Creative Panic: How Agility Turned Terror Into Triumph

[Music] hello everybody welcome to our talk thanks for coming I just want to say I'm Tim Schafer the president of Double Fine productions here in San Francisco thank you and I've come here today with several of our cohorts from Double Fine to talk to you about a big change in our production the way we produce games that went over the last couple years a double fine and how it some things we came up against and how we solved them and it's called creative panic how agility turned terror into triumph it's a beautiful slide Lee thank you I want to remind everyone if your cell phone rings during this presentation we will stop and restart from the very beginning even if we're like two minutes from the end so please turn off your ringers and there we all want to remind you to fill out your feedback forms because they are not actually forms anymore so it's kind of misleading that gesture if you get your card your

lanyard you get your pass scan but I wanted to see as they will you'll get an email asking you if you liked this talk or not I know it's hard to give feedback like that I would like to recommend fives if it's a you know scale of one to five or or ten I haven't really seen them yet so I just want to in case you need to copy someone else's work those are my suggestions for the ratings so um that would've been a good slide to show while I was doing all that whoa can we talk cuz we're gonna miss that right now um I am here to tell you my friends that we are in crazy times but these times we live in there are a lot of big games out there and that's picture me and we a double five made big games and we compete with big games but the games are just getting bigger they're getting bigger and more expensive and they take that money and they buy the top talents and the games get they get better and bigger and it's like a snowball like he's rolling it's very hard to compete against for smaller studios but they're even the really small studios that also compete in a way of being incredibly creative and taking many many years to make their games and

not paying themselves any money and living out of their basements while they do that and those are those kind of studios are also very hard for a studio like Double Fine to compete with because they have a lot of flexibility with the whole lack of payroll thing we've always been kind of unusual studio and that were we're an independent developer but we have healthcare you know somewhere somewhere right in the middle we've been comfortable there except for lately the the phrase death for the middle has been going around which makes us a little nervous there aren't a lot of steals left in that little space and we did see a lot of pressure could like things closing in on us in a way when we're thinking about what game to make after brutal legend we were it's getting harder harder to sign big games like that and there's pressures that even as you can sign them make them maybe not what you want to sign for example publishers are very versus in new very versed in new IP when you're investing millions and millions of dollars you'd rather place it on the license title or a sequel it's just it's you know in their defense it makes sense you know they also want to own the IP which is something that Double Fine

believes developers should own their own IP and not give it away to publishers and yeahshe remember to ask for that next time you're negotiating your contract because I think that's what leads to the best games developers care about their their characters and worlds are making and it makes sense but it's very hard to do that at these big budgets that are happening and people giving you a lot of money to make a game also rightfully want to make make it safe make it a good return on their money so they won't take out the risks and unknowns but Double Fine the things that really excite us are these risky things is unknown doing something that hasn't been done before that's what makes it fun so we saw this pressure to take out a lot of things that made games fun if we go for these bigger bigger games so how's Double Fine's survived this kind of pressure we spent ten years as a one team studio making one game of a time and I was always in charge of it and we were it was a very an entrenched into our culture that that's the way we did things but we managed to turn the battleship this is a phrase I learned at LucasArts every time there was a new president or a layoff or a new president with the layoffs there would be a big meeting and the first thing he'd say is

like we're gonna turn the battleship everybody which sounds really exciting not that means probably boring most boring thing about ship could do is turn around but I mean so we did manage to turn the battleship into a fleet of tugboats didn't see that coming or like bigger sexier but like cigarette boats from Miami Vice or with guns on them just awesome boats and we did that by using amnesia fortnight many of you know amnesia fortnight as a psychedelic mushroom and we all took it and they gave us the idea now the Asian fortnight is um something that came up were thinking about I heard a story about a filmmaker in Hong Kong Wong kar-wai who was making ashes of time as a huge three-year production and his team was getting really you know they're spending all this time in the desert getting really oppressed by this huge production and so he took his star and his cinematographer and they went to Hong Kong and they improvised a bunch of dialogue that later turned into Chungking Express and fallen angels two completely different movies that were actually really really someone's most famous movies and it was a great break for his team and I thought that's a

great that's a great idea we should do that it's right in the middle brutal we could use a break and um it's called amnesia because you totally forget what you're working on for two weeks forget about Berta Legend for two weeks and we'll just work on something else it's called fortnight I don't know why um because it was two weeks so some companies have done this also and they do it for one weeks for some reason I really believe two weeks is is the right amount of time we broke the whole company into smaller teams sorry this picture makes me laugh and we gave each we had a 60% team four brutal always put it into four groups and each of those groups had to make a game in two weeks and we really wanted to be a complete experience which meant not just like a demo of like here's a guy walking around imagine using a great world or imagine you know but really even if it's a small little slice of game play make it complete like a beginning a middle and let us feel what this game was gonna feel like that you guys are making and it was success I think I think for the following reasons it gave us big morale boost everyone on the team you know loved I was walking to the hallway I

could just feel people being excited about what they're working on in a whole new way there was for new ideas going on in the company and people were you know trying new things and everyone it was just it was a great on that well on that on that level that everyone was really excited and there were people got to UM try out new roles I think this is true Skillman trying out the new role of God people get a trial at new roles because when you have one production one one team and you have me as a creative director you have one lead programmer and you have one lead artist and a designer and there's like not a lot of room for people to move up in that unless I'm dead or get killed and or fired or something so I'm and so in order to avoid being killed we started this whole this whole process so people got to with four teams we had four leads and for lead burners for lead artists and people got modelers got to try concept art because it was just like you're a two-week thing everyone no rules anyway and we actually ended up with usable game ideas we actually ended up with these little demos that we said wow this is really fun this we could actually ship this or something something like it and also as a side

