Designing Shadow Complex

[Music] all right I'm uh I'm gonna get started just come in and sit down I we only have a short time for this talk so got to try and CR cram in as much as we can uh my name is uh Donald mustard and I'm the creative director at chair Entertainment Group this is Jeremy mustard who's the technical director at chair Entertainment Group and today we're going to be talking about designing Shadow complex uh just really quickly uh Shadow complex was was uh released for the Xbox Live arcade this past summer uh it was a uh a very successful game uh by at least our standards of looking at things and uh and we're going to talk a little bit today about just some of the different philosophies that we kind of brought to our game design in trying to make a successful downloadable game uh and we're going to hopefully what we can do is impart some at least a little bit of

knowledge to help you guys making your games we we sure stumbled through a lot of stuff um and we we well we began the process of learning things along the way um now I'm going to need your guys help uh the best the best way that we're going to actually learn something today is If you guys ask good questions so I'm going to Rattle on for a few minutes here but I need you guys to be thinking of what things actually matter to your games and what you're doing doing and uh and please please ask us because I probably won't cover everything that's relevant to you and that's really the whole point of you being here is to actually hopefully get something out of this um so let's get started uh embracing the limitations I think that is the number one key thing that you need to do when you are making a downloadable game um what are some of those limitations for us and this is what we kind of think probably the main limit ation that you're probably hitting

if you are like us if you're a small team if you uh are are making an original game and you're you're really kind of embarking out there on your own so these are what we found were our biggest limitations were genre budget Tech Team and memory so genre genre is one of your limitations because you aren't just competing against other games that are released on the downloadable space or the downloadable consoles you really are competing against Gears of War Mass Effect 2 Uncharted 2 that is your real competition and you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from those kind of games uh and and that is an awesome opportunity it's an amazing opportunity actually it's the coolest thing that's ever happened to our industry I think that you have the opportunity

to orthogonally go away from what the mainstream games are doing or what the big $60 retail games are doing you have the opportunity to in the downloadable space create something completely unique and cool that will be a fun entertaining experience for your consumer okay budget if you have a a $10 million development budget for your live arcade game and a $20 million marketing budget just just leave now we all hate you you know that's that's great um I don't think that that's I don't think that that's reality right reality is you don't really have much of a budget at all you have no marketing you have no PR and so you need to find ways to make that work for you you need to find ways to be unique enough that the media will be intrinsically interested in what you're doing you need to find ways to differentiate yourself and again lots of opportunity there with so much noise

of you know again all these big games you have an opportunity to be unique and special and and push things that way tech tech is something that we're going to talk about a little bit we we debated this uh for a while but we we ultimately came to the conclusion that every minute we would spend writing our own technology would be a minute someone else would spend who used license technology to be focusing on gameplay and so we when we first started Shadow complex we were an independent Studio kind of doing our own thing about halfway through developing Shadow complex we were acquired by epic games so it probably gives you some Clue Into what technology we decided to go with but that really was one of the best decisions that we ever made because that allowed us to focus completely on creating unique cool gameplay instead of riding a renderer or a physics engine the consumer does not care about that

they care about what you're doing cool in your game and then memory at least at the time when we started Shadow complex this was a this was a a pretty big issue uh when we first started Shadow complex we uh were under the impression that our game had to be under 150 megabytes total uh our previous game undertoe was under 50 megabytes and we learned a lot on making that game of how to really really uh again kind of embrace the limitations of how much memory you have and find ways to boil your game down to its Core Essence of fun and we're going to talk a lot about that okay so we came to the conclusion that people don't want a cheap version of their favorite retail game what I mean by Cheap is you know imagine if we went and spent our limited resources making a kind of a hacky crappy version of Gears of War you know why would you want to pay $15 for a crappy version of Gears of War when you can go buy the full retail version and have it be awesome this is something

