Breaking Through: Psychosis and the Making of Hellblade

[Music] thanks very much for coming along to this session today it's a real honor and a privilege for the men to mean to be here today so I'm Dominic Matthews I'm commercial director at Ninja Theory and I'm here with Tamim antoniadis who is one of the ninja theory co-founders and chief creative ninja at the studio so today we're going to talk to you about Hell Blake sin or a sacrifice which has been an incredible journey for us so yeah it's it's really great to be able to be here today to share that journey with you please remember to evaluate the session particularly if you think it's good if you don't think it's good then don't bother cool so we'll crack on with the presentation so a bit about Ninja Theory first we're a studio of about 100 people

were based in Cambridge in the UK and we've been making games for 18 years now and over those years we've created a number of titles starting with kung fu Kaos back in 2003 for the original Xbox with with Microsoft Heavenly Sword for the PlayStation 3 in 2007 with with Sony enslaved Odyssey to the west in 2010 with Namco Bandai DMC Devil May Cry the reboot of that franchise in 2013 and then the definitive edition of that in 2015 and we worked on disney infinity 3.0 in 2015 as well as we created the starter playset for that as well as redesigning the entire combat system and then the title in question last year on August the 8th we released hell-blade sin or sacrifice which was our first independently funded and self-published

title the game was sold at $29.99 dollars it was a ps4 and PC only title and digital-only title and it focused on Ninja Theory DNA that DNA that we've created over the last 15 years which is really creating immersive worlds and character led stories and visceral fluid combat gameplay and combining all of those things to create an experience that really is what we see is pure ninja theory for Ninja Theory fans and it tells the story of Sanwa a Celtic Warrior and her her vision quest to find the soul of her lover it's a journey into into psychosis which to mean we'll talk about a bit more later but to kind of tell the the hell-blade story from the beginning we need to go

back to 2014 or just released DMC Devil May Cry and as a studio we took a step back and took a look at the market at that time and the games the game space we tried to pitch a very big triple a game to publishers game called Razer which never was never greenlit it was a big games as a service title and through that process we really identified that the market had evolved into something we're essentially sort of middle tier mid-sized developers like us making Triple A games couldn't really survive it was a difficult market for Studios like us and this was really down to the

the triple a arms race as we see it which is the fixed price of games Triple A games at retail of $60 has meant that developers and games can't compete on price and instead have to compete on size in scale and scope and this has meant that over the years games have got bigger and bigger and bigger development teams have got bigger and bigger and bigger and of course development costs have got bigger and bigger and bigger too and what that has meant is that many genres that have thrived in the triple-eight space in years gone by simply can't survive anymore because they can't appeal to enough people to be justified games at this level now need to appeal to not just two million people or three million people but now we're talking about five six seven eight million people and

through the process of us talking to two publishers and about this this title is big title that we were looking at and over the years we kind of came up with this checklist of or tick boxes that titles now need to tick in order to survive in that space things like what's the what's the season pass can it look like all you need to have multiplayer every game needs to have multiplayer now well does your protagonist appeal to enough people is it a Caucasian male with with stubborn as shaved head because hey that's what everyone's looking for these days yeah just like just like me yeah yeah thank you to me and this this kind of checklist culture in the triple-a space is sadly meant that many genres

have disappeared in the triple-a end and unfortunately so to have have the teams and the developers behind those types of games and those developers have either disappeared altogether they've had to move away from triple-a development or they've had to go and do something else completely different and the list of studios have disappeared is sort of between 2000 and sort of 2017 is absolutely phenomenal and it's genres of you know games that I love playing when I was when I was younger like jet set radio and parappa the rapper and ICO and a car me all incredible games high production values incredibly creative but just not mainstream enough to peel a to appeal to those millions and millions

of people so for us as a studio we you know we felt that we felt that pinch and being in this situation where team of a hundred people we make games that people the people love you know we've got a fan base behind us it's not it's not huge but it's a dedicated fan base that love what we do but we were left with this choice of do we either ramp up our team and our studio you know triple our team size to make games that can appeal to there's many many many millions of people and and risk sacrificing our core values and our creativity I think in the process or do we walk away from our at that time 15 years of development in the console business and we didn't want to do either of those things and that situation I think can be kind of summed up in in this slide which is players want creative games players want

