any logos, splash screens, or even the front end.
+And God of War 2018 had a very simplified image calibration screen in this place.
+But our driving factor for an Ubi was really our commitment to accessibility.
+We wanted to prioritize giving folks options from the very beginning.
+So to do this menu, to build this menu, we took a lot of inspiration from what Naughty Dog had done over the last couple of games.
+But we also innovated in some small ways.
+This landing page is a really good example because we wanted to provide players with a really quick choice as if they wanted to skip past this or take their time through a guided setup.
+Choosing the guided setup dropped players into the first of four pages.
+This is just simply our common settings.
+We wanted a place where all the standard options that you would expect would be chosen.
+So language, subtitles, and UI text size, which is actually super important.
+So remember that it exists inside of the Ubi, because I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later.
+But as a quick aside, we totally underestimated the technical weight of our accessibility options.
+And we ended up getting pinched by it in a couple of ways.
+On the right-hand side is a visualization of all of the Lua files owned by the UI.
+And the largest one is our settings menu.
+We had almost 8,000 lines of Lua logic just for the definitions of what these settings options are.
+In an ideal world, Lua is really not where we should be storing this.
+Ideally, it's in a static data library, similar to what I was talking about earlier.
+The last Ubi page that I want to cover is our accessibility presets, because one of the challenges we noticed with the Ubis that Naughty Dog had begun to develop was that there were so many options, it very quickly became overwhelming to players.
+So to smooth out that user experience, we ended up creating these presets, which would change a wide variety of settings all in one go.
+And they served needs like vision, hearing, motion, and motor.
+Our front end is fairly standard.
+It provides all the basics.
+New game, settings.
+And like God of War 2018, it exists in the same screen space as our introductory cut scene.
+And I personally love it when the front end gets set up this way because it gives you this opportunity to have a seamless cut directly into the start of the game instead of hitting a big loading screen, which for a lot of players, especially if it's a narratively driven game, it can kind of ruin the excitement of starting that game.
+but has a lot of extra overhead because it's a full scene.
+It needs level designers, it needs lighting, it needs art direction.
+So the core creative team needs to be on board pretty early on.
+But thankfully we knew what we were getting ourselves in for.
+What we didn't expect were the challenges with the recap video.
+The recap was an overview of the events of God of War 2018.
+And our challenge really ended up becoming how our engine deals with streaming video.
+Because remember, our engine pre-allocates everything.
+That includes video.
+And the overall need to play video is really limited.
+As a result, the max video size we actually support in-game is only 1280x720.
+And now we were going to project this huge video along a wall, knowing that some players were going to be playing on a 4K television.
+The crazy thing is, we ultimately didn't change anything.
+This is actually a 720p video that is just stretched way out to fill the screen.
+But the campfire aesthetic passes the low quality off as something that's almost genuine.
+So I have kind of a takeaway for you.
+You've got to pick your battles.
+This one instance could have forced us to change the streaming video budget, which would have had major memory implications across the entire game.
+But we ended up finding a creative solution, which turned a weakness into a strength.
+Now, when you start supporting a wide number of settings options, we had 65, 70 options or something like that, it becomes difficult to how you categorize all of these.
+And we ended up settling with a mix of standard categories, like gameplay, as well as adding some new and very specific ones, like text and color, as well as accessibility and our audio cues.
+But we ended up being really flexible on exactly what was contained inside of each category.
+Auto pickup is in gameplay, but it also appears in accessibility.
+And this ended up being a combination of some of our opinions, but also the result of a lot of playtesting.
+If we noticed players struggling to find a particular setting, we would end up just duplicating it into other categories.
+With so many different settings, and some of them are controlled by the player, and some of them are being controlled through presets, we needed a way to know if a setting had been changed from its default value, which is where the blue text comes into play.
+It's this bright pop of color to help players know at a glance what's been affected, whether they changed it or one of their presets did.
+This is super cheap and immediately got a ton of results for us.
+One of the single largest accessibility options we ended up supporting for Ragnarok was full controller remapping.
+And I can't understate how colossal this was, as it involved re-architecting major ways the game worked under the hood.
+Because up until this point, designers had hard-coded specific buttons for every action in the entire game.
+So changing that paradigm took an entire village.
+Now when a designer sets up an interact, they specify the action most suitable to the context of that action.
+That could be aim, it could be interact, it could be evade.
+So if you're looking to make major headway into embracing accessibility and the community behind it, full controller remapping is the single most requested feature by far and away.
+And not every team has the advantages of AAA to support dozens of accessibility options.
+But there are some really great ways that we've seen indies support players like this.
+Like Celeste, which exposes just some basic gameplay options, which gives players a variety of different ways they can tune in order to make the game more accessible to them.
+Or in Overland, where you can swap out the core font for one that better serves players with dyslexia.
+Another aspect of utilities that the UI group supported was tutorialization.
+We supported about 70 distinct tutorials in Ragnarok.
+The vast majority of them all looked like this.
+They were just utilizing our simple sidebar message and were happening in-game.
+But we also supported about 15 in-menu tutorials which guided players through equipment, skills, transmog, and more.
+For effective tutorialization, because we did a lot of this, I've got a couple of tips for you.
+Number one, show tutorials in a very consistent space with consistent visualization so that players can learn where to look when they want advice.
+Number two, please only teach one thing at a time.
+From personal experience, combining multiple tutorials in-game really never gets you the results that you're looking for.
+Now, this third one might only be for sequels, but slightly delaying the activation in case players have already discovered it or they remembered it from the previous title is a really great quality of life feature, and it just streamlines and continues to immerse the player without pulling them out into a tutorial.
+For successful in-menu tutorials, I recommend a couple of steps.
+You want to support additional visualization, such as the bouncing arrows that you saw earlier.
+Those really help guide the player where they're looking on the screen.
+You also need to architect your tutorial logic so that it ends up hijacking your input system, to ensure that only specific actions allow players to go to the next step in the process.
+But ultimately, please keep your in-menu tutorials brief.
+No longer than seven steps.
+Because after this, players just start mashing buttons.
+They're like, I'm done, I wanna get back to the game.
+So, as we wrap up this portion on utilities, I wanna do a really small breakout lesson specifically on fonts.
+Because I have a big passion for this and nobody else in the studio cares.
+If you're new to fonts, here's a rule that I follow.
+Just use two fonts.
+Your first is your header font.
+It's going to be stylized, and it's going to represent your artistic direction.
+You're going to use this fairly sparingly.
+For Ragnarok, we used a font called Berserker, which was created in-house, and it captures the feeling of the kind of Norse, runic-like patterns, and we only used it in two places.
+our title text, and then our area announcement messages when you move from one realm to another or to a brand new area that you've never seen before.
+It gives that moment kind of an epic space, an epic time.
+For the second font, it's going to be your body font.
+And if there's one thing I want you to take away from this entire talk, it's that your body font should be readable.
+Our body font was Gilsans.
+It's something we licensed from Adobe, and this font covered us for eFIGS.
+And for those unfamiliar with localization, this stands for English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
+This covers you for most of your western regions.
+However, there's a number of regions that often require specialized fonts, as your eFIGS font just doesn't have the glyphs.
+Thai, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese often require entirely separate fonts.
+We actually lucked out.
+Gill Sans already supports Cyrillic, so we didn't need an additional font for Russian.
+The single biggest way we saved memory on Ragnarok was by utilizing a custom icon font.
+Using applications like FontForge, we loaded in black and white icons into a font sheet and then we're recalling them in-game by using a Unicode value.
+And this was a huge savings for us.
+Instead of having material and texture costs for over 200 icons, we could instead leverage a single font that was baked into a 2048 by 2048 texture that was then compressed further down.
+The additional advantage of using a font like this was that we ended up creating macros for our writers, so that they could embed inline specific icons into text fields.
+So, with a tutorial, use HackSilver to purchase this.
+Instead of writing HackSilver, they would use a macro for the HackSilver icon, which then players recognize and use everywhere else in their game.
+And that was totally free.
+That was awesome.
+So for a quick minute, I want to talk about the future of how we're going to approach fonts at Santa Monica.
+Because right now, we actually scan through all of the text in the whole game and scrape every glyph into a texture-packed sheet.
+We do this for both the God of War icon font I showed you earlier, as well as our header and body fonts.
+These are generally 1024 by 1024.
+Our icon font has a lot more going on, so it's twice that size.
+Each language in our game has its own WAD.
+Every time you swap your language, we're just reloading the same WAD slot.
+They each have about 10 megabytes.
+But even with compression, we actually ran dangerously close to our memory limit by just supporting three fonts, which ended up limiting us in some really weird and kind of painful ways.
+So our initial plan is to start looking at some GPU-based renders, like Slug.
+So instead of creating texture sheets at all, we're just going to plug in an OTF or .ttf file, and then have that glyph get directly rendered on screen, which gives us this huge advantage of supporting a wide variety of potential font styles.
+So you get a bunch of variety from your body font that you've created.
+And this is a huge win from a graphic design perspective.
+Being able to support thin, regular, heavy, or bold is something that artists ask for all the time.
+But what's also really interesting is it unlocks emojis.
+The implication is, up until now, all of our icons have been just in black and white.
+But if we use emojis, we get to add color to all of those same icons, which is a huge boon for our artists.
+So we're pretty excited.
+Alright, I'm going to stop talking about fonts because I'm going to talk a little bit about the HUD.
+Story comes first at Santa Monica, and with it, a clear cinematic direction that drives everything that we do.
+From a UI perspective, we're always looking to minimize the on-screen presence to enhance that feeling.
+But on the UX side, we also need to support a wide array of information that we need to give to the player.
+Now, compared to the rest of the UI, the HUD visually didn't change very much since the last title.
+However, we did change the system that governs the notifications that are on screen.
+Most notably, we put everything into a single global queue.
+Only one notification type can be on screen at any time.
+But the problem was feedback we got late in development was that players sometimes had to wait too long for some of these messages to appear.
+It was all in one giant queue.
+And if you ever visited the well in Vanaheim and had a ton of resources, I'm sure you ran into this.
+So moving forward, we're going to be revising the system to be more regional.
+We'd have a queue in the upper left, a queue in the upper right.
+And then we could either tie them together if we want to have a moment where a single UI message is really important, like the area announcement ones, or allow them to exist simultaneously in order to get through all of these different messages.
+So the major HUD considerations we had for Ragnarok actually came in the form of supporting new and custom UI that all have a very specific gameplay use.
+Muspelheim challenges, the Raven Arena, and the Mystic Gateway are all good examples of this.
+Because for Ragnarok, we knew a key feature was that players needed to travel freely between all nine of the realms, as well as the realm between realms.
+And our goal was to make this as intuitive and as time-saving as possible.
+And that actually meant a major departure from what we had done on the previous title.
+To give you a little bit of context, that was a while ago.
+This was how realm travel functioned in God of War.
+Kratos had to travel to a very specific place, Tyr's temple, and interact with this physical element in order to change all the various realms.
+And this felt epic.
+You had to go through this huge process in order to change realms, and it made that feel really meaningful.
+but it was also really limiting from a UX perspective.
+Players could only enter a realm from a single point, which made backtracking and revisiting areas really time intensive.
+So for Ragnarok, all of that logic got moved directly onto the gateway itself.
+And this UI is a blend of both Lua logic as well as some visual scripting because there's a lot of animations that are going into supporting this.
+It's a unique blend between screen space UI but also diegetic elements.
+The realm icons, their locked and unlocked states are all directly built into the doorway itself.
+But midway through production, it became clear that players were starting to lose their momentum when they hit a mystic gateway.
+Which was kind of odd.
+Why were players spending so much time here?
+In the videos captured during playtests, we ended up seeing players jumping in and out of the pause menu, trying to figure out where they needed to go.
+So to solve this, we brought the information the players were looking for to directly to them by just adding two elements.
+The first was that quest icons now appear on the door if one is present within a given realm.
+And then secondly, we also keep a log of all the available quests on the right-hand side to give them a little bit more context for exactly what was being offered in each one of those realms.
+and immediately we saw a huge change in player engagement as well as exploration.
+There are these natural breaks in the story where Kratos encourages you to go explore and this directly helped support all of that.
+So, some takeaways.
+Playtests and having video footage of players is invaluable because they may not tell you that they need help.
+They will just suffer in silence.
+We only discovered this issue after watching through the footage ourselves.
+And then anytime players open up the pause menu, they break away from the story that's being told.
+In this instance, we actually empowered players with the right information in order to keep them in the flow, which is really important if you have a narratively driven title.
+Another instance of custom UI requests that you're also gonna see in a lot of different types of games are specific variations of known systems.
+For us, this was our boss health bars.
+So early on, we sat down with the combat team and we discussed bosses and what kinds of support they would need for their health bars.
+And the news was great.
+Kratos was only ever going to fight one boss at a time.
+Well, there was this one unique instance where he fights two Valkyries, but that fight's kind of unique because they share a health bar.
+So we ended up only building a single self-contained element and we called it a day.
+The thing was, a couple of months later, the combat team came back around again and said, well, we have this instance where Kratos fights two water dragons.
+Can you support that?
+Of course.
+Of course we can support that.
+But we actually don't have a great solution for more than two bosses, because there's only so much screen space.
+And the combat team said, yep, that's great, and they went along their way.
+In the last five months of development, The combat team came back around again and said, so, we have this instance where Kratos fights three bosses all at once.
+Can you support this?
+Of course.
+Of course we can support this.
+But we only have the room for two health bars.
+So we ended up recycling the twin Valkyrie health bar in order to realize the creative vision of having this crazy, challenging boss encounter.
+which is probably a good thing because fighting three of those things would be just insane.
+So, some takeaways.
+When building UI, you need to approach this from adaptability and scalability.
+You never know when you need to expand a system or design decides to keep going further than you first expected.
+But you also need to be clear about some constraints.
+The combat team fully understood the limitations of screen space.
+There's only so much real estate to go around.
+And ultimately, it ended up in a better design.
+So before we dive into the pause menu, let's talk a little bit about how the team looked back at God of War 2018.
+It's a known fact that God of War 2018's development cycle had difficulties.
+There's actually a great documentary out there if you're interested in learning more.
+But when it came to the UI, there were two core issues.
+Despite building a deep RPG that had an extensive progression and menu structure, the UI group had really limited resources at the time.
+As a result, the whole UI that was shipped for the game was only built in six months, which is an amazing feat, but it ends up coming at a cost.
+Because when you go fast, you miss things.
+So while God of War 2018 was universally celebrated, there were aspects of the UI that held it back.
+So we didn't shy away from sitting down and having a hard critique about what worked and what just didn't work.
+So starting on Ragnarok, we had four specific goals from a UI perspective.
+We wanted to let our pause menu characters have a greater visual impact.
+We wanted to ensure that our font was always going to be readable this time.
+We wanted to optimize our space as efficiently as possible.
+And we wanted to make the UI really easy to navigate.
+So looking back on Kratos in the menus, it was clear that instead of coexisting, he was competing with the UI for space.
+From the tabs at the top to the info cards on the left and right, he was given this very narrow space to live in, and he was often overlapped by elements of the UI.
+For Kratos to have the space to breathe, we needed to slide him over to the right, which gave us a much better separation between model and UI spaces.
+because this one simple change had a whole cascade of updates, with the tab menu moving to the bottom, the attribute panel being condensed, and swapped over to the opposite side.
+Our menu prompts in the bottom right now react to the menu depth and adjust their position accordingly.
+This allows us to zoom in and out, have characters step forward and backward into frame, and it ensures that Kratos is never covered by the UI.
+One of the biggest weaknesses of the UI on the last project was that text was painfully unreadable from a distance.
+And while there was a post-launch patch, which made things maybe a little bit better, there's only so much that it could do.
+This underlying system just straight up did not support this kind of content.
+So we swore that this time around, it was just not gonna happen.
+And in particular, for small text, these are the areas where players struggle the most.
+Early on, we decided that our body font would never be smaller than 24 points.
+And in fact, we were going to offer a wide array of text scaling options.
+So no matter how far players were sitting, or if they had some kind of visual impairment, we wanted everyone to be able to read what was on screen.
+As a quick aside, this text scaling was phenomenally successful.
+Our early metrics at the number of players who changed the font initially did not seem real.
+As of today, we're seeing nearly 60% of players change their setting, which never happens, to large, which is one step up from our default.
+Once you make this commitment to having font scaling, it means that you need to build the content and the technology that scales well with it.
+And this is often called dynamic layouts, where the position of content shifts to accommodate other content.
+So, for instance, when you have one text field's Y position being based on the height of the text field above it.
+This seemingly simple concept is not supported out of the box by most UI systems, and it needs to be built.
+The card in the middle of the screen is a great example of this.
+It is capable of reacting to a wide variety of possible components, from attributes and descriptions to perks, bink videos, and lore entries.
+No matter what kind of content we throw at this card, we're capable of handling it, which comes in especially handy for localization, where a simple description can easily become a paragraph in certain languages.
+Now, in comparison, for God of War 2018, all of the layouts were completely static.
+We didn't even change or update to take advantage of the space that was available.
+The stats card in the middle was built with the fullest possible layout in mind, which looks pretty good at the end of the game, but it looks really awkward at the start of the game when a piece of gear hasn't been fully realized.
+And then lastly, from a pure graphic design perspective, there were some inconsistencies with navigation.
+While primary navigation was localized in the same general screen space, what we considered a button was really different depending on the menu that you were in.
+Buttons end up being these large sockets on the weapons menu.
+They were a completely different shaped socket on the armor menu.
+They were a list on the enchantments screen and there were nodes on the skill tree.
+So for Ragnarok, we have a very consistent sidebar, which shows up everywhere, from the weapons and armor menus, to the skill tree, to the vendor.
+We also visually transition.
+Anytime we dive deeper, the menu slides to the right, while ascending is always to the left instead.
+Our last section today is going to be on the menus for Ragnarok.
+But instead of diving into each of the pause menus, I'm going to take you through three specific case studies.
+Enchantments, skill mods, and the journal.
+Our first case study, the enchantments screen, is one that I see as one of the greatest success stories of the UI.
+One of the core long-term progression systems in 2018 was the enchantment system.
+Gear, such as chest or waist equipment, had some number of enchantment slots.
+And these slots were filled with enchantments that offered a wide variety of bonuses, from simple attribute buffs to some build-defining perks that could fundamentally change combat in interesting and unique ways.
+By having enchantment slots tied directly to gear, it made that equipment really valuable, but it also created a weird UX issue.
+There was no way to view all of the players' equipped enchantments all at once.
+You needed to individually inspect every piece of gear, making it difficult for players to understand their overall build.
+And ultimately, this UX issue led to a lower-than-desired percentage of players who would even interact with the system, particularly on the deeper side of things.
+So there was this universal desire from the combat and the UI team to remedy this particular problem for Ragnarok.
+And thus, the amulet of Yggdrasil was created.
+It's a single place where all of the player's nine enchantments could be viewed at once.
+On the UI side, this offered some challenges though.
+Our first iteration had this function like every other equipment screen in the game.
+Our goal was to have consistent navigation no matter where you were in the menus.
+because where every slot is just a category that we dive into and then we show the list of all the possible items that can be equipped.
+But this proved totally disastrous.
+Players and developers hated it because just like in 2018, you end up losing track of every other enchantment you actually had socketed in.
+So the solution ended up being that we had to break some of the conventions that we had stuck to our guns on for so long.
+In this particular instance, we decided that the user experience need was greater than the game fantasy, so we put UI directly on top of Kratos.
+And we developed a new menu structure that allowed for two simultaneous lists, the items on the left-hand side and the slots on the right, which is actually another convention that we're breaking.
+Usually it's the other way around.
+We start from the top and work down instead.
+But in this instance, players choose an item, and then they choose a slot that it goes into.
+And this was a total breakthrough.
+All of a sudden, people were really starting to engage with the system.
+Sorry.
+But there was still some friction where players were beginning to reconceptualize their build.
+So the next iteration was a context-sensitive approach.
+where we allowed players to directly navigate onto the menu list, which would allow them to reverse their flow back into kind of our standard convention, where players would then pick a slot and then choose which enchantment would go into it, which ended up being a great way to rapidly unsocket all of your build if you wanted to make changes, which was really important for our power players, particularly towards the end of the game where things got really difficult and you had to hyper-specialize in order to complete the game.
+Our director, Eric Williams, loved this navigation flow so much he wanted us to use the same framework for all of our companion accessories as well.
+So this system and this interface is seen by the UI team as a great triumph.
+It's a great system that ends up blending systems design and great UX.
+And we know it's successful because nobody mentions this UI at all.
+Instead, they talk about their builds and their excitement and the possibility space that enchantments provide.
+So you know you've created great UI when it becomes totally invisible.
+So the two takeaways that I have for you are, if it's a core system that's fundamental for long-term player engagement, and it's just not clicking, keep iterating.
+But please build time into your schedule.
+We did not do this.
+It was a lot to finally get there, but it was totally worth it in the end.
+But you also need to know when to break your own rules.
+In our case, the UX rule won out over our own artistic pillars.
+So the second case study I want to take a look at is our skill mods, and how another system that ended up lacking a lot of engagement in 2018 was re-conceptualized.
+So in the previous title, there was a system in the skill tree called bonuses.
+It's down there on the bottom right, and probably not a lot of you remember it.
+This bonus system was really interesting from a combat perspective, and it opened up a lot of new possibilities for players.
+The system was intended to continually keep combat fresh during the end portion of the game, after the players have already unlocked a lot of their skills.
+But nobody engaged in the system at all, because it was a mismatch of player priorities.
+On this menu, we had been training players for hours, just worry about your skills.
+This is the only thing you need to do.
+But the thing was, all of these bonuses were gated by attributes, which is something they did on a totally separate screen.
+So this mismatch in player priorities basically made the system that we spent all this time building totally useless.
+So, for Ragnarok, we wanted to take another stab at this.
+For the same reasons as before, we wanted to keep combat fresh during the end portion of the game, after players have unlocked a bunch of skills already.
+But to drive engagement, we end up doing an unusual thing.
+We hid the system away entirely.
+Players don't unlock skill mods until they've completed a chain of quests tied to a particular skill.
+Once they complete it, next time they open up the skill menu, we introduce the system with the tutorial.
+Instead of having a passive bonus that simply activates, this system now takes active participation from the player.
+Players have to purchase a skill mod from a curated list of possibilities, which allows a lot of experimentation on the player end, but gives us a little bit of context and a little bit of constraints to ensure they can't get overly powerful in a particular way.
+They then socket that into place.
+And this tangible nature of upgrading the skill went a really long way.
+We're seeing massive player engagement and player enthusiasm for this system across the board, and for something that is pretty hardcore in a lot of instances.
+So, some takeaways.
+Presentation matters, especially for systems that require active engagement.
+But hiding progression systems, especially if they're targeted towards high-end or end-game players, can be really valuable because it makes them novel.
+But don't forget to tutorialize it because you want to really introduce the fact that this is something brand new, you've never seen this before, and then they know it's a brand new system.
+Our last case study that I want to discuss is a feature that I think we failed to properly deliver on, and this was the journal.
+For reference, here's what it looked like in God of War 2018.
+Because the pages are flat, you can't tell that we're totally faking it.
+All of the assets are rendered on top of the book.
+And here's the journal for Ragnarok.
+In a lot of ways, it's totally identical.
+But this time, the content is directly rendered onto the page.
+And you can see some evidence of that with some highlights and some of the background effects that kind of like contour to the page.
+But we were like, we're AAA, we want to take this a little further.
+So we wanted to provide, we really wanted to prove that the content was physically present or diegetic.
+So to do this, we were determined to get the book to flip the pages.
+Oh man, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves in for.
+At first, things are pretty straightforward.
+You get these elements to show up on a page using something called a custom render target, or custom RT.
+Anything sharing a custom RT texture would render together as a single flat texture that was just texture mapped to a page.
+Cool, we have content on a page, this is great.
+When a book is flipped, you have the left and right pages.
+But when you're flipping a page, you also have the left and right pages of the next upcoming page to deal with as well.
+Now a page flip happens anytime we change categories.
+And some categories have similar UI elements, like headers, descriptions, or lists.
+But because we're page flipping, we can't recycle any of it.
+Any possible combination of categories could be opened at any time, like labors and the treasure maps.
+So instead, we ended up supporting unique assets for every category.
+What further complicated this was that we decided to flip pages between tabs, which was a really bad idea.
+Because despite the fact that they look the same to the user, these are entirely different scripting classes under the hood.
+So between the complexities of page flipping and our ability to render all of these assets in a really limited way, the scope of what should have been the simplest menu in the entire game ballooned.
+And ultimately, it came to a head during the finaling period of Ragnarok.
+Because testers were able to break this in so many ways.
+It took a long time.
+The journal is stable-ish.
+But to this day, you can still put it into a broken state where no UI will render at all.
+It does fix itself, I assure you, most of the time.
+But please do not try pushing this harder than it should be.
+So while aesthetically pleasing, most players will actually never notice this effect.
+So the takeaways from the journal should really be, don't change something just because you can or you feel like you should.
+Please evaluate what the change brings to the experience.
+As our producer likes to say, is the juice worth the squeeze?
+This was not worth the squeeze.
+I spent a lot of time on this.
+I'm really glad that I don't have to do that again.
+So we've covered a lot of ground here, ranging from the ways that we build UI at Santa Monica to deep dives on specific UI, as well as how the UI for God of War has evolved over time to provide a better user experience for players, which really brings us to the end.
+My name is Zach Bone, and I really thank you for coming out and coming out to GDC.
+We've got 13 minutes left for questions if anybody wants to ask.
+Hello.
+I was wondering if you guys localized your header font since you said they made that in-house and we had a lot of fonts for your other languages.
+Did you guys localize that in-house or what was your solution there?
+So the question is, do we localize our header font?
+The answer is no.
+If you are not one of the western regions, you do not get this font.
+We instead swap it for your body font instead, which is a real bummer, but that's kind of the limitation when you end up building something by hand.
+If we had someone on staff who was a graphic designer and could continue building out all those glyphs, that's awesome.
+But that's also a huge skill set.
+I don't know if I would feel comfortable trying to author a Chinese glyph and making sure that it appears correctly.
+So that's just kind of a limitation we live with.
+Thank you.
+Go ahead.
+Hi, thank you for your talk.
+It was very good.
+I just wanted to know, what are your most recommended places to find fonts?
+And what are the telltale things to know if it's readable?
+So the question is, where do we often find fonts?
+And what was the second part?
+And what are some signs that are going to let you know that it's going to be a readable font?
+It's going to be a readable font.
+So the advantage of working for a really large company, and some of the downsides too, is that we are very limited to where we can find fonts from a licensing perspective.
+Sony has access to a huge variety of Adobe style fonts.
+So basically they're like, You can pick whatever you want, but it needs to be on the Adobe side.
+As for readability, we tested a lot of different fonts in the past with a bunch of users where we just put a bunch of like lorem ipsum text and we put them side by side and eventually kind of picked down to the one that we're looking for.
+What I did do for a lot of other languages was I was given a font for Arabic, for instance, and they were like, just go ahead and use this.
+But I ended up turning back around to native Arabic speakers, particularly through our localization QA, and said, what do you think about this font?
+and I'm really glad I did because they came back and they said, it just looks like a textbook, it's fine, whatever.
+But ultimately, I then basically sat them down next to me as we went through Adobe's huge library of Arabic fonts and we picked out one that we just liked and it worked out.
+Nice, thank you so much.
+Go ahead.
+Hi Zach, thank you for the talk.
+I'm a technical UI designer, and you mentioned in the beginning that there aren't many talks on UI.
+So with it being such a huge part of games, why do you think that is?
+So why do I think there's not a lot of UI talks?
+I think it's because it's a really specialized skill set still.
+You don't see a lot of UI positions for the most part, or it's kind of a field that only developed over the last three to five years.
+The industry is going to catch on, but it's also one that's really limited.
+On a title like Ragnarok, we have 40 level designers, where we only have a couple of UI folks.
+So the need is always going to be smaller.
+It's just like at a studio, you may only need one writer.
+So that is just kind of how it goes.
+I hope it does change over time though.
+Thank you.
+Awesome talk, super informative for all of us, I think.
+My question actually comes down to the connection between combat design and UI.
+As a combat designer, I would love to know any tips or like insight you have to what we could do to help UI and reduce pain points late in development when we realize that we have limitations and any tips you have.
+Okay, so question is like, how can you better foster a relationship between the combat and the UI teams?
+This is something we talk about a lot at Santa Monica.
+The combat team drives a lot of design for us.
+So the biggest thing is On the UI side, being in the room when decisions are being made, that's probably the biggest thing.
+We can just be a fly on the wall and kind of listen for when something needs an extra piece of user interface or potentially another set of ears.
+That's probably the best thing to get started with.
+Anytime there's a new system being a part of that, talk.
+Hey, thank you.
+That was really good.
+My question is, what was the process for you guys like when you do the UI and then knowing that you have to support a lot of different languages and with fancy features like the font scaling?
+Did you guys experience a lot of problems when you work on the UI and then everything is working well but only realized that it doesn't really work in another language at all.
+Was there a lot of back and forth or did you guys do anything special throughout the production to help solve this sort of issues?
+So kind of a good culmination of that question is, how do we make sure that we don't get bit later on for localization?
+For me, it came from experience.
+I ran into that exact issue on Spider-Man, and I spent three months fixing Korean, and I was like, I'm never doing this ever again.
+So when I came on at Santa Monica, my goal was like, we're doing dynamic layouts, and this is how it's gonna be.
+So super early on into every system, I built this expectation that it needed to have a dynamic layout.
+And as we moved forward with every layout we would do, all the way down to the wireframing, we were always asking the question, how is this going to be supported in other languages?
+How are we going to make sure that it doesn't have overlap or have too long of a space?
+Unfortunately for a lot of localization, it comes online really late sometimes, maybe in the last five or six months where you actually get meaningful amounts of localization in and you can kind of test your UI at scale.
+And it came online and it was crickets.
+And I was like, oh my gosh, the world is exploding.
+Like, why am I not getting any bugs like I did for Spider-Man?
+And it was because the dynamic layouts worked, which was really weird.
+So you got to pre-plan for it.
+Great, thank you.
+Go ahead.
+Thanks for the talk.
+I was wondering how the conversation went between you and your team, how it was when you were kind of talking about breaking your own rules, specifically about putting overlap on Kratos, and was there any disagreements, and how did you kind of manage that conversation?
+So, how did we finally realize that we needed to break our own rules, specifically around the enchantment screen?
+It was through feedback and through testing, we had gone through two different play sessions with the enchantment system in the game.
+And the first set of play tests, we kind of ignored the feedback.
+We were like, yeah, it can't possibly be that bad.
+And then once it repeats, you know it's a real problem.
+So at that point, we started wireframing at the very beginning of like, how can we redo this system?
+But we were also under this really intense period of time where we needed to make sure whatever we did, we could implement fairly quickly and with a low amount of bugs.
+So I actually ended up leading that wireframing to say, what if we did this instead?
+And people were like, yep, let's run with it, which was great.
+So we had a great team with a lot of great communication.
+Hi.
+I can see that you have a very tight memory budget, and I would like to know how you manage to support CJK in Funtouchi, because it tends to get pretty big, and we usually tend to narrow the use of character sets, but I would like to know how you tackle this.
+Okay, so you're asking how did we support Chinese languages specifically on the localization side?
+Yes.
+Yeah.
+So this is kind of the sad truth, is that we downscaled our God of War icon font down to 1024x1024 in order to upscale for a 2048x2048 to give the body font, which from a UX perspective is the most important thing, the players need to be able to read that text, That is more important than our icons, despite the fact we put so much effort into making them look good.
+That's how we did it.
+That is a painful thing, decision to make, and I made that decision.
+That's why we're looking at other solutions to avoid having to make that decision ever again.
+We ended up making that for Chinese, for Japanese, for Korean, and for Thai.
+all the other languages kind of miraculously worked.
+We were so close that it was fine and we could get away with it.
+Thank you very much.
+Go ahead.
+A lot of this was answered in a previous question, but I just wanted to bring up, I work as a UI UX designer, and I really appreciated your insight into having the different panels be scalable to fit other content, rather than the content having to be adjusted.
+I was wondering, for the max use cases of Ingottawar Ragnarok, like having max font size, and longer localizations like in Japanese and Korean that use a larger width.
+Are there specific fallbacks that your team had used to do that?
+Did the panels still adjust dynamically to fit it?
+Did you have to work to shrink any particular lines of text?
+Did you have to scroll it?
+A big problem.
+For me, as I work in a live service game and the localization comes in late, it comes in for a lot of different things.
+It switches all the time.
+And we have problems with it posterizing, scrolling back and forth, and bringing a lot of players' eye attention just to that text.
+So I'm going to try to summarize a little bit of how do we make sure that our largest font size works in all of our dynamic layout conditions.
+So we design from a perspective of the default layout.
+That's the one we want to have looking the nicest from a pure graphic design perspective.
+and we accept the fact that if you are pushing it all the way up to the highest text size, it may not look great in all of the instances.
+There are resources in the upper right-hand corner which track your hack silver and some of your XP.
+That kind of overrides or overlaps some UI in specific instances and you're like, yep, that's fine, don't worry about it.
+So you kind of have to figure out what you care about and what you don't care about.
+We have a scrolling solution on the cards, and in a lot of places we made sure that we had scrolling.
+In the future, and this is kind of a time-intensive thing, you get the ticker tape, like you would see on CNN or something like that, where the text will go off-screen and then slowly march on-screen.
+And this is really good when your text field can't go multi-line and has to stay inside of a very specific box.
+and you see that a lot specifically in the settings menu where you have all of these things listed down and you don't want to support multi-line because now your buttons are offset and because you're not actually scrolling your list smoothly that you run into problems there.
+So the ticker tape is ultimately like the sweet spot if you can do it right, but it takes a lot of time to make sure you can build that correctly.
+Thank you so much.
+Hi there, my name's Andrew.
+Sounds like your team is a very supportive, generous, collaborative UI team.
+As a UI designer, and maybe others here, we dread having to say no to something.
+Always want to be helpful and support what the user needs, what the teams need.
+Were there any instances where you did have to push back a little more at something, or had to say no to something, and how did that go?
+Were there any places where we needed to say no?
+I try not to say no a lot.
+There are definitely places where I want to say no a lot.
+The goal is it should be a conversation of like, here are the limitations that we're running up against.
+And if we feel like this feature or this piece is really important, we now need to have a production conversation about what needs to get bumped next.
+That is not always how it goes, but that is ideally the conversation about how we kind of handle it.
+And there's a couple of instances, a lot of it is content that's cut, I don't know if I can talk about, that we ran into for that.
+Sure, yeah, appreciate that, thank you.
+Hi Zach, thanks for the awesome talk, I would love to ask a question about what do you think about building visual effects into a UI element, what do you think like the positive side on that, negative side on that, or do you just like don't like to do that and just treat VFX as VFX, especially for like on-screen, like a non-pausing gameplay style overlay stuff?
+So how do I view VFX specifically in UI and kind of its role and its place?
+VFX are awesome.
+They are the super extra polish element that you not always have the time to do.
+The VFX team at Santa Monica gets pulled in a lot of different ways, so we end up being the ones who author most of the visual effects talk about compared to a lot of other teams where we have designers, and we have programmers, and we have artists, is that we do so much of our stuff in-house, inside of our own team, in order to not change the trajectory or the scope or scale of other teams.
+Anytime we go out and do that, it could be weeks before we get an answer, or the answer could just be, nope, they are totally booked because they're doing something else.
+So, and a lot of times, our artists, our generalists, and they actively go out and learn more about other techniques or other things in order to bring that back to the UI team in order to build really polished UI elements.
+Thank you.
+Cool.
+We are actually a little bit over time.
+Thank you so much for coming out.
+We'll see you around.
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+so We're going to talk about Bear and Breakfast.
+For those of you who haven't heard about Bear and Breakfast before, it's a laid-back management adventure game where you build and run a bed and breakfast, but you're a bear.
+And that on its own doesn't mean much, especially since PC Gamers said that a laid-back management adventure is whatever your boss is off doing when he takes a two-hour lunch.
+So to give you a slightly better clue, we're going to have to watch a very, very short trailer.
+So as you can see, the game has some crafting, it has some building, some decorating, some talking, some walking, some heavy UI action, and even a map that we added way too late.
+But of course, it has its central element there.
+And before the game could look like this, unfortunately, it had to look like this.
+I don't know why the universe works the way that it does, but it just needed to look this bad so we could all be in a room together.
+But anyway, by talking about our game and how we got it from point A to point B, I'll attempt to answer a question that was on my mind while developing it, and maybe some of you have thought of as well before.
+How do you approach an increasingly saturated indie scene?
+There's so many games out there.
+I'll do that by kind of showing you how we tried, failed, and sometimes succeeding at standing out by mixing and bashing a few game genres together.
+And I know what you're all thinking.
+It's pretty simple.
+Just add a bear.
+Of course, it's a tried and true tactic that worked for a lot of extraordinary games.
+Of course, I'm talking about EnviroBear 2000.
+A masterpiece that's such a high level that I still aspire to reach one day.
+But before I get too excited about this, I'll tell you a bit about myself.
+My name is Rares.
+I'm a 30-year-old developer from Romania, which is in Eastern Europe.
+I don't know why I picked this photo.
+This is in France.
+Anyway, in 2016, I also started a company called Gummy Cat.
+It's a game development studio also based in Romania.
+And for the first few years, it was just by me, by myself, just kind of screwing around.
+And eventually, we kind of began developing Bear and Breakfast as more of a team in about 2020.
+With me was Ioana, our art director and my partner, and Andu, who's our programmer, lead programmer.
+But wait, we're an indie studio.
+That means we wear a lot of hats.
+And sometimes against our better judgment.
+Um, but wait, we're an indie studio, which meant that we were actually more than just three people.
+We were five, but it wasn't for the whole period of time.
+It was just, so it's weird to define the core team because not everyone worked for the same amount of time, but wait, we're an indie studio.
+So, uh, that meant that a lot of people actually worked on the game from QA localization, contractors, our publisher also helped.
+Um, so it was something like 50 people in the end that just touched the game at some point.
+And in any case, I'm going to tell you the story about how we got to doing something that everyone here has either done or aspires to one day do, which is to push this little green button in Steam's backend.
+And this, as you all know, is a very relaxing and peaceful experience.
+It's comparable to a day at the spa.
+And in order to do that, I'll just quickly present throughout the whole presentation what we pitched to publishers and investors in the summer of 2019 and compare it to what we eventually launched in the world.
+kind of to see if we kept our promise and if we had a through line that survived the whole process.
+And as a side note, our pitch was sent to something like 70 publishers and investors, out of which 15 never got back to us at all.
+About 25 responded.
+And after talking and negotiating, we refused, or we were refused by about 24.
+But that's all right, since in the end, we only needed one to sign the game and make it happen, which we did thanks to Armor Games, our publisher.
+which some of them are here as well.
+And also, our pitch deck is online.
+You can actually see it, see the exact thing that we used to pitch the game and get a deal out of it.
+It's on this website from a company called Hey Glitch, who have a thing called Founders Kit, also has other pitch decks.
+It's really good.
+It's a great resource.
+You should really see it.
+And from now on, if there's ever an image or a slide from our original pitch deck, it'll have this handy little annotation.
+Cool.
+Just to give you a little bit of insight of what's coming up, I'm going to talk about what blending genres meant to us and kind of our process.
+And then we'll tackle the genres that make up Bear and Breakfast, so adventure and management, and kind of like how we blended them together, how we smushed them, what really worked in this process, and then what didn't, or the mistakes that we made along the way.
+Cool?
+Cool.
+Let's go.
+So mixing genres.
+It's not a novel concept.
+It's not like a top 10 secret tactic that publishers will hate you for.
+There's plenty of games that implement multiple elements from multiple genres all the time, but mostly with budgets much, much higher than what a first time studio from middle of nowhere Eastern Europe could realistically aim for for our first title.
+This, like the original pitch back in 2019 promised roughly the same thing as today, a management adventure game.
+But if you really think about it, combining genres seems like a straightforward idea for about three seconds until you realize there's like no way you can actually bear the weight of what this kind of combination inherently implies.
+And it can be like a very, very daunting and prone to over promise process.
+So within the context of a small team, with limited budget, limited development time, limited space in our brains, the more genres we aim to combine, the more we'll have to strip away from each of those genres in order to actually ship, let alone to ship something that you're happy with.
+um and especially something that players would like because given player expectations and based on like common knowledge and games they've played previously you could easily find yourself in a mess um like too far gone to realistically bring it all together before you launch And yeah, how exactly did we measure or decide on the features of or elements of the genres that we needed to take away from for the game?
+I think it's a more complex answer that I could realistically say in a 30 minute lecture, but for us it boiled down to perceived player expectations.
