Architecting a Multiverse - Cooperative Design in Dead Space 3

[Music] alright everybody we are going to pick things up again with the one and only Seth Maranello who's going to give a talk on hi everybody so as a quarry introduce me already I'm Seth Maranello I was a level designer on dead space 2 and then most recently dead space 3 and rather than kind of do a full post-mortem on dead space 3 I decided to focus on one specific element which is the cooperative design that we added to this game so that we can kind of drill down and look at what building this sort of you know major new feature meant to as a level designer as we step through the different phases of development and I've kind of broken this talk down into four distinct areas and there was definitely overlap between these but I've separated

it out based on like what's the predominant thing on the design teams mind at any one point so at the very beginning the main thing we were worried about is like what's the concept we're adding dead or adding a co-op to dead space what does that mean to the dead space franchise in the universe and what do we want it to feel like as a design team and then there was this period where it's like alright great we've got an idea what do we want to do but there's all these technical problems because we're going from you know a franchise that was predominantly single-player an engine that's predominantly single-player how do we make that work in a multiplayer world and with those two players that we now have how do we adapt our gameplay and make it work in a way that still feels balanced and tight like the single-player campaign does when we drop another player in there and also now that we have two screens how do we take that and create something that expands the experience that's possible in the dead space universe so that we're not just you know adding another feature of is like all right yeah great your buddy can drop into the game now but it's like we're leveraging it in a way that that

makes something possible that we couldn't have done before without adding this before we get our head of ourselves we're gonna kind of start off with phase one which is the concept and when we announce that we're adding co-op to DES phase 3 I think the first thing that popped and pretty much everyone's mind is why the hell are you adding co-op right but if you actually step through it I think it makes a certain amount of sense it did space - we had a multiplayer mode called outbreak and it was a four-on-four competitive mode that you know is a lot of fun and coming out of a legacy of like making multiplayer maps for quake and things like that it was fun to make these small map so you don't have to do any streaming on it was also fun to have a part of the game that we could go and interact directly with the community we did you know viral suits and we had some people that really got into it but ultimately it didn't really set the world on fire and at the same time we have you know all these videos going upon YouTube work large numbers of people are beating it on hardcore mode which is where you only have three saves and I'm walking special you know weapons and things like that

and we have a lot of people that are playing the game over and over again on New Game+ to sort of explore the full breadth of our weapon tree and experiment with all the different things that are possible within the levels so we're looking it's like well you know the thing that everyone likes about dead space are these immersive narrative levels and that's the thing that seems like it's a strength of our team we're really good at the art we're really good at creating atmosphere and people like playing this content over and over again and we added a number of features that would leverage this things like a weapon crafting mode which we have a talk about on Friday and the duck the coop dungeons and the beta dungeons but specifically co-op gave us a way to go through that campaign an additional time was sort of like a different perspective on everything and make it feel fresh in a different way so we decided to take the resources out of the competitive multiplayer mode and put those into creating a co-op mode that played more to our core strengths a team and once we decided that this is a something that

was worthwhile and that we really wanted to pursue we had to lay out some high-level goals that would dictate sort of all of our future decisions as a design team the first is we're going to leave single-player untouched as much as possible and this doesn't mean that we're not going to change anything going from Dead Space 2 to Dead Space 3 but that there's this coral loop and this core feeling that you get as a player which as a team we're fans of and we know that the people that have played the previous two games are fans of we want to preserve that as much as possible so single-player has to be largely untouched but at the same time we want the co-op mode to feel like it's an extension of the core experience it needs to be complete if I beat the game in single-player it needs to feel like I beat a complete game and if I complete the game in co-op it needs to feel like I've reached the end of a complete game there's a full journey so it shouldn't feel like this sort of disc connected separate bonus mode or something like that and once we had these we went out and looked at you know was there an existing pattern in the industry is there some other game that we can look to to draw kind of directly

