'FTL: Faster Than Light' Postmortem: Designing Without a Pitch

hello everybody uh my name is Justin Ma I did the art and um half of the design and I'm Matthew Davis and I did the programming and the other half of the design um we are pretty much the only two creators that were on FTL we had a few important contractors like music and for writing but it was pretty much just the two of us the whole time um it was about an 18th month project that we started shortly after leaving a bigger studio uh about two years ago now um I'll start by introducing to the game for those of you that don't know what FTL is there's a screenshot that's pretty typical of what you expect in faster than light the core concept is that we felt that a lot of games were putting you in the pilot shoes instead of the commander shoes in science fiction we watch Star Trek and Firefly and we watch the captain and he's the center of everything and it's not the pilot and so we wanted to give you that Captain Kirk feeling the the controlling your crew and telling where to aim and what to do and so we have the basic game

screen that you see all the time is just sented on your ship in the left there and then the enemy ship on the right and it's a kind of a tactical combat where you're targeting different systems and you're managing your power and you're commanding your crew to go repair stuff and it's all very kind of abstracted out because there's no actual ship movement it's also uh largely Pro procedurally generated and um so each time you play the game it's very different and uh very high difficulty is another Hallmark it was something that we didn't tend it to be very hard from the start yeah so just to introduce this talk a bit um first we're going to go through uh our design process to come up with how FTL would work um the whole process from the beginning until the the game and then um the second half is going to be on how um our experiences with actually releasing and turning into a commercial product which wasn't initially in the plan um so first the first half which we call designing without pitch I have to

clarify by pitch you know pitch can mean a lot of things in this specific situation I'm saying it means that a very clear idea of what the game will be the game mechanics the structure the pacing all that sort of stuff with FTL we did not have that we had a more sort of nebulous overarching feeling that we wanted to uh achieve which Matt will go through now um all we had in the beginning was one page I wrote a quick page of just kind of a summary a type of game that that we could picture but it it didn't describe a game it described more of just an atmosphere and a a theme if you will and the bottom quote would be pulled straight from it and it's kind of really captures what we're going for this concept of we're out of food and half the ship was on fire and there's these aliens in the Ducks so we need to vent the rooms and kill some people but we save the day and meet Scorpions so the idea is that you have these very layered problems with a lot of different exits and solutions to them that and that was kind of a core concept but not much of a game on its own there also this you know we we focus on spaceship

simulation so there's some things we knew we wanted like we had crew members you'd move around you had certain systems you'd have to manage and there probably a text based adventure thing involved as well but that on its own not really a game you could go anywhere from there and we didn't really know where we wanted to go but we were eager to get going the one kind of image whenever we try to describe it to friends as we started was that maybe it would end up kind of like a Sim City but for B Galactica or the enterprise we would have thousands of crew members and you'd have morale and food and kind of a big picture control instead of the micromanaging that we ended up with very abstract representations of everything morale food Etc yeah that kind of stuff and then with forx which is very traditional for the space stuff would be more trading in open world maybe even building up a fleet um just a lot more open-ended with a lot more content than what we ended up with and with the prototyping there was also one moment when we were kind of picturing almost a Diner Dash in space where it's just

these if you picture one scenario in FTL where you're like you have that half your ship is on fire and you have three Borders or something's happening we would just preset up those scenarios and it would be like different levels that you get scored on once you beat it and that was when we were really kind of desperately trying to figure out a way to turn things into a game which we'll go into shortly but we had to start somewhere and so the initial Focus was because we were eager to just start programming and get going on it so the initial Focus was a single ship that's largely because you know practicality sake what's the easiest thing to start working on is a single small ship so this drawing was probably the first drawing I did for FTL and you can see how we knew that we wanted a sort of cross-section if we're showing the interior of the ship uh we weren't certain how big it would be you could see they're labeled by by color for like um engineering versus medical or even living spaces so there's a lot of things that we weren't um sure about this uh at this point I even was playing with the idea of having a cargo ship attached to the bottom because I like

the idea of in Aliens when you have to abandon everything and you basically ruin the whole point of your mission um obviously that wasn't used the the strange part is with this image is it was pretty much the description that was on the previous page and that image were all we had for design docs when we started programming like that was what we started with we had very little as far as structure in mind yeah we so we just wanted to dive in and see how things felt because I mean initially we thought this was going to be a 3-month project just for fun on the side so we want to just start jumping in and trying things out so the first thing we thought you know if we're going to have a ship in a layout the easiest thing is a grid so all the rooms would be on the grid we thought this would be a temporary feature which turned out to be in the final release as well and that's pretty much a running theme on FTL is we would have this simplest way to quickly get it into the game and then intend to maybe improve or make it more complex later but there are some systems especially like the grid that stayed right till the end very surprising even a lot of the code which can cause problems as well

but um so um as you can see in this picture I was enamored with the idea of uh working with the negative space in the ship um being able to see if the power goes out to a certain room you could see the actual power lines that have gotten disconnected um if there you know engine brakes you can see the various things you could see oxygen flow like there'd be a series of overlays um where you get to see what's working on the interior of the ship um and so you know none of that very detailed atmosphere was used but um you could see how I kept keep trying to want to desperately add that in um kind of a native desire to always think bigger than what you end up with yeah as pretty much everyone in the room probably knows um so Matt's going to show a little bit of the first playable that we actually had uh running so here is um the first version of FTL uh you can see it has a lot of the same Hallmarks like uh crew members that move um on a grid

