Exploding the Box: Thinking Differently in the A + B Era

[Music] hey guys thanks for coming out there's a happy hours I know and party's starting so I appreciate you guys coming out for the last session on Thursday I'm drew Murray I'm the game director at insomniac games I recently shipped sunset overdrive Marcus Smith who was supposed to be doing this with me he was the creative director he bailed but that's my first pro tip for you is do a talk with someone else have them bail and say you'll forgive them if they do the entire PowerPoint presentation it makes makes presenting a lot easier so Marcus and I were about halfway through the production of resistance 3 when Marcus that's him the creator he was the creative director on resistance 3 I was the lead designer we basically won the game design lottery Ted price insomniac CEO came to us and said for our next game we're gonna do whatever you guys want if you guys wanted to rabbit some space we'll do rabbits in space that's the game design

dream right that's what when you're starting school or you get your first job people say that's never ever gonna happen to you like don't just give up the idea that that's never gonna happen there's actually happening to us and we were as you would expect we were ecstatic about this we didn't really have any constraints put on us that the main one was that we couldn't do an open-world game so we pitched and made insomniac first open-world and we really empowered to to come up and create with whatever we wanted to do and for the first couple of months it was it was awesome Marcus and I would get together and we would brainstorm like like school kids well I like open-world games and centaurs and Rayman Pettibone and lity grrah and he'd say oh that's cool I like pinball machines and Tank Girl and badminton and sunset walks with my soul mate would be like awesome let's let's make that and I'm missin mention my fascination was like vintage Halloween masks and Jeff Koons and we carried gleefully on like that for a few months combined all these loves and interests into this massive bloated PowerPoint with no real connection or or method to its madness

and presented that to the owners of insomniac games and the best thing I can say about it is that they were more dumbfounded I think then I gasped and and Ted didn't actually fire us they did have us they gave us a few weeks and we came back with a little bit more similar of a game but um today I'm gonna talk about that process of how Marcus and I went from this sort of mess of a PowerPoint presentation to what I think is a really fun game and a game that I'm really proud of so the job is of a director is as you might guess this is to direct and to our mind that encompasses three core aspects inspiration communication and conviction and these are kind of what I'm going to be using to frame what I'm what I'm talking about as I go through the tools that we used it on sense that ever drive inspiration is something that's that's relevant to both you and the team for you you've got to be into this idea that you're gonna spend the next three to four years of the cluster cus that is game development and then the team

obviously also has to be excited they're also there in that three to four year process but I think it's really helpful as well if you can give people something that they're able to still fit some of themselves in and be inspired and and put a lot of themselves into if you're an introvert and I am communication is what it will seem like you do all day every day and it's the hardest part of the job there's the day-to-day of just making sure everyone is talking to each other and those knows what to do but the hard part was as as I said taking this this kind of crazy powerpoint in a couple years of Marcus's and I conversation and putting that into a cohesive package that in a few minutes we could explain what we were trying to do to to the owners of the company to the team and and then ultimately when we were pitching it to publishers and then last this conviction you have to be the the rock that really believes in the game you have to be championing the game and even if things aren't going well and

everybody knows it and you know it and the games awful and it's broken and it's no fun I think you still have to be the person who believes in the end of process that's like yeah we've we've done this before it's always kind of kind of shitty at some point and if we just keep walking through the swamp eventually we're gonna hit dry land because if if you start feeling like oh my god the process might not work everyone picks up on it and everything starts to fall apart and so we can get to the the subs of production I'm gonna give the most brief description that I can of the first two years that Marcus and I were talking about and working on sunset overdrive before we actually started making it and basically come down came down to a lunch conversation that Marcus and I had you can make any game what would you want to make and we came up with this a spin-off of I am Legend the the book more than the movie but we were interested in this idea of this mechanic of the player being able to go out into a post-apocalyptic world that's that's relatively safe that they could go out and explore and scavenge and gather

things and prepare but then at night all the monsters would come out they'd have to hunker down in their home and use all the supplies that they had during the day and be under siege and at first it was deadly serious it was very much the we would have been going towards that like the insomniac version of dayz if we could continue down that path unfortunately someone sent around the guerrillas video for on melancholy Hill around that time saying man it would be really cool to play a game that looks like this and then the next time we got together we were like it'd be really fun to make a game that looks like this and I think that resented us on in a very significant way Marcus and I and a lot of insomniacs came to insomniac because we love this biro and ratchet games games that are a lot about fun and stylization and humor and this idea of shifting sunset away from this dark gray toned zombie apocalypse is a very colorful fun focused game that didn't take itself too seriously excited us a lot more and gave us a lot of freedom

and that freedom led us up some down some great roads and and and up some more difficult ones we really were inspired to start talking about all these things that we loved and found interesting we had some mechanical ideas for the game but what was really exciting was to us was to be talking about a particular feeling or mood for the game and so then we weren't talking a lot about video games we were having conversations about the meanings of fashion and freedom and consumerism and we were looking at art and talking about like the good and bad points of different animes and British comedies and we're making mix with liner notes you know telling each other why we thought that this this song embodied the the spirit of sunset overdrive and it was really fun and we were very very slowly honing in on what we wanted sunset overdrive to be and then once we had had that rough concept we just needed to convince everyone else that this was a good idea to make and unfortunately for us and anyone who had