benefit it also saved the company which I love when that happens how did that happen how I did it save the company well we did it twice first we did it in the middle of a brutal legend in production we took a break and we did the first mutant fortnight project and we did 14 and we can't with these fun prototypes and we just we took time away we're like okay we're gonna come back to this when we have time maybe on the side we'll do some work on these games will ship them later and then after brutal legend two actually after brutal legend stopped we did it again with five teams and and we said okay these are great we can do some of these two after we you know while we're working upper legend two will just you will do all this but the universe is a tricky funny place and the games industry is no exception and brutal legend 2 was cancelled and we were like that's interesting because we're gonna go out of business so what can we do what could we do to not what's plan B after going out of business is plan a it's um II had nothing ready to go I had

no big idea because I was working at brutal legend to was supposed to be a done deal I was concentrated on that I had nothing to pitch but then I thought about these nine prototypes we had made and there are a lot of really promising interesting things in there and so we picked four of them and we took him on the road and we ended up it took a little time but we got them all signed and we just shipped them all this year and you can see him costing quests tacking iron Brigade and Sesame Street what's one monster and that was amazing to have these it was it was really great to be able to take a demo on the road and so much easier to sign a game when you have a demo it made such a made sign and go faster so um I'll tell you where to talk about the process of taking these prototypes and turning into full games and also the specific like case studies of some of the production challenges that we face because this is a whole new way of doing production that don't find it's a big change for us and then um the exact solutions that these teams came up with and I'm gonna let these guys talk unfortunately Tasha would do costume quest is went to Pixar back to Pixar where she came from and

she is not here but we have these attractive young fellows to talk to you that's actually the first design of the lamprey from real legend I think with Brad's head on it we have we have nathan marks the the lead programmer or legend and the lead of once upon a monster we have Brad mirror from iron Brigade and they're gonna tell these stories and first up we have you know mr. Lee petty from the game stacking and I'm gonna have him come up here and talk to you next so here's a little a little peek at what stacking looks like just to remind you please welcome mr. Lee petty [Applause] [Music]

alright hey everyone I thank Tim for making sure that was very anti-climatic I'm Lee petty I was the art director and brutal legend and the project lead on stacking and I'm gonna talk to you guys a bit about how stacking started off in amnesia fortnight and kind of how we took it through production and some of the challenges we faced when I got the opportunity to come up with an idea for a game for amnesia fortnight one of my first inspirations was German expressionistic film and these were films silent films from the 1920s that were considered pretty experimental in their day and one of the things that I always found really inspirational interesting about these films is that they had really small budgets and one of the ways that they compensated for that

one of the ways they made themselves interesting and stand out is that they designed these very unique highly stylized stage and set designs I was also really interested at the same time in a coming up with a game that explored identity in some way maybe the changing player character identity and so I kind of I did this little sketch at the time that was kind of fusing these two together about some crazy character that could we're living masks and when they put these living masks on they would the rest of the way they would interact the world would change but that these these things are just a little too dark and weird for for the sort of first game out of the gate for me and I really wanted to do something a little more charming and I wasn't sure where to go and I saw my daughter playing with a stack of Russian nesting dolls and I thought wow that'd be really cool those are they have their own style and they're a little bit creepy which is cool but not too creepy like German anything German really and so I did this little sketch and like how its we're gonna make this and we still let me explore themes of identity because you know what sort of

worlds with these dolls living and what's the relationship like what does it mean to stack inside another dog I don't know and from there I decided that we'd go for with Russian dolls and I wasn't sure what do these dolls do I mean a lot of things they could do and I started thinking about isn't when the first ideas was well maybe it's a game about gentleman's hat combat and you know they would fling hats that when another resolve all their disputes that way but it yeah it's clearly been done too much so I I instead I thought or something more more mainstream which was what if they fought German industrialist nutcrackers and these nutcrackers would arrive in the land of the Russian dolls and crushed the poor little Russian dolls with their nut cracking jaws and yeah again I was I started getting is a dark place so I I also remembered the time that we really only had two weeks to make this game so rather than go down these roads I decided to just focus just on the act of stacking let's make the

mechanic an idea of stacking in another dollar with Anna doll with a whole focus of they had knees a fortnight prototype at the same time I thought well it'd be really cool to do an adventure game I grew up with adventure games and I work at the same company as a mr. Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert to the pioneers of the adventure game genre I thought I could benefit from some of their knowledge and it'd be good to get to it before senility drives it from their heads and it was really not a good assumption but I thought it was a though I was gonna work so we did the amnesia fortnight Damone it worked well Tim liked it we pitched it we were fortunate enough to sign the game and and then we were like oh well we have to actually make this now that's that's tricky and one of the the big challenge for us from stacking was that we wanted to do an original high fidelity game but we had a really small budget and we a short time frame like nine months and a small team and we

wanted to do something in this downloadable space that that that let us do things that we otherwise couldn't do in big games so maybe things are a little a little different visually and gameplay wise and a lot that comes from the personality of the game and personality is important to us but personality is often expressed into small details and the presentation of the game and that doesn't that takes a lot of time so how are we going to do that and we knew the expectations would be high both internally because we just come off Myrtle legend and spent a lot of time with with so many characters and really manicuring this large world we didn't want to give up that attention to detail and the XBLA and PSN markets where the games are getting more elaborate on those when we pitch these so we needed a way of thinking about making this game like how we're gonna make this game some sort of guideline to keep this on track and the term we used was economy of design and by that I simply mean that we wanted a game to have everything it needed to feel itself but nothing else you know fat and we were going to start this production by

