Dream Daddy: How Game Grumps Created Player Inclusivity and You Can Too

hi everyone thank you for coming to my talk my name is Tyler and this is a dream daddy how we created player inclusivity and you can too this is the first talk I've given in about 10 years so come on this journey with me [Music] is anyone else really nervous this is just a very nope uh-huh so here's me I'm Tyler Jay Hutchison I work for a company called game grumps you might know them and I was the director and lead developer of a video game called dream daddy hey dad dating simulator for those

of you who aren't aware of what dream daddy is I feel like some of you might know since you came to this talk and it's on the it's in front of the door but for those of you who don't know what dream daddy a dream daddy is it was a very successful game that came out on Steam this summer in dream daddy you play as a dad whose goal is to meet and romance the dad of his dreams it's a a dad dating simulator so this talk how we created player inclusivity and you can too it's kind of important for a game that's a dating simulator but man dating other men and you might expect the next slide to answer a very important question for you this is an advocacy talk after all so you might expect me to say why why should you care

about this talk why should you care about player inclusivity well it's 2018 I'm not going to answer this question for you it's kind of already been answered by numerous other people so I'm going to draw your attention to these talks which you can watch on the GDC vault most of them are between 30 to 60 minutes so if you bring them up on your phone right now and watch it at 60 times speed we can all get done with them within about a minute are you okay so I think we're probably all on the same page now we agree that like player inclusivity is really important to have in your games and it probably makes for better games and no it definitely makes you're better games not probably what's wrong with me so you also might be coming to this talk hoping and expecting me to be an expert to tell

you how to make your game diverse and to what to strive for how to make a really excellent diverse game you might even expect that this talk will be killed my joke comprehensive it's not player inclusivity and diversity is a ginormous topic there's so much to cover and I could not possibly hope to cover it in a 30-minute talk if you want a longer version and probably a better version of this talk that's just all more encompassing and expensive I highly recommend you check out this talk by Meg giant ten ways to make your game more diverse it's very broad and it is also very specific at the same time and it's just a great resource please check it out also it features pictures of baby sloths and puppies so and now my talk

also features pictures of baby sloths and puppies okay so this isn't the be-all-end-all talk on player inclusivity I'm not an expert I in case you haven't noticed I'm like a straight sis white dude I probably have not the like best person to be talking about this but Here I am so is this talk about well dream daddy is a really cool game that had a lot of big dreams we knew we were kind of doing something really cool and that had not been explored and we knew we wanted diversity and the inclusivity as a part of our game we felt it was pretty important but we had a short timeline to make the game and we had a small budget so a lot of these big dreams and cool ideas we had were totally out of scope if we wanted

to accomplish these things we had to find a way to make them work within our means so what we had to do was figure out a way to add as much inclusivity and diversity and fun the primary thing we really want to make it's a fun game with minimal scope increase if you're a developer you are probably familiar with the term scope which is how much stuff are you gonna add to your game or how much stuff are you gonna add to a project we needed to find that balance of scope between budget and time so we needed minimal scope increases you could say we needed no scope increases hi I'm Tyler did I mention I worked on a game filled with dad jokes and bad puns I apologize for that so the title of this talk how we created player inclusivity and you can too might better be

summarized as how we create a player inclusivity while still being mindful of our budget and our timeline and it made our game better like just overall pretty cool so before we begin there's a few exceptions I would like to cover that your results may vary [Laughter] so some exceptions dream daddy is not a perfect game I mean like I think we did a really great job on it but it's not the be-all end-all for player inclusivity and diversity again these are really diverse topics and there's a a lot of different ways you can approach this but I think we did some pretty cool stuff that's worth talking about dream daddy is a small game which allowed us to kind of experiment and do things that you might not see in a very large game so as a result some of these some of the

things we did may not scale to a triple-a game but I think they would work very well in any small budget or even a medium budget game that like has a lot of heart hopefully though the takeaway from this is that you'll see some of the things we did and it might inspire you to come up with your own ideas for larger projects and figure out how to make things that scale and also don't eat into your budget of of your game because if we can find a way to make our game inclusive without spending millions of dollars why wouldn't you right so I think a lot of people seem to think that inclusivity costs money or it's hard you need to have experts and stuff like that but you don't you just need to kind of be thoughtful and take a step back sometimes okay the first way we did things let's get to the obvious thing

sorry this is zero indexed I'm a developer we told a story dream daddy is is a story that features a cast of hot dads who are gay or bisexual or I don't know sapiosexual maybe yeah but one of the best ways to increase player inclusivity and diversity in your game is to feature characters who are diverse I can't stress this enough just do it tell diverse stories it improves the stories it opens up new creative paths but I think everyone here probably knows this already if you're coming to a talk about how to increase player inclusivity you're probably like yeah it was tell stories about diverse characters so the next thing we added to Dream daddy that I think really helped increase player inclusivity is a character creator a character creator is a fantastic way to