+So we had to make a decision pretty early on in the process on which expectations we really aim to fulfill.
+and which we were okay with kind of disappointing some players on.
+It's impossible to meet everyone's expectations anyway and this just added another layer of complexity to the problem.
+And then, once you do all of this, you have to hope that your original vision, that you had from the start, is strong enough to hold through all the circles of game development, from pitching to production, and especially marketing.
+But let's talk about some concrete examples.
+So what makes Barren Breakfast an adventure game?
+Let me ask you, what thing pops into your mind if you think about a shooter tag on Steam?
+That's pretty straightforward.
+But what about adventure?
+We called it an adventure game, but we quickly found that it's like, you know, trying to categorize dishes in a restaurant by which ones you salt.
+According to Steam Tags, VRChat is an adventure game, but so is God of War, and so is Terraria, and so is Valheim.
+And that's not really helpful when you're trying to explain what your game is in more detail.
+So because of the weight of that adventure qualifier, we decided to focus our efforts on a specific part of the genre that we could actually realistically deliver.
+Specifically, we wanted to signal that our game had a rich narrative that would help immerse you in the world.
+So for us, adventure in the end just meant story and characters.
+Now, I was born in Romania, and it had a pretty rough time up until like 30 years ago, and it wasn't exactly known for its rich and outstanding characters and stories.
+But I was born right on time for Western pop culture to kick in and fill my tiny child brain, which was starving for an escape at the time.
+So for me, shows like The Simpsons were peak comedy and almost a religious experience.
+Homer Simpson, as you know, as you maybe know, is a naive and lovable but a little dumb kind of character So I'd like to introduce you all to Hank Hank is the main character in Burn Breakfast.
+Now I'm going to talk a lot about Hank.
+And quite frankly, because I want to drive home a point that is very important to me.
+And I think that it's important in developing any story-based thing, but especially video games, which is build your character.
+And I mean really build your character.
+Define them.
+Develop them.
+Give them lives.
+Give them quirks and features.
+Just make them funny.
+Make them sad.
+Whatever you do, don't make them boring.
+Make them interesting.
+Super easy.
+When we developed our pitch, we had a pretty good idea of what Hank needed to be, and we knew we'd need to spend some serious time polishing him up, both for his art direction, his animation, his personality, and I think it was one of the best decisions we could make to build him up as much as possible.
+It took about 12 months out of our process to just get the final Hank.
+We kept pushing his design forward, kept iterating.
+We needed him to feel right because the game centered around this character who the player had to actually perceive and not just project themselves onto.
+So one of the core parts of Hank is his adorable walk cycle, which this was not it.
+We kept iterating.
+We invested a lot of time and effort in.
+There were many walk cycles.
+Arguably, this was the second best after the one we actually picked.
+But we took some really serious time in exploring all the ways a bear could walk until it was funny looking enough, weighty, and made this kind of happy to just walk around in the world with.
+And after all of that, we finally landed on Psych.
+There were even more walk cycles.
+It was a lot of walk cycles.
+But anyway, we finally landed on something we were actually proud of.
+And I really want to emphasize how important this long period of constant iteration turned out to be, because Hank is arguably the most successful part of the game.
+And I think a lot of the game's achievements rest on his little shoulders.
+Now, the game also has a handful of other varied characters, some of which were created to kind of subtly support a role within the game's mechanics, which I'll talk about a little bit later, beyond this narrative box that they needed to fill.
+Even if it didn't matter to the gameplay though, characters always needed to serve a purpose, either moving the story forward or supporting the main character.
+And like I said, we designed characters that ended up actually informing mechanics rather than the other way around.
+For example, this little person right here, his name is Took.
+This little dumpster raccoon would obviously be associated with garbage.
+And as a side note, you'd think that the name Took comes from a combination of Tom and Nook, and you'd be right, but he also has kind of a duo character that hasn't been revealed yet, but like they're kind of a pair and it's kind of a love letter to Peregrine Took, and there's also the past tense of the verb to take because he's a little thief, and I'm very proud of that.
+Anyway, in the game, the player has to deal with the plague that is human beings, specifically tourists.
+Worst.
+I am a tourist.
+If you haven't played the game, the guests rate their vacation with you through a simple point-based system for things like comfort, hygiene, food, and also decoration.
+Humans also, unfortunately, really like to leave garbage everywhere.
+It negatively impacts the decoration score and it just makes things ugly.
+And as a player, you have to find all the garbage and pick it up.
+So while developing this, we realized that, hey, our little dumpster diver could serve a very logical, mechanical role in the game.
+We could turn the garbage you collect into currency and then exchange it for decorative items in a shop that Tuk would own.
+After characters, the second part of our adventure qualifier is the story of the game, which is a very linear one, and that's arguably an odd choice in a game like this, mainly because a linear story doesn't usually mean a lot of replayability, and that kind of is an important part of a management-style game.
+You can also make choices in a game, but they're not real, just like real life.
+Instead, we use them as kind of a progression gate, or as a way to break the dialogue, to give the player a bit of like a rest in between the more text-heavy conversations, but also as a way to showcase Hank's personality.
+So for example, whenever Hank talked to humans, as opposed to talking to other animals, no matter what the player chose in the dialogue option, the result would always be bear noises.
+and sometimes make them more personable through text formatting.
+We also used comic book style cutscenes.
+This was really important for us to be able to have a lot of flexibility in defining some story moments, which we otherwise couldn't have done with a team of our size.
+And there's also some secrets here and there in the game.
+There's diverse areas and you wouldn't really find any of the secrets if you didn't look for them, but we felt it was important to add.
+And speaking of secrets, there are also plenty of secrets in the story of the game, but they're all optional beyond the main part of the story.
+And last but not least, the ending of the game is pretty open-ended, which we did from like a desire to tell a deeper story than we could ship originally.
+So we left a lot of loose threads that we could hang on to and we're still like kind of developing.
+And also let the player be able to continue the management gameplay once they're done with the story.
+So in my mind, based on what we had in our original pitch deck, we've threaded the needle on story and characters decently well, and even if we don't have puzzles or combat, this wasn't an issue, because we satisfied everything, all the elements we wanted to highlight from this genre, and we were kind of happy with the distillation of having adventure in our game To summarize the main pillars we had to define the adventure, elements of the game were a very polished main character with a well-defined cast of supporting characters, a strong linear storyline mainly told through secondary characters with some added mystery for spice, and a very varied and interesting world with small secrets to reward exploration.
+Cool.
+But what about the meat of the game, the rest of the game?
+What about management?
+Well, management is far easier to categorize in your head.
+For me, it brings up things like Roller Coaster Tycoon or City Skylines, but it still kind of bears a lot of weight.
+It's arguably more than adventure because management games have historically attracted players who are looking for deeper mechanics, kind of, and they can sometimes be pretty hardcore about it.
+Barren Breakfast plays a little bit like a game called Theme Hospital, which is one of my favorites growing up.
+And instead of being like an all-controlling figure in the sky, you use Hank to do crafting in some of the buildings, mostly.
+And when we were picking the loop for pitching the game, we had a pretty straightforward one in mind.
+And I'm pretty happy with how it turned out eventually, because we have a game where you can scavenge for materials, craft furniture, place it in the hotel rooms that you build, and then accept guests and manage them.
+And if you get tired of all that, you can just do a little exploring for more materials and secrets.
+So in the end, a pretty complex overall tight game loop, right?
+I'm so happy we didn't do something really dumb like overscoping and adding a card-based cooking minigame or a clothing and trinket system that further added complexity to the gameplay loop.
+An unfortunate reality for modern developers, I feel, is that you're kind of playing to the tune of successful and influential games that came before yours.
+So for us, that meant that there are a lot of quality of life expectations for modern management games, especially in UI and UX.
+And this adds on top of your already really heavy workload.
+Terraria has an auto-sort inventory button.
+Why doesn't yours?
+World of Warcraft has auto-loot on containers.
+Where's yours?
+So while we kept having to add and add and add things to the game, I felt like we couldn't afford to de-scope because I felt like we'd risk losing the player's interest in the management mechanics.
+We also sprinkled new mechanics from the start of the game all the way throughout the end in an attempt to kind of keep things fresh so even in the last area as you discover it you still found a new mechanic that you didn't have like 20 hours earlier in the game.
+To summarize the core of the management aspect of the game, we kind of prioritized a very tight loop that didn't rush the player to progress and allowed us to introduce new gameplay all throughout the game.
+We had a pretty simple resource system that felt familiar enough and felt like it provided a familiar and satisfying crafting experience, and it didn't really become a grind.
+And managing groups, rooms, and guests was simplified to like a point-based system that was pretty relaxed.
+But we had just enough room for the min-maxers out there.
+So now with the two genres covered, let's talk about how we kind of blend them together with some specific examples.
+Like I mentioned before, combining genres is a very deliberate choice to make your life harder.
+But when you can get it to work, it can make you feel very smart.
+And that's like the kind of small wins that you need to feed on during game development.
+For example, we realized that we could automate some of the micromanagement mechanics we introduced very early in the game, and it would go a really long way towards freeing up the player in the endgame and allow them to spend more time doing things that maybe they found to be fun, like exploring, decorating, min-maxing, whatever.
+We made four possible automations around accepting guests, around garbage, around food, for example.
+We realized that instead of going like the generic route that some management games do of hiring staff in the game from a randomly generated pool, we could instead make it more like a more personalized experience with the characters that you kind of grew up with in the game and kind of connected through.
+For instance, instead of going to every hotel in the whole game and kind of making sure rooms are booked and turning a profit, you could hire Gus, the possum.
+as a concierge.
+And he would welcome your guests and be an all-around helpful and kind presence.
+Or instead, for instance, if you didn't want to clear the garbage in every single house by yourself, you could hire Wade the rat.
+And Wade would just run around and gather all of the currency for you simultaneously, kind of giving you passive income and keeping your cabins clean.
+Of course, Wade is a much cuter connoisseur of garbage compared to Took the raccoon.
+And all of these services in-game cost money.
+Well, in-game money, obviously.
+And you couldn't just hire this character from the start, but you could instead progress their quest to a certain point, which allowed us to kind of pace the game intuitively and give the player, like, get them acquainted with these characters.
+And the micromanagement tasks first, and then give them a choice to be like, spend some profit and have an easier life in the game.
+And then they could make this choice.
+Our pitch also had an element of progress and difficulty, which translated well in the final game.
+This is Pinefall.
+Pinefall is the very last area, and it had three full cabins, all the mechanics unlocked, and you basically had the task of making as much money as possible in order to advance the story and finish the game.
+We also pitched the story progression through bigger and bigger areas, which also translated well into the game in the end.
+In this original slide in the pitch deck, this wasn't about progression, this was about making the game a roguelike management game, which I'm so happy we didn't do.
+So in the end, this kind of combination really worked out.
+and it was because of the compromises we made and not despite them.
+We wouldn't have been able to deliver like a fully fledged adventure game, whatever that means, or a very deep management game, but we did end up with a very solid blend and players really seemed to appreciate that.
+So that brings me to what actually worked.
+The overall success and perks that we got due to blending genres.
+Well, it allowed us to kind of synthesize the essentials of each game category and kind of pick our desired elements and let us be focused on each of them.
+It helped us play to our strengths, both creatively and throughout production.
+Although, as you'll see towards the end, not all the time.
+And the things like I mentioned earlier, like hiring established characters as staff in the cabins was a really big strength point.
+It gave a deeper sense of purpose to the task itself because it was a character you cared about.
+And this could be a talk in itself, but I really want to mention some small marketing beats, specifically on Twitter, that I really love.
+Catherine, who's here today, our community manager from our publisher, had a talk on this subject, which was really good.
+But basically, using Hank as a voice for our Twitter account was a really solid choice, given how complex of a character he is.
+There was also a moment when Unity decided to award us like a third place most anticipated game in 2020 after Silksong and League of Legends Wild Rift.
+We had to announce a delay in the game at one point and we were really really surprised to see that our community rallied behind us really hard and these last two ones like don't aren't really related to mixing genres but I still love them.
+But I do think our approach gave some of our bigger partners the confidence to showcase us multiple times.
+Like, for instance, Nintendo always helped us by putting our trailers up on their channels, and it helped us immensely throughout.
+It put a lot of eyes on us.
+So in the end, the perks of kind of mixing the genres for us, mixing adventure and management, Our team was kind of better positioned to take on production of elements we picked rather than try to do everything at once from just one genre.
+the combination of elements from each genre kind of complemented each other even from the concept stage and it made like our overall vision stronger so it was a great tool to validate and kind of make that vision better and the game was kind of originally born out of a desire for more management games with a more developed narrative and this really gave us a really concrete niche to feel it really helped us find our place in the world Overall, the positives really shined through for us, but as you all know, it can't always be rosy.
+So what about what didn't work?
+Or better yet, like I like to call it, what about the mistakes?
+Well, for example, The start of the game is really slow.
+Like, there's a bunch of front-loaded story, which I'm still very happy about, because you meet some of my favorite characters at the start of the game.
+But it can take players, like, up to 30 minutes before they get to build anything, and that can turn off a lot of people, like, just looking to start building something.
+In addition to the slow start we chose to add like optional quests very early in the game and we didn't give a specific explicit pathway to progress in the main storyline and You know and not being very explicit about the optional quests being both optional just this kind of led players to being very confused as a start and getting a lot of support tickets for people saying they were softlocked despite that not being the case this came like from an over indulgence in trying to mix the narrative with the management.
+We also tried our best to mention that the game was on the casual side.
+Even in the first description text you see about the game on the Steam page for instance.
+But I don't know if we could even actually fix this if we wanted to.
+Because we had players that were pretty upset that the game didn't offer more, for instance, freedom in time manipulation and didn't allow for a more straightforward management-only experience because that's what you'd expect from games in this genre.
+And our desire to keep the story and management progression so intertwined forced us to limit these freedoms.
+There's no sandbox mode yet.
+But on the other side, we had players that were kind of pissed off that we didn't have enough character interaction, like there's no dating system, there's no gifting or anything like in Stardew Valley, for instance.
+So we kind of had complaints coming in from both ends, which we were expecting, but still.
+And finally, the big one and kind of by far my biggest regret in the development of this game is the way we handle production sometimes.
+In our pitch deck, coming from a place of relatively little experience as a team, we pitched a development time of 12 to 14 months from prototype to ship.
+which was a wild plan to begin with, but in the end it took us over 30.
+And I know that doesn't sound like a long time anyway, but it was like over double what the pitch was.
+And with the delays, of course, that meant more budget and our budget kind of exploded, which is a lot.
+It was quite a big margin and we were only able to do this because our publisher was cool.
+And in the end, we'll always be thankful for that.
+Despite all this, it kind of still led to a lot of difficult times during production, which I feel personally a lot of regret for.
+We had moments that felt pretty hopeless and very anxiety-inducing, like this screenshot from a Zoom call.
+Midway through development, we were obviously having a great time.
+and the personal failing of mine was taking on way more jobs than I could handle at once, which led to certain aspects of the game falling behind.
+I had to finish writing the game at this point, but I was making these.
+These pieces were way less stressful than having to actually write a good story.
+Anyway, in the end, I'm happy to report that this wasn't always the case.
+We were able to stick together, we were able to learn from our mistakes as we went along, and I know that not all teams are able to do that.
+But having the game resonate with a lot of people very early on kept us kind of together and focused on shipping, and combining genres served as a tool for us.
+It allowed us to explore more facets of game development, perhaps making the game stand out more and give us more opportunities for marketing.
+And we did have happy moments during development as well.
+In the end, on July 28th, 2022, we launched the game, still together as a team.
+Quick recap to finish up.
+Why would you blend genres for an indie game?
+Well, throwing currently popular genres in a bowl and seeing what blends can be a valid approach for quick prototyping or like it can define your whole game.
+It's always a gamble though.
+It has to be utilized as a way to come up with an idea rather than a method to strengthen an existing one.
+You should have a good vision.
+More and more games come out and studios become more and more specialized in their niche.
+So kind of trying to mix and match genre elements feel like it's becoming more of a method to stand out.
+And it's a great tool for a small team with limited resources, but it should probably just not serve as a replacement for like that strong vision and like sturdy base.
+Thank you so much.
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+so First thing I want to do is say a handful of thank yous.
+I'll make it quick.
+Thank you, Damian, for mentoring this talk.
+Thank you so much.
+Thank you to Brian Schmidt and GameSoundCon for allowing me to give an earlier iteration of this talk at GameSoundCon last year.
+And massive, massive thank you to both the audio and QA teams on Diablo 4 for listening to the absolutely atrocious first version of this talk and giving me all the feedback I needed to make it good for all of you.
+All right, let's go.
+So, who am I?
+Why am I here talking to you about Audio QA?
+I am a composer and sound designer in my own right, a man who loves music and sound.
+I am currently the Audio QA subject matter expert on Diablo 4 at Blizzard Entertainment, specifically Blizzard Albany, which used to be Vicarious Visions.
+Prior to that, I was the audio test lead for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 at Vicarious Visions.
+I have an MFA in music composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
+I'm a cat lover and a yarn connoisseur.
+You can see my two cats there, Aurelia and Oberon.
+They are vital to the game development process.
+My co-workers get a little bit disappointed if they don't show up to our morning meetings.
+A couple things I didn't put on here.
+I am also the chair of the Albany IGDA, and I am also one of the organizing members of GWA Albany, which is our QA union at Blizzard Albany.
+What is QA?
+This is apparently has been a a hot topic today.
+Uh so QA stands for quality assurance and it is what it sounds like.
+We want to assure the quality... Oh no!
+Ah!
+Okay.
+All right.
+We want to assure the quality of the game.
+What does that mean?
+We want to make sure that everything that has been designed is working the way it's supposed to and isn't working in any of the ways it's not supposed to.
+Right?
+And how do we do that?
+We gather information.
+We ask questions.
+We author documentation to guide testing.
+We find and report defects, also known as bugs.
+And then once bugs have been fixed, we go back and verify those fixes to make sure that they haven't broken anything else.
+Um, so this, the image that I have here is a screenshot of the playlist from Tony Hawk's pro skater one and two.
+And just a little bit about this.
+It works like an MP3 player on shuffle.
+So things that we needed to test for it, make sure that it's random, make sure that no songs repeat until every song in the playlist has been played.
+Make sure that you can check and uncheck songs so that you can add and remove them from the playlist.
+Some other things we had to test.
+The game had a T rating.
+That means that we needed to make sure there was no language in the lyrics that was going to threaten that rating.
+So that meant listening through, making sure everything was properly bleeped, properly censored, right?
+In order to do that, we created an audio test spec, a glossary of terms, test passes, a custom bug tracker for UI, including instructions for testing.
+and so on.
+I apologize, my notes are on my phone because we couldn't make the computer work.
+Alright, moving on.
+Common misconceptions about QA.
+What is not QA?
+There's a very common misconception that QA and playtesting are the same thing.
+This is not true.
+While it is true that we may organize and participate in playtests, we being QA testers, it is not far from the bulk of our job.
+It's kind of more of a rare thing, to be honest with you.
+We are not breaking the game.
+We are merely exposing the ways in which it is already broken.
+We're also not fixing the game.
+We're not fixing the game.
+We're just telling you how it's broken and then it's up to y'all to figure out how to fix it.
+It's not getting paid to play games all day.
+A lot of the time we're not even really playing the game, not in a natural way that a human being would do it.
+Often we're actually testing in the engine or we're looking at documentation.
+A lot of time I spend test planning.
+Very rarely am I actually in the game playing the way a player would.
+We cannot find every bug.
+There are going to be things that are only exposed in really unique circumstances.
+There are going to be situations where you need thousands upon thousands of players in order to expose a bug, and you're not going to have a QA team that big.
+So every game ships with bugs.
+And not every bug that we find is going to get fixed.
+And I have a couple little funny stories about that.
+That's why there's lobsters on the screen right now.
+Diablo II Resurrected.
+I didn't actually really work on it.
+I did a little bit of testing support, but there was just the absolute funniest bug that someone wrote.
+One of the testers had actually grown up in the Caribbean and knew the difference between a warm water and a cold water lobster, and wrote a bug that there were cold water lobsters being sold at a fishmonger in an area of the game that would have been warm water area.
+It's the wrong kind of lobster.
+that didn't get fixed.
+Didn't get fixed.
+Uh, and then another one down here is something that also didn't get fixed in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2.
+This is actually a bug I wrote myself.
+And since this screenshot is just from Google, uh, you know that it didn't get fixed.
+So if you look at that little, uh, concrete thing to the right of the screen there, and you see how it's sort of turned to the side.
+Concrete does not do that.
+It doesn't work that way.
+It'll break, it'll break, it'll crack, but it's not just going to get picked up.
+Like floor tiles do that.
+Concrete doesn't do that.
+I know this because my dad does concrete for a living.
+That didn't get fixed either, as you can see.
+So audio QA, and by that I mean a QA tester or testers who are specifically assigned to work on audio testing.
+Why do you want that?
+Specialization allows for expertise.
+When you have someone who is specifically trained in your audio tools and in your engine, you're going to get more and higher quality bug reports.
+That doesn't mean that there's more bugs in your game.
+That means that more of them are being exposed so that you can make more educated decisions about what you want to fix.
+Uh, you'll get fewer dupes, NMIs, WNFs, NMIs meaning needs more information, which is when you get a bug report that is incomplete and does not give you what you need to actually fix the bug and you have to send it back and wait for the tester to go and add more information to it.
+WNF being a will not fix, uh, you don't want them writing bugs for things that are actually intended, right?
+A well-trained audio QA who understands your system and your design will also anticipate potential points of failure.
+So one way that I did this when I was working on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 is that I had found an area very early in development.
+I had found an area that when you skated on it, the skate loop did not play.
+It just went silent.
+And I asked the audio team about it.
+And this was pre-pandemic.
+So one of the sound designers came to my desk and showed me in Unreal the exact settings on that actor that were incorrect, that were causing the loop not to play.
+And since I then had that information, I was able to figure out that that was probably going to happen in a lot of other places.
+So because it was early enough in development that I had a lot of free time, I went through every single level in the engine.
+And I pulled up every single actor.
+And I checked the collision settings for all of them.
+And I made a massive document per level with every actor that had incorrect collision settings.
+And I sent that off in bug reports.
+And that got fixed so early that by the time the game shipped, we really didn't have that problem anymore.
+That also falls into understanding where the bug needs to go, because that was actually a level design bug, it wasn't an audio bug.
+And because that had been explained to me, I was able to send it right to the level design team and the audio team didn't have to waste time looking at it and figuring it out that it wasn't up to them to fix.
+So a well-trained audio QA tester will also provide additional information.
+If they understand your middleware and your engine, they will give you specific actor names, specific file names, specific Wwise events.
+They will capture Wwise profiling sessions.
+They will give you more information to make it easier and faster to fix your bugs.
+Audio QA can also gather information and perform tasks for you if they know what they're doing.
+When I worked on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, I actually helped with some of the VO recording.
+All of the exertion VO was recorded with the exception of Tony Hawk and Jack Black.
+All of the other skaters' exertions were recorded in-house at Vicarious Visions, and I was able to help set that up and facilitate those sessions.
+What are the relationships that your audio QA tester has with different members of your audio department?
+Well, when it comes to design, we need to know what your vision and goals are.
+We need to know what the theme of the game is.
+What is the narrative?
+What is the mood?
+So that when we hear a sound that isn't conveying that, like Tony Hawk sounds a lot different than Diablo 4, right?
+You don't want them to sound the same.
+So we need to know what your vision and what your goals are.
+When it comes to implementation, we need to understand your systems and your structure.
+How do these work?
+How do these sounds work?
+How are things set up?
+And to be honest with you, just the way that your middleware, just the way that your project is set up in Wwise can inform our test passes a lot.
+I've actually directly used the Wwise project for games to inform the test passes that I've been writing to check functionality.
+When it comes to engineering, we need to understand how the audio relates to other features, how it's set up, is the sound on the VFX, and then when the VFX doesn't play, the sound's not gonna play, and then we understand that that's not an audio bug, it's a VFX bug, so we're not wasting audio's time with that again.
+When it comes to production, we need to understand the timeline and the state that the work is in.
+You don't want a million UI bugs for missing audio when you haven't actually started to create your UI audio yet.
+And when it comes to other QA testers who are testing other features, there is significant overlap in testing.
+You really don't want to have your audio testers go through and retest features that have already been checked for functionality and art and so on, just listening to the audio.
+It's very redundant.
+It makes a lot more sense if you can coordinate that testing so that everything's getting done at the same time.
+What do we do all day?
+What does QA actually do?
+So now we understand the goal of QA.
+But what does the average day in a tester's life look like?
+So often we'll start the day with either a smoke test or a build verification test.
+The terms are interchangeable really.
+And what that means is we'll get a nightly build.
+And we want to make sure that all the core functionality is available in that build.
+We want to make sure you can get into the game.
+We want to make sure you can select a character.
+We want to make sure you can move around, and so on.
+And these tests will vary based on the project, but you want to make sure the core functionality is there so that the build is actually viable for other play tests that other teams may be doing and further testing.
+If it's not, then you need to roll back to a previous build.
+We'll do a lot of targeted ad hoc.
+Ad hoc just means unguided testing, means you're not following a test pass.
+You're just going through and playing the game, sometimes the way a player would, sometimes the way a player wouldn't.
+You're trying to access areas that you shouldn't have access to, trying to perform abilities that you shouldn't be able to perform, trying to use things that you shouldn't be able to use, do things out of order, see what happens when you do stuff that wasn't intended in the design, right?
+Because often you'll find things that are broken.
+The first bug I ever found when I was working on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, I actually was able to, there was an issue I think with the velocity of the skate and I was able to get way higher than I should have, but the bug I actually wrote was that I was able to jump up on top of a building and actually fall right through it because I had no collision.
+So that was the first bug I ever wrote.
+We create and maintain documentation.
+This is documentation relating to test, but not always.
+Sometimes the documentation that we create can be very, very helpful to other departments.
+I created a bespoke bug tracker for UI audio bugs on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 at the request of one of our sound designers, which was very helpful to me to keep track of that work being done, but also helpful to him.
+We can also perform dev requested tests and tasks.
+So if you've just finished work on the music for this part of the game, and you want to make sure that it's all transitioning smoothly, we can go and do that.
+And we can go do it in ways that you wouldn't want the player to do it and see what happens to the music when we do that.
+So you can get really intense testing on a specific feature.
+We can also sometimes do tasks for you.
+So like I said, the VO recording thing, I actually helped out with the batch material tagging for the skate system on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2.
+which saved a lot of time for the sound designers.
+And test planning and execution.
+Test planning is the art of actually figuring out what is to be tested, how you're going to do it, what the prerequisites are, what the actual steps for executing the test are, what the expected results are.
+And execution is actually performing that test, writing any bugs that come up, and passing or failing the cases, and generating reports on the state that the game is in.
+We also perform confirmation and verification.
+So once a bug is marked fixed, that's not the end of the story.
+There's a couple things that we need to do.
+For one, we need to make sure the fix actually worked.
+Sometimes it doesn't.
+And we also need to make sure that it didn't break anything else, because that can also happen.
+So dev requests, what can you ask your QA to do?
+We can gather information for you.
+We can do media capture.
+We can tell you how to trigger certain events, how to get to a certain part of the game, how to put the game in a specific state.
+I remember on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2, I was asked, hey, is there a way to set this up so that my character always spawns at the top of this building?
+And I was able to figure out that you could move the player start location.
+If you were in the engine, you could move it wherever you wanted it and just make sure not to check it in.
+Um, we write bugs.
+So you can ask us to write bugs.
+If you find something, please ask us to write bugs.
+Please don't do it yourself.
+Because if you haven't been trained in QA, you probably don't know what is needed in that bug.
+And what's going to happen is that's going to get sent back to QA and they're not going to know what you're talking about either.
+Uh, so then they're going to come and pester you.
+So you're much better off just reaching out directly to your QA and saying, Hey, I found this weird thing.
+Can you go investigate it and write it up?
+And we'll be happy to do that for you.
+Again, you can ask us to test specific features or areas.
+We're going to do that anyway, but if you've just completed something and you want stress testing on it or you have priority that you want to make sure it gets done, you can definitely reach out to us anytime and let us know.
+We can answer questions for you.
+So QA touches every part of the game, right?
+Audio touches every part of the game.
+Every feature makes a sound.
+That means that QA needs to understand how to test pretty much every feature of the game.
+And to be honest with you, we spend a lot of time testing things that aren't audio, too.
+So we often know how to start that quest, how to get to that location, where that character is, how that debug functionality works, right?
+So please, reach out, ask questions.
+We can often get you that information really fast.
+And even if we don't know, we usually know who to ask.
+And again, helping with dev tasks, like the VO recording and the batch material tagging.
+How do we make this work?
+How do you get the most from your relationship with Audio QA?
+Help us help you.
+Invest in your QA testers.
+Create documentation and maintain it.
+Invest the time to sit down with your audio QA point of contact and walk them through your WISE project or your FMOD project.
+Walk them through how things are set up in the engine.
+Take the time to answer their questions.
+Give them tasks and testing.
+That often helps.
+We are capable of doing things on our own, but having that guidance of knowing where you need our attention the most helps us as much as it helps you.
+It helps us make sure that we are focused on what we need to be focused on.
+Maintain open communication.
+Answer questions.
+Ask questions.
+Invite your QA into your Slack channels.
+Invite them to all of the relevant meetings.
+Invite them to your sprint planning.
+Do triage, bug triage with them.
+Invite them to some of your social meetings.
+Create thorough, up-to-date documentation.
+Create thorough, up-to-date documentation.
+And maintain it.
+Please.
+Please.
+Please.
+build strong relationships, build friendships, collaboration, and advocate for your QA.
+It's not really a secret that QA in the industry isn't always treated very well, and I think that the misconceptions around it contribute to that, the idea that, oh, you're just getting paid to play games all day.
+No.
+So please advocate for your QA.
+If you don't have full-time QA, please advocate for your company creating full-time positions.
+If your QA is not paid well enough, if your QA doesn't have benefits, if your QA is not allowed to talk to developers, which tends to be more of a publishing QA thing than a developer QA thing.
+So there is a difference between those two.
+And I had it in my notes to tell you, but since I don't have my notes, I forgot to tell you that.
+So publishing QA comes at a much later stage and doesn't have as much interaction whereas development QA is there from the very beginning and is in constant contact with the developers.
+And contact and memes.
+I think I kind of rushed through this because, again, I didn't have my notes, so sorry.
+Does anyone have questions?
+Hi.
+For the how to write a QA bug report, do you have any resources that could be helpful for proper language or proper orientation for those type of bug reports so they don't get bounced back and forth between dev and QA?
+So it's going to vary a lot based on your project and the type of information that is needed for your project.
+Our bug reports for Tony Hawk look different than our bug reports for Diablo 4.
+But the core things that you need to have, you need to know what build you're on, what branch you're on.
+You need repro steps, and you need detailed repro steps, not just go to this place and do this thing.
+But be specific.
+If you're using a debug tool, indicate how to access that tool and how to do it.
+Give exact coordinates for where in the game you are.
+Be as precise as possible whenever you can.
+You should also include your expected results of what you thought was going to happen when you encountered this bug, as well as your actual results of what actually happened.
+Keywords can also help to make your bugs more searchable, especially on a really large project that has thousands upon thousands of bugs.
+Media capture is very important.
+If a screenshot is sufficient, if it's just an art bug where a screenshot shows the problem in full, that's great.
+Video is better.
+and any other information that you might need, the team that's going to work on it and so on.
+Hey, how's it going?
+Good.
+How are you?
+Yeah, good.
+Um, I was just wondering if there's ever any, um, uh, I don't know if this is like technically bugs, but, um, like kind of mix issues that might come into play.
+Like if I've made a song and there's like a certain amount of high end and then, uh, this sound designer has made some sound effects and they're all like really harsh as well.
+And those two things are clashing.
+If you would ever be like, Oh, this is it.
+Is that a bug or is that a mix issue or who would kind of look at that?
+Yeah, so if we encounter something and we're not sure if it's intended or not, best practice is to get a capture of it, a video of it, send it to the design team and say, is this intended?
+Is this what you want?
+Right?
+We're not here to judge your work.
+We're not here to tell you we hate it.
+We're not here to tell you that you're doing it wrong.
+We want to make sure that the vision you're trying to convey is what is actually getting across.
+So often we may run into something where we're not sure what the intended functionality is and the proper practice is to ask.
+Great.
+Thank you.
+You're welcome.
+Thank you for your talk.
+If you were to hire an audio QA, would you look for someone in audio with an interest in QA or someone in QA with an interest of audio or neither?
+Well, I can tell you how I got hired, which is that I had more of a background in audio and I was applying for a QA job.
+And that was actually what got me hired for Tony Hawk because I happened to apply at exactly the right time that they were looking for an audio tester.
+So the way that Vicarious Visions and Blizzard hire is not to list a specific audio QA position.
+It's, it's just hiring generic QA, but I have helped hire candidates before.
+I've helped interview candidates before.
+And we do look for folks who have specific interests because that means that they may have more knowledge that can be applicable to testing those areas.
+And then they'll have more interest and be paying more attention to those areas.
+So I don't know that I've really answered your question, but I'm also not in a hiring capacity, so it's a little hard to say.
+But I was primarily an audio person who was applying for a QA job, if that helps.
+It helps.
+Thank you.
+You're welcome.
+Thank you for your talk.
+And I was just curious that if you have any standards for listening environments for audio queries in your team.
+Could you clarify a little bit what you mean?
+Like some people can listen on headphones or speakers or surround systems.
+And I was just wondering if you guys have some kind of standardization team.
+some kind of a setup, whether it's at the studio or like I have a surround setup that was sent to me that I need to finish assembling when I get back home to be able to test on surround.
+So you do want to test in every format that you're shipping in, but probably not every tester is going to have access to those formats.
+Okay, thank you.
+Hi, perhaps this question has already been dealt with a little bit But for those who already have some QA experience maybe outside of audio QA, I have work experience in like software QA or perhaps they're a game tester QA but not for audio.
+What would you suggest the skills they would want to have besides obviously audio knowledge to say work in what you're doing and what would you recommend for them to know?
+I think a knowledge of middleware and knowledge of game engine.
+And again, those doesn't have to be the exact middleware or engine that's being used.
+Like for example, Diablo four is in a proprietary engine.
+So there is no knowing that engine before you work on that project, for example.
+But having a base knowledge of other engines, it's the same thing as like knowing one DAW, you can kind of, you can kind of figure out the other ones from there.
+Right.
+So you want to have some experience with engine.
+You want to have some experience with middleware.
+and you definitely want to have some experience in QA if you can.
+I don't think I can get much more specific than that because every project is so different and every team works so differently.
+Thank you.
+You're welcome.
+Hi, that was a great talk and I was taking some rigorous, crazy notes.
+You mentioned earlier about the way the Wwise project is being set up.
+kind of help with that.
+And I was wondering if you have any best practices or suggestions when setting up a Wwise project as not the QA person but as one of the main sound designers or one of the main people setting up the project.
+Are there any best practices when setting that kind of project up so it can be easily read and understood?
+I think it'll be the same practices as, uh, you know, if you're working with other sound designers, wanting to set things up in a way that is clear and it's the same thing, right?
+So you're, you're going to want to train your QA to understand how your project is set up.
+So it's more that you want to educate them on how you've done things rather than trying to tailor what you're doing to them.
+But the more clear and readable and the more sense it makes, obviously.
+The easier it'll be.
+So it's more about taking the time to train your QA on how you've set up your project.
+versus tailoring your project to your QA person.
+Uh, okay, thank you.
+You're welcome.
+Hey Amanda, thanks for sharing all the insight.
+Um, as someone that fixes a lot of audio bugs, uh, let me tell you how valuable I think two services are that you, that you provide.
+One is regression testing.
+To ask you folks to tell me exactly which code change or asset change made the bug appear is dramatically valuable because I can super surgically know that is the delta that I can investigate and fix it.
+The other thing is that I constantly ask QA is to reproduce the bug in the simplest form ever.
+Like if you are on the fifth mission in the third level after leveling, like go into the test map, do this console command, there's your bug.
+That is such a good valuable thing that you provide as well, so thanks for that.
+Yes, definitely.
+That is a really good point.
+Sometimes you'll run into a bug really deep into gameplay, but you don't need to get that deep into it.
+Simplify it.
+Keep the steps as simple as possible.
+Make it as reproducible as possible.
+Definitely.
+Awesome.
+Are there any more questions?
+I'm sorry the talk was so short.
+I had other things I was going to talk about, but I didn't have my notes.
+so
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+Hello there, everybody.
+Welcome to our talk, Creating Narrative Visual Effects in Temtem.
+We're super honored to kick off the Visual Effects Summit right now.
+And yeah, without further ado, let's go.
+Let's show some magic.
+All right, of course, it's good to know who you're listening to at least.
+So my name is Kees.
+I'm a senior visual effects artist at Crema Games.
+I started my visual effects career as a 2D artist working on Lethal League Blaze and eventually transitioned to a 3D real-time visual effects style combining the 2D elements.
+And currently I'm a full-time animator on Temtem and also a teaching assistant and mentor at Visual Effects Apprentice.
+As you can see already from my pictures, I'm a dog lover.
+And for me, dogs are here, cats here.
+There needs to be some balance, of course, in the Visual Effects team, and I like to explain everything in sound effects.
+Hello everyone, I'm Mireille, I'm the Lead VFX Artist here at Crema, and so far I have developed my career mostly working in Crema and Intentum, also some minor previous projects, but mostly there.
+Also, one of my main tasks within the team is to translate Kei-san's effect to the rest of the team, because you may know that not everyone speaks VFX language, so that's a thing.
+And also, whatever he said about cats and dogs, still under discussion.
+We'll get to it.
+Okay, so for a lot of you that may not know what Temtem is, Temtem is a MMO monster creature collector that's equipped with turn-based battles that are mostly 2v2 battles.
+It was created by Crema Games, which is a small Spanish team of around 30 people.
+And regarding visual effects, there have been four VFX artists in total, but never more than two at the same time.
+For us both, we've been working there, me, almost three years, and Case, a bit more than two years.
+And yeah, we've tried to put a bit, a lot of emphasis on handling the different narrative of the different creatures that appear in the game.
+We also wanted to say that the game has been developed using Unity with its built-in runner pipeline.
+Okay, and now Kees will tell you a bit about what can you expect from this talk.
+All right, so of course you want to think, what are the things we're going to talk about?
+So the main red line of our presentation will be the narrative aspect that we try to incorporate with our visual effects technique animations.
+So along this, we'll tell about the different tools we use to make this a reality.
+So we're going to show you the tool or the videos first without, then we're going to apply the tool and tell you what it does and how we think it makes the narrative visual effects storytelling a reality.
+And we want to point out these talks for intermediate to experienced visual effects artists that maybe want to put a bit more emphasis on narrative storytelling in their visual effects work, because we think it's really important.
+And of course, it might be interesting for other art professions that actually want to start out as a visual effects artist.
+Are there actually any people in the audience that aren't visual effects artists?
+Well, maybe after this talk you want to become a visual effects artist because it's a really cool job.
+And you could have already seen it repeated a few times on the screen.
+Along the presentation or during the presentation, we'll show you many different visual effects to kind of set the tone.
+To set the tone already for the talk, over here you see one of our many temtem called Drakash, not being smashed once, not twice, but of course three times by a giant pixel block named Turbo Attack.
+But of course, what makes it narrative, Mikko?
+So, what do we mean when we say that Phantom has a space for narrative visual effects?
+Okay, so Temtem has little gameplay limitations.
+We, of course, have some design constraints when it comes to how much damage a technique does, how much stamina it uses, the number of targets it has, but not really apart from that.
+This comes from the fact that the visual effects are mostly contained in 2v2 battles, where information that would be key in other games can make competitive games like League of Legends or, you know, adventure games, soul flight games, that information is not really relevant for us.
+This means that we can focus and investigate a bit more into other aspects of the visual effects, like for example, the narrative ones.
+We also wanted to say that since the game came out as an early access game, we've had a lot of interaction with the community.
+For us, this has been, I think, a privilege, because it's mostly been a lot of constructive feedback.
+Also, Temtem has a space for signature moves, and these are special moves that only one Temtem can use, and we've used them to further and deepen the different stories of a particular creature.
+Okay, so in here, you can see the main three techniques that we're gonna talk about in our presentation.
+From right to left, you can see leech, repress, and cozy net, but for now, we'll let you wondering how do the sequences look, and we'll tell you a bit about our production workflow.
+All right, so we think it's always nice to see how different games get created.
+So we want to show how it starts from getting an idea of a technique animation, up until applying and thinking of gameplay details, up until the final product.
+So what Miguel already said, we have little limitations in creative freedom.
+So we have done things like creating a giant black hole, sucking everything inwards, or a giant lava wall, which eventually pours hot lava over this little platypod, which is fine and is still fine to this day.