that people have spent so much time making um and that just doesn't seem like a smart investment uh for us we we' conclude that people want a unique game experience and I think that that's just a pretty obvious statement but sometimes it's hard to forget that when you're thinking oh yeah yeah yeah we're just going to go we're going to take you know the Unreal Engine because we decided to use it and we're going to make you know we're going to make gears and we're going to sell it for $1 no you're not you're not it's not going to happen you you don't have the time you don't have the resources to do it so find something that can be really unique about your game and deliver a unique original game experience I think that people are uh I me there's always going to be room for old ports or remakes of old games but that isn't really really what's going to drive this Market forward or our industry forward we need to be originating and pushing new things forward okay the other thing that we decided was that we had to find what a small game could do that a big retail Game Wouldn't do and so for

us you know we deliberated about this for a long long time and for us what that ultimately meant was we tried to Target an old and abandoned genre uh which to us was kind of this Metroid vinia sidescroller Adventure uh genre that had been abandoned no one was making games in this genre and we said what if we took that genre and we fused that with some of the modern sensibilities that have come out some of you know the modern ideas of of AI and physics and Graphics that would be a really cool combination and guess what nobody's going to do that at the $60 price point no one would do that no one's going to make an XG sidescroller uh in this style so we said we're going to and we're going to do it on this platform if you even wanted to experience that kind of game you needed to have a a Super Nintendo or a Game Boy and or an original PlayStation there was nothing on the 360 even remotely close to this so we found a niche and we

decided to push it all right so let's kind of actually get these all up here so once we determined that we we feel pretty passionately about uh this next stuff that we're going to talk about um because you have a small team you don't have time to write really really lengthy documents the most important thing that you can do excuse me is create gameplay so we found that it was critical for us to quickly quickly plan out what our game was and have big sessions with your with your little team that's the advantage you have of a little team is that you can all gather around the little table and hash it out and you can get a collective understanding quickly of what you're trying to do and instead of then document documenting it in a 50-page design document make a three-page design document the design document for shadow complex was I think it was like five pages right and it had a couple couple

screenshots in it right I mean it was it was it was nothing it was very very boiled down and uh but we quickly quickly focused on getting gameplay up and running when we made undertoe so undertoe was a a 16 player uh multiplayer shooter within 10 days within the first 10 days of development we had the entire game up and running and we were playing multiplayer matches against each other and it was freaking awesome I mean it was really really fun to do the shadow complex within the first few weeks we were in and we were refining gameplay already it was just little cubes and little stuff that we were running around and jumping around and we were trying to focus on our core gameplay Loop um knowing the end from the beginning you must scope your game you do not have the luxury when you're making a game of this size to waste your time on anything uh there might be a few games that this isn't appropriate for like I don't know if you're making Tetris maybe or something like that where where the pacing of your game or

the the the scope of your game isn't isn't as critical but almost every game type uh is pretty reliant on pacing and on timing and how the game flows through from beginning to end um it's just like making a film people if they're making a film don't make a vertical slice of their film they gesture it all in they create an animatic they create storyboards of the entire thing so they know how it flows blows through so we developed a process where we very very quickly rap rapidly prototype our entire game and with Shadow complex that that uh that was a few different things so we had our little you know couple page document uh but what we then did is we went into illustrator and we created the entire game uh in illustrator in about a month and a half period and I'm going to zoom out and show it to you so

this this is Shadow complex there's the whole game that we made and we spent the a lot of time going through and figuring out where everything needed to be and what for us our entire game is is completely dependent on the PowerUp acquisition going from a little guy with a flashlight to by the end of the game you're triple jumping and hook shotting and foaming stuff and so if we put in creating like a nonlinear game we had to know where all those power-ups were going to be and what they would affect so that we could get everything in the right place and so to do this we uh and we designed it all out and then we made these little guides this right here was our core gameplay Loop we said that's how high you can jump that's how high you can double jump that's how high you can triple jump that's the extension of your hook shot and and we started to design out exactly how we wanted things to move and flow and then we would take this little guy and we would play through the game so we would go to the