by starting small and growing instead of big and cut and that sounds obvious but actually just about every game I worked on is done the exact opposite it starts with really over ambitious systems design a huge list of assets and they inevitably are cut as the production goes on but we didn't have that time to waste and one of the ways we thought about it was let's just relate everything we come up with visually gameplay-wise narrative to the core idea of just stacking it if it doesn't directly relate to that that almost physicality of stacking within their doll then let's just not pursue it and that doesn't mean though that we came up with a really tiny feature set up front and just never did anything and execute it on it and we were all happy and wore money hats it it meant that we created Headroom for ourselves that during the production because we didn't have much of a pre-production during the production we could look for creative opportunities to expand the game and enhance it and one way that this idea of a common design really made sense the obvious way is

that the characters we basically had one character model for the entire game and rather than you know make the characters interesting through lots of variation and in the shape we just challenge yourself to do them with the textures itself we did find though that that characters are the players rather needed to have some another layer of differentiation on top of the characters because the characters were used to solve all the puzzles in the game they were the inventory as well as the characters so we did that with by just adding simple accessories and a lot of hats and canes and monocles and you know those sorts of things but they were very quick to make they added a lot of new personality to the game as well and they accomplish that gameplay goal of recognizability and the characters were really cheap to render right they weren't rainy polygons they had very few bones and that meant that we could put a lot of months green at once so a lot of our levels I have you know about one to two hundred dolls on screen at once moving around doing their thing and that led us create an actual world which was really important to us like we didn't brood a legend but within a much more

economical way the other issue that we ran into is that we again we love personality we try and put personality into our games but how do we do that animation wives is with just a few joints and we considered adding animating textures or some sort of detailed facial animation but I thought it'd just be really a little too creepy to have an animating face on a doll and and it was an expensive choice so we just tried to animate just using rigid body animation and there was it was really charming it actually worked pretty well and my take away is a torture your animators because you just give them really strange requests and see what they come up with and but they're really clever right there they can communicate ideas and emotions in ways that are really long-form to communicate other ways but they do it really well with simple motion and as an example I had this little dog character in a level and he did a lot of tricks and did things like walk on his hind legs and backflip and so I said to the animators like I would really like this dog to drag his ass across the ground on occasion because you know if you've ever

had a dog they occasionally do that and its really funny and you think you could do that and they're like the dog does even haven't asked to drag and I was like just give it a shot it'll be great and and they did and it looked it looked a little something like this this little dragon so yeah animators are good but the art production really wasn't the only way that we used economy design the gameplay itself centered on a series of adventure game style puzzles that we call challenges and one of the things that made the challenges a little different in stacking than other adventure games is they all had multiple solutions the player only had to do one solution but they could choose to do there's many different solutions for a particular challenge and get rewarded and although that sounds like a ton of work and it is it's a lot less than creating unique puzzles right because we were able to use the same art assets that the area of the world a lot of the writing and set up some of the same dolls so we know we got a pretty economical approached to replayability that way as opposed to making so many unique challenges and the

other thing that that there was a nice byproduct of that is that it increased the accessibility of the game which was a really which was a goal for us unstacking was to make it very casual and approachable and I think in most adventure games that there is there's one solution and if players try something differently and it's logical it just doesn't work that sort of a classic snafu and in our case since we had multiple solutions odds were they're gonna find one of them and that that worked out well the last thing about challenges that's worth noting is that the solutions because it could be done in any order or not at all by the player they had to be designed so they had no dependency on each other and the game flow itself had no dependency on any single solution so all the way up to well I should say alpha but it was probably like a week before submission we were messing with the gameplay and swapping solutions in and out based on what we saw people trying to do and play test and if they were trying to do something that seemed logical we just made a new doll coded a solution in and in two days later or so we had a whole new solution it worked well so we also

ran into problems in that we had no budget for voice acting but we had a lot of characters I mean we had a couple hundred unique characters I think when I counted was about twenty eight thousand lines of dialogue a lot of stuff there and so I knew we're gonna have to put text on screen but I was really uncomfortable with that because text on screen just didn't feel I wanted it to be cohesive thematically cohesive with the rest of the game and then I remembered my early inspirations German expressionistic film so I brought back the idea of silent films and we we did all of our storytelling with the site of silent film motif and and even complete with dialogue cards and everything and that worked out pretty well but then we ran into the fact that we had a pretty small music budget and silent films are scored and we couldn't afford to score all these with custom music and our are awesome audio guys license classical music and managed to edit that too the cutscenes as if it were custom scored music and it worked really well and it was really awesome to have a doll fart while Chopin was playing in the background which is

great and and ultimately this silent film stuff added more personality for us they gave us another motif to kind of weave in with some of the other influences we had it started in film stacking dolls we did our crossfades and silent film style we played a lot with those themes that kind of overacting and all that sort of stuff and it really just gave us another great angle on the game so my lessons learned from this process are a very straightforward but important and one is to embrace your limitations you hear this a lot and I think a lot of times it's more of a like ah we can't possibly just embrace it stomach it and that's not really what I'm thinking like the idea of we embrace your limitations and by embracing them and we made different creative choices than we would have otherwise made and that went a long ways to give me the game its own sense of personality so just work with those limitations it's probably going to come out pretty cool like most everyone in this industry is really clever and then find your essence early I think the amnesia fortnight process forces you to forces you in a very fatherly good way to find all of the the personality upfront don't just protect the core mechanic in a gray box