the kind of games that creative developers make their games that we're a ninja Theory make and and frankly that's what we want to make you know we're in the business of making the games that we want to make for the people with the want them but there was a block on this the triple a space wasn't allowing us to do that so we we wanted to find another way we didn't want to go bigger we didn't want to go home we wanted to find a third way and we identified in the market that there's really these two two extremes on one side you have independent games where creativity is is incredible new genres are being created all the time but budgetary restrictions mean that quite often those small teams have to go down a route that isn't

triple-eight production values and then on the other side in the the blockbuster space games getting bigger the production values are phenomenal and just incredible what's being achieved there but each of those games have to fit into very narrow genres a small number of genres that can survive at that very top end so these two extremes have but really nothing that sits in the middle of those two and this is the space that we call independent triple-a an independent triple-a was about making triple a quality games but that can be offered at lower flexible pricing so that we can break away from that $60 retail model make a game that we want to make that is the scale and the scope that we want to make and then price it appropriately it's about having creative ownership the independent freedom gives

you self-publishing so we can build a direct relationship with our players and digital distribution is key to the model too it allows us to achieve higher margins per unit that we sell it allows us to have price control and it allows us to deliver our product to two fans across the world wherever they may be without the need to have a huge sales and publishing and distribution team within our small studio so this started out as a as a concept for how we could break through that triple a block make triple a production gains with triple a production values but on with a small team and with a small budget so fundamentally how did this change things for us well the biggest thing is that we were looking at a far smaller budget than we'd worked with ever before so you

know this isn't indie budgets you know this is something bigger than that but it's certainly something far smaller than we would normally work with for a triple-a game and certainly far smaller than other Triple A games are being made for in the current in the current market and the biggest cost in game development is obviously your team so for us we have a team of a hundred people across ninja theory and traditionally all of those people have worked on one one product but with hell-blade we had a team of 20 people on the project across three years so that meant that in many discipline areas we had one person and we had to have we had to be very innovative and we had to be very creative in the way in which we could deliver the quality and the quantity that we needed to to make the experience that we had the vision for in in hell-blade and key to this

really was having the mindset and the attitude that we would never sacrifice on quality and it wasn't a question of can we do it it was a question of how do we do it and a good example of that is in his in performance capture so performance capture is a technology and a technique that we've worked with since Heavenly Sword it was a technology that we pioneered on that project in video games and it's something that we strongly believe is the way in which you can realize the truest character performance in in a game so on hell-blade when we started the project we knew that this was something that we wanted to not just utilize in hell-blade but that we wanted to push further and try and push the boundaries of what we could achieve but with our very small budget so typically we would fly out to the US or to New Zealand to a purpose-built motion capture facility to

shoot all of the scenes for our for our games but with hell-blade that just wasn't possible within our budget so the solution that we came up with it was certainly the idea initially was well we've got our boardroom in the studio which is our biggest meeting room what about if we try and convert our boardroom into a motion capture studio and initially those conversations were quite difficult internally it's like well we still need to use it as a meeting room okay you can still have and say you still have a table in there over time that table was was moved out but but I think it's a good example of our attitude which was well let's give it a go you know let's let's try and let's take a risk on this and let's try and make it work and if it doesn't we'll move on to another solution so we we went into that boardroom balayage who's the cinematic lead on on hell-blade he drove to Ikea and bought wardrobe poles

to mount our cameras on we bought lighting from Amazon so the light the lights you can see in this video our ceiling tile lights for officers from Amazon and they cost $50 $50 each something in that kind of region we bought soundproofing curtains we've walked gym mats for the floor and we worked with vikon to try and find a solution and a way to have a camera set up that would work within within our budget and and that turned out to be the space in which we shot all of our cinematics for help late so every scene that you see in hell-blade was shot in our boardroom in this room and an important point on this is that the the quality of the data that we gain from this was in line if not better than anything we'd achieved before and that's the important point is that we weren't just we weren't the the important point is that what comes across on screen is