very start of the game I don't know if if any of you have played it this is where Jason and Claire first dropped down into the cave so we'd go oh yeah that was a cool jump and then we' walk through the game a little bit and we no I'm totally serious and we drop down and be like oh oh see how okay they could still make that jump and get back out of that hole because they could jump that high and they could ledge grab and we'd start to play through and be like oh we want to train them that when they fall down into here that they have to hold down the jump button a little bit to get up to this and so we made that jump height so they wouldn't make it across and we started to just go through and play through the entire game and we had the entire team play testing this map for a few weeks and we would tweak it and tweak it until we thought it was fun now it requires a lot of imagination but you guys are game developers you have imagination you know so it works and it was awesome we learned so much by going through this process and and honestly in the guilty side of this was it was so freaking fun to like make a game on

paper and you're playing through it you're like yeah yeah that's awesome I totally stealth killed that guy you know and like no it was it was cool you know and so this is like this is the funnest game that will never get released right cuz you're going through and you're like oh yeah man and we we sit there in meetings and be like yeah I went through and I like shot that guy in the head and then I jumped up here and then I went back and you know so ridiculous but but uh but it was pretty it was pretty awesome but we learned a lot by going through this process because it really helped us to Define what our core gameplay Loop was once we had this down then can you switch over to the game engine so once we had this down we then quickly quickly went into our editor uh the unreal editor and quickly prototyped out the entire game and what we call bsp so that's just basically this little cubes we went through the the whole game and granted even this like we have a few crates placed or whatever so let me show

you actually on the illustrator map that room so in illustrator this is what this area looked like we initially designed out this thing where we're like oh we want them to kind of learn what wall jumping is going to be so we're going to put these ladders here so they kind of get the idea of going back and forth and we'll have this guy in a ledge and some shootable stuff here and we quickly quickly block that in to bsp like this so same thing I see my little Elevator Shaft I have a guy there some crates and we quickly in about 2 weeks did this for the entire game we just threw it in there and we made the entire game or the entire team play through the the whole game from start to finish and it sucked but it totally taught us where our pacing was because we could go through and be like oh you know what this does feel like the powerups going to be in the right place you know for boss fights we put in cards that said boss fight you know for cinematics we put in story you know I mean we just and it would but we'd Pace it out we could start to see this is where everything is going to happen and that allowed us to very very quickly make really really smart

decisions about what we needed to cut and what we needed to keep um and it also taught us to focus on our core loop our core gameplay Loop was uh exploration punctuated by moments of combat so for us we decided that the players were going to have the most fun when they were exploring this nonlinear World when they were discovering powerups and things like that and everything we decided needed to support that core Fun Loop uh and then we had the idea of combat as contrast to that core Loop it was not it was not the focus of the game um so determining that really really helped us to make again Smart Cuts Like let me how do I um I mean again if you look at the map anyone that's really really familiar with the game which I don't know if any of you are I if you look at this map there are drastic differences between

this and the actual shipped game this whole bottom area is gone that whole flying airship in the background that you were going to get on not in the final game there's all sorts of areas that did because when we initially planned out like oh this will work but when we played it really really quickly after like oh the pacing is wrong this needs to be trimmed this needs to be edited and it helped us to quickly mush the game into something that was really really fun so then we just had this really ugly fun game and we spent the rest of the development layering on polish it was easy after that because all of our hard questions were answered in the first few months of development um oh oops I accidentally closed our slideshow just click on here and say from Cur side all right so once you have that you can start to really really work on stuff our philosophy is that everything that

you have in your game must support your core gameplay Loop um and and really a lot of that was taught to us by making undertoe where with on undertoe we literally had only 50 megabytes for the whole game so we had to look at every single every single thing that was going in the game and say does this sound actually matter does this pixel actually matter does this normal map actually matter and it really I mean we had to look at every single little thing and make these tough choices between should our guy make a sound or should he have a texture map I mean it was literally that that hard right and so it really taught us to say you know we can only have things in here that are critical to the player actually having a good time and we kind of brought that lean mentality into Shadow complex because again we only thought we had 150 only thought we had 150 megabytes so so that gestural process and that kind of mindset of always be cutting uh really kind of helped us to just