+I guess that's what happens when you let visual effects artists decide mostly what happens with visuals in the game.
+But how does it actually look?
+So, we have some information on the screen.
+Of course, we have an idea.
+This can be a designer's little story, like, hey, I got, for example, a lava wall and I want to pour hot lava over this platypad.
+Or we can even have a lot of freedom that we can create even our own ideas.
+So for example, next up we get some gameplay details.
+And you can see over underneath here, for example, we have Thunderstrike, of course.
+What kind of typing is it?
+Electric.
+How much, what is the category?
+Special, physical.
+What kind of damage does it do?
+Stamina and holds.
+And these little details I'll explain further down because we think gameplay details are very important to even begin, starting with the visual effects animations.
+Again, next time, for example, Fire Tornado.
+What kind of category is it?
+Of course, element fire.
+For example, you can see two holds.
+This will also depend on how long will the technique take.
+Next up, we have the concepting phase.
+And this really depends on actually the choice of the visual effects artists.
+Of course, we're an indie game, so of course we're an indie game.
+We're an indie company, so we don't have a lot of people in the company, around 30-ish people.
+So we don't have a dedicated 2D concept artist that helps us out.
+So what we like to do, we just draw our own concept art.
+So we like to draw the key frame, the biggest impactful key frame of the technique animation.
+And this is a very fast way for the art director, lead visual effects artist, to already discuss within 15 minutes already, this is what we want.
+And it's really fast.
+We also think maybe sometimes faster than kitbashing in a way.
+And also little scribbles, like this stampede scribble.
+And also, it's a very team collaborative effort that Miko and I work together.
+So we constantly go back and forth, overpaint, timing changes, tune in little details.
+And that's really fun to do.
+But let me explain further now what the gameplay elements actually are.
+Because we do have gameplay elements or restrictions, but we have different ones than compared to player versus player games, for example.
+So we have the duration that you already saw in the picture, spectacularity, and some other elements.
+So duration, what you saw is we have three holds.
+And basically, the bigger the hold, or the more turns you have to wait, the longer the technique animation has to be on the screen.
+So we can have technique animations that we have to make visuals on two to three seconds, or the highest holds eight to nine seconds.
+So that's a very good thing to point out.
+Okay, we need to create an effect that takes nine seconds.
+Next up, we have Spectacularity.
+This is mostly based on the damage, because if we make every technique 150 damage, of course, none of them would stand out.
+So we have some restrictions.
+Some techniques are zero damage, some are 10 damage, and some can go up to 150 damage.
+And we have some other elements such as stamina.
+How much stamina does it cost to cast a technique animation?
+The priority, does it go first, second, third, or fourth because of the turn-based battle system?
+How many target numbers?
+One temtem getting targeted, two temtem, or the whole area, or the whole battle zone?
+And what are the conditionings applied?
+Is it poison, burned, frozen, and so on?
+So even in the end, it doesn't look like this much, that much on their own.
+It's really a combination of of the elements together that we can pinpoint, okay, how big does the technique get?
+But, Migo, can you tell us something about the unique game aspects?
+Of course.
+Okay, so this will be the last bit of information before we dive into the techniques.
+And as for now, Tentame is 12 different elemental types.
+Each, of course, with its own color palette and shape language.
+And we have water, electrical, fire, earth, melee, crystal, you name it.
+And we have developed these color palettes for each one that are useful for more things that you may think of.
+For example, for us, VFX artists, it's super helpful to have this as a reference to fall back to.
+And also, for example, case is colorblind for some values of yellow.
+And since we mostly want yellow electricity and yellow fire, even if green fire is cool, green fire is really cool.
+But yeah, having this to fall back to has proven super useful.
+Also, the game is divided into main areas, as we call them the battle zones and the free-roam area.
+The free-roam area is where the game itself happens.
+It's where you find the other players, since it's an MMO game.
+It's where you find the NPCs, where the story itself happens.
+And then we have the battle zones areas.
+This is where the 2v2 battle happens and where we have developed most of our visual effects.
+And finally, Temtem right now, we have 164 different Temtem, and more than 350 techniques.
+And if you think about it, this has been one of the hardest parts of developing visual effects for Temtem, because we have to consider that every technique has to look good on every Temtem, because every Temtem can potentially use every technique, and of course they can re-sit them.
+So we have to play a lot with the scale of the techniques and the different effects because it's not the same if a small temtem like this body but receives a technique, a middle-sized temtem like this ballast over here, or the super huge electrical mythical temtem like this mulligan.
+Okay, so that was it for the information and right now we'll dive into our first big technique that's called leech.
+All right, so we have all the very important information out of the way that we even think of before we're starting.
+So we know, okay, how long does it take and everything.
+So let's talk about Leech.
+And of course, first, what's the narrative?
+How did it start?
+So let me introduce you to one of our many temtem called Typhoo.
+And we can say Typhoo is a pretty big meme in the community.
+Because well, Typhoo is a meme.
+Why does T-Pose Typhoo look like a dollar store scissor?
+Like once every couple of months, people are like, hmm, Typhoo.
+And then after a few games, don't play Typhoo, even for the memes.
+Typhoo doesn't deserve to be good.
+Typhoo deserves to be left in the dirt.
+So, of course, us as visual effects artists, I can look at everybody in the audience.
+When you hear from your, in this case, from a designer, hey, Typhoon needs a new special signature move, so it's really special only for Typhoon.
+Of course, we want to make Typhoon matter, because who doesn't love this T-pose and dollar store scissor?
+So when thinking of like an idea conceptualization, we think of, okay, what does fit the best and makes Typhoon matter and be part of something bigger than the Temtem universe?
+And eventually we wanted to give Typhoon a very nature godly feel that is like part of something bigger.
+Of course, we take much, much reference from games you have worked on, TV shows, everything we can take references off, anime also.
+And we thought a very fitting thematic for Taifu, a godly nature feel, was the Watcher from the What If series.
+I don't know if you've watched the What If series, but it's just the way it's looking at you, it's very menacing in a way, it's kind of like very godly.
+And we thought, well, we think this will be very special for Taifu.
+So here's a little sneak peek and let's dive into it actually, how we actually started out and what are the tools and techniques we apply.
+So first of all, we're talking about, we're going to talk about with Leech's spectacularism, I'll say spectacularity because I stumble constantly over the words, time remapping and Temtem battle shader effects.
+So first up, Spectacularity.
+So, you already heard us say a few times, 10x a turn-based battle game.
+So, what we really try to focus on, we need to keep the players engaged, because we can have technique animations up to 9 seconds.
+So we want to really encapture those hype moments because we create games for the players.
+So every time they use a skill, they're like, yes, I want to maybe use that Temtem only because of the skill.
+That's actually our goal.
+And we want to make it really matter and fit the whole Temtem story itself.
+So for Typhoon, that's the leeching part.
+And also what really works the best for it is mostly anime because anime timing is really great.
+It's very snappy and it's constantly engaging in a way, like the colors, everything's working.
+And we can really put a more emphasis on the thematic.
+We can give it much, much more power, really increased power of punches and everything together.
+And we really think that works great for Leech and the technique animations.
+Next up, we have time remapping.
+And in this video over here, we'll show you the video actually without the tool applied.
+We'll tell you what the tool actually does.
+And then afterwards, we're going to take a look how it looks with it applied.
+So what is time remapping?
+So with time remapping, we're able to slow or speed up time with time curves that you can see on the left bottom over here.
+This is actually a very artist-friendly way for us to efficiently try out different things.
+Like maybe we kick in a very slow motion kind of feel, a very speed up kind of feel.
+And we can give the technique 10 times more power with it.
+So just imagine for yourself, you're looking at this technique GIF.
+How would it look if it's very linear?
+It would lose a lot of power, a lot of anticipation.
+It kind of misses that hype moment and that anticipation moment for the players.
+So by just really increasing those curves, we can really give that a very spectacular feel to it.
+And we can say what gets affected by it.
+We can say everything gets affected in the scene.
+We can say the source animators, so the source temtem is getting affected, the targeted temtem, or we can say all the temtem in the area.
+So we have lots of possibilities if you think of it.
+So let's do a refresh for the mind how it looks without time remapping.
+And these can be some pretty small details actually.
+So the narrative is there, but it's kind of missing that juicy feel.
+It's kind of like the oomph of it.
+It's really like, oh, it's coming, it's coming.
+And then, bam, it explodes.
+So let's see how it looks with time remapping.
+And it can be a slight detail that some of you might not really recognize in the beginning.
+But for us, it's really adding on top of that extra animation feel.
+So Typhoo casts its skill, it builds up, it goes in slow-mo and it rapidly increases over time to really show Typhoo leeching the life source out of the enemy Temtem.
+And for the last tool of leech, let's talk about Temtem Battle Shader effects.
+And you can already get a question actually yourself, or, hey, Kees, why are there two floating eyes and some swishy swooshies, solar coasters, curve meshes?
+Yeah, you can name it what it is.
+We call it solar coast for now.
+Let me explain actually how that works, Temtem Battle Shader effects.
+So here we show Taifu in the Unity editor scene.
+And the cool thing we can do with Temtem Battle Shader effects is we can place Temtem clones.
+And you heard me say clones, and Miguel will tell a bit more about clones eventually.
+But what we can do is we can set custom parameters during the animation timing of the technique.
+So during the eight seconds, we can say we want to increase the fresnel over time.
+the texture speed, the power of the glow and everything.
+We have lots of possibilities with this and we use it again with the curve meshes we showed you, the curve files.
+But we can do other things only giving typhoon a nature godly feel.
+We can give a tantum a digital feel that is a distorted hologram.
+We can go more to nightmare field kind of effects like nightmare feet.
+We can even glitch the temtem like it's stuck in the matrix and offsetting the vertices so much for digital type effects.
+And we can send out an extra temtem clone with a battle shader on it, and we really portray the power of, okay, the temtem is getting punched, bonk, it goes backwards, and it's like an aura shader that we apply to it.
+So again, what does it do for Typhoo?
+Without the temtem battle shader effects, two floating eyes, some swishy-smooshy, solar coasters, it's missing something.
+but with the Temtem Battle Shader effect.
+It comes all together.
+The narrative is there that we think will really try to give Temtem Typhoon a very nature-godly feel.
+And it's a really cool tool, too.
+We can do lots of things with it.
+And let's see how it looks actually when we have all the tools combined and with some sound effects on it and see how it comes to a whole final product.
+And you might also notice at the end of the effect, we let some particles linger so the player can already register for, okay, this tantrum just got attacked because sometimes there are maybe four of the same tantrum in the battle scene.
+So with the first big technique out of the leech, Migo, can you tell us something about our next mental technique called Depress?
+Yep, definitely.
+Okay, so after leech, we are diving into Depress.
+This one is a mental technique.
+It's a damaging technique that requires the target to be asleep for it to work.
+So given the name of this technique, we wanted to try and recreate those kinds of feelings and emotions that you may get when you're going through a bad time.
+Our narrative idea for this technique was that if we were able to implement in some sort of way our own feelings into the game, then the technique would be more fitting inside the Temtem universe, but also outside of it, and the players would be able to relate more to it.
+Ok, so that's why, let me show you a technique As you can see, the enemy temtem goes into some sort of personality disorder where it sees itself out of its own body and some particles that play with it and it gets pulled back together, but of course it's damaged Okay, so in here we're going to talk about two main tools that we made to make this technique stand out, that are the extra tantrums or clones as Kees just said, and of course post-processing.
+So for these extra tantrums or clones, what these are, they are copies of the tantrums that are within a technique and we can use several different animations for them.
+We can use animations that they have in their Battlezone kit, that can be for example the gate hit animation or the attacking animation, but also we can use some animations from the free-roam area.
+This, in addition with, for example, some more basic animation that's just position, rotation, and scaling, we can create techniques that have sufficient narrative meaning just with that.
+Like, for example, you can see a lot of running temtems.
+That's the stampede scribble that I showed you earlier.
+Also in the GIF, you can see this technique that's called Oshidashi, and you can definitely see the impact that being able to animate this temtem has.
+Without it, well, the punch would feel powerful, okay, because we have the impact frame, we have the timbre mapping, but it will feel much less powerful if we didn't launch the temtem up into the sky.
+It also helps us to give some comedic effect, because as you may have seen, temtem visual effects lean into some sort of comedic or funny effect.
+And you can see that little star up in the sky, that's like, okay.
+Okay, and next up, you can see the effect this one has on the press.
+Without the extra temtem, you can see some particles floating around, but you don't understand why the temtem has disappeared, you don't really get where it is, and it has no narrative meaning.
+On the other hand, when we put it back on, you can definitely see that something's happening to it.
+We also use basic animation principles like this squat and stretch, so you can understand the violence of the pullback and the pullback together.
+Okay, also post-processing, maybe for some of you that may not know what post-processing is, it consists of filters that are applied in the last stages of rendering and with it we can create some effects like vignetting or changes of contrast, bloom, etc.
+So in Tantum we are able to modify the current post-processing that we have at any current time within the technique animation and we can have two of them overlapping at the same time.
+This means that we can have, for example, one handling a change of bloom and another one handling a LUT color swap of the full screen.
+We can do this also with curving files that I showed you earlier in time remapping.
+So this is a very artist-friendly way to do it.
+For example, this would be some LUT textures that we created for post-processing.
+And with this we can portray, for example, the violence of an explosion in this technique that's called knockback blast with these full black and white values, or color, sorry.
+We can also portray, for example, an electrical field with these blue and dark blue values.
+And also, we can create that feeling that you may have had if you had an electrifying massage, maybe.
+But yeah, for example, here we get a full black and white color swap of the full screen, that in addition with an inverted fresnel on the enemy temtem.
+We portrayed that thing that we may have seen in a lot of animes where the skeleton gets shown when you get electrocuted.
+Okay, we've also created an Uber shader for post-processing.
+because sometimes we want to handle more than one thing at the same time.
+For example, if we have overlapping stuff in time, it's easier to do it in just one file and not have to move it around.
+And you can see, for example, how we handle in the right part of the screen vignetting, in the middle part, there's kinetic lengths for some super fast techniques.
+And up there is the LUT color swaps.
+Okay, so getting back to the press, you can see the effect this one has.
+So without post-processing, you can definitely feel that something's missing, a transition feels a lot more bland, and we're missing something, yeah.
+But when we put it back on, you can definitely understand that you are going into that sort of mental state where the damage could happen, and suddenly it gets a lot more narrative meaning.
+Okay, so now let's show it with sound effects, of course.
+So yeah, you can definitely see the projectile finding, then you get both copies or both personalities pulled back of the temtem.
+The projectiles are the particles that are playing with both copies, and then the violins pull back.
+So you can definitely understand that life will never be the same again for this temtem.
+Okay, so next up, this is the app for the press, and we'll tell you about our next big technique that's called coaching it.
+So, our third big technique is called CozNet and maybe the wording is a bit wrong because it doesn't look very cozy for little Mosu.
+Yeah, we can all agree about that.
+Fun fact, actually, if we show our work in progress videos, we cast all the different technique animations, all the different small temtem, because we have, we think that's the most impact and sells the idea a bit more.
+And a lot of actually colleagues of us are like, no, the little temtem, so.
+All right, so what is the narrative of CozyNet?
+So with CozyNet, we really wanted to portray the feel of the temtem getting pulled into the lair of Arachnid, a spire temtem with the typings digital and nature, where Arachnid crawls down and eventually feasts on this little snack called Mosu.
+And yeah, we treat them with love, don't worry.
+So what are the things we're going to talk about?
+We're going to talk about actually two very important things that we think are very special when it comes to Temtem.
+It's camera movement and BZChain's Battlezone changes.
+So you can already see in the video over here, it's not shippable.
+The camera has an error or something.
+So let me get you through it, how the camera movement works and what we actually can do by adding extra movement on already everything that's there.
+So, Yeah, it's quite unique being a visual effects art for Temtem because sometimes we have our own ownership that we come up with our own idea.
+We create it from the beginning up until the end.
+And it's really, we think it's really special that we can do that.
+But also with this comes camera movements because camera movement is very important because we have the time for it with the turn-based battle system and everything.
+So we can really create interesting camera shots and camera positioning or camera positions.
+But how are we doing it?
+So we do it again with the curve files.
+It's a lifesaver for us.
+We can do, for example, animate the field of view curve of the camera.
+So instead of only doing screen shakes, we can create extra wobbles.
+So think of, for example, a very climactic explosion.
+It goes boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and then brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr it explodes.
+Those are kind of like the things we can do with field of view curves and we can go all out and just have a lot of fun with it actually.
+Next up we have curvings of different cameras so camera A and B and we have all kinds of freedom from how can we move camera A towards camera B so we can create shots of the cameras and how is it transitioning or when is camera B kicking in maybe camera C, D, E. We have lots of cameras sometimes.
+And during this, actually approaching 1.0 of Temtem, it actually released last September, there was one colleague of ours, Adrie Dovonio-Andres, we call him the shader god, and he had one thing, like one sentence he constantly repeated to us, and we want to share it with you.
+So, this is Adrie.
+And Adrie always told us, let the camera follow the effect.
+And why is this actually?
+Well, this way it looks like the player is naturally getting guided by the visual effects instead of an almighty being controlling the camera.
+What if typhoon?
+So what do we mean by this?
+Let's go, for example, through some examples.
+So over here you have Unseen Blow and you can already see something and I'm letting the first run of GIF again.
+Yeah.
+And you can already maybe see some things that when a projectile starts, we first let the player register, okay, there's something happening with the projectile, but we only let the second camera kick in when a projectile is halfway through the trajectory.
+So this way the player knows, okay, I need to take a look at the projectile.
+Okay, the projectile is going to do something.
+It's going to damage the other temtem.
+Because if we instantly let the camera move towards the target, the player doesn't know what to do.
+And it's kind of, we're forcing the player in a way.
+And the player is like, oh, I'm maybe not really together with the visual effects and the projectile movement of it.
+Over here you have the coach net itself.
+So you can see also with the line how the camera's moving.
+So first camera moves down.
+We do the anticipation also.
+It's really building up to that hype moment.
+It's like da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
+And it goes back to the normal battle zone area.
+And what I was talking about, building up to that climactic explosion with field of view curves.
+So this is one technique called DG thread.
+So the camera is zooming inwards.
+We really increase the field of view power.
+And it's like, we're holding a moment, tiny bit, and then it kicks in, it zooms very far actually inwards.
+And we show that, yeah, the 10th time is damaged by quite a, quite an amount of damage.
+So let's see again for coast net, how it looks without the camera movement, actually.
+So Eric Knight is casting the skill, and of course, there's something wrong.
+It doesn't look shippable at all.
+But let's see actually how it looks with the camera movement.
+So Eric Knight is casting the skill, crawls down like Spider-Man, and eventually feasting on his little snack called Mosu.
+So with camera movement out of the way, let's talk about battle zone changes.
+And you can already see, this is not the final battle zone, this is actually our visual effects test that you've seen.
+It doesn't look that great, so let's see how we can make it even better.
+So what are Battlezone changes?
+Battlezone changes are custom unity scenes where we hand place all kinds of different assets that are actually at our disposal.
+And we're doing it to really capture that because we do mostly Battlezones for signature moves that are special to one certain temtem.
+So we can really give a temtem like Arachnid, a temtem like Leech, like Typhoon, much more meaning to the overall, the skill of it and what it does.
+So what we did, for example, we created a giant spider web that's actually like the focus point, leading with the shape language, the lines to the middle, that little mouse.
+So there's something going to happen with the enemy temtem.
+And with that, we also added some environmental effects.
+So we give the feeling of the players inside the spider cocoon, and there's something going wrong, and it's definitely going to go wrong with the enemy Temtem.
+But also with this, if you think it yourself, we have lots of possibilities with this, because the Temtem universe for us is very big as visual effects artists.
+So what are some other things we can actually do with this?
+We can create a toxic wasteland, a stone dune and trench environment, a more martial arts melee environment.
+And we can even summon a stormy sea where thunder and tornadoes appear.
+Just a bit like in the Netherlands, where it's constantly raining.
+And trust me, I am from the Netherlands.
+It's constantly raining.
+Actually, also in San Francisco this week.
+So you can already see like we're having loads of fun also with this and we just kind of can go all out and just use all kinds of different things and the why's and the how of a meaning to the scene.
+Because why are we doing it?
+We're doing it to give again Eric Knight that special feel that maybe people want to play the Spire 10 because we can cast our enemy tantrums in a giant spider cocoon.
+And how are we doing it?
+We're using basically everything at our disposal that we can use.
+So if, for example, some 3D artists create some very cool environment art assets, we think we can use it in a way, create some interesting composition and camera shots.
+And if that works, yeah, we use that actually.
+So a refresher for the mind.
+How does it look without battlezone changes?
+So again, you can remember the normal visual effects test scene, it's not fitting at all.
+It misses the whole point of the technique.
+But with the Battlezone change, there's already more meaning to it.
+The narrative is there and just capture that moment of the spider tent and what could a spider tent be.
+And lastly, let's see how it looks with some sound effects because we think adding sound effects, getting added to the facial effects makes it a whole picture and become a final product.
+And there's also one thing I want to point out is that with certain techniques, we favor some cameras on the right side and the left side.
+This is more because when a camera is favored on the left side, it could be the friendly team.
+And when a camera favors the right side, it's the enemy team.
+Because what I told you again, some temtem can be, there can be two of the same temtem in the battle zone.
+So this is like a small cue for the players.
+It's like, okay, the enemy is using this skill right now.
+So with our third big technique out of the way, CozyNet, we have one more thing that's very important when it's getting applied to our technique animations, which is composition.
+Can you tell us something more about that, Miguel?
+Yep, okay, so as you've been seeing Temtem techniques are a little bit like small cinematics or like mini mini movies and we've tried to learn stuff like for example for animated series or movies and put what we've learned from them to use.
+We of course tried to live up to those standards and we have tried to implement this like for example with a low angle shot to portray a Temtem as much much more powerful or even just the opposite.
+Like if we portray a shot from a super high position, and it's a small temtem in a super big environment, then that temtem suddenly feels super weak.
+We've also tried to put two things together.
+One thing was that what Keith said, that the camera has to follow the effect.
+And the other thing is that the visual effects have to guide the eye.
+This is really important for us.
+So let me show you what I mean.
+In this technique that's called Crystal Deluge, you can see that we try to, at first, the camera following the effects, because we don't start moving the camera up until the VFX have left the camera shot.
+And also we have that triangular shape, so we make sure that the player is looking downwards.
+Also that way the transition feels a lot more natural.
+This is important because in composition in Temtem we don't want the player to miss any important information and we've tried to do it and it's been one of the hardest parts of developing VFX here.
+This would be a sketch of the triangular shape I was talking about and you can see that the effect has already left the screen.
+This next technique, that's called unseen blow.
+You can see what Kees was telling about earlier, that we don't start moving the camera up until the projectile is like 50% on its way over the enemy.
+In here, we put our higher values in the projectile, so we make sure that the player is looking, well, of course, at the projectile, and that they are looking at this action line.
+And finally here, this is the signature move of Wasp Beam.
+That's a Wasp Temtem.
+and we do portray the temtem as more powerful with this slight low angle shot at the beginning and also with that conic shape that we do upwards we make sure that the player is looking above and behind the temtem because of course the first time they see the technique they are not going to know what's going to happen but at least they know where it's coming from so they are not surprised and they're like okay I wanted to look there but in a way we're making that look there So this would be the action line that we want the player to look at.
+And yeah, we are getting close to the end of the presentation, but not quite there.
+Because, but wait, there is more.
+So let's do a small recap of what we talked about with the three techniques, leech, depress, and cozy net.
+We've talked about things such as time remapping, adding spectacularity.
+Temtem battle shader effects, Temtem clones, and so on.
+And we really think we have many more tools, but we think these are the most important tools that we can go actually all out and capture that narrative feeling of the technique animations.
+We also think, even in the slightest, this could also work for you, because narrative visual effects meaning is very important, we think, and to give maybe the basic explosion a bit more meaning to it.
+Of course, but wait, there is more.
+Because we're all visual effects artists, there are lots of visual effects artists over here.
+Imagine what we can do with this.
+So, with that out of the way, can you tell us something about the divine god called Peak Epic?
+Okay, so this is the signature move, this Piggy Tentum, that's called Piggy Pig.
+And let me tell you the story for this one.
+So since the game came out as an early access, there was a lot of interaction with the community.
+And some Tentums in the beginning, they were super overpowered, like insane.
+And it was the case for this Piggy Pig Tentum.
+And of course, since it was so powerful, people started comparing it with a god.
+and like shortly after this was all around in the discord okay and shortly after of course the pkip charge was born that was a thing and we wanted to give back to the community in a way and and try to put what well what they showed us and put it in the game so let me show you Okay, so of course this is a meme for us, but we also wanted to make it look good for the players that weren't there in the beginning.
+But yeah, I think it's been super fun developing VFX for this game.
+You can also see that we've used all of the tools that we've been talking about, like for example, the time remapping, overlapping post-processing with that vignetting and chromatic aberration.
+But yeah, next up we'll tell you a bit about another technique that's called horror.
+So approaching 1.0, we kind of got like super comfortable with the Temtem IP.
+I think we can speak for a lot of people that when you get at the end of like a stage from DLC or a game, you're really trying to push yourselves.
+Okay, we got all this, let's create some crazy things actually.
+So what we try to do with the mental technique, especially because fire is fire, electric is electric, but mental can be lots of things.
+It can be depersonalization with the press, for example.
+Or it can be something in your mind, like something affecting your amygdala.
+Think of games such as Bloodborne, stories of H.P.
+Lovecraft.
+I'm myself a huge fan of those.
+I was like, let's see how we can really put maybe Temtem in the Temtem universe and let's summon the depths of Cthulhu and put it in a Temtem jacket that fits the whole narrative of it.
+So we summoned the giant tentacle eye floating, looks like a raid boss in a way to give that feeling of composition.
+Oops.
+Oh, sorry.
+To give the feeling of composition and the menacing feel of the temtem that's in the mental realms.
+Oh no, I'm not going to be the same after this anymore.
+And what we did was we sent out a pulse of mental powers when upon impact tentacles burst out with toxic viscous goo splashing towards the player's screen.
+The next technique is called outgrowth, or first when it started, drain climbing plant.
+And this was actually a technique we came up with our own, like the whole idea was on our own.
+And the designer also told us, okay, sure, you can do it.
+Good luck.
+And then afterwards, oh, okay, how are we going to do this?
+So this technique is for one of our mythical tantrum called tyrannic.
+which comes from the fire volcano environment and its typing is fire and nature.
+And what we wanted to capture with this technique animation was the full force of nature ramping towards the enemy, creating a tree of life and eventually exploding in nature colors and nature schematic.
+And a bit of flavor of Naruto wood style jutsu.
+So for this technique, it was a real team collaborative thing.
+And again, our shader god comes back, Adri de Voglio Andres, created a root shader because this was a very necessary thing for us that we needed.
+So I'm going to explain to you actually how we set it up and how we made this possible, this effect.
+So first, we needed some custom meshes that we created in Blender.
+And you can see some red vertices painted on these meshes.
+Maybe some of you already know how the root shader works or like how you let the roots grow in a way.
+But these actually, these vertices determine the thickness of the root because again, shape language is very important and we want to get rid of the symmetrical shapes in the technique animation.
+So it feels more natural and the roots really feel natural in a way.
+Next up, we have a basic shader that actually Chromium made over here, together with Andri.
+And these cover things such as fresnel, for example, texture panning, because that's a very important thing also, together with the roots.
+And also, of course, the root growing in a point, actually, instead of being cut off, because then it feels more natural and believable to the players.
+We painted our own personal roots tileable texture.
+And you can see over here how we try to implement the roots hand placed again with the battle zone change that we think really fits the camera movement and the battle zone and the composition for the battle zone changes.
+And it's also nice to see how it actually started, because this was the first color scheme.
+But of course, the narrative is very important, but you can already guess it.
+Tyrannic comes from a fire volcano there, and it's typings fires in nature.
+So it leads more towards the orange colors, the more brighter colors.
+So we changed it up totally.
+And it took a while, of course, but these things, mistakes can happen in game dev.
+And I think everybody makes sometimes these mistakes.
+And let's see, let's also show you the first ever draft of outgrowth.
+And there might, there are some important things I want to point out afterwards.
+So you can already see the camera movement is there.
+The composition, everything is there.
+The roots are basically working, but it's very cluttered.
+You don't really see where you have to look.
+The color scheme is all wrong.
+But this actually shows that camera movement is really a key into our visual effects animations.
+And that, yeah, a lot of signature moves, we just even start with camera movement.
+And on top of that, we add the visual effects layers.
+So we make it easy for ourselves.
+Next up, Migo is going to tell us more about Black Hole.
+Okay, so as we've been saying, sometimes the ideas for the techniques came from the designer or our CEO, Enrique Paños, who was the one that created the techniques.
+But other times, the ideas for the techniques came from either ourselves or more tech part of the company.
+So this was the case for Black Hole.
+In this one, we wanted to try and recreate the moment that you would feel, would think, inside a black hole, of course.
+That's you hear nothing, you see nothing, there's nothing happening.
+So let me show you.
+Yeah, so that was that.
+And yeah, we also did a custom post-processing here.
+Let me show you, actually.
+Swirling distortion in the middle to also portray that feeling that everything's been sucked inside the black hole.
+You can see it right over there.
+So yeah, that's also helped out a bit.
+Okay, so this would be our last technique.
+So Kees, will you do me the honors here?
+I can.
+I think we can speak for a lot of people and this technique will speak some volume actually.
+And we've all experienced this like maybe every week, three, four times, five times.
+And if not, well, we have a very special computer actually.
+So let's just let this be a technique speak for itself.
+Yay, blue screens.
+Who doesn't love those?
+Okay, so what we want you to take from this, of course we know that you have to be in this sort of position where putting this in your game makes sense, but if you are to take anything from this talk it's that in some cases less is more, okay?
+Because you see that this is literally one big blue billboard and a sad face, and it has a lot of narrative and comedic meaning.
+So we think that if you are able to implement, well, maybe any of that, even in the slightest in your own games, maybe you can benefit from that.
+Great, so thank you all so much for coming.
+This was the end of our talk, but we didn't want to leave before saying some shout outs and some thank yous.
+So of course we didn't create Temtem on our own because yeah, that's just not possible.
+And we want to thank the, just want to give some huge shout outs to the team back in Madrid.
+Each and every person is super talented and just working with such a team that has so much passion for the Temtem IP is just great.
+And that we can share our visual effects work with them is just an amazing opportunity.
+Also, we want to thank our bosses, Enrique Paños and Guillermo Andradas, for believing in us, letting us give this talk and just having trust in us as representing Temtem, the IP.
+Also Alex Munoz and our shader god, Adrie de Vognio-Andres, during 1.0 and just working on Temtem techniques, the feedback sessions were just super into detail with animation to time, shape, language, everything.
+Shaders also helping out, and it's just, for us, really valuable.
+People that really helped us out a lot.
+And Jason, where are you sitting?
+Jason, thank you so much for reaching out to us to give us the opportunity to give this talk about Temtem and creating narrative visual effects animations.
+It's actually our first time going to GDC and our first time in America, so it can be quite overwhelming, but just sharing, because we're also quite new in the visual effects industry, and just sharing how much fun we have creating visual effects and how we can also do other kinds of visual effects and narrative visual effects, it's just amazing to share that.
+And of course, lastly, regarding the GDC team giving out the important information about travel documents and everything, it really helped us out a lot.
+And thank you especially Sam Warnke for replying so super fast.
+So with that out of the way, actually, there is a little temtem that has actually a question.
+And that is, are there any questions?
+Yeah.
+Yeah, if it's at the mic, that could be possible, yeah.
+Yeah, I think that's best.
+I'm a little short.
+Excellent talk, thank you.
+I wanted to check, what were the main points of collaboration you had with the wider team?
+Like, what departments are you mainly collaborating with?
+So, the main point with the wider team, like the collaboration.
+So, I think especially with Adrie de Vogna Andres and the art director, we really wanted to capture that the Temtem style of the visual effects fits the universe.
+But for example, also with the sound people that created the visual effects sounds, They also sometimes ask us like, hey, what is actually your feeling with this technique animation?
+Because sometimes the ideas come up ourselves.
+And I can think also with game design, when we created Outgrowth with the routes moving forward, we had this idea and we showed a concept, but of course then the designer is going to ask, oh, how many targets does it have?
+Is it one target, two targets?
+How long is it?
+Because if we make technique animations too long compared to 50 damage, then players will just be, Come on, again, again, again.
+Sometimes that happens.
+I think, well, since it's a rather small company, in the end, we've had a lot of interaction with every department, mostly, because, for example, some techniques, I can think of the Shane Schmoyer's REC.
+That one, the animation team did the animation for that one, and then we put on the visual effects.
+Also, sometimes the 3D department created some of the environments, so in the end, Actually a mix of every department almost.
+Like for example a monkey getting animated jumping up with two giant rocks and smashing it downwards.
+Those kind of things.
+So it's really cool to create effects for that.
+That's super cool.
+Thank you.
+No problem.
+Hey there.
+First, it's really impressive you built this game with 30 people.
+Thank you.
+Pass it off to you.
+That's great.
+So you guys obviously have so much creative freedom to build these effects for your TemTems.
+So where did you checkpoint yourself in terms of budgeting or memory usage or time?
+Because you could build environments, you can build shaders.
+What kind of went on with that process?
+So where do we build the budgeting, timing, everything?
+Well, I think for optimization, the hardest thing was for, for example, Nintendo Switch, because we have lots of billboards that are just full on in screen.
+So you can already imagine the overdraw.
+So when we optimized for the Switch, it took a long time because we want to capture that feeling that it feels like very rich, the effects, but doesn't lose the glow and everything in the shapes.
+And that was pretty difficult.
+Yeah, we had to kill our uber shader that we had for PC and just build several super minor shaders that worked for that.
+And also regarding time, I think we did every technique within 3 or 4 days.
+Of course, it took more, it took less.
+Outgrowth took two weeks because of the color change and everything and the slight colorblind values.
+I was like, okay, these colors, oh no, again, again, back and forth, but that happens.
+Yeah, and a follow-up.
+Do you guys use the visual effects graph, or do you guys use particle systems, or do you guys use... Like, what's the core for what you build?
+We use Shuriken, because it was built with a built-in render pipeline, a 2019.4 version.
+Cool.
+For example... Oh, sorry.
+For example, like, the routes we animated by hand with the animator, because you just have control in the way the feeling control.
+Like, you have to feel in this, okay, how can I really...
+When the root grows, it goes like, it bursts upwards and you let it hang.
+And then when it goes, it goes.
+Yeah.
+Kind of like how they do it in Naruto and like the animes.
+That's like very timing feeling.
+Yeah.
+Cool.
+Well, thank you so much.
+Thank you.
+Thank you.
+Hi, guys.
+I was curious about how you went about deciding when to trade off between keeping the animation as satisfying as possible and how much time the animation takes.
+Because I realize that sometimes, take the animation as good as it can look, you need a certain amount of time.
+But after a certain point, you're making a player wait a certain amount each time they play it.
+So how did you go about deciding when it needed to be So regarding timing and how long do you think a technique animation should take and how we decided.
+So we have the holds for example.
+So 0 holds is 2 to 3 seconds and 3 holds so how long the technique animation holds before getting cast.
+possible to cast, it's nine seconds.
+But we have, for example, the giant lava wall that you saw with like platypus standing there and then eventually lava will pour over the temtem.
+First, the technique was 15 seconds or so, 13, because we had like a whole concept art that the lava walls are appearing, we have a camera pouring like over the lava wall, looking downwards, then we follow the lava, following downwards.
+And then our shader guard, Adrieu Von Andres, he was like, It's 15 seconds.
+It's two holds, so it needs to be seven seconds.
+So we had to just cut off like half of the technique animation and still make it work.
+So sometimes it's also a try and error.
+We have the, because we have lots and loads of fun, but sometimes you forget, ooh, okay, this takes too long.
+Players are not gonna like this.
+We got too excited with it.
+Yeah.
+And also if you think about it, like if it's a three hold technique, it's gonna be seen much less.
+Because you have to wait three turns to use it.
+So in the end, we balance it out.
+A technique that's three seconds, maybe you can use it three times, so in the end it's nine seconds.
+And one technique that you can use it once every three turns, it's nine seconds.
+So it kind of balances it out, yeah.
+Thank you.
+Oh, yes.
+Thank you so much for doing this talk, it was really nice and really cool to learn about.
+And I was wondering, for your concepting stuff, what are you guys trying to focus on with that?
+Are you more like color theory stuff, or like, I guess just what's your focus with that?
+I think when I start out at Tantum, I'm a huge advocate of overpaints for visual effects artists because For example, when you're a smaller team, you don't have concept art.
+And I think it's, uh, for example, kit bashing sometimes might take a bit longer and just drawing it out.
+Even a little sketch or just full out sketch 15, maybe up 20 minutes.
+It just shows in one shot.
+This is what we want.
+We don't do like some techniques.
+We do the charge part, the impact part, and then the ending part.
+And we concept it out, but we never go longer than 30 minutes in a way.
+But this is just, uh, Sorry, what was the question again?
+Oh, just to get your focus for the concept.
+Yeah.
+So with the focus, it's like to capture that main impact moment, the highest part of the technique animation.
+Awesome.
+Thank you so much.
+Thank you.
+Hello.
+I have a question about your gradients and your gradient management system.
+How do you iterate making new gradients?
+Let's say you make a new like attack class or.
+Damage type and then also how do you balance that against your very vibrant and colorful environments?
+Like do you mean for example, how do we tackle our color gradients for example LUT textures?
+The what, sorry?
+The LUT textures Well, we can, for example, with knockback blast that you saw with the very black and white flashing frames that you're really building up to the anticipation.
+Sometimes we invert the colors by accident and it's like, oh, that's cool.
+That's cool.
+And then we use it for loads of other techniques.
+but yeah with colors and everything and other other times we just like for example if it's an electrical field we think that we have to go for those blue or bluish dark blue values so in the end it's mostly going back to our color palettes and applying that to the to the technique also of course if it's something super particular like the electrocution thing we have to go for references outside of the game So it can be anime references or other games, of course.
+So yeah, I think that's it.
+Thanks.
+Awesome.
+Thank you.
+No more questions?
+All right, cool.
+Thank you so much, everybody.
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+I'm going to tell you all about our project Immortality.
+This was already going to be a loose and ramshackle presentation, and then the organizer of this conference decided to schedule my talk first thing in the morning, the day after the awards show.
+I'm going to try and get through it, and we'll pull together.
+I want to get to a nice, substantial Q&A, so I'm going to try and power through it.
+Apologies, anyone that has to try and keep up with me.
+So let's go.
+I'll start my timer.
+So I'm Sam Barlow.
+I'm a game director, designer, writer.
+Founded this company, Half Mermaid Productions, to go make interesting narrative games.
+Why are we called Half Mermaid?
+It's a fun story.
+When we started my last project, Telling Lies, we had to set up an entity to go make things and do all the legal stuff, and the lawyer rang me up and was like, oh shit, we need a name for your company.
+that has to be unique and interesting.
+And on the spur of the moment, I thought of this dream project that I had, which was an idea for a movie about Alfred Hitchcock working with Esther Williams.
+If you don't know who Esther Williams is, this is Esther Williams.
+She was at the height of her fame, probably the most famous film star at the time, and she was known for making movies in which she would swim.
+She kind of invented the Olympic sport of synchronized swimming, and she would do these elaborate musical spectacles involving swimming.
+Her story was fascinating because she had aspirations to be more significant as an actress, to take on work that didn't just involve swimming.
+And so the idea for this movie was you'd kind of have Alfred Hitchcock at the end of his career and he's kind of fading and he comes together with Esther and they both want to make something special and the focus of this movie would be Hitchcock wanting to shoot the most elaborate drowning sequence that had ever been conceived.
+And so the name of this movie was Drowning a Mermaid, which was nicely kind of ironic.
+So that became the name of the company.
+And then when we started Immortality, we decided we were going to self-publish.
+We realized that without the context I've just given you, drowning a mermaid sounded kind of aggressive and scary as a company name, so we kind of morphed it into Half Mermaid, acknowledging that all of us, at least from the top up, are half a mermaid.
+And this is significant because that dream project I had, this idea of exploring this combination of director and actress and the creative tensions, essentially found a new form in, ultimately, the project Immortality, which, if you haven't played Immortality, I am probably going to spoil everything.
+So you have, I don't know, like three minutes if you can download it on your phones before it's all going to be ruined for you.
+Immortality is a video game about exploring footage from three lost movies and answering, initially, the question, what happened to Marissa Marcel, the star of these three movies?
+It was the first indie game ever to get a perfect score of 10 in Edge magazine.
