All Systems No: Learning from the Doomed Launch of Brigador

How's everybody doing? Survive Thursday night. Only one more day to go. Um okay, so I'm Huw Mannering. I am the co-founder and designer at Stellar Jockeys. Uh my brother Jack is the other co-founder. Um he ran a design blog called Design Reboot for a while and worked on some other projects. Brigador and Stellar Jockeys have the prestigious uh uh quality of being the first thing that I've really worked on in the games industry. Uh so take all that uh in mind when we go through this. Um before we really get started uh couple things, you know, cell phones, you guys know the drill. Um also want to thank uh Chris Charla. He was my advisor on this and you know, I've I've only shipped one game. He has been around for a little bit longer than that. So he gave some good context. Um

So yeah, so this is All Systems No: Learning from the Doomed Launch of Brigador or as I've been calling it uh just how I cocked up our launch. Um not a big deal. Uh okay, so what did I mean by doomed? Um and like what's this overall thesis for this talk? Uh The 1.0 launch was a failure before it happened. I didn't know it uh but a myriad of factors went into um basically preventing us from ever getting any kind of real momentum with the game. Um so the real question though is was it doomed as in nothing I could do about it or doomed as in all my fault? Um yeah. And that turns out that's something that you need a lot of time away from it to really get the context you need. Um So yeah, as I'm sure anyone who can you know, anyone who's shipped a game

can vouch that like that month before and after is you know, everything's kind of a blur. You don't really Nothing really makes sense. Um and the other thing is that when things don't go well, your immediate instinct is to look to the other. Right? So, okay, this project didn't go so hot. Who screwed me? And thankfully I kind of just let that sit for a bit. Uh and now we're 9 months out from that original launch. So, I've got a little bit more context and I'm I think a little bit of a cooler head to be able to talk about this stuff. So, um before we really get into it though, we need the context for the launch, for the game, the studio, just everything. So, we were four full-time devs uh between 2011 and 2016. Um well, mostly full-time. Early years were kind of off and on. Um this was the first commercial game for three-fourths of us. Like I said, my brother had done some contract work and had worked on uh Darkest of Days at 8

Monkey. Um But, for the rest of us, we were freshly minted game developers. Uh this project was 100% self-funded. Uh and so, when specifically I mean, we took no outside money. We did not work with a publisher. Um and because we were, you know, fresh in the industry, we also had almost no connections at all. So, we also scratched both the engine. Um this is something we took a lot of flak for. Uh a lot of armchair generals uh in gaming forums. And the thing that I wanted to point out there is it's important to remember the context for this. In 2010, 2011, uh the landscape for licensed game engines was very different than it is now. Um Unity was not quite what it is and Unreal was also extraordinarily more expensive.

Um, and the other thing too is that because we didn't have full funding for this project, by necessity it was a passion project. Um, for me personally that was you know, getting to be a designer and putting all my bad ideas into a game. Uh, and for the programmers, that was being able to make their own engine. Um, unlike me, Harry and Dale, both of the wonderful programmers on the project, had much better offers ready to go for them and they chose instead to work with my brother and I on this project. Um, and so you need to be able to bring something to the table when you're asking someone to sacrifice a very, very healthy wage on the West Coast and permanent sunshine with near poverty wage and uh living with me for 3 years.

Um, so the goals on the project, one was to make a unique game with a high skill ceiling. Um, I should qualify that. So, Brigador was a ridiculously ambitious project, um, especially given our means and experience at the time. Um, much of that was driven by a communal desire of the team members to make something distinct. Um, you know, if if we're going to go through these tremendous pains of developing a game, uh, then it should be one that sort of bore our distinct imprint, um, something that hadn't been done before, at least in some respects, uh, and which respected player time. Um, one of the things we talked about a lot was the Doom rule, which is that uh, you know, you get into a game, you spam enter, and within one or two seconds you should be in combat playing the game. If you boot up Brigador, that is absolutely true. Um,

and it also kind of pervades the overall mindset with the game is that uh, there's only downtime if you want it. Uh, there's nothing worse for me than having these sort of uh, designer-mandated wait periods. Uh, either they're I mean, it's understandable when the case where it's a disguised loading screen, um, but if it's not necessary to actually, you know, a mechanical component to the game, I prefer to avoid that. Um, and regarding the high skill ceiling, uh, part of that is just having a game that's reactive to the player in some component. Like, if we wanted to be able to reward players who were willing to put in the time and the effort uh, on a game to truly learn all the mechanics. Um, and I I think we accomplished that. And it was also relative to uh, one of the programmers, uh, Dale's an avid Counter-Strike player. And so, that

that kind of uh, mentality for uh, precision play is something that I think continually crept into our design. Um, the second goal is to make enough money to do it again. That's fairly self-explanatory. I mean, it's nice if you break even, great if you can fund another project. Uh, third goal was to keep the team together after ship. Um, one of the unfortunate realities of game development is that often times a team doesn't really gel until the uh, you know, getting towards the end of a project. Uh, and then, you know, you ship a game and then things happen, studios close, people move on. Um, and so, our our hope was that this was the first step in a much longer journey together as a studio. Uh and the fourth goal was to build a reputation as a high-quality developer. Um The best way to sum that up is just I mean, you want to be known for being the guy who like makes really good stuff. Um

