A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon

[Music] hey uh I hope it's a useful talk um that that would be nice my name is Chris uh I'm the creative director and artist at Red Hook Studios and worked on darkest dungeon and uh I wanted to start really quick by just saying it's very uh humbling experience to be able to stand up here I've learned a lot from GDC and especially from a lot of people that I see in the audience um that are people that I look up to so hopefully I can kind of give something back um okay so enough kissing ass uh so after three years working on darkest dungeon from like uh Tyler Sigman and I and a bottle of Scotch in my living room uh through all the way to Early Access and into finishing um this idea kind of took hold hold in my mind essentially that development is a lot like being in a in a Dungeon Crawl you um form a party of skilled adventurers you equi yourself with the best gear you know for us like workflow methodology

competencies great ideas and then you basically plunge headlong into this like sprawling abyss of uncertainty for like the next couple years of your life running out of money ruining your relationships and and all the rest of it it's uh what's that yeah too soon no it's going better it is um development for all of you guys you guys know this it's a it's a it can be paralyzing because you're faced with making like constant choices with consequences you don't never fully really understand until it's it's too late and this the landscape is always changing and you're always operating with imperfect information essentially and I have come to believe that based on my experience on this game if you go into this development dungeon um without a strong Creative Vision for your game you're essentially going in torchless so what is creative Direction

um I think it's a lot of things to a lot of people uh you could call it like the thematic and conceptual framework of the game you could call it the the DNA that runs through all the sort of soft Sciences you know narrative game design art music audio um it's a it's a very nebulous and amorphous concept and I think a lot of times it gets um it gets ignored for that reason or not talked about in uh in in Practical terms um I think on big projects you know when you get face Toof face with sort of the realities of development the pillars and the vision documents they just live on the drive somewhere and because there's no time to go back to that stuff it doesn't it's not relevant anymore and on a smaller project you're like well maybe I don't need it because our game's about jumping so let's just make the jumping really good um but I I respectfully disagree I think that the misconception that it's a a nebulous and intangible notion um is uh is a missed opportunity for for Indie developers um for us it was was a practical tool it was

something that we consulted and referred to constantly throughout our development and it and it served us really well we're small teams uh we don't have a lot of money when we get started um we can't afford to just arbitrarily bloat scope or like add parkour on Sunday morning to the game just uh it just it doesn't it doesn't work for us I think that um we have to be more focused and uh deliver tighter um experiences by necessity and in order to do that successfully we need to make sure that we align all the elements in our game um to deliver on those on those thematic beats or we lose we risk like losing our way in development for us on this game um what am I 38 39 pushing 40 um the opportunity cost was extremely high so actually before Tyler and I kicked off the game both of us had had job interviews and and there were offers on the table um I have a

wife and children in a mortgage and um an iPad now that's cool and uh you know it costs a lot and and it's a huge risk um when you're at that that sort of stage in your life so for me it was really important to clearly understand the game we were going to make so that I didn't wake up one morning like eight months later completely depleted of my careers's worth of savings and wonder like wait a second what is this game actually about um and and so so we invested early and intensely in clearly understanding uh the game's creative Direction and we looked back on it you know at every sort of decision Point um we've gotten a lot of great feedback on uh on darkest dungeon a lot of really positive comments which are awesome about how the atmosphere and the thematics all sort of like all the features funnel in together to deliver this sort of singular experience and that's great but it wasn't it wasn't by accident um it was basically a function of how we approached looking at the game

so consider this like horrible looking tree in the soil you put all your ideas and and your Inspirations and your influences so like classic crpgs and comic books and um sad music and HP Lovecraft and just the the Earth you know that that the game is going to kind of grow out of and um through a process of like debate and discussion you arrive at like the trunk of the game the the the I'm going to skip ah hand here there we go um the the clearly defined Vision that's going to create a framework for you to move forward and and from that trunk the branches grow up all the different disciplin so design can head off in its area and face its own challenges art can do the same audio writing but if you trace them back far enough they all share An ancestry which I think looking at the project this way gave us a really um great place to to start and uh no matter what challenges we Face later we could always come back to this this trunk that we built um uh sort of a