add diversity to your game because players are more diverse than I can predict or you can predict or really anyone can can predict so letting a player represent themselves instantly opens the experience up for them and providing players with plenty of options and choices and how they represent yourselves a game is it's just fantastic the problem we ran into is dating Sims and visual novels normally don't have character creators so adding one into ours seemed a little like out of scope remember we are on a budget adding a character creator to a visual novel that's totally out of scope um but we wanted one anyways so we needed to figure out a way to add one we felt it was really important because obviously the helps players feel more invested in this story it allows players to be represented character creators are fun

right and also our character creator is going to be called build and add and it's rebuilding dad so does we gotta have that except character creators are usually expensive assets details sliders on a small game like Dream Daddy we could never do something like this or this look at that it's a child depth what is that or this this is an amazing character creator like a really cool this one is a beautiful character creator from the sins look at all the choices of how you can make a pair of lips look almost exactly the same to all these other pairs of lips this was really expensive I bet but totally worth it for the Sims and this would have looked great in dream daddy like how cool would that be if your dads could look like that

here's a modified version of Skyrim it's character creator someone decided they didn't have enough sliders and needed to add more sliders so like people love character creators and the amount of effort in detail that goes into building something like this it is really expensive and it's a lot of work but seriously so awesome guys great job please keep making character creators like this I love them I'm not here to tell you like don't make character creators um so we we wanted one of these so we had to do this ki SS if you know what this stands for it is keep it simple stupid we had to work within our means and come up with something that we could manage so number one things to building our build a dad no sliders sliders are really complicated you could have to create rules and boundaries for them none sorry

Jerry O'Connell so we took a look at the original character creator paper dolls it's maybe not obvious that like hey this is a totally functional way to have a character creator and it's pretty simple you just slap things on top of each other paper dolls are great especially if you have tons and tons of assets you could just start swapping images in and having all kinds of stuff but I can't stress how much money we did not have to work with that all times so we needed to have some limited choices in our character creator and we really wanted to make these choices out so to do that we focused on big tonal shifts for our assets and options rather than subtle ones we can't afford to have a thousand pairs of lips that all kind of look the same but we can't afford to make big changes and do things like create three body types that are

all varying in size and shape and are different so in dream daddy you can play as this like athletic guy a thick dad and a slim daddy all of them are I think pretty attractive they look great and they're fun and they kind of encompass a wide range of body types the important thing is we didn't focus on letting people adjust like their shoulder too width to height ratio or their like almost size or whatever femur length most people can identify with one of these body types and say like hey cool this represents me we also knew that once your dad zona was built in the game you'd mostly be seeing him from the shoulders up so we focused on creating a lot of hair hair assets

because this is one of the most distinguishing features on a face if you like looked at someone from 20 feet away you can't really focus on their eyes or no shape but you can totally tell someone who someone is just based on their hair so it's a really good way to get a lot of diversity so we focused on hair texture color silhouette all of these things that players use to reflect a player style race and gender identity so we start off with a standard bulb but we also have a pompadour and a lot of hair colors that are not just like white people only hair so when you're making hair of and check out added that in there this is an important hair option in all cases but make the effort to to make as many hair options for your players as possible because hair is extremely diverse and we got a lot of bang for our buck just by

adding lots and lots of hair options we also created a pre-selected color palette and we did this for some specific reasons we did not add a full color gradient so you could create any color skin because we wanted to be representational of skin colors specifically and not rainbows and if you give someone the ability to pick one of 256 million colors it becomes really hard to find something that actually you can kind of identify with so instead we tried to just develop a nice range of skin colors and Leighton here in the front spent a long time going through and just making sure we had a diverse rainbow of flesh tones this makes it really nice when you're actually building your character to quickly identify like oh here's some nice colors that I want to look at and I think Layton went through and just kind of picked every I think every color in

andreen daddy is like a beautiful color and you can make a beautiful dad with it so overall we aimed to focus on stylization over realism we didn't want our players to build an exact replica of themselves we wanted them to build a cool dead sona that they could identify with our goal was for people to self-identify and express themselves so even though you can't tweak the focal distance between eyeballs or gel depth you can build a dad who looks cool and and that I think is probably one of the most effective uses of the character creator is saying like hey this is a cool version of myself or something I aspire to be on screen that's fun our next thing is fill in the blanks so