not in any way compromised if it was we wouldn't have done this it was trying to find a way that we could do it with an arm within our budget and keep that quality bar not just high but higher than it's ever been before for us at Ninja Theory so for comparison obviously the cost with that we had here were a fraction of what it cost for us to you know fly everyone out for a dedicated shoot but we built our own in in-house mocap space for what it would cost for around three or four days in in external studio so we gave us quality but it also gave us a huge amount of flexibility and flexibility that we now wouldn't want to give up moving forward so not only did we the uses for our all of our cinematics but also it was a tool that our animators could use to go into that space at any time they wanted jump in a mocap suit and try stuff out so throughout hell-blade there's a lot of a lot of detailed animation the sir--no has in particular situations so running

through fire where she's coughing balancing across beans trying to visualize her different different states of being within the game so hundreds and hundreds of animations that we have in there and that was really only possible because just along the corridor in our board rooms a facility that our animators could go and use and they could experiment to try and find solutions to deliver that quality in detail that we needed to tell senator's story we also used that space for all of our video recording and again this was something that was incredibly experimental so what you can see here is us using a binaural microphone so binaural microphone is a microphone that record sound in the same way that a human head hears it so it's a funny-looking thing it's a microphone with two rubber ears on the side that men the shadowy anger that your is particularly mine do so we could this

was a this was a way for us to represent the voice hearing that as a player you and sent over experiences throughout the journey so rather than us being kind of cramped up in a recording studio we could use that entire space put our binaural microphone in the middle and have physical performers theater performers perform around that microphone to bring some real physicality to to to that audio so again cost-saving we could do everything in-house we could bring our actors in but it allowed us to be more experimental to Jeff who is our character artist on the project had the task of creating all of our all of our enemies so an approach that he took was to use a handheld scanner to capture both textures and geometry base level textures and geometry for which he can build on top of so we use this for for anatomy but we also use this for things

like textiles and this was just a good way of deriving realism high level of realism but it didn't it didn't mean that Jeff had to go in there and by hand create all of this stuff from scratch he had a good base to work from so again using technology off-the-shelf technology in this case in a clever way to achieve quality and quantity and really the same with with environment so down at well-up lead environment artist on the project giving the responsibilities of delivering all of the the hell-blade world and his approach was to use a kit part based approach to the environment so what you can see in this shot here is on the left is all of the assets that are used to create this environment in the screen shot so his focus was to create a small number of very high quality assets and focus his time on that and then use them in clever ways to create to create the world so just using these trees and

these rocks in in different ways sinking them into the ground painting over them with moss these types of things he could create a very high-quality varied environment without the need to create a huge amount of bespoke content and this was one that was quite late on in the project so given what we were doing with with characters in the project we have a focus on characters but we always knew that Senna was the real focus we wanted to make her the most realistic real time character that anyone had ever seen but to me always held on to this idea that maybe we could visualize the characters in another way so and Tim's idea was to use live action which of course given the track record of live action in games the entire team was incredibly on board

with from from day from day one raised a few eyebrows but but again it was the attitude of let well let's give it a go and if it's going to fail its failed quick and move on to an alternative solution so when we were shooting some of the video we had a friend who was a costume designer create costumes for the actors we shot them on green-screen and we got them into the game got those shots into the game as quickly as possible to try and see if we could make it make it work and and it worked it worked really well we first time we showed this to anyone was actually when Game Informer came over to visit the studio and we just got into the game and we just got the this or final treatment in there and we showed them one of these scenes without telling that it was live action we were kind of sat there and I thought are they are they gonna notice and they didn't there so we thought that does the job job well done so again an example of you know let there's a ways let's challenge the way things have always been done yes live action has introduced he worked

in games but let's see if we can might make it work for help late and we did so there some examples really how we we delivered that high quality in the game with creativity and with innovation but also key to I think what we've achieved on hell-blade was not just development within the budget but also marketing and engaging people in the game within budget as well and our approach was to to try and engage players at a deeper level than just showing them a trailer and that was to announce the game early very early look how young I looked at full of hope so we announced the game really the very beginning of the project three years before before launch and we told this story warts and all in a very open and honest way through 30 development Diaries throughout the throughout the project and we told the story of the ups and the downs and everything that we were trying in the game and through that