pretty straightforward there. Um Anyway, sorry. So, as far as actually whether we hit that or not, um Excuse me. Didn't need to drop that note. Okay, so did we make any unique game? Um I think we did. Uh I'm I'm not going to give any wiggle room on uh some of the distinctive components. Uh I'm very proud of that we managed to capture that granularity of aiming that I mentioned with um with Counter-Strike. The the the goal was to make a first-person shooter, to to bring the the the precision that you get in those kinds of games, but into an isometric environment. Um Took a year of prototyping to get uh an aim scheme that really worked there, and there were all sorts of wonderful problems that we had to deal with, but we got there. Um

We did not make enough money to do it again. Um at least not yet. So, the the little asterisk there is that um even though Brigador's launch wasn't so hot, uh we've actually been trending up in day-to-day sales. Um Now, as much as I'd like to attribute that to my own personal charisma and running my mouth continually on the internet, I think there's also a component of the launch itself just being that bad. Uh but, you know, maybe it was just uh you needed to get the ball rolling a little bit more. Um We did not keep the team together after the ship. Um It was a very amicable parting. There's nothing There's no like terror story here. Um It was just we finished the game, we didn't have money to do it again. Uh and we had all gotten largely what we needed to out of the project. Uh so I'm

very happy with just even though we didn't stay together and that goal wasn't itself met, that this was a stepping stone for all four of us to actually uh move forward in the industry. Uh and as for building a reputation as a high-quality developer, I'm not I'm not the person who can really make that judgment. Um And the other thing too is that I don't think you can make those kinds of qualitative assessments until at least your second or third project. I mean you know, everyone's heard of like one-hit wonders. Um that's mostly referred to I mean you mostly hear that in the context of music or film, but I think it can certainly apply to games as well. Um And then just a quick run through on end results. So like I said, Brigador shipped June of 2016 after a nice stint in early access starting in October of 2015. We had

review scores ranging between 4 out of 10 and 9.5 out of 10. Um obviously I'd prefer one of those. Um Our final Metacritic score was exactly 70%. Uh it was 78 and then our very last review was that 40%. Uh so that that one stung. Um We actually are overwhelmingly positive uh on our Steam user reviews. Uh that's been a nice vindication. Uh and actually we just even though we've been at that percentage level uh for a while, we just hit the minimum review threshold a week before I flew out for GDC. So, that's a that's a fresh freshly minted title. Um Now, 9 months out from release for a game that took 5 years to make, we are standing at 15,000 units sold. And I'll let you come to your own conclusions there. Um But, we did ship a game, a 2 and 1/2 hour soundtrack, a book, and an

audiobook uh all as part of our first project. Um And then the double asterisk there is that a lot of those negative reviews we received were relating to controls, uh something I will more fully address later in the talk. But, uh uh When we went into ship, um that whole thing I mentioned about high-quality developer and wanting to kind of make a splash, I definitely think that I bit off more than I uh could reasonably have chewed. Uh and that you end up paying the price for that uh in different ways. But, at the end of the day, we still managed to produce all of these things. So, the game itself. Um I've been doing a lot of prefacing without actually talking about the project. Uh So, what is Brigador? Um

It turns out that's actually a very difficult question to answer. Um We were plagued for the entire 2-year stretch running into release trying to articulate it in a a pithy fashion. Um So, the best I could do at the time was just figuring out what it wasn't. So, it's not a twin-stick shooter. Uh and this is actually something that if I had taken that to heart much earlier in the development cycle, I might have better been able to market it and anticipate uh some of the issues we had going into launch. Um but it looks like a twin stick shooter, but it is very much is not. It's a very mechanically dense game. It's slower than a twin stick uh and it they're just distinct elements. Um it's not Tiberian Sun an RTS. Um I mainly bring that one up because we use sprite-based graphics um both out of a stylistic decision and out of necessity. The entire game art was

produced by a single artist and that includes uh over about 2 and 1/2 years of art. Um 130 units uh and over 1,000 environment assets. Um if we were to do that in a 3D pipeline, uh it it we would have been able to build a fraction of that. Um We utilized a kit-bashing style uh to produce all of the in-game assets. Since we didn't have to worry about topology um or the you know, any of the qualities of the 3D render itself uh or the 3D model itself, all that mattered was the render. Um the we were and by we I mean Jack uh was able to produce these assets at a diabolical speed. By the end of the uh art pipeline uh by the end of the the the process of art assets being produced, he was able to create a finished vehicle for the game within about 6 hours.

So, it's not a roguelike or a roguelite. Um there were certain aspects of roguelite that we wanted to hit. Um I feel like everyone who's been up on stage on GDC for the last couple years mentions Spelunky in some capacity. It's a very important game that, you know, kind of tickles the back of everyone's brain uh since it came out. Um Our only real touch uh touching onto that that genre was that you we had an entire segment of the game that was built around these sort of uh semi-procedural runs where you set up your equipment, you go and then see either see how far you can get or, you know, go until you die. Um So, the only thing we could figure out was that it's kind of like Desert Strike, kind of like Crusader No Remorse. Um But, it turns out it's a bit of a problem when your major touchstones came out 22 and 25 years ago respectively.