from and you know if you're familiar with the history of the dead space franchise it's like well our e4 was a huge influence on the original team so looking at re five is a natural touch point but they would down with the decision of having a follower or that would allow you to you know script the same thing in single-player or co-op you didn't have to change the story you didn't have to change the puzzles you just had a follower and in a lot of ways that would have been an easy path to go down but for us it just didn't seem like it was a fit for the dead space franchise and it would have changed to many things that we wanted to preserve the other sort of approach to this I think you can see in games like Halo where you have the ability to play campaign co-op but every time you hit a major story moment it's like oh well it's actually just a story Master Chief like this other guy over here he doesn't really exist and you know they experimented and reached with this a little bit but ultimately the second player is just another gun running around the world and it's a lot of fun it's actually my preferred way of going through Halo but when you're making a

game where you need to be immersed in your character and you have this third-person camera and you're looking at someone that you're investing in your weapon upgrades and things like that I think it's very important that whatever player Isaac or Carver which is the name of our secondary character that you have some sort of investment in understanding of them has you know an entity within the dead space universe so it was obvious that there wasn't an existing pattern that we could directly apply and meet all the needs that we had for Dead Space 3 so we ended up coming up with these sort of two distinct universes one is this the single-player universe where it's the story of Isaac struggling alone on towel volantis against Necromorphs and the npc interactions are just like they were in dead space 2 he's still talking to people on his rig system getting audio logs and things like that and at the same time we have this parallel universe and in this one it's got the same core story the same you know plot thread about the markers and this you know ice planet but the core characters arc is about Isaac

and Carver working together and kind of overcoming their differences to unite against this greater evil and this required us creating a sort of flexible narrative that could go one way or the other and this is basically in a lot of ways an impossible challenge but I think that our writing crew actually was able to come up with something that would allow it to for the most part feel like Isaac could achieve all the goals that would put before him alone but that when Carver was there it felt like he was important and that you know him being there was an integral part of the narrative so by having this same core backbone story throughout the whole game we're allowed to have game progress be shared between these because since we want the single player and the co-op mode to be sort of like peers on the same level of campaign this we want it to be that you can play up to like chapter 5 with your buddy right and then he can't play that day and we don't want it to be well now you have to start the game over again so you can just continue at chapter 5 in the single-player campaign and the game sort of automatically configures to what

universe it is that you're currently decided to play in and to encourage people to take advantage of this feature which was obviously something that took a lot of work to implement we made it so you could freely move back and forth between the modes so I can be single-player and I can just invite someone in you know all this sounds really great on paper but then we take this to the engineers and they're like well you had a level that we didn't have doors and multiplayer and dead space - like what so where there's a lot of technological challenges that we had to deal with in order to implement this and actually during our design process we had to hang this sign in our meeting room that says don't let science get in the way of awesome town because we kept having this thing it's like oh I know we'll do this and then it's like no the engine doesn't do that and that will take you know two weeks to two months to implement so we're like all right we're just gonna focus on the design for a little while but eventually we have to start addressing these technical issues and actually implement something right so this is just a very narrow view of

the challenges we ran into I'm looking at it mostly from the level designer perspective and things like scripting and lay out if you have like larger questions of like how did you deal with you know what local streaming issues or whatever just feel free to send me an email afterwards but as a level designer you know one of the major things we're doing is setting up all of our scripting setting above our puzzles and combat and things like that so we had to figure out how is it that we're gonna structure this and we went with a very you know industry standard way of having all of the gameplay scripting reside on the host machine and the client for the most part is just sort of receiving information but we immediately ran into an issue where it's like oh well I've got one player hater on one player here so they've got two different views so we had to make it so that the environment calling our the visibility the lighting the VFX the things like that that are very positional are independent between host and client and one challenge that was a little unique to deadspace is we have the ability to use the telekinesis ability or TK to pick up almost any

object in the world so I just you know like I grab like a pickup and I'm moving it around in space and initially since those are gameplay relevant we had those be host controlled but as the client it just felt terrible because you're you're touching a thing and it has to go across the network and come back and it didn't feel responsive so we ended up making it so the authority of any TK object is transferred to the client and that's really the one exception we had to make in terms of host controlling all the important stuff so once we kind of know the high-level layout of our level scripting what what is it how do we implement this whole multiverse this to sort of a universe thing and one of the first things that we did was we had to come over the way of setting alright this is gonna spawn on the in single player this is gonna spawn in co-op but only on the host and this is gonna spawn in you know on the client and those are represented by these heads that you see in the upper right hand corner of these two entities from our editor and why it's not just like an S&H and a see you

