Fireside Chat: Amir Rao and Kelly Wallick on 'Hades'

[Music] hello there i am kelly wallick um the ceo and founder of the indie mega booth the chairperson for the independent games festival and community builder for the 1up fund and this is the hades fireside chat with amir the studio director of supergiant games so want to welcome amir to our virtual stage hello i'm amir rao i'm the studio director of supergiant games i've worked on all our games bastion transistor pyre and hades which is the game we'll be talking about today at supergiant i coordinate our work um and i do game design so i'm one of the designers who is responsible for um tuning various parts of the game and making sure that the game is coming together so uh yeah i'm excited to talk about our experience making hades i'm excited to be back at gdc in some form um i know yeah i'm uh you know i i've

always loved this conference i was a conference associate in like 2004 or something like that um as a volunteer for gdc so it's uh it's really really cool to be back here um and and to be to be speaking at it i think the last time i spoke at gdc was at the failure workshop um so it's like pretty good pretty good gap between um between that we were talking about bastion actually um i believe that was the last time i spoke at least um so yeah that's uh that was a long time ago it was my impression was bastion was not a failure so no yeah workshop was about yeah well you know the failure workshop is really interesting it was it was actually talking about mechanics that didn't work and one of the mechanics that didn't work in bastion was um uh we had this whole gardening game inside of bastion that really didn't work discussion of the things that didn't really didn't really pan out um inside that game even though the game uh came together um pretty well actually yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of bastion coming up so that was uh

that's exciting too so it's a lot of a lot of exciting stuff happening um yeah yeah one of my favorite kind of um i don't know super giant connection stories for me is i actually still have the bastion um bandana that you guys were giving out and i don't even know what conference that was i feel like that was the first time after all pax in 2011 i think before the game came out yeah a million years ago yeah yeah it was it's it was uh the yeah the show floor was a little different than it was pax east yeah yeah it was it was exciting to to see those everywhere yeah a lot a lot has happened since then yeah so i mean i've known you and most folks on the team since since those days um yeah and i think we were talking a little bit about this so part of my homework for this as i watched the entire no clip documentary which is amazing by the way if you have an extra five-ish hours and you really want to hear a lot of things about supergiant and game development i'm like total thumbs up on it i highly recommend it um but it was like a very interesting insight after knowing all of you for so long and through so many different like

games and iterations of um you know not so much the studio because a lot of the core components of the studio stay the same but just like to kind of be along on that journey and then like kind of see this like climax of of how well hades has done and been received was like very very cool so as a friend situation i'm like super happy for all of you well thank you yeah we are we're over just over the moon with the success uh and the reception of of hades and um it's one of those things where uh we you know we did not know to expect that um but it's you know it's it's been wonderful to see so many people uh love the game so much yeah the reactions and the in the documentary to you all especially watching the game awards thing and now i can see why you like jeff keeley so much just in general like it's just like a cool situation and there's like this thread you know he's a very hard worker yeah yeah yeah he i mean the the way he puts together a lot of that stuff it's it's um it just it

just takes so much um so yeah i've always i've always i've always been a fan of of the way he conducts himself and the way he puts those events together yeah but like watching the reaction of the team you know as they're like announcing everyone's on zoom of course because it's you know pandemic time and like and also too like the games you're up like nominated against was like legit i mean not that hades isn't a legit game but like that was like some impressive that was an impressive lineup to be up against as well too yeah we i mean we're actually lucky um we're nominated for six awards in tonight's show um for the game developers choice awards so that'll be that'll be really exciting as well um we um i think we we won a game developers choice award for best debut in 2012 for bastion um so um you know the whole group of people who worked on that game is still working together at supergiant games today and so you know we just feel really lucky to have been able to to keep doing the work um through um through everything through several

games through the last the last year and all that kind of stuff so yeah yeah i mean i think it's incredible and and you know one of the things that i had realized with the documentary is like i didn't realize how early jen was on the team because i feel like she's like a little bit enigmatic in the sense of like you know i don't really like hang out like here at conferences and stuff but like she wasn't she was in pretty early right yeah jen jen is one who prefers to speak with her work and her work is incredible her work speaks very loudly so yeah yeah so gen z is the art director for super giant games she came up with all the character designs and obviously a lot of the art direction art style a lot of the execution of specific assets in the game just uh has her hands on everything related to the art that we do uh yeah jen is incredible there's like um i think the shocking thing about a talent like jen and and this is true of almost um i say almost because i don't want to include myself in such a statement um but of everyone i work with um is uh you know i sort of

when you have a game like bastion come out and you have a lot of people love it your first game um i think you know a lot of us would have been right and expecting that that was kind of as good as it was gonna get for us um because you know we came out of nowhere people really liked it um it was our first effort and all that kind of stuff but um like the crazy thing about jen and greg and darren all these people i work with is like somehow they get better and better and better um and um i think that's the like sort of joy of working with them as individuals but also the joy of our chemistry as a group is you know we have these long relationships that have gone over several games and then for hades specifically we like added all these new voices um so we were 12 people for a really long time um for about five years before um making hades and over the course of hades we grew to around 20 people um a little under 20. and so um you know we've added all these new