world that's valuable yes but it's much more valuable to do that and try and get the art look in there and and get the music in there so you can see all those connections early on and then the team was making it with you has a hand in forging the vision for the game so when you go right into production everyone's on board the vision cuz they helped make it as opposed to reading some large document and looking at a bunch of gray box prototypes so I talked a little bit about finding the essence from your product early and why that's important but next up mr. Nathan Mart's project lead of once upon a monster is going to talk about keeping that vision intact even though the product itself might have to adapt to a variety of situations Nathan [Applause] join Sesame Street's Cookie Monster and Elmo in a controller free storybook adventure filled with important life lessons inspiring challenges and friendly new monsters that even the

biggest of joy and joy hey everyone I'm Nathan Mart's and I'm the project leader of Sesame Street once upon a monster the game you can see up there and if you really want to understand where once upon a monster started we need to go back in time we need to rewind all the way back to a time when housing prices could only go up and when cutting-edge unit at humor was Rick rollin and Lal cats and by that I mean the amazing year of 2007 so back then five years ago while the rest of the world is making irresponsible real-estate investments I was writing the dismemberment code for brutal legend and it turns out this is actually not the first time I've written dismemberment code for a videogame was actually the second time and as I was writing code that way along with drew two dismembered limbs and heads and spouts blood I kind of started to feel like I was done with that and I was really excited to think about the next game that I worked on as much as I loved brutal legend and I loved the team that

I was building it with and I want to do something different for my next game that I wanted to explore a different set of emotions but I wasn't exactly sure what that was but fortunately five years ago I came to GDC and I saw an amazing talk by two Tomoko oh no you probably better know as the creator of loco loco and it was really inspiring for me to see this talk by a guy who is so clearly committed to making a like fun positive uplifting game it's one of my all-time favorite games and I was like wow I want to make a game like that except I don't want to copy him I want to do something that's that's my own that's original because you know that's what we're about a double fine so like a lot of us do I started sort of with my childhood heroes I thought back to the people that influenced me creatively Bill Watterson for example the creator of Calvin and Hobbes and also Jim Henson the creator of the Muppets and what struck me about both of these childhood heroes was how remarkably positive they were in their work that people remember that for the amazingly liked good-natured

work that they did and I was like that's awesome I would love to do a game with that same level of like upbeat positivity you know I was also learning how to be a really terrible musician at the time like remarkably bad but along the way I was learning I was reminded of how evocative music can be as a tool for creating emotion and expressing emotion it's like there are very few things that tap into like our inner selves the way that music does and in fact one day my girlfriend at the time and that's actually not a photo of her she she came up to me and she said you know do you ever give her half like a happy song a song that like gets stuck in your head and you just feel better for listening to it you know what of course I was like nah baby I'm all man I don't have happy songs but you know of course we all do we all have songs so yeah that's as a game developer that's as macho as I get you know we all have songs that really

move us so when Tim came up to me later that year and he said hey I want to do this crazy thing called amnesia fortnight do you have any ideas I was like actually I do I've got this idea for a game where you experience the joy of creating music in fact there's this game that I want to make and it's gonna be an interactive musical toy and in this toy you're gonna create your own personal happy song but the thing is most people they're not musicians they need some help so we're going to introduce them to some friends who are musical monsters and those musical monsters are going to help them make their own personal happy song Tim was into the idea and we started in Asia fortnight two weeks later we made a prototype I'm sorry I forgot to mention that because when I had two weeks it was gonna be minimalistic environments very simple music monsters the end so we made that prototype and it looked like this an awesome little Jamboree of musical monsters in a minimalist environment and we called the game happy song and we were super proud of it but being amnesia fortnight we forgot about it

until two years later in 2009 when the end of brutal legend was in sight and at that time Tim came up to me and he said you know hey let's let's make a small game you know maybe something addition to this big game that we know we're going to do called brutal legend you know let's pitch happy song as that game and I was like that's awesome you know I would love to pitch the game but if we're gonna pitch it we actually have to pitch it you know to the suits right to publishers that we're gonna have to make this game we're gonna have to make it seem at least commercial yeah and and the things like publishers are they have reasonable reasons for wanting commercial games and the thing is that when we looked at the happy song prototype we honestly felt like it wasn't commercial that it wasn't actually going to be a viable commercial product in particular we felt like the monster friends were really really awesome but the musical toy was less so

it felt really honestly kind of niche you know even for us so so that was really the essence of our production challenge was how could we adapt the prototype sign the game and preserve the vision preserve this idea of a game about joy of a game that makes you feel happier for having played it so we actually did two adaptations of that game and the first adaptation was to pitch it and the second adaptation was to sign it and our first opportunity to do it at the game was with Kinect which as you all know was announced with much fanfare at e3 in 2009 and when that came out we're like wow this is a new platform which is going to mean new opportunity a hunger for new IPs and it's obviously family oriented Microsoft is making a play for the Wii audience and they're gonna want wholesome uplifting positive you know pro-social entertainment for that device there's gonna be a demand maybe for new mechanics because like there's no buttons and attracts your skeleton so maybe we could innovate there and in the end it was a great opportunity but the

question was how could we adapt this game about musical monsters to really work on Kinect so the idea that we had to add adapt it was to change from a game about just musical monsters and the joy of making music into a game about the joy of interacting interacting with other people and with monsters and the game that we're gonna make would be a collection of monster mini games all about interactions with monsters of course we wanted to keep what works in particular the monster friends and a game that makes you feel happy those are still going to be the essence of the product but we had to change some stuff as well and the first thing that we wanted to change was the focus on character interaction where the original prototype was focused on music we were going to focus on the connection between the characters in the world and in order to do that we're gonna have multiple activities we wanted to have a game that where you could you know you could play dress-up with the monsters you can do opposing Simon Says game you could dance all of these things would be ways to interact with them and these activities would be more physical because on Connect physical is fun so we had a DM