can ask our UI designer but the good thing that came out of this is that when something wouldn't spawn on one thing or the other we could refer to as like oh well your hats aren't configured properly or like what's what's your current head situation and from there you also see we have an example of the coop gate which is the most dumb simple thing ever but these are the kind of things that are awesome when you're doing scripting right it just takes one input and then outputs one message in single player and one message in multiplayer so if I want to have some sort of branching content I want to have you know this cutscene happen in single-player and this cutscene happen in multiplayer there's an easy way to do it as a level designer you don't have to think about a lot of flags and the other thing is is when we're going in and trying to final the game or trying to debug something you know me is one of the technical designers I can go in and be like alright show me all the coop gates that are in this level and I can get a good idea of how much branching we're doing and I can also make sure that our testing plan is covering all those different branches because as soon as

you start adding this in and you've got a 20 hour campaign it's really hard to debug all that when you're trying to get the thing out the door so having something that's easily searchable is very important but we have to build content right we can't just put a bunch of scripting and avoid and we have to build levels and if you're dealing with data streaming which you're gonna have to in any sort of a campaign game one of the big issues you're gonna run into is how to locate these players how to keep them together because all the scripting is executing on the host so I can't have the client somewhere where a trigger is that isn't loaded yet on the host in in Dead Space 1 and in space too we had a kind of natural gating system we just had these doors and right here we have one hallway that's drawn and two closed doors and if I as it goes in forward he just opens it up and it says alright ya draw the next room and if we need to stream it off the disk we have a natural gate for the player and this was something that we didn't really have to think about that much because once we get to the next door it's like oh the door closed behind you so if we had guys

in the first room we can unspun them and spawn guys in the next room and everyone's happy in general we draw two rooms at one time and in general we have a way of air walking encounters and then we get running in co-op and it's like Oh Carver what are you doing right now we're drawing three rooms simultaneously and I don't have a good way of air walking these two combat encounters so it's like what do we do and we wind down and a lot of different sort of investigations of like well maybe we should just get rid of this whole weird door system because it's kind of unique to the wait game you know most games are built nowadays but dead space is a lot of corridors a lot of tight spaces so we wanted to try to preserve that and was lucky that we were able to come up with two relatively easy changes to our door code that allowed us to sort of enforce this behavior which happens naturally before and that's only one door can be open at a time when you open the door all the other doors get disabled and that door will remain open until both

players are on the same side of the door and this is all those issues we're like all right they're separated where's my buddy or I just went off and triggered this door and screamed out the ground that my friend was standing on or some other terrible thing and these changes are relatively easy to implement and for the most part preserved the player experience and the way that we built levels so we didn't have to re-architect the fundamental way that we connected our spaces this is great because now we've got a world where the door is open but the next door is disabled we have to wait for both of them to be on that thing and great we only draw two rooms at a time it's slightly less elegant than just moving through the space on your own in single-player but in general it works and allows us to build the game the way that we've you know built the game for two games already and once we have this pattern of the way the doors behave in Dead Space 3 we can apply it to other things right so elevators we just made sure that they have a door on the outside so all the other doors going

into the room with the elevator have to be closed before it can open so the environment ours can go crazy with the interiors of the elevators or put whatever VFX they want in there and the elevator can't leave until both players are inside on the same side of the door and then the door can close and you can go to another floor so it's the same pattern that we had before so we only have to sort of teach it at once but obviously if we made a game where you've got two players and they always have to be you know within one or two rooms of each other it would be like well you're kind of undermining the point of adding in co-op so we kept the lifts and we added in ladders in a way that you didn't require for the players to sort of work in andum one player could go to a top floor of a room the other player could be on the bottom floor and now we can have combat on two tiers or we can allow players to take advantage of the weapons that they've crafted and sort of go to different layers of the space they're fighting in and with that we know like right this is how we're gonna lay out our scripting this is how we're gonna