Uh of you know, a significant portion of our player base weren't even alive uh when the games that we would refer them to were made. Um And that's just it's a similar problem as anyone who's making like a truly new game. Like I don't know if any of you caught the uh the For Honor uh talk about its development. Um but that I mean that that is a game that is truly unique. And so, when you don't have any of those kinds of natural touchstones uh to draw from, you know, Brigador is like Dark Souls plus tanks. Oh, man. You know, we didn't have like the easy shorthands to pull from. Uh And so, the best we found was and I'm just giving a sampling of of what we did get. Uh PC Gamer review said, "It's a colorful and chaotic isometric 2D mech shooter set in a world steeped in '80s futurism." It's a lovely description, but it's also mouthful. And if you just walk up to

someone and say that, they're they're going to kind of give you a little squint. Um We have a pretty active uh Something Awful thread, uh the forum, and someone described it as a tank western. Uh that has a nice romantic quality to it, but again, it's not super useful. Um, and the one I ended up using the most, uh, in talking with press was it's a Kool-Aid Man simulator. Um, uh, that was cuz I lacking the ability to have distinct, uh, game touchstones, uh, I started to move into just the evoking the feeling of the game, uh, and something we had started saying internally was that it you need to feel like the Kool-Aid Man, at least when you're in the you know, the big giant building-sized tanks and mechs. Um, so, for a little context, I don't know, um, how familiar everyone is with the game, but I'm going to play our early access trailer. So, this was

when we launched in October of 2015. So, Oh, that's not supposed to happen. Okay. Um, so, the interesting thing about that

trailer is that uh, it's a very good trailer for a different game. Um, when we went into it, uh, our original trailer, which I'll actually play later, was very slow. It was very It was more concerned with atmosphere. And our assumption was that going into our actual launch, we wanted to show gameplay, show that's like the bombastic quality of hey, in Brigador you can blow everything up. The whole The whole stick of our game, the whole premise is that the entire game world is destructible. And we figured we would highlight that through these, you know, high-intensity quick cuts, things blowing up, you know, people like explosions. Um But the problem is that it showed the game as a twin-stick shooter. And the urban destruction elements I mean, it kind of got highlighted at the end of that trailer, but it was still more of a peripheral element to just

like, oh, this is like a high-intensity loud thing where like the music never changes, apparently. Um This trailer got about a third of the views of our original launch trailer. Now, part of that I think is just natural diminishing returns. Once people know a thing exists, they're less It's harder to build up excitement on subsequent trailers and and press releases, but it also It just wasn't as effective. We weren't able to draw people in. Um Okay, so the one way that we did manage to draw people in was through me running my mouth on the internet. Um So back in uh um February This is prior to release. Um February of last year, excuse me. Uh we had a a poster on our Steam thread who was very insistent that Brigador should cost $15 and not $20. Um which is

fine. Uh I mean, I don't agree with you, but you're welcome to post your opinions. The the last straw came when he posted back again on it, genuinely confused and insulted that I hadn't taken his advice. Um And and like like he was actually like like genuinely sad and perplexed, like why why didn't you take my advice? I I could have helped you. Um so my initial response to that was 2:00 in the morning, two or three beers in, and just a long list of the you know, um And because I had a good English teacher in high school, I decided to do a second draft. Um sat on it for a bit, and then, you know, I realized that often times the best way to reach people is through humor. Uh so I rewrote it just as like, "Okay, here's all the things that you are willing to pay $20 for, and that people don't really balk at." Things like a

Nickelback poster, or uh you know, a case of beer, toilet plunger. All these sorts of things that because of the context and and the usage, people have completely different valuations of those things. Um So I I I wrote that reply, and this actually relates to a very important lesson that I learned, which is that most virality is has to be stimulated, or I mean manufactured makes it sound uh kind of evil and dubious, but so I wrote that post. And if I had just left it on this Steam forum, I don't think anyone it wouldn't have blown up. Uh and maybe some people would have shared it. Uh but instead, I wrote that post at very late in the morning, but then I emailed it to everyone I had made contacts with both uh as developers and as uh journalists. The few that would listen to me. Um

emailed I just did a big big blast with this uh just say, "Hey, here's this thing that happened to us. You might find it interesting." Cool beans. Um and then I woke up 8 hours later with my face plastered on some of these different sites and with coverage on Kotaku. All these kinds of uh The response to that was the coverage that we'd been trying to get for the game itself and had failed at miserably. Um So So then later uh about 2 weeks after our launch um in a uh less considered uh fit of frustration um we were 2 months out of launch and we had yet to receive a Metacritic aggregated rating. Um, I can't remember if the minimum was four or five, but whatever it is, we were one below that. Um and I was furious at this cuz it you

know, it was like we had done our due diligence. Um and it it it seemed like it was emblematic of what I perceived as like well, everything that was wrong with the games industry and so I wrote this big blog post uh on Imgur about how don't become a game dev, it's terrible. Uh I you know, I have terrible health problems leading into launch. All these kinds of things. Um And yeah, that got shared around uh and it ended up with me doing a follow-up interview with Nathan Gray Nathan Grayson on Kotaku. Um I would prefer a slightly different headline um but again, that was that interview with him alone was ended up being about 85,000 views. The Imgur post was about 70,000 views. Um and that doesn't even include just sort of word of mouth elements as well. Um this one is my favorite though because this actually was following the uh uh the price post. Um