ffice eyes music and emphasized the physicality and lastly we wanted to take advantage of the the magic of Connect that connect can see you and pretend that the monsters could also see you so that you could interact with them in a very direct connected way as part of that we're like well if you're interacting with the monsters how about also interacting with other people we really love this idea of parent-child co-player that a game that parents and kids could play together so we're gonna make all of the activities two-player we're gonna have a fundamentally intergenerational focus and you can play it with a friend you can play with a sibling but really we want to focus on a parent and a young child and lastly that means it's going to be a real-world interaction but not just a synthetic interaction with the characters on screen as part of that we realize that our minimalistic environment wasn't going to work in order to contextualize these activities we needed an actual world a place that these that these activities could happen and we were really inspired by story book illustrators like Eric Carle and Mary

Blair we loved their flat two-dimensional sensibilities and so we said we're gonna have an environment we're gonna embrace still this idea of minimalism of a 2d flat simply constructed world and the last thing we're gonna do is players are gonna need instruction they're gonna need to know what to do and how to do it so we're gonna add a narrator maybe you know a David Attenborough ask a character he's gonna provide exposition and instruction but you know because some narrators are kind of strange-looking he'll be disembodied and omniscient and you know not actually part of the the real experience so that was actually all awesome and we adapted our game we made a new prototype it looked like this and we called it monster party because it was going to represent this idea of a collaborative social experience and that was all super awesome but then another opportunity came along and that opportunity was in early 2010 when I read a Gamasutra article where we heard Warner Brothers had announced a brand new partnership and the partnership was a Sesame Street that Warner Brothers was going to become the exclusive publisher and distributor

of all things Sesame Street so one of the cool things about that was that these were obviously a very compatible values you know Sesame Street is about education and making the world a better place we were about making games a better place and in fact this would be a return to our original inspiration not just inspired by Jim Henson but working directly with some of his creations so as with the Kinect it was a great opportunity for our game but now the question was how could we adapt that game for Sesame Street how could we make this game into sin that really felt genuinely Sesame so the idea we had was to adapt again the game and to change it from being about the joy of interaction to the joy of helping others of which interaction is kind of a subset and the game is going to turn from a collection of activities into a collection of stories stories about monsters with problems who need your help in order to make sure that their story has a happy ending and as before we're going to keep what works we're going to keep the monster friends the interactive game play The Parent Child Co play and a game that

makes you feel happy all these things are important and they're successful they're gonna stay but some other things again have to change so the first big change was that the storybook inspired world became a literal storybook we actually decided to fictionalize the world as a storybook come to life again that provided a context for not just the activities but also for the stories and it allowed us to bridge the real world of Sesame Street with the fictional world of our game and our monsters the second thing that we did was just took our narrator this person who provided exposition in context and we were placed in with Cookie Monster and Elmo that they would now become our guides they would have the same function in the world but because they're physical monsters they could be part of the game world and because they're part of the world they could be physical and funny and personable in a way that a disembodied narrator never could have lastly to make a sesame product meant that we had to be educational we couldn't we didn't want to be the tickle-me-elmo of Sesame Street videogames but we also knew that we had

to be you know entertaining at the same time when you think about classic Sesame Street you think of numeracy and literacy ABCs and one two threes well first that was not going to work it's too didactic it's too doll it's very age specific instead what we want to do is focus on Sesame Street's emotional curriculum their curriculum about sharing empathy compassion the identification of emotions these things we thought would be really consistent with our original vision of a game about joy and rather than just making players happy we could actually inspire them and teach them a little bit about how to be better human beings so we made that game and it looks like this and we called it Sesame Street once upon a monster that's the game that we shipped so throughout all this the biggest lesson that I learned is that you really have to know your vision in order to stick to it especially in difficult changing times see if for us that was a game about creating joy and not only do you need to know your vision you need to keep it simple you needs to be one sentence or less and it should focus on the experience of the product not just a mechanic or a hook or an art direction

or a monetization strategy but how do people feel having played it and once you know that you need to tell the team and tell them often because if your game is going to be changing all the time your team are the ones really grappling with that and if they don't know if they've lost sight of what the vision is you'll lose sight of it too and that little beating heart of your game is going to go away so really in the end a remarkable amount of change is possible you can see where we started and see where we ended but ultimately only because we knew and were able to stay true the core vision of our get our core idea of our vision of a game about joy so you know that's that's all cool it's great to know our idea our vision for one title but we were making four games and so how about our vision for our brand what were we going to run into there and talk about that my excellent colleague mr. Brad mirror lead of iron Brigade is going to come up and talk to you about that how're we doing on time okay all your

children monovision Menace has destroyed our army our Navy our Air Force left to fight hey hey I'm Brad so I was a project lead on trenched and then I was the project lead on I am brigade so um 2007 amnesia fortnight I I was in that the class of 2007 amnesia fortnight with Nathan and you know we were gonna make a game and my inspiration at the time I was deeply involved in brutal legend and I really liked as a game designer I really liked a core mechanic mashup type stuff really like deconstructing mechanics from different games and then kind of putting them together and see what you get and hopefully it's great so I was looking at mechs sure there's a lot and that's mech assault I really love that game you know