to sit through the early presentations we were not very good at distilling all those hours of conversations into into sound bytes and in fact at the at the beginning we didn't even try to distill them hence the bloated PowerPoint in which we dumped everything we liked in the in the lap of insomniacs owners and the problem which we hadn't really considered but became the bane of our existence for the next year or a year and a half is that by changing to something kind of different it went from really easy being really easy to describe the game to really difficult when we were talking about making the I am Legend sunset overdrive is really easy to be in say you know I've kind of like the walking dead except at night it'll be sort of like like Dungeon Defenders or you know it's going to look like like fallout or resistance and people really like to default to a plus B statements they're they're easy to understand I think that most games and and probably most creative projects are pitched that way you know it's like the matrix but the

matrix meets 50 shades of gray or more likely it's going to have the sales of colour duty the subscription fees of world of warcraft and the microtransactions of league of legends be great and so what we tried to do was we had all these things and so we tried to create an A plus B plus C plus D plus e statement that would encompass the main point so imagine the scavenging of fallout with the under siege feeling of Nazi zombies but starring the guerrillas in a hyperactive version of an American city like check on King Crete was to Tokyo with a humor of repo-man and you can probably imagine that that didn't go over real well and I know the game and I look at that I I'm not exactly sure what what that would what that would mean but we just continued for with it with that and as we kept trying to get more and more specific so we just kind continued adding to the problem we added an F and then a G and then an H and then around the time we got to pre-production we had a team of around twenty to twenty two people roll on they were still

pretty confused by by what we were talking about doing and I think that I think the team had trust in me and Marcus we'd been working with most of these people for quite a while I think that they trusted our passion for the concept but I don't think there's a lot of faith in the concept itself at that time and Marcus and I and our job is describing the Box in which everyone is supposed to be working and instead we basically had this giant cutter Mari ball with all these disparate parts that were glommed on and we could talk about the specific parts we could say well that a pink tree that represents this this idea but it was really difficult to explain how those things meshed together and so we started trying to come up with some different strategies to get people both on board with what we wanted to do and also helping and helping us figure out what exactly it was we wanted to do so the one of the first things we did

was start we started having movie nights Marcus and I are very similar people where the exact same age we both grew up with dads who owned construction businesses and spent our summers doing construction we both were punk rock kids we both went to art school and so whenever I say yeah do you remember you know that particular episode from facts of life and remember how they did that he's like yeah I totally know what you're talking about but whenever we were working with the our team a lot of different ages a lot more diversity and so when we would say make a reference to something like like the Warriors the movie the the gang exploitations a lot of them didn't have any idea of what we were talking about no so we started this this idea of a movie night to try to create a shared vernacular and these were mostly based on on creating a tone for sunset overdrive I think that movies and videos you can a lot of times even in just like a two or three or five minute clip explain a tone to someone at most you're talking an hour and a half or two hours it's a lot shorter than doing something like like playing a game and one of the first ones we watched was

was the war and we found that it really helped a lot in fact it was kind of useless to have these if we couldn't explain beforehand this is the reason that we are watching this movie and so with the war is we said we're gonna have all these different survivor groups in the city we're gonna watch this show and these gangs are like insanely wacky and really specialized and they're very exaggerated but they all take themselves very very seriously they're silly but they take themselves very seriously and so it's easy for us to say it was easy for us to say that's the kind of feeling that we want for our survivor groups and that clicked in people got it we count through the movie it's like okay they're not that's what we needed to be focusing on idiocracy was the same way a really good satire of pop culture and consumerism it helps sell I think a lot of the team on the idea of having humour in the game and then we watched other movies that didn't go over so well and I

think part of that was it was I think certain movies it was hard for us to tease out have you seen Turk 182 probably I'm single person one person all right turkey 182 it's about this guy who is fighting this very outrageous public man or fighting against in New York City Hall it's kind of a slow burn of a movie and frankly it's got kind of crappy production quality now that you go back and revisit it and I think that even though there's a little bit of something that we were trying to tease out of there frankly most of the most of the team was just just laughing at the movie more than more than taking it seriously and then my biggest personal disappointment we watched a couple episodes of The Young Ones an old BBC comedy that they rebroadcast on MTV in the 80s and it had very typically dry humor it had really outrageous physical comedy and violence every week segwayed into there would be a random rock band playing in some random location like it might be Motorhead is playing one of the characters bedrooms and there's no

explanation for it just just happens and it has like a through plotline but it segues in and out of absurdity and nonsense and to to us this was like this is great this is this is what we want some so overdrive to be but then we had the team watch it and the end of it Lisa one of our designers raised her hands why did you make us watch that and this is one of the times that I really screwed up I said that you know I felt like the team at the at the time had trust in me and Marcus and and trusted our passion but didn't fully fully trust in the in the concept and I I think I felt like we were on this really thin crust on top of lava and that if I had said yeah this is it we've got all this money and Microsoft is gonna publish a game that's like like a version of The Young Ones that that people are just gonna freak out and and people are gonna lose all whatever faith they actually did have and so I mumbled something about humor and rap and pacing and kind of left it at that because at the time I didn't feel confident enough to say that

