Classic Game Design Postmortem: Swinging with Spider-Man

[Music] Wow when they invited me to go up here and talk I was kind of expecting maybe a classroom with 2030 people in it thank you all so much for getting up this early if I hadn't been assigned this slot I would still be in bed right now a couple things I'm supposed to remind you of one is please shut off your put your phones on do not disturb or whatever the other is there are evaluations please fill those out so the organizers will know whether to bring me back some day so this is what we're here to talk about somehow I got old and this game I worked on 15 years ago is now considered a

classic classic game post mortem and Who am I I was the second employee at Treyarch the founders Peter and Dawn were friends of mine from college so like they say to you know looking at lucky to know the right people and also lucky that when the spider-man games came around and Activision gave us the license to do those games I was in the I just come off the working on some Tony Hawk ports so I was in the perfect position to take over as lead programmer on those titles and that gave me the opportunity to put a unique thumbprint on things or get a unique thumbprint started that metaphor makes no sense after after spider-man I went indie and this is not so well known I made I made a solo project called energy hook that

was continuing to investigate the idea of swinging game mechanics it's probably more famous for would be having a Kickstarter funding goal of $1 I am in the Guinness Book of World Records video game edition for the highest percentage funded Kickstarter project some insane percentage but it raised $40,000 which you know is not not much compared to the budget of spider-man 2 and it did not do well it got mixed reviews to be kind and so I've got some imposter syndrome going on right now it's like do I really should I really get up here and talk about how to make a swingin game when some some people really didn't like energy hook that said let me tell you the story about Oh actually the meet sorry getting ahead of myself a speaking of energy hook I have open sourced it I

just I just set this up yesterday I took all the stuff in the project that I'm not allowed to share took it out put the bulk of the project up here if you go down to the bottom of the page energy hook game calm you can start downloading the energy hook unity project now and play with some of these I'm glad that's awesome say thank you I'm glad you're glad you guys are excited about that and then you can start playing with the ideas you were talked about if anybody wants to use that source code to violate a certain famous intellectual IP I can't stop you bad news I did not get it up to unity 2018 it's still in unity 5 so if anybody if anybody wants to do that for me let me know and I'll put that up instead anyways the story is that when I was when I was at Treyarch I was lead programmer spider-man one things have been going along I wasn't happy with the swinging it didn't feel like spider-man to me and this was and

so I would come in late at night and try to make my own ideas make my own prototypes and eventually those prototypes took on a life of their own and by the time spider-man 2 rolled around we were able to keep iterating on those and eventually end up with what is now you know considered a classic game and up until last year when the insomniac guys made made their spiderman game it it was the reigning champion of spider-man games so 15 years run and let me get into it I am mostly going to talk about intrinsic motivation today and extrinsic motivation is playing playing with the game or doing a thing because you're getting some kind of reward like money levels unlocks in-game currency to buy a new stuff achievements leaderboards extrinsic motivation can be easier to talk about it's easier to analyze it's easier to tweak parameters and see if your customers are coming back or not and so

and it's what people it's what generally what people talk about when they talk about gamification taking taking things and adding game elements to them they're talking about any leveling systems what they're not talking about is Jessie Shell's definition of fun which is doing things because we don't have to that is intrinsic motivation that is I am just doing this activity because it is a joy in itself and intrinsic motivations harder to talk about it's harder to analyze it becomes more of an art than a science when we start talking about intrinsic motivation and like why is one activity more pleasant than others so we've got these Spider Man games and but this is back this is back mm there's one on the PlayStation we're swinging is

kind of like jumping you jump from building to building your webs are cosmetic spider-man 1 the game we the game we the game I first made swinging you're flying through the air and your and your webs are attaching to the sky and the webs are just cosmetic and these activities we're kind of anemic they're kind of they're kind of not doing it for us and then for some reason spider-man 2 doesn't for us so how do we get there I'm just I'm gonna skip that I think I think it's a combination some insights and some luck we still need game designers to have insights and to prototype those and to see how they feel and we need luck like I've made a bunch of prototypes over my career and very few of them have had the I've had the impact of spider-man and so it's

sort of a seat of our pants development system right we're not able to say oh if we if we you know increase this number then scientifically we'll we'll get to this this better experience it's more of a it's it's you make a prototype you say hey will this work we try and it doesn't work we try something else it does work and over and over again this process is sort of how we get there and some people are going to be more likely with this process than others one thing I can say though is in this process of making intrinsic tempting to make intrinsically motivating prototypes and activities that people will just do for the sake of doing them is to keep and keep extrinsic motivation out of it it's tempting to start adding your score systems and your achievements and your leveling up into these really into these early prototypes

