Forging Hardspace: Shipbreaker: Creating Processes for Original IPs

[Music] greetings everyone uh this is forging hard space ship breaker uh we're going to talk about our journey the last four and a half years as we made this game and some lessons that we learned and some things that we can share with all of you uh so who are these people that you're seeing in front of you i'm ron mcguire i'm the chief creative officer here at blackbird i've been in games industry almost 20 years now i've got to work on a ton of amazing brands in ip most recently we've contributed to the minecraft series um but i've also got to work on some original ip which is uh what we've did here with heartspace shipbreaker and what we're going to be talking about and i'm elliot hudson i'm associate creative director here at blackbeard i've been with black for about i think eight years now i started on a game called hardware that eventually became deserts of care act and for the past four years i've been working on what eventually would become heart space ship breaker but it wasn't always ship breaker so we're gonna go through the journey and share some things with you guys so who are we as a studio we were founded in 2010 we're based out of

vancouver bc uh the studio was founded by a number of ea and relic folks um and really the goal was to create incredible games original games games that people could be immersed into games that when you're playing them the screen edge disappears and you just fade into the game uh we our first game was in uh 2016 homeworld desperately carrick launched we had been working on a game that was kind of a spiritual successor to homeworld uh and while we were developing that the homeworld ip actually went up for auction uh we bid on it but we were also dramatically outbid by gearbox but the first thing that happened was gearbox reached out to us and said hey would you guys like to do something with us uh at that time we were working on this incredible game uh that launched in 2016 uh and we're about 79.80 on metacritic but amongst pc gaming focus sites namely pc gamer gamespot ign they gush they love the game and that kind of put us on the map shortly after that we collaborated with nasa's jpl on what was called project eagle which

was imagining on mars base 100 years from the day it launched we that was an interesting process because we often create ideas on our own but in this case we're creating concept and then vetting them with engineers and biology you know xenobiologists and all these crazy things at jpl that went on to steam for free to celebrate nasa's insight landing and then finally what we announced last year homeworld 3 which we announced in september on stage with gearbox attacks we all missed pax but we're not talking about any of these today we're talking about uh shipbreaker shipbreaker um went on to steams right around a month ago in a couple of days yeah um and it has we spent a couple of days at the top of the steam charts um but the press and the fan response to it has just overwhelmed us and this is what we're going to be talking about today so just a quick look at what shipbreaker is so shipwrecker obviously you play

the shipbreaker and you work in this salvage yard for this company that sends you these derelict ships and your job is to strip these things down try to salvage all the valuable materials all the components etc and try to get as much value other ships as possible but just like real world ship breaking real world salvaging it can be extremely dangerous there's fuel running through these ships electrical systems they have faulty reactors in them lots of ways for you to die the company will just clone you and throw you back in the yard so it's all about trying to escape that seemingly endless cycle so what we built was um quite unusual and quite different one of the things the team struggled with was there weren't a lot of market comparables or games that were in the market that were um uh similar so talk a little bit about how we got there um both from a brand side or ip side as well as gameplay side um and really that was driven through the goals that we set initially and the goals that we continued to calibrate with the team as we were working on it and what we're hoping is is you're going to go on this journey with us through the last four and a half years we have slides that are about learnings

and they're labeled learnings but we also have a ton of slides that are actually from team presentations at those times you'll be looking at videos that we presented at those times so you'll get to see a little bit about how the game evolved and get some takeaways from it so as a studio we've modeled ourselves after you know these kind of legendary studios or certainly legendary studios other studios similar to this would be uh psyonix that most recently did rocket league and what these studios did aside from being known for being just incredible and producing incredible games they began doing work for other people which is what we did as well as they took on um took on games with other people's ip in the case of gearbox we know quite well we worked with them on a couple games gearbox began by making incredible fps's for example the expansion half-life like what an amazing gig or the pc port of halo again what an amazing gig to build out their tech base to build out their studio and then start taking shots at games of their own so in the case of gearbox that was brothers and arms but really it's stuck with borderlands