but it's an interesting counterpoint with Scott Pilgrim which we watched a few weeks later and I think if you take the veneer away they're very similar movies they have a lot of absurdity they're breaking the fourth wall there's a lot of humor music plays a big part in how in the in the field of movie but a lot of it it's just it's just a lot more timely the stylization than music the humor do they feel more contemporary and I think for our team who was a lot of you know late 20s to mid 30s it just made a lot more sense than the young ones and people are like oh yeah we should totally make a game like Scott Pilgrim I thank God we're not making a game like that Young Ones show and so what we learned with it may be nice is really this idea of if we had a talking point that we could tell people this is what you're looking at and we could could give them something that they they could relate to they tended to go over really well and and sell or help people grasp with what we were doing with the tone really well so at the same time we were trying to break the team out of

some of their preconceived notions and a normal way of thinking and designing games and so we started doing these song missions and I remembered this interview with Perry Farrell when he was starting Jane's Addiction he talked about working with with Dave Navarro a lot and trying to sort of unteach him how to play guitar and it keep keep his technical skills obviously but putting him into a different headspace of how rock and roll was supposed to sound and we want to do this thing with our pre-production teams we started thinking of different exercises to do and one of the ones that we did was we started having these song missions and every week we would assign a song to every member of the the pre-production team and then a week later we asked them to pitch a mission based on either the lyrics of the song or how that particular song made them feel and we do things like tricky and LCD soundsystem wu-tang and The Velvet Underground and a bunch of other different thing and then we at the end the week we'd gather everyone into a room we listen to everyone's pitches

things like physical comedy and and horrible voice acting and weird props and and visual aids we're highly encouraged and none of these initial missions ended up in the game but I think that they were really useful for for for several reasons I think for one thing they were they're really good at getting that the team inspired it got them approaching problems in a very different way they weren't thinking oh well you know what are we gonna do this is a game and I know how to design a level it was asking them to spring their ideas from a different place there's also a place for non designers to be pitching ideas and participating in this early process programmers animators everyone we had on the pre-production team was a part of this process I think maybe they're one of the most valuable things was it was a place where outrageousness and humor were really encouraged there's always a lot of a lot of laughter we gave a crappy vintage blacklight poster each week as a prize for the best pitch and I think it create a really safe place for people to pitch ideas and be absurd and and and put out ideas that they might not normally be

comfortable pitching either say this in my previous six years at insomniac I never heard a mission pitch mission pitched there related to dating or girlfriends and I would guess that 20 to 25 percent of the missions they got pitched during this process either had to do with getting a girlfriend keeping a girlfriend or dealing with an ex-girlfriend and then lastly it helped Marcus and I really quickly and publicly defined what what that box of the game was after he knew after each pitch we basically just talked through okay we like this part we didn't like this part and it created this very nitty-gritty of okay that that humor you're talking about it's sort of it's kind of grossed out humor we're going we're going more for satire or yeah it doesn't make any sense that there's this this green bus that travels through this post-apocalyptic world where you can get on and drive around and drink and shoot it at enemies but but that's okay that that totally fits that'll that'll be great and it was also placed for Marcus and I

to publicly disagree about what the game was supposed to be sometimes you know one of its a yeah that that totally fits and then I'd say no I don't think it does and we instead of waiting and talk about later we would actually have a conversation from the team and and you know we wouldn't get in fist fighting but we'd have a debate sometimes about like that that that seems just over the edge to me or no that doesn't seem appropriate and and go through this and these work for us you know when we were pitching the game we were talking a lot about rock and roll and less from less from a sense of music which which confuse people for a while people were you know or we're gonna be carrying like a guitar and and and rhythm matching games to destroy mutants we were talking more about an attitude and so we figured pitching these songs getting people to listen this kind of music it would help people get into that that sense of that feeling and I think it's worth thinking about what in your project it might not be rock songs but thinking about sort of bringing people from a different perspective I don't know like what else

you could do but I can be awesome to see like do aromatherapy missions for for Assassin's Creed or something like what what a what a sandalwood Splinter Cell level would look like and there's one thing that really created the the lightbulb moment for the team it was our respawn animations I was working at home on sunset overdrive writing Docs and I had on a TV show in the background that was a sort of a survey of classic for movies and in really quick sequence they had a thing with Dracula you know comes out of the coffin and then Frankenstein's getting electrified and waking up and then the classic zombie coming up from out of the dead and after this thing I think it's like you know this these are all these are respawns these are like these are coming back from from the dead and I showed I think it was like you know this is kind of in in single-player games in our game this it's a free space there's you die and then there's a

reload sometimes there's not but then you spawn back in and what happens in that period doesn't really change the the mechanics of the game plane it seemed like a cool little space in which we could fit a little bin yet or something that that created a tone for the game and sold the tone of the game and so I went in the next day and talked to one of our animators Steve Ryder about this idea pitched this idea of you know what if it when the player dies there's we go and there's there's all this and there's a coffin there and there's flowers and candles around and the player bursts out and and and comes back to life that way and in typical Steve fashion he went really nuts with it I'm gonna play this video it has got within about a week we had all these these rough these rough responds done and actually in the game and then has followed up with how a lot of these ended up in the and the in the ship game and it really completely these could transformed how the team understood what we were were aiming for you know months

of Marcus and I saying fun Trump's realism if it's fun and it doesn't make sense don't worry about it we'll get it in there anyway I don't think it was really registering I think the song missions were doing good doing a good job at getting people out of the the typical headspace and taking baby steps for that but these response response really created a different shift and I think it's because in just a few seconds they didn't capsulate what we wanted sunset overdrive to be about we wanted to be nonsensical and humorous and self-aware referential of our real world and real pop culture not just the internal world of sunset overdrive and it you know people came up and they're like oh you guys need to say we can do anything insensitive or you mean we can do anything and I'm not entirely sure what made them so six everything part of us that that and encapsulated bit but I also think it's a way that really quickly basically took an animator you know a few days and a programmer probably a couple hours to actually get these in the game and at the at that point we were still so focused on just