process we not only created a fan base behind hell-blade but we created evangelists and people that wanted to tell people about the game and tell people about our journey and and how that really kind of tangibly manifested was that when we announced pre-order and went into pre-order we got we got pre-order numbers way beyond our expectations and we were able to use that revenue from pre-order to to drive a larger marketing campaign at launch so it was by kind of mobilizing that community bringing them on board early and treating them with respect and giving them an insight into what we what our journey was that they repaid us with their faith not just by pre-ordering the game and helping us with our marketing budget but really evangelizing the game to to their own communities too so to sum up my my section keys to independent

triple a flexible lower pricing breaking away from that $60 retail model to offer a game that is smaller in scope is no less higher-quality but can be offering offered at a value price keeping your budget low predominately through team size but through innovation to keep that break-even low that so that you can make games for smaller niche audiences you don't have to make a game that appeals to 5 plus million people and the creative sacrifices that come with that building community having a direct relationship with your fans and being honest being open with them giving them the opportunity to be part of your journey making them believe in what you believe not just selling them the game and finally having a creative focus and much of the structure of independent triple-a is about allowing the creative team to have that focus and that freedom to tell the story that they want to and I'll hand over to

Tamim to talk about that story in that journey that we decided to tell in hell-blade thank them so I always get asked what gave you the idea to do hell-blade and when I think of truly original fantasy I think of Lord of the Rings 1984 Blade Runner Night of the Living Dead obviously fantasy goes way further back you know Gilgamesh and Beowulf or what have you but I'd say most popular fantasy today is a derivation of those popular movies or books and I didn't want to do that because they also come with their own set of rules and baggage and expectations that have been built up over time so I really did want to make

something original a game that wasn't derived from those well-trodden tropes and to find something that felt a bit more grounded and I thought fantasy comes from the mind so why not go to the source and a frightening and very frightening an extreme example of what the mind is capable of creating can be found in psychotic mental illness and you know at the time it sounded dangerous perhaps even reckless to kind of broach that subject but I do I do truly believe that the power of fantasy comes from its ability to help further understanding through allegory our fantasies is able to break down prejudices and assumptions because you have to open your mind to these worlds in order to accept and enjoy them so the idea was born that hell-blade would be a classic hero's journey but one where the fantasy world is a construct of Senna was mine so that's sort of where it

began so just just to cover what psychosis is it's it's it's psychosis is a set of other symptoms and it can be caused by various causes smoking pot schizophrenia you know it is there so there's a multitude of causes but it's about losing contact with reality and it often manifests itself with visions and voices and strange beliefs and delusions excuse me so so Sena what can be described as having a severe psychotic mental illness and it is a subject that is tapu for sure taboo for sure and where it does feature it's usually in the form of like the the the serial killer you know or the plot twist

at the end where nothing was real it was all a dream aha you know that's the you know I find out both those aspects quite frustrating so why is it not represented directly a more honesty in fiction I think for one we don't actually know a lot about it science from a scientific point of view it's it's you know compared to physical illnesses and conditions we're way behind when it comes to mental conditions I mean we're not taught about if you think about it we're not taught about the mind like in school like we are taught about biology so we all grow up ignorant about what the mind is how it functions and I also see I also think that a lot of creators think that this is a you know this this is dangerous territory so it's a Pandora's box that once opened will open you up to savage critical attacks that will expose your ignorance and this is something that I very much fear that the start of the project I have no qualms with admitting that I was ignorant on the subject and

if you if you were around for DMC you'd know that like you know savage critical attacks is something we've sort of had to deal with before so we weren't that afraid of dealing that if it would come but creatively what excited me was it was a path least trodden I mean the I think that's what I was looking for just something different something new a chance to show you what it might be like to experience the world through the mind of someone who to psychosis it felt interesting intellectually exciting creatively but I had to learn the whole team had to learn so how did we learn we well Dom went to Google and found Paul Fletcher professor of health neuroscience and psychiatry at University of Cambridge and sent him an

email he also got in touch with welcome Wellcome Trust which is a massive charity organisation and that deals with health and a and David welcome often provides grants for like arts projects and films so we were hoping that you know with these with these with their assistance you know they could open doors for us so Paul and representatives of welcome met us grilled us we have to do good a good amount of presentations to them and once day came on board they came on board fully for the full three years of development they involved other clinicians and experts Professor Charles Burnie who an expert in voice hearing lots of people with lived experience of psychosis from recovery college East in Cambridge and a voice collective various

