Developing 'Terra Nil': A Strategy Game About Nature, Not Expansion

[Music] welcome everyone to developing Teran a strategy game about nature not expansion um before we get started just some introductions um my name is Sam Alfred I'm the lead designer programmer on terel um being a programmer this is probably more people than I talk to in a normal year so I uh I'm a bit nervous but I think it'll be okay I I work at a studio called free lives of dubious fame um these are some of our other titles and uh we uh we all live and work in the City of Cape Town in South Africa and uh as I'll explain where Teran null was uh conceived and developed ended up being quite important to its design

and I just want to say that although I'm the one here giving the talk uh terano was developed by an amazing team of incredible people um and I uh I just drew the Short Straw uh so hopefully uh most of you have at least seen some footage of tanel or uh it was supposed to be out by now uh but uh game development being what it is it's actually only coming out in six days so Teran is a a hybrid strategy puzzle relaxation game where you're taking uh A Wasteland to this um and in order to do that you're using the the normal verbs of the city Builder genre you're constructing buildings you're constructing machines uh but there are some differences notably and kind of what this talk is mostly about uh Teran does

not contain any of these things um it's generally a Mainstay of the strategy genre that uh exploitation of resources is just a core part of of the game and that you know you need to chop down forests so you can build your houses or mine rocks to build up your Castle um teral doesn't have any of that um it also has no land colonization which is another common common main stay of the genre um and it's not a game about unfed expansion it's a it's a very finite game where once you completely restore an ecosystem you move on it's not a game you can play Forever um this is not to say these are inherently bad or wrong but that's not the kind of game we wanted to make just to go through the structure before we begin what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be telling the story of The Game's development and uh although presenting it in retrospect a lot seems obvious uh the process was not

always obvious and at the risk of making a terrible pun a lot of it grew organically uh I'll be talking about what worked and what didn't um in some of the lessons and in order to illustrate this I'll I'll go through some of the the pillars of our design so let's start at the beginning Teran started at ludum um I can't say ludum with a straight face um so I say ludum D um and the the theme of that jam was a start with nothing uh this was original prototype was a very literal interpretation of the theme um there's a piece of wasteland with nothing on it and at the time I was playing a lot of Islanders um which if you haven't

played it you really should it's this incredible minimalist City Builder um but it's also really relaxing and uh doesn't have a lot of time pressure it's also not simulated um so wanted to make something with these City Builder style mechanics uh but about nature uh and instead of building a city or a factory you were building an ecosystem so just a just a warning I'm about to show something really gross this was the uh this was the original plan um it in my defense it was a terrible camera it was uh it was 3:00 a.m. local time I'd been jamming for 48 hours and uh I never thought I'd have to show to GDC I mostly just didn't want to lose it if I needed the Whiteboard the next day um and it is illegible so I will explain

it but before that um this was the result of the the 48 hour Jam um had six buildings and you would build them and your goal was to cover 50% of the landscape in Greenery and this is how it worked so the beginning of of a level there were some rocks scattered around the map and uh on those rocks you could build wind turbines which would provide Power and you could only con struct turbines on rocks power is important because it Powers toxin scrubbers toxin scrubbers would clean the Wasteland and create fertile soil which was a necessary step before creating green houses which would then allow Greenery to grow on the fertile soil uh The Greenery was both the thing that earned the currency and the goal of winning the game so you were trying to cover 50% of the map in Greenery um but you also using the currency to construct more

buildings and I'll talk a little bit more on the currency later but there weren't enough rocks on the map to completely reach the goal so you needed a way to create more rocks uh and to do that um was rather complicated process of constructing an excavator which would create straight River beds uh and sometimes you would have to create more than one and ended up being this interesting spatial tety thing and then those r beds could be filled with water using a water pump uh and uh the water would uh create Greenery on the river banks and also was used to power calcifiers which uh are very handwavy game magic ways of turning plants into rocks and then you could build more turbines on the rocks and so in this way the rivers become like the vein

of your operation you have to get water where you need power so you can construct uh turbines and so on um and this these were the results of that jam um it did pretty well uh and uh for us anyway uh at our studio when when a Jam game does really well Lo them there uh we we generally think of warrants further exploration it's it's not necessarily a shoe in for success but it definitely means that we should we should be looking at it further but I want to draw your attention to a couple of things here um most notably the the graphics result and so this original 48h hour prototype was a full of program art uh and I don't really think it deserved first in graphics and so um I have a theory about why it got that and that the idea is that players would just enjoying bringing life back to the

