GDC Live Q&A: Lucas Pope and Return of the Obra Dinn

my name is Ryan Francis I am a contributing editor at gamma search command at GDC I'm the community manager slash video person in general who's around the office figuring out how to make things like this happen it's lovely to see you all today I hope some of you are coming here from the gamasutra twitch channel which is where some of you may know my face and voice from we are here today because for the first time ever we're going to be using the GDC twitch channel to host conversations with game developers as we get ready for DC yeah the finger games coming ready - okay fix that right yeah if you don't know what GDC is it's the Game Developers Conference I can see in chat or can recognize Clifton B is someone who I've seen replying to our social media just gonna give a shout San Dovan

works too we are here today with our first ever stream with a game called return to the O burden this comes from developer Lucas Pope and normally I'm the person who is invisible in these chats that you can see our guests face but today our guest has opted to remain in the shadows and speak from a distance Lucas how are you doing I'm doing great hey everybody we are here this game came out return of the open didn't came out a couple weeks ago it's been in development for how many years Lucas four and a half from start to finish four and a half years and it is a the the is pitch is a merkin they actually have it over here on twitter a mercantile mystery i think is the phrasing you are an insurance inspector checking out the ship the Obrador just returned to harbor and using them a serious tool that lets you relive the events of certain people's death to find

out how they died and figure out what happened as you can see today we're playing we're playing the game but we're looking at some footage i already captured of me playing it so what you're seeing isn't live so we won't yell at me if I'm getting stuff wrong but you will be able to ask Lucas about questions about what you're seeing if you had similar experience Clifton tans to your question in chat we are this is the first hour of the game we're only going to go for an hour so the only spoilers will be me figuring out a few of the mysteries or maybe I got them wrong maybe the spoiler is that I am bad at video games in chat quick shout outs to L Kyle how says she Oh says she weird you on the channel on the gum a search or a while back I recognized your name volt killer games starlight skies a lot of great people in chat we really want your questions for Lucas today because as good as my questions are if you are in the business of making games yourself you should absolutely be asking Lucas what his experience was working on over

dinner Lucas my first question for you today I think a lot of people have heard of you because of papers please how did you transition from papers please to working on return to the oh burden ah good question I basically wanted to do something totally different from papers please that's generally how I move on to the next project and then okay it's so tired of whatever I was doing before I want to change everything up and over ten papers please was kind of designed first projects where I had the idea for the mechanics and this one o burden was visuals for some more art focused I wanted to make something one bit mm-hmm and just kind of bang you on that for a while ended up with this setting on the ship and then after a few months the core concept of figuring out how people died right on I think it's actually I think maybe it's worth stopping there on the art focus for a moment we have an old feature from Gamasutra comm talking to you about the one one bit dinner Punk is the way we phrased it I don't know if

that's like I don't know if that's entirely accurate what exactly is this one business that ik what inspired you to chase to like work on a game with it and how how does it work because it's really beautiful thank you yeah so the other Punk is a great work actually I love that word and that article is the first time I heard it it's basically me taking what I've played as a kid which is Macintosh games which were one bit and for the time they were actually high-resolution it was only 512 by three 42 or something crazy like that but it's on a nine inch screen so it was very sharp very striking for me as a kid and I played a lot of games that way and I specifically remember never thinking hard remembers and nothing he taught me but for me I never thought I want more colors here I always look beautiful I didn't one bit and so papers please had some level of art in it but it wasn't really art focus and I like to

pretend I'm an artist so I thought what I want to do is take this one bit style that I played as a kid and try to make it legible and playable now using modern technology so that was the idea and then I walked up a few things what's interesting to me is that title screen for the game is the first thing I ever mocked up in one hit in Photoshop mm-hmm it's also the first thing that I made in unity and it didn't change for the entire four and a half years so that basically once I got that working it taught me that everything was possible and it could look cool and that sent me four years down the line nice um I think I when I was doing some research for this can I found some great gifts about how you were like trying to make this work for the ship itself we're looking now at on screen that's some really good uh some good people model you know the architecture of the ship itself what's the process for for taking you know this starting at it has to be a 1-bit ship and making sure that these people these objects are still legible because you can kind of see a difference between the people and the gun like the captain here