voices who are integral to to the stuff we've been making and um we're just so important to to making hades uh the game it was yeah and then that kind of answers a little bit of like one of my i guess first official questions which i was like live journaling my thoughts while i was watching this documentary is like why is jen so amazing like that that scene where the um concept art for chaos comes up i was like like oh my god that's so good yeah and i'm like why is she so great like how does that happen yeah it's just one of those things you know even when you work with her you you know she's like really really amazing to talk to and collaborate with and she's very articulate about what she's trying to do but then there's this whole invisible process where the art is made um or even sometimes it's happening you know a couple seats over and you still um you know it's just it's always shocking and surprising to see what will be done with it um that's another that's another part about working on the team that i feel really really good about is

there's a lot of like elevation of each other's work so um you know you know that the various parts of the pieces that other people are working on are gonna are gonna kind of like raise what you do so even if what you do is still kind of feeling like a work in progress and that happens a lot on the design side um you know like hey when this gets good feedback when this gets when this gets like a theme when it starts to make sense when it when it gets narrative and voice over and music and all these different pieces um it's gonna it's gonna be different than than the experience you know you normally have which is you know early games are pretty rough even hades was um so so i think you know you can only do this um for a really long time if you're constantly being surprised um by the work of your peers and learning from them and so we're lucky to be able to have both yeah and you know i think that it seems like like you said the kind of core team of the folks who had worked on bastion have been there um for a while and like i said you know i've interacted with all of you over time as well too and seeing

the work that you're doing but you know seeing like darren work on music and and all that it just is like yeah it's pretty i don't i don't want to say like mind-blowing but it's really fascinating on like how much and how detailed and how far in you can tell that he's like really gone and thought about this stuff and i think you know for me too like art and music are things that i love that i'm not particularly talented at so every time i see people do them i'm just like you know like how and how on earth did that happen you know um and i think that that you know that growth and that change and um you know with the audio and with darren's work is really cool but then also like how he's explaining that he's working on it like there was a quote where he was just like i wanted to sound rad when you fight a minotaur that's a perfect way to go into writing a song right yeah yeah no it's uh it's it's getting on the same page i mean so yeah darren you know it's still it's it's still shocking um when when you hear uh the work for the first time because you don't know what to expect and and it's very exciting him and greg work really closely on audio stuff and in fact him

and greg are giving a talk right now so if you've made the mistake of coming to this hades conversation instead of the one about how they did all the voice over uh don't despair because like they are um i think you can still rewatch it later um but they they're talking about back and forth between the two talks yeah yeah yeah yeah you can split back and forth um but um you know greg and darren collaborate really closely on the audio experience and darren of course executes um so so much of it and darren also uh did all the voice direction and he was the voice of zagreus in the game so um he that was surreal that was very strange to why i kind of always get a little weirded out when i see people actually doing like voiceovers like cartoon characters and stuff too i'm like that's not what you look like yeah yeah it's pretty it's pretty shocking they're they're um yeah he's just an enormous talent so it's it's been awesome to work with i've known him since i was like eight years old or something too so that luck too yeah which is i also really love that that it was just like you know a friendship relationship that

kind of blossomed into this professional relationship as opposed to like somebody you know coming in like you know to someone outside of games and that kind of perspective and stuff and as well too i think is really interesting um but then you have someone like greg who you know has like been very deeply involved in games for a long time um and you know i think even though i feel like i'm just like gushing about everyone on your team you know i think that what is like this this thread to me is this really like very high level of thoughtfulness um and like contemplation and like research and the kind of like stewing of ideas and and concepts and i felt like that really came out a lot like through that that side of it you know like the music the art um and the the narrative component of it like the three of them talking about their work like you can really tell that this is like something that they're they're really like contemplating on a pretty like interesting level yeah they i mean they are very thoughtful about it they're very good at discussing discussing it and and they're very good at executing on it so it's one of those

things where um uh they're there you know there's plenty that goes into it so i don't make it sound like it's easy but they're they're just very um we have the advantage of working together for so long that like um uh you know we've developed a lot of shared just things shared vocabulary shared experiences um you know a shared sense of things and when we were working on hades um we were sort of excited to build on all our best ideas from our previous games um which was like a really different mindset than we used before because you know when we when we went from bastion to transistor we thought you know we need to make something new and original we want to make something new original and so we're going to spend a bunch of time figuring out a new original world which meant like a lot of the great ideas of bastion we felt were sort of off limits you know like we shouldn't use those those are bastion's thing and transistor needs its own thing and so um with hades it was a little less like that we had made three games we were

interested in doing something in the roguelike genre and we wanted to do something more narrative and so we just um we sort of allowed ourselves the space to use stuff that had worked for us in the past to build on them and and and also you know that just is enhanced by the chemistry the fact is the same people working on that stuff so we knew what the problems were with our previous versions of those or we knew what was new about what we were trying to do um and um and so yeah so so in a lot of ways hades is like an expression of of our strengths as a team and also our um i guess our strengths as as collaborators you know this is like the stuff we know we do well actually together not just individually it's like this is the stuff that we can really really do um uh at a level that we can we can feel satisfied with um so yeah just lucky to to work with them yeah and i mean i think that that

um you know how you're saying that it's kind of like a progression of all of the different games and and you all like working together yeah i think that that also to me ties in a bit too there's a point a point where you talked about how you all toil like kind of toil on games for a long time and i want to get into talking a little bit about like the kind of all-encompassing nature of doing a project like this but you know the the time frames that you're talking about you're like okay you know we like toil on a game for like three or four years um which you know is a long amount of time you know like i guess just in general i mean not relative to all of time and space you know but it is like a long time but also in like game development it's kind of not actually a long time and especially i think for smaller teams and indie developers like projects can go on way longer than you're imagining um just because of constraints and team size and things like that and i do think that one of the things that is very interesting from other developers and studios standpoint is that you are pretty consistent with like every couple years there is like a new game that has come out that is fully fleshed out and thought out and you know and there's all