there's a lot of customization and the combats really fun and I love the perspective and just lots of things to love about that game and then I was looking at tower defense games also like I think that's Defense Grid and I love Defense Grid and there's just so many awesome decisions that you're making when you're playing in a tower defense game about where you're gonna put your towers and how are you gonna spend your resources and where the enemies are coming from so I really wanted to like put those two things together in a game I also wanted to make a game that focus heavily on co-op because like I think years of Ward come out recently and I was really liking the trend in the industry this sort of shipped to co-op my brother had moved away and this is that's him on my back there and that this is like our primary method of keeping in touch so I really wanted it to be a game that we could play together and I didn't realize it at the time but I also wanted to continue that positivity and you know make this a game about love it's really important to me that that you know much like once upon a monster we try to inject more positivity into the industry and you know how

better to do that than with guns and Max and explosions so the amnesia fortnight prototype I really didn't want to focus on the core mechanics so I just picked like a very very kind of off-the-shelf steampunk Britain setting for the game so the players are tasked with defending this this giant steam Factory and they're piloting these mobile factories and they can make defenses around the map and there are these zombie robots that will come out at night and assault their factory so the game looked like this we called it custodians of the clock and that is the worst name please never repeat that because the custodian people don't think of a cool guy driving a Mac they think about other stuff so that would have to change but a lot a lot of others that would have to change also so our big production challenge in the game is is that you know we're this is a game that's inspired by core mechanics and you know the players that have played our games like you know that's not very double fine like that's not really how Tim has always like traditionally come up with game ideas and made games so

yeah it's like tim is a top-down designer he comes up with the fiction in the world and you know all of the all of the the dressing for the game and in the setting of the fiction and all that stuff and then works down to the core mechanics and me I'm the other way I go bottom-up I start with the that's weird I start with the that's not what I come on so I start with the core mechanics and then build from there and then add a fiction in a world on top of it so that's the real the real question is that can these approaches work inside the inside the same company because you know talking with Tim it's important that we stand for something we have all these creative voices that are now like being expressed and we can't just be all over the map like we want to make sure that we're still kind of in the same domain together so is it possible for the game to be different and yet still double fine so we kind of examine what our brand was to people who played our games so from the outside looking in we thought that players really liked the

stories they really liked the funny cutscenes that are in the game and they really liked the characters so what was it really we kind of thought about it and the answer was that we just we didn't know so we decided to you know explore this and try to figure it out before we we made modifications to custodians so the first one this story we decided after talking about it there really wasn't about like a great deep story it was more about originality is that all these games are set in original fantasy worlds and that you know that's very important to our core brand so trying to add originality to two iron Brigade we're taking the original 2007 setting of steampunk Britain and you know we didn't it just felt a little too prepackaged it felt like someone else's original idea so you know we really wanted to attack this and make the game a lot more original so we held the first ever Double Fine Art Jam so we grabbed the entire 2d concept art team for a couple of days and this generated a really high number of ridiculous ideas so the first one

Scott Campbell came up with the idea for these giant castle robots so you had these chivalrous Knights driving these big huge robots and they're super awesome but we thought that was a little a little out there Mark Hamer had an idea to use a Hieronymus Bosch I don't know if you know this guy we used him a lot of his work on brutal legend to inspire the the team coil but he had an idea to make a Bosch robots that would be attacking you and they're all super creepy and weird and then another one that we didn't use bagel came up with this idea is that there were he thought that the heroes would be the founding fathers of the United States and that they would pilot robots that were you know giant versions of their own heads so there's a Ben Franklin one and then the George Washington one is up there and it has wooden teeth and that was a little bit too out there so we just decided that we would cherry-pick the best ideas that came out of there so I really like Lee petty but handsome Lee petty right here came up with this idea of like makeshift World War one

stuff you know you see this tea-drinking guy on his tractor with a bunch of guns on it and stuff in this big smokestack cannon that came off of a big cruise liner I thought that was so awesome I loved the idea of like found technology and it really fit this sort of like post-apocalyptic thing that I was I was interested in oh and then Scott Campbell had this idea for these TV smoke monsters and so these were like you know amorphous shapes that have these TVs in them and you had to blast the blasted TVs and this was the basis for our enemies and then Lee also had this other awesome idea that went along with his his makeshift World War 1 stuff and that was these big cruise liners with legs so both with legs awesome and this made it almost all the way into the shipping version of the game where the USS McKinley that you see for the mobile trench brigade it has four legs as a giant aircraft carrier and it's awesome so we kind of took these these three major elements and put them together and we came up with the concept of the mobile trench so it's like a small open top Mac with the sandbags on it and a bunch of guns you can see the pilot in there and then we wanted them to be fighting these TV monsters so this was our first stab at both of these and then

through iteration we came up with like a more blocky design for the mobile trench that you see in the shipping game and then we came up with the more creepy organic look for the for the mono vision you see okay so we talked about how the you know what people really want like the first core thing is originality so looking at the funny cutscenes we decided that the the second thing was really personality for the game you know our games have like the tons of personality and it's not necessarily about the funny cutscenes it's just about like that they're dripping with personality so to attack this problem I decided that I really wanted to involve the whole team you know the company's awesome and Tim hires awesome people I yeah I think so and your team has been has been soaking in your company culture for a really long time and that they literally are your company culture so if we can take ideas from them and inject them directly into the game the game's just gonna have a lot more personnel it's gonna feel like a game that comes out of our studio so this is Raz and he is yeah Raz he's a concept artist on on the game and he had

this great idea for using these men's magazine covers from the 40s and 50s and this was a really awesome inspiration for the game I love the over-the-top manly men and the machismo it's like very satirical to take this and sort of make fun of it also a lot of these covers there's a whole subset of them that I love where it's men fighting little tiny animals I I don't know it's very very strange but we we use these and sort of made you know we made our own versions of them and the this kind of formed the the aesthetic backbone of the whole game you know using these men's magazine covers the typography is awesome and they're just awesome I love them so this is Chris Turney and he's the lead programmer and he's also in front row right there he was a lead programmer and trench iron Brigade and he had this great idea actually I didn't think it was a great idea at first he had this idea that in between the missions you're running your trench murine around on the deck of the ship and that you could use the right analog trigger to like salute and I was like