others researchers and advisers so he didn't they didn't just open doors though they really did blow the doors off now and I really would like to share what the insights that we've had on this because I think it's important not just from a game development point of view I think it's just a fascinating subject so I'm sorry for if it if it's slightly off the game developers track but this key insight that I learned which is that we only really see the shadows of reality is is what underpins the whole of the creative effort inhale blade we like to think that we are objective seeing the world as it is but we are so far removed from objective reality that the whole concept is almost meaningless and of course this is not a particularly new insight as attested by Plato's allegory of the cave and for those who are not familiar the idea is that a bunch of people are in a cave and they're set up such that

they can only see the projected shadows of people in the real world and so they formed their own strange interpretation of how this world functions until one of them breaks free and then sees the real world and then rushes back and tells them what it actually is like and of course they think he's insane it doesn't make sense to any of them and so this insight really does apply to us I mean we only see shadows I mean if you consider vision light is a narrow spectrum of the electromagnetic spectrum it's actually a ten trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum that's how we define color and objects and concepts like race like we create our own reality just from that sliver of what we see in the in it that's out there in the universe and we don't even experience the world in real-time so from the time you click your fingers to understanding what's what you've just done or what you've just seen can take half a second and our visual processing and our

auditory processing happens at different speeds so it's not in sync so somehow our brain just manages to amass all this noisy unreliable information and create a reality for us so that we can function so we feel like we are in a world that is fully 3d present with us at the center and we call this objective reality and now our mind is able to construct this fellow fallacy of objectivity a simulation of the world no less based on everything we have experienced since birth so if you have wondered you know whether you are living in a simulation or I think one answer has to be yes we are living in a simulation of our own minds making and so what does this mean it means that we don't passively perceive a world we don't just receive a world and arise here we actually hallucinate the world in our

everyday every second of every day we are actually a loose using a simulation of a world that our brain creates for us just think of moments when you were fearful and at night and maybe you could see shapes and shadows or when you're really angry and you're red with rage how you interpret what people say or the kind of gray lethargic world of grief I mean these are all the world looks different depending on how you're on your state of mind so in this context it becomes easier to conceive of scenarios where our mind with this endless adaptive feedback loops can divert from the standard we term normality and what we see in an inner psychotic mind is often a deconstruction a separation of the fundamental relationships between sights sounds senses concepts belief even flow of time and once we understood and accepted that we do not see through our eyes but create worlds through our mind's eye we had a model a model of

reality that we could then start to deconstruct and combined with the real lived experiences of people with psychosis we had a powerful coming together of science art and human experience so this was the Eureka moment for me the mind's eye what but what does this mean practically it means we are not seeing this game through the lens of a camera man it means we're not hearing the music from the composer or seeing the editors handiwork in the cutscenes everything has to feel subjective as it would feel looking sound to Center it through her mind's eye we like to think that we experience the world almost like a high-definition photograph as it really is but actually a lot of the time what we're doing is using what we already know and govern what we perceive you know if we recognize that principle of how the brain functions it may be that we begin to understand what happens in the context of psychosis because psychosis

can't really easily be understood as just some malfunction of the mind it's actually a very creative process with somebody constructs the world so that's that's professor cha oh sorry professor Paul Fletcher who who I consider a mentor and guru throughout the course of this development so that's why his name comes up first in the credits because he was that fundamental to our understanding of what how the mind works does the neuroscience behind it the experiences behind it and he helped shape the development of the project in a deep and fundamental way so to break it down visual perception we did meet with recovery college East to speak to people with lived experience of psychosis regularly throughout the project and they became our mental health advisors combined with the knowledge of psychiatric conditions that Paul could come across we we did a rapid prototyping phase in the project where we took what we took their experiences

they're described experiences and we mocked it up in unreal so this is sort of a a little video where we have quotes from people and then we iterate on we've iterated in unreal to try and represent those ideas and we invited we invited them back in to have a look at what we've done and then they will tell us so that feels a bit awful that doesn't feel right and obviously everyone's experiences is unique but this did seem to be enough of a common thread amongst them that we could really refine the visual perceptual representations in the game so yeah it's the classic iterative process we all use in games but instead of applying it to mechanics we were applying it to people's lived experience so the camera viewpoint I think one thing that struck me is that our mind sorry doesn't always see in the first person if you think about memories sometimes you see yourself in the third person and it's quite easy to sit there