these different components and stuff to it and so i actually kind of wanted to like hear you talk a little bit uh you know about that because i think even though it feels like a long time and maybe it doesn't feel so consistent i think out of a lot of studios you actually are fairly consistent and fairly like kind of like quick in a way um yeah i so um i i feel like um part of the so we're consistent i think for too consistent in terms of like how our output for two reasons one is dispositionally as people who work together we like want to work on stuff scope it down and finish it um that is like sort of like the simple way of saying it like we share this disposition it we we have we are always refining the thing we're doing and the reason we do that in a way that works across the board is we have this like uh value around basically embracing constraints so

like as a small team you have a ton of constraints right even big teams have constraints um um and so for us though it it's really wonderful to like work within them it's like what are the things we can do what are the things we can do well um how how you know like when do we want to do it and you know stuff like pax for example in the past where we used to bring a demo to pax and then go back into the lab and then release a game and that was the only times um you'd ever see it um you know until we tried early access on hades um those the constraint of a deadline for pax was actually useful because um you know going back to the failure talk that i referenced the top of this we cut gardening from bastion four days before driving up to seattle from san francisco because we thought this doesn't make any sense and it doesn't work um and and the constraint of that was you know was a hard decision and we had been working on that part of it for over a year but

the upside is like almost the relief of like not having to think about it anymore it's out so so we are very like um constraint driven in in as a as a team we're always mindful of that and that comes down to everything we do even like even when we're trying a new idea we want to see some ideas show promise like as you know quickly which you know uh really does work for some things like it really works for certain design ideas or certain system ideas um it may be work works less well for like really big problems like um like technical problems that might take months and months and months to solve um and so those are examples of the types of things like our mindset is usually around like what are the constraints we want to know the constraints um we want to know the constraints we want to know what the problems are we want to solve them and so uh yeah we we really value them like constraints are are wonderful we we always want to know what the constraints are um and that's

part of being realistic with ourselves and with each other you know it's the only way we can make sensible decisions yeah and you know i have heard that that deadline kind of like a like having an external deadline or an external thing you know like you don't you can't push pax back and you can't stop people from coming and playing the game you know so you kind of just like have to get it done um i think has been helpful for a lot of teams but now this is also kind of like leading me into another question that i had and i'm kind of wondering is like is part of the decision to move forward with doing a game in early access is to just basically have another set of like constraints in a way you know i hadn't really thought about it until you had said it this way but is that like partially one of the factors yes it's partially one of the factors so the the you know um hades was an early access game before it was a greek mythology roguelike um coming off of pyre having worked on three games in the model of we work on it in secret we like announce it and then we release it and

you know maybe maybe a couple hundred people will play it at pax and maybe some of our friends will play it along the way um having done that so many times we were just really interested in doing a process that was more open more transparent and got us to a game faster and the last time we had actually done something like that was bastion because um bastion went to pax i think like a year after it started or something like that um it was something like that um so yeah started in 2009 it went to pax in 2010 it released a year later um so it was one of those things where we were interested in in doing that but we were also interested in the changes we would have to make to do that if that makes any sense so like we would have to learn for example how to keep a game stable over a longer period of time we would have to learn how to take community feedback and integrate it into our process and we would have to um we would have to learn what are what happens when those are the constraints

and not just kind of like you know the deadline of pax or when we when we hope the game would be done or or any of those types of things so um we're really really interested in seeing what we would learn from such a process and um and we were lucky that that there were so many examples like so many amazing examples of games that had been created in early access um that were huge inspirations to us you know like much of the clay catalog fits into that darkest dungeon subnautica larian's uh games there's just so many so many amazing early access successes and and of course dead cells by motion twin which was a roguelike that they had done in early access um just seeing um seeing how it could be done well um was like inspiring as a game developer um and uh and so we wanted to see if if we could do that as well and so um you know the hades hades hades was born um

the idea for hades came out of a desire to to to try something in that direction yeah i think it's it's really interesting to hear you talk about some of the other examples of games that have gone through early access because i think i was talking about this yesterday i was like no games go through early access and you're like the thing is like a lot of games actually go through early access just nobody kind of remembers that yeah they were early access games but i remember when early access first like came out and it was it was kind of like met with some trepidation i feel like because people were just like oh i don't i don't know um but even with like going to events and things like that like games are kind of one of the few mediums where fans get to interact with it a lot of times while it's in progress you know like nobody's kind of watching like an undone version of a marvel movie or something you know and then like giving community feedback on it i mean i guess aside from like a trailer yeah or something but you know i think it's it's interesting how are you talking about using it like as a learning experience and ways for the studio to like gain gain new skills and i think you had mentioned too about um like kind of practicing something yeah we

yeah we we actually rehearsed it so before our initial launch in 2018 um we we we shipped three one month updates to ourselves um basically so we didn't do like the marketing art necessarily and stuff but we tried to like do a lot of the parts like let's let's like what would we call this thing um this update this last thing like what does it look what does the contour of a four-week cycle look like compared to you know a three-year cycle which is what we're we're used to before and um uh rehearsing it was awesome because um it gave us the sense that we were ready for the real thing um um it's a very smart idea yeah and then the real thing happens and then and then um you know like an example of a change we made really early on in our early access we went from four week updates um you know update every four weeks to an update closer to every it was more like eight to ten and we tried different things we tried