that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard I hate you and I would fire you if I could so but I asked him I was like how long will it take and he's like it'll take two days in one day of an animator and I was like all right fine you can try it fine and he went and did it and we play tested it and everybody just totally loved it and they ate it up and it was awesome and I have since been swayed and our buddies over at Giant Bomb turned into this big like weird mean thing and it was it really helped us grow the community it was just very like you know it was it was something a unique and original and gave the game a lot of personality this is Jeff solace he is the lead artist of our game and so I had this giant spreadsheet with all these weapons that I wanted to have in the game and I felt like it was way too big it was like a hundred and fifty plus or something stupid like that and I just gave it to him and I was like hey will you you know you want to just make a bunch of these guns and you know I think he's gonna come back and be like oh I can give you half but um no he was like yeah I'll do that all does is do all those and I was like sweet and he just

came up with all these crazy guns on his own there was not a lot of time for concept art or anything he was just you know cranking these out and they all have unique reload animations and they're just awesome they gave I gave the game a ton of personality okay so we talked about that's the second core thing for the Double Fine brand is personality so the third one are the really memorable characters and you know we thought about it and it turns out that yeah it's really memorable characters you guys totally nailed that one so uh-huh one of the problems was that it's really difficult to inject character into a mech game I'm not picking on mech assault here I love that game but you know the the the Mac is so big and the human that's piling in it that would be a mech warrior is so tiny you can't even see him and there's just it's really hard to actually get you know get get a character like really really in there so our solution was the open top mechs the mobile trenches so if we peel the top off of it and make it a lot smaller the the humans gonna be a lot larger and he'll be a lot more visible so we can do things like here he's you know drinking a whole bottle of

whiskey after completing a mission or lighting the cigar with a pistol like a lot of you know these manly things from the men's magazines can really shine when the mechs a lot smaller another other place where we added more character in the game was the commander of the mobile trench brigade he wasn't really like a major gameplay piece at all was just a dude on the ship that gives you missions so you know we thought about having maybe like one different character for each of the theaters that you go through and you know it was kind of boring but then Tim and Peter Chan came up with this idea that maybe the commander can be confined to this iron lung which is a really creepy contraption and Peter's first take on it was a little weird yeah this upright upright iron lung the decide yeah we were not super into that but um you know just going with a more traditional iron lung that had in these little mechanical arms on it was like really cool and gave it you know created a really memorable character that you're interacting with all the time on the ship and it just really it really helped us hit that so um yeah the double fine Bram like we

really feel like it's about originality personality and memorable characters but through this process we also learned that it's about another thing and that's the element of surprise and I am brigade as a game was kind of already doing this you know nobody really expected us to make a shooter but you know by making it and by going through this exercise we just really feel that we want our fans to expect the unexpected like the next game the neck that we announce will just be something that nobody saw coming and that's really important to us so the lessons that we learned from going through this process like you really want to identify your brand as soon as you can and it really just helps drive your decision-making also you shouldn't be beholden to what other people think your brand is about it's really up to you to define it to really put a stake in the ground and and tell people what it is and then also you should always be on the lookout for opportunities to apply your brands fundamentals to your game without disrupting its core and now we're gonna check out a video of the the transformation of these three games from

their amnesia fortnight versions into their shipping versions [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] oh hello again so just a couple of quick takeaways first takeaways these guys Rock these guys have a big hand for lis and Nathan and Brad and also Tasha touch as well it was really important to this whole process that I was able to let

these guys run their own projects and not have to you know they they we had full autonomy and I could trust them to get these things done which was really important to it I think this going into multiple teams like this a lot of double fine to become really agile which led to our survival I mean I think if we were married to one one plan one type of game one platform one device we would be out of business by that way we now have both little teams so we can try things if they don't work out we can move into another direction and it's really made us a lot healthier as a company having multiple teams allows the team like I mentioned before to grow everybody can move up into leadership roles and we can try someone out on a two-week you know prototype without risking the whole company on them and then if they work out and give them a bigger project later on and as a company now that we can did we can really diversify we might not have wanted to try a licensed product like Sesame Street was about a monster if it was good to find our entire company now we're doing licensed properties or even a connect game or or you know we're doing a mobile game or something like that because people would think well that's what they're doing now they're they're a mobile game company all of a sudden but now we can have

multiple teams we can try each of these things we could try mobile we could try free-to-play game we could try to get money from the internet on Kickstarter we can do anything we want because we have multiple teams and we're really just we're sending a recon team out to investigate that opportunity for us and I think the biggest takeaway for me was that is about core principles not just like how important it is to stick to your core principles when you are doing a major transition but actually you can use your core principles to make that transition happen and and for me it was finding out that the core principle of the company the number one thing for me was creativity and when we had a big blow to our financial stability by losing a multi-million dollar project like Brutalism - and we were worried about going out of business we weren't bailed out by some big publisher or a angel investor we didn't have a big Kickstarter back then give us some millions of dollars we weren't saved by anyone except for we looked at the team's creativity and it was really our the the creativity of the team that saved our whole company and that was for me just really a great moment for our company to know that we