basically the different systems in the room um however there's no real game all it is the only goal is to survive a torrent of asteroids you just open up that Shield so to clarify the little squares of breaches and uh red squares are fire we also have algae which is kind of the anti-p point of fire it sort of heals crew members and spreads if in no oxygen um and uh there's a lot of things that are different obviously the the positional Shields I really we really both wanted um sort of X-Wing versus tie fire style Shields um if you open a door you can vent your crew out into space which happens quite frequently and accidentally um and a little bit more uh D there's bug but um so and you can also see like an early version of the systems we knew that we wanted power management but in this build it wasn't particularly successful um there wasn't really much point to changing it yeah you could

overclock your systems which is interesting and that would drain fuel but uh that wasn't really fun in the end you pretty much just always have to overclock it if you want to survive you can notice the the cat Port portraits those are Matt's cats um which you'll see as we go through the screenshots they stay a lot longer than yeah they stay pretty they stay pretty long um uh what else anything of Interest I think it's the important stuff oh yeah and so um uh we basically the first things we added was movement the systems fire oxygen um and like so from that we started to feel like okay now you can feel like there's problems going on in your ship how can we make you feel like you're a captain like guys go to the engine room so those were the first things we had to we knew that ultimately there would need to be this ship simulation and the stuff that we started with that we felt was fun for a ship simulation was well oxygen being probably the very first system in the game followed by people that could walk around your ship ship and it was just it

was always built from just let's make a really simple representation of a ship and then we'll figure out where we're actually going to put the ship and what type of game that ship is going to existant yeah I remember being very um shocked by the scene in ballar Galactica where they vent where they bent part of that ship and all those people die so that was like something we knew we really wanted so from this build which I don't know how long it took um about a month about a month into our work um we found out that the micromanaging this well managing of crew around your ship dealing with problems that was pretty enjoyable focusing on the interior um when problems were very scalable you get a very small thing which can Cascade into a series of of impossibly to impossible to recover from problems and all that was really exciting and uh we thought it worked pretty well what didn't work pretty well uh was the abstract lack of game goal there's no real game there the micromanaging I don't know if you no this but you can move crew based on squares and fire spread based on squares so you need to

like surround Fire and then move around and then work as a group to move like that and that was not fun at all you would be caught pausing constantly even more than the current version of the game and just yeah getting three crew members to fight one fire yeah otherwise your ship would just completely be destroyed yeah so I mean it was I was if you like micromanagement it was kind of fun but it was it was not the direction we wanted this sort of this Commander feeling not this like very detailed focused uh feeling so um where could we bring the game from this point we felt the most important thing to add next would have to be combat because that how would would have to be in the game in some form or other so they may as well try and add combat to the mix and see how that feels we went initially for the very traditional type of combat where you immediately picture with with a space two-dimensional shooter type thing where you you zoom out and you can manage your ship on a 2d space and you're just kind of shooting at each other the it wasn't

very tactical and that you couldn't Target specific systems you couldn't really do anything other than broadside each other and you'd have to be zooming in and out on the ship to manage your crew so you you manage your crew zoom out and and see and position him and then when you zoom in half your ship's on fire and half your crew's dead while you were managing the space battle but it was also a lot of fun to zoom in on the enemy ship and see half their ship was on fire as well and nobody was having a good time um one other aspect we were pretty um we really wanted to have multiple ships and this would be easy way to have like a mini Fleet battle even in yeah if you played like weird worlds or know countless Space Games an image like this is probably pretty familiar um it also will allow us to do the sort of Shield that are POS positional Shields as well as positional based weapons like weapon cones so you have to organize and strategize where you want to put your weapons based on strategy and you can also turn your ship to sort of protect a certain side and at this point we were actually generating long lists of

different weapons and designs that we thought would work really well with this type of combat um and that's basically the oh there was another thought with the because of the lack of crew control because you're zooming in and out there was a moment that both power and crew control we considered automating it so you would when you zoomed out your crew would still do their thing so you wouldn't actually zoom in and find half the ship dead um but it was not something actually implemented but it was intended for if that actually went forward but when we stopped to consider this well there were a lot of things we thought were fun um like zooming in and seeing the enemy get destroyed and some of the positional combat can be interesting it we felt the vast majority of it wasn't fun and at this point I actually thought the entire game wasn't fun the micromanagement didn't work it was too heavy and then when you're zooming out to do combat the combat was muddy and didn't work well and the micr management failed but everything nothing was working together and we weren't capturing the feeling we wanted at all

it was hectic and and difficult to know what was even happening instead we realized as we thought about it that the commander aspect if if you're going to capture Star Trek if you're going to capture Firefly the positioning of the ship didn't matter it was F flying around wasn't something you ever watched the most you ever heard of Captain yell was Delta formation and that was the extent of the of the movement that you ever saw on Star Trek and so we started to consider if removing sh sh movement was even possible and it wasn't something we could really pull on other games for that the overriding image in my head was Tetris and this idea that you're sitting here dealing with a bunch of cascading problems as these bricks are falling and your enemy or your opponent is dealing with their bricks falling and then every once in a while at least in some versions if you're successful you get to throw a bunch of bricks at the other guy and that was the basic concept of what we could see ft working on and that you're both frantically fixing your ship and every once in a while you get to throw a bunch of problems with the other okay one of

the other things that we realized was just that we have to be able to show everything on one screen there's there's no two ways about it we um the the moving between screens to get additional information just would not work um and so from this point we tried to focus on that those those feelings as well as uh consolidating the UI we became almost phobic of putting of making you ever open anything other than the one main screen yeah um so then this was after Matt had the the tetris idea which really it was at that point where like wait a minute this could actually work um and okay let's let's go back in and try really hard because I think it could possibly work this screen was the first um version where we tried to implement that you can see we still have multiple ships that you could potentially fight um we still had the very unusual um system management which wasn't particularly functional uh and some basic weapons