I made a few waves with that soon after uh Jane from uh uh Firewatch uh and that that whole debacle about people returning the game after beating it in under 2 hours. Um The close proximity there meant that people were kind of putting these two together. Um But in the process of talking about it uh everyone who approached it was like, "Yeah, there's there's Firewatch. Everyone loves Firewatch." And then there's pre- I don't I don't know what this game is. But But apparently uh there's this uh price component here. Um so that was it wasn't so good. Um But those three things uh tallied up for about a third of our sales. And that's that's a very very important thing. So

let's look at um total Brigade or purchases from 2015 to 2016. Um I don't have Christmas in here. This chart was made a few months back. Um but those three posts um or rather the posts and the reactions to them. So the $20 price post by Imgur dev life post and then the Kotaku interview that was actually significantly after it. Um those three elements are directly responsible for about a third of our sales. Um And we've done a few more things after that and we've had more more sales and everything, but that response of press reaction to uh I guess you could call it non-traditional marketing. Um and it I wasn't even intended as marketing. It was just me being angry on the internet. Um but that was a significant role in broadening the exposure uh of Brigador. So, this brings me to kind of summing up

all the things that uh I learned over the course of this launch, um my litany of doom. So, the first thing is priming. Um you have to teach a consumer how to react to and interact with your game. Um I'm kind of touched on this a little bit earlier with our uh trailer uh and how it was a great trailer for a twin-stick shooter, not for Brigador. Um Um actually, I've got some more slides before that. Um but yeah, another thing is that you have to be you have to start doing that before they play it. Um if a player is in your menu or, you know, just booting up the first level of your game, uh and they don't have to know exactly what the game is, but they need to know to a degree what to expect or how to approach it. Um This, I mean, for anyone who's not actually familiar with the game itself, uh this is a GIF of uh this is a a test that we did for what

proper full destruction in the game could look like. Um And this is the kind of thing that we should have focused on a lot more. Um we had a pretty good success sharing GIFs uh of the game, I mean, exactly this kind of thing. Um But the problem was that we didn't convey to the player um anything more significant than shoot stuff, blow stuff up. And what happens is that there's kind of an embedded message in that kind of ethos, which is that you are super powerful going in and that it's more it's more of that empowerment fantasy. And as a result, when you subvert that, when you know, a player can get killed by walking into a gas station, which we thought was hilarious, or at least I thought it was hilarious. I think it gave uh one at least one of the programmers an aneurysm.

Um but that's that getting killed by a gas station when you're cool mercenary in a giant mech is like the least empowering thing that can happen in the game. Um And that that was part of the whole messaging. Uh and we we we we we we didn't Players came into the game like they were a bull in a china shop as opposed to something more like uh a matador where you're actually trying to avoid and corral this much more powerful force. Um so this was our very first trailer. This is um February 2 2014, right before I attended my second GDC. Oh, nope, nope, nope, nope. Let's actually play that.

Yeah. So, um that was before we learned how to encode trailers. Uh and also there were some some things a little embarrassing there. Also, it turns out uh don't name your game before you do uh copyright checks um and IP searches and also search engine optimization. Um cuz Matador uh turns out kind of a common word uh both in general use and in business. Uh doing a cursory Google search for Matador, you come up with uh Matador beef jerky, Matador condoms. Uh and if you look Okay, well, let's refine a little bit. Matador trailer. Haha. Uh Pierce Brosnan movie.

You know, so that having to pivot on that didn't didn't exactly help us, but that's that's a it's not really it's not nearly as important I think as as a lot of these other elements. Um So, regarding this whole priming thing, let's give me the next slide. Okay. So, I'm only going to briefly talk about BioShock Infinite specifically because the messaging for that game was almost entirely based around Elizabeth, around storytelling, and how like when you play this game, you're going to have this great like it's going to be great story and like a great you're going to be emotionally involved. Um, and very little of it was actually focused directly on it's a shooter, um, even though it it's a shooter. Um, and I think because of that focus, well, first of all, it primed people for um, being focused on the things that they did well in like the the I mean not that they did things poorly, but like the storytelling elements,

um, they put all these energies into those elements of the game. Uh, and they set up their audience and their critics as well to look at those things to to, you know, they put the spotlight on it. Which I think is also why when the cover featured Booker, um, I think that's part of the reason for that backlash is because all their entire, uh, marketing campaign leading up to that was putting all the focus away from the traditional shooter set up. And as a result, those audience members who did or audience members, those players who were, um, who were already like part of that message, there was a bit of a dissonance there in that messaging. Um, Alien Isolation I think is just a great example of a game where you had this coherence across, okay, what the game was, um, how it was marketed, how it was presented at trade shows,