getting the core mechanics good and we're in this ugly gray box world and there there was no tone to the game other than just trying to get something working it was a really easy way that in this in this rough form you still get it you still get sold on the tone and it was a great lesson to me of wow if you can even get this the smallest detail of feeling and tone in there then every time people are playing these ugly prototypes of the game everything they die they still get that that reminder of oh yeah all this detail is going to get matched and that tones going to be there so I think getting some something early in or something easy and early can even if it's an irrelevant detail like like respawning can make a big difference so near the beginning of production I read an article called less talk more rock by a super brothers and it dealt with a couple different things but the the thing that I got out of is they were talking about Jordan machiners theory of game design which is you know usually people get inspiration and then they

talk about about what they're gonna do for really long time and then after they've talked really long really long time they Rock which they start actually making the game and Jordan Mechner is like said you should get inspired and then make it and then once you've started making it then you then you can start talking about it and it allows you to build momentum off the ends off that that that initial inspiration but it also I think more importantly it actually gives you something to talk about I personally am NOT a big fan of Theory crafting we're familiar with action games where it comes down to a visceral feel and you can sit there and argue about it all the time but it's once you get it in the game it gives people something to actually have an opinion about and so we'd consider ideas discuss them briefly but our default perspective was that any answer to a problem was the fastest way to find the right answer and we took this really seriously we pretty much drop the idea of design Docs or much documentation at all most of our design Doc's would be either

you know four or five bullet points of this is this is what they should do or just a conversation or maybe a whiteboard drawing and we'd take a picture and forward it around to the team and then it allowed us to really speed up the iteration with which we worked we had a style meter gauge in the game where the more you connected traversal and the more you you killed things while you were traversing the higher your Sudheer style would go and then it would unlock these different abilities and we went through easily half a dozen iterations that had nothing to do with each other like how you've got this style and what happened when you triggered this style whether or not you triggered it or it happened automatically and it took us I don't know probably six weeks to two to eight weeks to define even one that we kind of liked and we still there's dozens of smaller iterations on it but not getting slowed by that down by that documentation just having these really these really quick and easy conversations none of those were documented again by more than just let's have a conversation or let's go to the

whiteboard and draw a diagram of how this might work again and it also gave us more space to allow the team to follow their own passions if someone had an idea that we weren't certain about we'd usually give them some time to pursue it anyway it led to a lot of failures which isn't surprising but it also led to some really massive features and and really really huge changes in the game I'll talk about the the traversal and a little bit but even things like the the reintroduction of insomniacs you know crazy weapons I was determined to make an insomniac game that was that people talk about anything other than than crazy weapons but we gave a guy he wanted he pitched the idea of a the high fidelity a gun that shoots vinyl records and we were like that is the worst idea ever like a we said no crazy weapon be when we said rock and roll like you're so on the nose that's not what we're talking about it all but he was really he was really passionate about the idea we gave

him a day or two and he you know got it in the game whenever Mike all right we'll have crazy weapons in the game and a lot of different fundamental features came as a result again a lot of times just giving people a day or two in in there out of their schedule to work on something that they were passionate about is that I do want to mention something that that didn't work for us is a few years ago I saw a stone LeBron day talk about visual design Docs and using these these kind of very graphic and pretty just poster like things instead of instead of these written word Docs to convey at a high level what what designs were and just at that they were attractive and people liked having them around and people actually looked at them and I was like this is great we can we can you know we're talking about this attitude of rock and local you make like rock fliers that explain at a high level what sunset overdrive this is supposed to be about and I think that they could they could work for frames for DLC or a

sequel but when we were we didn't have any idea of what we were doing you know updating a word doc is hard enough but whenever you you know every other day we were changing how the character moved trying to get give people the time to go in and mess around with a bunch of illustrator files and come up with a new poster it just didn't work out but it's something that I'd like to like to explore again on a game that that's a little bit more settled but that was unfortunately one of our failures so game jams this is sort of the ultimate form of our less talk more rock I'm sure everyone knows what a game jam is I know a lot of companies use them but we did a couple two to three day jams when we were still pre-production where everyone could do whatever they wanted could be something on paper it didn't actually even have to be in the game they said to show their work at the at the end of the at the end of the period some of these were super hyper focused and really technical some were really high concepts some explored really small features or

different game modes and most of them after the two or three days didn't make a big impact on the game but a few of them really did make some some some big detours and changes to the to the game and one of the best examples this is our world design you know we talked about we'd watched the tech on can creat anime and we're like yet we want to make this awesome beautiful crazy city that doesn't doesn't entirely make sense but if you looked at the gray box world that we were we were building in it basically looked like you were looking out of our office windows at the like suburban Burbank which is so boring and one of our designers Josue Benavidez took on the task of always something interesting and he was inspired by by both the movie tech on concrete and the sense of place that he got and like Skyrim where you felt like there's either always something in the distance that he could see that that made him want to go there or if he couldn't see something if you saw a path they had it encouraged and then delivered on the promise of if I go up that path there will be something cool even if I can't