in the case of blizzard we all know um rock and roll racing and the lost vikings but really it's warcraft that that set the stage and then after that world of warcraft so this is what we've modeled ourselves after which is that we're building these incredible games revealing this incredible technology we're also able to take our own shots and and build our own games so the the journey for shipbreaker starts at the beginning of 2016. we had just shipped deserts of carrack um and the studio hadn't quite spun up our next big project yet so they had a lot of people who needed something to to do something to work on and it was also an opportunity for us to decompress a little bit from from working on on on carrick and then also do some creative bloodletting and just kind of refresh ourselves and so blackberry decided to run an internal game jam so we split the teams of about seven to eight people i think there's about five teams totaled um and everyone was involved accounting uh it manager was involved audio engineers were involved it was great it was really fun and i had to be part of a team that worked on something called hello collector which is what we're going to look at because that was where shipbreaker started yeah so out of five

teams we had just this remarkable game here yeah so the the goal for the jam for this demo here that we're looking at was recreate that sense of in the movie gravity of sandra bollix spinning through debris barely held on by a cable that's keeping her from flipping off into the void so you have a very simple set of mechanics you can grab and crawl along this three pieces you have your grapple that can pull you around and that's essentially it and your objective is to climb through the swirling debris field and find the valuable resources without getting flung off into the void extremely effective it was super tense to play and very rewarding very successful so we did a big review with the whole studio um at the time it was probably 60 folks and we we looked at all of all of the game jam games and the sense in the room was electric that we had to make a hello collector into a game like everyone produced these awesome games for game jam but i probably had 10 people come up to me afterwards that weren't on the team talking about are we gonna make this

game it's super cool let's make this game let's do this thing so it literally took about two days before we had a full green light and we set a goal i think we started production about a month later we started the team going about a month later and the team what was the hello collector team the game jam team began working on what we would call project links or codename links and right off the bat we want to set goals for the team we talked a little bit about this earlier there's a phenomenon that was served by sociologists in the criminal justice system where um detectives are deeply incentivized to solve cases they're called clearance rates um and from outside perspective or even if you're in the system that makes sense detectives solve cases but what happens is is that detectives are now incented and sent to progress their careers to not take on cases they're they're difficult to solve and that's not actually what we want from our detectives now that this is something that was observed and many you know changes have been made to that system but it's a very human thing that

when you set a goal in front of someone they try to solve it and sometimes that means not taking on cases is where there's out there somewhere it's hard case to solve so in the case of shipbreaker we didn't set a goal where we said uh we want you to make a shitload of money or we want you to make a ton of money we want you to um ship a game that has 10 million active users or anything like that we set three really simple goals was that one we want you to ship to we want you to make it a original game that is unusual and three we want it to be an original ip that is ours and we didn't set any other goals aside from that there were times where we did financial forecasts but those didn't go into team facing goals and they were extremely conservative because we didn't want pressure on the team to do something else so then we yeah like where we said we started development on trying to turn this into a full-fledged project and this is a screenshot from around that time and really what we were doing is we were just taking all the stuff we liked about the game jam and really trying to inflate and stretch it into a full-sized game so rather than like a randomized

degree field here you are at a space station that's falling apart and your objective is to try to clamber your way inside that station and find out why it's it's crumbling to pieces and you start to move through other locations throughout the this galaxy um and it was it was fun it was really exciting we already started adding more maneuvering mechanics more gameplay more hazards um and then we start to work on the actual tone and narrative direction of the game as well and so this is where we were this is a slide from that that time uh where we did an exercise of trying to place ourselves on a sort of tone spectrum um the game jam had a lot of tense uh gameplay it was very dark but you'd also get these very satirical and sardonic emails from the company that had sent you out to the depths of space so there was this kind of humor to it a very dark humor so between something that's very light and satirical and something that's straight up dark core we sort of felt that we were kind of in the middle of that we're showing that here because this is one of the big things that we would start to reevaluate as we continue to progress

through progression through development as elliot said we had a ton of mechanics that we thought were really impressive like we were at this point we were eight months into six months into development something like that and we had all the mechanics that we list here this is from the presentation that was made to the team when we evaluated it all of these features are in the game four years later or all of these mechanics were in the game four years later we were really we really love the viscerality of grabbing on to a ladder grabbing onto a piece of wreckage and spinning with it with zero g we thought it was really cool yeah but once we once we got um this build and we got the mechanics together and we were able to look at it and we were able to step back from it there are some lessons um which is one of our one of our next learnings which is when we first began development on uh what would become shipbreaker which was a time called codename links or project links we felt that milestones and gates were things that publishers forced on developers that are not forced on developers but it was part of that process