but but but don't because a that that corrupts your data you don't know if people are coming back and playing longer to get those points and the extrinsic rewards or if they're doing it because it's a if the core is a fun activity and B the extrinsic motivation can actually damage the intrinsic motivation you've probably heard it may be an apocryphal study that you may have heard that the study where there's two classrooms one set of kids draws for free the other set of kids is paid to draw and the set of kids that are paid to draw all the next day they don't want to do it anymore it I tried to track down that study for this talk I couldn't find it it may be mythical and obviously we all know from making games ourselves and like looking at analytics when you add extrinsic motivators to a game it helps people come back but there's something powerful about that and it comes back what Jesse Schell said about fun once you start making it an obligation to play your game because you're getting those goodies then people start talking

about farming and grinding and they're doing it not because the intrinsic activity is giving them joy but just because they're trying to get the next level so what turned out to work for us with spider-man 2 so I'm here I'm on going this I feel like spider-man this game is not satisfying me personally I think that's probably where a lot of you can also find motivation to to improve game mechanics and make them more intrinsically satisfying and for me it was for me the webs that attach to midair were a big part of the problem but also just it was just this sort of the slow sedate feeling and back then I was I thought it was about realism I thought this isn't realistic this game should be this game should be realistic

and I'm lately learning that that that's not that's not what it was about it wasn't so much that people wanted realism it's that people wanted to be spider-man and when you imagine what it's like to be spider-man webs attaching to the sky is not part of the fantasy it violates the fantasy of being spider-man because it turned out that there were a whole bunch of physical impossibility --zz that people are just fine with gravity and spider-man 2 is about 10 times earth normal that's the only way we can sort of make the speed of the game the speed a Spider Man have sort of a exciting dynamic feel spider-man can jump an amazing number of stories in that game it feels like he's not jumping as high as he is and and spider-man can steer in midair like in a lot of games spider-man can steer in me

there here is a here is a real-world situation where I'm at camp with my daughter I did not come as close to that trees it looks like but I can tell you I was not able to steer in midair and yet in our video games when we can steer in that air lots of games do it spider-man 2 certainly wasn't the first although physics has nothing to say about that it just feels right I think it's a little like it's a little like when you go bowling and you and you and you let that bowling ball go and it's heading towards the gutter and you start with your whole bodies or tense up and it's like like you think you can push that bowling ball just for the effort of your mind video games make that real they people in general people have

what's the word that our our our preconceptions about physics are often wrong like a child will assume that a heavier object is going to fall faster than a light object and we have these broken notions of physics and when a videogame takes those broken notions of physics and and gives them life in a virtual world it doesn't it doesn't bother us the another good thing about spider-man 2 was we decided to do something that had never been done before the advantage of doing something like this is we gave game reviewers something to love and it's part of the reason I think that that spider-man 2 was as people look back to it to this day it's like wow this came out of nowhere there's nothing

like it once I've met once I start to master this thing it's incredibly expressive but like I said I made a bunch of prototypes over the years and and most of them although very few of them or maybe as unique as Spiderman was they're all they're all unique they're all I want to do stuff that hasn't been done before right and most of them don't resonate with people so it's a huge risk maybe the risk reward is worth it in the long run I am Not sure let's talk with Flo who here is familiar with csikszentmihalyi's flow state stuff yeah I figured a lot of you the one of the hardest parts of this talk was learning how to pronounce cheek sent me hi there is a YouTube video fortunately with 80,000 views that teaches people how to do it for those of you don't know it's this it's what he

calls flow is that feeling of being in the zone of being intense of intensely concentrating on something so hard the time sort of loses meaning and and the rest the world goes away it's it's something that a lot of games like to mine and benefit from one one thing about the flow state if it's too easy you get bored the rest of the world comes back time comes back and if you it gets too hard you get frustrated and stop we never had a problem really with people being bored of the spider-man swinging the the frustrating and too hard part was what we were sort of constantly battling with through the life of the project okay sorry about this like high density information slide there will not be a test so when I'm first thinking about spider-man and