streamline streamline stream line down to what actually matters um and that kind of brings us to what I think is one of the most kind of critical things in any game development which is the fully integrated experience how does every feature you have loop back into your core Loop uh so to give you an example of that in in Shadow complex we have uh this device we call the foam gun and what it let you do is shoot these little blobs that could stick onto each other so that you could make geometry to build your own platforms and get around the world when we initially conceived the foam gun that's all it was it was a device to build platforms and navigate because to us exploration is the core Loop that's all that really matters is exploration so building platforms to navigate fun right so we we focused on that but as we got into development we said no everything in the world needs to work together because what happens if the

player wants to stick some foam and then throw a grenade into it or stick some foam and then hook shot into it or or all sorts of other different things that they would try to do and we found that the more that we integrated every feature into each other the more emergent our game became and the more fun our game became and this is something that we discovered I I think a little a little too late so like at our game you can you can you can build foam things you can stick grenade into it it'll make a bigger explosion that's awesome um you can but you can't like if you build some foam and you try and hook shot into it I don't I think it just bounces off I wish we would have made the hook shot work with it you know I wish we would have really really push to have everything be fully fully integrated um and the more that we pushed that the more that we found again that just things were cleaner things were more exciting and I think that's something that you guys should think about in your is how how can jumping be

more integrated into my world again in our game we had the jump mechanic that was our most basic mechanic was jumping and grabbing um but as we started to kind of develop this integrated mindset we said there's got to be this just seems obvious like there need to be a reason to have combat with jumping so we put in a ground pound you know that you can jump up and hit the attack button you slam down on the ground and hit guys and to us that was just start started to be an extension of this idea of the fully integrated experience so we don't have a ton of time and I'm so sorry there's a billion things I would love to say that we don't have time for um but this would be the biggest advice or the biggest stuff that we learned was don't try and compete with the retail games offer something unique and original and understand that you actually are competing with them but that's how you compete with them is to do something that's orthogonal and different than than what they're doing and thoughtful planning and early

prototyping are absolutely essential to good pacing we think that um the the the one the main thing that we did right with Shadow complex was was do this because it allowed us to solidify the entire game experience before we'd invested too heavily in any one area it really really helped us to focus on the right right things to polish um and then just you know the final advice of every bit of effort now yields dividend later I mean so push just push to your game playable I promise you that if you can kind of break from the mentality of drooling down and polishing too fast that you will you will find that you're freed up to really see much more clearly where you need to focus your time and efforts because again when you have a small team no budget and all the constraints that you have you must must make smart decisions and uh that's that's what we have found is the best way to do that so moving forward

um there's so much that we learn on Shadow complex we definitely don't know what we're doing um you know we're just we're just trying to make our best decisions as we go along um we we've started to really uh push this philosophy into our next project and now now it's kind of a little different because we're really focusing on expanding and growing our team so we're going from a team of what shadow complex was made with n people so we had six artists and three programmers and we're we're now pushing a little a little bit in a different direction and growing and we're trying to apply the same principle to what we're doing and we're finding all sorts of new things but I'm telling you that this works and uh and uh and that's about all I have to say so uh questions please please let us know how we can help what questions do you guys have there we have about uh two minutes for questions but there's

not another thing in here for half an hour so I'll answer questions until they shut off my mic so uh once you had the bsp like layout after your paper file how do you make changes was that did the bsp layout kind of become your like existing world map uh your mic's cutting out what what did you say it l that bsp file kind of become your working like map of the game it did yeah so once so actually what we did is the bsp once we had that all blocked in and kind of refined that actually became all of our Collision geometry for the entire game we took the whole bsp map converted it to Collision and then I don't know if we have I'll just show you really fast so like this level in its end State turned into this right so this is what it starts to look like when it was actually finished and you can see that those little blocking volumes that used to be the bsp and that got changed into stuff and we you know we refined that gameplay and kind of moved everything around so yeah it was perfect hi uh nice