I guess that's a spoiler that he's the captain so careful about that literally everyone's identity on the stream is a spoiler so if you're sensitive but yeah the gun he's holding there is obviously very different from his own model himself what's what's how come yeah okay so the first thing I did was I I played some old actual Mac first-person games and the best one that I could find is something called colony and it's it's a very low poly just the walls kind of thing but one of the things from playing that game and also playing some modern one bit games where they just they take the the render and they did their it and it looks cool but you can't see what's going on you can't see anything so the in these modern games in the colony you can see everything very clearly and I decided that everything is gonna have an outline so geometric shapes are gonna be outlined and if it's if it's against white they'll have a black outline if it's against black the white outline so there's always an inverse and it's always the shapes and geometry are always clear to see mm-hmm and the thing

about that is that it removes any mystery about where you are or the environment everything is perfectly defined basically which was fine because I'm I wasn't making a horror game so I didn't want to hide things in the player it was okay that everything was was you could tell where you world at all times was kind of what I was going for so that's that was on the surface a simple thing that like how can I make this work okay everything is outlined but as the the kind of production progress the bigger problem became comfort bu in comfort because everything you've only got two colors to work with I mean you need to make shades out of those using dithering but Deering is not a technology that you want to use in a moving picture basically because it gives you a headache more or less though there's too many flashing pixel high contrast pixels so the real magic for me in making this work was getting solving that different problem and figuring out how to make it so people could play a four hour game without getting massively

uncomfortable right on what what were the first you said it's uncomfortable look out what were the first solutions that worked in terms of getting people like in terms of lowering discomfort which is I don't think usually I'm asking developers about that when we're in VR but I haven't asked a developer about that in conventional games at some time yeah well the first solution is just to increase the resolution so your pixels are smaller so that when you did your eyes hold more into thinking it's a tone instead of just a dot but two dots mm-hmm but one of the other like I want it to be one bit but I also wanted to be low resolution and that was partly because of production it makes it easier to create this thing when it's not super high res but also I just like that style more I like the low resolution I like trying to do more with less pixels so when I decided I couldn't raise a resolution to solve that I put off the problem for a long time years and then finally when I started I had enough to sort of sit down and play a lot of it fullscreen in front of me

I changed the dither pattern basically so it didn't it wasn't trying to be shade so much it was trying to be kind of a woodcut more pattern style which worked okay where it worked fine to me it looked okay but in the take source devlog which I kept for the game nobody else liked it everybody hated it so I kind of went back to the drawing board and devised a dithering technique that keeps the dither sort of fixed when you're looking around so when you turn your head the dither a turn is not sort of sliding across as you would expect it's moving with the scene and that took a lot of time to get right and in the end you don't really notice it except that my hope is that you don't get sick as much as you would have with the other one I'm gonna say I fix everything but it's makes it more much more comfortable to look at when you're just standing there looking around right on moving on from the art although if folks in questions have chat feel feel free to feel free to ask them

Clifton points out that and you end of studios talks about how this get like the the one bit graphics of a burden are sort of different than the one bit cut the graphics of the Macintosh games my next question is going to be about that process of moving from like this art style into the design of the game because it's interesting to hear you about you going from design first to art first after after you had the art style what was your process for figuring out the like what was what was fun about this style like where did the inner where did the design interaction come from originally I had big plans for this game that you would actually go back in time and you would relive the death but you know everything was moving you'd have to replay how they died so there was this idea that you go back in time someone's gonna die it's either gonna be you or the person that you're sort of embodying no anyways that was way too much work nothing I could do that way but once I started getting his rendering technique dad and starting getting some

visuals up and some characters on the screen I realize it looks good just as it is you could walk around and still seen that would look good so the idea sort of changed to be just go back and hear the audio and then see the frozen scene and that took me through the initial demo because there were I think there were four people in the initial demo for this in 2014 and that was easy at whatever dialogue or characters a text I wrote then was with nothing else in mind I didn't have any of the story written at that time just kind of okay these guys will be fighting over something and the captain ends up killing a bunch of them whatever that worked for the progress I've made at that time and I kind of stuck with this idea that the game would be about figuring out how people died I stuck with that for a long time until I realized that that's not hard to tell usually you can usually see how people died for these like this guy yeah I mean he's getting hit by somebody so yeah yeah not much challenge there but it