as part of that social contractor business contract that you get with publishers we were making our own original ip everything was in-house we're like ah we don't need to do gates or milestones we spent about five six months in that in that view or that world view when we realized like actually gates and milestones even if we're not triggering a payment or all the business things associated with it it lets us take a moment to evaluate the game to build it up to a point where we can all look at it we can all talk about it and then have an official takeaway of this is the feedback this is what we're going to do next and complain for the future so you know our first or one of our early lessons is kind of a goofy one but we aren't above gates and milestones we're not beyond the law like it's important to take these inflection moments and look at the game um the second is we're going to talk more about what happened out of this first milestone but there was something really important that we wanted to embrace and really lean into so what we're looking at here is the evolution of what would become halo so on the far left is the original halo

prototype or at least in the public this is the original halo prototype which is a sci-fi rts for mac using soldiers from the future that are battling and vehicles that are roughly to scale there's something obviously really cool there and actually if you look at the very top of the screen that is a tank that is incredibly similar to what would actually ship in halo but they didn't keep that game they pla clearly they played it they iterated on it and they decided that there was something cool here but they wanted to remove something from it and refocus it so in the middle you can see this is where it became a third person action game i'm not sure what the platform is at this point i'm fairly certain they're still on mac and then the thing on the far right is an hd version of what would actually ship of halo combat evolved which was a first person xbox only title uh a radical transformation in terms of what the game was but at the same time you can see the threads of dna or them following the breadcrumbs as they're doing each iteration of uh halo to find that that was something really important to us and

it's something we want to preserve and hang on to if you're curious about the evolution of halo or the development of halo there's a ton of articles on this online uh and i don't want to turn this into a gdc talk on a postman but it was important to us to follow the breadcrumbs yeah exactly and like rory said the we didn't do the gates at first but for the for the first half a year of development really was just let the team do their thing they're creative they'll pump something cool um but we realize is that the gates are really important to evaluate whether you are following those breadcrumbs that are working this is a slide from one of the gates i think probably the landscape before we decided to make a pretty big change to the game um and we had come up with something that we thought was really strong like objectively it's it was a good game but it had this sort of cosmic horror dark slow plotting pace to it and it just wasn't something that blackbird as a studio felt would fit in their roster games wasn't the type of game that they wanted to make and so that's where we had to really step back and find what do we like about what's what's here and what do we want to add to this to take it in a different direction

yeah so we took um just a few days with the team evaluating the build talking about it and we decided that we were going to move away yeah we built yeah so at the very beginning that was the end of 2016 the very beginning of 2017 we started to work on something called falling skies and this is our first pivot of helicollector which would then become shipwrecker eventually and falling skies was basically there's this battle happening above earth there's these ships that are taking damage and getting destroyed and they're slowly falling through the atmosphere threatening to to smash into the ground and cause massive devastation and so you take your grapple gun which we had already and you basically spiderman from falling ship the falling ship and this is where we introduced a new mechanic a new breadcrumb which would be the cutting tool um so you would slice these chips up until they were small enough that they just dissipate in the atmosphere and they don't cause a hazard anymore um there were some issues with this pitch even though it was very fun it was very action oriented we called it fruit ninja in space we found that there was actually a problem yeah we were really excited about this

concept of cutting but overall we weren't happy where we ended up totally yeah we took that back to the team we chat with them about it we worked on it i think or maybe two months tops and what became clear is that the team wasn't happy with this concept with this tonal shift in trying to address the concerns with held a collector being too slow and too plotting they felt that we had gone and done an over pivot that we'd gone towards something that was far too action arcadey that didn't leverage the mechanics very well um that we had lost actually a break come along the way that that sense of relatability and and this personal touch the game had and it didn't feel unique anymore it felt like you were just kind of a super soldier like you see in so many other games whereas in helicopter you felt like a real person out in space so the team um came to the creative leadership at blackbird and essentially said we don't really want to do this and so we said okay well what excites you guys um are you folks excuse me and they come up with four ideas and uh which they pitch yeah exactly so we realized rather than try to come something else take it back

to the team see if they like it go back we could just flip flop there forever like rory said we decided to do this more collaboratively so we came up with a bunch of different concepts that we could possibly do all of these leveraging the mechanics that we knew we really liked the zero g stuff and the the cutting so those falling skies savateur was all about using your cover to penetrate through this invasive alien colony ship and try to destroy and destroy the fleet knight errant was traveling through deep space with your grapple and you're cutting your cutting tool and battling these giant ship-like leviathan creatures kind of wacko but kind of cool and then the last concept that we hit on was this idea of someone just working in a salvage yard being given these derelict ships and having to tear them apart and salvage them and as elliott said all of these used grappling they're all first person they all involve cutting heavily like whether we're cutting into a mother ship or cutting into some space beast um but there there was one idea again that stood head and shoulders above the rest which was this concept of