and quick uh uh six three code how long would you say till you got to like Alpha Beta so we so undertale came out in November of 2007 uh we had that little illustrator map at that point and our Alpha our Alpha for us meant completely not just the bsp playable but every boss was in every cinematic was in we could truly see everything and that was um about 10 months later that next October November is when we were there um how did the the change from the 150 megabyte limit to whatever limit it is now how did that affect your design and development process like did it occur early enough that it didn't really matter or really what it let us do was so on undertoe what our plan was we still wanted all the content so on you know we were just planning on really really really compressing the audio so Shadow complex was 834 megabytes which is a lot bigger than 50

but help me out with 450 megab of that was audio and we localized full audio in nine languages so so just removing that the game was only you know 400 me and so we were we just allowed our audio not to be so compressed but audio and textures that's the big stuff hey uh making games for xbla we've kind of discovered that the trial portion like that experience is really really important yes was there anything surprising you guys learned trying to make that as good as possible uh yeah no you're right I I probably should have touched on that and I apologize the demo is critical um because you are you you have no choice in giving away a portion of your game for free so that really is your marketing your marketing is your demo and we uh on undertoe we felt like we did not spend enough time focusing on our on our demo not Shadow complex we spent a ton of time focusing on the first five seconds of game play the first 30 seconds of game play the first

five minutes of game play the first 20 minutes of game play which was the demo and then the first 90 minutes of game play and we spent a lot of time again think I mean for shadow complex we considered the first 5 Seconds of game play our title screen and so we purposely put a lot of really pretty graphics on our title screen so the first thing you saw was oo pretty game I've never seen this on live arcade before and so we considered that the first interaction with the player and I do it's it's critical that you focus on that and what we found was you have to give the players a really really good time but you got to leave them really really hanging so the best thing you can do is get them and we did lots of play testing to try and get this get them right to the moment where they're like this is awesome this is awesome then take it away no that's what you have to do because if they're satisfied at all then they're satisfied they're like ah that was cool but it's not as good as oh oh it's going to be so awesome no buy uh okay okay I'll buy it so you want to kind of create cre that feeling of I

must have more and I don't know how successfully did that with Shadow Comics but we have a pretty high conversion rate so but even moving forward we have all sorts of ideas for next kind of titles and how we can make that an even more refined process of getting people uh appropriately titilated right I mean okay one more question yeah hi I was just wondering within your marketing plan um what are the things that you did to make your game unique and stand out sorry what uh Within your marketing plan what are the things you guys did to make your game stand out and really unique uh so we think that some of the key things were we took this old genre that we thought was beloved and luckily we guessed right that people actually wanted games in that genre so a lot of people instantly when they heard we were making that kind of a game that was a big that was a big draw but we also knew the drawback of that was if we were going to compete with these old games that are beloved we our game had to really really measure up so if if you're going to if you're going to go that far and be that bold you have to like you

have to deliver or else you're screwed right and so um but so I think uh an an unused genre was a big deal um we really really thought that uh graphically we had something that we could say there just hadn't been a lot of games I mean we don't have the best graphics ever I mean it's whatever it's fine you know but in the space there were not other games that looked like this at the time and so we thought that that would be a big Advantage um and then that was all this window dressing to get people to play the game because once we could get the media playing the game uh we knew that we had a fun fun core game and that as they played the game they would start to evangelize it for us so that was that was the key oh and okay one last thing I'm going to probably get in trouble for saying this cuz it's such an awesome secret but uh this is the first game we launched with Twitter and one advantage that you guys have that retail games don't is your game is downloadable so a few days before Shadow Comics came out

we got codes that we were supposed to give to the media to review and we gave them codes to review but we also a few days before started leaking codes out onto Twitter and so we had people a few random just customers playing the game before it actually shipped and we exploded on Twitter we were like the number three thing on Twitter behind like Miley Cyrus and and like Britney Spears crotch for like for like for like 2 weeks and that was huge because so many people are out there talking about oh my gosh Shadow complex I'm playing it it's awesome it's so fun because people want free stuff and you have the ability to give your game away in a way that retail can't do so try and think of ways to use viral marketing to your advantage okay thanks guys sorry there