after announcing dree Betty online before it came out there was a lot of excitement on the internet people talked about it all the time but there were also a few questions that came up frequently this was one I saw this a lot of on Twitter how do all of these day dads have kids and I think the expectation of the person asking this was usually the to try and offer a counterpoint of like this games not possible because gay dads can't have kids and that's silly it's not 1999 there's tons of avenues for gay couples to become parents and with dream daddy we of course wanted to cater to that if you've not played the game amanda is your dad's owner's daughter and one of the ways we wanted to answer this question was to have the player answer it for themselves we're not in the business of telling you exactly how you're gonna play we want you to feel

represented and included so of course the first answer is Amanda could be adopted or she could be birth by a surrogate or birth by a partner like this is female 1 perhaps you're dead zona is bisexual or previously had a female partner maybe they took them longer to come to terms with their sexuality there's a lot of history and reasons why a gay man might have a child it could also be that your daughter was born by you if you are a trans male or born by a partner who's a trans male there are a lot of ways that couples can have children and we wanted to cater to all of them some of these though start to bring in the question of a character or your dad sona's sexual orientation right because just because your dad is dating other dads that does not mean we should

assume your dad Sona is gay but we also kind of want to know if your dad is gay bi pansexual sapiosexual or heterosexual it was maybe coming to new realizations we wanted to make sure that canonically there was a way for the player to represent their diverse stories this was important to us but pretty quickly when you start matching these up some of them are interlinked these options can turn into a complex decision tree with lots of edge cases as I mentioned before we had a small budget poor this tree looks very expensive it would be nice to cater to ever in have specific stories for every single case but we couldn't do that so we had to ask ourselves how do we allow people to explore this without getting into a crazy tree or worse doing something like this how many people have

fun filling out one of these mister I can't okay one person great now can let me ask you this can you imagine filling out one of these for sexual preferences I think it's already kind of awkward enough just for race but I imagine that getting into the nitty-gritty of something like this is even more awkward and that's not necessarily an experience we want our player to have this also be can become technically complex and it doesn't make sense narrative li-2 like all of a sudden have a questionnaire at the end of your character creator of like hey what's your sexual orientation how's it how's your daughter here I'd like fill us in and we obviously don't want to make people feel categorized so the answer was narrative choices we realized that it doesn't actually we don't need to know your exact sexual orientation we don't need to know Amanda's exact status of if she was born from a surrogate or

was it was born by you but by making our questions part of the narrative and making the questions about Amanda and your relationship we were able to and keeping the questions simple it leaves the door open for a lot of scenarios and it keeps you involved in your universe of dream daddy so we don't deny a player's existence we keep it open this allows us to dollar acknowledge the player's preferences about forcing them into a category so instead we ask you what was your ex-partner was it a did you call him father or mother or did a man to call them father her mother and we also ask you you tell samanda story and if it was a story about when she was born or when she was adopted we do this rather than in a questionnaire in the actual game so we use a narrative that where you are

looking through a series of old photographs and you go through and you basically tell Amanda a series of stories about each photograph which helps us build your characters past I think this is ultimately more effective in creating your dead sona's Kanon than just filling out a questionnaire and also it lends to some I think really beautiful and fun moments with Amanda where you know it kind of brings you to this area of being a little sentimental and going through some old photographs with your daughter who you loved very much and want to protect um so next we have number three enable your team with tools this is I think very important if you are like me and like a white guy who's non-diverse something you can do is if you are in a

position of leadership is make sure you're striving as best as possible to make sure that everyone is heard and enable everyone on your team to have access to creating and participating in the overall narrative and story of your game with Bream daddy we had an evolving story that was regularly changing and if we were building dream daddy using a node-based visual novel tool like twine or yarn or fungus we wouldn't necessarily have been able to explore our character development with and and make changes to the game simultaneously with our teeny when you budget because the writers Layton and Vernon would write something and then we'd have to bring it into an engine and like you know translate things and then add scripting for characters sliding across and actions and changing their expressions our writers would have been locked into time restraints with traditional dating some tools I mean whatever they wrote would have required extra build time so this kind of sucks but I found this really cool tool called

ink and I highly recommend it it's super easy to use kind of I think Layton sometimes has some she had some problems with the crashing ones but that's fine we figured it out for the most part it's a great tool and it allowed our writers to have direct control of the game the only problem is it was geared towards text-based games specifically and we were building a visual novel so created a tool called the DD ml compiler this is the dream daddy markup language compiler it's based on an altered version of ink syntax and it would allow us to generate every single scene in our game based on these scripts it was inspired by things like Ruby on Rails which means you could just hand it something and plop there's everything in your scene all of our animations facial expressions eggplants it would parse through this and figure everything out and build it for you our entire unity scene was just there so