four then we tried eight then we did five again and then we went back to eight to ten yeah and um you know one of the things you can learn in your early access is like how to do your early access um you know we we learned a lot from those first two or three one month updates um that that got us um realizing like hey we could what the game needs now is like longer updates with more time our development director and the co-founder of supergiant gavin simon actually architected the the rhythm that we work we worked under and it was um you know we when we stuck to it you talk about constraints we did features for two and a half weeks two you know two and a half to three weeks if you include the time to plan the update then if a feature wasn't done it did not graduate like if there was still work left on it to to even stand it up then we couldn't move it forward then we did content for several weeks and then the last couple weeks were polish and in the polish phase a small a small group of

people inside the community got to play it and then it would go out um it would go out and you know we also had in internal qa resources and stuff so um that we're vetting the update as we were making it um and we would play it so it was one of those things where it you know it gave a rhythm to the whole process um that we got quite comfortable with over time yeah yeah and i think um there was a part in the documentary where greg was talking about kind of the thought and the rationale behind the way that you also approach doing early access so kind of having like multiple early access accesses i guess you know and then leading into into the steam launch you know which is um where there's you know like a larger part of your fan base and and things like that and um i think i've mentioned to you this a few times before but i feel like talking with you and hearing about how um supergiant runs is like when you talk to someone who's just in a really good functioning marriage and you're oh yeah of course that's how you would do that yeah of course you should practice like a little bit of early access before you

like go and do early access like totally why didn't i think of that and honestly did not think of it you know i just i think it's it's kind of a testament to the way that you all think about it and work together to really be like kind of very like practical um but innovative at the same time around like how you're approaching a change or a shift or something new with the studio yeah i mean for us it's the you know we uh the the two things to say there is just we didn't we didn't invent that process right so we could see we could see so many people do it so well yeah so that's the first thing you know and we saw you know really specific things we did we saw other people do like for example um the countdown clock to the next update that was inside the main menu is something that clay had been doing for a long time the um marking inside your patch notes which pieces of it were inspired by community feedback something we saw dead cells do and you know it's one of those things where you see these specific practices and you go i see what that does it shows it shows honestly and truthfully um

you know which changes kind of came from people's experience with the game that you as developers um were not always having because especially with a roguelike game you can't experience all of it um and as a developer it's really hard to experience your game like a like a player might and so uh all of these things kind of came together to to to to make that like a functional process for us because you know we didn't have to make it up but i mean i think the other thing about it is that um [Music] you know if you have like a learning orientation then you can as a group know that part of what you're doing it for is not for it to be perfect but for for you to learn something from the process of doing it and then the output can be the learning even if it doesn't always go well even if every update isn't always like a slam dunk or whatever yeah and we can do that because we have the privilege and good fortune of self-funding our titles of owning our

own ip and all this kind of stuff so yeah you know uh uh you know like a question you did not ask is like why doesn't everyone just practice it's because everyone has different constraints than the ones we have right and so we're really lucky that our first game enabled us to um essentially um choose our own destiny in in a lot of these ways and um and to basically have the flexibility to to make these types of decisions that work well for our team yeah yeah and i think that that's really interesting to point out too as well too like going into these projects with like a curiosity and like beginner's mindset you know because then you're kind of less attached to it like okay it has to definitely look like this or it has to come out on this day or it has to be this thing and so it can be rewarding even when it's not exactly the way that you're imagining it would be and another thing i'd like to kind of highlight and and there as well too is i think that this is not totally unique to the indie community but i do love this about it that it's it's very kind of collaborative across studios and across

like leaders and developers and people and even something like gdc you know to come and share like the insights that you learn because it's this kind of like it's not so much a competition as it is like the rising tide floats all boats um kind of situation and you know there's always people kind of paving the way and trying new things and then when they're willing to share like what worked for them and what did what didn't work um you know i think it can benefit everybody because like you said you know a lot of these things were not like the first time that they had ever been done um but they have been done the first time by someone yeah no for sure and you know we we um the people i mentioned the studios i mentioned we've we talked to all those people um like like we didn't just get inspired by them we like we like went to the primary source for a lot of that because um you know another thing that we're fortunate to be able to do but it's one of those things where uh i guess for whatever reason you know i think i feel like a lot of a lot of development on small teams is like people racing against their own

best time you're not really like trying to like destroy the other one or whatever so um it's [Laughter] it's really uh it's really like sort of fortunate that you can have those types of conversations and and and ask you know like what how how might i do this am i thinking about this right are we thinking about this right yeah like um that's that's uh we have the good fortune to be able to do that yeah and then you know the amazing outcome or hopefully you know the outcome of of that kind those kinds of conversations and that kind of work is that like the games are all cooler right yeah in the end hopefully like you know the fans are getting the best of this is like everybody's mind sharing on like how do we how do we make like this experience in these games just like the coolest things that they can be possible so people enjoy them and play them and have fun you know yeah yeah and you know especially when some comes something like a like a process right like yeah um production process at the scale of pretty of smaller teams is like pretty different right um than than it is for a like a much bigger team um and so

um a lot of what a lot of what's interesting to talk about is like what what's your process because i think sort of what you're actually asking is like how do your people work together in a functional way like what is the way in which your your group does this um like how are you thinking about this and so you know we're always thinking about that too how do we work together better um how do we um how do we make it make it um yeah make it work for each part of the process that we're in yeah yeah and i think there's kind of like two sort of like branches of this part of the conversation that i'm interested in you know one we talked a little bit about before is the kind of like i think the documentary did a good job of putting this forward is like how all encompassing working on a project like this is especially as a small team like like i mean can you even imagine the number of times you said the word hades in the last like four years you know like how many times you've seen that logo or how many times you talked about something about hades or thought about