getting ready to make that first prototype I'm like okay I have this idea I don't want the webs to attach this guy I want them to attach the points in the world I want to I want to be basically a bob on a pendulum but that is an insanely difficult problem for players to play we were asking players to in a in a simulated 3d environment when they're given a certain trajectory pick a point in the world to attach a rope to which will then give you the direction and speed to end you up where you want to be like I can't think of it I can't think of a mass-market game that we intend millions of players to play that has a mechanic that challenging and so I think okay maybe there's some way we can assist the players and doing this existing at the time we had the quake grappling hook mod

that was one example of movement with and swinging together where you pick where first-person-shooter you pick with the center of the screen crosshairs exactly where you want your grappling hook to attach we also had jak and daxter which had points in the world that were clearly marked that you could swing from it was a sub game a minigame injected daxter's just a just a tiny part of it I thought well maybe we can go somewhere between those maybe we can have lots of points at intelligent places corners of buildings let's say that probably spider-man's only gonna want to swing from the corners of buildings right like you'll you don't want to swing from the middle of the building because you'll just run right into it but if you're always swinging from the corner and you're in you're going parallel to the building you can you'll be able to use those two those points to slalom that was my first prototype was going in engineering level and marking marking

certain points as ideal points to swing from and that prototype wasn't there yet that wasn't quite good enough it was good enough once was a couple other modifications it was good enough to sort of get to the point with like okay let's keep investigating this let's see if we can make a game out of this but it had it had issues it's like how come my web sometimes don't attach to anything how come my webs sometimes attach to this corner over here when I thought they'd attached that corner Tomah Milwaukee the creative director and Eric Pavan one of the designers said well let's just keep adding points to the levels and see what happens and they found that the more points the more of these invisible points we added to the levels the less confused the player got the more it's like yeah that's kind of we're kind of in the general vicinity of where I wanted my web to attach and so we carried that on we carried that on all the way by then having a programmer say okay let's what if what if there's

infinite points and we're just intersecting with surfaces sending out sending out rays sort of like feelers where they intersect a surface that's the point we swing from and we can by us we can bias the way the feelers go by pushing pushing the joystick let's try that and that felt really good we were finally at a point where where it was less mysterious you were almost always had a point to swing from unless you were above the buildings and the point usually was around where you wanted but and usually not stupid usually not crashing you straight into a wall after spider-man shipped a game came out called Bionic Commando rearmed sequel Bionic Commando when I'm not probably the one of the very few 3d swinging games out there they had a different solution and they marketed their game as more of a skill game they didn't actually call

spider onto out by name but they said this is a swing game and but and this one is about skill like Spider Man she wasn't hard enough and what they did was it was an over-the-shoulder aiming shooter the center of the screen where your crosshair was would determine the vertical plane of where you attached and it was sort of like sort of like you're you're chopping down and where and where you're and where you're where your hand or your invisible feeler hits an object that's the point you swing from so it was much more precise and it was much more clear how you were picking points in the world it also did require a lot more skill I thought it was a very cool game it as I understand it it did not make a profit I don't necessarily think that's because it was like hardcore I think it was mostly because it didn't have spider-man in it I mentioned energy hook I had it in I had a and this and this I can kind of

you can kind of visualize the way the the way the beams work and spider-man by playing energy hook my solution to sort of compromise between precision and lack of difficulty in energy hook is that an energy hook this hey I made the beams visible but feelers visible that are determining which points to swing from but be it the cone a feeler starts out very narrow and precise kind of like Bionic Commando rearmed and then it expands as as you hold the button down so skilled players precise players pressing the button as necessary will target the things they want and then if they have trouble finding a spot eventually the cone widens up so it will intersect with something and you'll swing from something got a little little video here to to demonstrate it there's the cone getting wider which is from a standing position here it is an action so particularly with bridges the the the

the the narrow the narrow beams enable much more precision than than the feelers from spider-man 2 and then when you're going next to a wall the sorry all tongue-tied when you're going next to a wall the wider count helps do the slaloming action that we're familiar with from spider-man to let me hydrate so picking the right points in the world is not enough beginning players still have trouble with the game and so we ramped way back on how fast the player

can move how high you can jump we increase our resistance and this makes the game more accessible for the new players but it would make the game a little less interesting for the advanced players so that's why as you go through the game once you've demonstrated that you you know have the chops and you're ready for it we allow you to have more speed higher jumps further jumps and in other words we kind of introduce shopping to the game spider-man could go into a little store and buy superpowers now I talked about how we shouldn't violate the super so that violate the spider-man fantasy and that kind of like violates it I can't imagine you know in a spider-man movie seeing him going into a store and buying superpowers but the benefits this gave us in terms of being able to ramp the players up slowly into the difficulty curve sort of like a clematis acclimatizing them like lobsters into the end of the challenge