look at that cool that got built not by me but it was generated so oh oops that one okay so our project became more agile we could iterate through concepts easier than if we were building Dream Daddy with the standard visual novel tools it allowed our story to keep changing while still making progress on the rest of the games I stress that because diversity was something we were conscientious of and that meant bringing in consultants with diverse points of view and sexualities to look at our script so bring in experts and outside voices this is always a good idea we brought in lots of consultants and it helped Layton and Vernon I know they were on the right track it helped them figure out parts that they maybe were not help happy with to have expert voices and identify things bringing consultants also may have increased our budget I know but I don't think it

changed our timeline and it was totally worth it because it got us to our final product faster by having outside consultants come in and give notes on our scripts we were able to get through things faster and having the DD ml compiler made it easy for us to listen to their to them and make changes based on on their suggestions also one of our consultants for the game happened to be this like kinda popular famous musician he's a gay man who loves dads if you follow his twitter and he came in and checked out dream daddy and he really really loved it and as a result of doing this he went home and he wrote the theme song for dream daddy because he loved it so much and this would have never happened if we had not brought in brought him in as a consultant to consult just on the script

in general we weren't hiring him as a musician we were hiring him for his opinions but like just synergy so do it it's great papé also pay people we paid we paid our consultants don't forget to pay your consultants it's important their voices are important it's gonna make everything better I promise okay the Devils in the details dream daddy had a problem it had gendered pronouns and a lot of in a lot of places and we went through the game we discovered that sometimes we were using gendered pronouns when we didn't need to we wanted to change this but remember our game is on a budget and doing something like this is totally actually fine and in scope it was actually really easy if you're not doing this please start doing it now it was like costs us nothing to be conscientious Vernon and Layton just went through and tried to remove a lot of gendered pronouns when referring to groups so right now if you want you can

go through your game and find for example any place where you use the phrase ladies and gentlemen and try saying something else like treasured guests fellow humans good people of Earth or even esteemed buttheads regardlessly the important thing is this forced us to think outside of comfort zone and think outside of the box and the results were that we ended having a lot more fun and I think Richard text with the dialogue that Vernon Layton wrote like there's some great stuff in there it got us to a better place than if we just left it okay you'll probably make mistakes dream daddy's not perfect and if you're not constantly checking things even if you are constantly checking things things still might fly under the radar

in the start of the game here's a mistake we made okay in the start of the game you have the option of sleeping with Robert the first time you meet him if you do this you unlock an achievement called bad dad and some players interpret this as us chastising them for expression expressing their sexuality when in reality we did not mean that at all it really just meant this because Roberts the bad dad he's got a leather jacket like and he likes knives so we did not even consider that you can't win them off and it's not gonna be perfect but please don't let this prevent you from trying and please don't let a fear of this prevent you from attempting to make inclusive games this might happen for instance ah be careful with that old unfinished never meant to be published thing you might have left lying around

in your code it turns out if people really liked your game they will find it and they will publish it on the internet and they will talk about it like it's canon and they will have a lot of opinions and thoughts on something that maybe wasn't even meant to see the light of day we were still figuring it out so take a deep breath there will be criticism but this is a good thing it will either be something you can change now or change in the future listen to it fear of imperfection should not prevent you from trying to be inclusive at all just go for it if you get it right for someone that normally doesn't get a slice of the pie you've made progress and I think in on the whole you've done a good thing so you may not be able to cater to every single person on earth but if you manage to do it for someone who's not normally being catered to who doesn't normally get to see themselves represented a plus okay here's the final thing this is important

take away four hours of time invested and let me see if we can figure out if it was worth it or not we included an option in dream daddy to do this so what this is is it's a binder and we wanted to include a binder option for player characters who wanted to play as a trans male and this is a way to do that without checking a box or questioning someone but it does recognize like hey you might be a man who wears a binder and we want to provide you with that representation it took us four hours investment to make this change to our game we had assets already all we had to do was kind of change some appearances and like drop it in we'd kind of already built everything so it was really easy to do we were able to do this because we'd kind of built things out and all we needed to do was

just be conscientious of it so let's find out if this was worth it or not what do you guys think all right so four hours of investment in time garnered results like this and this and this and this as a pet transman there's little representation for me and my brothers and similar body types thank you all so much for this rep when I saw you could just casually make a trans binder wearing dad I kind of almost cried as a gay trans guide the trans options and the game made me cry it was touched thank you for representation dream teddy I'm in tears sorry it was hard to go through and read all the B's there's a lot Canon trans characters and options that make your dead someone to translate early brought tears to my eyes literally in tears about dream daddy um this one it really means a lot of support that I've never gotten from a game before

this one I love this one I'm crying my dad actually looks like me thank you so much for having heavier and trans options he's a cool dad ass thank you all very much i may've run long I don't know if there's time for questions nope there's no time for questions so if you have questions meet me over in the Overlook room on the second floor thank you all so much for coming and watching