see it right now and so here's a section of what he built over over two or three days just while we're still on PC so it's a it's a little bit hichi in the video but in a completely different kind of city than how we had before is one based on on all this exaggeration you can see it's multi-layered it's not built on a grid it's got these crazy waterfalls that don't make really any sense but look cool and it's great that the state of the architecture hadn't even really clicked in with me I was so focused on yeah we're working on mechanics and and not paying a lot of attention in the background but it's it was bugging his way and he stepped up and and made this little thing in a couple days and as soon as the whole team saw really all of us were like yeah that's that's what we need to be making we we live in Burbank that's not where we want this the fantasy of this game to be and that was the first step towards getting to a city that looked more like this and I think there was a great way to inspire the team it was letting them have some free time in a in a single block to work on

what inspired them and I I think and I hope that they saw that if an idea resonated we didn't waste any time at all in adopting it and in this case it meant completely rebuilding sunset city which we ended up actually doing four or five more times from scratch to find the right combination of a verticality and the sense of feeling kind of grounded but also a little bit of a Fantasyland and so those are some of the tools that that we use to actually figure out what we what we wanted from the game to communicate that to the team and try to try to get them inspire but I want to talk a little bit about conviction and then talk about a few specific things that that we we did on the on the on the game and and and my role in my conviction of those things some of which was sometimes right and sometimes wrong and I've said earlier you really have to obviously in the core of the game you have to be the person who believes in

the process of the game but the thing that I was not expecting to have difficulty with but I did was this this idea of yeah I have to be the one who's there's champion like this is this is the way we're doing it we're in good shape and we're going in this direction but then at some point having to make really hard left turns or right turns and not not feel like people thought that I was I was crazy or I didn't know what I was doing especially when I you know I'd been fighting with someone for a couple weeks and they were really sure that their way was right and I was really sure that my way was right and I was like we're doing it my way we're doing it my way and then at some point I'd be like yeah you were right we're doing it your way and I think the thing that helped defuse those arguments a lot was was went back to the the less talk more rock whenever we had a disagreement you know I would choose how to proceed and it wasn't always my way if I was if I was not sure or I was kind of like I think this is the right way but you seem really confident that this is the right way or

that person had more experience with a particular aspect of designing games than we would try their way but we'd say let's get in the game let's build it if either one of us doesn't like it we can just come back and revisit it and I think it kept the engine moving we didn't spend a lot of time talking about it it gave them agency so that if if we did put something in and they didn't like it they had an open open door am I really that that close whoa you freaked me out okay they just gave me the five minute warning I've still got almost 30 minutes okay oh I don't think I was that off and sorry I lost my place for a little bit oh and the other thing is is you know honestly most the time whenever people are disagreeing and having conversations if you if you get something playable you tend to build consensus really quickly if something if a bad idea goes in there's usually not a lot of disagreement about whether or not it's a

bad idea and a lot of first ideas are bad ideas you know the difficult thing is when you're like you both agree okay this is this is a idea but but my idea is a great idea and so we should go to that but even again with the less rock let's let's talk more rock a lot of times we had the time to then sort of take a couple steps towards that other idea and and figure out okay is that a direction we do one ahead or not so I want to go through a couple specific instances that we did from sunset overdrive this encapsulate really everything I'm talking but specifically about my conviction about these things and and probably how wrong I am about so when we first started creating the game I think the game design had not really caught up to that that tonal shift from moving from the the I am Legend sunset overdrive her this you know gorillas sunset overdrive we've moved this more stylized and subversive tone but you

know we've been talking about this game for a couple of years before we actually started making it and I think I just started getting enamored of a certain design choice that it's like fitted these different puzzles together like this this is going to be a great mechanic and maybe it would have but I don't know that it was fitting what we were trying to make anymore and totally we kept talking about being about so the speed and action and aggressiveness but mechanically we were what I call skinny skinny guy skinny guy Gears of War this was about hiding and and taking cover but instead of being like a linebacker basically star star me and so I can move a little bit quicker but but it was a very different sense of a game than having this aggressiveness and almost right away people started sort of bringing up absque ape boarding which Marcus I shut down right away we thought it had too much baggage both both culturally and and and other games having been made you were like Tony Hawk's an awesome game we're gonna make this giant game with a shitty version of Tony Hawk in it and everyone's gonna

come and say yeah this is a game that has a shitty version of Tony Hawk in it and even then people wouldn't drop it I'm gonna click forward and start a movie it starts with hos way Benavides the the guy who did the city earlier and the the next game jam he made skateboarding without without a skateboard he called I think Treat Street surfing I think he was hoping that we wouldn't notice that if there was no actual physical skateboard that it wasn't that it was skateboarding and then it progresses from there through a bunch of the different prototypes that we we made while we were figuring out what traversal was going to be in the game and again this came out and we were like no way we are definitely not doing this but we did want to have these these little situational moves so you're running and maybe we could jump on an oil slick and and slide a little bit quickly to if you were just people were chasing you or something like that and so the designer who is working on those Cameron Christian he was working on these little small moves but he wanted

to make those more expansive and and really make the the player a lot more agile he was really passionate about this and you know we kept saying you know we're not feeling this this is this is not what sunset overdrive is about but if you guys while you're making these these little moves if you guys want to spend a day or two messing around with some of your things we put them in and we'll look at them and and and and yeah you got you got that time and this really worked on it and then we looked at it like yep this is this isn't working this this isn't where we want to go but as long as it's here this is what we don't like about what you have here so I want you take a day or two and and fix that and we just kept on going like that for for quite a while like giving them a couple days a week for probably a couple of months and it became more and more about we're improving what was there but we kept caveat in every time they would bring it back like we're gonna let you guys keep working on us but you know that eventually we're gonna say this is not the game and if all this