hades and like you know it was one of the things when i was watching that i was i was kind of missing a bit about working on my own projects is like oh yeah there's this thing where at some point it's not like it takes over your entire existence you know some people some people have that it seems like you all have a good like work-life balance but it is this thing where it's just like it kind of gets into like your dna or something at some point you know and i think that that was like a really interesting thing that came across um in the documentary just like the kind of yeah the all-encompassing nature of game development and making a project like this yeah well you know i think this is the part with an early access game as a game developer can be especially um i'll use the word compelling because you know how often do you get people to play something of yours and give you like a response to the experience to produce so fast you know there's nothing like that where you know you someone is having a problem you read about it you fix it you know the way we conduct our early access through our discord we had a feedback channel an idea we got from the rocket

league discord and we um you know we read every piece of feedback that came through and um some of those some of those feedback got coalesced and became action became a task on the team and and someone would do something about it and then you'd push it out and sometimes you could tell it would work because someone in the community might say god that's so much better or sometimes you could tell it could work because they stopped talking about it as much like this is just not coming up as much anymore and so maybe that problem is actually like gone now and we don't have to think about it for a little bit yeah um so so yeah it's it's a very it's it's like a very compelling process and it does get into every every part of you but the truth is like these games we make they're like kind of they're like kind of with us forever um you know we're still you know jen was just doing bastion anniversary art you know that we we posted yesterday and stuff like that you know still thinking about rex and the kid and zulfenzia and all that stuff so we we we're like still you know they're they're they're a part of you and um

and i think as people dispositionally we we do get um just really creatively compelled by that by the projects we pick and and we know in some way um they're going to be with us like you know like kind of no matter what they're like or how they turn out or or um or any of those types of things they're just always going to be be with us um yeah be impossible not to think and talk about them yeah yeah yeah and then you know the other kind of side of that um earlier thread was a bit about you know the process of like how do you how do you do this process or how does this happen and i think i texted you about this when i was watching i was like i think my favorite piece of television that's ever been produced is the conversation where you're having like between a bunch of folks on the team about like whether he should like float while he has a gun or not oh yeah the the real conversation i live for that kind of stuff you know like there is a lot of like there's like this exciting like ooh like look at the art and look at this but like a lot of a lot

of projects are a lot of like let's talk about this thing yeah very big very detail-oriented you know and it just kind of goes on and there's not like an exciting resolution in the meeting you know like sometimes these things just like they're just long meetings and conversations that go on for a while yeah it's a reference to a conversation about um you know we we have this weapon in the game that is essentially like it's a gun um it's called the adamant rail um and um we knew we wanted to make it there was just a discussion over like well how should it work and one of the constraints actually is the way we kind of do our characters it would it would have been pretty hard for the character to move and fire yeah but every gun in every video game allows the character to move and fire basically so so how to get around such a constraint and so my brilliant idea was you know maybe the character could float and it would be fine you know and uh that wasn't fine we didn't do that um yeah instead he plants his feet in place it looks sensible it feels it feels good i'm happy to work where we got with that but

it's a good example of you know when you think about like functional collaborative teams some some sometimes i think about like well how much do you have to talk um because when you have a conversation now we're going to be using our words and luckily we all practice communication well and we we practice trying to improve it and and get and and get good at it but like a way easier way to do that is to demonstrate the work um and so you know if someone can make a thing and show it to you um the conversation can be more focused around the thing that was made and is it is it getting us closer to our goals or is it pushing us further from our goals and so um as a team we've we've we've become very like sort of cognizant about conversations that are going wrong it's like what like what's what's

missing here like what is is there is actually something that someone needs to kind of take back into the their own mental space or work on something and bring it back to the group so really something we can talk ourselves out of or around um and i think that's like an example of you know a sensitivity to something that we we we've developed over time i tell you um someone who's very good at this is actually our creative director greg um you know the the the you and i have actually talked about this before but hades used to be of a different character it used to be about yeah i was going to bring that up yeah it's the story of of theseus uh going in into the labyrinth to slay the minotaur that was originally the game we were gonna make and um when it came time to draw the main character um there was aspects of it that weren't really coming together and we were talking about it and jen and greg were talking about it and

greg felt like there was just something missing and so he came back from his christmas break and he had this idea which is like what if you know you play as the son of hades you play zagreus this character it's a little known character from greek mythology and you're trying to get out of hell and every time you try to you you fail you know your dad pulls you back into into your your house and um i think that's an example of an idea that like six or seven years earlier might have taken us like a month or two or three to get used to but like in a week a lot of the characters greg had described in that idea were like kind of in the game in some form and and um him and jen were kind of off to the races on a on a revision and so much of what we had made to that point because greg of course was internalizing the constraint of how do we keep the greek myth stuff that's working like how do we keep aspects of the gameplay and stuff that's working

how do we keep aspects of this like we had this olympian boone system where the where the olympians would empower you and that was working too so like what is the idea that keeps that um but but gets us around this this um issue we're having with with dry main character and it frankly didn't even appear as an issue at first um it did did to greg and jen when they were working on it but it didn't appear like as like a it wasn't like a stop the presses everyone let's get into a room and figure this out and talk it out um and so the the dominoes fell really fast when when greg came back with that and and um one after the other people contributed their piece to this new idea and um came together really fast and it was um it was it was you know we've had sort of main character changes and big changes like that on other games they take a really long time this time it didn't so i don't know just went way faster yeah and i mean i i was going to ask too like okay well how long did that kind of