where you are and project yourself so that you're looking at the back of your head and then you remember that memory you remember looking at the back of your head it's this it's quite a strange concept and I thought the third-person camera view actually could be used to give you a feeling of disassociation which which for some people is a real thing where they just don't feel like they live inside their own skin they feel like strangers in their own skin so this would mean letting go of standards film theory and camera cuts the game would be just one continuous uncomfortable shot whether it's cutscene or game play it would also mean that there would be no health bars no hit points no inventory no tutorials nothing that would break you out of the idea that you're fully immersed in this world as an observer as part of Senna was psyche and a participant you are her mind's eye a watchful mind side it also

helped with the budget because now we only needed one camera person and the the mocospace could track one person a lot better than three camera people which is what we would normally use so the flashbacks were also interesting one of our mental health advisors described vividly how she experiences them to her she would see the flashback appear around her forming from something that might start offing unclear and then she would get drawn in and start to relive that experience so it's not like films we get lots of fast cuts it was more like you'll just sucked into a new reality and I could relate to that somewhat if you think of times where you're dreaming and then your dream just transitions from one moment to another seamlessly and you just drawn in you're not aware of of how it happens it just does happen so the flashbacks that appear in the game all appear and all the story scenes in fact the main story

scenes Pyrrhus flashbacks they appear nonlinearly they're largely in reverse chronological order and my fear was that this would be terribly confusing but when you think about memories you don't think about memories in a linear chronological order you think about the moments that define your life that's what matters the impact those moments those scenes in your in your life experience have on you so that's how they appear in the game and I was I really was not sure if people would get the story where there would just be a incomprehensible you know mess by the end of it but I think it actually did come across as quite natural to a lot of people they didn't need to see the links between the krona at the time period between these events they just got an insight into the moments that shaped a lot a seonhwa's life and and this is another example of how the game was more reflective of our minds eye than reflective of film narrative constructs and the void the

voices are the most immediate experience that hits you I didn't have any clue what people who hear voices here chances are you know people that do hear voices it's apparently one in ten of us experience it at some point in our lives welcome introduced us to Professor Paul as I go getting all my professors wrong Professor Charles Bernie who who's a leading experts in voice hearing and he in turn put us in such was a group of people called the voice collective and we felt we heard firsthand from these people you know what these voices are like and it was quite revelation it was to have the opportunity to speak to in particular a couple of young voice heroes at our studio the term mentally ill just never came across our minds from talking to them it clearly did not apply to them and I really fell for

really felt their frustration because because they don't consider themselves mentally ill they hear voices and they endure quite a lot of frustration stigma on a daily basis because of this fact and this is why a lot of these mental health advisors were keen to work with us on this game they wanted to show what it's like for them or at least give a taste of what it's like for them anyway when it comes to the voices they said that they were all around them in 3d they were sometimes there in very specific positions sometimes they speak in fragments sometimes it distorted sometimes at different languages sometimes they've fully fleshed characters that they've grown up with from childhood that are they might consider long trusted friends or or or foes and the binaural microphone is the best way to represent 3d spatial audio in in that manner so that's what we use to try and iterate on the voices with our physical theater actors to try and

get closer and closer and closer to what their experience was like now this is another interesting decision we made you know because the idea that you would make a game that's designed for headphones you know wouldn't wash you know as a triple-a game but our goal was to create Santa's mind's eye create her experience and we that's why we asked we asked players to put on a set of headphones when they put when they played a game at the start of the game and and and it worked like people the first thing one of the main things that people say when they recommend our game is you have to play it with headphones it's it's such a fundamental part of the experience so I like that it's given me a lot of trust in our in our audience you know the idea that people really do want to experience new things and we just have to we don't have to do the fit the common lowest