helped a lot there's a bunch of a bunch of other valuable things about buying upgrades which is you get to learn the parts piecemeal as you go through the game and and now it's time we're adding extrinsic motivators is actually kind of cool we're far enough along in the project that we feel safe about about adding these things spider-man to add a tutorial a lot of people complain about tutorials you know perfect world your game mechanic is so simple or so well designed that people can learn it without a tutorial some games though you really want it and I've definitely found with a lot of my games I have a game I'm working on right now where if I accidentally break the tutorial I see it immediately in the game's analytics like session length drops or tension drops i Ono what do i do what do I break I

look at it's like oh I accidentally broke through toriel okay so some players are getting so frustrated with the spider-man to you in the cleaner Oh everybody no Kleenex testing who doesn't know what Kleenex testers are so Kleenex testers or testers that you bring in watch them play the game once and then throw them away will will write Sturm I think and and because they get poisoned if once they start learning the mechanic you can't have them see the mechanic again for a second time and say oh yeah cool I fixed it because now they're able to play because of the reason they're able to play the second time is because they did it before so some people are getting so frustrated some of the Kleenex testers get so frustrated playing spider-man they'd see that next objective and instead of swinging there they would just stop and they'd run run through the street to the next to their next objective we called it the running man and no offense the insomniac guys you still hear it still can be a problem my

9 year old daughter I was watching her play spider-man she swung a few times and then she's like I don't care I'm just gonna have fun running through the streets the streets look much more cool in the new game than they did back in the spider-man 2 days so I can kind of see how you'd want to do that just just to enjoy the graphics so what what one of the most best things we did when trying to get the players to learn the swing system was this okay hold up last time I checked you were still spider-man you know fancy outfit fights crime while swinging from building the building so where's the swinging if you're just gonna run everywhere then I'm gonna be forced to say hurtful things that I'll regret later and neither of us want that so just swing it takes some practice but I'm sure you can do it eventually with time how many people don't know who that is nice yeah so Bruce Campbell does the

tutorials and in between commentary no voice over narration and both the spider-man games I worked on and a theme of this talk is actually what I would tell young Jamie it occurs to me like young Jamie thought realism was important young Jamie thought you shouldn't make fun of your players but here we found that if you make fun of your players we saw this in clean accesing they'd be doing the running man thing we'd eventually detect it and say they've been running too long Bruce Campbell would give them crap and they'd say he's on to me and they'd start swinging again Csikszentmihalyi stole the word flow and so now we can't use it when we're talking about games behaving fluidly so I'm gonna I'm gonna call that fluidity some sometimes people I think sometimes came to find us conflate those two terms

flow and fluidity so close beacons um fluidity is having a game that Kerdi it doesn't it doesn't stop you jar you it's not linear I have no scientific evidence for this but I think we just prefer curvy nonlinear things I think that's why when we animate we always use tweens even if their UI elements there's just something about a UI element coming in and gracefully coming to a stop rather than linearly coming in and jarring to a stop that we appreciate and that goes for our game mechanics as well so with spider-man I had to retool some stuff the original spider-man engine evolved from a game called Draconis which was a fighting game and all the animations drove the behavior in that game it wasn't it

wasn't like a lot of the shooters at the time it was to move from one spot to another we play an animation and then update the character's route so I had to turn that around there were also lots of places in the engine which just literally stopped the character such as velocity to zero that was a simple process of going through and commenting out a bunch of lines of code and things started feeling better they're like you'd like when when when spider-man would land on the ground at first he would just stop that didn't feel as good when we took that velocity cancelling thing out he lands on the ground he takes a few steps that felt a lot better another way we introduced fluidity spider-man one spider-man automatically stuck to walls you just brush a wall and he sticks to it and in spider-man one that was great it was what we wanted spider-man sticky in spider-man 2 that

would that would be really frustrating he suddenly you're swinging along and suddenly boom you're stopped so turning that off was one of the was one of the biggest things that turned that initial crappy prototype that didn't get greenlit into a game that we could continue exploring and then and then taking that there was a problem with that though the problem the problem being even when you bounce into walls it still looks dumb it doesn't feel particularly spider-man II or super heroic to bounce into a wall and the way we dealt with that we didn't have any magical technology to prevent you from bumping into the walls in the first place back then but what we did do is is a play cool looking animations when you did hit a wall little surfer moves your hands on the wall you do a spin and your feet run along the wall for a little bit and suddenly even though the game mechanics are exactly the same the