implement these two universes and we know that we can start building a space but there's this problem right like engineers had this whole that you know path they had to go down to figure out how do I spawn NPCs how do I get them to follow two different players simultaneously but that wasn't so much of a design task what was a major level design challenge was how do i balance this thing right because we put in all this combat placeholder combat and it's all for single-player and it's like oh well now we've got two guns this isn't challenging right and a dead space game with no challenge is not really a dead space game so we had to figure out a way of fixing this and the first thing we tried was the really obvious thing of take that co-op gate and have it go to a single-player encounter and then make one that's harder and have that one be the co-op encounter and we can do some of that by just putting in harder enemies tweaking their health values a little bit but ultimately our enemies and dead space are really expensive they have all these different animation States they have these ragdoll parts that you can introduce by shooting off limbs and we

can only have about five or six of them at any one time and we're running up against that ceiling even single-player so this was a solution that worked about two to three times per level but wasn't something that we could just blank it through the whole game and honestly we didn't want to increase the number of enemies just everywhere when you were playing in co-op so we went to the engineers and like we need a fix for this and they gave us these co-op damage multipliers that allow us to make the enemies take a little less damage from you or deal with more damage back to you in co-op but obviously there's an upper limit on this because we have tricked dismemberment so if I shoot a whim you need to get feedback that you're receiving a damage multiplier by shooting a whim and not the chest so we can't start making bullet sponges or else you lose the feedback as a player and the other thing is is we've got a hardcore mode where you have essentially permadeath and we so we can't make it so as soon as you go into a hardcore mode on you no impossible and you have a co-op buddy that one hit kills anyone basically it would just it wouldn't work

so we needed a third level and that was aggression so most of our enemies have a state where you shoot off enough limbs and they'll go berserk or they'll start swinging their arms at a higher rate and not taking breaks and we just made it so that we could conditionally turn that on on enemies so if we wanted to have one guy that would help escalate the fight a little bit we could say all right in co-op you're just gonna go wild and this actually encouraged the behavior that we wanted which is players covering each other and grappling being more on more common things so when our enemies kind of grab you and you go into a button mash mode it gave it the other player opportunities to have to shoot players or shoot the enemies off the other player there's another side to this sort of coin of combat right because killing all these enemies is draining and resources your health and your ammo so we had to come up with a way of making the economy work in co-op and initially you know on our design land were like having all these visions of players arguing over who gets the pickup on the ground and all these kind of things but

ultimately there was a lot of issues with this because it basically meant that if we drop the one item out of every enemy spell that we had sort of half the items that could go in any players inventory and we couldn't do the stuff that we do in dead space which is look at how much health how much ammo you have when the last time you got resources were and then tune the drops based on this information when you end up in a situation where one player has no ammo and the other one has no health it's like what do you put on the ground right and so we want to be able to take advantage of that and we ended up going down the path of having independent drops so you stomp a corpse it drops one item on the host of one item on the client and this gets us around the issue of one player just gobbling up all of the items it allows us to use the balancing that we did in single-player and co-op so we don't have to balance the game twice which is important again when you have a really long game and a relatively small design team but we had quest items right we had you'd go through a dungeon and you get this this magical item or some you know a Tesla

engine and it was a story moment when as soon as you picked it up so we added this shared pickup flag that would make it so important story elements things that were tied into the progression of the game or things that we didn't want one player to miss at the bottom of a dungeon if you're getting a special log that explains the whole reason why you did this for the last 20 minutes we want both players to get it so we turned those into shared pickups and that got around a lot of the limitations that we had in in doing this independent drop pattern but co-op isn't the only thing that we have in dead space and also combat isn't the only thing that we have in dead space there's activities and puzzles and we have you know historically these large things like the center of huge puzzle in Dead Space 1 we have the Gravitron puzzle and that's page 2 and we wanted to do even more of those to reinforce the idea that Isaac was an engineer and so this was an important part of the single-player design and we wanted this to be reflected in co-op and because we're building these larger set-piece

environments to support these puzzles we wanted to make sure that they could be used in both because we couldn't just redesign the whole you know puzzle space if we were gonna go into multiplayer and at the same time we wanted the second player to feel like oh I'm actually helping solve this puzzle it's not just like I'm gonna watch my buddy do it because again Carver needs to feel like he's an important part of the narrative so to step through how sort of initially we struggled with this and then overcame it I'm gonna go through one of the first major set these puzzles that we have in the game it's in the CMS Roanoke and you come into this big generator room and you need to restore the power so you can get to your buddies that are up in this command saucer and initially we have this gigantic circuit board with all these sliding breakers and you needed to align them with connectors in order to you know be able to start the generator up it was kind of interesting there's a little abstract but I liked it a lot and in single-player it worked but you had to move everything in sort of a particular order and we've got it up and