clearly defined and articulated vision statement for the game um we did this a couple different ways the old uh collect a bunch of reference art put it on a image classic classic move um but you know putting uh like annotating it with what about those images is really important I think because it it's not enough just to stick a picture somewhere um we had a lot of conversation and debate we stress tested what we felt like the game would be about and how the game would handle certain problems as they popped up and we ended up with this uncompromising Gothic Rogue like low fantasy lovecraftian um Adventure uh that challenges players to make the best of a bad situation and make decisions with permanent consequences um with imperfect information and that really became the sort of the core vision for the game and and everything was routed through that and I I wanted to point out I think the the love child metaphor thanks Jeff for clarifying with that actually is um you

know when you're like oh your my game is X meets y um for us it became like XCOM meets Dark Souls I think that's nice to arrive at at the end of the day after you've gone through a more exhaustive process of understanding what it is you're trying to make but if you start from there I think it's really reductive and I think that you risk like if if that's your internal Mantra is XCOM meets Dark Souls it's not specific enough because you're not saying what about XCOM you're taking and leaving and what about Dark Souls you're taking and leaving it's just up to personal interpretation and I guess that's what I'm really driving at is that when you settle on a creative direction for your game it cannot be subject to a personal interpretation it needs to be strong enough to exist on its own so I did this drawing at Batman um I think what worked really well for us by defining this vision for the game repeatedly articulating it and and actively looking for ways to involve it in in our development process it it kind of it became its own entity we externalized it darkest dungeon became a team member you know it wasn't um what I

thought was cool or or what Tyler thought would work it the game was a part of our team and it had its own likes and dislikes and things that it wanted to be and things that it it didn't need um like parkour so it's a lot like uh you know Batman and Bruce Wayne the creative director is a man he can be or a woman obviously um he can be sort of swayed by shifting Trends you can wake up one morning after you you know play a great round of Fallout 4 and now you have power armor in your racing game um you're You're vulnerable to these things as a person just by the nature of especially a creative person right we're very easily attracted to need ideas but the creative direction for a game has has to be a symbol it has to be like immutable and powerful and and outside of yourself and Batman's really cool I could have chosen a different superhero but it wouldn't have been a great creative Choice given the talk subject matter um so yeah essentially you the thing has to be strong enough to live on its own and fight crime

um so being you know moving into production wi with the confidence of what we knew what we wanted to make um led to some really interesting choices so what I thought I would do is demonstrate the practical application of creative Direction by just sort of selecting a few sort of key examples like I said it was it was literally something we talked about all the time but um the art style the the overall presentation of the game the writing style on the lore um some marketing um some some game design stuff all of these things were really like big sort of home runs I think for a creative Direction excuse me when we first started pixel art was hot and it was only getting hotter and you could get a lot of attention by virtue of Simply being a pixel art game um and I think you know there's there's a case to be made for like the irony of cute pixel characters suffering horrible depression and cilis in a dungeon like that's kind of funny right there's something there um but uh it it ultimately we looked at it but it uh it

communicated the wrong things it led out with this idea of retro and charming and even though we were sort of a retro inspired kind of RPG um we couldn't lead out with that um rosec colored Nostalgia and and cuteness it actually um it flew in the face of what we were trying to accomplish we needed something like really awful and depressing um to really just Hammer that horrible stuff home um so heavy blacks you know came into Play We started looking at a lot of comic books and and and how to deliver on on that Vibe and the looseness of the art uh really reinforced this idea of imperfection Your Heroes are imperfect um the information you're getting for your decision-making is imperfect imperfection is a huge theme in our game and it was great to give that like a visual personification so that it's literally there even if you're not consciously aware of it when you're playing it's one of those things that uh it creeps up on you and you understand it without necessarily knowing it consciously so I think that was a good choice um and the big win for me is that if I

can be loose and sloppy and people still think it's cool then I can get more done faster um which is great because there's only one of me um the other uh the other sort of assumption when you go into make like an RPG especially a turn-based one is that the um the top- down ISO Diablo or classic you know Final Fantasy grid cam is usually the default assumption when you describe a game like this to someone but we ended up with this weird sidescrolling thing you're always moving left to right um and the reason was because you know as you can see we did some exploration even after sort of getting some real solid winds on the art style you can see it's starting to creep in over there um we tried to make it work with this sort of operating under the assumption that we had to do this um but the more we got into it we realized that the wide angles and the sort of Godlike overview robbed the game of that claustrophobic tension that we felt like was so important we wanted you down in the dungeon with your characters we