Barren ecos Barren Wasteland um as players really like coloring in books it play is like turning something dirty into something clean you just have to look at something like power wash simulator to see this happen um and this can also be seen in the mood score a little bit uh but so it was quite promising we decided to develop it a bit further um this was this was Teran then it was a a tiny sapling and uh yes the guy talking about the tree game is going to Sho Hornet tree metaphor into his talk it's a building game it's about nature and we needed to figure out how to add to it um the core Loop was quite strong it was mechanically sound people were enjoying it and attempts to make it longer or add Su Loops that went back into the C Loop didn't really work we

tried some stuff with like growing grass on top of buildings but none of that was really working and anyway all of that ignored what people really liked about the game which was the satisfaction of bringing life back to the Wasteland So to that effect we decided okay what if we double down on the nature aspect and uh in order to do so there are sort of three things we need to consider um Nature's not it's varied and diverse um it's full of cycles and South Africa where we come from has this incredible natural heritage this is a photograph from where we live uh this is like I don't know 30 minutes hike out of the city um so on the first point um the original prototype had representations of water soil and Greenery and uh compare that to

the the complexity and diversity of Flora in the world to say nothing of animal and fora animals and forer um you know you have rivers with forests growing alongside them which are full of biodiversity wetlands are some of the most complex and important ecosystems on the planet and even deserts are are full of life that is specifically evolved to live there and so we were never going to capture all of the nuance and all of the complexity of the natural world in in a video game but we could do better than just Greenery so biodiversity then would be the the next goal that we wanted our players to achieve and this was kind of the first big lesson for us um it's this idea that your players will care about whatever metrics you decide to track that is we make biodivers this goal uh of completing a level of

Teran and then players will begin to care about it no one at any point ever questioned why you used green money to build buildings even though it made no sense you as a designer have the tools to tell your players what to care about so if you want to make players care about something other than gold or population or health points or territory ownership all you got to do is you got to build it into the way to win your game on the second and third points I uh need to take a brief biology tangent and talk about a floral Kingdom of wild flowers that exists around Cape Town where we're from called Fain boss um it's one of the one of the biggest biodiversity hotspots in the world and I want to talk about the

protea flow um specifically which is the flower on the left uh Proto flow is the national flower of South Africa and it is pyrophytic which means that it requires fire to germinate and Proto flowers are super interesting where after they're pollinated they will actually close their petals and wait sometimes for years to be burned before opening and releasing their seeds and the reason they do this is so that that all the grasses and the and the shrub uh beneath them is burned away and gives the seeds a better chance with less competition to grow into new plants and also the ash is nutritious and over the course of development I would go on to discover that or we would go on to discover that this kind of process of of burning um whether it's human initiated or natural actually exists in many ecosystems all over the world but this was our example in South Africa so we found ourselves in a

position where we want to make biodiversity a core part of the game we can't break the existing Loop and we have this great example of life and death on our doorstep and so we created another loop the thing that you do after the initial Reclamation phase so once you've reached a certain density of greenery and water you need to begin to diversify and improve the biodiversity of the landscape so to do that the uh the map would start with a couple of dead trees um and on those trees you would construct beehives um and those beehives would create Fame boss from the flowers uh sorry from the grasslands around them um you could use a solar amplifier which was a unnecessarily complex way of starting a fire to then create a controlled burn