co-op there was two major problems one is that if there's any lag on the network you're kind of drawing to dynamic havoc objects into each other and they can get stuck and just as things go crazy really fast with dynamic constraint and the other thing was that solving this kind of felt like two people trying to solve a Rubik's Cube at one time is like you could be like oh this is what I'm doing I'm gonna move this here and you have a plan right that's multiple steps but then your other guys doing something that's counter to that and unless you're on a microphone coordinating in some way it just didn't really work so it was obvious that we needed to go back to the drawing board on this but what we ended up doing was creating three separate instances of one action that was relatively simple it was one step and it's these we have this turning handle here that you can see sort of in the foreground and that rotates a coil and on the outside you can see kind of on the left there's a ring of magnets and so the overall goal here is you know TK the ring of magnets

around the coil and then spin the coil in order to generate some electricity and it's a relatively simple act and single player you just move the thing in place and spin it and it walks there and you're good and we could do ramping external from that by throwing in enemies having environmental hazards and so we can have the difficulty ramp be external from the activity and when we're in coop the important thing is is once you get at one time it's easy to communicate what you need to do in the subsequent sort of phases of this activity and the other thing is is that the actions you need to perform are independent right so one player is sliding it up and down and the other player is of rotating the coil in the center and you know you need to coordinate at one instant but it's not like you can be moving the thing up and down and stop the player from rotating it right so you don't feel like you're you're fighting each other you feel like you're coordinating and this pattern of hold this in place while I do X was actually something that was super successful and we used throughout the

game in sort of different guises because it was a relatively easy thing to teach to the player and to script one way or the other really there's only one downside that we found to this pattern or this solution which is that you have to use two Xbox controllers or ps3 controllers whatever platform you're on in order to actually test your scripting right so you have you're doing all these crazy sort of hand contortions of like oh I'm going to aim and hold while I then do this on the other leg or whatever so if you're going to be making a co-op game I highly recommend like getting some interns or something to just sit in your cube and yeah help you test your test your co-op scripting because your neighbors will get tired of it so one thing that this deals with in another is another side effect of having both players needing to be you know physically connected via TK beam this object is this problem of two two cameras at once this is something that's come up before we were talking about performance scripting and doors and things like that but in puzzles it's

also really hard because if you come into a room and you've got a trigger that you know makes the thing you need to shoot spark but it only does that one time the other player that's the guy that's gonna figure it out is like looking somewhere else he's down a ladder or he's in some other room who knows what stomping a corpse and they miss this Q so messaging becomes something that you really have to think about when you're dealing with these two cameras and so well it wasn't necessarily required in this particular generator puzzle example we ended up testing out this idea of a centralized console and we use this a number of times so we've got a central console that you see when you first come in and it has the information of the state of whatever activity you're currently doing it gives you output and it's got everything labeled that ties in to the other generators that you'll see it also function functions as a logical place to send the players back to when you want to do sort of the final moment because if we want to have a cutscene or we want to have a reveal of some sort some sort of like the effects show it gives us a way to pull the players back into that space in a way that's player control we

don't have to do a camera cut right we can send the players there and we've got two switches that they have to press simultaneously and this is you know it's a lot like a pressure pad it's very gamey in some ways but by building a console that kind of felt like you know you're arming a bomb and both people have to turn the keys simultaneously to activate it I think we were able to fictionalize this you know traditional game mechanic had a way that fit within the dead space universe and that was a huge boon in terms of us being able to do whatever we wanted as level designers but then send them to the place that you know that the animation team was demanding that we get the players to move forward in the story with that you know we've got combat and we've got activities puzzles interactions with the world so sir the core bare-bones things that you need to make a dead space campaign are there but at this point we we haven't really done anything with the coop mechanic that that is unique or expands the dead space experience in some sort of meaningful way right we've basically just found a way for two players to play dead space which is