+And last night, we won two awards.
+We clearly did something right, and if you follow all the steps I lay out here, you can recreate that success.
+It's very reproducible.
+This is a template you can just apply to your own projects.
+So I'm going to zoom back out, and I'm going to kind of start from the higher level philosophies and goals that drive what we're doing.
+And hopefully, if we have time, I'll get to the spreadsheets, which I know is the thing that everyone is here to hear about.
+So what is the driving mission behind what we're doing at Half Mermaid and what is my mission in games in general?
+And for me, it's kind of crystallized, especially over the last few games, to be about storytelling and the form of storytelling.
+And for me, if I look back at the 20th century, which, you know, I was born in the 20th century.
+As my kids remind me, I was born in the late 20th century, which makes me sound like an antique.
+The 20th century as a period of storytelling for me is defined by broadcast, right?
+This is the big game changer.
+You've gone from traditional storytelling techniques, kind of oral storytelling, in-person theatrical storytelling, and you have the popularity of radio that then blossoms into network TV and cinema where a storyteller can create a beautiful piece of storytelling and then share it with a huge audience and that audience can then absorb and react and there is a sense of global community.
+around it but it's so powerful and my go-to, this is like the best fact ever, my go-to kind of example of how powerful this moment was and this transformation to broadcast was in the 50s Orson Welles did a live TV version of King Lear when this version of King Lear was broadcast, more people watched the live TV version of King Lear than had ever watched any performance of King Lear in the entire history of humanity prior to that day.
+So you get this sense of like the seismic shift from like how stories were told and distributed and the scale at which they operated.
+Once we hit broadcast, you know, the scale is obscene.
+And that is such an interesting and powerful thing.
+So now that we're in the 21st century, what is my sense of what is gonna define the forms of storytelling that we create?
+And for me, it's all tied up in digital, right?
+What does it mean to tell stories through digital media?
+What does that enable?
+And for me, the initial beautiful first step is what I call throwing away the container.
+So if you look at, take movies as an example, The structure of a movie, the fact that it's like 90 minutes to 2 hours roughly, the act structure is very specific.
+Like the container of movies exists for very practical purposes, right?
+If you want to distribute a movie, you need to print it on film, put it in a can, at least you used to.
+drive it to the movie theater, play it.
+If you're broadcasting a television show, naturally you have a single static version of the show that then gets blatted out to everybody, and again, there are restrictions there, right?
+The 30-minute show or the 45-minute show, act structures based around commercial breaks, these very specific containers that, you know, exist for very practical reasons.
+If I'm watching a movie, there is a limitation to the human bladder.
+The movie theaters want to schedule multiple movies throughout the day for commercial reasons.
+So we have all these kind of restrictions that come with this kind of 20th century version of broadcast.
+But now that we're digital, we can throw those away entirely, right?
+And I think up until now, the disruptive kind of digital storytelling media has tweaked the container, right?
+Netflix might say, oh, we can have a 35, 36, 37-minute episode.
+Or maybe Stranger Things can be two and a half hours long or an hour long.
+Is it a movie?
+Is it TV?
+But these are all like very subtle shifts.
+They're still writing these pieces of television in the same structure, with the same container, with the same usage of plot as this kind of guiding principle.
+So for me, the real opportunity that we have in coming from games is to throw these containers away and what happens then?
+What do you do in the absence of the container?
+And for me, if you look at the core pillars of what video games do best and can do best, these are the means by which we can navigate this much more open, interesting space for storytelling.
+So here are my four pillars.
+In the background there, that's the pillars of Nosgoth, which is a little bit of foreshadowing, if you take note.
+And the four pillars for me are challenge, right?
+As human beings, if you put an obstacle in my path, if you give me a riddle or question, I'm naturally inclined to want to overcome that obstacle, to solve the riddle, to answer the questions.
+So challenge is this really interesting driver.
+When you give people agency and control in a piece of storytelling, that's going to really drag them in and give them that sense of immersion.
+Expression is, I think, like my favorite.
+When I think of expression, I think of like Nintendo.
+I think of playing Mario, which is a game in which Nintendo say, here is this game about running and jumping, but the mechanics of that game give you a richness and a fluidity to allow you to express yourself through how you run and jump, right?
+Any two people playing Mario are going to navigate differently.
+There's like a real kind of nice possibility space within that mechanic.
+And I think what differentiates my games often with some other narrative games is really paying attention to how can the player express themselves through how they interact with the story and finding mechanics and structures which open up to that expressivity.
+The third pillar, exploration, is obviously a fundamental feature of a lot of video games.
+As a hunter-gatherer species, we are predisposed to dig exploration, being led by a sense of curiosity, discovery.
+These are key fundamental aspects to a lot of traditional video games.
+And I think, again, what I've been doing is trying to take a lot of those verbs around exploration and apply them directly to the story itself.
+And that's been kind of a fascinating journey.
+And then the fourth pillar is the one that we sometimes take for granted.
+Video games are very good at simulating things.
+We can simulate physics and vehicles and bullets and have AI that has an abstracted simulation of some kind of creature.
+And so we kind of lean on that a lot because it's for would involve players, but I kind of questioned how useful it was for my, specifically my storytelling, and so starting with her story in 2015, I kind of explicitly gave myself the challenge of make a video game with no simulation, no state changes, no tracking of kind of structure, can I still create an experience which is enjoyable and immersive.
+Given this kind of approach, the last few games I've made, I set out, so with her story, I was exploring a lot of these ideas for the first time.
+The idea was to deconstruct a detective story, take a type of story that the audience is familiar with, knows all the tropes, take that knowledge and then use that to kind of fuel the experience by breaking it down into atomic elements, letting people freely navigate.
+I followed this up with Telling Lies And the use of video in her story was somewhat instinctive.
+There wasn't a lot of conscious thinking about why I did that.
+But looking back with Telling Lies, I started to think about what was interesting about this technique of using video.
+And the kind of stated mission of Telling Lies was to make an anti-movie.
+It was like all the things which make this distinct from the traditional forms of movies, the structure of it, the pacing of it, the way we shoot it, were kind of driving the idea of telling lies.
+And so both of these kind of culminate in Immortality where we kind of then revisited a cinematic aesthetic and said, well, what happens if we deconstruct movies themselves, right?
+If we start to break apart how movies work, why movies work, how they're made, and kind of really dig into that.
+And it unlocked some extremely ambitious and challenging questions.
+So it's like a kind of fun thing to do.
+So, also driving this, I have like my pillars of what is a video game, right?
+And as I'm working on a game, I'll keep returning to those, right?
+Is this expressive enough?
+Is there a meaningful challenge?
+You know, how does the exploration work?
+Are we empowering the player with our exploration?
+But the kind of other method I have, which is sort of fundamental to my process, is I have these three aspects of the game and The logic is, if I have all three of these in place, this is going to be a good game.
+And if I don't have a clear idea of all three of these, do not start making game.
+This is the early sanity check of is there an actual solid core here, and as well it helps with When the game's finished, is it going to be sellable?
+Is it going to be explainable?
+Is this something I can market?
+The whole kind of concept gets tied up here.
+So the method is to come up with a theme.
+So the theme is, what is the question that we're exploring here?
+And it might be a question I don't have an answer to.
+and And then there's the emotion.
+And this is kind of key to me, is as a storyteller, I want to have a really specific emotion that I felt that I want to communicate.
+And to communicate that needs an experience, right?
+If I was to just put it into words, it would sound trite or unspecific.
+So how do we create an experience, and through living that experience, have the player feel this emotion.
+So for example in Telling Lies the emotion was how does it feel to have been in a relationship that's failed but still hold in your head the memories of the happy memories of when that relationship was working, right?
+And it's a very complicated part of being a human is holding these conflicting emotions and still having the spark and the way that memory works.
+Like there was this real gnarly little emotion there.
+It was like, how do we get people to experience that and think about it?
+Because if I express it like I just did, it's kind of lame.
+And then a key thing is the metaphor.
+I call it, I'm slightly breaking the use of the word metaphor.
+The idea here is what is what is the metaphor and kind of it becomes the mechanic that describes the game and this becomes really useful communication tool to the player so for example with her story the metaphor was that moment in a police show where the detective is sat at the computer and they've run out of leads they're at the you know it's about That's the core mechanic of her story, and that is this metaphor.
+So then if you build the game around that, when you then show players the game, they get it because they recognize this thing.
+And the question is, is this a useful metaphor for the story we're telling?
+Is this going to be something that you can wrap these themes and emotions in?
+And so yeah, the process is to really use this as just like a way of analyzing a piece of game design and going, do I have these three things?
+And, you know, maybe it's easier to do this in the indie space, but also like throw out the crap that is extraneous to this, right?
+If you can kind of focus on these three things, that gives you a tight and cohesive piece of game.
+So doing this process on immortality, our theme, which was absurdly ambitious, was why do human beings tell stories?
+And we're like, if we're going to do something that's about cinema and looking back at the 20th century, and cinema is the great storytelling form of the 20th century, this is an opportunity to ask these very deep questions.
+And it was exciting.
+to give myself permission to ask something as ambitious and silly as this.
+Because sometimes you try and kind of scope things down and you feel like, oh, this is like overreaching or it could end up awkward if we try and answer these big questions.
+And, you know, with this project, it really became tied up in Like to what extent is our mortality part of this?
+You know, oftentimes you look at people creating pieces of art, creating stories, and sometimes the objective is to use it as an immortality project, to create something that will live beyond them.
+And is that a useful and healthy thing to do?
+So this was like the theme that we set out to explore.
+The emotion was, again, it always sounds trite when you try and express it, but struggling with the impossibility of creating the perfect story.
+And it was like, if storytelling is something we're driven to do, if there are kind of primal reasons for it, the most interesting way to explore that is a case of failure, right?
+So this fella here is from the cancelled Legacy of Kane game that I spent three years of my life working on.
+was the most challenging thing I worked on and the biggest failure, probably, of my career.
+After that I went and did some stuff and I did her story.
+So it's slowly being repressed and buried, all my feelings of this project.
+And as we started to build this one, I'm like, oh shit, this is all This is all about that Legacy of Kain game because there's such a commonality between movies and games in terms of the number of people you need, the expense, the technology, right?
+These are very challenging places to try and tell a story and tell a true and pure story because there's just so much going on.
+So, you know, I really wanted to try and tap into how that felt.
+Why did I work so hard?
+Why did I push myself so hard at the expense of my family and the rest of my life to try and make this legacy of Kengame, which was a constant struggle, and how did it feel when it failed?
+And, you know, trying to put that into an experience for you all to enjoy.
+Then the metaphor became the Moviola.
+This was like the very first design doc for the project was this little picture of Pikachu with Moviola.
+It's a slightly mixed metaphor.
+We can kind of expand it and say it's the Moviola of the editing suite, right?
+The metaphor became, imagine you're in an editing room and you have all this footage, right?
+That process where in making a movie, The editor sits down to do the assembly cut, and they have everything that's been filmed, this vast amount of footage.
+And they start organizing it, and obsessing over it, and looking at it, and picking out the good takes, and going frame by frame, and just really immersing themselves in the beauty of the film, and slowly they assemble a movie.
+And so that kind of was our sort of guiding principle and the mechanics of that and kind of wanting to explore the tactile nature of film as a medium versus the kind of more digital stuff we're familiar with.
+But even at this point, the presence of Pikachu shows that we were aware that we were also making Pokemon Snap, essentially.
+And this was another way that I justified, like, this project's going to work.
+and we're doing some weird stuff and we have these ideas but I've played Pokemon Snap and that was fun and people liked Pokemon Snap so this is going to work.
+So then the next thing that we do and this is going to be a huge difference for me going from the AAA space or the bigger project space to being an indie and being able to kind of define how projects work.
+And it is specificity.
+And to be honest, like, all I ask of a game these days is to have some specificity.
+Like, I want some real crunchy, little, special, unique details.
+I want to feel like I'm engaging with something that's very authentic and specific.
+Like, I just recently finished playing Pentament, right?
+And I was like, oh, this is some, like, This is like a deep, deep dive into a particular fetish for this period of history.
+I'm feeling enriched by interacting with this.
+It doesn't feel like a mishmash of generic stuff.
+And the 100% reliable recipe I have for imbuing a game with specificity is research.
+So on this project, we spent a year, year and a half of a two and a half year project was researching and outlining and writing and thinking about this stuff.
+And I have another cheesy tool that I call the list, which is I will basically go and read everything on a subject.
+Just read hundreds of books, watch as much footage, read academic papers, just everything I can get my hands on.
+And as I'm going, if I find a really interesting little detail, I'll add it to a list and at the end of this process I just have this really long list just full of these little textures or details or moments that I've never seen before that feel fresh.
+And it's kind of this little toolkit that I have as we then start to actually assemble the story and the process and the mechanics of like, oh, there's that little thing.
+I've been looking for a way to use that and insert that.
+But yeah, the research, reading, it's so easy now to just go online and convince yourself that you've researched something.
+But if you sit down and read like three different autobiographies of someone, you just get like a volume of genuine like human detail.
+That's interesting.
+So to give you an idea, we're gonna watch a bunch of videos.
+now.
+Actually, I'm going to intro you first.
+We started thinking about this idea of exploring movie making, answering these questions, trying to explore this idea of failure and the struggle.
+For me, I have a particular love and interest in the idea of lost movies.
+Here we've got a shot from a movie that Orson Welles He shot like half of called The Deep, which was an adaptation of the book Dead Calm, which is one of my favorite thriller novels.
+He never completed it.
+He ran out of money.
+In fact, Orson Welles ran out of money a lot later in his career.
+Like he probably has the record for the greatest number of lost movies.
+And it's like this perfect encapsulation of what we're talking about, because if the purpose of art is to create an immortality project, a lost movie is a failure.
+You put all this effort in and it never comes out.
+It's this radical example of failure.
+But it still lives, right?
+I get excited thinking about this movie that never happened and I see a couple of frames from it and a few clips from it and that's so evocative and interesting and my brain starts working and thinking about it.
+So it's also got this nuance to it.
+And then similarly, there are movies that have come out.
+So Eyes Wide Shut was something of a North Star for this project.
+of the movie.
+From the very beginning, he was constantly trying to adapt this book that it was based on.
+At various points, they almost made it with Woody Allen as the star, which is an alternate path that we have luckily developed.
+There was a version with Steve Martin.
+He had John Le Carre write the treatment.
+He just kept trying to figure out how to make this movie.
+and it ends up being his last movie, right?
+And he literally died before finishing his movie.
+In fact, this movie killed him.
+So when Kubrick died, the version of Eyes Wide Shut that's out there was not a finished edit.
+It was like, you know, 90%.
+And Kubrick was also famous for continuing to edit the movie even after it had premiered.
+And it's this idea of struggle and failure as well.
+Like this at the time was the longest ever movie shoot There was all this kind of intrigue and interest around what was going on, why this movie was running for so long, what was happening with Tom and Nicole.
+And fascinating things like Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh were in this movie, shot out 90% of their scenes.
+And then when it ran for so long, they had to recast them and reshoot it all.
+So it's even a movie that came out, it's full of all these what ifs and potential versions that could have existed.
+So the idea that the kind of finished, ultimate version, like, is that the perfect version that Kubrick spent his whole life trying to make?
+You know, and all those kind of unlived possibilities are kind of fascinating.
+So this was, you know, we started to kind of hone in on this and this idea, well, how about we make our subject lost movies, right?
+The idea that we're exploring and kind of unearthing and bringing back to life these lost movies felt like a really nice way to explore our themes.
+And then we kind of quickly what goes on in the making of a movie and the history of making of movies and the power structures, this was like the absolute locus of like all of these forces.
+So for example, the person on the left there is Margarita Cancino, and on the right is the person she became.
+The movie studios picked her and decided to transform her.
+She underwent painful plastic surgery, and this was like old school plastic surgery, They changed her ethnicity, they changed her name, they kind of essentially rebuilt her from the ground up.
+And she was their creation, right?
+Under the studio system, they owned her.
+Rita Hayworth was this new entity that they had created.
+So it's like this real apex of like that sacrifice of self to essentially allow yourself to be rebuilt in service of the storytelling.
+But at the same time, There was this nuance as well of like thinking now from the 21st century, like Rita Hayworth has survived.
+There is something of her soul that when we watch her movies, lives beyond the screen.
+And we don't talk about the studio heads who created her, right?
+And all the other people that were part of all these different power systems.
+All these mechanisms, like there's something where she has kind of survived and she does still live on through this footage of her.
+And so this idea of like a star, this idea of an actress who's brought in and kind of molded felt like a really useful kind of locus as our main character to explore some of these themes.
+I also started to get really into hair, realized that hair was super important in our story.
+So here on the right, this is Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, a film that she filmed with Orson Welles, who at that point was her ex.
+So like all of those complexities and different power dynamics were extremely complicated When he heard of this, he was absolutely furious.
+He was like, we created Rita Hayworth, the hair is like 50% of who Rita Hayworth is.
+And so you had these two guys, one was the guy who created her and owned her, the other was her ex who was also her director, both arguing about what she should be doing with her hair.
+And it's like, it's kind of screwed up.
+And the hair continues, right?
+So we started to get really interested in Jane Fonda as well because she occupied this beautiful moment where film changed, right?
+We went from the studio system into kind of new Hollywood and tracking her career, she was an actress who was able to actually assert herself and gain some agency and start taking on roles and sort of transform.
+was he was in love with the fantasy of them that he created on the camera and he was extremely controlling and so for him the idea of the beautiful blonde uh... woman was like his his archetype and at a point in her life where Jane Fonda was discovering feminism and was trying to assert herself and change her career she went out got a hairdresser and they cut the hair went back to a natural color and what became known as the clute haircut was born There's a lot, there's so much hair, hair trivia that we were just like, oh, this is like such a big deal and it's so kind of interesting, the nuance that it brings.
+Here we've got some videos.
+So we were watching like so much video, I became obsessed with talk shows, right?
+I watched like a hundred hours of Dick Cavett, which is, I recommend it.
+And there's something really interesting about these actresses coming out, being interviewed, so they're playing a version of themselves.
+And it was at points excruciating because all of the sexism and the power dynamics, fully on display in a lot of this stuff so this was this is from like I guess the 80s is Phoebe Cates with Letterman I have a particular love of grungy video so clips like this I'm like I love this shit this is beautiful There's a constant obsession with the age of actresses and their youth and their perfection and how moldable and controllable they are.
+Thank you for being here.
+Thank you for being here.
+It's quite an honor, I guess, huh?
+Yeah, it's a real honor.
+Yeah.
+You look very young in person.
+Yeah, everybody says that.
+Yeah, you look like, I don't know, 15, 16, maybe?
+Well, yeah, maybe.
+Yeah.
+And can we tell folks how... The rest of the interview gets worse.
+He was completely...
+Okay, we got next.
+Okay, so this was another clip that kind of had pride of place on our mood board.
+So this is Olivia Hussey with her co-star in the Romeo and Juliet movie at the end of the 60s.
+They were both like 15, 16 when they filmed this movie.
+And they're being interviewed by a very kind of BBC-ish British interviewer.
+And there's this small little clip here which YouTube loves, like the YouTube commenters love this stuff because it's all about smoking.
+personal question of the uh... and as you know you're at fifteen it's pretty young to be smoking cigarettes when did you start?
+at about fourteen about fourteen while you were doing the prime of miss jean brody?
+yes well just before then actually i mean that that is pretty young there aren't many girls at fifteen i know that smoke cigarettes publicly oh there are and uh... what are your Yeah, she spent the whole interview smoking like a chimney.
+But that little bit, the whole interview, this BBC guy is treating her like some slightly exotic, precocious creature, and he's very intrigued by her strength of character or whatever.
+But the look she gave him, and she was like, you don't know shit about teenage girls and what they're up to.
+That stuck with me, and I started watching a lot of these clips as an exaggeration and reflection of actually how much strength of character these actresses have to sit there and just kind of smile through this crap.
+If actually inside of them there was something even more powerful that could just step up and rip the head off this interviewer or, you know, had a lived experience or a wisdom that was far in excess of what you're thinking.
+And that kind of grew into the fantasy element of this game.
+Another character that I kind of became obsessed with and interestingly paralleled the story of Jane Fonda and where Jane Fonda was able to actually kind of emerge and gain control.
+Jean Seberg, who you see here, did not.
+She was an actress who was kind of cast from obscurity by Otto Preminger.
+into a movie where he literally burned her alive on set and was a big failure.
+She had this incredible moment where she essentially ushered in the new wave by starring in Goddard's Breathless, but subsequent to that, her career didn't work.
+She was constantly trying to seek out meaningful work, and the system, the men around her consistently failed her, and then she kind of died tragically.
+So kind of getting really deep into her story, became a big part of the thought process of trying to create this character of Marissa Marcel.
+This clip here is the first time she appeared on television ever.
+This is a deep archival thing, so the quality is amazingly bad.
+It's beautiful.
+The generation loss is exquisite.
+But check out some of the body language in here.
+It's actually kind of excruciating.
+exact moment.
+You know, here are the two principals in the most exciting adventure in show business in the last 25 years.
+The gentleman here, you probably recognize him, the distinguished producer and director from Hollywood, Otto Preminger.
+So let's have a nice welcome to Otto.
+Now before I introduce this youngster, I want to tell you the story that Otto Preminger conceived and carried out.
+He has the rights to Shaw's St.
+Joan for the movie.
+He thought to himself that, wearying of the star system temporarily, that this time he was going to find a girl, an unknown, and so he scouted through all of the United States, and then in most of the countries of Europe and in Canada, and out of probably 18,000 girls, I believe, submitted their applications and their backgrounds, And then Otto reduced this to 3,000.
+He tested all of those.
+And this youngster here, Jean Seberg, is the one who caught lightning in a bottle because of her talent and her beauty and the qualities that Otto was looking for.
+So let's have a wonderful hand for this 17-year-old youngster.
+And then we talked about Jane Fonda already.
+We really kind of zoomed in on this moment in her life when she had this reinvention and she was living in 70s New York, hanging out with Warhol, who himself was doing some very interesting explorations.
+Warhol's studio called The Factory is on Union Square.
+He called there, no result.
+He was at a farewell party for Jane Fonda on the SS France.
+We're doing a picture together.
+Building up all this research, we then kind of zoomed on responding to all this research, kind of orchestrate and pick where we put these in the history of film.
+So we had our first movie at the tail end of the studio system, this idea of a director who is out of fashion, a kind of late period Hitchcock style director, who, you know, is coming from a studio system where everything is fake and owned.
+And, you know, it's things that would have felt extremely cinematic and exciting, early in their career now feel more dated and theatrical.
+And then we contrast that with this jump to the new Hollywood in the early 70s, particularly in New York, where filmmaking becomes more organic and authentic.
+We have this idea of, like, 70s filmmaking being this kind of ideal of, like, grown-up cinema.
+And we wanted to kind of interrogate that.
+And then for our final movie, we give ourselves a little interesting time jump, and we're at the end of the millennium, where everyone's kind of looking back.
+You have the invention and explosion of the indie movie.
+There's all these young people who are looking back at the 70s and being like, this was the good shit, and we're going to try and replicate that.
+And it was kind of the last hurrah before everything became digital.
+So this gave us like this interesting arc to explore, right, and have this character live through these different moments.
+and we were able to figure out different aspect ratios, so we'd have this kind of nice explorability of seeing footage from these different areas and being able to recognize where we were.
+Okay, I'm going to get on to the mechanics.
+I'm going to have to go fast, otherwise we won't get to the spreadsheets.
+So whilst we're doing all this research and outlining and thinking, we're also in parallel, like prototyping the mechanics, so we kind of have the time to let those bed in and get the right game feel.
+So the movie Ola, I talked about, you know, this idea of putting you in the editing room.
+And we wanted to hit something, you know, I pitched someone early on about this and they were like, so is it like final cut?
+Are you like gamifying final cut?
+It was like, well, no, cause that's like the prosaic bit.
+What we want more is like, you're in the editing suite with the editor, right?
+You're looking over their shoulder and you're reaching into this bin and pulling out footage and putting it in the machine and then discovering what's on it, right?
+We wanted to give you that, the excitement of that and the tactile nature of that.
+without a lot of the prosaic stuff.
+So the movie only became this focus.
+We had like 15 hours of recordings of movie over sounds that we started trying to kind of use and concatenate.
+And then there was this piece of research that I just kept going back to.
+And this was Nick Rogue when he, so the film director, Nick Rogue, when he started out, he was like a T-boy at one of the studios.
+And he talks about, and this part of his biography, He talks about the moment where he first saw, this was an editola, which is the same thing as a movieola, first time he saw footage running and he could turn it backwards and he could play with the speed of it and he was just like mind blown like this was magical to him that he could manipulate time and it fundamentally changed his understanding of filmmaking and storytelling and In the same biography, he then goes on to say, so the editola was like a PlayStation 3 for me.
+So he was writing this a few years back.
+And just like you read that when you're doing your research and you're like, holy shit, like he's telling us what to do, right?
+We're gonna take the PlayStation 5 and make it into a movieola.
+We're gonna flip that equation.
+But he understood that there was something like playful and kind of tactile and exploratory about that experience for him.
+I put this clip in as an indulgence, but I don't know if I can... I'll indulge myself.
+So you see this in his work.
+In the film Walkabout, he uses the manipulation of the footage to express some subjectivity.
+So in this movie, some evil hunters shoot this buffalo.
+We see the buffalo die.
+And then Rogue starts screwing around to try and express something.
+So he does this zoom right into the grain of the footage, right?
+Breaking it down into its kind of atomic elements.
+And then along comes this kid who, by the way, is Nick Rogue's son.
+Movie making is always incestuous and complicated.
+on And he looks over, and because he's willing the buffalo to not be dead, we then see from his perspective the footage of the buffalo in reverse, coming back to life again.
+This was like an obsession of Nick Rogue's.
+And we really dug into that as well, this idea that playing the footage backwards was a way of resurrecting something, of bringing something back to life.
+And if you of play to mortality, you might see some moments or scenes in this where the idea of playing things backwards as a way of resurrecting, the idea that the existence of this footage and your manipulation of it as a way of bringing someone back to life is kind of a big core beat of that story.
+And as a side note, using your marketing to foreshadow your big story beats and the endings of your stories is awesome, and you should do it.
+So we just, yeah, every time we talk about immortality, early teaser trailers, we put out these images of this fire and these flaming posters.
+So even before people were playing the game, we were preparing them and helping them build up the richness of where we were going in our story.
+I think Pentamon did that as well.
+not Great.
+They were terrified it might look like crap, and a lot of film grain in video games doesn't look very authentic.
+So we set out to do the best film grain, and we came up with a system.
+So the way film grain works is there's two grains.
+When you first capture the image on the negative, there is an initial grain that's created by the little imperfections and holes between the actual material.
+team.
+look at the luminosity of the image, and then apply these different grains in varying amounts.
+We had these fun little curves that we could set up in Unity for the different film.
+Each different type of film, we had scans of actual film grain that we turned into tileable textures, and then we could apply and tweak the way the luminosity gradients worked so that we were applying the grain.
+And you'll notice where you hit the really hot, burnt-out whites, there is no grain.
+A lot of film grain shaders will just sort of multiply.
+and you'll see the dots everywhere.
+So this we just kept tweaking and going back and forth on to try and hit that authenticity and give us that beautiful kind of crisp grain when we were zooming in and out so it didn't feel like a kind of compressed digital version of this analog film that we were trying to celebrate.
+So we continued to prototype and work on things.
+And so we spent a year tweaking the feel of scrubbing the film.
+And we had this prototype build.
+So we hadn't shot anything.
+We had a bunch of clips of different films.
+And this was from the eyes of Laura Mars, a scene in which Tolly Lee Jones does take his shirt off.
+And rewinding and tweaking film is so much fun, right?
+Me and Chris Nolan and Tennant are just like on the same wavelength of like, people take clothes off, you play that backwards, it looks amazing.
+People shake their hair, play it backwards, see water, smoke, all these kind of things that just look beautiful and you start messing around with them.
+So this was one of the scenes that I would just test and test and test.
+And we tried so many different things of like, how are you scrubbing the film?
+We started with this idea of like a movie, Ola is quite mechanical.
+But we ended up kind of mixing our metaphor a little bit because we wanted it to have like a real tactile feel.
+So we're like, well, imagining the film reels, if you're touching the reel and you can kind of move it, but then you can spin it and it'll have some inertia to it.
+So we came up with these ideas of like flicking and what does it feel like to flick an analog stick?
+Then we realized you lose control.
+So we started like ratcheting it and locking you into certain speeds.
+And there was like, yeah, it was like a year's worth of just like screwing around with the footage playback.
+And as you can see there, I'm now technically married to Tom Lee Jones.
+He's a lovely partner.
+And then we got onto the grid, right?
+This was exciting for me.
+Like in the previous games, we'd always do a trailer.
+And to show in the trailer just how much cool footage we had and the range and variety, we'd always end up on this visual of like a video wall.
+Like, whoa, look at all the cool stuff here.
+And on this one, I was like, what?
+Couldn't that just be the game?
+Wouldn't that be exciting?
+I was also like, my teenage years were spent going to video installations in art galleries, I was obsessed with those things.
+So just like big screens and walls of video is an aesthetic that I really appreciate.
+And this is how we ended up with kind of our core interface of this grid that you can zoom in and out of and shuffle.
+And the excitement for me here was this idea of the map is the territory, right?
+It's like a Borges short story about the idea of a map that is actually to scale And that's video games, right?
+Like we navigate these virtual worlds that have essentially an extent that is huge and here This idea of an interface that does all these things I'm listing here like it's essentially your menu, it's your inventory of clips you've collected, it also serves as a kind of history because we have this symbol grid that every time you click on something we're capturing that image and the grid shows the place you parked the footage at as well so it becomes very personal and specific to you.
+So the idea that it was doing all these things, and we wanted as well, like you never leave this screen really.
+You zoom into the footage, and then you'll zoom out of the footage, and you can teleport between bits of footage, but like you're essentially in this consistent world, right?
+Again, it's like an abstraction of the edit room.
+You're surrounded by all the footage.
+and we're just allowing you to feel overwhelmed by how much is there.
+And it also recalls, like, if you're a hardcore cinephile, you're going to, you know, there's sites that do, like, a frame from every minute of, like, your favorite movie, and you can see how the color schemes shift across the movie and stuff, and it's, like, a really fun way to just kind of x-ray a movie.
+A lot of this game was, like, what is all the cool shit I do as a cinephile?
+How can we just trick the player into doing that without realizing it, right?
+Because they just think it's a game mechanic.
+The one thing we did, we were trying to be so authentic in everything we did, the one thing, and we were so torn about this because the aspect ratio of most gaming things is landscape, to sort all these clips It made sense that the film strip would be on its side.
+Movie film, however, is vertical.
+So technically, if this was real footage, the strips and the little holes would run vertically down.
+We did briefly try that, and it just didn't work aesthetically.
+So we were like, yeah, well, we know that we're breaking a rule here and that this is not real, but it's going to help everything in the long run.
+So we felt bad about it, but we pushed forward.
+And then the core kind of marquee mechanic of this video game, the match cut.
+Let's see if we've got time.
+This is such a good match cut.
+This is from Peeping Tom, a movie about people dying on camera and what that means.
+Oh, look at that match cut.
+Again, the match cut is something people are going to be able to grok.
+It's this thing they'll understand.
+It's exciting and fun.
+Could that be the mechanic at the heart of our game?
+Because we had been discussing how do we make a mechanic out of cutting in film, right?
+How do we not have it be prosaic, like final cut?
+How do you have that be interesting and expressive?
+So we had this idea of what if I could click on anything in any frame and have that then cut to something else?
+That's so expressive.
+You can click on anything.
+You're deciding what's interesting, what's aesthetically interesting.
+And then we get really interested in this idea of, well, to preserve the magic of the cut, you don't know where it's going to go.
+The game is going to decide where this cut takes you.
+And that was fascinating to me because it was introducing randomness into a pure narrative game.
+And we know that randomness works in Diablo loot drops, all these other game mechanics.
+But usually in narrative, you're looking for this causality and this very simple causality and logic to it.
+So I was like, oh, this...
+feels interesting, right?
+It's a big risk, but let's explore what it feels like to have randomness in a story mechanic.
+And it felt like teleportation.
+I'm obsessed with the idea of teleportation.
+So many games are about moving faster, having superpowers, right?
+And this idea of teleporting around a narrative feels like a superpower.
+I'm going to skip showing you the video, because you know how it works.
+So how did we do it?
+And this was the big challenge.
+I'm going to go really fast now, sorry.
+And then I love in-game, sometimes the solution is just to do a huge amount of work.
+And that's what we did.
+We said, well, is it possible to actually just track every single thing that we think is worth clicking on?
+And it was.
+We had a team of people in After Effects, myself and Natalie, would mark up, these are all the things that are in focus that should be clickable.
+And then we had a team of people using tracking technology to track all these objects.
+We then had the complexity of having to compress that information, which was gigabytes per scene in VFX software, into these simpler, lower polygon animations so that every single object is constantly being tracked.
+There were rules for how things overlapped and things that were interesting.
+And then we had this big lookup table that would tell the code there is an equivalence.
+An apple and an orange could cut together.
+Marissa Marcel playing Franny can cut to Marissa Marcel playing Maria.
+And there is a ranking to it.
+which I'll get to in one second but also we kind of did a lot of iteration on well how do you click we had a version where you you could just click at any point and it would do the match cut and we're like it doesn't feel sexy enough so then we were like well let's make it a mode let's have to enter the mode and then it becomes like at I'm We have all this information about thematically what's happening in scenes, what various elements mean, and it tries to choose a good point to jump to.
+Maybe in the Q&A or outside we can talk more about the specifics of that.
+But it tries to do clever things and it has this kind of heartbeat so it'll alternate between trying to connect things that are in proximity and of logic to it, but it's not exposed to the player.
+It's kind of doing this meaningful little dance.
+It's like playing a kind of two-player party game, right?
+You play consequences.
+I draw a funny little picture, and for it to be fun, you have to meaningfully respond to what I've done, but I also want you to surprise me.
+So this was kind of this interesting balance And then we have secrets in the game.
+There are some big secrets.
+We wanted this thing to feel alive and feel haunted.
+So we talked about Orson Welles again, about the War of the Worlds, how he took radio, something people were so familiar with, and kind of took for granted, and then used that as a chance to actually surprise them and scare them and horrify them.
+I keep mentioning Orson Welles.
+The secret is we were trying to make the Citizen Kane of video games.
+So we were explicitly like, let's just learn everything about Orson Welles and that will get us there.
+We did lots of prototyping on this idea of hidden aspects to the footage.
+This idea, like I said, of rewinding being a way of accessing and resurrecting and discovering things.
+And we knew it was going to work because we did tests with footage of me during the pandemic, just at home.
+And it still frightened me, like when stuff would appear and pop out or fade in when I wasn't expecting it.
+And the few things we kind of iterated on in this mechanic that are interesting.
+Originally, we had a lot more of these kind of invisible cuts where a character would walk off screen, and then seamlessly we would transition to a different version of this scene.
+And those were really cool, and we used quite a lot of those in the game.
+But then when we were actually implementing them, we discovered that there were places where if we actually created a jump cut, that should actually be kind of more scary and more horrific.
+So we kind of started adding those in.
+We have this concept of free-floating moments, so a lot of the supernatural and hidden scenes are linked to specific instances, right, and are very located in the moment.
+But to facilitate keeping things spooky, there are a whole bunch of scenes that are free-floating that the code will attach to a clip.
+If it feels like, oh, you haven't seen anything spooky for a while, here's a place we could insert something, it'll kind of fit those in.
+So it's trying to keep things Interesting and then we played around a lot with what people now call the immortality noise like how do we add these?
+Audio layers to hint on the menu on the grid and also within the footage to let you know There's something creepy and usually people kind of start hearing that and paying attention to it And then 30 minutes later is when they really like hang on okay?
+and discover things.
+But thanks Metroid Prime because we talked a lot about how Metroid Prime hints its secrets with audio.
+So now we've got two minutes to get into the spreadsheets which is why you're all here.
+Everyone always asks me, like, how do you do this?
+How do you create these things?
+And the answer is, like, lots of spreadsheets, lots of outlining.
+Like, we started here with early plans of, like, the meta story of Marissa Marcelle, figuring out the years, what was happening to Marissa Marcelle across the different time periods.
+Then we came up with the three movies, and we outlined and scripted out the beats for all of these movies.
+Then we got a producer to look at it and give us a shoot order of how would they actually have shot this movie, what order would it have been shot in, and transposed that onto Marissa Marcel's story so we could find synergies and beats of like, oh if this thing happens to Marissa it would be cool if it happened whilst they were shooting this thing.
+We took these outlines, put them back into order, gave them to some of the great screenwriters in history, like Barry Gifford, Alan Scott, Amelia Gray, who I've worked with before.
+They went and wrote us the movies based on these outlines.
+Whole, full, finished screenplays of movies.
+brought those back, moved them around again.
+I sat down and then I injected the making of stuff.
+I was like, well, if they're shooting this scene, what is Marissa saying?
+What's happening?
+What's the kind of behind the scenes drama?
+So we started to kind of work into these screenplays and create the story of Marissa that kind of weaved into them.
+And we get to a point where we have Okay, I'm nearly there.
+We had this sheet which was called the Organizing Monster, which is a giant, this is like a teeny slice of it, giant spreadsheet that is like everything in the game.
+And then we used what I call a hologram method, which is how do these nonlinear things that you make sound make sense?
+And the answer is like a hologram contains in every piece of it, like the information for the whole rest of the image, right?
+So we look at every scene and we have all these columns and it's like every scene has to meaningfully answer a question about Marissa's story, tell us a piece of plot beat from the fictional movie, have a piece of craft from movie making, have some hint at the meta story, tell the story of what's going on with Arthur Fisher, what's happening with Robert Jones, have a piece of imagery that resonates with our themes, all three of our themes that we're tracking.
+we just go through and make sure that every scene is doing everything so that then when the player starts combining them in different orders they can meaningfully make progressions in theme or in story, if they're digging into a particular character or subset of the story, they can meaningfully put these things together.
+And as well, like having seen this thing, seeing this other scene, now I put the two things together and I get some kind of greater insight.
+So this is just like, it's all just about lots and lots of work and like just going over it again and again and again, iterating these outlines and these story beats.
+talk.
+Any object that was in the scene would be underlined in the script, and then the code would import the entire script in fountain format, which is like this kind of markup version of screenwriting, and it would extract all of the images, characters, and we had this looping scene from Eyes Wide Shut, and it basically generated the entire game of Immortality based on the screenplay.
+So you could drop into a scene and it would just loop Tom Cruise taking his shoes off, and then it would beat out the dialogue, time out the dialogue based on the script, place all the action lines, and every time an object or a character came into the script, they'd get this little box that would appear on the screen.
+So I could sit and play the whole game and click on these boxes and imagine the finished game, right?
+And this was never a useful prototype, but none of my prototypes are ever useful to give to normal human beings.
+But there's enough there that I can answer questions around pacing, discoverability, feel, flow, and kind of get to the point where we feel good.
+And we can also run like algorithmic tests that tell us how interlinked scenes are, how frequently certain things appear, and we can kind of tweak based on that.
+So we basically just play this a lot, We look at all the data we're extracting from the script and use that to balance the script and the format so that then we can go and shoot three entire movies and have a game that works at the end of it.
+What next?
+This is it.
+It's my final slide.
+We're slightly over.
+Are there any takeaways?
+If you want to make immortality, that's how we did it.
+But I think genuinely this stuff that we're doing that I think is really interesting, like this idea of randomness and narrative, I think is a really interesting thing to explore.
+You know, we're so tied to narratives that are on train tracks and the idea of causality and systems that actually injecting a little bit of spice, I think is really interesting.
+Thinking about exploring narrative content they will have very different experiences in their heads, but also in what they're doing, what they're clicking on, the flow through the game.
+Like it's meaningful to them, it's meaningfully personable and kind of expressive.
+And then just fundamentally, if I have one takeaway, it's like this idea of losing the container plot.
+People ask me like, how do your games still tell a story that makes sense if it's all out of order?
+And it's like, well, plot isn't interesting or relevant.
+Like plot is a requirement of a movie because people are sat in a chair and they need the toilet and they're getting tired and they're looking for 90 minutes or three hours if it's a Marvel movie looking at the screen and so plot is this thing that's like keeps their attention right what happens next what's next what's next what's next We don't need that because we have all these other things.
+We have the challenge and the exploration and the expressivity.
+So we have an engaged audience.
+So these conventional ideas of plot and how you order and contain things are things that we can kind of move beyond.
+That's something I would love to see more of.
+Here we go, tail slates.
+That's what you do when you have like a messed up shot and you can't actually get the clapperboard in shot to start with because it's all complicated.