don't want you standing up above like you know the Lord kind of looking down with this wide panoramic view um it lost its sense of intimacy and a lot of the intensity and also argum is about the psychological ramifications of adventuring and that's the characters it's not the environment so it's less about dungeon layout and more about who's in the dungeon so again that was an argument to be made for for getting nice close in on those characters um and it's also really hard to relate to the top of someone's head so you know having nice side view characters gives you something it's a little bit more interesting to look at and you can kind of attach yourself to the look and feel of the character and again another big win is that it's the same set of assets as combat so we didn't have to jrpg to a battle Cam and and again imply bigger spaces um and as a result the game feels very um you're very wrapped up in it as you're playing it the uh the writing um a big assumption I think too that that we sort of L with is that you know when you make

an RPG usually there's got to be like dwarves and elves that fought like 10,000 years ago and then there's a Chosen One thrown in there at some point maybe there's a life tree I don't know collect a few elements but it's always like very exhaustively spelled out and it quite frankly it kind of bores me to tear sometimes and I and I kind of skip through a lot of the quests I'm like do you want the wolf pelts like yes or no I just I just want to get another sword man um so we felt like for our game though um if imperfect information again we don't want to spell out the story we we want to sort of suggest that it's there and create this this fog around the player um to deliver on this like Twilight Zone uncertainty that I think is is really important and it features in a lot of Lovecraft stuff you only get a keyhole glimpse into these awful Horrors and if they were to be described exactly it actually does them a disservice um so we we went a different direction um we tried to tell the story as much in the panels as in the gutters like I'm I'm sure a lot of you guys read

comics and your brain interpolates what's happening between the panels in in the white space in between and so that gives you um like a point of contact as the consumer of the product to get invested to to use your own imagination to fill in those gaps and we felt like that would be um it would pair nicely with the comic book style art and um it would allow people to sort of integrate themselves into the fiction and it means that we don't have to write a novel which is a huge win um the writing style was a big risk for us as well because you know the game uses a lot of uh really Antiquated verbiage if you will um and it was really a way of us honoring the source material we felt like we couldn't decouple the the lovecraftian overwrought tonality um from the actual thematic influences like I felt like they were they were really iMed and so to try and tell a Lovecraft style story without that terminology that phrasing that turn of phrase um

would would rob it of something inherently that it needed um but it was a risk as far as localization goes and uh and we were worried that um people just wouldn't like it or or wouldn't get it um but that was a risk we were willing to take because we felt like it honored the creative direction of the game much more and and again yeah horror thrives in the absence of certainty so the dark places of your imagination that's where kind of fear and concern settle in and anytime you can play that pay that out in a in a horror game I think you're you're doing well so we've looked at a few of these like uh soft science areas where where the creative Direction was important that's kind of low hanging fruit because I think when people talk about creative Direction they immediately associate it with art and and that kind of thing but we used it actually as a as a razor when it came to to Features as well um we really tried to ask the game essentially what it wanted what it needed to be able to pay off its identity um so for instance um a gear system is a popular thing to have an RPG it's usually what

drives the player experience they want to you know upgrade their stuff and get new loot um but it's extremely extremely costly and and we have a small team obviously and limited resources and we had to really ask ourselves is this something is this a road we want to go down does this actually serve the creative direction of the game and and and the answer was no um our game is about the sword arm not the sword it's about the person who's wearing like the armor not like the a number of upgrade gems on the armor those games are great I love those games games but that's not this game and I think understanding what game we were making really helped us make these decisions and and really never look back um so we used it as a razor to measure the relative value and importance of many many features like you'll notice there's no crafting system um we so we we reduced it down to like two inventory slots but then we blew out the number of items that were there because we recognized the value in having you know collectible loot it's great it's part and parcel of the experience but it shouldn't play lead guitar in this game it it's the bass or even just the little dude with the