um from this point this is a mockup it wasn't in game um but you can see at this point we came up with the idea to another turning point in the game was having the Power Bars the way the Power Bars work having them be representative of many different things it was it's the how much power is being used it's the strength of the system it's the potential strength of the system it's the the damage it's whether you're repairing it it's whether it's on fire so like all these things are shown in this very small um in this very small icon which previously was in throughout the whole ship um so this was a first trying to add those into the game as well as trying to figure out how we could potentially show weapons and um how much information would need to be shown with them and you can also see an early version of um what I call the croissant ship um and also the um collapsible menus so we were still worried that there would be too much

information at any given time so we were playing with the idea of things being hidden and popping up when necessary and that also was abandoned for the same reason of being just too much um too much movement and you really need to see everything there there's no moment that you're like oh I don't care about my weapons in the middle of a fight so the the idea of collapsing was definitely unnecessary um now we sort of figured out the basic layout that we wanted to show the information and how to have the weapons uh fit on the screen more cleanly um we also realized that at least for now we'd have to do a single ship combat we just wouldn't be able to add uh multiple ships for the time being um other things not this is when we started to realize that this the size of the ships were problems uh were a problem um we we you know we really felt this project was just going to be just for fun a small thing so we so there's couple structural things which came back to bite Us in the ass um such as the the very limited screen resolution um and so

once we realized we had we were going to use the screen resolution and that we were using this pixel art things like slightly shrinking the ships or the rooms even become you real we realized it really wasn't an option like it just doesn't look good um and so we had to realize we'd shrink the ships down but that didn't happen yet um if you want to go sorry just a big one on this one um was the consolidation of systems in the rooms we used to have systems in individual rooms I mean individual squares in the room so it wasn't really the engine room it was the engines inside of that room and so if you had to work on it youd have to go to that corner and there was all these white spaces like this long hallway and this giant middle bit which did kind of stick around but we Le started putting systems like cloaking into it later and it was this consolidation so that the system was the room and there was no distinction between them really helped that the streamlining effect and the whole Commander feeling cuz it stopped being you know go to A1 B1 of the engine

room and do something it was just you get to the engine room you get to the shield room and it was very straightforward a much more elegant solution than trying to pack the rooms with individual details which at one point we were really trying to get very detailed on sorry um and and also that was a precursor to us realizing we needed room based movement for the crew which didn't come around until a bit later we start with the micromanaging for far longer than we should have yeah um and in this mockup this was the full size version of this Proto kestral which um I was this was me trying to really go back to to the atmosphere inside the ship and if we had a much slower paced game which was you know we could have gone in that direction we could have had a lot less combat more trade all that kind of stuff um if we had gone that way I would have wanted to have the inside of the ship be very atmospheric um you could see there's in the airlock there's some little space suits you guys go walk over there put on a SPAC suit go outside and a breach or uh or take off a drone

that's attached itself to a ship if a system is under duress it would be smoking and and eventually break and shatter or whatever um and so or like you'd see the captain go walk over into the cockpit and sit down in the chair and then start typing and so all these things were you know ideas from bygone age which I was still trying to cram into the game but it we quickly realized that that wouldn't be possible especially since um we started really figuring out the type of gameplay that we wanted to have and so um this was uh when was this 6 months six months into the development when we had like when it B when we were uh preparing to submit to igf China 2011 we basically in 3 weeks turned a whole bunch of weird ideas and gameplay systems into an actual game um and so that crunch period was like pretty intense but it was uh it was very useful for the whole game and for example during that period um my brother who's also game designer um he

was like you got to get rid of the circles you got to get rid of the circles and we're like what's wrong with the circles I like the circles um and then so at this point we added crew members and we add we also separated the subsystems because we realized we wanted the power management to be more functional and more interesting uh core of the game and that uh wasn't the case earlier there you see even though we got rid of the circles the crew just kind of stand there awkwardly in this version and adding consoles was such a major change for the atmosphere like the biggest thing for me when we first added that was that instead of the enemy standing around awkwardly where you destroyed them you saw the little guys typing furiously away to destroy you and it was this really kind of a scary atmosphere moment that this was a living ship with people doing things on it which as you can see from this screenshot it just doesn't really have that same feeling um yeah and so at this point we about six months we felt like we had the core game we sort of fumbled around through our ideas constantly and eventually arrived at what would

progress to the final game we had some events we had uh seven events you know like you fight a you fight a pirate you're fighting a pirate in an asteroid um and with that and the sort of very basic sector map we had um this this this core game which we uh felt like could potentially work um and then so for the rest the rest of development a whole year was just spent polishing that um that game idea so in this final screenshot you can see the game at at release which we basically just added tons of content and polish the ship doesn't look as Hollow um there's various alien races and places you can explore we abandoned the kitties for um little crew portraits um tons of weapons and more complication due to ion versus uh locking your system for for when you use it and of course the weapons they that were exterior to the ship which added tons of atmosphere to the game as well so

um that is the end of part one um just to sort of recap a bit um we we started with this very vague idea for a concept and we use that as a sort of guiding principle Guiding Light for the whole for the whole um project and so by having this One Singular Focus we were able to abandon everything else that didn't fit in line we we felt like we really wanted multi uh multi ship fights but eventually that just had to go we we want spatial movement but because that didn't fit in that core feeling um we were we felt the freedom like we could just ditch it and keep on moving keep on going to that singular goal um and so if if anyone wants to use this specific uh thought process in their design I mean technically that Focus could be anything it could be a certain type of um visual aesthetic it could be uh one game mechanic that you want to be really