which would result in Ash and building husks you could then construct Auber on the building husks which would grow forests from the nutritious Ash and then those forests were full of trees that you could use to build more beehives um so that's how that Loop worked at the same time we were specializing the green houses into uh hydroniums uh which could create Wetlands um hydroniums could only be placed on lowly ground near to rivers and they would create they would create wetlands and the other one is a biodome and that was the opposite it would create arid plants but it needed to be in a dry Place far from water and all of these things together became the goal of the the second phase of of of a level of panol you needed to improve the biodiversity and this had some significant implications for the design um most

notably it became a game about balance which was sort of hand inand with the idea of it being about nature because Nature's not about infinite growth it's it's ecosystems naturally find an equilibrium and balance and so the game is about balance if you use tiles for a wetland implicitly you cannot grow FB there or your Forest if you if there's too much Forest that's almost as bad as having not enough um hand in hand with that is the idea that the game is finite uh to this day we still receive requests from players to expand the map to be able to buy more territory and that would that's completely contrary to the design of the game because if you run out of if you run out of land because you you haven't created a good balance then you kind of ignored what the game is trying to tell you to do and if we let you then just buy more land so you could create the wetlands you missed out on kind of

invalidates the philosophy so this would become our Core Design pillar that we are not doing a whole lot of the things that are normally done in strategy games so we need we need an alternative we need a place to look um and we would turn to nature for inspiration over the coming months and years this is what a a level of panol might have looked like uh at that point and uh it looks good you got your your Wetland and your Fain boss and your forests but um there was a looming problem here and you get to see my fantastic editing skills copy paste um this might have been the result if we just added another layer of buildings the thing about making game where you take actions by building

things is building things is your main verb so we needed to to keep building the same game we need to keep the verb the same and you need to keep building but if you just kept building then you would end up with something like this where it's beginning to resemble a city or a factory or something like that when really we want a place to be focusing on the nature so we needed to keep the verbs the same but we needed to not add more buildings so the kind of flash of inspiration came in the fact that teran's never had a cell button a teran's never had a cell button because like uh like Islanders it's an order of operations puzzle you have to build the toxin scrubbers before the the green houses otherwise it doesn't work um it's not simulated per se that's why I call it sort of a half strategy half hybrid uh puzzle game um but if we

created buildings that could remove buildings then we would be keeping the verbs the same but also not adding more buildings to the landscape and then once we made that connection recycling became a natural extension of that idea where do all the where does all the stuff go once you remove it so the Final Phase of a level in terel is recycling phase you would uh recycle use these recycling beacons or recycl silos um to recycle all of these buildings and then you would use um you would use a loading port and um wle to uh to ship them to a rocket Silo where they would get recycled into a rocket of recycled parts and then you would blast off and leave the landscape behind and it wasn't as mechanically deep as the previous two stages and it

was a little bit more of a Victory lap but that didn't really matter and it didn't really matter that there were no buildings left because you ended up with something like this and that was that was great players loved that you got to leave a paradise behind um there's another mechanic involving weather that I haven't spoken about yet but more on that later so we add recycling to our uh mechanics pillar and um this was the result this at this stage terano was still a free prototype on H iio that graph at the bottom is daily downloads um and uh the first Spike you see in January 2021 was the um was the biodiversity update and then the second Spike around June is is the

recycling update and it was really resonating with people they were making YouTube videos I'm getting excited about it um still a free prototype but watching people play watching YouTubers listening reading comments we realized that what really resonated with people is the overall experience it's the fantasy of cleaning up the Wasteland the puzzle mechanics were good they were fine but without the experience they wouldn't been sufficient I don't think anyone would have been playing the game if not for the feelings they were getting uh with the experience of cleaning up and so all of the pillars then became in support of this idea this experience of restoring and healing uh A Wasteland uh right so the game was promising it uh it