works can be thrown away but if you guys feel passionate about it keep working on it and then one day I woke up and said to myself you know you keep saying that aggressiveness and velocity are what this game is centered on but that's that's not what it feels like at all and so I came in that day and I was like alright traversal is what this game is all about we're Codel totally going in that direction now but we're definitely not gonna Traverse and shoot at the same time and I'll spare you the details but a few months later we were traversing and shooting and that really became the absolute mechanical Center of sunset overdrive and then we spent the next few years fighting for for traversal and and combat and there's a lot of work we were doing you know trying to leave different moves we're doing a ton of usability tests to see if people understood what they were wanting to do if they could deal with the controls we were having to rebuild our entire city again to enable this this traversal I'm just gonna start this over

because otherwise you're gonna look at a black screen for 30 seconds and we were having to rebuild our camera and the way our shooting model worked in order to work with this traversal system and it was still very much a mess at the point that we hit when we had to say all right well you're either gonna do this forward or we're gonna go back to kind of the the original idea and it was it's kind of a scary time because it wasn't fun and it it wasn't very cool but we we thought this is this is different we said we wanted to do something different with the game we have some time to make it better and everything sucks at first and we if we could do it it would be really cool and so at that at the point where we were like alright we do have to rebuild all these things to make them work it was definitely not clear that that was the right direction there were a lot of people both at insomniac not all but a lot of people insomniac and Microsoft who were not into this idea and somewhere but more than a few people

came up to me and said you are taking whatever chance this game has to be good and ruining it by making this decision but I think this is a perfect case of how development is supposed to work you know I'm not the smartest guy in the room I'm not the best designer than somme niak I think my job is basically to get the best designers to do their best work and then I'm fortunate enough that I get to come in and cherry-pick the best of that best and and figure out how those things those things fit together and we give just enough rope to this this guy that we worked with we trust we respect that he was able to get something working and we still didn't really like it at first we didn't hate it either and we gave him a little bit more time and eventually we did see the potential of it and I think that it was a great lesson for me of you know if you give if you give people with good at good in things that you trust some from some free space to experiment it really can have this this and I can't overstate the the massive impact that that these

experiments that cam and Ross and and Steve did on the game it would be a much much more boring and not probably not very cool game if we hadn't done that the next thing I want to talk about is our character customization system what we call our vanity system and this is something that Marcus and I locked in on immediately and this is the thing this was one of the things that we never ever wavered on and one of our first decisions was we want people to be able to express themselves in the game some way and clothing seems like a very obvious way it's something that you know if we were playing a multiplayer cooperative it's the thing that you always carry around with you and we had this this central theme in incentive that we described as be who you want to be and it was a manifestation of something that I had had read in a Steven Pressfield book turning pro if you guys haven't ever read this is actually the sequel to a book called the war of art steven pressfield's the guy who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance but

these two books are about how difficult it is to be a creative person and how to be a better creative person but it had this part that it was well I'll read it to you and you will understand what it says so this is from turning pro the tribe doesn't give a [ __ ] the amateur dreads becoming who she really is because she fears that this new person will be judged by others as different the tribe will declare us weird or queer or crazy the tribe will reject us here's the truth the tribe doesn't give a [ __ ] there is no tribe that gang or Posse that we imagined sustaining us by the bombs we shares in fact a conglomeration of individuals who are just as [ __ ] up as we are and just as terrified each individual is so caught up in his own [ __ ] that he doesn't have two seconds to worry about yours or mine or to reject or diminish us because of it when we truly understand that the tribe doesn't give a damn we're free there is no tribe and there never was our lives are entirely up to us

I think it's a little bit easier said than done and I would say that anyone who have ever been on the internet would say that there actually are plenty of people who are not caught up in their own [ __ ] that they have plan time to reject him diminish all of ours but it's a it was a good statement and I and the spirit of that was something that we wanted to get into sunset overdrive I'd also been obsessively watching this Bill Cunningham New York it's a documentary about Bill Cunningham that the New York Times street photographer and Marx as I were talking about how strictly society judges appearance and you know I think a lot of people think of fashion as sort of silly it's just your appearance what difference there's a there's an outfit change make and you know I think the the barrier to getting like probably an average dude in America to get in like a fistfight or or maybe start a war is probably much lower than getting an average guy in America to go out in public with a skirt on by the way I love that I've stained this on the wear a kilt day I didn't know it was wear a kilt day and I was walking around this

morning early early and I saw three guys and kilts in the hall and I was I twittered I was like I think this must be is it is it is it we're a kill day and it turns out it actually is so guys with skirts and is fascinating to us that you know an article clothing can can have so much power and in the movie mr. Cunningham says the wider world perceives fashion sometimes as a frivolity that should be done away with in the face of social upheavals and problems that are enormous the point is in fact that it's the armor to survive the reality of everyday life and so we had we said we're gonna have all this crazy stuff for people to where we're gonna allow and hopefully encourage people to at least in the game and in this sort of this the safety of the game let their their inner freak flag fly we have different body sizes different genders different races we're not going to designate any clothing or hairstyles or makeup as male or female everything is wearable by anyone for the the last production question that we had was Gavin Gould our lead character artist came to me and said so we can either do