focused on could be audio or could be a story so um by having this one focus and and letting that direct your whole thing your whole experience you can basically approach your builds uh slightly distance and be able to uh look at it and find out what's actually fun what should we actually keep that will make the game into the experience that we want which you know very often you can get bogged down when you spend months designing a certain whole gameplay system and it just doesn't work and he just keep spending months and months like trying to make it cram that in and uh and so it was helpful that we didn't have pages of design documents before we got going for that reason yeah we just we just had this one idea and then we just dove in and um it may it probably doesn't work for everybody but it definitely helped us uh stay agile and actually find a game mechanic and a game game playay system that a we didn't know it could exist and B we hadn't had seen precedent for I I hear there's other games that we ourselves hadn't played other games like this so it allowed us to sort of stumble

on that and be open to seeing uh what was interesting in it um for part two we'll kind of talk about a lot of the stuff that happened in our final six months of development as we as we got to kind of in the public eye through our Kickstarter and a beta we finally kind of came out of our cave if you will to to see how the game and the design got changed because of that um at this point right about the time that we released it for China igf um the FTL was in a point that it didn't have a lot of the stuff still it didn't have boarding it didn't have cloaking it didn't have teleporters it didn't have a lot of the features that you know are really important to the game and the and the biggest problem with it then was this lack of the layers I I still at this point didn't think the game was fun it was we found success that I'm grateful for the China igf but I was still really nervous about the game and felt like it just didn't keep busy enough and there wasn't enough going on and so the main goal going on

from there was this layering of of more things to keep you busy it was fun though and just the there was a potential there it wasn't anymore like we even considered abandoning it we just knew that we needed more content to keep it going sadly about a year into development is when we were running low on funds since it was started as a hobby project we never really intended to go as long as we did and so we turned to the kickstarter since it was kind of um it was not quite as well known back then it was we launched about um a week after Double find uh double F find Adventure uh game and we had just known it from friends who had done like a film projects or starting a farm and that sort of thing and and double find as just drove thousands to Kickstarter and we were lucky enough to be sitting there with a game that people thought was kind of cool and um we ended up with 20 times the 10K that we needed to finish the game and it was about 10,000 backers that did

that and it really influenced the game for the better but it also caused a few extra stresses that we might not have known going into it um the first thing I want to talk about is how that having 10,000 people watching us um changed the game and we were very used to being able to cut and move around very agile by ourselves in our cave without really worrying about what other people thought but when we had this giant audience come that kind of changed everything we had over night fans like talking about our game which was really cool and really weird that there are these other people that were just as excited about this game as we were um and so it really drove the motivation but at the same time it was this immense pressure there's only two of us and people put their faith and their money into our hands and it was absolutely terrifying and many sleepless nights knowing that we had to create this product to make these people happy um the expectations of course varied the it was difficult sometimes to balance as you'd expect 10,000 people have different thoughts

but we took the time to talk to everyone that we could anytime we got a question posted to our form or emailed to us we took it very seriously and and answered it and tried to talk through it and that really helped us as well in just kind of explaining our own thought process even if the idea were like that's not at all what we want but I've never really had to explain why that's not at all what I want and so it was fun to have to to verbalize it and really structure the game in that manner um one of the biggest things that was difficult for us was the kickstarter was that we had these list of things we said we'd put it in the game we put it up there as of course these would be fun stuff like the aliens and ship customization this idea that you would when you start your game instead of choosing a ship you'd you'd have a more of a shell and you'd add weapons to it and add systems to it and kind of minmax what you want for your ship it sounded fun on paper as as and it's still something we get requests for literally every day um and they once we got it in the game though it didn't really work and it just it wasn't as fun

there weren't that many options when you have every option in front of you it kind of muddies the options that are actually available and there was an obvious choice and and a less obvious choice and the we were ready to cut it immediately but because we had 10,000 people who expected it in the game we were very worried about cutting it prematurely because it was something that they might want and so we put on probably another week or two of development time and balance time trying to see if there was a way to crack this nut and make it work and it's hard to say the time was wasted but at the same time it was a little bit wasted we had a lot of stuff to do before we could release the game and we spent more time than we should have on ship customization especially considering the fact that we had also promised for a release date um which was not too far away so like every week was super important U during that period our release date we we finished the kickstarter in April and the releas release date was supposed to be in August um that's largely because we also thought you know we would just get around $10,000 maybe a bit more if we

were lucky and that we would just work with our small Focus for the game which was considerably smaller than the final game and then so that leads us to which leads us to how the money actually changed things the extra 20 times what we needed to kind of do the vision we wanted for the game um was was awesome and it and it let us really think about the bigger content of what we could do but it's also really difficult because you have a game and you have a vision for a game and it the scope of a game and it's kind of complete in your mind the design is there and just because you have some extra money doesn't necessarily mean you can improve the game it just doesn't necessarily work that way you can't just throw money at something and it gets better and a common request would be something like multiplayer for Co-Op or competitive um it's just we never saw it in the game and we still don't think it would fit in the game but it's something that people kind of think about when you have extra funds and maybe you could fit it in now cuz you have more time and you could hire people to do it just for some