great but it'd be optimal if we could find a way to take that a little further so I kind of like this story because it comes out of a bug and we would script the game so that we have a prop you know something great like the Sun prop from Dead Space 2 and it shows up great on the host I'm playing as Isaac and it's like awesome son prop and then I connect in co-op and it's like there's a Sun crop shaped void in my life I'm not seeing it right now and normally this is a heads issue right like that we're just not wearing the right hats and it's not spawning on the client but you know it's easy to fix but it we start thinking well you know what if that was how it was supposed to be right like what if we want to have the Sun be on one machine and then have something really terrifying on the client like the alarm clock from Dead Space 2 and Mister thing well you actually know you know this

might be really interesting like how do we how do we leverage this right and we're actually really lucky that you know on one hand pretty much every character in the dead space universe is either insane or on the road to insanity and we also had this whole backstory for Carver that we created for the the comic dead space liberation that we hadn't necessarily explored fully in the main campaign right because it's mostly about Isaac and Carver's relationship when you're playing co-op it's not necessarily about Carver's backstory we just built that to flesh him out with in the universe so we thought well what if we make some co-op only missions that are focused on Carver and we can take advantage of the fact that he hasn't sort of dealt with his inner demons in the way Isaac did in Dead Space 2 and start making you know toy soldiers appear all over the place for the client but on an machine it's just seeing like a box or some artifact from the alien dig site or something like that and so we started doing that and then we start thinking uh well what if we have like a scurrying

sound that only appears on one machine and that's random and then you're like playing on the mics it's like hey did you hear that or then we put in like an audio log where you know one players is hearing something that's like oh hey you need to go do this and get this and then the other player just starts hearing someone's screaming the entire time and so we just started having like more and more fun with this idea of how could we create this divergence cuz we've already got a single player and a multiplayer campaign but then it's like but what if we fracture that multiplayer campaign into kind of two more universes where we've got what one player experiences and the other player experiences as we're trying to take this idea of two cameras that up until this point had been kind of a burden something that we kept being like god dammit we got these two players in there to different positions it's like how do we leverage that right and so this all sorts of sort of culminated in us thinking back well you know in Dead Space 2 we spoiler alert I'm sorry Isaac kind of goes into his own mind and has to confront these issues that he's had for two games into

this place that we call dementia land and Carver hasn't gone through this same process and also if you played that space too you know that if you die we transfer back to the real world and have sort of established that this whole thing happens in Isaac's mind and he's just really standing in reality so we're like well what if we could have someone that's standing in reality and another person that's like going inside of his head and so we created these sequences where we teleport Carver into his mind and we have all these things that are you know being told or he's seeing reenactments of you know some of the terrible stuff that happened in his backstory well Isaac he's just seeing Carver kind of raving on the ground it has to cover him from being attacked and now we were really taking advantage I think of the fact that we have two players they're in two different things and we've reintroduced this kind of uncertainty that you had when you were playing alone you know in Dead Space 1 in Dead Space 2 and it's kind of we found a way to reintroduce some of that to the spirit of that I think in co-op because you know a lot of the there's a lot of struggles when you're talking out of mic you're just like oh I'm going to go get or whatever right and it's hard to be

immersed in that way but when you start playing with what's real between the two players I think it does something really interesting and this is something that we explored a lot in that space awakened because one of the things that became obvious to us as we wrapped up Dead Space 3 was that this is something that we really wished we'd kind of you know been able to build upon more and we'd been able to do some more interesting things with the Isaacs side of the equation so this is something we really played around there and if there's one thing that I think in today's three I could expand upon the concept of it would be this idea of a sort of a fracture of world between single-player and multiplayer and with that we've kind of gone through all of the major phases of development and we've come up with a concept where like this is what co-op means to dead space we dealt with kind of the level design technical challenges of alright this is how we're gonna be able to do it we figured out how to transfer the gameplay over so we can create mostly the same sort of balanced experience that you had in Dead Space 2 or Dead Space 3 single player' into this