Shaker in the back you know um it applies to marketing too we trailers you know when when we were first getting started I did a lot of research um into sort of how game trailers should be constructed and the conventional wisdom was that they need to be fast Punchy there needs to be flying text I think you're supposed to in like um announce a new game mechanic every like 5 seconds or there's it's all you can find it on Google we didn't do any of that we it just because it didn't it didn't align with the mood and tone of the game so our trailers are um are too long they're too slow and they deliver feeling over function but ultimately they were really successful precisely for those reasons they they stood out from a lot of other marketing materials because of their commitment to the game's identity they felt like they were an extension of the game as opposed to something that was slapped together after the fact and I think that's really important because what's a marketing material but like an on-ramp right you're trying to pull people in and if you're pulling them in in a slap Dash

way that doesn't feel genuinely connected to the product itself um I think you're just you're on ramping them onto a gravel road somewhere so the last example I want to bring up uh is a releas a game design generally this is a sound principle right like don't just take away from people who've worked really hard in your game to earn it right that's kind of a no-brainer um so you can kind of see what we did here that crit though baby M oh yeah come on to your maker what oh my God I have to choose a hero no oh no way f up oh it's The Cauldron all over again no wonder you were bring that up oh wow piss oh man we've got oh boy I don't know who to pick I feel like

we need our healer for the rest of this but all right well we're getting to spare the others I'm ready from our leper so I guess we're going to send him in God damn that's cold dude son of a my my God come on you just you go through all this and then you just have to give him up [Applause] so that was a that was the final boss for the game we we violated like pretty much every uiux Rule and game design rule with that fight precisely to pay off um Cosmic horror incomprehensible Cosmic horror and the futility of trying to swing a two-handed sword at the heart of the world um you can't beat this right like how can you beat a lovecraftian monster it's absurd so um the the final boss fight is is like a compression of the entire play

experience there's all the mechanics feature into that fight it's the entire Mission and and death and loss are an important part of our game and so we have to kill you in this fight even if you're the best player in the world you must die in this fight um but the first time you play it you don't understand what's happening we we broke the move flow and you can see um this is from a streamer called bitter bits um you can see he he pauses he's like I don't understand because the game completely stops doing what it what they're used to seeing it do and we did that specifically to create this sense of like Dawning horror it's uncertain what's going on suddenly now the player is in the position of the heroes who are in the game I mean it's not as bad for the guy in his computer right but you know it it aligns their expectations and suddenly the Playfield is wide open and you're just racked with uncertainty how many more times is he going to do this is this a Death Race am I on a timer all these questions kind of swim around and it elevates the intensity of the fight especially in the in the final minutes truth be told told we built it so you could beat this

end fight like we we want you to to to go through this experience but we want you to go through it um off balance and unsure and because that's really what our game has has been about and we wanted to make that final encounter everything that we'd been building up to um what yeah this so those are some some examples of how we use creative Direction like practically throughout the project what we do is not easy I mean you guys know this there the hours there's the pressure the desire to do great work as creative people um not to mention the the crushing self-doubt and financial insecurity uh and all the other sort of Horrors that like lurk around in in the dark um but having the confidence that comes from investing early in a strong creative direction for our game and and understanding it articulating it and and referencing it in every discussion that we possibly could um it uh it gave us a lot of a lot of confidence and um made our journey a lot easier I think than it than it could

have been otherwise so we we got to know our game we externalized its creative core we invited it to the meetings we leveraged its uh you know it's its Creative Vision to to vet features to inform decision-making um and the result was thankfully a high degree of creative consistency um thematics mesh with art meshed with sound and audio and you know Stuart chatwood and Wayne June and PowerUp audio did a fantastic job on on the audio stuff and uh everything is in there for a reason everything has a purpose in in our game and it can be clearly pointed to I think that's really important as a as an indie game you can't do everything but what you do do you have to do it really really well to stand out so thanks I asked him to do like a Brazilian MAA thing to let me know when I was running out of time was good it was good yeah so you know we we spent a long time in Early Access we were with an onslaught of of fantastic but often

times diametrically opposed feedback um we had our own ideas we had deadlines um so you know for a while there we were mired in the darkest dungeon of development but we used our creative direction to sort of illuminate our decision space a little bit and uh and keep our party focused on what was important and ultimately we we got out intact um having said that I still need a few nights at the tavern but anyway that's my talk thank you very much so I think I timed it okay I think we got a few minutes for Q&A if anybody wants to say anything I have a question yeah okay so when you're making a game you sometimes have to Pivot Your Design cuz you realize it didn't work as well as you did when you separate yourself from your creat of direction as its own thing is