perspective this was our K our Kickstarter was also before the whole stretch goals was a standard as it was now so we had zero plan for um previously for what we would do if we would reach uh x amount of money so we hadn't even thought about it the idea that that could even happen was beyond us we thought 10,000 would be kind of eak out we didn't think that 200,000 would come rolling our way um and so we had this difficult Balancing Act of how do we the game how do we take advantage of this awesome new clump of resources but at the same time how do we hit our release date and keep everyone happy and so the easiest way to do that was to kind of improve or double the content that we already planned that fit into the preexisting design and so some of it was aesthetic stuff like the music the the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant um we could have gotten by without it but we all know that the game wouldn't be as good without it and without Ben um we wouldn't he was able to devote a lot more time because we could pay him a lot

better and so he could stop working at yeah he was generous enough to work pretty much for free up until this moment and so throwing funds his way let him stop working full-time and put a lot more time into the soundtrack which ended up really awesome it's something that people love and we love um one of the things I'm most proud about coming out of the game is that we helped make this awesome thing of music come out to and the similarly we were able to contract out an extra Rider to expand the events as we were going further into the game we realized that the tech Bas events were extremely difficult are more difficult than we expected to kind of get out and keep the variety up we you know we thought mistakenly that there's some it's just text you just write a few more and then you have a lot and then you and then there's a lot of variety in the game how hard can that be but it's amazing how many words we needed even it at something like 15,000 when we brought on the writer wasn't anywhere near enough words in the game to create the variety that we needed and so with the extra money we're able to get the guy um

Tom Tom Tom Shar from in England to help us out and really expand the game greatly which was awesome he also helped us expand kind of our alien and ship World in general and that he gave a lot more backstory and a lot more we just had little Sprites that had no purpose they they were created for game design reasons like we thought it would be cool if an alien could power a system and that was the extent of why that alien existed and the writer really helped us flush it out into something that matter and changed the game y so about 2 months after the kickstarter we were ready to launch our beta the beta was for 3,000 beta players um that paid about $25 to get into that private Clos beta at that point we thought the game was actually I finally felt the game was really coming together we had every layer on and it was a lot of fun the only big problem was that there wasn't a lot of replay value there wasn't a lot of reason other than finding new events which as I just said

we were having troubles filling out to come back and play and so we needed stuff like the ship unlocks and the achievements and the things we would add that would help you drive people to come back and we were hoping that during the beta we could figure out what made people play the game and then kind of capitalize on that so since there were the 3,000 players that paid $25 and more than anybody else has paid for FTL these were our most hardcore fans these were people that loved games like FTL and wanted games like FTL we had already started with a game being very difficult as we talked about in the beginning it was intended to be something that was challenging the it was harder going into the Beta we did reduce the difficulty but we reduced it down to a level for players that love that type of game and are good at that type of game so that's why we still ended up with a difficulty that FTL is known for um we feel that balancing to that group the group that plays for 300 hours was a good idea that

the the game is taken off because of that difficulty the people that love it really appreciate that it's tailored to that type of experience and it also helps that replayability issue we if the game was too easy then you beat it and then you're done and if you beat it every time there's not a lot of interest there but getting your ass kicked every time you played actually kind of drove you back to play it more and so it got that repay ability that we needed um for example the the easy mode was added a I don't know a few weeks before release or something like a month before release and so like that's why you know it's that's why it's labeled easy versus normal is because normal as opposed to being absurdly difficult mode um that was the experience that we were actually trying to create for people because we wanted to make a game that we ourselves would enjoy that was the highest goal early on yeah not all 3,000 of them Lov the difficulty I guess there were a few that wanted it slightly easier um there Al very effective I mean anything out of a beta that you'd hope to get is

effective bug hunting and feedback and these guys were awesome for that as well what was interesting going into the Beta is that we also we had a lot of these visual effects that we had put into the game very early that we weren't sure about the stuff like that jump animation that was made 18 months ago now that was put into the game in an hour to just we need a jump animation let's get let's get that in we always intended to go back and change it and the same idea that we had about five background and half a dozen planets and that was all we had in the game and we always assumed that that's all part of the visual polish we do leading up to release but it's something that nobody mentioned during the beta there were tons of complaints and issues and feedback that we got but not one of them had anything to do with a really crappy jump animation and so that animation is still in the game everything that all that stuff kind of fell of the back burner there was no reason to do it we felt because that's not what players wanted what players were talking about it was theame gameplay it was more content it was more balancing it was the stuff that

they were really latching on to that mattered and so we pretty much forgot about that through it out the window and focused on that yeah or for the fact that um the only ship that actually has thrusters that do anything is the Kel no one has ever mentioned that to us either yeah as a result though you can cater a little bit too much to this group of hardcore players and one of them as we talked about the as I just said the game play that we were expanding kind of started to lean on feuture creep we had at this point the bombs and the iron weapons and a lot of different types of weapons but it was so many types of weapons that we still envisioned and if we had piled those into the game any new player or even medium player wouldn't figure anything out the as by Rog like's nature everything's open from the beginning it's just there it is when you start the game and we didn't want to overwhelm it with this topheavy Advanced gameplay which is what the new weapons would be naturally they lead to tiny

small places you'd need it for little strategic holes that we wanted to plug in the game play but it was just not necessary it would make the game bloated and we were warned by some of our play tester friends as well that we needed to just leave it the way it was and and make sure it was just balanced um one thing that happened from it was in the very beginning we made it very simple decision for how to unlock players ships if you've played the game there's you know there's events that you randomly come across that if you have certain equipment like you have your engines and your medbay and your teleporter then you can unlock a players ship and the event plays through in a little story and you can kind of figure out what you need based on what happens in the story like oh no he died if only we had a better medbay it's not that obvious but enough to kind of make you figure it out and it was more of a quick solution so we could get it out the door to the beta players so and see figure out something from there but the beta players really liked it they thought it was a lot of fun to discuss the puzzle