decision take to propagate through because it seems like it would be a big thing but i think that you're right about there's this kind of non-vermi non-verbal like kind of component to things like that that when it was like slightly off somehow in a way that wasn't really conscious with the team and then when the solution was presented it was just kind of like oh yes like this is the right yeah it's like your mind opens up it's like yeah you know you see the humor in the idea he's talking about the characters he's contemplating you see exactly how the stuff we've made mostly fits with it yeah you know at that point and and how how um it actually gets us closer to the stated goals we had for the project in a lot of ways um and so you know he he he tried the work he put in game it's part of the reason you know darren darren voiced zagreus and we thought it was scratch like we thought it was all scratch view the main character yeah because you know we have logan uh cunningham who's our principal voice actor was the voice of the narrator and bastion and the arch justice empire and and the voice and transistor and you know so logan is you

know playing all these parts the game plays six or seven parts or something and you know he's and and we're like you know well logan of course all of these are going to stay um but this darren one you know who knows um and then but yeah it's like freaking worked um so you know after a while it felt like it was the right thing so yeah i mean even you talking about it now i'm like i you know my mind goes from like oh it'd be cool to go fight a minotaur to like oh yeah like you know with the context of having hades already out yeah yeah yeah yeah all my original ideas you know but like it does kind of like open up a like ooh like that's a really cool like there's this and then there's this you know and you know the key thing there is it it it turned uh it it it added a more of a family story to the game and the family story is i think one of you know the olympians are one big dysfunctional family in the way that greg has been thinking about them and and you know zagreus and his dad and and his principal goal of trying to find his mother um and so all of these types of things um

you know you you uh as creators you bring your own experience to it but you just you but you also see like wow the possibilities of this are yeah really interesting um and uh and what would happen if we if we did it yeah you want to know yeah yeah and yeah and i mean i think this is a good example of another question that um that i had actually heard uh gotten from another developer around you know was there any kind of decision you know that you guys made design wise business whatever that didn't like seem totally intuitive at the time that now you look back at it and you're like yeah that was that that was clutch you know i mean that was a big answer to that you know like oh we changed the entire main character and story of the game yeah yeah we did that that was pretty that yeah that's a good one yeah that worked out pretty well you know it's it's it's tough to say there's two or three things i guess um there's at least a few things that we tried that i can say with certainty we didn't know if they would work um you know um some of them were technical

like we we converted our whole engine from c sharp um to native to a native c engine so that we could you know be on the switch at 1.0 and and uh you know when we came out and out of early access in september 17th so there's probably two other things that come to mind so this isn't an unexpected design decision but it's like one of the one of the most potent design mechanics in the game um is actually inspired a lot by uh by mechanics and other games like the um if you remember in world of warcraft uh they introduced the rest system which was like shocking at the time which is like instead of penalizing you over and over for dying um they were like what if you had to like sort of if you like accumulated rest and you logged off you would get this experience bonus they turned you know mechanics that were often kind of really punitive into some sort of positive uh uh sort of formatting and so there was

there was you know we have uh examples or versions of mechanics like that in the game so we have this dark thirst mechanic which incentivizes you to try try and follow the the bonus the weapon is applied to and um you know we we see that that's pretty effective at getting people to try different stuff even though they could just use the same thing over and over and over again um you know there's there's other things like that that that um that that come to mind um but i'm well i was gonna say my so my other kind of like tangential question to this because there's a little bit of this in the no clip documentary about it like a kind of just really sort of like funny bug that made it into like oh yeah got patched eventually but i it kind of got me thinking there's like whole blogs dedicated to like the sims just going off their you know like somebody's like through the roof or whatever like was there like a bug or just something that happened when you guys were doing it where it's just like obviously you can't keep it in but just like the best bug yeah you know what there was the the there was like a

i don't know if there was a best bug but there one of my favorite bugs was the um i like to think about it as like i don't know it's something about it just like is very heartwarming to me we had a bug okay someone realized when you throw the shield and you put the aries boon on it which is supposed to give it a curse it doesn't work so we're reading discord we're like geez that's weird did we miss that so we go put the aries curse on the shield and sure enough it doesn't work and so we're like all right you know what let's fix that we'll push it in tonight's patch fix it push in tonight's patch and then um a bunch of people are killing themselves in the game and we're like well you can't really kill yourself there's no way to do that yeah yeah um and we realized that because the shield comes back to you after you throw it that when you threw the curse out it would stay attached to the shield to come back to you and then apply the curse to you and then if you had low enough helps you just die yeah um and so

it was like i like you think of it as heartwarming because like everyone doing the right thing it's like you know a person found a bug they reported it you know on our site someone fixed it yeah um and you know we we're like this looks pretty good we put it in um and then it's like oh everyone's dying now um and and then then we fixed that you know it was like it was hot fixed yeah um and you know we we improved our process and stuff so yeah stuff like that didn't happen as often um but yeah i mean there's there's stuff like that where it's just um yeah where it's it's a little bit it's one of those things where it's just really you the surprises are really fun there were probably lots of things like that that i just don't remember um during our early access i mean that's that's the thing that's kind of interesting with games when you're troubleshooting like from before i was in the games industry you know like i just kind of assumed that like whoever created the game had this like god-like ability to just make the game