it still able to Pivot or you like this is where we have to build now I think you want to get to the point where you feel confident in it before you jump into development so you save yourself a pivot later obviously practically sometimes you've got to make adjustments and changes but I think that um when you're talking about creative Direction it can be implemented a number of different ways and usually when you pivot you're pivoting on specific features or or the way it's expressed um so I think you can make strides on articulating a creative Direction and still adjusts to your implementation I don't think they're mutually exclusive thanks uh with regards to the kind of metag game in darkest dungeon with uh the characters being disposable um was that something that was intentionally designed with the same theme of horror and uncertainty and all that kind of stuff yeah of course cuz we kind of wanted to subvert this idea that when you start an RPG like they're all little precious snowflakes that you're going to carry through to the end um and pay off that sort of Pulp horror view of

of humanity as being inconsequential so we layer that in right from the beginning although you don't actually know that's what we're doing until it's kind of too late and you're getting heart attacked just relentlessly um so so the the disposability of human life is um is part and parcel of of the whole Cosmic horror thing and um it's also just sort of a really neat exploration in terms of how people play the game they start out very attached and then they start to lose their Heroes and then they get resentful at the game so they they say well fine I'm not going to name anybody and then they start making way more money and then they realize they're the villain yeah and we didn't do that it's on you thanks yeah hi um I was wondering uh you had mentioned uh you had that fear of the financial issues and stuff so I was wondering uh exactly how did you guys choose where to allocate funds for when you were in development um well you know

we the first part of our project was all bootstrapped so we each had our own sort of like personal runways um that we that we used up you know for a while and Kickstarter was a was a huge huge help to us um but really it just went towards cost of living and just and just keeping us fed and keeping the lights on um where we where we broke down our our manh hours or our Focus um was was driven a lot by what we felt were the most Salient and important things sometimes it's not like you can't always work on your Topline feature the other stuff has to get attention too but you know certainly the The Early Access release that we brought to Market um a year ago uh was sort of our best effort in making sure that we put our our our time and energy on the things that were most important and then throughout the year we we were able to Circle back and kind of like raise the quality level and everything else thank you hi I was just curious how much of the games mechanics had you prototyped before you felt like your creative Direction was totally solid um it's it's a bit weird and I can't say that this is going to be entirely transferable but like Tyler and

I would sit down and we talked through and storyboarded most of the game prior to even starting development it was just the two of us so when we started I'm not saying we had every problem solved but we certainly had a lot of the the the the vision and the core um idea of how the game would play out and and what the mechanics kind of looked like obviously there were changes and nuances and we added corpses that was really fun and uh you know so things evolved over time as as they should um but it's uh we knew we knew a lot before we before we started thanks uh sorry I think he was up yeah he wasn't uh so most games focus on giving power to the players and make them have a lot of fun and feel good about playing the game were you prepared for making a game where you were pretty much doing the opposite and maybe making people really upset like just out of curiosity yes okay um we knew we knew that we were sort of

like walking a bit of a tight RPP um to to be totally honest with you guys and I guess the internet because it's going to be recorded but um we we maybe weren't prepared for some of the like uh the vitriolic responses once you've experienced the party wipe and the level of like lemon juice that goes along with some of those uh some of those comments um but we always felt like we managed to straddle the line and make sure that you were empowered enough to make progress but that your progress was never uh guaranteed and so I grew to sort of disregard feedback that said you know I have my level two guys with level two armor fighting a level two monster I should win fundamentally you should not in our game that's not a promise that we ever made you um that's just your condition for it right um but yeah I think that you know in some ways we weren't necessarily prepared for for some of the more colorful responses to that

thank you for being so uncompromising you're welcome so obviously you highlighted the importance of creative Direction when it comes to unifying all of the game elements such as art design narrative and so on in order to create a cohesive hole because because otherwise if you had one element that kind of stood out of the pack and wasn't outlier and obviously it would have been all the more noticeable and that would have kind of thrown the player off and regarding you know maintaining that creative Direction like can you name me like any particular roadblocks and disagreements you you and your teammates that had uh during the development of darkest dungeon um the irony of making games is that you don't often times get a lot of time to play them um but I can say that like crypto the necrodancer for instance I felt like really had the same sort of tight Vision the way the dungeon floor turns into a disco and you you know little nods like that just to keep looping it back around and the beating

heart was a great um yeah they wo like sort of this dark fantasy story around this like crazy dance game and I thought they did that really really masterfully so that that was a stand up for me as well all right interesting thank you very much no problem okay all right thank you very much guys I appreciate your time