20 beards that work on guys or we can do 10 beers that work on everyone I was like ask this question and we're right we're right the finish line but the most controversial decision that Marcus and I made with with the fashion was that we said it absolutely no steps associated with it we didn't want people to feel like I have to wear the Robin Hood hat because it gives me plus two agility and I can't tell you how many meetings we had where sometimes it was really the whole design team and there arguing with me people are not gonna care about this stuff if there's if there aren't stats attached to it and it eventually I switched from from arguing to bagging please let us put stats on this stuff we need it from a mechanical standpoint we need this to create meaningful progression but just it wasn't about mechanics it was about this this theme and this this idea and this point of view of of wanting people to feel a certain sense of freedom in the game and and their defense is a long long long time before it became even a

little bit clear that that that this was going to work it wasn't until I would say bye III of last year probably two and a half months before we we we went gold we probably had about we at that point we had maybe 15% of the options in the game at that point it was also the first time we really showed the game publicly but all sudden people people started people at e3 we're like oh this is really cool I can dress in these different ways and I can do these different things and and and and present myself in these different ways and even though it it people were like yeah they may be this this can worked it really wasn't apparent until until the game shipped that people were going to be in it be into it it wasn't something that was easy to play test all this stuff was coming on at the last second a lot of these these these clothing things are things that you have to earn over time it was something that was very difficult to to measure as we were making the game but the number of people after the game

came out and were complaining that the Xbox didn't have a screenshot tool or taking picture of their TV with their phone or capturing capturing videos and then taking screenshots off that it was really cool to see the diversity of how people dress some people just came out looking like they just walk straight out of Banana Republic or J Crew and some people look like they they walk you know just walk out a Burning Man and that was actually that was a one of the debates with particular with Microsoft was you know how much are you talking and how much Burning Man are you talking they were really concerned that we have enough Plain White T's in the game but then one of the nicest things and one of the things that we were hoping would happen was a post on neogaf and a woman wrote I wanted to play as a guy because I usually love to dress them more than women but since I'm a girl and the body proportions are treating mine I definitely was making a girl plus they have my afro that I actually have it felt like an enlightening experience insomniac so far is the only developers

who have blessed me with my actual hairstyle I cried Lowe and that's really cool I think that's awesome and I certainly wouldn't ever want people you know the I don't want I don't want to feel like like I want to feel in this game because I'm gonna shoot a little bit more accurately or my foot speeds gonna be a little bit quicker and I think that you know mr. Cunningham talks about fashion being the armor to survive everyday life but I like to think that it can be a little bit of a weapon against conformity and tradition and that it it can provide a in a safe space a place for to experiment and and for more guys to wear skirts and then the last feature I want to talk about is our night defense missions you remember I've at the being of the talk I was talking about this I am Legend idea if you've got on scavenger in the day and then the big action part of the game would be at night when all these enemies of these hordes of enemies come come running in and that initial idea this is the high

action point of the game this is this really part of the game I think got a little bit ossified in my in my mind it was the first thing that we started prototyping because it was very action-oriented it was the first thing that was fun in the game because it was action-oriented and we were spending a lot of time we were working on AI built around this we were working on defense related mechanics and trap systems and individual traps and defense related economies and UI and training all this stuff built around the night defense and there's also a way that we had something fun is something to show the team see see we can do something right but the feedback that we started getting from playtests once we had more of the game panned together was really really odd and confusing the fun scores for the night defense were the highest in the game like you know you read and night defense need to do tonight defense they did night defense and they would go down a little bit and successive defenses but they were still even though the low

night defenses we're still higher than the rest of the game at that point but at the same time the narrative comments started to get kind of negative after the second or third night defenses this is getting repetitive I don't know I'm not really liking this and I didn't know what to do with that is you know they were saying I'm not really liking this but they're also saying based on the numbers but I'm also I'm still liking this better than anything else you guys are doing in the game and we kept working on it and the play chess the the results kept coming back the same and rather than doing what I should have done which is step back and looked at it more as a big game as a whole we did the opposite where we started looking at each individual night defense and saying okay well why aren't fire people not liking this night defensive site the site despite the fact they're saying that they're having fun they're getting they're saying they're getting tired of it so how do we make them not tired of it and then we got our we had a mock review done for the game it was I

think well we got the game running start to finish in order to get this mock review done it was the first time that you could play from from start to end again there are a couple definitely still a couple places you had to it had to had to squint but this guy just loathed the night defenses he hated them and it was again it hearkened back to this like why people keep saying this is fun but they don't like it and I said okay well I need I obviously need to go and figure out what what this guy experienced so I blocked out a few days I went lock myself in a conference room I'm gonna play through the game start to finish and get the experience that this guy did and after about the second or third night defense I was ready to kill somebody and unfortunately the only real person I had to kill myself was myself Jesus there are a lot of these and this is really late in production this is

probably early July mid July when we were going gold at the end of August and it didn't leave a lot of options and we did some serious triage we went that day we went from having eight of these in the game to five they went from seven to eight minutes in length to three to four minutes in length we added mid mid midnight midnight checkpoints that's not good night Minh but you know you can probably imagine that when they were eight minute segments and if you failed we actually sent you all the way back and it was it was really frustrating all these all these decisions that when you're playing just that little part of the game it's like oh yeah I played five minutes and I failed and I'll just play it again but whenever in the context of playing the whole game and I want to get to the next thing it was really really frustrating I'm still kind of torn on them because I still like playing them I think that they they are for the great high action part of the game and it is sort of like my first love of sunset overdrive but I