um, and on top of that, uh, they were having to overcome the challenge of the reputation of previous games both from a qualitative standpoint and from a genre standpoint. I mean, this was, uh, a, you know, a proper horror game. Um, Tim Keenan's Duskers, uh, I think is actually given similar challenges that we faced for the players, this is how you do it correctly. Um, which I wish I could have figured that out about a year ago. Um, But with Duskers um And he actually mentioned this in his talk, originally they had a mouse interface on the menu. And he said that it wasn't until they when you enter the game from the get-go, there's no mouse input and everything is keyboard only. Um that they stopped getting complaints or having issues with players not only just trying to use the mouse,

but even having a problem with that direct keyboard interface. Um Also it it looks like a game you would use a keyboard for. And I there's kind of like an intangible quality that, but there's you know the the the console commands um and his overall just presentation of the game was much more in line with the way that players ended up playing it. Um a sort of uh I think the best way it can be summed up is that he the the trailers in the marketing for that game uh much more accurately described the uh the experience of playing it rather than the physical realities of the game. It's the the subjective experience of that game. Um And that was a lesson that I didn't understand, which is that we tried to be

very literal in everything that we showed with Brigador. It's like uh you know we didn't have the budget for uh trailers that didn't exclusively use gameplay footage. Uh and we focused on um it was also kind of like our counter marketing thing where it's like everything that we're going to show in this game for the trailers and everything else is going to be unadulterated gameplay footage. Nothing's going to be fabricated in that regard. Um and while, you know, we we did that, the downside of that was that that was ineffective marketing. Uh so, you know, why do it in the first place? Um the last one I want to say is that Zachtronics, um he's sort of a great example of taking that priming and applying it across multiple projects. I mean, you you know to an extent that you're getting into some serious puzzle when you get a Zachtronics game.

Um you know it's going to be different. Uh and you know, you going to need to sit down uh and like have not don't let anyone bug you for a while uh and just dig in. So, priming, uh death of the designer, what do I mean by that? So, uh all that really matters at the end of the day is whether players buy and enjoy your game. Um this determines sales, and sales determine longevity. Um controls are very interesting thing. So, Bridge Constructor was designed around tank controls, um where pressing, you know, WASD uh or uh left control stick uh on a vehicle, W is forward, not up on the screen. So, it's relative to the orientation of your vehicle. Um this hasn't really been a common control scheme for a couple decades. Again, Desert Strike, Crusader No Remorse, these our touchstones are older

than most people's children and cars and even their, you know, anything of substance in their lives. Uh and I I failed to account for the fact that with video games, most players going into a game, it's not the first game that they've ever played. Um that's more That's a problem that mobile developers have to deal with a lot more, I think. Uh Um, but generally speaking, you can usually assume that someone has played a video game before yours. Uh, and that means that there's a sort of a legacy knowledge set going into it. If you made a shooter, usually someone's played a shooter before yours. Um, so for us, we had this legacy skill set of people who had played twin stick shooters, and I don't really know of any twin stick shooters that use tank controls. So, we had this entire player base where they were expecting a twin stick shooter, and then not only is the game mechanically very different from a twin stick shooter, uh, but also the control schemes are like, why why why would you do this? Um,

and this is a genuine case of of my sort of arrogance and enforcement as a designer, uh, cuz in my mind, the game was designed around a tank controls control scheme. And I both wanted players to experience this like ideal way of playing the game, uh, and also, uh, because of the limitations of adapting it to a twin stick style control scheme, um, players who tried to progress with that would eventually hit an artificial ceiling in what they could do in the game. Uh, and so I I I didn't want to ambush players with this like, okay, you know, got you, where you know, you put 5 hours in the game, and now all of a sudden you have to relearn a new control scheme in order to be able to meaningfully progress. Um, that's just flavor picture. Uh, so the problem there, oh, no, I thought

I had another slide there. Well, so to actually articulate that, um, the issue that comes up there is that A, most players don't make it far enough to actually run into any kind of a skill ceiling. Uh, and B, if a player is an engaging with your game right off the bat, very few people are going to bang their head against the wall for 45 minutes or an hour until they start liking a game. Um very few people can like trust in a game or a developer. Uh you have to have some very strong extrin- external motivators to get people to stick with something that long. Uh and what And we we had all this data right in front of our noses. Um we found that for most players it took them Most players who weren't acquainted with tank controls took them 45 minutes to an hour to to start to settle into the game. Now, in a testing environment, you know, you have someone who's either paid to be there or they're your friends, so it's like a social payment. Um they're going to get beers later. Uh they are there They're incentivized to

stick around with the game. Uh and so we weren't responding to the fact that for most players they would come in, not like the controls, and just immediately be done with the game. It's an instant return. We had a whole set of 0.1 hours returns, negative review, "These controls are so dumb." Um so we did eventually pivot on that. Uh added in a twin-stick style control scheme. We added in controller support. Um they weren't ideal control interfaces, but again, at the end of the day, if a player's having fun and they they purchased your game, that's that's the thing that's important. So tying into this, uh the first like the first 60 minutes foundation, um so the majority of your players, also known as the ones who fund your company, will never make it past the early stages of gameplay. Um