of how to unlock the ships our Forum had long threads of people really talking about all the different ways they might be able to do it and kind of solve this puzzle and so we thought that was really cool and they were enjoying it and so we kept it in the game and we made all the chip unlocks like that but once the game came out and it stopped being this very small audience of people solving the problems it just became a list of things you had to do people just can Google the list of everything you need there's no more discussion and it becomes a waiting game of just hoping that the random universe will give you what you need to unlock the ship and it's one of the most common complaints and it kind of fell out of the uh the beta appearing that it was fun but in the actual open world it wasn't um so near what as we neared the release we realized we really just had to focus on a single um a single focused game so like Matt was saying we really just needed to stop adding stuff we really needed to find out out what is a what is a good you know structured

system that has enough events enough variety enough weapons enough things you could learn um as you play the game and enough skill caps and all that kind of stuff and so um part of that as you can see in this image like this is in the final game even that super clean simple power bar which represented a lot of things became ridiculously bloated and it can mean there's a lot of information being conveyed that so that could be like Matt was saying really terrifying new players and that sort of thing or old players and me look at there's so the poor Power Bars we just piled onto them yeah and but that was you know because we were trying desperately to have everything in one game screen and if we added more things that were added that were requested or even planned like hacking systems or or um you know various things that could really make it feel quite bloated so we so we knew um near this in this time that we really just wanted to have a good coherent solid game release it and there there you go there's our game um so just some

of the the ideas that got cut um that we had really wanted to be in the game or the sort of like in the same way that you have the asteroid field as a special environment you have these special encounters such as cloaked sabots who would wander around your ship and you need to have a person in that room to be able to see them and they'd lay bombs and they would destroy parts of your ship you need to find them or have a slug guy to help you out um various monsters like a aliens monster an egg that hatch will would infect crew members or spread or then become a disaster board your ship potentially killing everybody um I really liked the energy based entity which would wander around and suck out energy from your reactor and that kind of thing yeah the sad part is all of these I still think would be awesome and I would love to have in the game but at the same time just because it would be good doesn't necessarily mean it would improve the game in the end we felt like it wasn't even cutting features because it would make it because it would be not fun it was cutting features because it was good the way it was why poke the deck of cards or the the

House of Cards if you don't need to and that it's it's sad it really was look at some of these but we know that it was the right decision to keep them out other things like gas based Weaponry like uh kind of like bombs who would explode in the room and then gas would spread out based on how doors would be opened and they could do various things like knock out crew members or heal them or um damage systems I stuff like that something else that we always initially dreamed was being able to uh go to a station kind of like Starcraft and be separate from your ship and have certain systems maybe that would be helpful for station boarding as your crew members are trying to rescue a VIP from from inside a prison facility or something like that and so um there's a link at the end but we actually put this slide online in addition to a document which has U Matt's original um kind of stream of Consciousness idea for the game as well as just this giant laundry list of features that we wanted and we didn't get to

add um so uh but in the end we had to come to to the release date and we were uh able to get a game that we were happy with uh released uh September last year and we released it on uh Windows Mac and Linux which had its own slew of problems uh and difficulties which we don't really suggest new developers to do um three three operating systems for their first game but um it it worked out in the end um and it was especially interesting to us because like we had never intended for this to be a commercial product it was just this weird flurry of of growing um interest and and so to be able to release the game it was um amazing especially since there was so many situations where we just felt up got to scrap this go find a job go do something um else you know um and I also have to thank you know this community because about two years two well two years ago I was here um I went to the igf all the indie game talks and

I was really inspired and I knew that I from that point on that I wanted to make Indie Games I just knew it and then that convinced me to quit my job and luckily I was able to work with Matt um to be able to do this and then two years later I'm coming here and showing off our game which is crazy to us and potentially and hopefully could Inspire some some of you out there to to you know make something awesome although I'm not encouraging you to quit your jobs um yeah we're a good example that you don't necessarily have to know what you're doing to stumble upon something kind of cool so yeah thank you to everybody who helped us and our family and friends to keep us sane and thank you to everybody else we probably ran a little fast here but we're we'd be excited to answer anyone's questions for as long as you'd like [Music]

hi guys uh firstly just you know great game uh my sons and I have put many hours into it and they've unlocked everything in the game it's it's great now obviously the randomness of the game can be a bit punishing at times um but you know that as you said it makes you come back to the game did you um try to kind of solve uh the negative feedback loops that can occur when you know you get damage you have to spend money repairing your ship and then you can't spend the money to upgrade your ship and then eventually you know you just have to quit the game and start again or did you sort of think players would just do that I mean um I personally I really like that that is in the game and I I do think it's a sort of different type of person who would get in a situation like that and be like oh quit restart and as opposed to us who would be playing that and you get in that awful situation you barely scape scrape through and then you keep going and now it's now it's a considerably more intense experience you now have one

crew member and I love that that's in the game even if it isn't ideal for some people yeah okay at at the same time there is a slight balancing for it and that the the scrap increase through the sectors is actually very high by the time you get to that last sector or the seventh sector you're getting so much money you'd be amazed how much you can buy last minute right before getting to the bxs so so the quitters don't win in the end they you've got to kind of stick at it get to the last level I mean if you don't enjoy that you don't have to but so some people do like other people I hear they just they just replay the first sector until they find weapons and if that's the way you want to play go for it yeah all thanks do so um like you said uh one of the biggest complaints is the locked ships and everything um have you guys thought about a way to deal with that you know now as like an update or um maybe even allow people to purchase them just for cashh well we will never do never consider that oh yeah we will never do any form of