+So at the very end, camera assistant runs in and says, tail slates, and they have the thing upside down.
+And it's really cool.
+And it's never not cute to see the camera assistant run in excitedly and call tail slates.
+It's the funnest thing.
+I guess we can go outside if anyone has any questions.
+Thank you for listening and putting up with me.
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+Thank you all for coming.
+My name is Morgan Jafford.
+I'm here to talk today about the rise and fall of defined development and some of the things that kind of go along the way.
+This is a talk about running indie studios and studio management, but it's not really about that.
+I'm going to lie to you a lot about what this talk is about.
+One thing that is true when we talk about business conversations, and this is a studio management kind of perspective on things, is we often don't talk about the human factors and the human cost and the feelings and emotions that go alongside running studios.
+And there's really good reasons for that.
+particularly if you have staff, nobody wants to hear that their boss is sad and worry whether or not they'll have a job the next week.
+So, given that defined development is now a little over three years deceased, that gives me the opportunity to speak really frankly and honestly about some of the ins and outs in a way that I wouldn't have spoken publicly while it was running.
+And this talk is about studio management.
+It's also about failure and it's about closure.
+It's about how to hopefully avoid ending up in the situation we did.
+But it's also about some of the reasons that we ended up making those decisions.
+And, you know, I'm not fundamentally a believer that companies need to be eternal entities that run until the end of time.
+It is a model to understand what you're for and what you're about and to run for that period of time.
+But this is also a talk about sadness.
+It's a talk about identity.
+and what it means to be a visible game developer, especially in the indie space, to talk about loss and what you do after things go wrong.
+But one of the things I want to talk about, to kind of kick things off, some of you know about Defiant Development, some of you may not.
+It was a studio that was founded post-GFC in Australia, and during the GFC, Australia lost a lot of games jobs.
+We lost about 75% of the game's jobs in Australia.
+Lots of people lost their jobs.
+Some people lost their jobs multiple times, going from one studio closure to the next studio closure to the next.
+And it left the Australian landscape, which had been previously dominated by American-owned international studios, in a really grim position.
+Dan, the co-founder of Define Development, and I started the company in that environment.
+We started it with a really clear mission.
+You know, we wanted to build a company that gave people great jobs, working on exciting games, so that those great people that we knew were out there had opportunities.
+And we started small, but across 10 years we built a studio that honored those goals at every stage along the way.
+I believe, in any case, and I am biased.
+And when you're setting up the goals for a studio, I think it's really important, particularly in that sort of environment, it's very easy to talk about the things you're not going to do.
+Like, we're going to avoid all of these mistakes that the big studios made.
+Negative goals, I don't think, help you get to a destination.
+Positive goals can help you get to where you're going.
+So we had a studio and we knew what it was for.
+And one thing I want to stress here, there are two elements that I really want to kind of knuckle down on.
+One, many of the things I talk about will sound simple.
+None of them are simple.
+They were all very complex situations.
+But this is a one hour talk and I'm going to go through things fast.
+So if you happen to listen and go, gosh, that sounds simple.
+He's an idiot.
+you could be right, but you might not be.
+And the other is that this is my story.
+Across the lifespan of Defiant, and there are some people in this room, over 50 people were involved, either as staff or working on the periphery.
+At our peak, we had 30 full-timers.
+They all have their own stories, and they are absolutely as important as mine.
+I got to see quite a lot from my seat, but I sure didn't see everything.
+So if you're interested, please ask, and they'll tell you.
+And the last thing I want to stress, just before we move on, is that I talk to a lot of people who run studios.
+both smaller and larger than Defiant.
+And I talked to a lot of people who find that experience incredibly stressful and who are very unhappy in the role that they're in.
+And there were stressful moments at the end, don't get me wrong.
+But if there's one thing I want you to take away from this is that 10 years of that journey for me was just a great time.
+I was walking into a room full of creative people doing work that I loved and that they loved, and it made me happy.
+So I think it's important to hold that context as we go.
+Before we closed down Defiant, we were working on a new project.
+We'd delivered HandiFate 1, which was a success and enabled us to grow.
+We delivered HandiFate 2, which was a success and had quite a lot of post-launch support.
+And we were looking at new projects.
+And there is a lens that we apply, that we applied, sorry, my tenses will wobble.
+There's a lens that we applied at Defiant.
+to find a meaningful project.
+It had to sit somewhere in the Venn diagram of games we wanted to make, games we felt there was an audience for, and games that our team could make as well as anybody else.
+And also, we always wanted to make sure every new project was something new and something old, that it combined something we knew how to do and could rely on, along with some things we'd never done before and we knew we'd learn along the way.
+That's how Hand of Fate came to be.
+So the game we were working on was called A World in My Attic.
+You can go and look at the trailer, it still exists, although the project is no more.
+And it was taking Hand of Fate, which is a card game that comes to life, and it was taking it to kind of a new level in that it was an open world Zelda-y game with the settlers of Catan set of hexes.
+You'd build your world and then you'd go out and adventure in it.
+That project was intentionally bigger than we'd built before.
+We wanted to grow the team.
+We wanted to make a bigger game.
+That was the ambition we'd set for the studio, to bring in more great people, make great games, and give them a great environment to do it in.
+The thing I will say is a lot of our team were pretty outside their comfort zone at this point in time.
+We'd been doing Hand to Fate at that point for five years.
+We really knew how to make that game.
+A lot of the team had joined along the road.
+They'd never been involved with the messy, confusing start of a project, which is a whole different ball game.
+And it is difficult.
+to express to people who've had a very solid and robust framework to work from, from the last three or four years, that it's okay.
+It's okay that it's messy.
+In the start, it is all a mess, but we're gonna put all the parts together and it's gonna come together.
+So there was a lot of work that needed to be done on that front.
+And as the studio head, and also creative director and a bit producer, the question of how I was doing is not great.
+My personal life was a disaster, is the truth, at this point in time.
+My wife has a very high power job.
+I had a very high power job.
+We had two children who were six and nine, and it was a disaster.
+Because they needed us more than we could provide, and we both needed each other more than we could provide.
+I was not doing great.
+The combination of all the personal and professional stress at that point in time meant that where I needed to be patient, I just didn't have the time.
+there is a lot of deep thinking that's involved with initiating projects.
+And I was not able to provide the support and structure that was going on.
+This is not the only issue we had.
+The team was very independent and capable of playing along very well.
+I'm not trying to take all of this on my own shoulders.
+But I do think it's important because We reached a position where we had a game, it was bigger than any game we'd made before, it was bigger than we could fund to conclusion on our own, and we needed external support.
+Now we knew that, and we had great relationships with a range of publishers, we'd had good conversations all the way along, and we had interest from a good half dozen publishers.
+The thing about interest from publishers is that it It's all very well and good until it comes time to sign a check.
+And everybody will say, show us a little bit more, and show us a little bit more.
+We'd been on the show us a little bit more road for a while.
+And truth be told, we'd been on that road for too long.
+So there came a point where we sat down and went, what are our options and opportunities?
+And there were some options that we'd intentionally written off because they didn't fit with the reasons that we built the company.
+We weren't particularly interested in taking external investment.
+We weren't particularly interested in, you know, selling the company off wholesale.
+And that was all fine until we realized that all of the publishing deals had now officially fallen through.
+and we didn't have the runway to make it to the end.
+So that leads to a plan with no alternative positions.
+our burn rate was pretty inflated and the studio was at the point where we had to do something about that, which leads into a bunch of options and opportunities.
+And when I was speaking earlier about like not having negative goals, like not having the, I will run a studio and I will not do this thing.
+I'll tell you the one that I've always held because Pandemic Australia is the studio I worked at before Define Development.
+That studio was bought by EA, and then it was shut down through the most brutal series of iterative cuts over the course of a year that I've ever experienced in my life.
+I was the last person there.
+I turned the lights off.
+I laid off a hundred-odd staff on behalf of EA, one piece at a time, in a desperate attempt to save anybody on that light boat.
+And I will tell you one thing that is on my negative list.
+I was not going to do that again.
+So then there were sell-offs.
+and they didn't look very attractive either.
+Every option and opportunity in front of us effectively compromised the reasons that we set the studio up in the first place.
+So there was a point where Dan sat down and ran the numbers and we looked at what we could do and how long we could go.
+And we realized that there was no plan that we had that could be executed in that timeframe to a positive outcome.
+What we could do is give people good packages, clarity, and an end to their time.
+So we ran those numbers, we ran those scenarios, and we basically came down to the point where there was a decision that had to be made between a very high risk, you know, fly close to the sun, lay off three quarters of the team, try and pull something together, or to call it a day.
+After sleeping on it, we made the decision to call it a day.
+We met with the leadership team and we explained it.
+And then we met with the rest of the team and we explained it.
+We gave everybody, as I said, generous packages.
+Gave them their hardware so they could work on projects if they wanted to.
+And it was done.
+It was one week from the initial decision to the studio being closed.
+one week from that room that I love to walk into, being full of life and vigor, to empty.
+And just me.
+And Dan.
+And for a moment, there was silence.
+So one of the things I think is the question of like, how do you avoid ending up in this situation?
+Which is, hopefully meaningful and useful to some of you.
+And the truth of the matter is that all the decisions that led to us closing down happened two years before we closed down.
+The correct time to make change was well before we reached the point where closure was inevitable.
+There's So this then is going to be a talk about how to avoid some of the pitfalls that we hit.
+But it's also not really about that either.
+When we started Defiant, a friend of ours who ran big studios for EA and Sega gave us some advice.
+And he said that your job is not to work in the business that you found, but to work on the business that you found.
+You shouldn't be giving yourself a job.
+You should be working on building a business that supports people.
+And that seemed great, except for the fact that it seemed really stupid from the indie dev perspective.
+Like, why do we build studios?
+We build studios because we want to make games.
+It's the only way to get games made.
+That's why I started a studio.
+All I ever wanted was to build the business I could work in.
+Why else do it?
+And I've had this conversation with a lot of indie studio heads, right?
+Where they're like, well, often the question comes up, why are you creative directing that project rather than getting somebody else in to do it?
+And it's like, because that's the fun bit.
+That's why I built the whole thing, right?
+And that is true, but it is limiting.
+One thing that I think is important is strategy meetings.
+And we had strategy meetings.
+We had a five-year plan, we had a one-year plan, we had a two-year plan.
+But we'd done them all.
+And we hadn't updated them.
+And those values I showed you right at the start about what Defiant was about, that defined us.
+Those were post-GFC values.
+When we closed, jobs for skilled developers were easy to find.
+there was no shortage.
+And that's one of the essential reasons that we started the studio.
+And it just wasn't valid anymore.
+And by putting a big strike through one of the core pillars that had built the studio, we didn't have that reason to continue and press on.
+It is critical that you know what your company is for, but it's equally critical that you revise it and understand what your company will be for.
+You need to work backwards from your big goals to what you're actually going to set out and achieve, right?
+It's all about, you know, everybody knows about smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, whatever.
+But specific and measurable is important.
+The reason our strategy meetings were nonsense is because they weren't specific and measurable.
+They were big and they were fluffy, and we could always feel like we were doing the big and fluffy thing.
+No, if you want to be bigger in five years, you say you want to be bigger in five years.
+We want this many people.
+If you don't want to be bigger in five years, and I would recommend that, then say that.
+Talk about how specifically you're going to do these things, because you can only identify the vulnerabilities of your studio when you miss your goals.
+That's the start of the process of understanding.
+And you always, I mean, the thing is, we're all smart people, right?
+And smart people are really, really good at justifying why the step that they've taken is the right step just in front of them.
+because of course it is.
+It's the only natural step by the time you get there.
+Planning is all about structure and it's all about setting up those goalposts so you come back and you can go, actually, you know what?
+We missed.
+Actually, you know what?
+We're not doing the thing we set out to do.
+Actually, you know what?
+Maybe this isn't the right game for us at this point in time.
+Actually, you know what?
+We need to sign up for a publisher here or we're going to go off in a different direction.
+And that, for us, vulnerability, particularly structural vulnerability for a studio, shouldn't come as a shock.
+And I'm not saying that we completely botched the planning, but we hadn't set our goals clearly enough to know that we were missing them along the way.
+We hadn't set the road clearly enough to understand that the path had gone awry.
+One thing I want to touch on, too, is money is a big part of running a business.
+You've got to keep the engine turning.
+You can't simply follow money, but you also can't operate without it.
+So you do need to make sure that you have your cash flow sorted out and you know how you're getting from one place to the next.
+So this When I think about what would we have done differently, how would we have updated the company goals from simply being a great place for people to work, making great games, there are things that we understood.
+And one of the big ones for me is that if you put a team of people together and you have them chew on the same sorts of problems for long enough, you get to great and meaningful and revolutionary games.
+Every great game, well they're not universally true, but certainly there are a lot of great games that are examples of people who've been sitting in the background chewing away on the same sorts of problems for game after game after game after game before hitting a moment where it's great.
+There was a terrible Hulk game back in the day that was followed by the fun Hulk game that was followed by Prototype.
+And as you look at Prototype, you can see all those steps along the way.
+It's true of the Infinity Ward team who moved from Medal of Honor to Call of Duty to Call of Duty to Call of Duty to Call of Duty to Call of Duty.
+Anyway, keeping developers together and chewing on the same sorts of problems is one of the fundamental beliefs I had.
+It's why at Defiant we had a philosophy about the games we built where we always took something old and combined it with something new.
+If we had taken that value into one of the founding principles of the studio, we would have found a new reason to exist that could have carried us forward.
+The other thing, you know, You've got to have big dreams.
+And the truth of the matter is, we started the studio with big dreams.
+We wanted a game that was out on consoles.
+We wanted to self-publish and get out to the masses.
+And we achieved all that.
+And if there's one thing that you take away from this talk, All the planning, all the strategy, all the rest is largely irrelevant.
+Take this away.
+When you succeed, celebrate.
+It's really important to mark the wins along the way, because you don't necessarily get to keep winning all the way.
+So when you pull it off, make sure you stop, give each other a high five, and then you need a new plan.
+then you need some new goals, you need some new ambitions.
+The truth is, we didn't have a big enough dream.
+And this is... A theme for this talk is advice I give others, but I'm too stupid to take myself.
+And I've spoken to indie devs often to say, it is important that you forge a big enough dream to act as a lighthouse for your team and your studio.
+And the other thing is that the transitional phases of game development studios are now well-known and understood.
+A two-person studio does not run like a 10-person studio.
+A 10-person studio, and a successful 10-person studio that's doing really well and making great stuff, does not run like a 20-person studio.
+To go from 20 to 40 or 50 is a whole another ball game and involves a whole new layer of management and every step along this phase transition is a chance for things to go terribly wrong.
+And they always do, by the way.
+We had planned for them.
+Every time we changed size, we had a plan that said, you know, we're writing off six months, working out how to make this happen.
+there is always a discomfort as you go through those transitional periods.
+But you do have to plan for them if growing bigger is part of your set of goals.
+And each one of them is about letting go.
+So when you grow, you find that the many different hats you've worn need to be taken off and put on individual people.
+So the process of growth and the process of transition is always a place to, what I've said here is put the team in charge of the dream.
+The fundamental thing that went awry here was for me looking at Defiant as a place I could work, as opposed to a place where my job was to help others thrive and succeed.
+We needed a vision that carried forward, that it was a place that we were building continuity, we were building studio, we were building that ongoing value and forward motion.
+So, you know, the truth of the matter is that, again, in talking with other studio heads, this is really common.
+Everybody's like, well, I wear a lot of hats.
+And I think it's important that we understand I wear a lot of hats to be a direct synonym for I'm doing a lot of things badly.
+And if you would like them to be done well, it's important that you entrust people with the responsibility that goes along with those hats.
+Likewise, one of the things that I think is very true universally with games is that games only happen through belief and willpower.
+Everything in games is taking something that doesn't exist and just forcing it to be birthed into the world in reality through sheer force of will.
+Belief is important.
+And I'm a big believer in the people I work with, a big believer in the people I work with now.
+I have an enormous amount of belief.
+Belief needs to turn into trust and faith.
+And people will surprise you.
+What happened next?
+What I've said here is energy gets released, and this is true.
+And this is one of the reasons that, you know, while the closure of Defiant makes me sad, it doesn't, you know, well, I'll talk about the sadness in a minute.
+But companies tie up people and effort and energy And sometimes they tie up people and effort and energy, as they did at Pandemic for us, for several years with no outcome whatsoever.
+It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's not great.
+People have a right to see the creative output of their work.
+When a studio closes, all that energy is released.
+As I said, when we started Defiant, there were not great jobs around.
+When Defiant closed, there were great jobs around and working for Defiant meant something for the people who'd worked for us.
+They had options and opportunities to go work on great projects at great studios.
+I could not be more happy about the successes of the Defiant alumni.
+There are so many people along the way who've gone on to do such great things, and the fact that we were able to be a small part of that journey with them makes me happy.
+We did still have an office and a lease at this point in time, which again was mainly a place that I could go and sit and be alone and feel sad.
+But it wasn't long after that Dan and I, Dan's my business partner by the way, And Dan and I were effectively the last people standing there.
+So we still had ongoing support for the old products.
+We weren't doing development anymore, but our games that we'd self-published were in the market.
+There were still things to do.
+There was still support.
+And that kept us busy.
+And it wasn't long after that that James Scott, who was one of the programmers at Defiant, said, look, I don't want a job.
+But I did pitch, you know, I pitched a superhero game back in the day as a thing that Defiant could work on and wasn't the right thing for the studio at the time.
+He's like, can I have that?
+Of course you can have that.
+We're not in the business of keeping people's ideas.
+So James started work on what became Capes, which is now signed to Daedalic and will be out later this year.
+And then Dan started working on that and Sean, who'd been our art director, started working on that.
+And the nice thing about having an office is that there was a space in which that could happen.
+And then, you know, COVID began and it was a big enough office that five people could in fact sit in opposite corners and still be socially distanced.
+So that was a positive.
+And I got roped into that project as well.
+I started doing some writing and doing some design.
+For Dan, I think the process of keeping busy was quite healing.
+And for me, it was not.
+It was really bad.
+I did not need to be busy.
+I was very done.
+So, you know, this is a talk, in some ways, about the very many ways that games can break your heart.
+But it's not really about that.
+There's a thing that comes along with being a developer in public and missing that is very shameful.
+Failure makes it really hard to want to put yourself out there.
+The other thing for me, too, is one of the things that really gave me joy was acting as a mentor to other studios and to other developers, offering advice where that advice was useful and practical.
+And nobody wants advice from a great big failure.
+It's certainly how I felt at the time.
+and the phone stopped ringing.
+And I think, you know, in retrospect, having spoken to people, I think people were being compassionate.
+So I think people didn't call because they felt like, you know, I'd taken myself away from the public eye and that was a fair and reasonable thing to do.
+But it had stolen from me one of the pieces of joy in my life, which was talking to other developers about the questions of game development.
+So here I am.
+Studios closed, some people are working on a game.
+I'm sort of working on a game, but not really.
+And it's impossible to not kind of come to terms with the fact that you may have just done the best thing professionally that you'll do.
+And from here, it is all downhill.
+And I've got to say that running indie studios is a thing that gave me great joy.
+But it's really hard to work out what the role of a failed indie studio head is in the broader context of the industry.
+Ten years running it successfully, one not so good, it's hard to work out where you fit.
+To be fair, early in the piece I had some very generous offers from people to come on board and do various roles for them, but I really wasn't ready.
+I talk here about the fun parts of a nervous breakdown, and I don't mean to use the language of mental health lightly because I was not in a place where my mental health was light.
+I was certainly depressed, I was certainly burned out, I was certainly in the midst of a nervous breakdown.
+I was certainly doing very, very badly.
+But pretty privately.
+It is interesting, the contrast between being a very, very public game developer, which I was, something like 50,000 Twitter followers.
+I turned my Twitter off because I was very keen not to be in public at this point in time.
+That turned out to be a mistake.
+I probably should have paused it.
+50,000 Twitter followers is useful when you're up to stuff.
+I definitely drew a line through that moment and said, oh, I am very much never going to make games again.
+Both by choice and by circumstance.
+I could not see myself as a person ever doing that work again.
+I was happy to help people who were doing stuff, but not for real.
+So, you know, I took time to you.
+really benefited from some full-on parenting, particularly as we went through COVID.
+I would not take those two years back under any circumstances.
+I would like to have been happier during them, but the value of turning my focus, which had been on external matters to the internal health and wellbeing of my family, helped a lot.
+And as I say, there's also, you know, the fun parts of a nervous breakdown.
+You get to, you know, tattoos and, you know, focus on your hobbies, do a bunch of gardening.
+And at that point I decided it was time to, you know, I'm going to get out of games.
+I'll go and become a therapist or something.
+I'll go and do some study, see how that goes.
+There's a reasonably big gap here at the end.
+to taking responsibility.
+And the thing about the way that I've always approached game development and the way that I've always approached the teams I work with and the studios I work with, ever since I've been a junior, is to be responsible.
+I do feel responsible for the team.
+I feel responsible for the game.
+I feel responsible for the people I work with.
+I carry an enormous amount of responsibility.
+But at this point, I also just couldn't help but think that there was a lot that was unfair.
+You know, it's possible to have a poker hand, play it perfectly, and lose the hand.
+I'm not saying we played it perfectly, but I didn't think, I mean, I think that game would have been great.
+I think publishers were wrong and stupid not to sign it.
+Often wrong and stupid.
+But there comes a point where you go, well, I did make all those decisions.
+The road that led me here, I walked down on my own.
+And then 10 years of being Morgan Jaffet of Defined Development, And you know, I'm certainly not the biggest named indie dev, but I was pretty well known, particularly in Australia.
+I was very visible.
+I was very vocal.
+When you are a public person, you become one thing in public.
+It is hard to have a multidimensional and complex identity in the public sphere.
+And when you're an indie game developer, It's hard to keep your public personality out of your private personality because there is an enormous amount of bleed backwards and forwards.
+A lot of my friends are people in the games industry.
+A lot of my social environment is the games industry.
+A lot of the ways that I interact and share and I'm a member of a community is through the games industry.
+Being Morgan Jaffet of Defiant Development, was exhausting.
+And, don't get me wrong either, like, I'm not a woman, I'm not a visible minority, but it was equally impossible not to worry that with 50,000 Twitter followers and a visible public presence, that one day that could just all turn into a rabid mob and it would all be over.
+Like, the ongoing pressure of the the social media machine is a tough thing.
+When you are just one thing, it's very hard to live a complex and fulfilling life.
+There's a bunch of things that play in to the way that you may approach other people, the stories you tell, the ways you pull things together.
+That being crushed down into that singular thing is also part of the kind of myth that keeps companies going, right?
+People think people in charge are in charge for some reason.
+They know more, they're wiser, they're cleverer.
+We make sort of figureheads of people so that, you know, we can respect them.
+We assume that the person at the top of the pile has a good reason for being there.
+It's all just people.
+It's all just people.
+They're all strange and weird and, you know, have their own things going on.
+But a lot of those people have forced themselves into very boring shapes in order to do the job that they do.
+You know, it is important to have a public face that represents the company.
+It is important for a myriad of different reasons.
+It's important in business, it's important in hiring, it's important for the overall relationships, but it's all people in the end.
+And you have real limitations because, as I noted at the start, your public behavior has a really concrete impact on the people you work with and for.
+the things you say are going to be read, if by nobody else on the internet, they will be read by your team.
+It's interesting, at one point I realized that whether or not I had a beard was one of the ways in which the team was trying to work out whether we were doing well or in trouble.
+Because when you lack the big picture information, when you don't actually see the bank statement, You have to, you know, cut open the animals and scry the auguries, right?
+You pick whatever the weather is and you go, gosh, does this indicate a bigger picture?
+Is God angry?
+Is that why we're being punished?
+You have to be careful with your public persona.
+This was two years of, like, not a great phase for me, where I was sad, and people had gone on to do good things, and I could be happy and proud of the work that had been done.
+But I was largely sad in private.
+And then, you know, we'd been working on Capes in the meantime, and that had reached a place where it was in good shape.
+So we decided to take it to Gamescom.
+And we were taking it to Gamescom to speak to publishers.
+That is the thing that I've done for Define many, many times in my life previously.
+I was happy to do it for the new group.
+Spitfire Interactive is what that group of ex-Define people were called.
+And they had Dan and I's support.
+And Dan was working very hard on it, and I was working gently on it.
+And we went to Gamescom.
+And in the lead up, I realized I was terrified.
+absolutely terrified to go and pitch this game, which is a thing I've done many, many times before with complete confidence.
+And I was terrified of the question of like, or what happened?
+Why didn't Defiant work out?
+Why is this a new studio?
+What's the relationship?
+How's that going on?
+And I did the thing that I hadn't done across the previous two years, which is I reached out to my friends in the industry and I said, I'm fucking terrified.
+What am I going to do?
+And it was a great moment because they were able to talk me down off that ledge, which was not a very high ledge.
+They said, nobody cares.
+Show the game.
+Is the game good?
+Nobody cares.
+You care.
+Nobody cares.
+Um, and I went to Gamescom, and we successfully signed a publisher for that title.
+And as I returned home and sat, for the first time, I had an idea for a game that I passionately wanted to make.
+And I realized something had changed.
+And I could see myself making games again, and I could see a way in which there could be a future for me in this industry, and there were ways that I could represent things.
+It is hard to say what burnout is and isn't, and where it starts and ends, but for me, it ended when inspiration came back.
+And there was nothing I could do to force that to happen, but to clear the space to allow it to happen.
+And God knows the first step on that road was being honest about the fact that I was in a terrible place.
+But while you're waiting for that kind of inspiration to come back and for new things to flow in, I do think there's a big question of, like, what do you do?
+I mean, outside getting tattoos and gardening.
+And I think the answer that I found was to help other people.
+And there's a truism in my life that is universal, which is that often I'm helping other people in the way that I'd like to be helped myself.
+And you hope that people will pick up on those cues.
+But I'll tell you what's even better than cues, which is just telling people that you'd like a hand.
+This flies very much in the face of the things I was talking about in terms of public face for a company.
+And that is the challenge and the bind that I was stuck in.
+But there are big and wide mentor and peer groups to ask for help.
+So at this point, things started opening up again.
+Options and opportunities were suddenly in front of me that felt interesting and compelling.
+I had my own projects I was working on.
+I was able to help in a fundamental way on CAPES.
+I was able to work with local developers on a game that I'm not sure is announced yet, but doing some narrative support.
+And I've recently started working with a team in New Zealand.
+Helping other people doing the thing that I'm good at has been very rewarding and fulfilling.
+It's nice because The message that I'd taken away from the closure of Define is that I was no longer good for anything.
+But the reason Define ran well for 10 years is because I'm actually quite good at a bunch of things.
+And it was nice to be able to start to apply them again.
+So, at the same time, that was an opportunity for me to engage with those projects as a much more complex and three-dimensional human.
+I'm no longer Morgan Jaffet to find development, which is good, which is good.
+I've helped different projects in different ways.
+I helped a mobile project that's based on narrative therapy and mobile health and rewrote all of their narratives so that it was a narrative therapy game with actual viable narrative design.
+And that was good.
+The thing about all of this, fundamentally, This is a talk about how to mend a broken heart.
+And that's really what it's about.
+Games will break your heart if you let it.
+But it'll heal it, too, if you let it.
+Companies, I think, are not the be-all and end-all.
+They tie up an enormous amount of energy.
+And often we have to build studios to make games, which is stupid, by the way.
+We need other models, and that's part of what I'm working on now.
+But what a company does is form human potential into a collective shape that can achieve bigger things than we can do alone.
+And that is worth doing.
+It is worth working with other people to try and make bigger games and achieve bigger things than we can do on our own.
+But if it's not going to do that, let it go.
+Let people free.
+Let them go into the world and do other things.
+But before you do that, maybe make a better plan, because that can really make a difference.
+You've got to have a plan that's worth your efforts, that's worth the people you bring together.
+Another thing that's really important to me, and this is something I did pretty well, but imperfectly.
+While the journey is good, tell your business partners, tell the people who work for you, tell them you love them and you're having a good time.
+Or at least tell them you love working with them, if you don't want to be too confrontational.
+It's in, if you don't, life is, and this is the thing that I've realized in talking to so many studio heads, life is what you do every day.
+And if the things you're doing every day are exhausting you and draining you and running you down, use the power you have to change that, to build structures that renew you and invigorate you every day.
+And when it is good, tell people.
+Share it.
+Let them know what that means to you.
+You know, Defiant development was a commercial proposition that we built for a singular moment in time.
+And I'm really proud now.
+I find myself able to be proud of what we achieved over the nearly a decade that we ran that studio.
+But we did grow it out of a particular moment and a particular thing.
+And in that same process, we were able to be part of something bigger.
+There was an indie game explosion happening around the world.
+There was an indie game explosion happening more specifically in Australia.
+We were able to be a part of that incredibly exciting moment in history.
+The studio closed and, you know, that left me with literally no idea what to do.
+and no idea who I was.
+And if you find your public self becoming visible and one-dimensional and creeping in at night and sliding in under the sheets, keeping you company, it might be time to think about how to expand yourself, how to be three-dimensional, how to be vulnerable.
+It's one thing to be popular, but it's another thing to be loved.
+You can be popular with a lot of people, but you can only be loved by a few.
+Relationships are everything.
+But if you're not vulnerable and honest, if you spend your entire time holding other people up, but not letting them hold you up, You're doing them a great disservice.
+And this applies not just in the broader scheme of things, but it applies in a studio fashion as well.
+If you're a studio founder and you're looking at yourself and you're going, but I'm indispensable.
+This company cannot run without me.
+You do that team a disservice.
+You're denying them the opportunity to grow into the roles that you occupy.
+You're denying them the opportunity to become the things that have led you along the path.
+Ultimately, when it comes to making indie games, running indie studios, you can walk that road on your own, and that's a viable way to do it.
+But I will tell you it is better with company, better with peers, and it's better with friends.
+And all I can tell you at the end of this is, the answer I found, not easily, What heals a broken heart?
+Only people.
+People to love, dreams to chase, and doing it together.
+That's my answer.
+Thank you so much.
+I appreciate you very much bearing with me for this story.
+This is a different talk to many of the talks I've given.
+I'm delighted to answer questions if anybody has questions.
+And I wrote some things down, because people like slides.
+But I'm really bad at slides.
+And it's hard, because I'm asking you to ask me questions, but I've just given you a bunch of stuff to read, which is why I hate slides.
+All right.
+Thanks, Morgan, for such an honest and vulnerable talk.
+I'm sure everyone here will agree with me that it was a beautiful, beautiful moment that you've shared with us.
+I'm curious now, like after the collapse of Defiant and working now with all these smaller studios, do you have a bit more hesitancy with studios to tell them to expand bigger and getting to that same size?
+Even when I was running Defiant, I told people, people would often come with questions about expansion, and expansion is a natural and easy thing to do when things are going well.
+I mean, there's a problem when you are sitting on a great big pile of money and you're a company and effectively you should be putting that to some use, right?
+Because the game's been successful or a publisher deal's signed.
+But even before this, I would always tell people that the fundamental is to know what your company is for.
+and growth can be a part of that or not a part of that.
+I think the thing that I spend more time than anything else talking to people about is people who have grown and are finding it uncomfortable.
+And it's really hard to put the genie back in the bottle at that point in time.
+So yeah, I would advise everybody, I mean, I know people in this room who have teams of three making games that are commercially successful that they can keep making forever.
+And look, don't get me wrong, there was a time when I said, if you've made a lot of money making a game, you probably should give some people some jobs.
+because Australia was desperately in need of people to provide jobs.
+But, yeah, I'm a long way from that now.
+I think thinking about a game and what it can sustain and how it can support people is the key step.
+And if people have companies they want to build, they should know what they're for and where they sit.
+And I think you should hire with great caution because, yeah, burn rates will kill you.
+every single time, every single time.
+So yeah, I would, my short answer to that is yes, grow only with caution.
+Okay, thanks.
+Pleasure.
+Hello.
+One question I had was in regards to resisting the urge to grow.
+One thing is that investors always want, you know, continual growth.
+How do you push back against that without cutting off your source of funding?
+Yeah, I mean, this is tricky.
+This is definitely one of the places that we hit at the end, right?
+It's like we just didn't have a good story to tell investors because we weren't interested in doing the things that would tell a good story to investors.
+I think it's really important to go into investment with eyes open as to what that means.
+And I say eyes open to what that means in terms of what is the mechanism of control.
+How does the board seat work in the example of an investor?
+How does the decision making work?
+How can leaders be replaced under certain circumstances?
+Who's actually in charge?
+And I think investment where you lose control for me defeats a lot of the purpose of being an indie developer, but it's certainly appropriate for people who want to be on that exponential growth road for success or failure.
+The interesting thing is, I've spent a lot of time beating myself up about running a studio for 10 years and then not.
+In the investor tech startup space, that's the norm, right?
+Take the money, ride it to the moon or fall off.
+One's fine.
+If you miss, you miss.
+Everybody took a good shot and you try and fail fast and succeed fast.
+And if you want to be in that world, then absolutely be in that world, but go in with eyes open.
+I think we are more and more able to find investors who understand what games are.
+I don't know how this is going to shift.
+When interest rates were zero, investment models changed a lot and people were now suddenly just interested in getting a better than zero return on their money.
+So you could find investors for games who had a really different approach and mentality than the ones that had previously been around.
+But yeah, I'm not 100% sure where we sit now that the interest rates are bouncing back up and people are starting to want to bet on, tell me how this is going to explode and be worth 10 times as much.
+Yeah, as I say, know what you're for.
+Know if that's the ride you want to be on.
+If that's not the ride you want to be on, find compassionate investors who understand that they're investing in a long-term proposition that can be a really great revenue raiser for a long time.
+Thank you.
+Pleasure.
+Anybody else?
+Hey.
+Morgan, thank you for an amazing heartfelt talk.
+That was actually just what I needed to hear right now in this moment.
+My question for you is, was there a sweet spot size-wise where you were happiest with I can tell you my personal sweet spot and I think in a lot of ways this is the story of why my personal sweet spot isn't necessarily the best way to run a business because my personal sweet spot is around that 30 person team that's where I can have the most impact and influence that's where I can get the most done but it really pushes you into making a certain sort of game And to find, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to very wise people who run very successful studios and, you know, Jamie Cheng at Clay always said to me, you are crazy putting all your eggs in one basket.
+If you have a 30-person studio, you need three games.
+You need to make much simpler games, you need to make more of them, you need to have the security and the backup of multiple partners.
+That's probably right.
+Jamie's very smart.
+So yeah, I think that's one of the takeaways for me is that the sweet spot and what I like to do and what I'm finding I'm most useful doing now with other studios is helping them around that transitional point.
+as they go from like 15 up to that 30 point because that's the place I'm comfortable.
+But I worked at Ubisoft back in the day on 300 person teams and got myself fired because I'm really bad at big company politics in that context.
+So yeah, I think it's important.
+That is one thing I will say, is through all of this, I've learned where I like to be making games.
+And it's not the same place that everybody I work with.
+has, right?
+Like some people who worked for Defiant were on a journey where they really wanted to go work for a blizzard, for example, and they really wanted to be a part of that big team doing big things that get plastered on the side of buses.
+And it's great, because those people got to work with us, fabulous contributors, and then move on to do great things.
+I think everybody has their comfort space and their comfort zone.
+So I know where mine is, and that's kind of where I try and lean in and be impactful now.
+But I also, you know, I wouldn't try and build a 30-person studio just because I like making games for 30 people at the moment.
+Ah, awesome.
+Sorry, just one more.
+No, excellent.
+Yeah, so you talked about that transition from 15 to 30, which sounds, from my own experience, quite an interesting one.
+Yeah.
+And I wondered if you had any kind of like specific bits of advice from your experiences about how to make that transition as smooth as possible.
+Yeah, I mean, that's probably another full talk.
+So that's probably another full talk and I will say, hit me up anytime, I'm very happy to talk.
+But it's all about structures and frameworks with individual leadership in there versus people who know everybody and can get things done.
+So when you're a 15-person studio, you know everybody in the room, you know everybody's speciality, you know who's working on what, and you don't need a lot of structure to get results.
+You just, somebody goes, oh, I'm gonna add this.
+I know you're working on that, what's your take on that?
+And those things all happen very organically.
+As you get above that and hit the 30-40 kind of person team, you actually need to make sure that you've put formal structures in place that work horizontally and vertically.
+So when I say horizontally and vertically, I mean you might have a department that works together.
+At Defiant, we used to have a writer's room of designers to break new content, talk about what we were doing.
+We would solve that problem collectively, but then one person would own it.
+And that meant that not only did one person own it, but the whole design team could answer a question if somebody was like, hey, what the hell are you thinking with that one?
+And we'd be like, oh, that's important because it ties into this thing.
+So we had that kind of horizontal knowledge across the design team, but then you make sure you have vertical knowledge as well by putting a designer, an artist, a programmer together on implementing this part and implementing this part.
+So by building that network, you build a really robust studio that can deal with the fact that no longer is it easy to just stand up and say, I know this bit is John's bit.
+John, what's the deal with that?
+So yeah, that's one of the elements.
+More structure, more structure, and people whose job it is just to make sure that people have meaningful work to do.
+Like, that's the other thing.
+Again, this is where that talk of hats comes in.
+Lots of people are really good individual contributors, and therefore they become leads.
+And then you have a lead who's like, oh yes, I'm also the best level designer, so I'm going to do this level because it's really important, so I'm going to get that done.
+That is a guaranteed way to make sure they do a terrible job.
+So Dan and I were always famous for saying, you know, if you want something done badly and late, you can put it on our slate.
+Otherwise, somebody who knows what they're doing shouldn't.
+We can do things.
+We used to be great individual contributors, but yeah, bad and late is how we do it now.
+Brilliant.
+Thank you very much.
+Hello, thank you so much for your talk, it was great.
+My question is, when the size of the studio grows, the administrative overhead grows.
+and usually the founders are creative directors, they are game designers and it's like you feel that you need to stop doing what you like the most, that is do game design, then stop doing creative direction and then you're on a business and you don't develop games anymore.
+It's people under you that will develop video games but not you.
+I think that is extremely true and My answer to this now is different to my answer then My answer to this now is that that is what you should do you should stop being a creative director or a designer and you should be a person who grows creative directors and designers and That that actually is a terribly rewarding thing to do to help other people become great.
+And trust me, a lot of them will become greater than you ever were.
+But to do that, you need to let go.
+So it is so hard for us, particularly when we've built something from scratch, to let go.
+But I am freer now than I have ever been.
+And that freedom came at the cost of the studio, but it didn't need to.
+I could have just let go.
+And if I had just let go, I could have been free a lot earlier.
+It's amazing when you stop viewing yourself as indispensable and start viewing yourself as responsible for helping everybody else become indispensable.
+it's a really valuable shift.
+So that's the best I can offer from the experience I've had, but God, I know it's hard.
+So it's all I ever wanted to do, was be creative director on games.
+Yeah, sorry.
+And I've had the chance to do it, and I had a great time.
+But I actually have other things I want to do.
+When I talk about becoming one-dimensional, don't let yourself become one-dimensional.
+We're big, complex, strange things.
+You have other projects in you that you will be free to do when you empower people to do those roles and take those jobs.
+And then your company runs like a real one.
+But like I say, that was a hard pill for me to swallow.
+Thank you.
+I was thinking the same because in our case, we cannot afford not to grow because it's the only way to survive.
+Because we had to offer work-for-care services, a lot of things just to keep the company running and don't crash down.
+And we went from three people to 62 people in two years.
+So it was very fast.
+Very fast.
+And I felt that there were no people with the capabilities to take responsibilities?
+The answer I have to that is that they will only ever be able to when you let them.
+So you have to let go and you have to let go and they will drop some things and they won't do them as well as you.
+And that's where you apply your creative direction skills to helping them and being a great mentor to them.
+I certainly, you know, I'm really sympathetic to that tale of growth.
+We started as a work-for-hire studio so I understand where you're coming from.
+And yeah, as I say, I think it is important.
+It's also important for corporate resilience.
+It's important to have multiple people who can sit in those roles and do those things in order to build a company that is strong and robust, as I didn't.
+So, you know, I definitely, as I say, a theme for the talk is advice, giving advice that I'm very poor at taking myself, but there is a great road on the other side.
+Thank you.
+Pleasure.
+I think we are done.
+We have to end there.
+Thank you so much for coming along.
+I really appreciate it.
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+This is so sick to be up here and see all of you here.
+Thank you all for coming.
+Can you please silence your phones?
+And also this talk is very full of spoilers.
+So if you have not played Tunic yet and you're like, I might play Tunic one day.
+If you leave right now, I will fully not be offended.
+and it'll be you having an untainted gameplay experience.
+So do your thing, please.
+Okay.
+Thank you for coming.