warranted progressing beyond the Prototype phase um so we decided to uh adopt it as a real game rather than just a free free prototype um as I've said we we believe that uh it was the experience of playing tanol that was resonating with players but we had these these theories and we wanted to answer the questions um we also had a large amount of te that because uh we building from the game Jam code base which is never ever a good idea um and so naturally uh we did what the most logical thing to do when you have a really promising game is we chucked it all out the window and started from scratch um Central to the experience of restoring and um this experience of restoration was

not just the design though uh just want to make the point and this is a design talk so I won't dwell on this for long um but the other disciplines were at least as important as the design and the mechanics um at this stage the the design was ahead sort of because we knew what we needed to rebuild but we were trying to figure out what a better art Direction was we were trying to figure out the music and the sound design um and yeah this was the most important lesson really that we learned making [Laughter] Teran so um Talk a bit about Music and Sound quickly um guy on the uh left there uh his name is maidan he's our composer he's not actually a free lives employee um we used his free music in the

Prototype and it was so good that everyone kept asking us for the OST so we decided you know we got to have this guy um he had this uh incredible natural piano uh that evoked wonderful emotion and at the same time we were working on a parallel Ambience prototype which is that picture on the right there um where and this made it into the final game the cursor in teral acts like a microphone where there's spatial audio based on the uh the current vegetation around your mouse cursor but also the buildings so that moving your mouse cursor from Ocean to beach to Wetland to Forest you'll hear something different every time and so we we have this like physical instrument and physical sound coming into the game at the same time we were pursuing uh some art experiments

and um it was beautiful game about nature so we were like everyone loves gibli we love gibli let's make it look like gibli and these are some of those early experiments um the one on the left there you can see is very sort of anime inspired uh and that had a big problem though because with that kind of art Direction the the backgrounds fade back and the foreground elements and the the important elements that the player plays with are generally cell shaded and they're much more noticeable and that kind of the opposite of what we wanted for tanol is that the buildings ended up dominating when we wanted the nature to be at front and center and then on the right there you can see an early 3D prototype um and that was that was cool that was gave us a lot of confidence in the idea of moving away from Pixel art because uh pixel art inherently because of its

because of its nature it's all Jagged edges and um this gave us softer shadows and softer curves everywhere and uh in that one nature was balanced much better with the buildings so these are some more of the odd experiments um and on the right hand side was a diarama we created to kind of test the waters of the new art style against our community and unfortunately or perhaps fortunately um it got mixed responses people weren't so fond of it um and part of that was they missed the iconic wind turbines and the way we understood that was here's this real world anchor that it's a fantasy but there's this real world anchor that allows people to understand and relate

to what's happening in the game and I also want to draw your attention to the uh the bottom left of that image where see some conveyor belts and concrete walls overgrown with with Greenery um and we were busy trying to figure out the story of the world and and what had happened and was it important and what we decided was not a game about everything that had gone wrong in the world and hitting our players over the head with oh industry has ruined the planet and now it's up to you to fix it was kind of contrary to the philosophy and the feeling we were going for um what had happened to the world was less important than what the player was going to be able to achieve and so in the end we didn't have any of that stuff uh we just had these these these Barren wastelands around the same time time this was when most of the the global

lockdowns were happening um we were beginning to see reports out of like New Delhi that they could see mountains that had not been visible for 50 years and um we read this this blog post by uh someone from Manila who' played tanol and was arguing that tanel worked and this being the pixelart version of tanel because uh embraced the fact that it's not the responsibility of individuals to restore the problems of industry it's the responsibility of Industry to restore the problem of industry and Industrial problems require industrial size Solutions and that really sort of made us think about the fact that we had these dinky gibly styled windmills and things when actually we needed to be embracing the fact that this is a hard problem and presenting it as needing sophisticated

tools and resources was much better um the other thing that was happening was we were realizing this game this game is this game is a conduit for climate positivity people playing the game have often told us that it helps ease their climate anxiety it helps uh them feel agency that they can do something about the climate crisis even though it's a fantasy and it's it's made up um it gives you the the idea that hey maybe we can do something about this and so those things go go hand inand with each other and so this is sort of where we settled uh in terms of art Direction it ended up being more industrial um and more more paintly um less obviously gibly influenced um and more focus on uh on the nature and we were beginning to see that there was a third pillar to our design