um just largely because like the same way we wanted you know we were making a game that we wanted to play we wouldn't particularly enjoy that um it it's a little bit of a odd situation cuz we like um we really did want to move on to the to the to a next project and even now we're still um working on the various things that are associated with the game as well it's um maybe possible be able to do small updates but really wasn't something we were planning to do was just keep adding things to the game because it could just I don't know it could ruin the experience that we were shooting for it's kind of the House of Cards thing be worried about tipping anything and making a decision that would actually make it worse I think it is functional the way it is and I if I had to go back I might say more stuff like the layout B unlocks where it's kind of gam play based and achievement based um but I think that it if anything I would probably just want to reduce the randomness but keep the same style cuz it's kind of fun to unlock it through

the event and that it's kind of a story that you help this race and that's why you get the ship there's still elements of it we like it's just that stuff like the crystal the crystal ship that is just purely exercise in Randomness is excessive I would rather remove the randomness then remove the design entirely uh over there okay um as you've stated that you're a team of one programmer and one artist who kind of shared the design uh sounded like 50/50 did you have any major creative differences as you went through the project and how did you address them we were pretty lucky in that um this sort of same like focal point for the game we kind of both I don't know intrinsically had the same image even though we weren't able to describe it to other people like we wouldn't be able to explain the game so we got really lucky that we just for some reason clicked like that in terms of design nothing major small stuff just small details we definitely get in fights about small details but nothing yeah the major

direction of the project was always very singular and focused impressively so still doesn't make any sense to me so you're always able to kind of come back to that and say well what serves the the vision best what serves the vision of I'm just saying that you were able to come back to that and just kind of ask what serves the vision best to resolve those things yeah yeah here's made comment okay cool thanks I think when people talk about your game and they're trying to describe it in a hurry I often hear them um describe it as a Rog likee in space and it does have Rog likee elements I didn't see you mentioned Perma death or any of these specific elements in your initial uh kind of grand division was that something you just kind of wandered into or did you always want per death to be part of the game that actually while it wasn't explicitly said in that initial vision and if you go read that Vision it's not there there's another document I don't know if we put it up that has five gameplay elements that I thought were really cool and and one of those five was perade perade

was intended from the beginning I think that having that basically actual like your decisions mattered was so vital especially for being the captain of the command of a Starship like I I wanted when you're making the decision for your crew that that decision mattered that there was depth to it and you were stressed about it you wanted to be in the shoes of that Captain and without perade death you don't have that and so the consequences of of your gameplay and your actions is something that I really enjoy and I always and we both really enjoy and so we always wanted and intended to having a game from day one yeah it definitely works in this game yeah thank you awesome game huge fan um so at the beginning of the talk you talked about how you're were reducing the pitch down to the core concept um if you were to since you guys are working on your second project now or going to be sometime or something who knows something's going to happen we hope uh would you do the same thing again would you modify that process any way um I mean I have a few various ideas you

know we that we've discussed for what potentially could be another project some of them involve more like I want this type of gameplay structure and some are more um just the sort of experience but I do think that that um even just thinking about it now yeah like pretty much always we're just I at least am trying to find um what do we want the player to feel like when he's playing this game and that that CU Pro I wouldn't be surprised if we also just started cutting things that didn't fit into that uh experiential feeling so yeah and as a programmer first I probably lean towards just diving into it getting things working and moving and tinkering because the code is just as related to the design as the design is so I think that just go for it and move forward on this kind of core random idea is definitely how I would still want to approach it yeah we wouldn't um we probably still would make some sort of project where we have like Global design documents for every single aspect of the game and then try and make that that that's I couldn't picture even trying that um yeah thank you hey uh as a fan

of FTL I'm really glad that the process kind of worked out to produce what it did but um there's probably countless anecdotes about how the process of just sort of we have an idea and we're just going to kind of attach features as we go could go horribly horribly wrong uh what process did you use to kind of prioritize and V out which features you would work on first or or developed first and then kind of where the line was of what went in the game and what didn't um it was never anything particularly formal I I think that it kind of what we covered in the first half with this idea that if it served that core feeling um it would work there wasn't in terms of like specific features that would still all fit within that feeling um I guess just a whim just like what we felt like at the time maybe isn't helpful I know just like well you know I really feel like there should be some weapon that can counter Shields um and and the defense

drone AKA bombs you know so like um just playing the game a lot figuring out what you feel is missing and that sort of thing thanks I forget the order now I think we're over there and we'll go that way um you talked about your kind of Kickstarter backers coming on board with your testing early on um how did you deal with that kind of shift in feedback from just being kind of a very close nit team of two to suddenly having kind of like 5,000 people's worth of fee but how did you prioritize which feedback was important we didn't deal with it very well I could tell you that but um we worked too hard mostly I mean it it was we had a we used get satisfaction to have the actual feedback coming through um with 3,000 people there was a vocal 500 maybe 250 in the beginning and it there was actually enough of a flow that we could manage that while developing we we're lucky enough I was terrified going into it that it was going to be this massive people just barraging us with questions and and concerns but it did actually end up with a manageable flow

that we didn't really have to stress about that too much and be able to do it we stressed about it a lot and did it U part of it is also just that we had had a core group that would go and answer a lot of our the basic simple questions for us just like the people who just were active in the Forum in the get satisfaction page and um and just really help us out in that way um in terms of prioritizing I as a programmer I was focusing on the bugs I would always look at bugs bugs had to come first no matter what everything else had to be put back and um it was definitely and luckily get satisfaction this the website and as I advertise it for them here has a a problem section and an idea section and a question section and so my day would start on the problem section and if I solved all that stuff then I would move on to the other sections so did you find the community was kind of quite disciplined in kind of not not posting you know duplicates of bugs so you get 10,000 bugs that were the same and then again great thing about get satisfaction is that when you type in your initial bug it runs a search to find if it's