+My name is Kevin Reggeme.
+I was audio director on Tunic and I've been outsourcing and freelance and that kind of work for like 13, 14 years.
+I've contributed to 300 some projects.
+I'm not really sure at this point, various ways.
+In sound design and editing and music and voiceover and kind of everything in between.
+and I also host Realtalk.
+Who's seen Realtalk?
+Who's been on Realtalk?
+Wow, sick.
+I should meet all of you later, probably.
+Uh, yeah, it's a, it's a bi-weekly stream.
+We break down and review demo reels from up-and-comers and say, here's how you can increase your chances of being hired.
+And also, a bit of a deep cut, who's played Phonopath?
+Skitch?
+No one else.
+It's an audio puzzler I made like 2012 and you can't play anymore, it's in Flash.
+But if you DM me on Twitter I can just give you all the game assets so you can play it at home.
+It's a good time.
+Okay, so I'm currently creative director at Power Up Audio, though.
+We're a team of six up in Vancouver, Canada.
+And, yeah, thank you, Power Up Audio, thank you.
+We do sound, music, and VO for games, and we're in our 11th year right now.
+We have some 150-ish credits thus far.
+I like Darkest Dungeon, End of the Breach, Super Meat Boy Forever, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and the new DLCs like Synchrony recently, Decayden's Higher Rule, Celeste, Subnautica Below Zero, Ruined King, and recently Phantom Brigade released in February.
+And now we're working on Darkest Dungeon 2 with Red Hook, Wayfinder with Airship Syndicate, Moonbreaker with Animal World Entertainment, and Rift of the Necrodancer with Brace Yourself Games, and Earthblade from the Celeste devs.
+So we're real busy.
+but we're talking about tunic today, yes?
+It's gonna be a, aw, you.
+No, it's gonna be a breakneck speed talk.
+I have like 300 slides.
+So it's like an animation basically.
+It's gonna be just nonstop.
+So it's gonna be a lot of stuff.
+This isn't really an essay format style talk.
+We're just gonna blast through a bunch of shit and hopefully some of it lands and you find it inspiring or interesting or helpful.
+Sound good?
+Okay, sweet.
+So there'll be some creative directions, some technical implementation and sound design techniques and how-tos and hot tips.
+And also we'll talk about game design and forming some audio decisions.
+And the talk might get a bit wild, so please enjoy.
+Okay, first up, we are talking about creative direction.
+And the first thing is we went for a rounded kind of sound design.
+We're talking simple and smooth contours, like not, you know, but cool with that.
+All right, that land.
+Okay.
+Also tamed transient, so less ta and ka and more da and ja is great.
+You know, and pleasing frequencies.
+Here's some white noise 321.
+Bring it up, Ru.
+We all love some white noise, right?
+And here's... Can I play it again?
+Let's do it again.
+Can I?
+Yeah.
+And here's pleasing white noise.
+Yeah, it's warm, right?
+Okay.
+Here's a good example in-game of some... Some round sound design.
+No shrill, no piercing, no scraping.
+Just soft everything, you know?
+Next up, some generalized and synthy stuff.
+We don't want to lean on library source recordings too, too much.
+They do appear all over the game, certainly plenty, but we don't want to be focused too much core wise, you know.
+So here's the air boss coming up next.
+It's the air, it's the final boss of the game.
+It'll be three iterations.
+V1 was a bit too much.
+It's a sword, just too real.
+The second one, Craig Barnes was the designer on this, on our team.
+Craig went a little more stylized, got kind of like thunderous and crunchy, is a bit too far, too aggressive.
+And it came back in this really nice synthy zinging, zingy whoosh area.
+So have a listen.
+It's a bit subtle, so check it out.
+Too crunchy.
+Now zing.
+And one more victory lap for Kite Barns.
+Thanks Craig.
+Okay, next up.
+We got, this can be very video game, the sound wise.
+We're talking non-diegetic sound is great.
+Anything for the sake of the player is great.
+Things like physical objects don't need consistent sonic properties.
+Nothing needs to make sense.
+It's totally fine and there'll be plenty of this in the talk.
+We'll get to that later on.
+So we're gonna move into some technical implementation now.
+This is the listener.
+Who knows what the listener is?
+It's real important.
+It is basically the audio version of the camera.
+It's the ear in the world.
+The camera gives us a window into the world and the listener gives us an ear.
+So the placement is paramount and it dictates everything you're going to hear in the mix and everything the player is going to do as a result.
+It's super, super fucking important to get it right.
+So where does it go though?
+What's the goal?
+The goal is to communicate everything the player needs to know to them in a way that they expect and can react to, they can perceive in a meaningful manner.
+So For example, first person shooter, where's it going to go?
+On the head.
+Carly says on the head.
+Okay, sweet.
+Correct.
+Well done, everyone.
+Carly?
+Okay.
+All right.
+So, it's on the head, of course.
+The eyes are on the head, the ears are on the head.
+If they hear a door open to the right, the player turns to the right and they shoot the guy, right?
+It's going to work out for them.
+And but for a game like Celeste, a platformer, it's 2D.
+If we have a listener on the player character, it's not going to make as much sense.
+That fire's going to sound like it's a hard left.
+But the player's looking at the fire right in front of them.
+It should sound like it's right in the middle, in the middle of the panorama, yeah?
+So instead, it's more like we pull the listener back from the plane of the gameplay, like it's going to match the player on their couch at home, you know?
+OK?
+But what about Tunic?
+What do you do for an isometric game?
+You might think, listener on the camera, because you're seeing the world, it's right in front of you.
+But here's an image I've sent to many clients, problems that arise with this.
+The distance from the camera or the length of space between the camera and the target of the camera, that is the center of the screen, what the player is currently focused on, is like a hypotenuse in a right triangle.
+And the thing is, if the listener is right in the camera, stuff beneath the camera and listener in 3D space will be nearer and therefore maybe louder.
+And suddenly we have a disconnect between what the player is looking at and what the player is hearing.
+It's a big problem in terms of communication.
+So instead, here's a solution for Tooth and Tail, the last game.
+We move the listener above the center of the screen, the target of the camera.
+And now we have absolved that problem.
+We now have the things that are closest to the listener are the thing that the player's looking at.
+So for Industries of Titan, it's a little more complex so that you can zoom out.
+There's like zoom levels, it snaps to zoom levels.
+So our solution was to just scale the listener position also.
+So the camera comes out and the listener comes out too.
+Easy, right?
+And going further, we also employed cone attenuation.
+So if we're really far out, there may be something like down low right, some ship battle or something we want to hear.
+But if we're super close in, we might not want to hear that thing way off to the right, because the player is looking at this right now.
+Or maybe less of it at least.
+So things outside that angle of the cone would be turned down as a result.
+For a game like Hades, Darren Korb put the listener on Zagreus, and it was still 3D audio.
+They put the sound size in FMOD, so they're automating sound size.
+It's a bit hard to describe in a short talk like this.
+I mean, in a long talk, but in this short slide.
+The gist, though, being that as things get farther away from Zagreus, they become more directional in quality.
+It's a bit easier to understand with a game like Death's Door, though.
+David Fenn put the listener on the player character as well.
+And automated spread in Wwise.
+So the farther it is away, the less spread there is, yeah?
+So imagine there is a sound source on the crow, our hero character.
+If it's mono, we have widespread.
+That means coming out both speakers.
+Therefore, the phantom image is right in front of you, and it sounds like it's right in front of you in the middle of the screen.
+Makes sense, right?
+consistent with the player expectation.
+If it's a stereo sound, it might be that it has full spread and we have full envelopment, like there's a big ass waterfall or something and it wants to take over the entire mix.
+If it's in the middle, we're gonna hear full spread too.
+As the sound source moves to the right, we're going to have the whole spread moving right, the phantom image moves, the spread of the waterfall moves, and further yet, it gets less and less spread and more point source.
+Likewise, far away in front, you may have that stereo sound moves to a point source.
+You hear the waterfall over there rather than all around you, yeah?
+Make sense so far?
+Okay.
+A lot of nods.
+Awesome.
+Okay.
+But the thing is, all of these games use 3D audio natively.
+It's like native 3D audio in Wwise and FMod.
+But for Tunic, we have things like altitude differences.
+We have enemies making sounds.
+There's sound sources above and below the characters, sometimes in other rooms.
+we have a ton of camera play that camera can pan around the player it can go above the player we have envelopment to consider with all these issues as well so in the end we decided no we're not going to do 3D space we're going to do screen space instead so what this means in practical terms is every sound is playing in 2D in the game and we're driving the playback with a set of parameters to define how it comes across to the player So these are the parameters.
+We have off-screen distance, screen space X position, screen space Y position, ortho size, and altitude delta.
+So off-screen distance is the easy one.
+It just simply is the sound source on the screen.
+Is it here at all?
+Is it here far away, near?
+It doesn't matter.
+Is it there?
+Then it's zero.
+If not, how far away is it?
+Is it one away?
+Is it 40 away?
+And then we can just make kind of classical, typical-looking attenuation curves that you'd see in like a 3D spatializer in FMOD.
+X position and Y position, very simple.
+Zero is the center of both.
+Positive one, negative one for X and Y and beyond.
+It could be like 40 away to the left in X position, right?
+Negative 40.
+So with the panning, with the X position, we can handle panning so it makes sense, right?
+We have things on the left side of the screen come out the left side of the speakers.
+Again, we're just being consistent with player expectation.
+And up top there, keep in mind, this is the edges of the screen, yeah?
+So that's gain up top.
+What this means, this is on both Y and X in some cases.
+And if you can picture, that means if you're in the middle of the screen, you're a bit louder.
+We still wanna hear things at the left, but if it's right in the middle, it's probably a little more relevant to the players, so we'll hear it just a bit bumped up in the mix.
+Altitude delta is a little bit weirder.
+It is simply the difference in vertical height between the fox character and the sound source in 3D space.
+So this is the unity view.
+We have a little scavenger above.
+That's our height.
+Yeah.
+And ortho size, orthographic size is kind of the weirdest one, but a decent analogy would be something like a telephoto lens.
+The camera position isn't changing across these photographs.
+It's just the gear used, right?
+And changing the lens, changing the settings, it alters the amount of world that we're seeing as a result.
+So something like this, this is ortho size 15.
+This green prism to the right here, that isn't the camera.
+It's just like a mock-up by me to show you like here's what it where it might be and here's like a window into the world, yeah?
+So, something with this green prism, this is 15, this might be 50?
+Does that make sense?
+So, you're not pulling the 15 back to see more of the world, you're just making the prism bigger.
+So, this again, 15, this might be 50, but the camera hasn't moved.
+So, again, we couldn't like scale listener distance with camera position and stuff, right?
+Wouldn't make any sense.
+Here's eight, if you're curious, and here's one.
+Look at his feet, it's so cute.
+Okay, so again, everything is in 2D, kinda, but, and without native 3D spatializers, and this text here is a debug tool that Andrew Sholdice, the primary developer, threw together for us, and it really helped in like live update with FMOD to kind of keep track of where the numbers actually were for a given sound source.
+So we'll see it in action with some waterfalls here.
+It's only three point source sounds for all these waterfalls.
+I'll be debug warping around just to watch the numbers there.
+So because we know as developers exactly where the player can go, we can set up curves to suit to ensure things sound correct.
+Make sense?
+Okay, sweet.
+And on top of that, it's not just making sure things sound correct, we can tell a story as well.
+So with this tuning fork up top, altitude delta is now zero.
+We're right in front of it.
+It's all we care about as a player, right?
+Come back down, it comes down a bit in the mix.
+We can go away, fade away.
+perhaps towards it again, we can drop off entirely to the left.
+Because over here, it doesn't matter at all.
+But walking up on this thing, we get a taste again because the camera's panning over.
+It's all just done with the curves.
+And if you're thinking, holy fuck, Kevin, how many curves did you make?
+Yeah, a lot.
+but we have FMOD effect chain presets on our side.
+So like the spider preset, for instance, we set up panning and or the exposition and the off-screen distance, all these curves we need for a given enemy and drop that effect chain preset on all the given events like hurt and attack and death and so forth.
+And then if we think, oh, we want to hear the spider from a bit further off screen, I can change that curve in one place and it'll proliferate across all the places we need it to change.
+Make sense?
+Super useful.
+Shout out to Matt Block for telling me that because I'd never used it before.
+Dynamic music and ambience is our next thing.
+Here it is in action.
+We're going to see a little crossfade, find a waterfall.
+We'll go to the piano instead.
+And then we're going to fade out entirely as we discover a secret room.
+I told you there were spoilers.
+So easy.
+Here's that room in Unity.
+And here's our first basic trigger volume to talk about.
+There's a portal there.
+You can see where the fox spawns into the scene.
+These guys here, these portals, have a play music on load script.
+Each scene in Unity has a play music on load script.
+You can see the event there at the top.
+It's one of the tracks in the game.
+And coincidentally, this track in this scene is the same one as in the overworld.
+So nothing happens for the script.
+But we also have the parameter data on the basic trigger down below, the volume trigger.
+And in this case, we say overworld layer 3 should be 1 now, and 2 and 1 should be 0.
+So we're going to fade out entirely over that piano.
+And then down here, we have a gradient trigger volume instead.
+It's kind of similar, but we have an A and B on each side, so we're able to float between two parameter values over the length of the volume.
+So you can see here it says, go from 1 to 0, from A to B, yeah?
+We have these all over the game.
+Here's one in the overworld.
+It's the first one most players encounter.
+We fade to kind of the B side of the overworld tunes.
+So in this case, we're fading 1 on each side and 0 on each side, right?
+Not just 1 fading out.
+And next up is another main trigger type.
+This is a room-specific trigger in the Frog Cave Vault.
+The player's got in here looking for a green key, and they see, oh no, it's empty.
+So we have a room system to handle a bunch of stuff in the game.
+It handles rooms kind of fading in and out of view as you go through doorways.
+It handles a bunch of stuff.
+And it also handles some audio here for us.
+So the volume, the gist is the volume only works if the current room that the fox is in is active.
+So in this case, we have a door with a trigger on each side.
+and we're able to snap according to the room being activated.
+It's a bit better than having a gradient there where the player can like walk kind of half in the gradients and then the sound is changed halfway but the room snapped over.
+It's just a little bit more elegant, right?
+So next up, tuned sound effects.
+Tuning sound effects to the music.
+Let's have a look.
+So many sounds in the game will always play in tune with the music regardless what track is playing.
+But how?
+We did this in every single music event.
+We dropped command instruments across the board that were sending global parameter settings, in this case, set music key center to C, to F, or to G sharp.
+Any fans of G sharp out there?
+Yeah, H sharps, okay.
+Yeah, I know humans are reading this, so the letters don't really matter, right?
+It's just like C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, et cetera.
+So, all that said, we have two things to deal with mainly in-game, two problems to solve.
+One is held and one is one-shot sound effects.
+The held is the easy one.
+The changing room music event is simply throwing parameter data over to this event for the prayer.
+And it's like, cool, gotcha.
+And it just changes over time.
+No problem.
+but one shots what do you do?
+Some problems arise.
+So if a command is sent after a sound is done, we're good.
+It's totally fine.
+No problem.
+But if it's sent during the sound, we can get re-triggering going on.
+It'd be very likely for players to encounter this, yeah?
+And some of you out there are like, ah, Kevin, come on, just hold value during playback, it's so easy.
+Well, this would break the held ones, unfortunately.
+It's a cool idea, it's super useful, lifesaver, checkbox.
+But, uh, we wanted to use only one parameter to control everything, and it's gonna break one of them, right?
+So, our solution was this, a big-ass transition hub.
+So, When the event starts, these are all conditional transitions.
+They say what keys are currently in, and it sends it to the right place.
+In this case, it says, go to G sharp, our favorite, and then to the end.
+So regardless of what plays, it's going to go to the right place and then go to the end.
+And if a parameter changes during that event, it doesn't matter anymore, because it only mattered when the event started.
+With me?
+OK, awesome.
+Last thing, some of you may have been keenly noticing that these command instruments are a bit pushed ahead of the beat division.
+And if you like play jazz or just composers, whatever, you might know of like a push.
+So you put a note that applies to the next chord.
+So it rings out in the right key as opposed to being in the old key.
+So we have this happening.
+Pretty cool, right?
+Right.
+Sound design techniques.
+This kind of blurs with the previous technical stuff, but just we're just gonna keep going, okay?
+So first up, first is the Siege Engine Foley, one of the bosses in the game.
+Here it is with the boss soloed.
+FL Studio, any fans?
+for life.
+I've been there since like version 2.7 or something.
+It's the best.
+So, uh, this is a 3D granulizer.
+I've used it so much.
+It's my favorite ever.
+Most granulizers have the same, like, similar functionality.
+So we'll just, you know, Mangler or whatever you're using, just, uh, transpose this to that stuff instead.
+This knob is the best one.
+It's the random knob.
+And these are a bunch of layers of different stone sounds.
+Here it is in action.
+Yeah.
+So here's no random.
+We're going to crank it up.
+Pull the key down and hear random grains from all over that waveform.
+The source material is just a bunch of stone stuff, right?
+Easy.
+We have our various layers and a layer instrument at the top, so we can just play a single thing and it'll play all of them together.
+And now we're no longer in the place or in a position of dropping a shit ton of regions onto a Pro Tools or a Reaper timeline, we can just simply perform the Foley.
+Sick, right?
+So cool.
+And if you're curious how I filmed that, not a GoPro, it was a phone and a shoelace.
+That was what I did.
+Metal Impact Variations the Easy Way The blue region here is a single variation.
+The top bin is like the reflect sound.
+It plays on a bunch of stuff in the game, but the blue one is the metal part, the big tuning fork specifically.
+I put two little parameters in this event, and it's randomEqNotch, randomEqPeak.
+We put them at 0.5 and randomize their value 100%, so it goes either 0 to 1 every time the event plays.
+And then we tie those two to EQ positions on this multiband EQ.
+Here it is.
+Maybe?
+There it is.
+What the?
+It's not there, apparently.
+Well, it sounds sweet, I promise you.
+Here we go.
+I'd be sad if the highly edited video didn't play.
+Okay, so next is the void strength effect.
+Okay, so void strength is tied to various things in game.
+In this case, proximity to these strange crystals, yeah?
+There's enemy attacks and stuff also in the game too.
+We hear the same sound.
+So the source here, to start things out was a main theme of the game's soundtrack, the title theme.
+And it's the random knob, yeah, let's go.
+And what we were going for in game, hopefully, was like downsampling it.
+That was the ambition.
+So that was the aim.
+But unfortunately, FMOD doesn't have native bit crushing.
+I did find this weird free thing online.
+It was free, so it's always kind of sketchy to put in a commercial project.
+And also there was no Xbox libraries or anything else anyways, so it's kind of a moot point.
+So back to the drawing board, I considered making a bunch of just baked loops.
+Here's different values of bit crushed whatever.
+But the thing about downsampling is it's really obvious when you swap across different levels.
+You're gonna get the stair casing effect for sure, so that's not gonna work.
+So back to the drawing board again, instead I thought perhaps a random square wave LFO, in particular these two knobs, the base level and the volume, it's like a range so you can move the knob and it'll change to suit.
+What we're talking about is randomization within a range over time.
+So we're going to have five baked loops, let's say across the void strength as it increases.
+We won't have this static set of loops where you're going to be staircasing so horribly.
+We'll have this instead.
+And now we have this expression over time as opposed to just these hard stairs.
+We have access to way more nuance as you do in game.
+So here's loosely what it looks like in action in FL.
+With me so far.
+We're like half with your void strength.
+So it's going to keep going.
+Okay.
+So, but first, before you go forwards, the goal of what we're doing here is to make it seem like the in-game content is being bit crushed.
+Like it's being down sampled.
+We can't do it actually.
+So we need to fake it.
+So to make it seem like we are, we consider when you down sample anything, it's the top most frequencies that are affected first.
+Yeah.
+So it goes like, These tickle of changes top to bottom as you crank up the downsampling.
+So the thing is with that, it leaves unaffected frequency range beneath it.
+It's kind of just like this wave traveling as you crank the knob up.
+So we want to have two things in-game.
+We have the progressively low-passed game audio, which is like the unaffected stuff underneath we're faking, and the bit-crushy downsampled stuff on top of it, okay?
+Here it is.
+So here's the event in Fmod.
+We're looping on silence because the event's always playing.
+Various things in the game cause void strength to take place.
+And here's the void strength parameter timeline.
+We don't hear anything at first because we don't want to have anything happen until some void strength is in effect at least.
+So we'll get some reference audio going.
+We have two snapshots.
+The first is part one.
+The second is part two.
+We crank to 100% over the first half for part one and then for part two.
+and part one is basically just a high shelf to make space for some for those down sampled highs it's not much happening so far just subtle and part two is a big old low pass and keep in mind we're again we're adding bitcrush stuff on top of this that's the most it'll get low pass to 100 again the goal to make it sound like the in-game audio is being distorted okay The second snapshot also bandpasses the in-game, like the gameplay sound effects, like Fox stuff and enemy stuff.
+We still kind of wanted to hear it, so we didn't want to cut it off entirely, like the music and ambience.
+So now, we'll get a reference sound effect going.
+It's that hit from earlier, yeah?
+And we'll hear the kind of screaming sound design loop we put on top of the void strength down below.
+and we side-chained the SFX against the screen loop too.
+Cool?
+Alright.
+So, and for the Bitcrush loop specifically...
+That's that nested event in that previous video, yeah?
+So, as mentioned earlier, we're mixing the in-game audio with the Bitcrush stuff.
+So we're high-passing this.
+All we want is the tickles, right?
+We don't want all the main theme stuff underneath.
+So we have this high-passed Bitcrush content with the low-passed game audio, and we're sweeping both.
+It all makes sense?
+Because I had to relearn that.
+So thank you for bearing with me.
+I did it a long time ago.
+Okay, next up, using game design to inform audio decisions.
+First up, first kind of umbrella of points, we're talking supporting the player's narrative.
+And what I mean by that is not necessarily like the narrative of the game, the story being told, but rather what's happening for this player specifically.
+What is their personal experience with the game?
+It could be there's a hallway and a door at the end.
+Well, did they just run down speed run style and like slam through it, like glitch through the wall?
+Or do they hang out for a while and like make a sandwich or talk to their wife or something?
+We need to make sure that both experiences are covered.
+So the, it all comes down to the choices they're making and the experience they're having as a result.
+So first thing here, it's really easy, real simple one, but checkpoints in music.
+For a long time, the checkpoints didn't reset the music and it just kept feeling kind of wrong because the world pauses, the whole world resets.
+It makes sense to have the audio follow suit.
+Yeah.
+Antunic being a game where everything is hidden, or many things are hidden in plain sight, and you're not really told how the game works or where to go or anything, this had a bonus knock-on effect of kind of implying further what the checkpoints do and how they work, just through the audio alone.
+Next up, we're talking first sightings.
+The first time players hit something, regardless of when.
+Here's a big reveal right here.
+Wow.
+Right?
+We're throwing a parameter down the timeline in the music track.
+It's not sound effects.
+Can you hear the same thing?
+Big reveals.
+So this is the void touched, we call it, under the hood in Unity.
+And this is the first hint of darkness in the game.
+It's mostly like a light, bouncy, colorful thing otherwise, right?
+So the player is like, oh, this is the game.
+OK, I had no idea.
+So this is a big moment.
+We wanted to make sure that the player was, their eyes were widening at the same rate the sound was increasing.
+So right there, gasp, oh my god, it's right there.
+It's possible they can go back up the ladder, but it's unlikely, right?
+They're going to keep coming down.
+And next up, same thing for the fuse field.
+Oh my god, it's the thing.
+Easy.
+And similar situation with some secret rooms, the player could never discover this room potentially, or they could discover it immediately.
+But regardless of when they get there, we want the music for that room to start when they get there.
+So when they arrive here, this trigger volume is like, hey, welcome to the room.
+Music start.
+And then if you leave and come back, it's going to crossfade in from where it started before, because they already know it exists.
+So we're keeping track of what the player knows.
+Okay, I'll write quick one here, but still kinda in first sightings.
+We're talking distant sound sources and massive spaces.
+So regardless of when the player arrives here, it's probably the first time they've been in such a massive space.
+And we wanna simulate travel time through the air, just push it forward on the timeline a bit.
+All right, isn't that elegant?
+It's like, here we go, done.
+Check it out, it's a bit subtle, but check it out.
+The Thunk.
+What a big space.
+Some streamer was like, wow, they did like the air travel time.
+I was like, fuck yeah, let's go.
+I totally heard it.
+OK.
+Next up, predicting and informing player behavior.
+It's kind of the next category for game design, informing player, or audio decisions, sorry.
+So, first thing, this is something I like to call heavy discouragement.
+The gist here in the quarry is you can travel down, and if you don't have a certain item, the void strength cranks up real quick, and it's just saying, hey player, maybe go somewhere else first.
+If they get that item, and they equip it, that negates the whole effect, they can see what they're doing, they don't have this thing screaming in their ears, and their health isn't gonna be drained to zero.
+It's like a pretty clear turn back now.
+It doesn't always work.
+Most people turn back, but not always.
+with this audio holy shit fuck it's not even tied up that was a bug we shipped, when I made that whole voice strength effect I went through earlier, making it, I broke its connection to the volume sliders by accident and just never realized.
+But I kind of liked it because it was like you're going down and someone's like, oh, I gotta turn that sound down.
+It's like, no, don't turn it down, just go, like leave.
+So yeah, we did fix it though in the end.
+So next up in predicting player behavior, these wind chimes, this puzzle here.
+The gist here is the chimes play in pairs and the sequence of pairs that happens, it could be ascending or descending or simultaneous, consecutive, same note.
+The sequence indicates a D-pad input sequence.
+and then you do the thing and you get a prize.
+So another challenge though is that there's this waterfall here and it's real loud.
+So while this is kind of a nice accessibility thing anyways, we specifically put the ambient slider in for this puzzle.
+Because while the chimes are arguably an ambient effect, this is like a point source thing hanging out in the ambient space, right?
+We put it on the sound effects slider.
+And in the end, we do want people to solve this stuff, right?
+Keeps not playing videos.
+It's like that.
+It was like a duh by itself.
+What does that mean?
+Let's, I wonder.
+Let me turn off ambience.
+Okay, that should be even optimal.
+Designed moment, right?
+Right.
+Down, left, right, up.
+We want him to solve it, right?
+Just set things up to allow for it, that's all.
+So finally on player behavior, Sonic foreshadowing.
+For context, this concerns the moment right after the player saw this void touched from earlier.
+This is an open world game, it's a bit difficult to foreshadow things with audio if the player can just sort of go anywhere.
+It can be done here and there, kinda, but it's a bit easier when it's like in front of them, they have to go forwards, yeah?
+So here, they must go forward.
+We just don't want them feeling great about it, you know?
+They've already been kind of unsettled from seeing that dark thing upstairs.
+They've gone down this elevator.
+It was real slow.
+We're just guaranteeing that they do hear this sound, right?
+In this case, we had a mono and stereo pair.
+The mono pair and stereo pair have, or stereo effect, have different spatialization settings.
+And like I was saying, it just guarantees that we can like crank this up when they're far away and pull it down when they're close to have the direct sound instead.
+I don't like that sound.
+What are those noises?
+Oh no.
+What the hell is that noise?
+That's a rare spawn animation, you got it.
+And not once, twice!
+That was great.
+Okay, so the first, I'm sorry, final category here in game design informing audio is serving design pillars.
+Game design pillars, the first being here, hidden in plain sight, we're doing spectrogram content.
+So consistent with the creative direction of hidden in plain sight, we want to have things a player might not ever know about.
+Here's the shopkeeper.
+room sounds like nothing.
+Again it can sound like anything.
+That's the point of the audio direction.
+So this being the shopkeeper, here's the ambience track if you rip it from the game, just record the output.
+And there are little glyphs in there, like the ones that appear throughout the manual and stuff.
+In this case, in the shop, this one means buy.
+there is a shop elsewhere, there's one shop like this, it's a special version, and in this case the shopkeeper's like, this one's on the house, have it, here take this manual page, it's all yours.
+And here's that ambience track, and this one means free.
+So we're nearing the end, last thing in design pillars, this is More hidden in plain sight.
+I'm not going to tell you what it is at first, though.
+Some of you probably might know, but I'll just get into it, OK?
+Let's do this.
+So this is arguably the biggest secret in the game.
+Last chance to leave.
+OK.
+So one main goal of Tunic's overall design was to make it feel like the world's not for you.
+You find chests that are already open.
+You can't read the language.
+There's no clear path, no direction.
+You aren't the hero.
+That's the idea.
+You're just small and lost in a land of mysteries, many of which are hidden in plain sight, like I've been saying.
+So Tunix glyph cipher for instance, you roll in here, you can't really read it, it's been since dubbed Trunik by our players.
+There's no expectation the player ever solve this, but if they want to take the time, the words are there.
+The garden path shortcuts, the secret controller inputs.
+the functionality of various items and props in the world.
+It's all there from the beginning.
+The player just might not yet possess the knowledge required to interact with it or understand it.
+So Tunix audio design was aimed in that same direction.
+Early in development, we imagined the game having a voice of sorts, maybe like from us, the devs, or just from the game itself.
+But regardless, as a voice, the player wasn't equipped to interpret.
+So I designed a musical cipher.
+It's heard throughout the entire game, and it's never acknowledged.
+But first, Shrewnik.
+So if you did take time to solve it, you'd find that it's phonetic in nature.
+Over the left you have no, then joy, pi, cheer.
+Here is a rundown, if you weren't aware.
+So a single character can be a single phonetic pair of consonant and vowel, or it can be by itself, just one part of those two things.
+The interior defines the consonant, the N part, N, of no.
+And the exterior is the vowel, in this case, O. So together we have no.
+But there's a little circle underneath.
+You swap the constant vowel order.
+Now it's vowel constant for own.
+With me so far?
+Sweet.
+Deciphering this might eventually lead the player to discover the secrets of the final late game glyph tower, which upon solving leads the player to do you fear the eyes of the far shore dot co, a website.
+This is where we finally reveal the existence of the audio language, the musical cipher, kind of.
+Downloading and viewing the website's audio and spectrogram view shows a series of glyphs.
+and importantly the audio track also features a series of musical arpeggios that occupy the same time space as the glyphs and correspond one-to-one in meaning.
+Have a listen.
+This is our musical cipher's Rosetta Stone.
+Dubbed Tunic by our players, doesn't make things hard to communicate at all, it's fine, Tunic.
+This cipher is the same as Trunic in structure.
+It's like a sister language, sister cipher.
+So for Trunic, a given phoneme is defined by the presence or absence of lines within a glyph frame.
+For Tunic, it's defined by the presence or absence of notes over two octaves of a pentatonic arpeggio.
+For trunic, we look at the internal and external components.
+For consonant and vowel, and for tunic, we're looking at the lower and upper ranges of notes.
+So I recognize we're getting into musical theory a bit here.
+It probably won't be a big deal for a lot of you, but I apologize to those who aren't as musically versed.
+But here's the briefest tutorial for those who might be out of the loop.
+A musical chord is notes all at once, yeah?
+An arpeggio, they're broken out and played separately, often ascending or descending.
+That was the phone in the shoelace again.
+I designed TUNIC with numbered notation in mind.
+That is, considering notes as scale degrees, as numbers, as opposed to absolute pitches or note letters.
+So for a C major scale, we're looking at not C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, but instead 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
+And to that end, I said it's a pentatonic arpeggio, so we have 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15.
+The consonant is defined by the lower octave, and the vowel by the upper octave, the notes up top.
+And one phoneme in tunic is one arpeggio.
+One arpeggio can be a consonant sound, a vowel sound, or commonly, the two put together for one phonetic pair.
+So for example, no would be 1-2-6 for the n, and 9-12-13 for the o. Is that gonna go?
+Oh, you're not gonna hear it, cool.
+There we go.
+All right.
+There it is.
+And by default, the phonetic pairs like in trunic are always constant vowel as an ascending arpeggio, but we can have a little circle underneath and have it vowel consonant instead with a descending arpeggio.
+Can we, please?
+Jeez.
+Okay, a pentatonic scale can be built starting from any note, any root note, and therefore tunic can be written in any key center.
+We can even follow along with chord changes.
+As long as all notes in a given arpeggio move together, it's still decipherable.
+All right.
+So every constant includes a one as part of its encoding.
+And that's because all, all note numbers are derived relative to that root note.
+So if it's not there, it can get tough to know what you're looking at.
+So for example, like the one, three, five, eight of guh there, if we kill the one, the three, five, eight becomes like one flat three flat six or something like that, you know?
+So, and then, yeah, notably for vowels alone, like ooh, we also use the one as a placeholder.
+We just say one and then go top right away.
+And sometimes, we'd even have a descending arpeggio lead directly into an ascending arpeggio.
+And in this case, we might employ only a single one acting as kind of an apostrophe connecting the two phonemes.
+And furthermore, since we're working in terms of numbered notation, the cipher's design accommodates for all kinds of expressions of tonality.
+All right.
+So major, minor, diminished, mixolydian, whatever you're writing in, it's all fair game.
+A flat five is still a five.
+Anyway, tuneic shows up all over the game.
+It's in UI sounds like when you start a new game.
+or when you hit the finish line in a speed run.
+It's an enemy sounds like this little probe guy.
+or this spell being cast.
+Finding a secret directs your attention.
+And one of my favorites, this is a secret spell, leading the Fox to some secrets to be found.
+And of course, the door in the mountains.
+I like this one a lot, actually, because it's kind of unique across Tunic.
+All the top notes are the same.
+So as a result, the subsequent root note of each arpeggio kind of helped to inform what the chord changes would actually be.
+It's pretty cool.
+Anyway, the cipher shows up all over the soundtrack as well, some three hours of music created by Terrence Lee and Janice Kwan.
+And for each track, I brainstormed secret lyrics of a sort with the primary developer, Andrew.
+These are words that were thematic or relevant in nature to each track's corresponding area or purpose, that kind of thing.
+So I'd make simple MIDI files for Terrence based on the words we selected.
+it's in it's most simplest form, right?
+It's like kind of like Morse code, it has like a very simple minimal form, but you can, if you know you're listening to Morse code, you can like do anything.
+I can do this.
+And you know, it's like dots and dashes, you know?
+So, and Terrence would then check my work.
+There's a misspelling.
+Kevin, come on man.
+He got pretty good at this stuff.
+And then Terrence would create a track working around that MIDI content.
+And here's an example of what I workshopped with Andrew versus what Terrence produced.
+It's Under Earth, it says.
+In this case, Andrew and I actually had some other reference material from like Zelda or something that was like, let's try to make it kind of feel like this tonality.
+So I already had the tonality built in and sent it Terrence's way.
+So see if you can hear it, Under Earth.
+And And here's my favorite.
+The game was called Secret Legend for a long time, and in fact, in the title of the game, it says Tunic with the glyphs above and below, that says Secret Legend 2.
+And here it is in the end credits.
+So I know what you're all thinking.
+Why?
+Why do all this fucking work?
+It's so much work.
+Why go to all this trouble?
+Well, apart from following suit with the secrets everywhere in plain sight kind of direction of the game, our dev team had a little phrase we employed throughout development, and that was content for no one.
+We use that phrase to refer to little or large things that we hid deeply in the game, very deeply in the game, for no other reason than we just liked making it, and we liked knowing it was there.
+Will anyone ever find it?
+Will they find it?
+Maybe, maybe not, but either way, it's totally fine, it's okay.
+And by the way, if all this talk of musical ciphers tuned to the music has you wondering, yes, this is a large reason why we called the game Tunic.
+So that was a lot.
+Hope it was helpful and inspiring and interesting and entertaining.
+I'm not sure, hopefully.
+But if you want to see more of Tunic, we're in the IGF booth until tomorrow at three.
+And thanks a lot.
+Thank you.
+Also, I wasn't sure if I'd have time for this.
+This is a bonus video of the source material for the Slarm enemy's voice.
+Thank you, Isla, the dog.
+Yeah.
+She just had some salmon or something.
+And that was, yeah, I heard across the room.
+It was like, Oh my God, I got my H6.
+Okay.
+All right.
+Yeah.
+So please fill out your evals.
+Of course, everyone's saying that just please do.
+It helps me improve.
+It helps GDC improve.
+It's super helpful.
+And, uh, I thought this would be like right to the hour, but that's fucking much fast.
+That was sick.
+So I'm available right now.
+Any questions, please.
+The mic's right there.
+Hello.
+Hi.
+In the lead up to release, Andrew Sholday said that his favorite sound was the lever puzzle activating.
+And when you were asked the same question, you said, that will have to be asked me after release.
+So now I'm asking you after release.
+Yeah, we kept that cipher pretty close to the chest.
+Not even like friendier for the most part.
+A lot of our indie pals around the industry.
+It's tough to pick one out.
+The existence of this thing.
+I mean, we had to... I kind of skipped over this, but it's heavily implied.
+We did this before like any music was written.
+It was done so, so, so early.
+So, I think the sound effects wise, I mean, I think that the secret, the fairies and their voices, oh you know what, I have an answer for you.
+So there's a waterfall and it's like a fairy fountain kind of room in the game and all the fairies you discover here and there with little secret inputs all end up there.
+And there's one fairy in that room that just sort of flies like to the group and all the other ones like fly into the sky and you just find the waterfall later.
+So I decided without telling Andrew to just make a special case fairy sound.
+So they don't say like, woo, hee, ha.
+They don't say, hey, I'm free.
+They don't say those things.
+He has like this very long...
+uh... like stand-up comic style routine is like roasting andrew and i mean a bit it was like it was a bad thing and i can go through and and making just a little or the lore of the game is tough and it's also pitch to the music over time it's like enough modding key with the music it's just it was way way too much work but uh... yet a search waterfall very fountain tunic i'm sure you hear online it's kinda ridiculous and totally unnecessary awesome thank you Hi, thank you for the talk.
+Cheers.
+I'm a freelance game audio designer and one of the things I often find really hard and difficult to do is figuring out how much work a project will be and how much to charge for my services.
+And so I'm wondering how you and how Power Up Audio does it with a project like this where there's so much more to just like per sound effect price, there's like so much design that goes on behind this.
+So how, if you can speak to that, that might be a subject for a whole nother talk.
+Yeah.
+What's the itemized invoice look like for this, right?
+Yeah.
+Okay.
+So I can answer in vague terms, certainly.
+So PowerUp works in a variety of ways.
+We do hourly invoicing and we just like track our hours and charge monthly.
+We do lump sum payments over installments like you know now and beta and like a release date or something we do revenue share where it's more like a partnership we do like the game releases and like at certain milestones of profit we get a little bonus payout it's across the board but in general For projects where we are diving into the trenches with the core development team, we definitely prefer to have some element of revenue share.
+It might not be all.
+It might be an advance plus some small percentage.
+It could be a variety of things.
+But having more of a partnership-style agreement and relationship makes this make a lot more sense.
+I answered that question without telling you what the contract terms were for tuning.
+I hope that was good.
+Yeah.
+Hi.
+Thanks.
+Great talk, by the way.
+Cheers.
+Thank you.
+So I'm kind of new to audio.
+Basically, I did a lot of graphics work.
+And then accessibility talks got me really jazzed about, like, everyone needs to be able to, you know, audio is a big thing for some people.
+of How do you make sure that, like, what are the best techniques and the best things to, like, track down where I'm, like, I'm gonna get the most bang for my buck, even if they have, like, a junky audio.
+Like, no one gets audio, standalone audio cards.
+Okay, so it seems that the question is about how do you ensure that the work you're doing, the mix you're preparing, is gonna translate across different systems?
+Yes, thank you.
+it's important to, yeah, play your game on a laptop, play on your home theater system, play it like on your phone, play it with your, like plugged into your car speakers.
+You can do any variety of things and it will, it will help you find like a good average.
+It may reveal things you didn't know that are problems.
+I mean, I'll hear work from up-and-comers, like students and such, and they'll have a big sound effect happens.
+It's like sub-bass, crazy thing.
+Up top, like some twinkly Chimes or something.
+I'm like yo if you're playing on a laptop.
+You're hearing the chimes only you're hearing no subs So so be aware of what you're designing some lows would be good some low mids probably to help I mean it sounds like you want to communicate some power if you put that in there also at least some and Yeah, that's the kind of problem that might be revealed if you play on like some shit system, right?
+Oh, is that adequate for response oh?
+Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
+I didn't know if there's any other documentation or anything you knew of.
+Kind of like when, like graphics, you can just pull down the resolution.
+Oh, sure.
+You can design multiple textures.
+Just big crush it.
+Yeah, multiple textures, like high-end, low-end.
+I didn't know if there's anything compatible with audio, or you just have to test things?
+It's not something we put in the game.
+No, it's not like audio quality.
+Perfect.
+Yeah, I didn't know.
+Thank you so much.