do whatever which you kind of do but really what you're doing is you're like creating a bunch of systems that you sort of have control over but like act in very strange ways like there's a part and the the documentary where you guys are putting the trailer together and you're like you know the way a lot of those like videos and screen captures and stuff is like somebody plays it until a thing happens it's really cool and you record it and they're like oh you know can we add the blood effect or something and i just like kind of dawned on me that it's like you can't just like make the game do the thing that you want to do to like record it which is like a very strange thing to to do where you're making something that you kind of don't really fully understand and then how you test that and how it all interacts with each other which i think is why the sims has you know bugs that just go off the rails because there's so many systems that are interacting with each other but haiti's had a lot of that right like there's a like an insane amount of yeah interacting yeah and overlapping systems that's also power really accessed to help us understand it and a really good qa team um but but yeah i mean you know there's there's so many permutations um and so many things

so many things that can happen in a game you know for for us for us i think the hard part actually at first was to embrace the idea that we were now making because we had made these sort of pyre was our first time where we made a game where there were so many choices that we knew that we weren't going to experience them all yeah and as as developers and um but it's still it still went somewhere that was semi-controlled until the end when there's all these different permutations and you know the game puts together a ballad that reacts to all the decisions you made in the game in hades um you know examples of things we had to become comfortable with as a team who who worked the other way was we weren't gonna we weren't gonna know we weren't even gonna have a chance to know actually how how the whole thing might might feel or come together in in any given update cycle and even you know it's quite interesting people are like when you were playing hades when did you know it would be what it became and it's like what's very surprising is that

we didn't know that um like hades was in early access for a long time so we thought we kind of understood the kind of game it was um and we and you know we started doing our final playthroughs the summer before it came out with the ending that we had always anticipated and we knew we were going to have a game that had an ending um even if you could if you could um well we had you know it sort of has multiple phases of that but it's something that we we knew we were going to put in the game the the narrative resolution yeah and even then it's like you know it's it's just one of those things where we you know we experience stuff we push it around we try to feel out what works but it's still hard to play your own game like a player yeah it's like it's like one of the play-acting things that i find really really really hard to do yeah and it's actually part of the thing with capture two um capture is different than even that captures performative play it's like how do you play so that it it it uh it like one of the one of the worst things

greg saving savannah creative director and and james uh one of our people who does qa like they did a lot of the the the actual like stuff that gets captured it's like if they have to try to recapture something mostly as is but just a little bit different like yes they can load the save and try and do it but a lot of weird stuff happens when you're when you're going through such a process so yeah anyway i i mean um i mean i guess deeply dissatisfying answer of i don't know yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know um yeah i mean it's it's kind of it's interesting and i'm you know i'm sure there's a lot of other art that is like this where you know to go back to the earlier thing of like you know how much it kind of sinks in while you're working on a project like this but it stays with you forever but it is also something that you kind of don't have control of especially after it goes out into the world and now in a lot of ways it is like the players you know the player's idea of it and the perception of it and the changes that were made because of those decisions and things like that so it's kind of like i don't know i don't want to liken it so

much like having a child because i don't actually have that full experience you know but it kind of feels a little bit like it's like you kind of have this thing that you're building and creating and you know have some control over and it just it kind of grows and at some point it is kind of no longer yours but always always with you you know in a way and it's kind of like i i think launching a game and that creative process to me is like one of the most kind of like vulnerable and intense and kind of like strange experiences that i think a creative person can go through and i've seen it with so many developers you know like putting something out like that out in the world i think is actually pretty like um i don't know like courageous or something in a way like it's pretty scary yeah yeah well we have each other so we're not we don't we're not doing it alone um but you know and we have our we have our fans and the people who were there for us from the start who really um who really voice you know sort of bolster us and and believe in us and and um so we have those things and so you obviously want to continue to earn their trust um so you

um you need to you need to stay vigilant but yeah i mean the thing you said is very similar to something i've thought about a lot and and sometimes to talk about on the team you know is like the part of the game that was ours was always just the part we hadn't released um because um i really love this phrase that i hear gavin use a lot he came out of one of his learnings on hades which is like when you know we talk about the feature week say the feature is done after two weeks but it's not the the phrase he really likes to use is that it's like ready to begin um it's like ready to start because now it needs content now it needs iteration now it needs qa now it needs audio now then then you know when an update is done it's actually ready to begin again with the players in early access and their feedback and you know our patching process on that and then wrapping that and then bringing that into the next update all the way until all the way until it's done so so that's why i think also for developers uh the experience of

finishing a game can be profoundly sad because everything you're talking the upside of everything you're talking about of the creative how compelling it is to work on something how much it seeped into your into your mind and in your life the the the sense of the rhythm and and um and how many things are ready to begin and then you're actually at a point now actually yeah we're we're out of ready to begin we're like ready to be done um and that's like a different different way of of doing it and then uh uh like you said it's it's it's more than yours something like hades which i'm very proud of and i'm very proud of the team that made it it gets this reaction partly because of what players bring to it um and and and you know the experience is a collaboration between us and them in some way and so yeah i mean i feel very fortunate the whole team feels very fortunate to have been been able to do this work to finish it um to have made something that so many people