uh which was the idea of emotion in design and that um this wasn't necessarily something we started set out to it's not necessarily something we set out to do but realizing that the emotional aspect of the game was really important at least as important as the mechanics meant that it became the third pillar of our design and just because the design was mostly just copying what the Prototype had already done doesn't mean there wasn't some Innovation also happening in Design Land we added a rain mechanic where initially this was me this was mechanically motivated uh because it's a it's a strategy game and there's a lot of Min maxing you want to uh you want to make sure that that you res you get the best

bang for buck you uh you don't spend your resources restoring something um a small piece of wasteland um and so what ended up happening is by towards the end of a level players would have these horrible little holes in their landscape where there was still Wasteland and so we created a a rain mechanic and a climate mechanic where once you restored the local uh weather system it would start raining and uh and then it would fill in gaps um and as I say it started as a mechanical thing but it end up being unexpectedly emotional um was it was almost like the game was saying to players you've done enough nature will take it from here and this was a little bit of a revelation that the the design could also support moments of Beauty and the Fe didn't all have to be mechanical in

nature so as I was saying we we restarted the uh we restarted the game and uh we put it out on Steam nextfest um and it blew up it was way way more had way more traction than any of us expected um when we put out the announce trailer um all of us including our Publishers at Devol were like what we got in touch with with Netflix and uh we started talking to them about or they got in touch with us actually um and they started talking to us about about doing a mobile version um and watching people play the demo this steam xest demo had about 100,000 plays in a week um people were talking about the emotions

and the feelings and not the mechanics so I want to read out one of these um it was lovely to see the barren Wasteland start to come back to life as I tended to the soil and the climate then a storm rolled in and it started to rain and I was a little overcome with emotion we started wanting to make a strategy game this was not the direction that we originally intended going but we ended up you know trying to listen to what people were really enjoying and so in order to respond to the uh overwhelmingly much larger response than we anticipated we need we decided we needed to go back to the drawing board and make the game a bit broader and so like all games when you need more content we added an ice

level um in our case um we looked at the to go back to this idea of looking at nature for inspiration we looked at the copen Giga climate classification system uh which is the classification system of the five broad categories and about 16 sub categories of biomes on Earth and we thought wouldn't it be cool if we can make one level for each broad category um and those being the uh temperate uh tropical polar continental and arid and you only see three here because I've showed you one already and the fifth one was cut because Game Dev um and in the end we decided we were only going to have one level per region

which was a difficult decision to make and I'm not still not sure it was the right one um we'll find out in six days um but the idea there is people loved the nature aspect um people loved seeing new environments um and so we didn't want to overstay our welcome anywhere and and make multiple multiple levels um in one region um because each region had brand new mechanics brand new brand new biomes brand new animal species brand new buildings um and so I want to give you some examples of other ways we kind of Follow The Guiding star of using nature as inspiration when we were're expanding the content so the first is um to do with coral restoration projects um this is a real life conservation technique um where I'm sure

many of you know that coral reefs all over the world are dying uh due to increases in uh sea sea water temperature and um there's Coral bleaching due to a cerification and in the restoration of coral reefs what um what conservationists often do is they will create these like pools of sea water on land um with with steel frames immersed in the water and for some reason that maybe someone who knows the stuff better than I do could tell you Carl really likes growing on steel um and in some places they even like sync Old World War I battleships to create artificial reefs as a result um but using these steel frames you can take an existing coral a piece of live existing coral and through a process called micr fracturing you can spread it out and then make it adhere to the frame and this increases the surface area of

the coral and allows it to grow a lot faster and then once it's matur that entire frame can be dropped in the ocean and over time the coral will just grow over the original frame and so the way we codified this in a video game is we have this Coral lab um which is built is built on top of a a greenhouse um it's part of our Phase 2 um in the tropical region um and what you do is there's a monoral system in the tropical level that you then use to transport this into the ocean um on the top right you can see um that was our geothermal power plant and yes I'm aware that geothermal power plants aren't really built on lava Fields but it was too good an image not to include um we wanted to have other kinds of renewable energy in the game and