common denominator we can create an experience that people come to that was great right so the implications of unreliable reality go far far deeper than visual and auditory I mean our neurons don't make a distinction between what we see here touch feel think and believe so those fun optical illusions and things that we see online the mental gymnastics that underpin them applies to pretty much everything that occurs within our brain it applies to our belief systems to our thoughts to the way we see people the way we see the world and it points to the fundamental way we think and believe in things no matter how irrational they they may be I mean I was thinking we were we were having that what was it there was that big hog the last night you know yeah and the hog roast right and it was it if you think about it why are we outraged when we

when sort of someone needs a dog and not when we'd have an equally sentient animal like a pig now I'm not a vegetarian but I recognize it as an irrational belief system or way of being sane could be applied to race religion gender we just categorize and believe strange delusional things and and we all grow up with these ingrained belief systems and diluted that we can't escape without extraordinary effort often but not always a change in belief system requires trauma and what we see in the psychotic mind are the very extreme cases of the mechanism that we all have in action so force and away this manifests in certain in several ways the Norse legends that are told her by truth are what shapes her reality she is on a real question this isn't all the dream she is on a real quest fighting fighting biking warriors but like Don

Quixote what she sees is and believes are interpreted by what she knows and what her life experiences are and the dark rot mechanism in the game that we shared with the player somewhat controversially with without permadeath message that's part of the belief systems the delusional belief systems that we wanted to instill in the player but contrary to what people may think the message is not a lie it's not a lie it's our interpretation of it based on our prior belief systems that makes it what it is so you can read about cycle psychosis the symptoms the theory but in a video game we can we could do so much more we we give you a taste of the lived experience and and and this scene is one

of my favorite ones it called sort of encapsulates all these different aspects for going into a flashback seeing visions the voices coming out of it one of the our mental health advisors told us that the thing that hurts the most for her was being in a beautiful state of mind in a calm serene beautiful state of mind because visions can be positive and then it's just being pulled like a rug under your feet into something horrific when you're not prepared for what's coming that's when it hurts the most and I think this is a scene that encapsulated that so we'll have some volume for this oh here we go let me try that again hang on

[Music] what's your name that's evil I'm not I don't know how much Oh general Stilton wait this way to find out No well I I watched you and learned all of that from watching [Applause] you should become awarded me and did it for the warrior trials come on

bring your sword you can't put it into words moment when you look up to the eyes of the one who is supposed to really see us what I see before you have a chance to make [Music] well change the days now [Applause] there's nothing to destroy you will die

here now all your suffering will agree for nothing's thank you I'll find him so she believes that she's gonna she can save her lover's soul despite the fact that that she's carrying his head dead not corpse had it you know on her hip so it sort of incorporates all of those kind of belief systems visions auditory

hallucinations flashbacks and it's you know it's it's it's it's moving in a way that just reading about this in the DSM or whatever just doesn't bring a cross and I think that's what games you know have the power to do so I'll leave you with this little it's clear to me now that the notion of objective reality is is just an impossibility but that doesn't mean that we have to live just accept an irrational state of mind we can all see the shadows of plato's case okay if we look for them we can find it in science in evidence in lived experience so without losing sight of these we can strive for higher levels of understanding we can improve our personal simulation of our world our play and our place in it and with games we have a tangible tool with which we can share our simulation with other people this game has now attracted the attention of clinicians policymakers and we've presented it to the houses of

parliament to put the to to MPs and I think there's an interest in it because we've made the invisible visible and ideas are starting to form about how gaming technology could be used to help understand and treat conditions like these in the future so some might pitch to you as artists graters is this don't sacrifice evidence on the altar of entertainment don't assume that your audience is too dumb to relate to reality if you're a confident artisanal storyteller the pursuit of truth it won't hinder you it will support you and enhanced revisions that in ways that will set you apart from cliché and derivative works so that's the lesson that I have learned making hell blink and I'll pass it back to doc thank you [Applause]

so to help late started out as an experiment to see if we could break through that triple a blockbuster model create a game that we we want to create in in our vision for fans that love them and you know we're really happy to be able to save it for that experiment turned into a great success for us critically the reviews we receive for the game were phenomenal we were extremely happy to have picked up a number of different Awards last week we heard that we've received nine BAFTA nominations which which is incredible and the games been a commercial success as well we kept our budget low enough that our breakeven $30 was was under five hundred thousand units and we went through that several months ahead of what we thought we would and we're well into profit on the on the game now which is which is incredible and when we