this varies depending on genre, um but if you look at Steam achievements, uh and like any kind of uh usage statistics for most games, um you get kind of like, you know, it's the the hockey stick, right? Most people aren't actually making it that far into games. Um so I talked with the guys at 17-Bit. Uh they had much better data tracking than we did. Um and they told us that 17% of their players dropped out before completing the first level. Uh and then 92% of their players dropped out before completing the first dungeon, which is roughly 2 hours in. So you've got 92% of your players uh never see anything more than your intro content. Like that and that that that blew my mind. Um I knew to an extent that you had a fall off. Um I had no idea that it was of that magnitude. So this screenshot's pertinent because

on the left is our tutorials, or rather the first hour of playing a game or of playing Brigador. On the right is what the game actually looks like. Uh we did this sort of virtualized abstracted environment for the game, uh but because there was so much the player needed to learn, so much of a skill set, and also because this was not the first draft on our tutorial. Uh and so this was something that we had, you know, banked out right before launch. And you know, everyone's under time pressure. Um it was easier to do this abstracted environment and not have to set dress it. Uh and also because we wanted to get the players directly into the game, we actually ended up with a much shorter tutorial as opposed to bridging that gap in player knowledge and skill over a much longer period of time. Um and as a result, we had a bunch of players dying in the tutorials because we were putting too much in there. The tutorial levels were taking too long, so you would die at the end of a tutorial level that took 10 minutes to

play, and then you'd have to start over again, and that is not a way that you endear yourself to your players. Um So, impedance. Um the more unusual, complicated, or difficult the game is, the stronger the incentive is required to get both players and reviewers to buy in. Uh this ties in a little bit to what I was saying earlier, but um if you if your game is different or not in some way not immediately approachable, you have to have something to hook them in. Um either within the game itself or external to the game. Um for us, we thought that we were doing that with our aesthetics, with the music, with the lore, and everything, but a very few people care anything about lore before they're already like 5 or 10 hours into a game. Um so, you can't use that as a pull. Um unless it's a sequel or something. Uh and

we didn't have the um the kind of momentum that you get from a game like Dark Souls, uh which also, I mean, they did some brilliant sort of I don't know how much they were directly involved in that, but the whole Dark Souls hard uh mentality, where there was almost like a social pressure to play that game and to excel at it because like, "Oh man, like, did you beat Dark Souls? You know, like, I I did it I did it on uh you know, the naked run with no equipment or anything like that." There was this whole uh momentum behind that game that helped players to stick around when they might normally have given up. Um tangentially related to this, uh this was a post that was going around on Reddit a while back. This is what it would have been about a year ago. Um which is that game developers should never ever be afraid to innovate. Um and it's a wonderful sentiment. Uh so, this screenshot is from the uh GameSpot October 2000 review of Alien Resurrection. The game's control setup

is the most is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down. Um, you know, early advent of what is now the staple control scheme. So, my my like asterisk for this is that when you do something different, um, unless it is something that is immediately obvious or very easy to learn, um, that you you have to there's a price you have to pay. You you have to have those motivators to get people to adapt to that new thing. Otherwise, your innovation actually comes at the cost of a non-insignificant portion of your player base. So, um, press is transactional. Um, let me decode that a little bit. So, I'm worked on Brigador with this

mentality of, I know, Field of Dreams. If you build it, they'll come. It was a very naive understanding of games development, of just the nature of how you build hype, of how you build interest, um, in a game. So, I think the most helpful thing for developers to keep in mind when they're interacting with press is what do you bring to the table? Um, because, you know, at the end of the day, games press are doing a job and they have to earn money. Um, there's a very interesting podcast, uh, Austin Walker over at Waypoint was talking with Pat Klepek. I think it was just right after the the New Year. But, they were talking about how, uh, Austin has all kinds of things that he would love to cover. He had these kind of passion projects or these sort of things either directly related to games or tangential to it that are they're very interesting. Um, Um

but it's his responsibility to put things up on Waypoint that are going to generate views. Um it's a business. He employs people. He has those responsibilities. And so for you as a person who's trying to get people like Waypoint to cover your content, the only way you can consistently do that is if you can offer them something in return. Um And it it this isn't to to kind of cast this like negative light on it. It's just understanding that that's that's the way things are. There's no free lunch. Um and so if you can uh figure out how to contextualize either what you're trying to promote or your game in general as an interesting thing. Or and a really common phrase among game developers is that, you know, what's what's your story? What's your story as a studio or as a developer or as a person or like give them something to latch on to because um what that boils down to is having a headline, having something that grabs

their audience because games press are having to deal with their own whole own host of problems. Um you know, I'm not a games journalist, so I don't know like I'm sure there could be like a parallel version where I'm giving this talk about how I'm a terrible games journalist. Um but there's all kinds of things that they have to deal with. So you have to meet them uh in the middle. So a kind of uh articulation of this, I don't know if you guys have heard of Slaughtering Grounds. There was this whole debacle a while back. Uh it was a game cost like one or two dollars. Uh and uh Jim Sterling had a thing where he would look at games that he does not think are qualitatively good and then he would say things about them and then sometimes they would say something back. There was this whole series of oh man, there was this video that Jim Sterling where he like totally trash talks this dev, and then the dev wrote a response trash talking back, and then there was a lawsuit involved, and then something