physics are exactly the same characters motion trajectories velocity all the same suddenly it feels good it's like yeah I meant to do that we took it even further later when we brought in the wall running and you can just see once the that how that wall running it's like your you can sort of imagine this continuous looping thread through the world as you as you as you traverse the traversal level and that feels so much better than a janky angular motion I was young Jamie was really afraid of just how hard the game was to control even after all the effort we we took to make it make it accessible

and as I'm thinking about this talk we had a snow day up in Washington we had a bunch of snow days up in Washington a few weeks back and I went out with my daughter we're on our saucer sleds going down the hill saucer turns backwards as saucer sleds do I can't see where I'm going it's scary I don't know what I might hit but it was also fun as hell and a lot of people came up to me after spider-man 2 and said you know I have trouble controlling it I'll like swing and I'll go somewhere and it won't be where I intended to go but I don't care I'm having fun I don't really care where I end up and and it suddenly clicks oh yeah this is what Richard Garfield and Greg Kosta kyun are talking about when they say how how uncertainty and randomness in games is important speaking of dumb young Jamie I to be

like Oh randomness in games is bad chess is the perfect game it removes you know as much randomness as possible so it's all about the player's skill and it wasn't till later hanging out with Richard and and reading Greg's book that first book looking games by the way is required reading for game designers with it where they where they pointed out that randomness actually is Wiig aims are all about uncertainty is what games are all about Greg Greg Gregg goes as far to say that uncertainty is pretty much what makes games game it's not a series of interest it's not it doesn't have to be a series of interesting decisions Candyland is not a series of interesting decisions but it's still a game it's still you playing Candyland and you don't know if you're gonna win or lose and that uncertainty can keep you going to the end just to find out the answer to that question the the the challenge for game

designers at this point becomes how do we control that uncertainty how do we how do we get it to the point where it is possible to master where we don't have players going this game is too random but it still keep that feeling of life and feeling of not knowing what's going to happen there final thing Cosmetics more required reading read Steve Swank's game feel and Martin Jane essence and Petra burrows juice it or lose it GDC talk young Jamie very into very into just the math of things like young Jae Myeong Janey probably would have thought that Spiderman to you would have been just as fun if you were just a sphere on a line segment navigating through a world of colored blocks young Jamie was kind of dumb manat have that would not

have sold the spider-man experience to sell the spider-man experience you need all the cosmetic stuff you need particle systems animations audio motion blur wind trails camera changes all of these things all of these things are there to sell the experience and make us start empathizing also with the hero suddenly we feel the danger the hero feels you wouldn't feel any danger if a pendulum if a sphere or pendulum bob falls from a great height but when a human even if he's a cartoon falls from a great height you feel for him you feel at your gut I don't know why but we have this empathy for the cartoon character and the more we can sell out experience the better yeah it's beyond the scope of this talk really but but these two these two resources are great for it but just as an example just in the audio track we had we had of being really high up

we had a whooshing sound that increased and decreased depending on the character's velocity and when you would when you would boost your character there was also an and also on top of that F noise for the for the speed boost I'm gonna finish with insomniacs game journalist Nick Nick Robinson aka Babylonian took some video of me playing the spider-man game for the first time of the new one and those I'm gonna play us a couple time but you can sort of see the contrails in that very first shot and you can see the way the camera gets closer and further away from you oops wrong way and we did not have the technology to do motion blur like that back then or at least it was not ready

for primetime yet you can really in this in this very final shot you can sort of I don't think that's a video compression artifact you can see the motion blur at work all those things really do a great job of selling the experience and the more the more graphic detail you have in the city the more it feels like yes I am a person I am this many stories above the ground I am in danger I'm going to die and and so that in a nutshell is a lot of the things I learned while working on spider-man 2 I will I will leave you here with one last bit from Bruce Campbell and then we can have questions well hang on stop the music cut okay you and me we need to have some words the swinging what you don't like it you think you're too good for it maybe like not good enough right is it the pressure you got a little

performance anxiety going on well that's alright no personally I don't know anything about that but I've heard it's rough anyway let's let's ease up on you for a little bit just slow everything down take away the pressure just breathe just get the class in your own good time okay yeah you guys have any questions hi okay so I teach a university in the Netherlands and one of the things I've been trying to do while I'm here is pick up some tips on how to get our students to be a little more creative because we were like laser focused on putting people into the industry and the result is being great for what we were trying to achieve but like their ideas are getting a little more risk-averse and there was something you said there that extrinsic motivation is kind of easier