could save ourselves but this thing that we've been working on this whole time and wanted to identify ourselves with so that's the the summary of our talk and I want to thank you all for coming and remind you to fill out your feedback forms and if we have any time now we can take some questions so thanks for coming so we have when do we have to get out of here yeah three what we have nine minutes oh we're good I know I know we're good I'm just saying so there are these microphones right over here in here and I see people are running to the doors where they think the microphones are but the microphones are actually kept up here you guys so I want to get rid of clothes first you over there hello there hi I had a question so you had multiple teams for your Emmys a fortnight but you also have multiple people in your your company how did you decide which idea is to run with like you had your four teens but there has to be an initial selection project or process of these are the ideas we're gonna run at yeah and I'm sure everyone

had an idea but how do you make that final selection yeah so how did we pick which projects to make immunity for tonight we had many sounds people in the company and there was a combination there's one it was like a solitary thing we just my you know I visibility on the whole company there's people I've had my eye on for a long time for disciplinary reasons likely or yeah well there's people like you know you can like you can kind of tell like who's who's got promised you know and you think I want to give that person a test and see if they can what they would do have given a little a chance given a shot and then also sometimes when there's a lot of there were especially because we did it we've done it a third time now a sense this and there were so many I just invited submissions from the whole company and there's so many that I had to get a kind of a you know group together of the some of the previous leads and senior people in companies like look at all these submissions really talk it through which one we thought fit the company strategy tested the right people and do the right thing so there's a combination of some hand picking but also some just really talking through with the team of like

which ones worked out and best for us long term so I think the question yes did it upset your publisher at all to take people away from the projects brutal legends and have so many people working I saw here was here's the interesting thing don't always tell your publisher everything I'm trying to figure out the timing on this cuz both times I feel like both times we're doing a media for tonight we were we had the luxury of not having a publisher at that moment that we had we had a very dark pair in the middle brutal legend where we were you know publisher free which was terrifying and and also after after brutal legend there we had we were you know the contract was over we had some freedom but we you know once we and what and that's something you really you only you don't to worry about the first time when you're a single company going to multiple projects we have multiple projects the multiple revenue streams is not everything is not coming you can no one found or no one funder of your company can prove they paid for your

muse you fortnight which is really important because anyway it's part of your overhead of your company and it is something that is totally valid to spend your money on you're investing in the future but basically you lie and say your milestones gonna be two weeks later than it really is okay why two weeks and would you find it to be effective to do more or less than two weeks I didn't bring my maths my slide rule which is oh I can prove this mathematically perfect amount of time to spend on this what it is you have to trust me okay I am I pick two weeks actually because of that story about won't kar-wai I heard it was two weeks and I don't I just say two weeks is this magical amount of time where you feel like you could do anything like when you're like once the tasks gonna be done I think it can be done about two weeks because that sounds like infinity basically so two weeks equals infinity and I really think it's I think it's more I think it's important to do two instead of one I think one week is just enough time to get your team in sync and moving I think two weeks really to do it is what helped us get these things that were ready to be pitched I think oh thank you yes I was just wondering like where did you start in terms of tech

with each of these games oh that was a really important thing where do we start in terms of tech it would have been really hard to do this if we didn't have the brutal engine engine we had the brutal engine engine working and we had tools of pipeline and the team knew how to use it and so we could just start day one on the gameplay and the you know art direction we didn't have to worry about making an engine anytime but even if you didn't have an engine there there out-of-the-box engines you could use when you say anything you could you could grab one of the things that's out there and use that I wouldn't start and write a whole new engine scratch into week so just would it would make you spend a lot of time on things that we're not right yeah we'd actually designed the the brute alleged engine to be severally a thoughtful separation between games specific code and game independent code and that's what actually allowed us to basically every amnesia for tonight project has always start with a little kernel we call it seed and it's just like the most basic game we're like it boots it runs there's a dude there's controller input and then like have fun and I think that like some of the architectural decisions we made very early in brutal legend have allowed us to build a code base that can support everything from once upon a monster to

stacking the trench to iron Brigade to happy action theater at Costume Quest you know it's it's a lot of that that top level kind of switching in and out alright Oh more question there do you think having these predefined like divisions of teams really helped have everyone on those teams like have creative input or do you think it could have been just as good to have these initial ideas and then allocate resources you know like this project needs a lot more artists or more technically demanding even though the teams might not have started out all being like one big family I use like anything how we split up the team we chose the teams for those how do we split I mean the way we split up the teams to do the image for tonight is that we we picked the leaders with teams and who and there and we let them pitch their games to the whole company and then everybody got to put a stack rank list of which ones they wanted to work on and then every team lead got to put a stack rank list of who they wanted on the team and then we made an excel document actually calculated points for each things and came up with this robot

generated list which was totally not just me filling in slots when no one was looking buddy I mean it was like it really was a we tried to a balance of what who wanted to work on what and who needed who for the project and then the way we would pull some people from here to there and and that's how we picked it for the team to be a good balance between we just try to make sure that each team had what it needed some of the times they had they had a scramble or Brad didn't have a was an animator you didn't have a concept artists didn't have a concept artist but I think Jeff or Randy what some of the guys in your team got a chance to draw something good concentration yeah yeah that was cool that's part of the reason that the original happy song prototype had no environment was I knew I needed a lot of animators and so I was like how about no environments and other people can take the environment artists and I'll take lots of animators and that worked out and there was some things were unfair about that but I it's kind of seem sad draconian but I think I should learn how to fight for resources as part of learning how to run a project but it's a it's a use knowing what your project needs and knowing how to get it on your project that's part of making a game so

that's part of the trial by fire there's a time for one more that's a wave does that mean go away or does that mean oh we're done okay we have to we have to go away so I don't have time to remind you to back our Kickstarter project or the stacking bill won't PC so I won't say that so bye