tearing apart derelict starships uh in search of value uh and all the threats that each one of these ships have exactly yeah uh so it began a change uh we didn't like the fantasy and tone that we first had with hello collector and we began discussing what our new fantasy is exactly so up to this point we've been following these little breadcrumb trails to see where this game would take us where it wanted to take us um and this was the total shift that uh it would end up actually being basically an entire loaf this is something that we got so excited about as a team as a studio as a as an executive team um it was just something that had so much potential talking about the working-class hero that sense of nobility in the work you do the reward of hard work contributing something bigger than yourself and contrasting that with industry and systems that exploit those kinds of people there's also an opportunity to bring back a lot of the humor and personality that that helicollector had and what's amazing so this is again as a slide from 2017 right when we made that pivot what's amazing is you can see this in

the game today yeah interestingly right before the game went live there was a preview where they they gushed about how the game felt like brazil in space yeah we were like yes so this was really a thing that we could sink our teeth into that we were really excited about totally um and and this informed a new set of pillars um a a set of changes to what we were trying to do yeah we took that tone and through a collaborative exercise with the team came up with our pillars and these aren't these aren't design pillars they're not um art pillars and audio pillars these are game colors and blackboard we use these to inform all of the disciplines so it's really important that these are strong and that they're very precise in what they're trying to convey and we'll talk a little bit more about how we we do that but this is where we were 2017 this i think maybe from the same presentation as the last slide uh blue collar fantasy that's been our our guiding star through this whole thing and you'll see that that rarely ever changes the other ones get nuanced a little bit but but you'll also see their dna i don't completely go away at this point um so let's talk a little bit about pillars so this is something i first

heard that associated with relic i mean we have many relic folks here at blackbird so we kind of inherited this this process this is pretty much industry industry standard now at this point there's two really great talks one from at gdc josh mascara gave a talk and jay wilson gave a talk both of which are about diablo 3 and the pillars that they had including when they pivoted into uh reversals um these are some of our guidelines for pillars one is we in general make authentic team product facing pillars authentic game facing pillars make pillars that the team can understand and connect with if you have strategic business pillars that's fine that's fine to have an executive level or a marketing level but um it's not something that teams get excited about right we also in general we try to be really specific um all of our our pillars after a certain point i actually noticed earlier that we in our earliest pillars we were not obeying this but we try to get really descriptive in the pillars and evocative with the pillars so that the team can repeat them often to each other they can talk about blue

collar fantasy i think if we were to measure the amount of times people on the lynx teams have blue collar fantasy would be like in the tens of thousands yeah um but we do refine them over time which we'll see even with these pillars here we're going to see them changing as we move through and like i mentioned we do this as a collaborative process with the team it's not like the creative director or the game director goes off and decides what the pillars are and dictates that back down we find that the most effective way to do it is to come to those pillars with the team for a couple reasons one is your pillars will probably be stronger because you'll talk through all the issues with it and you'll and you'll massage it into a place that it actually has a lot of meaning and the other is that people will feel super invested in those pillars and they'll take that out into their work uh and and you won't have to do much maintenance on on it you won't have to repeat it very often people will actually they'll surface in the stuff that they're doing every single day so that's why it's it's extremely important to us that we do this as a team process yeah and and just as examples of that like you know you you can direct your audio director just

give you the sounds of industry and blue color fantasy or they can take that pillar away and in the background you can hear the sounds of metal colliding and it evokes that and you never even ask for that so ideally that's the position that you're in with the entirety of your team and then this is just an example of a whiteboard from one of those uh exercises of the team trying to arrive at those pillars and we actually heavily use something called the mda framework nda stands for mechanic dynamic aesthetic and typically it's used as an analysis tool for complete games to try to determine okay how do the mechanics of this game interact with one another to create these dynamics which are then perceived interpreted by the player as the aesthetics of the game you know the uh the um the the livable experience of the game you know the emotional experience of the game um and we actually use it because we had a list of mechanics that we knew we really liked we said we showed that earlier in the presentation we had this new aesthetic that we knew we wanted to hit the blue collar vibe the industrial sci-fi vibe