+Yeah, cheers.
+Hello, I'm Sabrina Fideli.
+Thank you for visiting my room.
+Hi, I had a question about your magic sounds in the game.
+So I noticed besides them being rounded, they had a lot of similar characteristics feeling very cool.
+He's like long reverb tails that shimmered.
+For someone who wants to incorporate those kinds of adjectives or warmth or coolness in their magic, what kind of steps you need to take to make sure you have that consistency?
+I mean, I am pulling from similar VSTs is an easy start.
+Things like the EQ palette is important too, right?
+If you have something that has a certain kind of presence or ratio or whatever of highs versus lows or just areas of the frequency spectrum, that's kind of important to have it in the same neighborhood at least.
+the long tails and stuff is yeah again to be consistent with that direction of like smooth it out if it's just like a hard thing and stops that's a big jagged edge right so it smooths down just come down for a landing it's super easy as far as warmth and coolness.
+I mean, yeah, you're talking lows and highs, right?
+That's kind of, that's a very common thing.
+Coolness.
+I mean, find anything that's like in a, in a, in a VST instrument, it's called like ice chimes or something like that.
+Like cool avalanche, whatever.
+And it's all like super shimmery high stuff.
+Cause that's what we've come to associate with that kind of thing.
+Okay.
+Thank you.
+Cheers.
+I feel like Tunic is an incredible example of what game development is, where nothing makes sense until it totally does.
+In your realm, audio took such a big part in being at the forefront of kind of going through development, when usually audio is kind of at the back end, the tail end of things.
+And so do you think working on this game, kind of flipping it on its head, has changed the way that you are going to look at working in future projects, and how audio is going to be much more at the forefront of design, or has that always been at the forefront of your mind?
+Well always will be a generous word to use but I think a Decent way to answer that is that I came before power-up audio.
+I was at another third-party house.
+That was very service-oriented they're like they would never do revenue share ever be hilarious and you'd be left out of the room and It was like get it done throw it over the wall and never look back I'd find a problem with a game and like a bug in audio and I tell my boss He's like, ah, they paid don't worry about it.
+It was like it was terrible and Jeff and I formed PowerUp, and we wanted to kind of change how we operated in general.
+We didn't want to just be this last-ditch, last-minute-decision paint job on some mobile game like Clash of Whatever anymore.
+We wanted to be involved much early and be entrenched with developers.
+And even if we're not doing production early on, this is kind of a unique example, obviously.
+even if we're not making stuff right away, early on, we can at least be in those meetings, we can be apprised of the kind of systems they're developing, the direction the design is going in, and maybe we can pipe up and be like, oh, for audio, we could do something in like 12 months or whatever, but they can build it, they can accommodate for it right now, whereas if we're not in those meetings, and 12 months pass, and now we say, hey, can we do this cool thing in audio with the system you've done?
+They're like, oh, we have to tear it all down and do it over again.
+No, absolutely not.
+So one thing I wanted to bring up I think really speaks to this particular project is this intersection between music background and sound design as a not a separate thing from music, but sort of as a partner to it because so much of the sound design for this game is musically informed and uses musical instruments and tools like the grain lights of VSTs and stuff like that.
+The main question is, what is some advice you can give for students or those who are primarily composers that have apprehension about breaking into sound design as a discipline and may not feel like they have the chops to do it?
+Oh sure, I mean, I think in my experience, talking to students and such, that apprehension is often coming from a place of they don't want to, they want to do music only.
+And if that's the case, that's totally fine, you can do music only.
+And in fact, you probably should do music only.
+If you don't like doing sound, people are going to smell it.
+You know, they're going to be like, oh this, I mean, I'll play games, like yeah, this sound was definitely done by the composer and they probably didn't want to do the sound.
+And I'm often correct, you know.
+that said if you want to get if you do genuinely want to get into sound design I mean there's tons of things out there I mean watch real talk you know you can get some advice there there as far as I mean I am trained musically I mean obviously and I went to school for music composition I'm at a college you know I that was thing in film scoring for a long time and eventually I was like, yeah, sounds pretty cool though.
+I'm still using music all the time in my day-to-day.
+Even like a short, a sort of like shing, like that note of the ring out, it's got to be on the fifth, you know, like make it dominant.
+It's going to be better than like a tritone or something.
+It's the kind of thing that no one notices or like tweets me like props for, but I mean it's important to the mix, right?
+So if you're looking to break into sound design, like have that be a larger part of things, if it's genuinely interesting to you, then great, you have a great foundation.
+I mean, even when we're hiring a power-up, having a musical background is like the biggest plus on the consideration for it, you know?
+They gotta have some kind of background in music.
+Alright, thank you.
+Thanks, Skitch.
+I think we're out of time here.
+Please, E-Vals, yes?
+Thank you so much.
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+Hello everyone and thank you for coming to this session where we will talk about frostbite procedural drains.
+My name is Julien Cable, and I am the team lead for Frozby Terrain Tools.
+I've been at Electronic Arts on the Frozby team for some eight years now.
+And at first, I was working on the runtime side of things, where I had lots of fun.
+But later on, there was an opportunity to explore procedural creation tools, which I found really exciting.
+So I switched on the tooling side and never switched back, actually.
+And that was to lead the project, which I'm talking about today.
+As you might know, Frostbite is EA's proprietary engine that powers a large number of games ranging from sport titles to racing games, first-person shooters and space games like the well-received Dead Space remake that came out of Motive, which is a studio located in Montreal where I happen to be coming from.
+This talk focuses on terrain tools, so let's only keep those titles that actually have frostbite terrains.
+We'll remove those space games and almost all sports games, and this leaves around 60% of titles, which is quite a lot.
+So before we begin, I just want to set expectations.
+So this is not a straightforward programming talk.
+It's kind of a fusion between a programming one and a visual arts one that caters to both sides of the spectrum, so part technical info, part eye candy.
+And we will start with a short overview of the part of Frostbite Training that is relevant for this talk.
+then I will explain what we did in the editor and the reasons we did it.
+Think of it as a sort of dev diary where I'll be showcasing the features in the order we design and added them over time.
+After that, we'll go straight to ship results, where all the eye candy will be sort of like eating dessert before the main course, because all the proteins will be right after, because we will talk about implementation details and architectural choices.
+And we will conclude this with a short retrospective and Q&A, if we have time.
+So Frostbite Terrain Runtime is best in class.
+It's very scalable, supports arbitrary view distance, arbitrary levels of details, and moving speeds that range from a soldier walking to a jet flying.
+It's backed by an efficient virtual texture system, which support complex materials.
+It also has runtime mesh scattering, which is entirely GPU based for things like small environment objects like grass and small size rocks and such things.
+and being the engine used by Battlefield, it obviously has support for destruction through things like hide field deformers and local texture updates.
+So let's start by looking at a simplified view of the terrain material data flow.
+In the editor, artists author a number of data maps for various aspects of the terrain.
+We call these rasters.
+They're just essentially 2D images that are broken up in tiles of varying resolution, but they're generally around two samples per meter in the gameplay areas.
+There is, of course, a height field, which provides the topology.
+We also have a color map, which provides four channels of data that can be used in the runtime.
+And there are many other rasters, usually defined, but I won't really cover them.
+They're not so relevant for this talk, like one that controls desolation level.
+There's also one that controls how deep the terrain can be destroyed at any specific location.
+And then you have a number of material masks.
+And these all get sent through the asset pipeline to get optimized in some way.
+And in the runtime, a material has a corresponding shader that produces a continuous texture that tiles seamlessly.
+And these shaders can also read from the height field and color map, so they can be fairly complex.
+Then the opacity that the shader outputs gets multiplied with its corresponding material mask, and blending all these together, you produce one tile of terrain texture.
+So this particular one here is just programmer art, not really beautiful.
+And part of the reason is that the textures are just fading into one another.
+In reality, this blending stage is fully programmable through a node-based system.
+And if you're actually fading a texture into another, it would look more like this.
+So you can have the sand appear in cracks before they're at full opacity.
+Another thing about Frostbite is that if you take any location, you can have multiple numbers of layers there, which means you can have complex materials with interwoven different materials.
+So while the runtime aspects are really interesting, we won't be talking much about them because all I'm going to talk about happens here if we take this as a timeline.
+So meaning, it's not an acid pipeline trick.
+It's not a runtime thing.
+It's really something that is in the editor.
+And another way to frame it is to say that we will talk about controlling topology and where these material appear at medium and large scale.
+The reason is that the small surface details is essentially handled by those material shaders.
+OK, so when we started this project some five years ago, most terrain work was done through manual painting.
+And as much as it was time consuming, it paid off.
+Because, for example, DICE had a reputation for creating high quality maps.
+But this came at the cost of excessive manual work.
+And when things were not done manually, they went through expensive import-export cycles into external DCCs.
+which takes extra times and means slower iterating.
+So how can we improve from this?
+Well, one way is to externalize more train tasks into external DCC, maybe a tool specifically for procedural trains, maybe Houdini, and then we could create some kind of bridge between the two.
+Maybe it's a script that uses an API, and if you're lucky, you get a button that automatically refreshes from the editor.
+Wait a few seconds and you see the result.
+But we wanted to approach this differently.
+We decided to bring back the sort of run-of-the-mill 80% of terrain workflows directly in the editor.
+The part that is about level design, where it really makes a great impact to be able to iterate inside the editor.
+So why?
+Well, we thought it would lower the cost of entry for light procedural tasks.
+Maybe you're not making an open world game, maybe you're just a small studio and all you want is flat and near roads.
+so you don't need the full setup.
+And second, live feedback meant easier experimenting through faster iterations.
+Not live feedback as wait a few seconds, live as you drag something and you get the whole stack to refresh.
+And finally, we wanted to unlock future opportunities.
+Say UGC, for example, owning that tech means we could eventually use it in the runtime.
+I'm gonna talk more about that later.
+And we're not fooling ourselves.
+We cannot replace Houdini.
+We actually love Houdini and use it all the time everywhere, but we wanted to own a few of those workflows.
+So Houdini can still read the train data and be used for other things like procedural asset placement and some other train tasks, for example, sand simulation.
+We wouldn't try to do it in the editor.
+It's not worth it.
+So the first thing we knew we needed is to break out every raster into overlays.
+Very simple move, or obvious, should I say.
+To be fair, those should probably be called layers, but that word was already taken for terrain layers, so we named them overlays, but you can think of them as layers.
+And with that, any modification could be located on a specific overlay and happen in a non-destructive way.
+So you might notice this pattern exists in the runtime as we composite the train layers together to get one piece of texture.
+And in the editor, each material mask itself is made from compositing different overlays.
+So it's exactly like that.
+So if we zoom a bit on this, each overlay has obviously a data channel, but also an opacity one, an alpha one, that stores opacity transparency.
+And the rest is pretty standard.
+There's a blending stage.
+And in that blending stage, we support things like a global opacity multiplier, blend modes.
+I think we have 12 of them.
+And blending all overlays together, you produce your final hide field raster or maybe your mask raster, your color map raster.
+They're just generic images after all with only their pixel format varying.
+Everything is sort of interchangeable.
+Hide field or float, color map is RGBA and so on.
+This is how it looks in the editor.
+So all the rasters are like collapsible sections and their content is children overlays basically.
+We also have folders and the idea is that the folder content gets blended and then I mean the children of the folder gets blended and the folder's content is that blended result.
+So what type of overlays do we have?
+Obviously, we will need paintable overlays.
+These are your standard overlays onto which you would just brush with tools, for example.
+Or maybe you could import images from an external BCC.
+They're just static, and they're saved on disk.
+So at this point, we have a nice layered setup that is non-destructive, but we're not procedural yet.
+Everything is still manual, so that's why we added auto paint overlays, as we call them.
+There's a second type, and you cannot brush on these.
+Their content is entirely produced from objects that act as terrain brushes, essentially.
+So let's look at how this works.
+The basic idea is to have assets expose a number of what we call auto-pane behaviors that are named.
+And on the other side, you have the auto-pane overlays which sort of subscribe to these behaviors.
+And then this produces some result.
+Before we continue, I just want to talk about this rainbowy color we have here, because I'm going to be showing some more of these.
+It's essentially a heat map with zeros and ones standing out.
+Yeah.
+So what is a behavior?
+As I said, it's kind of like a terrain brush, assets behaving as terrain brushes.
+And at its core, it's simply a mesh, a transform that can deform the mesh, and some shader with some parameters.
+And as simple as it is, the power comes from the different workflows that are enabled by combining different meshes and shaders.
+Then the idea is just to take an orthographic camera and grab a snapshot of the mesh from above, and this is your result that you stamp on the overlay.
+So if we imagine a very simple case where you would use the asset's own mesh to auto-paint, just with this you can get surprisingly useful results, as we'll see in a moment.
+Since overlays have opacity information, the shaders output both the data for the content and its alpha, or opacity.
+If you're auto-painting on a mask, it's very simple.
+You just write 1 in both data and opacity.
+This gets the mesh projection stamped on the overlay.
+When auto-painting on the height field, you just output the fragment's height as the data and 1 for opacity.
+And this deforms the height field so it perfectly wraps the object.
+So let's have this shown in practice.
+The rock here is on wet sand, but we'd like to make the two better integrated together, and also add some variety.
+So let's add a little bump on the sand.
+We can limit the effect by scaling the mesh using the transform.
+then let's use a mask coat of paint on a sort of rippled sand mask, and we also make it a bit bigger.
+And the second mask, why not, some sand with gravel, and we get this effect.
+And in the editor, it's live.
+So as the rock transform is changed, the projected shapes are impacted because they inherit that transform on top of their own.
+So this is actually three rock meshes aggregated together.
+That's why they rotate a bit funny.
+Confession here.
+So not only static assets can be auto-painted, same goes for roads.
+They're also a mesh, although a dynamic one that is generated from a spline.
+So a typical workflow is to flatten the height field where roads are.
+And by generating a slightly wider mesh, we can have the auto-paint shader fade out the flattening on the sides by using the opacity channel output so that they better integrate with the environment.
+So this is how it looks like in the editor.
+So with this, we can see why interactivity is not just a nice-to-have.
+Being able to iterate that quickly has a strong impact on the final quality.
+When a user moves a spline, they're not guessing what the procedural output will be.
+They see it at in-game quality as they work.
+Another thing you can do by auto-painting a mesh directly on the height field is what we call auto-paint blockout.
+Somebody figured this out and we didn't see it coming, but the idea is to work with a library of abstract shapes, landscape features, and sculpt the height field piecewise using those shapes.
+Key to this workflow is obviously having the auto-paint work in max blend mode, so intersections are seamless.
+And yeah, you can iterate rapidly with this.
+Here's another workflow we have we call Capture.
+The idea is to have artists place assets in the level where they paint a sculpt around the assets and using a volume we capture this terrain into textures and we automatically create the behaviors in the asset prefab.
+Bottom line is when you place the asset in level the terrain follows with it.
+another combination a road mesh with the texture and you get a nice riverbed carver spline.
+So this is from an internal demo that was made by a small team of artists, and it showcases a number of techs we built.
+And it has a lot of auto-paint workflows that I just showed.
+For example, the height field is all blocked out.
+The stone stairs carve the height field around them using custom meshes, and all trees have auto-paint capture.
+Okay, there is one last type of overlay we added to get a full feature set, and it's effects overlay.
+These include generators and filters and more, but the idea is that they're applied on the whole terrain.
+They don't relate to objects, and you cannot brush on them either.
+So at first, we started adding generators like Voronoi, which can be applied on a mask, or the height field.
+Again, everything is interchangeable.
+They're all images.
+And you can create also this slightly unsettling breathing terrain, which I made by playing with a slider.
+One thing I want to mention is that to create these effects, we chose to leverage our runtime node-based shaders, which obviously had large consequences on the overall architecture.
+But I will talk more about this later.
+So the great thing about this is that since our tech artists already know this tech, they can just author their own effects, basically, to augment the basic library.
+So going back to this overlay compositing diagram, we have now overlays that get their content from shaders.
+And it seems it would be very easy to provide them with the previous stage, the previous blended overlay.
+So which means we can create filters.
+So that's the next thing we did.
+Blur, Dye Lay, Warp.
+And again, you can blur the height field or color map anything.
+But in many cases, what user want is to generate masks derived from the topology.
+For example, maybe they need a mask that matches the flat areas.
+So there's a very, very straightforward way to make this possible, which is to provide the height field to all effects systematically.
+And we did that exactly at first.
+So it unlocked a new family of interesting effects like the slope mask I was talking about, but also one to highlight height ranges, for example.
+And we also made more complex ones, like kernel-based filters, curvature filters to highlight concavity or convexity, or this relief filter, which is showing the height compared to the average height in a radius.
+And we also created ray-marching effects, like sun exposure.
+This particular one really looks like it's in-game with lighting, but it's actually just the mask that is using a black and white palette.
+And it's very useful to bake shadows, for one thing.
+Or you could use that to simulate vegetation growth, for example.
+And what's nice is you can also accumulate the whole sun arc over a day, for example.
+We have nice features like that.
+And we also have one that does ambient occlusion.
+And it's pretty much like you would do in a screen pass in runtime, except it's done in the height field.
+And it shows the amount of sky visibility.
+So far, so good.
+We can read from the height field.
+But soon enough came new requests to have things be able to write to the height field.
+Say you want the terrain to be more lumpy where the snow is, you need the height field to read from a mask.
+Or maybe you want your asphalt mask to delete the grass mask.
+So clearly, this original setup won't work.
+And you might see what is coming, but what we need is a full dependency graph.
+So if we pause a moment, we have this layered UX, and we also want this node-based thing.
+At this point, we kind of took the decision to keep the layered UX because people are familiar with this, and if you're not in a lot of spaghetti dependency, it kind of really fits the bill.
+So what we did is add navigational arrows, basically.
+Each overlay shows their incoming and outgoing connections, and the users can navigate like this.
+So this kind of sums up what we have in the end.
+Talk is not finished, but this is just one clean way to wrap things up.
+We have a graph, a node-based graph backend that is invisible and automatically generated from the layered UX that has dependency navigation.
+So there's one last piece of the puzzle that's still missing, which is iterative processes.
+A classic example would be erosion.
+This is just anything that you need to run a number of times to get the final result.
+And to do that, we added a sort of, a way to declare how output textures are routed back into input textures.
+And we can just run the effect a number of times by swapping the outputs with the input.
+And with that, we could implement things like thermal erosion, for example, which happens to be quite fast because you can still brush right under the effect and see it live with no performance impact whatsoever, which is great, but not surprising because GPUs are really fast these days.
+And at the same time, those rasters, again, are like two samples per meter.
+So unless you're painting with a one kilometer brush, you should be fine.
+And then we added also water simulation.
+That's a very important brick of a procedural toolkit.
+And we have a mode that just lets the water flow and one that accumulates water to produce flow maps.
+And we made it to the candy part.
+So time for some ship results.
+The first game I'm going to talk about is EA Sports PGA Tour golf game.
+And they have a particular setup because they work from LiDAR scans.
+They're reproducing existing courses.
+So what they get from these scans are high-density point clouds for the height field, and then a number of vector paths for important features, bunkers, fairways, greens, and roughs.
+And then through Houdini, they extract the actual height field and masks that they can import in Frosted, which is the name of the editor, by the way.
+And inside Frosted, they iterate using our tools to do minor, minor changes, but important ones.
+An example is this one, so for some reason they found they wanted to increase the lip on the sand bunkers, the bunkers, that's how it's called, and to use that, to do that they used the sand mask that was fed to the height field in subtract mode, so they could just tweak what they wanted, obviously faster than painting by hand.
+Other things they did, they added a bit of clumpiness in the rough areas using like Perlin noise modulated with the high field curvature.
+They derived a number of additional masks like dry grass versus grass versus semi-dry grass, I guess.
+And all these were driven from topology operators or filters.
+This screenshot has a number of them together.
+There's also little mounds at the base of tree that were added with auto paint and yeah, a lot of things.
+All right.
+So now let's talk about Battlefield.
+As opposed to PGSports, which works from LiDAR scans, they needed to iterate a lot more on the levels, if only for gameplay reasons.
+So they were a lot freer to experiment with the tools.
+And frankly, they surprised us in many different ways on many occasions by going beyond what we had initially made the tools for.
+So they really pushed the tools to their limit, which is great.
+So this map is a location where water has recessed, leaving pools of rusty water.
+And an important visual thematic is those sediment lines, I guess I would call, stratified lines.
+And at small scale, this is produced in the material shaders that can read from the height field.
+And at distance, you have larger ones that are coming from the color map.
+as you can see in a second.
+So if we pull back the curtain for a moment and examine the foundation of this level's terrain, there are 20 or so material layers that are used.
+And they have shaders that read from textures and break up the tiling in seamless ways.
+And they all write to the terrain virtual texture, which has typical g-buffer channels, but also vertical displacement, or should I say normal-based displacement.
+And so this view shows all the materials together with nothing else.
+Pretty patchy and kind of flat at distance.
+So that's why we have the color map.
+So the color map adds variation.
+And since all materials read from it, it can also control the overall hue of all materials.
+So this is showing both together.
+And then adding decals, which are essentially meshes that write on the virtual texture and all those same channels, including displacement.
+So that's how they can sort of dig a bit into it.
+Now adding objects, starting to come up together nicely.
+And the one missing thing is, maybe you guessed it, GPU scattering, which is small-scale vegetation and small-scale objects.
+Again, completely GPU power in the case of Frostbite, and the placement is driven by material masks.
+So if we look at how the procedural data operates together, We start with, let's say, material rasters first.
+And then they also added a number of what we call utility rasters, concept rasters.
+They're not sent in the runtime.
+They're just references for other masks to read from.
+And they influence the material masks, but also things like the color map.
+adding the height field.
+The height field pretty much writes to everything and the objects again impacts everything including the height field.
+So this is just a simplified overview.
+The actual graph looks like this.
+Nobody ever looks at that except me a couple of times, I guess, to debug.
+And one thing to mention is that you can see most connections are coming from the height field topmost overlay because everything reads from topology.
+All masks almost read from topology.
+But there's other connections as well.
+So it's impossible to look at everything.
+But let's just take one mask, for example.
+This one is called rock color.
+It's a utility mask.
+So it's not driving a shader, it's just used by other things.
+So it starts off with Cliff Mesh Autopaint.
+One thing to notice is that the Autopaint discards anything below the height field, because Autopaint can also peek at the height field.
+And then a bit of blur is added, then slope blur, which blurs in the direction of slope.
+creating a sort of leaking effect, I guess.
+And then a bit of height map is used, height range is used to trim the top off and levels for a final tweak.
+So if we follow that, it's using the color map and it's looped in one of these folders and it creates this sort of dark and brownish tint effect.
+And adding all those folders one by one, we can see how they built it, really layer by layer.
+I won't add them all one by one because it's too long.
+But the final thing, the final color map looks like this.
+This is a bird's eye view.
+And you can see it's completely procedurally generated, meaning that if anyone changes the height field, anything should readapt instantly in the editor.
+And if other rasters depend on the color map, they would get in turn updated.
+So not all levels use a procedural color map.
+Sometimes they use satellite imagery, especially when the level is based on the real life location.
+And it's the case with this next level, which I'm going to talk about.
+So again, all material masks are driven from procedural operations.
+You can see the plow lines in the back, plowing lines, I guess.
+And there's some curvature going on there probably.
+So if we take just one mask, one such mask, this one is This one is called Snowgrass.
+It's kind of snow with a bit of grass blades peeking through.
+It starts off with ambient occlusion as its basis.
+And then this is a selection from the color map, a color selection.
+Maybe the greens are pulled in, for example.
+Then the river is removed using a height selection.
+Then a bit of flow map, water simulation.
+Then a number of auto-painted things are removed, like roads and trees.
+And finally, artist touch-ups.
+So this last overlay is where artists can override anything.
+Say the game designer wants some extra cover using mesh scattering.
+For example, it can just be added using brushes there.
+The next map I'm going to talk about is called Hourglass, and it features a city that has been lost to sand as the result of desertification and sandstorms.
+So the main feature of the terrain is obviously sand dunes here.
+And before we look into this map, I want to show you again our road auto paint tool.
+So this is just two intersecting roads, very basic.
+Let's fix the intersection by using a max blend mode, which we support between objects on the same overlay.
+Making the road width zero, and then making the falloff 100 meters, we get this.
+And tweaking the curve of the falloff, we get this.
+Maybe you see where this is going.
+It's essentially looking like a sand dune, right?
+When I opened this map, this was the first map I opened, by the way, when they started production, and I saw this and I had no idea what was going on.
+And it turns out it's hundreds and hundreds of roads.
+And so I had to call the person that thought about it, and Michael Anderson is his name, I asked him, like, isn't it, it's fascinating, but isn't it a bit overkill to have all these hand placed?
+And he said, no, it just took me two days.
+And it's actually quite useful because this is a first person shooter, right?
+And so when you iterate, you can get calls very late in production that are basically, can you clear this line of sight and remove all sand dunes?
+And it turns out you can actually just grab the sand dune and move it or copy it.
+And again, showing like how Powerful it is to get instant feedback.
+You're not guessing what it will look like once you run your procedural external DCC, you just see it live.
+And if there are some effects over it, you see that as well.
+The next level I'm going to talk about was made with a lot of photogrammetry and the studio called Ripple Effect that made it found a location that matched the look they were after.
+So they went out on a field trip, probably had tons of fun, and collected materials for assets using photogrammetry.
+And they made this.
+One is the real one, one is a frostbite version, and I know because the reference ball is on a stand in one of the two.
+So pretty amazing.
+And here's a trailer, internal trailer, but I guess it's not internal anymore if I show it.
+OK, so it may be surprising considering how monochromatic this level is.
+desert essentially, but it actually has 24 different material layers, which together contribute to create a very detailed and rich landscape.
+There are also 15 utility masks that are defined and as much as 122,000 auto-painted objects, so that would be splines mainly, but also rocks and buildings.
+So let's look at the height field for a change.
+If we add every overlay one by one, what we see at first is essentially the evolution of the level over time as they were changing major features by adding mountains and things like this.
+Meaning they can just walk back their decisions since it's all overlays and it's non-destructive.
+So adding those.
+and then you get this thing which is creating flow lines in the height field and it's coming from this mask which is defined using a flow map and other things and then the roads are deleted using auto paint or maybe actually a reference to another mask and finally you have this thing which I'm going to talk about so remember how this looks It's adding detail outside of the gameplay area, essentially.
+And finally, road auto-pane, and yeah, that's it.
+So this is a texture that the runtime shader used at distance, like big boulders, essentially.
+And what they wanted to do is create more details at distance.
+They essentially wanted to bake the displacement like you would have at close distance, but they wanted to bake it in the height field at distance.
+And because we used our rendering shaders, they could just copy their runtime shaders in effect and use the same complex de-tiling algorithm like this.
+And so they could bake it in like this.
+And you can show this effect at distance where the height field has this nice texture.
+All right, we made it up to the proteins.
+So when we planned this framework, we had the ambitious goal to have live, real-time feedback.
+This not only means we need fast terrain updates, but in the first place, we need to know when a change invalidates the terrain.
+So this can get pretty tricky for AutoPaint, because One reason is that behavior definitions can be nested deep into prefabs of prefabs.
+So we need to track all this.
+In other cases, it's pretty simple.
+For example, if a brush is applied.
+So let's look at this case and sort of trace what happens when a brush stroke is applied.
+So the brush event triggers an update request, which has the ID of the modified overlay and the impacted world coverage.
+And in the editor, there is a job queue.
+So the first thing we need to do is create jobs that will refresh the modified terrain.
+As you know, the back end is a directed graph.
+So we need to walk from the the overlay where the change happened and walk to the end nodes to find what has been modified.
+So from this we can identify primary job, which is the raster that owns this overlay you're painting on, but also secondary jobs that are just the side effects.
+Primary jobs means they need to have high priority and secondary job can probably wait a little.
+But wait, right after the paintable, there's a blur.
+So let's suppose what you brushed is this GDC logo.
+The blur is going to spread the change, right?
+So you probably need to rebake a bit larger.
+And it would be the case for other things like curvature, any kernel filter, or iterative processes would be in the same situation.
+So how can we fix this?
+Well, one way, which is what we did first, again, is you could just slap an extra 30 meter everywhere, right?
+And it works.
+Until today, it doesn't work, because someone calls you and says, hey, your terrain is broken.
+Look at that.
+And you say, oh, just raise it to 100 meters.
+And it still works, but you're impacting.
+Your performance is degrading over time.
+So the right way to fix that is that as you're walking the path from the overlay, you need to add up the spread of like how much each overlay spreads change.
+In the case of blur, it's very simple.
+It's just a radius, but it can get pretty tricky, like warp has a very complex expression.
+And then you get the final coverage you actually need to refresh.
+So once the jobs are created, we don't immediately insert them in the queue.
+We try to be smart about it by recycling existing jobs that can just be extended.
+For example, if you're brushing on the height field, tons of masks are impacted.
+But until you mouse release, we won't process these.
+So while we push them in the queue, we don't create tons of fragmented, overlapping jobs because of this simplification.
+And then we just do a sort and insert in the queue and we sort by kind of obvious things like frustum intersection, you don't need to refresh what you're not looking at.
+You don't need to refresh secondary jobs as fast as primary ones and camera distance.
+And then job execution deserve its own section, so let's go.
+So the first thing to mention about job execution is that we use an external process.
+Let's call this the TrainUpdateService.
+It's actually a sort of lightweight Frostbite rendering stack.
+And why did we do that?
+Sounds like asking for trouble.
+Well, again, we wanted to leverage our node-based shader graphs that we have in runtime.
+And we also wanted to not code a whole graph engine that we have that gets compiled to bytecode in the engine in the runtime.
+And finally, as I mentioned, we wanted to sort of own this tech and having it in the runtime sounded like a good idea just to unlock future ideas like UGC, for example.
+So we did that.
+And in the end, that's what we have.
+On the one hand, you have Frosted, which has all the world data, like autopaint, objects, their transforms.
+We have spatial lookup tables to be able to know exactly what needs to be part of a bake job.
+And terrain tile data also lives there.
+And the rule graph is generated there.
+And the update service, we have built, runtime built version of the graph and the shaders.
+And we're essentially running a context agnostic image processing graph there.
+So when a job is removed from the queue to be processed, we send an RPC call that has a number of different information.
+But one thing to highlight is that we use GPU shared memory resources.
+And using this shared memory was key for us to reduce the friction involved in having those two process talking to one another.
+After all, trained data doesn't need to leave the GPU.
+You're displaying it there, but you're also processing it there.
+And when it's done, we just send an RPC back with some statistics.
+So zooming in on the active nodes that are in the input RPC data, the editor takes care of caching all the dependencies between overlays and outputs and the other direction.
+So it can provide a list of active nodes that are needed given an output node, basically.
+And it sends this as part of the information.
+We also need to provide paintable tiles.
+Paintable tiles are stored on disk, so the editor has them.
+And they actually live in tiles, as I mentioned earlier, but they're also laid out on a quadtree.
+And so we need to revisit this algorithm of spreading change, because it works in the other way as well.
+If a blur spreads the change, it also needs to read from that same radius.
+So as we walk back from the end, we need to add up these lookout ranges to get the actual coverage we need to bundle the tiles for.
+And what we do is we push them into GPU memory into the tiles are pushing 2D texture arrays.
+And we have an indirection texture that maps the world position to the tile index.
+So basically, the paintable overlay's job, in terms of processing, is just to on indirect, I guess, produce a flat tile where tiles are not separate, basically.
+Okay.
+Retrospective and takeaways.
+OK.
+So there's a very important question we can ask ourselves, which is how much of the procedural content had to be manually repainted by game studios?
+In other words, what we produce is the equivalent of macaroni art, and they needed a major surgery to make it live up to the studio standards.
+We failed, right?
+So if we look at a battlefield map from season one, We here are shown three representative masks.
+And we can see that around 15% have touch-ups.
+That's what I'm toggling on and off here.
+And if we look at season four, this is down to 1%.
+And the explanation was provided to me by a studio artist.
+And he said that as they get more familiar with the procedural tool, they can express more things and more organic looks and get closer to what they want just with the procedural tools, which is a nice thing to hear.
+So I'd like to go over a few design choices we did to see how they paid off or not.
+So the first one is this promise that we have, which is terrain is always up to date.
+Again, tracking the full auto-pane chain of dependency came to a cost.
+It's complicated.
+So maybe in hindsight I would have gone for something like Autopane gets refreshed as you move the object or change the transform, but maybe not if you change a parameter like three levels deep, then you could probably suffer a right-click and refresh object.
+Second, using Frostbite Runtime as a service, this obviously increased our dependencies and it came at a cost because we got sometimes broke by people that don't really know us being on the tool side.
+So we made a lot of friends.
+Maybe enemies, I don't know.
+But I think the decision still pays off today in new ways.
+For example, with what I've shown about using runtime shaders as effect overlays.
+And finally, the age-old debate between node-based versus layer UX.
+So in the end, obviously, levels went beyond our expectations They were way more complex than we thought they would be.
+So I think we need better tools to navigate dependencies than just these little arrows.
+Maybe we need things like this kind of diagram that I have shown where dependencies are shown at the raster level, not at the overlay level, just to sort of get an overview of what the level is like.
+Or maybe we could go hybrid and have some rasters be node-based, some others, simpler ones, could stay in the layer paradigm.
+So what lies ahead for us?
+We need better UX, and one of the examples of what we need is better presets.
+So effect presets, but also full raster presets.
+Imagine you have just a dry grass coming with all the full layer stack, or maybe biome presets even.
+And we want to tailor the visibility of things to crafts, meaning like you can gradually ramp up.
+If you are coming on a team just to do two weeks of painting, you don't need to see the whole procedural setup, for example.
+So the maps that I've shown are obviously not large in the sense of open world games, and we want to improve our multi-user workflows and tools and improve on large data management.
+And obviously performance is key, so we can, there's a lot of opportunities where we could do smarter caching and have, for example, higher GPU occupancy.
+The baking is quite sequential.
+We're not really, there are gaps where the GPU is sort of waiting for RPC calls and things like that.
+So we could probably improve on that.
+And yeah, so to summarize all this, we enable procedural terrain authoring in the editor by supporting live feedback, thanks to powerful GPUs.
+And our workflows are non-destructive because we have overlays.
+And we have rich world asset integration using AutoPaint.
+The terrain procedural rules don't live in their own little silo.
+They're aware of walls and objects.
+And we support complex data interaction because we have a node-based backend and all scenarios are possible as long as you don't create cycles, right?
+And it's extendable by tech artists because we're using runtime shaders.
+So that's pretty much it.
+A couple of people I want to thank.
+Cody Ritchie, who was there since the beginning, had a lot of foundational idea.
+Matthew Gandel made this possible also.
+My family, they saw me disappear for a month making these slides.
+And my team, obviously, Train, Tools, Jean, Vadim, and Sean, the whole procedural team, and the studios, obviously, that dared to follow us in this crazy adventure.
+That's it.
+I have a small farewell outro that I'm going to run now.
+Thank you all for coming.
+I appreciate it.
+And we have time for a little Q&A, if there are questions, hot takes, anything.
+Hello.
+Oh, hello.
+Hi.
+Yeah, thank you for the five course meal.
+It was delicious.
+I had a question regarding customization of the pipeline procedural tools relative to different studios.
+So different studios have different requirements where you have like PGA, they probably want really high level of quality for individual texel like tiles and probably large tile sizes or something, versus Battlefield.
+How customizable are those macro parameters for the toolset?
+Yeah, so there's one answer to that.
+If you're talking about like resolution specifically, maybe not.
+Tile size, resolution, textual density, all those.
+briefly about it, but like our tile resolution is, so all tiles have the same pixel size, but they're laid out on a quadtree.
+And you can just refine that quadtree, not infinitely of course, but like to maybe something like eight samples per meter.
+Typically what game team do is that they have a sort of a resolution that goes lower with distance.
+Thanks.
+Quick question.
+When you guys are bringing in the effects layers or overlay filters for the artists, like erosion and flow and stuff like that, what's the level of effort and how long does it take?
+Like if an artist comes to you guys and says, I want like sun direction or something like that, or like, is it a huge effort for you guys to pull in those filters or?
+Not really, actually.
+No, it probably... I mean, it's really using our runtime tech, so it's as quick as making a shader, which is probably around half a day, I would say, but obviously it depends on the effect, but half a day is a typical time I've seen to come up with a new shader.
+They were all made by one of our tech artists, like all the ones in the default library, and he always comes up with new ones, and so the response time...
+Pretty quick, I would say.
+So how many of those effects layers would you guys have or filters to choose from?
+Oh, the presets?
+Yeah.
+I would say, like, I would say 30 maybe.
+Okay.
+Probably not as much as a fully dedicated, like, procedural terrain DCC.
+We're not there yet.
+Like, erosion is not, like, on par with the high end, I would say.
+But that's Not where the value is.
+I mean, there would be obviously value in having top-notch erosion.
+We're working on it, actually.
+But where the value is, it's iterating with objects and things like that, like level design, not your foundational height field.
+Hi.
+Whoa, that's a lot louder than I thought it'd be.
+Hi, I'm Sasha Chacon from Venn Studio.
+I have a question on kind of the initial setup of this process.
+So you said that you maybe were considering Houdini and setting up these tools beforehand, but then decided to switch entirely to doing it all in-house on your own homebrew engine.
+Yes, I got this right?
+Well, we didn't.
+What I said is like, this would be one way, typical way to go, like using Houdini, of course.
+But we really wanted this sort of live feedback experience.
+So it wasn't really a hesitation at first, you know.
+Okay.
+But you did like most of your tools, like you built them inside your engine.
+session.
+Where did the tool generation come in when the programmers potentially might have had made those nodes?
+Did you have them at the ready, or did you have to go back and forth between them?
+So the nodes, to be clear, the nodes were, first of all, not the most time expensive thing to code.
+Really not, actually.
+Because again, we're using the runtime shader node tech.
+And the nodes were not made by programmers, they were made by mostly one tech artist, honestly.
+And so, yeah, that was really not the most complicated part.
+The most complicated part was the sort of inter-process, you know, navigation, like having this an external process.
+And then we were kind of outliers being on the tool side, using rendering side.
+So that was where most of the friction was, not creating the effects themselves, honestly.
+Obviously some are more harder, like water simulation and things like that, but even those would be maybe five days, I don't know.
+Again, we're talking about maybe 30 effects, so overall that's not where the battle was.
+a lot Yeah, no, good question.
+But again, we're not abandoning it.
+What I mean is, it's still, Turing data is still there for grabs for Houdini, for example, and in some levels, I had to cut some slides, but some levels have Houdini setups, like the last one I've shown, the height field to generate flow spline decals, roads, and Houdini is still involved in a lot of places, but we just sort of grabbed one aspect that is usually made through Houdini and we brought it back for, yeah, all the reasons I said earlier.
+Okay, cool.
+Thank you.
+Hello.
+Regarding the 1% or 15% case of people that had to do manual modifications to something after using the procedural tools, how did that affect the procedural workflow?
+Did their manual changes get blown away if they needed to make more procedural changes, or what happened?
+No, because that's the thing.
+They always had this topmost overlay that is called like artist input or something like that.
+And that's where the changes, the manual changes were done.
+So that's the whole point, actually, of being non-destructive.
+Because if you changed whatever, like your auto paint shader, touch ups would still be there and only affect those areas.
+You paint manually, all the rest was still free to move.
+Thank you.
+Hi there.
+Thanks for the talk.
+It was great.
+I'm wondering, you know, it sounds like you have a lot of overlays and a lot of textures, a lot of materials on top of that.
+Where do those fit in memory?
+How do you deal with those both in the editor and in runtime?
+Like, how do you manage all that?
+I'm sure you can't go into detail, but just curious, like, what are some strategies?
+It all just works.
+No, seriously, I mean, uh, okay.
+So just like throw it all at the GPU and sit off.
+No, no, no.
+Okay.
+Good.
+Good.
+Good.
+Okay.
+Yeah.
+So in that, from that angle, no, obviously it's not, not all on the GPU.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+So we have a pool, you know, a budget on GPU and like if you're brushing like those style around where you're brushing will stay on the GPU.
+But if you move around and you're brushing everywhere, uh, we, we, we noticed we're missing some tiles and we, remove some from the GPU.
+It's kind of that simple.
+I see.
+So, so like what's in memory typically, like when you're not editing is just the last layer, like the final kind of compressed layer.
+Is that like how it usually, or a few layers and the source materials are kind of Not in memory?
+Okay, so all the paintable tiles need to be in GPU memory, but the non-paintable overlays like auto-paint and effects, these are all sort of, you know, done just in time in that update service we have, and they're ephemeral, is that a word?
+Ephemeral, yeah.
+So they, you know, but the paintable ones need to be in GPU because they're controlled from the editor.
+And we actually want to move this to that service.