started this project we had we had the notion that if we could make this work that not only could we as ninja theory continue to make independent Triple A games but that it would be an example for other developers to find themselves in a similar situation to us - that can use it as ammunition when they're having those conversations with publishers with funders or internally to say look if Ninja Theory can make it work with their vision with help I'd say no sacrifice then maybe we can make it work - so critically successful commercially successful which are all things that we hope for but I think one of the most valuable things from this project for us and the most one of the most unexpected things was the overwhelming response to the themes that we presented in the game we've received hundreds of messages from players that have found that the game and sandwich journey has had an impact

on them and on their lives and the lives of their family people have found that it's given them a language in which they can talk about their own difficulties it's given them a platform and confidence too to talk about their own mental health difficulties for the first time and people have have shown it to their friends and family and said what senna goats what senna wa has gone through in this story is similar to what i've been through and it's helped people to understand which you know for us you know us personally i think being able to work on this project and have that kind of reaction has been you know something i never thought i'd have in my career and I think that is due to the independent triple-a model to have that creative vision to take creative risks and have a creative focus we could deliver something that has had a genuine impact not only that but we through the success of hell-blade we had the opportunity to give something back to that mental health community and on

Mental Health Awareness Day last October October the 10th we were in a position to donate all of the proceeds that we at Ninja Theory receive from the sale of the game on that day and we were able to give a check for just over sixty thousand pounds to rethink mental illness a charity that focused on on helping people who are diagnosed with mental health issues so that sums up the presentation for today you can follow us on on the socials you can email me please remember to evaluate session yeah I think we've got I think we've got time for a question or two if anyone has questions yeah just walk up to the mic and turn a fire away okay I'll go first

um my name Louis um very special thanks thanks the top is very inspired inspirational for all the dead diary my question is um how was the lookout light balance of the 20 people who involved in help led and we can probably both answer this but I think image theory we have we're dedicated to you know not scheduling in crunch you know it's it's counterproductive so I think the nature of the project it was a big part of our lives but that didn't mean that we were working 24/7 we were working every weekend that wasn't the case yes we put in extra time and hard work at the end of the project to realize it but you can't you can't scheduling crunch you know this model wouldn't work with on that basis and one way we try and avoid it is to we give time off in lieu so when people have to work to a deadline

we have to give the time off in lieu so that controls you know how much we ask of them I something very much thank you let's do so we're calling back to one of my favorite lines from the game where she's on the bridge and the narrator mentions you know if you think that send you was reality has warped and you have to admit there's a chance yours is too and the whole game taps into this fan tent fantastic concept within the player of their empathy which is one of the I think core learning capabilities of the brain what kind of ways or have you guys ever thought about using this game as even like an academic educational positive with as an independent developer you guys don't really have a publisher to kind of block yeah so the question is how we thought about using it in an academic or a research basis the professor Paul and his research team uses uses the game to to teach his students we've had various like so

Kyah tourists and clinicians get in touch with us and they use the game to to show to people but but really what the game does is help people see experience something I think there's another step beyond that which is if you can simulate these realities we can probably phenotype them phenotype people's experiences and then see if treatments may or may not have a success so that's something I would dearly like either ourselves or other researchers to explore thank you and we probably have time for just one more I'm sorry guys you know I don't know if this is I don't know if this is a actual thing with the types of psychosis that you were dealing with in the game so I apologize if this question doesn't make that much sense but in your research in trying to basically replicate these experiences that are in some cases I am sure traumatic were you ever afraid that you would cause harm to people that were engaging the game and

how did you yeah I communicate that yeah so so so I so what were we afraid that we would cause harm but by doing this well I mean I was yes but until I understood that the issues that people have like are incredibly pervasive repetitive issues that dogged them for years and years and years and I don't think one piece of entertainment is is there gonna be the tipping point but I would also argue that having an honest representation is better than having the myriad of dishonest reputations representations that are out there so most people you know we put a warning sign up we put a help page up for people so we've tried to we try to show the truth but also to kind of just caution people and give them some way to go thanks it was a fantastic time all right I'm sorry guys I think we're out of time there so thank you so much for for coming you