have connected with um but they brought their experiences to it so like they they brought themselves to the game they brought their imaginations um to fill in the parts of it that we as a small team can't always create right there's not lavish giant lavish cut scenes to describe every interaction right so um the things they brought to it i feel like very honored that we could be part of that process for them yeah um so that part that part feels feels quite good for i think everyone on the team yeah that's a really like kind of like wonderful way to think about it um actually while you're talking about that it kind of reminds me of my art teacher in high school had said that like basically a painting is never done you just decide to stop working on it because like you can and and there are you know i've seen it in a lot of creative fields where people just will work on perpetually work on something you know and and never like quote unquote finish it and i think you know there's so much and you can go so far down into the process that like kind of being done

with something is just like deciding like i am done you know and one of the other questions actually i had for you is like do you feel like hades is like done you know yeah so so you know part of the way we i've i've asked and asked that question i find it really hard to answer how do you know when you're done and and i'll answer your question in a moment but we often try to think about like completeness completeness to us is different than perfection completeness is like all the parts have a reason to be there and nothing is extraneous yeah um so yeah i'm just going to have a mirror kind of summarize i'd ask them if it felt like um the game was like done um yeah what they're what they're working on now with it so yeah you know we we have the xbox and playstation launches coming up on august 13th as i mentioned and so you know we're you know it's still an act part of our of our um of our lives you know we just released a patch that added japanese and all this kind of stuff so um you know while we're working on hades we patch pyre we we just we just um the games are just a part of our our studio

right and and so they're they're you know it's always these little little things for sure yeah yeah i think another one of my favorite parts of the noclip documentary is like one of the very last things that danny asked you is like what are you working on next and you're like we're making we're doing a patch just like literally what you've been doing for like the whole like three year or however long it was was like we're danny we're making a patch yeah we're making a pet so danny daniel danny did a great job on the noclip series we're really like lucky to be working with him but you know i think the the thing that working on it showed is just like danny's amazing it's just like he was just a part of the making of that game as far as i think a lot of us are concerned because he he you know he added something which we might not have done ourselves which is like an opportunity to reflect on it while it was happening um and so it's a wonderful gift um and and so yeah

we're really really grateful to him for that and yeah that you know he knows as well as anyone it's like wow that stuff just yeah sometimes it just feels like it might not stop um yeah and you know i think that that's really poignant to kind of say about the chance to have reflection especially even while you're working on it or even now to be able to look back at it um you know i remember uh i think it was michelle obama or something was talking about her book and she was like you know we had this really interesting opportunity that a lot of people don't have is that i basically had the time and the space to sit down and write this book and reflect on like what happened to us over the last eight years you know a lot of times you're just kind of going going going and you don't really get to like kind of understand the progress that you're making or you know the kind of the true length of the journey because you're not documenting it in that way or you're not getting the time to reflect on it so i actually think it's like incredibly cool that you guys are always gonna have this like thing that you can look at and see like the reactions of like what was it gonna feel like when we launched it and what was it gonna you know like watching to see what you're nominated for like you get to like have that you know recorded for yourself which is which is

amazing it's an amazing gift you know um yeah if you if you uh if you have a learning orientation as we do as a studio it's really useful because you can keep kind of taking your experience and pushing it forward yeah and all that kind of stuff but you quite easily forget i think even if you don't have that if you do or don't have that like what the experience of doing the thing was actually like the time you did yeah yeah and now inescapably we will always know yeah people always always have that you'll always have that image of you watching yourself on nintendo direct yes yeah i can see your hoodie i can reprise that scene yeah at any time but yeah that makes sense yeah um so we're coming up on the last few minutes here which i'm kind of a little bummed about because i feel like i could talk to you about this stuff forever um yeah but i did have one last one last question um you know is there any like is there any game or piece of music or book or like thing or something that you're just like really into right now or thinking a lot about or anything that you kind of just want to like

talk about or plug yes i want to talk about so there's so many there's there's a lot of inspiring and amazing work being done by a lot of developers out there um i have personally been really inspired lately by the work of um youth cat studios who made dyson sphere program which is an early access game that game does like everything that a sensible independent developer would tell another independent developer not to do right it's like a massive scope it's a game with a whole universe inside of it and um like all the universes inside of it and um it's just it's a it's a it's an amazing amazing uh compelling game that has so many moments that open your mind a little bit more to what the game is and what it could be and how and how expansive it could be and um and it does it in a very smart way i i i love it and i found out the game is made by a small number of people um it's it's a really small team um and uh

i had the i had the joy of tracking down their email and sending them a note and they said they sent something back which was nice too so they're very excited about that well i was just excited yeah i was just excited to tell them their game is yeah their game is so good you know when uh when people make something like that that gives you like energy like creative energy to do stuff because you sit there and go how did they do this like how did they do this is such a small team how did they do this um and um i i just get a lot out of that um so they they've they've given me a tremendous gift i love i love when game developers geek out on other developers games like it's one of my one of my favorite things yeah i know the other game that did that for me in the last couple years was was started value for sure so you know i mean there's people on the team they can rattle off a list of them these are just mine um for sure i don't feel quite lucky i don't even want to go down the rabbit hole of us no no it's okay so yeah anyways uh so we're gonna wrap up there and uh just as a kind of parting thing i'm here if there's anything like you know where can people find hades and like follow you and all

that stuff yeah hades is out on on pc and the nintendo switch and then on august 13th it will be out on xbox and playstation uh of this year and uh thank you so much to all our players and and thank you to the game developers conference for nominating us for for six awards in tonight's show we're really excited to see how that goes yeah great awesome yeah and thank you so much amir for taking the time to do this and for asking me to have this conversation with you i'm really excited about it yeah awesome thank you all right great thank you all right bye everyone [Music]