+They don't really need to be in the editor.
+The brushing happens in the editor, but that's just a legacy thing, honestly, because we would want the brushing to be fully done on the GPU in that service.
+But we didn't have time yet.
+All right.
+Thank you.
+Hey, thank you.
+Great talk.
+I'm curious.
+on the resources on the GPU and then the external process is able to access the same resources to avoid duplication.
+Could you explain more about the technology that allows this?
+So there is such a thing as GPU shared memory like at the OS level that exists.
+I had to Google it five years ago and we actually stress it so much that they had to fix bugs in the drivers because we're like, you're brushing and it's like, and that's basically it, you know?
+So again, like we upload what needs to be in the GPU memory only and that is Thank you.
+Final question here.
+So you mentioned the use of satellite imagery to some extent within Frostbite and this emphasis on hyper-realism, these beautiful scenes that look so real.
+I wonder to what extent you've used geospatial data within your own workflows to create scenes to make more realistic ones.
+Good question.
+The interesting thing about Battlefield, for example, I mentioned PGA Sport was LiDAR data, so that is easily explained.
+Battlefield, they were a bit freer in terms of what they could experiment with, so some maps are based from...
+I'm a programmer, I'm not a tech artist, so this is just my best, not my best guess because I know a bit about it, but some maps were made using, like the last one I've shown, a bit of satellite data, photogrammetry, and LiDAR, I don't know, I'm sorry.
+but they had really varied approaches.
+There's not one, I think they're actually coming up with probably a more unified approach as they learn the tools, but for Kingston it was different setups per level.
+Okay, thank you very much.
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+My name is Patrik Rosander.
+I'm a senior concept artist.
+I worked in the games industry and entertainment industry as a whole for 12 years.
+And I started out working in small studios and eventually I worked myself up to bigger AAA studios as more of a specialist.
+I'm currently at Remedy Entertainment.
+and I've always been a big fan of vistas in games.
+You know those moments where you just like take a moment and enjoy the view and get transported into another world and creating those kind of moments have been a driving force in my concept art career and then trying to get those moments into every single game that I work on.
+but there's very little information on how to create those vistas and those moments.
+So today I'm gonna present my approach focused on matte painting.
+And there are many other techniques different from matte painting that you can use and different workflows you can use to create large vistas but this is like another tool that you can have in your toolbox.
+So what you see here, what you see here is the result that we're going for.
+And the example that I'm going to be showing today is not connected to any Remedy projects, current or future.
+It's just made for this talk.
+So first I'm going to cover the background and the core concepts of a matte painting.
+And in my view, the different components you need to pay attention to is the camera placement, the geometry placement, and where the matte painting lives in the world.
+that I'm going to go through a quick creation process where we create the example that I just showed you guys.
+So math painting has a long history from painting on glass back in the day to digital math painting and slowly evolving to full 3D environments.
+And according to Wikipedia, a math painting is a representation of a landscape set to a distant location that allows filmmakers to create an illusion of an environment that is not present at the filming location.
+For me, it's a way to show a larger world and to inform the player of the bigger universe that they're a part of.
+And it's usually way beyond the scope of a game production to create spectacles like that that are actually playable.
+So I find that it's a technique that is as powerful in games as it is in movies.
+And just like in movies, matte paintings and vistas help you show the world outside of the game space.
+You might be walking on a very constricted street area, but a matte painting and a good vista gives you the feeling that you're in an epic hive city, for example, in this picture.
+It's also a very important part of creating a suspension of disbelief for the player, making sure that they buy into the entire story and the premise of the game.
+So the easiest way to describe a matte painting in a game is that it's an Texture with baiting lighting on a low poly geometry with an unlit shader.
+And texture is actually the big limiting factor of a matte painting in games.
+You can push as much detail as you can possibly get into that texture, but the cost of a matte painting is generally extremely cheap and performant.
+And the actual virtue of this technique that is a simple geometry and just a texture and an unlit shader makes the iteration time and the creation time extremely fast.
+So when it comes to creating our matte painting asset, there are a couple of elements to consider.
+The first is the camera.
+Second one is the placement of the matte painting and the projection geometry.
+I'll go through what these are in further detail.
+So a matte painting always looks best when it's viewed head on.
+And the further the view angle strays from that head on position, the more the illusion will start to break and you'll get distortion in the actual matte painting.
+And when it comes to placing the matte painting in a game, I always think of a game level as having three layers.
+You have the foreground geometry, you have the backdrop geometry and the skybox.
+The foreground is the player interactable space, the backdrop is the jump towards the skydome, but you can never interact with it.
+And the skydome, of course, is just the texture.
+and you can basically place a matte painting as close to the player as you want.
+The projection geometry and the texture resolution will be the limiting factor, but it usually holds up really close.
+So this is a little formula I use.
+Just keep it in the back of your head if you're going to do a matte painting.
+So the distance to the camera and the view angle, for example, if you're going to view the matte painting from the start of the level and the end of the level, you'll have like a 90 degree change of angle of view.
+That kind of dictates the complexity of your geometry that you're going to create.
+So why use a matte painting in the first place?
+You could just paint a detail in the information in the sky dome or make a 3D model.
+I mean, every product is different and you kind of need to make your own judgment calls, but a sky dome most usually does not have the texture resolution for a good like detail backdrop.
+And it also lacks parallax, which we'll talk on later on.
+The 3D model approach is great and I would actually recommend it, but it takes a lot of time and it's really tough to iterate on.
+But if you have the project and the timeline that allows it, go ahead, do it.
+Yeah, let's get into the creation process.
+So for this example, I'm going to create a matte painting for a level segment in a first-person shooter.
+and it's a traversal area between two gameplay areas.
+And this is the prime location for a matte painting.
+Player has nothing to do except breathe out between two very intense, hopefully, encounters.
+And they just can get a palette cleanser and enjoy the view.
+And of course, it's a sci-fi universe because that's what I like doing.
+So this is a brief kind of outline, the steps I have here.
+You can skip some, you can move them around a bit with experience, but it's good to have as a starting point.
+So first up is selecting the camera location.
+So I have a fly-through of the level example that we're going to be working with.
+And as you can see, there are going to be a couple of instances where the camera looks kind of straight ahead into the void.
+That is an ideal camera hero view, I like to call it.
+Basically the reference point of our map painting.
+Basically, when you're going to select a camera view, you want to have it in the middle point of the level.
+For example, you see there's maybe a 50 meter segment that we're going to be walking through.
+So we want to have it in a place that represents the best picture of those 50 meters of traversal.
+So here we see the critical path or the player path in a more overhead view with the dots representing the potential camera locations.
+we have for you.
+the one in the middle is the selected hero location.
+Looks straight out into the void like the matte painting territory and it's in the vertical middle of the level and the kind of horizontal middle as well.
+So the next step is blocking it out.
+I use Unreal in this example and using their brushes and 3D models I quickly kind of make a block out of the composition that I want to have.
+and it's really important to work on it through the entire level segment, watching it from every single view and paying attention to both the scale cues and kind of the parallax you get and the distance and scale you get from the small objects next to the big ones.
+Because in the end, if it doesn't look good in this state, there's no way to save it.
+and in this example as well we have a lighting setup which provides us with some nice specularity and some nice shadows and for a matte painting it is kind of a must to have some sort of basic lighting setup in the beginning because you will position your objects and your matte painting elements in order to catch that light to get the specularity to really communicate the materials of the objects that you have it's the main key ingredient of doing a good matte painting So the more work you get done in this stage, the better.
+And as I said before, this is like the defining point.
+It might not look like much.
+It's just a couple of boxes, but to me, it's the most important point.
+Because if it doesn't work here, it will never work.
+So the next step is creating the concept art.
+You might already have a concept before starting.
+I'm a concept artist.
+I usually work on my own concepts for the math paintings.
+Every studio is different.
+but my process is to export the foreground geometry of the level, export the camera as well and the block out.
+That way I have a one-to-one representation of the level but in my 3D package and I can confidently go forward and just flash the matte painting out without any kind of hesitation if it will work in game or not.
+If it works here, it will work in game.
+and don't be afraid to kind of go back switch up the camera angles and experiment because we only spent like a half a day maybe at this point with the finished concept maybe one day two days and the power of this technique is that it's so straightforward that you can just restart it restart it and restart it until you really get the good composition that sells the fantasy you're going for But the downside of being a concept artist is you want to make a kick-ass concept.
+And this is not the time to create a kick-ass concept necessarily.
+It's a step in the process.
+This is just a sketch in order for us to get information of what elements we want in the actual matte painting.
+For example, how does the sky intersect with the space elevator that I made here?
+How does the god rays look?
+How does the fog interact?
+I think I put, yeah, I put some red position lights, which are always a favorite thing of mine to put.
+And all those elements need to be represented in the matte painting using additional geometry or shaders.
+So even this concept for me is a way to plan out my coming workflow.
+So once this is done, we're going to set up the projection.
+And basically, we're using the concept art camera.
+We're zooming it out to give us more screen real estate.
+As you can see, there's kind of space for the mountains and space for the sky as well.
+Because this is more like the player is going to see in game.
+And the concept is always zoomed in to look awesome and sell stuff.
+But this is the practical camera.
+We have enough geometry and kind of space in the foreground to create the transition as well once we get to that stage.
+So in most cases, as I said before, you're going to need to reposition your camera and tweak it until you actually get a good matte painting render out of your 3D scene.
+And once you've done that, you're going to go ahead and basically duplicate the scene and delete all your beautiful geometry and add a plane instead.
+And you can just map your plane to that, map your texture to that plane using a UV projection from the camera.
+And then you should have basically the same result as your heavy 3D scene, but just on a flat plane.
+And this is basically the setup that goes into the engine.
+And as you can see here, we have, yeah, basically the matte painting concept, but just on a plane projected in the game world.
+Yeah.
+And the good part about it is the fact that even if it's just a plane, you get immense amount of detail.
+And that's the power of this technique.
+So thank you for coming to my talk and yeah, have a good afternoon.
+I'm you place the matte painting in the world and you create your projection geometry.
+And it's never going to get better no matter how much painting time or rendering time you put into it.
+So this is the next step in the process.
+We have fleshed out the train and the actual 3D geometry of the main building.
+And as you can see, the difference is not huge, but the detail is starting to get in there.
+and the SkyDome is there as well.
+It's just a 16-bit HDRI, but it's an important part to try to build up towards the concept that we did earlier.
+And keeping the models at around 80% finished is kind of a core concept here.
+You don't want to push it too far, because you still want to be able to go back and change things.
+And there's a couple of more steps we're going to add on before we can pull the trigger and just go to town and paint.
+So we also want to refine our plane or our projection geometry in order to get the most out of it in engine.
+So just by adding depth into the projection geometry, we can create parallax and we can make the matte painting stand up much more to different view angles than just a flat plane.
+And as you can see, we have the mountains moving in the back in relation to the sci-fi structure.
+And that kind of illusion really helps set the tone of the matte painting and helps it integrate into the game world.
+It's really easy to overdo it, but that kind of breaks the illusion as well.
+So don't have too much fun with the parallax.
+And the next step, when the parallax works, is to add dynamic elements.
+So for me, I want to have the matte painting working in a static shot.
+Here, I've added some simple sky animation using flow maps.
+And to kind of integrate that into the painting, I also added cloud shadows, which is basically a noise texture that would just tile all over the matte painting, kind of match the speeds.
+And it already makes it feel like it's kind of a part of the game lighting and game world instead of just a painting.
+And as a cherry on top, I'm putting in my favorite signal lights as well.
+Here they come.
+Nice.
+Which is basically just an additive plane that we make visible and hide with a looping script.
+And just by adding these elements, you have something that looks like a, it could just be a 3D model, right?
+In a game.
+There's no real difference from the player's point of view, but it's just a very cheap asset and quick asset to make.
+So at this point we have our projection geometry set up, we have our refined shapes, we have our dynamic elements, we know that this is going to work, right?
+We can actually start enjoying the work process.
+So for this stage what I've done here is I basically just improved on the train geometry, improved on the The sci-fi asset geometry improved on the sky dome and the dynamic elements as well, making sure that the speeds of the animation is correct and also adding cloud planes and mist cloud cards to help the painting sit better into the actual environment.
+And a key part of this part is actually to hide all the seams and make sure that it seamlessly integrates with the backdrop geometry.
+In this case, I put the seams in the shadow areas, which is a cheap trick.
+But if you can't do that, just make sure that the edges are high poly and that it intersects with the geometry in a nice way.
+And there's always other tricks you can use.
+Tree cards, et cetera.
+Alpha blending.
+So basically, this is the target that you want to reach.
+You have a really detailed background that is basically almost a one man show.
+It takes usually between one to two weeks to make, or even shorter if the brief is simpler.
+And I mean, when we're at that stage with the refined 3D, we can just start painting.
+And I think that's the beauty, at least for me as a concept artist, of this technique is we have the texture set up so I can use whatever tool that I want.
+Photos, photo bashing, just pushing the 3D more just to create the most kind of epic painting I could possibly create.
+But the actual limiting factor is, as I said before, the texture, texture memory.
+Yeah, and also a good point to think about is if you push the detail too much, you will eventually kind of overdo it.
+Like you will have a map painted and it's more detailed than the game world and that kind of like ruins the entire thing.
+You need to restrain yourself and remember that you're working on a game that needs to like look cohesive.
+So what about performance, right?
+It's always a big question in games.
+and like I said before this is an unlit asset it's low poly but it still has kind of a performance footprint even if it's really lightweight and of course the heaviest element is the texture size but it's also very scalable and it's a known quantity up front you know what you're going to aim for and it's going to be constant once you actually pay that cost and the geometry should be super light.
+You can go from a couple of hundred triangles to like a couple of thousand, depending on the complexity of your projection, et cetera.
+And the shader setup, as I said, is extremely simple.
+Alpha overdraw, like in this case, can be a factor, but you can also just cut off the geometry using the alpha channel and just remove all the alpha straight away.
+So in my mind, this technique is really fast and efficient.
+That's why I'm promoting it today.
+And it's a good way to create awe-inspiring moments in games and just help your players get into that fantasy and enjoy the world.
+And yeah, that's my approach to creating matte paintings in games.
+And thank you guys for coming.
+Also a shout out to Justin for mentoring the talk, and Johan Barek back at home, he's my shader guy who helped me with this workflow.
+And Remedy is hiring, go in and check it out.
+Looking for a lot of positions from all over the world.
+And that's my socials if you want to get in touch or have any questions.
+Okay, any questions?
+Well, then I wish you a great afternoon and a good flight home.
+Oh, we have one.
+Yeah, cool.
+I just wanted to ask you how much support you have from the 3D artists to create that structure?
+Do you do it all yourself?
+Yeah, I usually do it myself, but I'm a very 3D heavy concept artist nowadays, but I mean if we are in production and we actually have an asset library, then the work is already done, right?
+So I'll just kitbash away.
+So the actual design of that structure is yours as well?
+Yeah.
+Okay, cool.
+Thanks.
+Thank you.
+maybe one more question so of course um when you show the parallax effect that you just split up the plane as manual work into more vertices and then extrude it or is that an automatic process no since the geometry is so low poly i just do it manually and the uvs are projected from the camera so there's no work when it comes to remapping the uvs or anything it's just moving vertices into space yeah okay thank you How much do you rely on, like what's your split between 2D and 3D, like how much are you doing hand painting versus the 3D rendering?
+Nowadays I do like 70 to 90 percent 3D, but it all depends on the actual brief, for example train, mountains and stuff in this case, I almost always photos because it's not worth the time investment for me as a concept artist to do the high-end train stuff, not yet.
+Thank you.
+Okay, well thank you all and have a good afternoon.
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+so My name is Dino.
+I've been working with tech for 23 years.
+I've been working professionally with games for 20 years.
+I'm mostly known for co-founding and running Playdead for around 10 years.
+Since then, I've done a company called Jump Ship that did a game called Somerville, and I'm also running a company called Coherence.
+And my goal for today is that if anybody of you kind of thinking about starting a company, like to inspire you to take the jump, and if you already did it, I hope to help you with some thoughts and some of the mindsets doing it.
+And it's also important for me to note that this, whoops, this of course is my perspective and a lot of this is my thought processes derived from the values I have and my experiences leading me to my goals.
+So take it with a grain of salt.
+But all of these are things when I made the talk that I thought it would be nice to know when I was starting out.
+So it's a talk that lasts half an hour and it's hard to go in depth, but I thought about five fundamentals I find very, very important for when you want to start your company.
+It's vision, risk, valuation, which maybe becomes a bit technical, team, and then I'll end up talking about you.
+These are vision basics, and this is very simple.
+This is also something you can kind of look up, but a vision is there for you to kind of picture yourself a clear, compelling future.
+It's for you to motivate yourself, and it's for you to motivate a team.
+It's something that helps you along the way to keep your eyes on the longer term goals because it's so easy to be bogged down in the short term.
+It's something that can both attract investors, partners, employees, but it's also something you can use to select the right partners, investors, employees.
+It's something you can use whenever you think about how you want to build your company culture.
+And lastly, it's something that you can use to differentiate yourself in the very early stage.
+And I want to start out with my story and some of it that relates to vision.
+So I started as an employee in the tech industry when I started out, and I shifted to games in around 2003.
+In 2005, I quit my job because I thought the game industry was shit.
+It was hard, I started consulting.
+But I remember when I started as a consultant, I had this urge of creating a product.
+I remember that if you just sell your own time, you're just limited.
+You're limited by your own time.
+So already at that point, I had the thought that I wanted to find some kind of product, something that I could make and it could be replicated.
+So this was the start of things.
+And in the end of 2005, I made Ant, as some of you know, and we created Playdead.
+And I remember my main motivation here was that I kind of felt I found my product.
+I felt that we could build a vision that was like worth it for me to kind of jump into this.
+And for me, it was kind of the big driver's license in trying to find out what it is to have a vision.
+Because it was kind of 10 years just with a deep focus on the vision, which was deep artistic independence and creative freedom.
+I learned how powerful it was to communicate.
+I learned how it was to communicate to partners.
+I learned how it was to fight for.
+And, you know, we were sticking stubbornly to this and it was kind of fun because it's learning about how powerful a vision is.
+I think, you know, I can tell it to you now, For 10 years in a row, fighting and trying to do something again and again, getting a feedback and a positive feedback loop, which sometimes, you know, it takes a year to get a positive feedback loop.
+You have an idea, and then after a year, you see, okay, now we have five employees that fit into that vision.
+Okay, it actually feels good.
+You say no to something.
+And it feels good because you find out a long time after it was a good choice because that helped you stick to the vision.
+Even at one point in the history of play that we had some investors and they wanted to sell the company and they wanted to sell it to Ubisoft.
+And I remember it was such a hard choice for us to say no to that, but it just felt that not saying no to that would completely ruin that vision in so many ways.
+I also learned that even if you're just making a game, you can still touch the hearts of people around the globe.
+Yeah.
+So when I started Jumpship, my goal was to kind of continue that with a focus on independence and creative freedom.
+This time it was just around Chris Olsen's vision.
+And again, the example is here that We only choose partners that could help us keep the creative vision.
+We had NetEase as investors, and they were chosen because they were the ones that said that they invested in us for our vision and not to change anything.
+And it was also, we recently sold the company to Thunderful, and it was again the same.
+This company that bought us was fully aligned with what we wanted to do with the company, that we could do it.
+With Coherence, it was a lot of things coming together.
+Coherence is a network technology.
+But it started out with a lot of talks about, where are games going?
+And I also at that time thought a lot about multiplayer games and I thought about, should I do a multiplayer game?
+I'm really fascinated about, you know, how is it to create a story in a multiplayer environment?
+But again, it all clicked for us.
+the feeling of making a technology where we could enable other people to be creative and iterate.
+And suddenly we came up with that idea that felt big enough.
+So yeah.
+So what I learned was you can cultivate a vision.
+I don't think that when you are young that you maybe are born with having a vision.
+I think for me it was something I learned, something that I learned by the positive food feedback loop.
+Yeah, the positive reinforcement.
+It's important to learn how to communicate it.
+I've never been really, really good at writing down like any vision I had.
+But I think in any steps of my life, when I did something with my companies, I always been really, really good at communicating it.
+And you know, if you ask me about it, I can talk day in and day out about it.
+And I also learned that the better you become in communicating what your vision is, actually the easier everything becomes.
+People understanding your vision, people understanding what you're doing, just removes barriers.
+Also, if there's holes in your vision, you kind of figure that out early on as you start talking about it.
+And I think it's so important to clear out, like, when you start a vision, that's the cheapest point for you to kind of find out if this is a good way to go.
+I also found out that having a big vision is better than a small vision.
+And it maybe seems self-explanatory, but how are you going to motivate yourself with a small vision?
+How are you going to motivate your employees with something bland?
+It's kind of, for me, defeats the purpose of having a vision at all.
+So it's, yeah, it's better to have a big one.
+The other thing I learned also is that to continue to use your vision, like you can have it and you can think about it, but then when you start working, Kind of the vision gets tainted because when you start out you have a really pure and clear idea always and there's no problems in that idea.
+There's always perfect and then When you go into it, there's a day-to-day thing, there's problems, there's things that doesn't work out.
+And if you don't always go back and think about what was the original intent with this, you often get lost in the day-to-day.
+And something I do myself, and this is like kind of an exercise, is like when I go around my own time, I run, I do something like when I'm not officially at work, I kind of just always take on the original vision.
+I try to go in and visualize how was it?
+What was the original feeling I wanted to have of this?
+Is it still what we have in the company?
+Sometimes it's not.
+Sometimes it is, you know, you need to go back and reevaluate.
+That's why it's important to kind of always use it.
+And you should use it when you prioritize and when you decide your focus.
+Is your prioritization aligned with what the vision was?
+And also when you're hiring and partnering.
+Will the person sitting in front of you that you consider higher, will that person help you complete this vision?
+Will this partner help make this vision?
+It's really important.
+And then I think emotion is like, you can almost not have a vision without invoking emotion.
+If vision don't have a component that makes you either excited or happy or gives you some kind of feeling, I think it's hard.
+And again, I think as long as you work with humans, it is this key element.
+If you don't have a vision that kind of sparks something in yourself or other people, it's useless.
+And the last point is, I think you should never make money part of the vision or any goal, to be honest.
+It is such a flat and emotionless motivator.
+And what would happen if you got enough?
+Would you then stop?
+I mean, I tried to both have little money and a lot of money.
+And in the end, it doesn't make a difference.
+Especially not if you want to achieve something big.
+And I have these exercises I use myself a lot.
+And the first one is just like, trying to vividly imagining your vision.
+Like, when you sit and you are thinking about starting a company or have started a company, try thinking about what is the end goal?
+What does it give you?
+What is the feeling in your body if you achieve this?
+Taking yourself forward to the future and experiencing the feeling you would get hitting your goal I think is a kind of a cheat code because you kind of already get a bit of that like feeling, and I do that often enough, and you will compel yourself to go toward that goal.
+And what is the story?
+What is the story from the point where you are now to that end goal?
+Is it a good story?
+And again, what emotion is it invoking in you?
+Try explaining it to others.
+It's actually, when you explain it to others, you often can hear your own bullshit.
+And I just think it's very powerful.
+The vision has to get out of one point, right?
+If you need other people to help you lift it, you need to start talking about it.
+And you kind of need to look at how do they look when you talk about it.
+I mean, yeah, here in America, like people are so nice and you tell them what you're doing and everybody says, oh, it sounds good, you know, you can tell anything and everybody here says, but you need to look at how, like, are they smiling?
+Are they really taking it in or are they just being polite?
+The other thing is also if you do it and you kind of want people on the vision, like, does your vision, would it include more people than you?
+Like, is it an egoistic vision or would it include other people?
+Is your vision worth fighting for?
+Because this is never going to be an easy thing.
+Like, I mean, it's always a fight to come from nothing, to create something of nothing.
+It don't take zero effort.
+There's always a lot of fighting because you also want other people fighting for it.
+And you probably also want other people putting money in it.
+And if the vision is not strong enough to hold that, Yeah, it's pretty hard.
+And again, the last thing is, are you working on the right vision?
+As I said, like in the start, where you have the vision, this is the easiest time to kind of decide if this is worth working on.
+And working on the, like, yeah.
+It's easier to become successful working on the right vision than putting effort into the wrong vision.
+A great vision is the fuel that propels us forward, challenging us to push beyond our limits and reach new heights.
+With that comes risk and the possibility of failure.
+You have to take risk.
+In the game industry, you have to take risk.
+I'm pretty sure.
+I think not taking risk and doing something common is kind of the most risky path here.
+There's so many games.
+There's so many standard games.
+Every game has been made, right?
+The only way to make it a game that hasn't been made before is to take risks.
+So with risk, the only thing there is with risk is you need to manage it and find the balance.
+And the fun thing with Risk is that it's visible from the outside, and when you look at any game production, it usually looks like this, that you find the finished game on Steam, and you think that the people who made it, they just had an idea about this game, and they made it.
+And this is normal.
+And the fun thing with Risk is actually that Risk is kind of like pain.
+It's such a momentary thing.
+Even people...
+working on any project can have a lot of risky situations and at any points have such a hard time with choices and prioritization.
+But when you often reach your goals, if they're set up correctly, all the risk is gone.
+There's nothing left, like everything.
+And when you think back about it, it's like, what was the risk?
+Like, of course we did these choices.
+And this is usually how it is.
+There's a starting point and you have a vision.
+And the vision is not a point usually, right?
+It's a feeling of a place you want to go.
+And you start off with nothing and you iterate.
+and you try to go towards your vision and it doesn't work and you go a bit like another direction and you know slowly you get close to the vision but of course you never hit it because the vision is big right the vision has everything the vision is always perfect and has like all of these ideas but the game is a thing right there's a you have a controller maybe or something that there's choices that needs to be made needs to be a specific thing And it's all about managing the risk in this.
+As a side note, if you are inexperienced, you usually only look for the budget to take you the direct path.
+And that's why you end up crunching because you actually need to do this.
+Then there's valuation.
+Just bear with me for a moment here.
+This is maybe a bit technical, but of course I don't really know the concept of valuation.
+It's the value of the company.
+And when you start up the company, it's the value of you because you are the company and you're the only person.
+And this consists of...
+Time and money.
+It's your team and team history.
+A lot about the founders, but it's always the whole team.
+It's what you have produced, the IP rights and game product.
+It's technology, blah, blah, blah.
+It's also external validation.
+If you have, already have customers, if you have early access, if you have a community, that's also value.
+You should have backers.
+And then there's the soft elements that actually also can affect your valuation.
+The reputation and the culture.
+And why am I talking about such a technical thing?
+The thing is, when you start out the first time, you have nothing.
+And the whole, what's it called?
+Your job is to make as much value as possible before you let external money in.
+And it usually looks like this.
+The left part is maybe your own value.
+That is the time you put in, and the right side is the external money.
+And what happens when you Understand how that is all about putting in as much value as possible you kind of get to a place where you get more and more power and in the end like I'm trying to say is that When you start your first company you often get offered shit deals and this is this is why So it's always like the more time you can use the more You can put into this, before you take external money, the more control you end up having in the end.
+I call it valuation steps.
+And in Playdead, we started from scratch, and it was, of course, really, really hard.
+We started with not so many things.
+And that was also the reason why we had, we lost control along the way, and we actually also ended up with less than 50%.
+But what changed since then was that I came out of that building new things, but I came, both the experience, and I came with my own money.
+And for example, in Jump Ship, I used my own money until we came to a vertical slice, and that just made everything much easier.
+Then I have a point about the team.
+There's a lot to say about this topic, and I'm already almost running out of time, I can see.
+You need a team to leverage your own time.
+So unless you're a one-man band and you do your own game, which I would not recommend.
+I know a lot of people have done it, and it's seemingly more hard than if you have a team.
+So you need a team to leverage something bigger.
+And you need a team to work for you, because it's critical if you want to build something that's bigger than you.
+Vision in a vacuum is nothing.
+Without execution, ideas are worthless.
+You always want to hire people that are better than you.
+And I'm not talking about juniors and interns, because I see them as an investment you do in your company, and you can do that later on the line when you want to scale more.
+But in the start, you only want to have people that are better than you.
+You want self-motivated people.
+Again, in the beginning, this is gold.
+The only way you can leverage your own time is if you find this.
+The team skills are defining what you can create.
+You either create what your team can make, or you have to hire people with skills that can create your vision.
+You cannot do it with anything else.
+And the last point is culture.
+And again, this is a big and huge topic.
+But in all the companies I've started, this has been one of the key things.
+You and the first people in the company are going to define how this is shaping up.
+And culture always trickles down.
+And there's a lot of soft factors going into this, but I think in the end it just comes down to your values and your behavior.
+And I know this is not the most important thing, but I also think that it's important to look at the work environment.
+Because is this where you want to have your grand ideas?
+Is this where you want to be creative?
+Or is it like this where you play board games and you kind of have a more loose environment?
+And I think it's maybe a smaller thing of culture, but I still feel like the place you spend most of your time It's really important as a coach.
+It's really important that it's a place you want to be.
+It's really important it's a place where all of your employees want to come, where they have a good time.
+And that's also why I always, again, whenever I started, have made a big deal out of making everybody feel really good and take good care of my employees.
+And the last thing is you.
+You will always start inexperienced.
+That's how it is.
+And most people start as, you know, a graphic designer, a game designer, a coder, sometimes also from business.
+And that's how it is.
+And you just need to learn.
+You need to learn immensely fast.
+And it's important that you like to learn.
+And you learn to like to learn.
+You need to learn leadership skills.
+You need to learn to prioritize.
+You need to learn to communicate your vision.
+You need to learn to leverage your skills.
+You need to learn to negotiate.
+You need to learn to hire.
+This becomes such a key skill of doing this.
+And you need to really learn to love it.
+Because there's like, there will be a lot of stress and pressure.
+And if you don't learn to kind of navigate it and really kind of also, in some sick way, enjoy it, it just becomes really, really tough.
+I also think you have to be critical of yourself and be able to take critique.
+It's so easy to fool yourself.
+It's super, super tough.
+I've taken a lot of critique and I'm also really, really critical of myself.
+And it's not easy to be honest to yourself.
+It's easier to hear what you want to hear.
+But I think it's really important for you to grow and actually to be able to learn.
+I also think in the end, nobody cares about your goals.
+If you're good at the vision, you make people care about the vision.
+But actually I think being an entrepreneur is kind of also a very lonely position.
+You're often alone with your thoughts.
+You cannot expect anyone to be sorry for you.
+All of the risk you have is by choice.
+So you cannot go and cry to anybody because this is something you choose.
+You can also not do it.
+And you're always trying somewhat to do something that's personal for you.
+And again, looping a bit back to vision.
+That's why I think it's important to have that.
+You need to have that feeling of where you're ending up.
+And also, you have to have that feeling of it being bigger than yourself and it including people.
+Because if it includes people, they will care a bit more about you.
+You need to level up.
+Going through different projects and companies, you need to level up.
+This is the only thing you bring with you.
+And in my own example, it was kind of shit scary to start up a new company after Playdead.
+You build up a lot of things around you.
+You have everything handled.
+There's a system for everything.
+And suddenly you start from square one.
+And you just have to rely on your experience and you have to learn again.
+You have to learn new people to know It was even scarier to start coherence.
+It was a new it was in tech and suddenly actually nobody even know who I was, to be honest.
+Whoever we raised money for never heard about Limbo Insight.
+They didn't care about it.
+So I kind of just had to rely on like raw experience of how to raise money and how to drive a company and all of that.
+But of course, because I feel I leveled up in all of this, I bought myself, I bought my experience, obviously also brought some money, helps.
+I actually think I maybe need to skip this because I'm very much over time.
+Just in short, I just want to say that there is an age for everything.
+And I think you need to do your biggest risk as you are in your 25 to 35.
+When you're above that, you can take risk.
+I still take risk, but I only take calculated risk.
+And again, the example for me is that when I started Playdead, I bet everything I had at that point.
+Luckily, there wasn't a lot, so it didn't matter if we failed.
+So, I mean, but now, you know, I can only afford to take calculated risk, but I take a lot of risk, but it's always calculated because, I mean, now it's different, right?
+Pitfalls.
+Avoid trends and the idea of quick rent That's in the game industry.
+There's so many fucking trends and it's so annoying, right?
+It's AI now, right?
+It was NFTs last year.
+Then it was a bit of VR, right?
+And it's like I I just think you need to have a vision of something that stands the test of time.
+And again, now, as I said, like I've been doing this for 20 years, I've seen so many trends come and go, and you need to find something that just, and that's why we work on multiplayer tech, because multiplayer will always be there.
+We can maybe, you know, do some major shit, I don't know, but I mean, in the end, I don't want to rely on these short-term trends.
+There are a lot of big tech companies trying to convince you to make these things, and they sometimes also pay you money.
+You get money to do your VR game.
+But when you're taking money, you are trading off short-term gain for your long-term goals.
+And it's fine, but you actually don't have a limited time.
+You can only do this a couple of times.
+If you do this a couple of times, you never end up reaching your goal because, you know, time's up.
+So think about it when you take those dirty money.
+Yeah, talent, that's not good for culture.
+I have many times met a lot of really, really talented people that were not good for culture.
+And I would never, I don't think you should ever trade off sacrificing culture for somebody that's really talented.
+It's not worth it in the end.
+It's better to have a good culture in a company.
+It will serve you better in the long run.
+And there's loss of focus.
+Nobody again.
+Nobody cares about your focus.
+Nobody cares about your time you get so much inbound and I think the more success you have the more inbound you get I get so many mails and Like a big learning I've made is just saying no saying no to fucking everything it's it's It feels hard in the beginning, and you also sometimes feel rude, but I mean, in the end, it just becomes such an important skill.
+You cannot read all mails, you cannot be looking into every technology that we offer for you.
+I actually very, very rarely got inbound that was worth a yes.
+Very few times, but most of the times, it's me researching the market.
+understanding what's happening around me, finding some things and then me going for things I want.
+I just think that it's so easy to lose focus in the company and not do what you're supposed to do.
+This is my last slide.
+This is the conclusion.
+Nobody will remember your small vision.
+Always go big.
+It's easier to go big sometimes.
+You can only hire level 10 talent for a level 10 idea.
+That's how it is.
+So why not?
+There's almost no downsides to have a big vision.
+The only thing is, as I talked about with evaluation steps, there's a maximum for how big the vision can be compared to where you are.
+Your first game or project will be the hardest birth.
+And I...
+I only tried my own first berth once, of course, but I really feel like this is what levels you up the most.
+This is where you take the hardest hits.
+From that point on, it's not downhill, but it only gets better.
+If you need to, cut scope, not quality.
+And I learned this the hard way.
+Find like-minded people and share ideas.
+I think the way I learned the most was by doing this.
+Finding mentors.
+I started going to GDC in 2010 and a lot of my friends or colleagues from here learned me a lot about how to drive a company and gave me a lot of answers of things I needed.
+And it's usually like-minded, other company owners that kind of give you what you need.
+And you can also share your ideas.
+This is a fun thing.
+And actually, I came, I thought about it going over here because I mean, if you're kind and generous, this has opened so many doors for me.
+It's crazy.
+Like, you go around, you're a good person.
+People want you to meet other good people.
+And I mean, if you think about like, yeah, it's just open more doors than I ever could pay for, that I get introduced, this person introduced me to this person randomly, because they just think, you know, you're nice, you're nice, like you need to like exchange ideas.
+And it really has, I think looking back at it has been one of the things that's been the most helpful.
+Yeah, my last point is never stop learning.
+When you go through any type of process to hit a goal, you quickly realize that If you're not putting enjoyment in the process, your enjoyment will be really short because all of your goals are just these small bleeps in this timeline.
+And that's why I think it's equally important to put focus on the process and not just put focus on the goals.
+because I hit my goals a couple of times and it is a really short joy.
+And some of the times I actually kind of, you know, if I didn't take care, like if I didn't think about what my next goal would be, I would kind of be a bit depressed about it.
+So my point is just here, like I think the process of what you're making is equally as important.
+So even though it's hard to start your company or it's, Yeah, that is hard to do the negotiation, all these things.
+You kind of have to find a way to make the process enjoyable.
+Because the goal will not be what you think it is.
+You hit it, you're happy for three months, you release that game, you're happy for three months, but after that, there's life.
+Even if that goal make you financially independent, it doesn't matter.
+You still need to have a path forward.
+Yeah, that's my talk.
+So I went five minutes over.
+I could take questions if there's anything.
+Yeah?
+Good afternoon.
+And no live stories as Elon Musk says.
+Okay.
+So my question is, you said you've started one company and later had to start another.
+And the only thing you carry with you is your own knowledge.
+But I feel like the company I have, which does comics and animation, is adjacent to gaming.
+Do you have any advice for how I could pot over the success in comics and animation into, let's say I'm trying to get funding or just someone interested in, hey, we already have these comics, would you partner with us to make the game?
+Because we already have a certain level of success in comics and animation, but we've done absolutely nothing in gaming.
+I think every aspiring entrepreneur has a vision, right?
+And as you said, you need more than that.
+You need a team.
+And it can be paralyzing trying to find a person to fit a specific role, especially if you don't know anything about it.
+Like if you're a programmer and you need an artist, how do I know if your portfolio is good?
+So as you've built these teams, do you have any advice on how to build a team out for areas that you have no familiarity with?
+But I mean, don't you have a feeling of it?
+Like, you know what looks good, right?
+You have an idea, but there are people who are really good at kind of BSing their way through things.
+And I think as the less experience you have, the more likely it is that you're going to be exploited by people who are good at doing that.
+But as you probably also saw in my talk, I'm not good at graphics myself, but I feel I can see good graphics.
+I can see if there's emotion in it.
+I can see other people being talented in it, but I don't know if like, yeah.
+So it's a feeling.
+Yeah, I think it's a feeling.
+I mean, as I said, you need to do the negotiation.
+You need to be able to turn them on.
+But I think if you're the one at the rudder, you're choosing, I guess, what the graphics is.
+Makes sense.
+Thank you.
+So follow your gut.
+Yeah.
+Do you do an advisory for startups?
+Game startups?
+Yeah, I've done a bit.
+Yeah?
+Yeah.
+Well, I'd like to contact you about advising mine.
+You can mail me.
+Great.
+I'd probably say no.
+That's okay.
+That's okay.
+Just read the email.
+Just read the email.
+Thank you.
+Yeah, I will.
+Thank you for your presentation.
+When you made your first transition from employee to business owner, how did you secure funding?
+Did you do because he had no experience?
+So was it crowdfunding?
+Was it grants?
+Was it VC?
+Can you just share your experience?
+But there's two elements to that.
+First of all, I could do the bet because I have saved up some of my own money, and I could work for a year without money.
+And I had really low expenditures.
+As I said, there was a point of my life where I spent almost nothing on where I lived.
+So that's why it was kind of good for me to... It was high risk, but what I risked was low.
+But we also got a grant.
+of $20,000, $30,000 I think it was at that point, which kind of helped hire the first person and get to a point where we could find funding.
+Thank you.
+But I would like your expenditures, just keep them low.
+I think that's the best way to keep your risk low.
+Okay, last question over here.
+You mentioned culture a couple of times.
+I was curious if you had anything more specific in terms of like any starter like culture for a new indie studio or like something that you experienced that you thought that worked well across your multiple companies.
+Yeah, but I think there's no right culture.
+I mean, the culture I appreciate is what I've created.
+And I just think it's important that people that I work with have a good life and have a good time.
+And I have some old Playdate employees here, and I hope they can attest to that we always, I don't know how it is now.
+I hope it's gone to shit, no.
+No, no, it's a joke.
+Don't write that down.
+No, but we always try to make it a good place to come.
+It's always homey, we have sofas, we have lunch for people, we have fridges.
+Like we didn't have that from the beginning, of course, but we had like an idea.
+We have a fridge with everything you could drink and want in life.
+And so we just want it to be a place where you can kind of, you were proud to bring your family.
+But again, I don't think it's the, I don't know if that's the right way.
+That's just how I like to have it.
+That's the workplace I need to want to come to.
+I mean, I think it is, it's important just to create what you would like to come to because you also need to attract the people that have it like that.
+I mean, I would not attract a accountant maybe because they want something else.
+Yeah, I hope that's enough to answer.
+When you started Playdead, were you driven by a specific vision for a particular game, or was it a more studio-level vision of the kind of experiences, and which do you think is more important for someone starting their own?
+Yeah, I don't know.
+So, Ant, my partner, he had the vision for the game, and I would say I had the studio vision, but it had been, I would, yeah, we were, It's at one point we were so synergetic, it was hard, you know, we always, we met a couple of times a week and synchronized about like, you know, everything about the company.
+So sometimes it was hard to find out who made the choice of what, but I mean, yeah, that was a split.
+Thank you.
+Cool.
+Thanks a lot for coming.