geothermal power presented this interesting uh scenario where lava kind of behaves like water in the game but it's also a lot more tricky um and uh can cause Ash and fire and there's interesting mechanics around that and the third example at the bottom is uh is kelp forest and um this we also Drew inspiration from real life conservation techniques that um kelp forests often lose their habitats to purple sea urchins uh kelp needs to grow on a rock um and purple sea urchins also grow on the same rocks and the thing about uh the purple sea urchins is they're a lot more aggressive and they spread a lot faster than kelp forests do and in many places um including off the coast of California there used to be populations of sea Arters who

naturally eat purple sea urchins keeping those populations in check and meaning that kelp forest can continue to grow and then in turn the sea ARS live in the kelp forest provides protection from predators Etc um so in Teran we have kelp forests that you then cre sea ARS to live in the kelp forests and this is just a couple of other examples of looking at the natural world conservation techniques for inspiration of mechanics so we add Regional diversity to the mechanic side um yeah read ice level I guess um but I do want to talk a little bit about what didn't work because it wasn't all smooth sailing um this was our most developed thing that we had to check out uh this

was an attempt to create a Loadout system um and a meta game uh I feel like it's the purview of every strategy game designer ever that game would be improved with a mat game but anyway um Loadout didn't work uh and there there are sort of three reasons why I think it didn't work um the first is that um loadouts work really well when you have lots of different things that do the same thing differently I.E you have lots of towers they all deal damage to creeps but in different ways whereas in terano you have lots of different things that do different things differently so didn't really make sense when everything was so specifically localized to give players the uh the option to choose what they wanted because they would always just choose the same stuff

um two it was contrary to uh what was making the game good and what people were enjoying about the game I don't think I ever saw a comment or a tweet that said geez do you know what this game could need a a meta game yeah um and uh and three uh we had no time we had a we had a quite a stringently uh stringent externally imposed deadline and um deadlines have a way of sharpening your priorities and as such this just kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list and it kept getting smaller and smaller and eventually we uh we decided just to do a level select thing instead but there were some mechanics that worked just about well enough that you know they're still a bit icky but whatever um this is our first powers and then abilities iteration um we realized

quite late in development that we had to add a second verb to the game that as wonderful and elegant as it would have been to only have the one verb of building buildings to influence the game State um we needed some buildings to be able to do a second action um and it felt ugly uh it felt like at the end of the game there were only handful of buildings that have this mechanic uh but it was kind of necessary and um in the end mechanics just needed to be good enough to support the experience so with the experience being the most important thing we uh you know put the bullet and made something a bit ugly this is our appreciate mode this was added right right right at the end of development and uh what happens here

is once you finish a level you get the opp opportunity to appreciate it and this is both to appreciate nature but also to uh appreciate your hard work and it has these closeups and these far outs and um and we we never would have bothered with a feature like this if if we weren't listening to the game because it's not gameplay mechanic it's it's it's a feature to allow people to enjoy more what they're already enjoying um so it's like this slow nature documentary style of thing so that would be the uh the final point on our emotional pillows this idea of relaxation and appreciation uh to appreciate what you have done but on the flip side it was really important for the

game to be a bit challenging that you're restoring a Barren Wasteland you're trying to bring life back to a place where life hasn't lived for I don't know how long uh if it didn't feel difficult it wouldn't feel earned if we just gave players a paintbrush and said you can paint whatever you want you can just place these flowers over here wouldn't have had the same emotional resonance so this balance between the relaxing elements and the challenge elements of tanol actually became one of the most difficult parts of the design and balancing those things against each other uh yeah I I hope we got it right um so this is the uh the final picture of the design um we have the mechanics on the left nature in the middle and emotions on the