think that was a place where my conviction got got really misguided and I'd kept thinking about them as representing something from this original idea of the game and and not realizing that the game had gone from this sort of systematic we're gonna go back and forth between day and night but too much more every mission that you're doing and sunset overdrive has something special about it maybe you're defending a boat and we're introducing a new enemy and there's a new weapon or you're you know the the leader of the the scouts has has drunk over charge and transforms into this this dragon boss that you're battling and that after all that switch this ended up being sort of despite being very high action ended up being the repetitive part and I think I think to a lot of people wanted the the more boring parts by the by the end of the game so this is a video of how sunset overdrive ended up and you know Marcus I

wanted sunset overdrive to have a point of view and feel different from the sea of grey and Triple A games out there we had never made an open-world game we had never made there are a lot of things about this game that were different for for insomniac and it was I think that was great and encouraging us to try a lot of different processes really quickly see what works see what didn't work and it's worth noting it's like the worst into the video arrow I'll play it one more time well you know there are tools that we used it that worked at certain points the project you not oh there's the the less talk more rock works great when you have 20 people when you have 120 people some of whom were in Burbank somewhere home or in our offices in North Carolina and a bunch of people at Microsoft working on it it starts not working so much and we would still use it for you know particular aspects of the game honing in on them but but but adjusting to that I think it's others think it's helpful to think about what

processes we're gonna work best for you or your team you know are you really methodical or a little bit more fly by the seat of your pants as your does your team like certainty or do they like experimentation you know is your demographics of your team tight enough that you can just sort of assume that people understand what you're talking about or do you need to do something like moving nice to create this this vernacular that everyone everyone speaks and you trust your team enough sometimes you just let them run amok and see where they go and I think work things work best whenever we were having fun making the game and you know I the game I'm really proud of it I'm really happy with it it was the first game I ever made that when it when it came out like publicly I actually took the week off and I went home and I sat down and I played it start to finish despite having played it many many times before and I think my biggest lesson though was that as someone who's pathologically neurotic and loves to control everything it became really clear to me that the less the more I let the reins go on the team

the better things went you know we definitely had a bumpy ride at the beginning trying to figure out where to tell people to go but as we started including people and having them help us decide where that was both by asking us questions and getting involved in the process but also the the kinds of things that they were bringing up or even mechanically things like like the traversal system at some point it became really I think Marx and I had the easiest job in the building it was just like we were like that's where we're going and everyone walked there on their on their own power and you know we were there to occasionally nudge people or we'd say you know with the target has shifted a little bit but I think the best decision that we made with sunset overdrive was that there wasn't a huge sense of logic and there weren't a lot of limits on what people could do and I think insomniac is a really talented team were a little bit quirky team I guess I might call us the it island of misfit toys of the the games industry but it really allowed I think the team members to let their own freak flag fly and put

thousands of unique bits of themselves in it which ultimately is why or what I think made since it over dreadfully successful that's my top and I think if like five minutes for questions yeah no yes okay so hi great presentation by the way was a very interesting I have a two question for you first one being at which points in the production process did you actually made it you felt that you you had the experience that you were looking to to get so that's question number one and question number two after this point has been a rich what was the flexibility that you that you guys allowed yourself to have to change stuff maybe late in the production process I think so the first question was wondering we have for the player experience that we felt was was what they what the game was gonna be probably

like two years into the three year cycle it was pretty late you know we were we were building we were building parts of the game and there were a lot of things that that ended up still working and we had we were billion enemies and weapons that no matter what what we were ended up doing with traversal and things like that that those things still work we might have to modify them a little bit but it was it was it was pretty far in before I think we really felt before the game felt the way it was going to feel I think probably around a year and a half in we were like that's the direction that we're gonna go you know we had we had at the time we on asleep we had an e3 coming up for our announced and so I was like okay are we gonna be hiding behind cover in the e3 trailer or you're gonna be you know running around on telephone wires and at that point that was that was the kind of we don't have time to go back as far as the flexibility we actually a lot of flexibility once we figured out what we were doing it's actually really easy to

make all this stuff mean the city got built up and torn down missions we're getting every time every time we do a mission it got quicker and quicker and just yeah like any game things as things work making things with those things that work gets easier and easier so I think we I think we might have a lot of flex pay and we were making still some pretty significant changes up to the up to the last minute to try to make the game as close to what we want as possible in the period where your game jamming and you're throwing in lots of things and the team is kind of going in disparate directions your codebase in your asset base can get kind of like muddled and crazy how did you contain that did you build an extra time to refactor and get it back to stable what did you do in that situation I have no idea your ad I am the least technical person I'm actually lucky that they let me out of the office with a laptop I don't know and I know that I know that you know intended to be the

programmers who would go in and get into the code and there were only three or four of them on the team at the time most of the people would if you were trying to do something that was code related they would have to team up with the programmer the designers we're using you know a lot of time just hacking together things with scripts that were easy to tear back out and I'll say at that point we were still working in a lot of just like literally great boxes and that kind of thing so there wasn't there wasn't a lot that we felt was like at the base of what the game we had like hero movement and some really basic III but I don't think there's a whole lot to get messed up it leaves at least the point of like our first Jam anything else cool thanks guys thanks for coming check it out [Applause]