happened. Um None of that itself is actually important. What's important is that it was a good story, so people talked about it. It was interesting. It was an easy headline. Um I'm not saying go out and like pick a fight with Jim Sterling. Uh I mean, maybe. I'm sure it would be interesting. Uh Don't don't don't don't do that. Um or at least don't say that I sent you. Um But they I mean, it brought something to the table. And so, here's a game that prior to that hadn't got really any attention at all, and all of a sudden, you've got most of the major games press sites uh articulating that like or I mean, like giving coverage to this thing. Uh and then last of all, the reserve tank. Um The week after shipping is just as demanding if not more than the week before. Uh and this this starts to just going into like personal health stuff. And obviously, like you know, no one wants to take poor care

of their health. Um But uh so, this this was the that image or post that I wrote a while back. Um intentionally trying to be a little goofy with that first picture. Like, oh, look at, you know, naive young cherubic developer, then hardened grizzled veteran at the end. Um The part that I talk about in that post though is that I gained 40 lb over about the last 8 months of development. Um and got into a whole slew of very unhealthy habits. Uh partly just out of the you know, the continuing push, the you know, we had gone 5 years in development and still hadn't shipped the game. Um so, that that that's a very strong pressure. Um but also uh you know, we we we talk a lot about crunch and it should be talked about. It's an important thing to be aware of. Uh but often times it's something that is used as a proxy for a lack of time or a lack of money.

Um And at the time for me, not knowing really like anywhere else to go uh and not having the experience to contextualize it, that was uh it was the only thing I could reach for. Um So, yeah. Uh some final notes that I'll just zip through real quick. This is just what the actual game looks like in the menu. Um we tried to do some interesting stuff uh with pilot-related difficulty and making the game as modular as possible from a player choice standpoint. So, you can change your difficulty through your pilot, through your vehicle, through the levels you play. Um None of that matters if your baseline difficulty is so high already that no no one's even hitting that low difficult that, you know, the the minimum uh level of difficulty. Um and then I mentioned this earlier, but uh yeah, so we shipped the game as well as a book and an audiobook. Um I don't I

mean, that's insane. Like, it was cool and I'm glad we did it, but also, uh you know, I was in the middle of trying to design levels for the game and then I was editing a 300-word sorry, a a 300-page book. Um and then also, because here's the thing, we liked that book so much. Uh guy named Brad Buckmaster was sort of a technical consultant for us during the game for military hardware. So, like we would design a tank and we would ask him about it. He'd be like, "Yeah, you know, that that seems kosher." And like he'd help us write a lot of descriptions. It was a very natural fit, so we decided, "Hey, you know, why don't you write a book?" Um so, we did and it was great. Uh and we liked it so much that we're like, "Okay, no, but no one reads video game books Uh unless you're like a big big studio." So it's like, "How do we get someone to read this video game book that no one reads?" So it's like, "Oh, audiobooks are cool." So we did an audiobook adaptation. Uh And again, that was also a lot of time and effort and another thing that had to

be finished by the time we shipped. Um So the bright side of this is that we had some great reviews. I mean, even now it's still standing at a five-star review on Amazon books. Uh Great feedback, but the other thing is that this kind of tangential content it was just rather than bringing people from the outside to the game, I can count on two hands the number of times that happened. Mainly it was just people who were already hardcore Brigador fans. This was the icing on the cake for them. So it was something that endeared us to our fans, but from a business standpoint it didn't do a whole lot more for us. So that's the audiobook. And then also we worked with Makeup and Vanity Set. They did a killer soundtrack. And then on his own he actually did We helped him with a cover art for it, but he also did vinyl pressings of the soundtrack as well. So we had a lot of cool stuff. Um and I'm going to end on just this was a single Steam review that we got.

Um That was really cool. Um And I think And you know, anyone who's a content creator, when you get this kind of a strong reaction from a user base, it's one of those things that helps you weather the storm. Um And also because I didn't want to make this sound like a really terrible lugubrious talk. So like the final context for all this is that we're relaunching Brigador this coming June. We added localization, new content. I'm sanding down all those really really rough edges and like the the difficulty curve that we used to be like a just giant plateau is now going to actually be a curve. You you doing all all these things that we can manage to uh course correct uh and see where things go from there. So, thanks very much. Um, we've got a couple question We've got time for a couple questions. So, anyone? Hi, thanks for the talk. Um, I bought

the game. So, hooray. Um, I had a question actually about that purchasing experience though. Um, you know, one thing that I noticed in following Brigador and then not following it and then eventually buying it is that I heard about it way early before it launched, was interested cuz I played those games back in the old SNES days and was was curious, then forgot about it for quite a while. And I did not even think about it again until the Imgur post. I actually saw the Imgur post was like, "Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about that thing." And went and bought it cuz I wanted to, you know, support you guys and I enjoyed the the difficulty curve is insane. Um, my question is uh did you talk at all about the timing of when you started talking about the product to when you could actually launch it um, and how that impacted things. Because that distance of excitement when people first got into it to the point of purchase, in my opinion, and I'm not an indie dev, I work for other you know, larger studios, but I found that to be a big problem when you