and so this was really an exercise with the team to figure out how do we massage those existing mechanics how do we add just a few more layers of systems in there to create the dynamics that we believe are going to create the aesthetic we want and then enshrining all of that logic into pillars and this uh exercise took actually a week or more we we went through and looked at these mechanics and things that we wanted to achieve but we would start to really dial in what we thought the game was so at this point the team begins working on a vertical slice which we're seeing here it's worth pointing out this footage is none of this ship in the game but it is very close to what we shipped this is we're seeing the cutting applied we're seeing grabbing objects and moving them we're seeing this here the reactor uh interacting with the environment in compelling ways um and everyone that saw this is like yes like all systems go let's put this into production we're good yeah totally this is um just under two years ago probably and

this is clearly the game that we wanted 100 like it has everything in it that you see nowadays the salvage bay that you salvage in the free-form cutting in the ships establishing these hazardous things but it was all handcrafted and so that's where we found we actually had a problem not thematically not creatively there was actually a production problem and that leads us towards our last pivot of the game yeah so we were ready to to put this game into development but once we realized uh or into production excuse me we're already in development once we realized what the there was a problem is that the team to make this vertical slice essentially hand built that ship and we would need to hand build all of the remaining ships which the team felt could only be three or four with a medium-sized team that was a problem because that meant that we would need to focus the game on a 5-10 hour experience which is of course doable and and there were games coming out at that point like firewatch we were talking about quite a bit that can do this but it actually felt disconnected from the game we've been talking about if you look at all of the pillars that we've

been sharing over time nowhere in there is there a narrative nowhere in there is the player is this person and their journey is this like we had had conversations about it but in order to build a five to ten hour experience a core part of that is the narrative and that felt a little bit disconnected to to take that from being a zero percent or a small percent emphasis to like a thirty or forty percent emphasis so actually didn't want to go down this path it was also uh informed by business conditions as well as we did want to target early access and we knew that a traditional story game um it typically doesn't do well in early access and we did want to engage with that and we wanted to grow this game with the community so we set out to do um the first impossible task that we built was cutting the second impossible task that we put in from the team was essentially taking all these beautiful starships that we've been making at blackbird and make them into kind of pseudo-procedural generated randomized ships yeah this was really the final bread comfort for the thing that would become shipwrecker and that was fully embracing systemic designs like

very saying pseudo uh procedural modular ships taking all that gameplay that we liked about that vertical slice chunking it up and trying to figure out how to make it dynamically mix and match to provide way more breadth of content and experience for the player than we could ever hope to do building by hand and so that that went beyond just the ships uh we actually doubled down on on making the actual elemental systems of the game far more interactive and systemic heavily inspired by breath of wild's element system which i think has just come out right around this time and things like equipment decay and having to maintain your tools and all of your vitalities and things like that that all came out of this final pivot and the the thing that's worth pointing out here as well is that this is um we are the studio many of our artists and art directors worked on the original homeworld and worked on deserts of carack and are now working on homeworld three it's the standard for ships in the studio of starships it's extremely high and uh to build these procedurally with an art direction that everyone was happy with when they saw them was quite an achievement so now that

we've got all the final pieces in place i wanted to show uh the contrast between where the pillars were when we started to decide that we're gonna make shipbreaker and where they were when we shipped basically uh in january of this year so in 2017 you can see the blue collar fantasy tactical ship disassembly and vehicle fantasy from the human perspective and then what we shipped with was blue-collar fantasy that didn't change like i said that has been one of the guiding forces of the whole game uh total shift assembly was just a slight nuance to better inform people what we meant by that pillar is where we said as you use these pillars you're going to refine them and then the last to be honest that one was actually a bad pillar from the start so vehicle fantasy is a reference to a pillar on our previous game deserts of care act um so we were you know subverting that uh that pillar for use um and that made sense to people who had worked with this care act but as we hired more people for the team who hadn't worked on davidson carrack it didn't make any sense it was it was total i think rory calls it inside baseball yeah people just didn't understand they were like what is vehicle fantasy