new co-op world and we found a way I think through this sort of fracture environment to create something that is it feels very very dead space but it's something that didn't exist in the franchise previous to this game so in you know in a lot of ways we've we found a way to take this feature and have it actually add to the franchise in a meaningful way which is really important it was something that's this core right and through all these things I think there's a number of lessons that you could take and you know if you want to ask many questions later tonight I could talk for hours about this but I think the most important thing that's most applicable to you know whatever game you're gonna make cuz you're not gonna go make a dead space co-op game is that you should create useful patterns because making games is really really hard and if you're as a level designer continually having to be like well how do I keep the players together how do I introduce enemies into the scene how do I line up this character to start this animation right you're spending all of your time worrying about these kind of problems when you're building a level layout and you're not getting to the point where it's like alright well how can I make interesting permutations of

these gameplay items that I already have or how can I take these existing patterns and turn them into something interesting right it was only when we had the foundation lay down on the ground and we could stand back and look at what we built that we're like you know what I think we could do something interesting with this and so getting to that point as fast as possible is good so solving a problem in a way that solves at one time sure but if you can find a way to solve that problem in a way that's repeatable and makes it so future instances of that same kind of class of issue can be overcome easier then great because that's going to give you the time to add the stuff to your again this really matters because I think there's a combination of you know having unique ideas good new ideas but then also having a strong foundation that's executed really well combined with a story or a fiction or some sort of hook that really draws the player in that creates a really quality product that players are going to enjoy so and I think this is something that can apply to really anything that you're building with that I think we have a little bit

of time for Q&A before we move on to the next talk so feel free to send me an email all right so we got 10 minutes just step up to Mike's okay yeah because we're gonna have to do a machine switch we'll do 2 or 3 questions [Music] thank you but so did you guys run into any problems and like the scary sequences lawyer he would maybe see something scary in coop like did you guys yeah did you guys have any trouble with that because the players might be looking at different things so would you have something that you wanted the players to look at to be scary at the moment and they wouldn't I think that in general our approach was if one player is going to see it that's fine right so we've got like in the Roanoke one of the

early things that we do you we have a door that opens and you immediately see like a wee bear crawling up and it'll catch the shadow into the other room because as far as I'm concerned if the other player reacts to it and the you know I'm the other guy on the other side of the room and I see him like running back or firing his gun it's something that works too and it keeps you immersed in this space right as much as I can I don't want to you know take control away from the player if you can find a way to set both things up simultaneously that's good what if it starts feeling too scripted you take away the natural kind of immersion that happens right audio also really helps because normally you're in the same audio space even if you're not looking the same direction so it's always been an important part of dead space but it was kind of doubly so in Dead Space 3 co-op if you had the second player just sitting outside somewhere yeah did you do anything about that specifically like did you teleport them in or did you give

like the host the option to kick them or something or what so if at all possible we try to never teleport the player it displaced - we actually tried to make sure that we had never had a camera cut in the game there's like a few times that we do it we had to break that rule on dead space 3 a little bit more than we would have previously but we actually created things called the lazy susans which are these like self-contained heat air walks that you get in and it rotates and then you pop out the other side for those kind of situations because we realized at a certain point like oh crap we've got like a tent and a gigantic outdoor Canyon how do we make this work so we sort of fictionalized these heat exchange devices that we call the lazy susans and that solved that problem so you guys have amazing environments in your game I'm curious like we heard from the Skyrim guys like they have the kits and that's how they make massive amounts of content yeah but your guys's levels or so you know like heavy on art at

least in the end product what do you guys draw on graph paper like do you guys rough it out how do you guys build levels we wait box in Maya to begin with and we also when when Joel sent out his talk earlier this is what I sort of tweeted about like my mind was blown over like why didn't I get this a while ago because all of our side dungeons and stuff we realized we were building so much game in Dead Space 3 that we needed to start you know actually using some sort of tile models and we actually did that in in this game a little bit just because the sheer scale of the game that we were building but we do custom what we call phase C which is the last sort of passive going in putting our blood and our handprints and everything that's unique per room so that's sort of how we balance that out put in like ground triggers and stuff like that to move around your we we we block the whole space out in Maya and like very rough shapes and then work with the art team on a phase that we

call art block where they take the LD block and turn it into something that looks somewhat logical from sort of my you know deranged sketches right cool things very much yeah all right [Applause]