talk about something for 3 years and it never comes out. Everyone just fatigues and forgets. Yeah. How is that changing? Is that something you thought about at all and how are you So, yeah, absolutely. So, um, the the short answer to that is that the 2-year gap between our first trailer and uh actually I guess 2 and 1/2, yeah, 2 and 1/2 year gap between our first trailer and our launch was entirely unintentional. Um, when we shipped that first trailer, we were like, "Oh, yeah, we got like another 8 12 months of work left, like at the worst." Um, and cuz I I did spend a lot of time looking at the uh the distance between first press and shipping for a lot of different indie titles. I don't remember them off the top of my head, but like we looked at Hotline Miami, we looked at uh Bastion. Um anything John Blow did. Uh and what I found was that the the minimum time uh was about 3 months uh prior to launch. And that's actually most PR industries that I've talked to,

they prefer to have at least a 3-month 3-month window with which to build the hype train. Uh and then the longest I found was like 3 years, but almost in almost every case, anything like that hyper annuated like longer than a year and a half, 2 years, um those were either AAA titles or they those were games that were, you know, indefinitely delayed. Uh you know, they're they're pulling a Duke Nukem Forever or whatever. Um So, yeah. I if I had my druthers and, you know, a proper set of experience, I think I probably would have shot for a year or less for between announce and ship. How do you Since someone else is asking you questions, how do you handle that with the uncertainty of being an indie dev then? You know, cuz you don't necessarily have a good context for your window, it seems like. So, what what kind of advice do you have for people that are trying to figure out how to do that and um are trying to figure out what that year window could possibly be when they're not sure what that is. Yeah, um so what I found is that um

and I and this is advice that I that seemed to be pretty common from everyone that I've talked to with experience in the press is that uh when you're at indie scale, uh it is better to have as big of a single blast as possible than, you know, a bunch of small little announcements and things because there's a certain threshold you have to hit to get the general public or like general press interested in what you have to offer. And so, if you distribute that across a broad set, there's a chance that, you know, maybe you'll get one, maybe two times covered, but for the most part, most of that stuff is just going to fall under the radar. Um Early access is obviously, I mean, it's not the right choice for everyone. For us, it was Originally, Brigador had no story campaign. It was entirely in this Spelunky set of here's the freelance mode, you pick your thing, you pick the mission, and then there's some procedural stuff, and you either win or you die, start again. Um and when we

were launched on early access, the universal response was, "This is a great tech demo. Where's the campaign?" Um so, we entirely retooled the game to actually hit uh that uh uh expectation. Um a- anyway, so yeah, what I would say is like maybe announce before early access, but at a small level. Um I think bundling all that together to actually maybe the right way to go. Thank you. Hi. Uh with a even with a relaunch, knowing that there's only so much you can do to change the fundamental design of the game, if you were to make a sequel, is there anything very fundamental about the game that you would do differently if you don't necessarily have to take on the baggage of the actual profit from the initial development? Yeah. Um Yeah, so this is a combination of stuff that got cut from the game as well as just things I learned about the design of the game as we went forward. So, one thing I would do is that um

in the game, you've got two guns, a broad variety of vehicles you can choose from, and a defensive ability. So, ev- every vehicle has two guns and a special ability. Um that part was okay. Uh the problem is that um we had no uh way to uh for the player to actively defend themselves. So, um, there's sort of assumption built into Brigador that you're going to get shot. Um, and what happened is that ultra light vehicles, uh, either means that you had to play super cat and mouse and, you know, use stealth tech all the time uh, or for the ultra vehicles that, you know, we added in damage resistances, uh, but also we made them slow because you can't have something that's both super tough, you know, a lot of firepower, uh, and, um, it just ends up being boring. Um, so like something more more active components. Something we considered was

actually having the shielding be a toggle, um, that like shielding just slowly burns out as it's on. Um, so you actually have to decide when you're going to have your shielding up. I think our whole armor mechanic didn't work all that well. Um, maybe have some something akin to like a, uh, uh, a guard break where it's like being able to time like flashing the shield. These sort of more active components. Um, we had a lot of concerns about, uh, player retention, but you know, that's a different case. The other thing I would say is that we, um, we originally had, uh, a prototype for, uh, hand braking in A-Gravs and in tread based vehicles. So like there's these tiny little like motorcycle tank things. Um, and we we had a prototype where you could like skid around a corner. It felt awesome, but there was a whole lot of stuff. Like like there was all these horrible edge cases that it was just going to be too much of a time commitment and we were too late in development to get that in. So, I mean, the answer is that there's a lot of I mean, the game itself, the core

would be there, but there's all these kinds of refinements to the formula that, um, you know, I have a notebook full of them, so. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Cheers. I think we're supposed to be out of here. So, thank you very much, guys, and I'm happy to chat more.