explain that to me and it's like well there's this game yeah yeah so there's a lot of uh hidden knowledge that's sort of required to understand that one so we just got rid of that completely and we realized we really need to make systems as content uh a pillar that we're not gonna try to handcraft stuff we're gonna try to have the game create these experiences so let's talk a little bit about some of our learnings through this experience we learned a lot and some of these we learned accidentally some of them were intentional but we'll just share some of the things that we think were really important so one is keeping the team size small so we we never um really invested deeply into a team beyond say like 10 to 15 until we'd really dialed in the game and we were really confident that we could pull it off and a team was able to build prototypes and or production prototypes that we could actually get hands-on with and understand but also on the opposite side is we didn't move people off of the team for the most part we kept people on the team there was an odd one or two week pinch hitting for something we pulled a

couple of concept artists to help with something here and there or a producer for a time period but in general we made a policy of not crippling the team by pulling people off and a policy that we would not ever pause the team this is also something that was shared by um the folks at psyonix when they were building rocket league is that they that game went through so many different pivots and changes but they never paused it even when they weren't quite sure what it was and that's really important because the act of spinning it back up is way harder it's way harder um the second is is time boxing thing so in the case of of um ship breaker we had two impossible asks that we talked about as cutting and it was this concept of pseudo-procedural ships both of those we essentially gave the team a period to evaluate it and actually discover whether or not this was doable the first week it was like you guys are crazy how can we possibly do this but as they started to explore the concept they started to make concessions here and there and like hey we can do the cutting this particular way if we change this particular thing and we never ever do this one thing

and we were actually able to pull it off same thing with procedural shifts and the idea is as long as we're making progress and we're moving towards these goals we're generally fine it's really easy as a studio and from the business perspective to get panicked about change change is good and if you go back through the history of amazing ips and original games we gave the example of halo but starcraft starcraft began this is very public knowledge that it began as chris metzen's crazy space vampire game and it's like what that connected with it with starcraft i have no idea i'm sure there's a great story there um but that act of changing the game and pivoting and refining and changing is super healthy um the last thing is is or one of the last things is ask for help we asked for a ton of help amongst amazing folks like brian and haley martello from gearbox very heavily involved in the creative direction of borderlands they gave us so much guidance on this process and really helped us through building an original game and then four

amazing uh vancouver-based independent developers shane neville jamie chang of clay tyler sigmund of red hook and derek johnson of thorium each one of these people contributed so much to this game and gives so much guidance yeah we're extremely grateful to them um and then our last uh insight is that you know when you're making an original game you don't always need a partner if you have the funds you don't necessarily need a partner um or if you have the business acumen to publish a game yourself you don't necessarily need it but if you do want a partner find someone that really likes your game for what it is uh when we were shipping desert to carrack we were showing it to publishers and to other potential partners and it's a game about vehicles set on desert planet and someone asked us completely seriously can you change out the vehicles for dragons and we were like we could uh you know and maybe that was a good game somewhere it's just not really our game so in the case of shipbreaker uh the partner we found focus

loved the game for what it was they were so excited about what it was and they wanted to help us make it what it was not not uh change it into a game where you dismantle dragons scale breakers that's pretty cool yes art space skill maker so this is where we ended up um so this is uh the love launch trailer that we saw for um shipwrecker that was actually produced by focus that came out uh right around launch day for early access yeah yeah exactly and it's been it's been a phenomenal experience being relaxed like we knew we knew that we loved this game internally as a studio we always knew also that it was kind of a weird concept we weren't sure how it would land unless it finally got out there but especially once focus came on board and they got it immediately we were like okay maybe this maybe there's some links to this thing and here we are in early access and we've got just a phenomenal community um it's done super well and they love it and they and we're so we're so happy to be talking to them about what to add to this how to expand on this experience they're giving us amazing fan art amazing fanfiction it's it's fantastic yeah yeah it's been an incredible

journey yeah and um and to think this began with a tiny game jam and uh though it's worth pointing out you guys have seen the footage along the way there's some things that still carried through there's some things that we still shift with that are pretty remarkable that we kept them through yeah and there's definitely code from the game jam still in the game you know that variable yes uh so that's shipwrecker we're in early access on uh on steam um i am rory mcguire the chief creative officer here at blackbird um and i'm allie johnson associate creative director uh if you guys have any questions at all about this process what we went through you have a question about some lore stuff that you experienced in shipbreaker or you have feedback about a game mechanic we would love to hear it so you can you can tweet at us uh here and or just send us emails though we apologize for spam filters and go sideways yeah so thank you all very much uh have a great uh gdc summer and we'll talk to you soon cheers thanks [Music] everybody