already posted it doesn't even let you post without running a search and um in general though they were pretty good about it and in general they were pretty good about not posting bugs or ideas as bugs or vice versa that can sometimes get in the way but it was they were a great community in terms of um the design which I I was spending more time on most of it was just ended up being like you know this isn't something that fits in our view you know like we just it was EI a lot of suggestions were either you know things that we had thought about things that we conceived but could never do and very few things that we' never even thought of but um but for example like I wrote sa we wrote save game in the little screenshot there oh yeah that save game was the big issue we didn't have it in the beta you couldn't save and quit from the very beginning and we didn't want to at it and we were fighting them for like months and there there was the most complained about thing to not have a save game they're like um some sort of temporary save feature and eventually that was the the one thing that we really like caved on we're like fine

here you go have your save game um yeah okay thanks um first of all I want to thank you for the great game um I spent personally I spend a huge amount of time trying to beat it on easy mode yeah I managed to do so uh and the question is uh could you please share uh a percentage uh rtio of user base on different operating systems I'm I'm sorry operating system um how how many percentage rate yeah yeah percentages oh I have no idea I'm sorry um vast majority Windows the vast majority is Windows as you'd expect um and then I would 5% maybe for Linux or I would no no smaller and I would guess that Mac and Linux is nearly equal the Linux Community really did respond to um us putting it on there and while it was extremely difficult for me to release as

the programmer the three operating systems day one um the Linux Community really made it worth it because they were so grateful for having us take the time to do that but it they were definitely still a small minority compared to the windows steam yeah thank you and Linux on Steam really boosted it as well yeah if we a lot doubled the Linux users at this point so you guys uh had quite a large following after the kickstarter and everything um I'm sure you guys are aware of like the community that kind of popped up and created mods for it uh especially with like new ship layouts and everything I was kind of curious your opinions of that and if you guys were to make another game in the future would you kind of accommodate something like that from the beginning um when we were starting you know like I was saying we ideally we you know for this community ideally we would have structured the game to be able to support modding so like you could see if you follow that Community there's a lot of struggles to sort of work within the

sort of crappy framew frame uh framework to U that we gave them so there's very limited things that they can do in terms of um in terms of like for the next project um maybe I mean obviously it would be smarter to do that especially if we will get a lot of fans who enjoyed FTL and be have the same sort of situation of people wanting to like you know own it and like work with it and that sort of thing we definitely should will we I don't know I would a more modable game is inherently a probably a better developed game it's easier for us to add content if if we have convenient ways to mod and and easier to break so I would hope if only for selfish reasons that it would be easier to mod in the future um or a future game would be and and it is a lot of fun it it's a little frightening at first seeing a community take apart your game we spent a year and a half slaving over it and then they're digging through your private notes and private scripts like going through your underwear drawer something and then posting look you made a typo in this

completely private packaged file and it's a yeah it's a bit creepy um or weird but we have gotten used to it and it's a lot of fun seeing the it's amazing what some of the people come out with and the the Devotion to the style and the and in the art and the new layouts and stuff a real impressive understanding of the game and and that still it blows me away like like one guy who actively knew that he was turning the ship into an AI ship so that uh players ship so that it could be uh AI ships by definition regenerate systems so like there's one ship that you can regenerate everything slowly but yeah so it's pretty it's it's awesome to to follow it yeah thank you guys thanks hey guys um in the earlier phases of your development when you were doing all the prototypes and you had like the basic prototype and then the spatial prototype Etc before the kickstarter did you look for a lot of feedback from people outside your group or was it just you two how did that kind of work when did Matt when did mat jump in about 5

months into the project I think is when we first um other than our girlfriends who would see from the beginning that was about that was about it for like that was about it for a while and then there were maybe two or three people that we gave it to um at about the 5 month Mark and were definitely incredibly important to the balance and design of the game about um once we got closer to that igf build where the game was more complete then we started uh reaching out to various Indie developers and people who um that we had contacted and they they helped us test a lot as well but we didn't do any sort of massive um QA in any sort at that time or trials thank you one more okay um sorry what was it like living in China and how did that affect your game uh yeah so for for those of you who don't know we were both living in China for a few years before we started um working on FTL we were working from our separate Apartments um for most of the time we didn't have a studio or anything and then uh near the end of development I at

least came to live in the US for a while um how did it affect China's awesome I mean China's a it's it's a especially Shanghai yes Shanghai is such an international City and it and there's a slightly lower necess the cheaper cost of living and so as an independent developer that was big the fact that we could live on much on a shoest string budget me you can go get lunch for 50 cents less than that and it would be a good lunch too and so there was definitely just the financial benefit of China was awesome and it's just it's it was it was fun being over there I I it was it's a it's a great place yeah it definitely um I mean I'm not exactly sure how much it has affected development other than enhancing the feeling like we were in a cave um like because we like it was just especially during those times we I left the apartment every once in a while um there was no point I I didn't we released the game and then like two months or a month

after we released the game I came to California to go to indic and that was the first time I met any of our Kickstarter backers or really met anybody who knew what FTL was even though that we' had been building publicity and things for a a year prior to that and so it did definitely enhance that cave likee feeling of developing over there which was not necessarily a bad thing I guess that's all we have time for so thank you everybody