right so to sum up these are the main takeaways for us genre rules exist for a reason if you're going to decide to not follow the established rules of a genre you better have something to replace them because even though we had this idea of following nature and looking to nature for inspiration to replace what we were losing from ignoring all the normal rules of strategy games often times we just felt like we were completely without a Rudder we didn't know what to do we're just trying to figure it out so even then they're there for a reason and you need to have a really good reason to ignore them and if you do you need to find something to replace them um you have you could and we have

probably alienated quite a lot of the strategy game audience as a result and people who like playing uh games where you build the same city for many hundreds of hours will probably well I don't know maybe they'll like tanel but it's very different to what they might expect um but hopefully by not adhering too closely to the rules of the genre we can also begin to cultivate a new audience and finally and I've been saying this throughout the talk everything in the game should be in service of the experience nothing is above the experience whether that be mechanics and design or out direction or audio more uh more lessons as I said in the beginning players care about the resources you track if if you tell them something is important they will care about it

there's no reason you have to have population as the resource you track you can have a different resource you track and players will care about it players like coloring in books uh they like filling in gaps they're like making things dirty clean they like making things Dead Alive and finally suboptimal design like our ability system which still feels pretty dirty to me is okay if it supports the experience because nothing is above the experience it's okay to make those concessions and I'm slightly short um on time but that is what I have for [Applause] you thank you for an amazing presentation this is eye opening like

insanely smart with the mouse cursor like tracking the sounds my mind is blown I have a question that maybe goes a little bit beyond your talk but I think it's also quite fitting to your lessons do you think in order to be able to pull this off in a real world we need to change the currency that we're [Laughter] tracking and so you asked uh if we we want to pull this off in the real world we have to change the currency we're tracking yes thank you uh so I have a less profound question thank you again for your talk um I can't believe I haven't heard of this game until today because I am currently in still very game Jam ruter lless level prototyping stages of a similar idea where instead of starting with a city Builder and turning it into a nature game I'm starting with Minecraft and turning it into a nature game right and I'm encountering a lot of these same problems that you've been saying about feeling rudderless and feeling like

there's a lot of discussion to be had about like avoiding the comfortable mechanics of your genre and like how much do you have to concede to the idea of like you're still building buildings but they're in the service of this larger goal yes and I guess my question is sort of how do you navigate that internal or social um experience of decid in when to concede to comfortable game mechanics and when you really want to force the experience and what is too comfortable and what is too far in the other direction right right so you're you're basically asking how to how to find the line between what what what genre Norms do you accept and what do you not uh do I put a furnace in my game is of the summary of my question right do you put a furnace in your game well our feeling anyway is that you can't change everything right um if you if you

want to uh The Innovation happens when when there is some familiarity for people to to latch on to but then once you have that familiarity you can then to begin to challenge things um so do you put a furnace in your game I'll have to maybe think about that I uh I would say that pick a pillar pick whether it's like controls mechanics whatever and make that familiar and then try change something else but also what we discovered with Teran is we did a lot of testing it in the real world um we when we had it on hi it was free and uh we we just saw what people were enjoying um so that also is a valuable way of of gaining more data thank you hi thanks so much it was a really interesting talk and I'm so excited to play the final build of the game uh I

wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your process of translating Research into mechanics I was really intrigued by some of the little like scientific details that you were talking about and I'm curious like how you came upon those and how you like worked with that data I guess in conversation with your design process sure sure so um in order to translate some real world techniques into mechanics we we generally as I said we started with wanting a multiple regions to the game and what we would do is when we when we go to a new region we would try and do some research about what grows there what lives there um is there anything weird and interesting and unique about it is there is there some weird process we've never heard of that we can then uh turn into a mechanic um and and in some cases that there was and in other cases we had to come up with stuff but um it

was mainly just because we had this idea of we want to try and represent the real world we could just look and research that particular like region and then see what we could find yeah that's really interesting thank you cool anyone else oh well thank [Applause] [Music] you