to balance and parameterize the intrinsic motivation and I'm wondering if you feel like maybe you know we picked up the ubisoft rational game design stuff and we started implementing that so there's a lot of information out there on how to balance and how to break your game down but the more you're talking about the Morrow's realism that's all extrinsic motivators how do you structure things how do you guide the player do you think maybe we're getting so good at extrinsic motivation we're not spending enough time exploring what we can do to get more intrinsic motivation in there so question is has I guess our obsession with gamification and extrinsic motivation is that is that one of the many things that sort of hurts creativity I don't know I mean I personally feel you know after after

seeing seeing a lot of the interesting game mechanics fail to be financially successful I think a lot of the risk aversion is just is just from we tried that and it didn't work let's do something safe let's let's let's make a battle royale clone but you know that said though that's not safe either because then then people just say oh been there done that that it's a huge it's also a huge risk to try to slavishly copy something else so that game game game making is hard that's cool that's it's cool that you're trying to trying to trying to push for creativity hi so one of the other things I really liked about the game was like the combat mechanics and such and so you know grabbing people putting them in a web hanging them on like a street lamp but then you know human punching bag or something but did you have did you work on that at all and then if you did did

that ever kind of evolve over the course of the project and evolved from the new like web swinging mechanics and such a Spider Man to combat mechanics so I was not definitely not as intimately involved with those as I was with with the swinging and how did they evolve that just like the rest of the game they they did evolve as we go one of the one of them one of my favorite stories about it was games with two punch buttons or a slow attack fast attack we're very popular back then and but most most most action games had that and so Activision was like higher-ups and actors remember I don't you have more why don't you have more attack buttons but this isn't this isn't a real game it's only got the one punch and we had to work back and forth with them on that and that's sort of where combos with the web attack button

and the punch button came from was like how could we get a breadth of different attacks and moves and animations without wasting one of our precious buttons you had mentioned adding extrinsic motivations behind the intrinsic flow of web-swinging in that process were there any unlocks that you realized before after the fact would be good or bad like one like for instance some unlocks of certain speed values or something like that that you realized should have been part like included in the base and then through testing in your life you said a little close to the mic on missing and missing somewhere saying sorry did you realize that there were some extrinsic

motivations and unlocks added for the web-swinging through testing that you re added back as part of the base of the web-swinging because you mentioned like speed and jumping and boosts and stuff like that right so uh are you asking sort of like this stuff oh we should make that power part of the core gameplay that shouldn't that shouldn't be left out no closest closest thing to that actually yes closest thing to that was not so much powers but originally the city unlocked gradually like parts zones weren't available a little like gta3 back then you couldn't get from Liberty from the one island to the other Island and beyond just having a and and instead of having that staged we went back to

just like okay here's the area for the tutorial and then once that's opened boom you can go anywhere that that was that was that was a that was that was one one thing like that but as far as like oh we really should have this I don't remember we were say we there was some tricks and stuff in the in the things weren't really necessary for the core gameplay and we left them and we left them to be things you unlock later and learn about later awesome thank you did you play the Mega Drive or Genesis spider one I have not played any Mega drive/genesis I also had a good swing today so I'm also a professor in game development and in my intro to game development class I actually use a Spider Man to swing mechanic as an example of all these different disciplines coming together to make something that has a right specific kind of feel so my question is because you you talk about having animation having

sound design having game design having all easy mechanics and tech all coming together how big was the team that actually worked specifically on the swinging mechanic and how did you communicate that philosophy and approaches and the balancing to that team the question is how big was the the team that worked specifically on swinging and how did we handle communication within that team and I I don't I don't have an exact number dozens of people touched the swinging at one point or another during its evolution one one where places places where we thought communication for close tight communication with essential there were parts where we yeah we will put Jason Baer who is implementing the coding side of the animation right next to James a Curry who is making the

animations and they will he will provide a pose and Jason Baer will integrate that pose and vice versa and and and making that piece as a unit but then maybe you have something like audio which is a little more separate a little more like here's Tom Hayes in his sound room making making the audio and then and then handing us the sound files later which Jason or somebody implements yeah all over the place hard hard to have it hard to have a good tight answer we were flexible thank you set it we done all right thank you thank you so much it's great it was great it was great to be able to talk about this again thank you [Applause]