wasn't until I kind of had a lot more of the game done that I realized the real fun part would be figuring out who they are is that that would lead into ways I can create clues in the environment and have the player kind of work out a clue like or a Moriarty like oops this old game kind of logic puzzle to figure out who people are so that that design shifted met does that shift happen kind of late I want to say because working out the narrative structure for this game was pretty tough you you have to tell you can only tell the story when somebody dies first off and then I also needed to have this kind of almost unbroken chain of bodies going back through time which you know probably isn't that normal and so I decided to break it up into chapters or disasters and then lay everything out like that that that structure was extremely difficult to figure out mm-hmm which tied my hands a bit because I might have changed design at a different way if I hadn't gone put all that work into this story but once I put all the work in this story I was stuck with it and I had to figure out a way to make it work and

that way was basically the book and focusing more on the identities than the means of death so it's really interesting so the kind of the order is art revisiting a death figuring out who the people are who died not how they died although as you can see how they died is still part of it um and then segmenting and splintering the stories and I just want to point out for everyone at home I'm about just I think I'm about to know I didn't wind up scrolling through the whole list but um it's 60 plus people right on the boat there's 60 plus bodies yeah and that's a case where it's a lot yeah when I decided that is gonna be on the ship because I thought that would be easy I can model with us she had four decks of the ship no problem that was my first big mistake on the game but once I decided that I did a lot of research on these ships and I started building the ship and then I don't know why but I I looked a number of the people that you would need to sail one of these ships and it was maybe 120 people 200 people and obviously I knew

ok I'm far enough I don't I can't do 120 people but maybe I could do 80 so my first number was 80 people and then when I actually made all the characters I realized damn the most I can do is 60 going crazy doing his characters so I'll stop at 60 but this is all before I'd work out the story so if I'd work on the story first there'd be 12 people on the tiny sailboat basically because I where I work from the ship and and the reality of what you would need to sail these ships I started super high and I felt like every time I cut it down I was gonna compromise the game not realizing that I was still gonna kill myself to try to finish 60 people I'm gonna have questions about quote-unquote killing yourself later on because you know production quality of life these are things that developer they're talking about 2018 but just to keep us roughly on track here so I had another game developer on the stream once tell me that the difference between like the thing that I've thought about especially when it comes to like the number of factors in making a game is

difference from 0 to 1 is shorter than the distance from 1 to 2 and and I guess I'm curious one every time I mean you started off with 80 and then dropped down to 60 how much does one character like increase the load I guess like what what do you know roughly how in it from a dev standpoint how much time that cutting those 20 people's shaved off uh no I couldn't say that actually making the characters themselves is not hard the hard part is weaving that into story that I felt wouldn't start dragging having too much for the player to worry about I mean at that point when I chose 60i this is awesome by the way sorry real just the scene right here when this pops up this is incredible thank you yeah but continue huh at that time I wasn't I don't know I wasn't thinking about much I was arranging the story or the players experience or anything I was just thinking about I need a bunch of people for the ship and I'll figure out the rest later and I I had the manifest

still in the minute and that's all I had was just a list of the names so the project kind of scaled at different times one at some point this doesn't scale so I got to scale it up and then I move over to some other thing and that doesn't scale so I got a scale up and they all kind of scale in different ways without really changing the other elements of the game because I don't want to remake them or I felt like I could still do something good with them so keep those and scale this guy up and that comment about zero to one and one the two for me was absolutely true for the beginning of the game because I I created the demo in just a few months the initial demo but everything that I had for that demo did not scale so the fact that there are four characters there I was already pushing up against all the pipeline and tools custom things I created to make those four guys so that there was no way that the tools and the systems I had was scale up to 60 people so that added almost another year of scaling up to the point where I could make the full game from the demo and this is true of every game ever worked on if you look at like the first prototype of anything it's hard to

imagine how much time it took to go from that to the final thing because in a lot of cases it looks just like the final game with some small differences but in most cases you had to change everything about your production and the way you made the game in order to get from that first initial thing to the end right on I I could kind of I want I guess I want to lean into you know having now like from papers please what is your kind of your guiding star when you know you you have a cool idea you begin working in the idea you work on the demo the prototype and you you think you have these sets of tools that will get you through the whole game what's your guiding star when moving between demo to full game and short or proof-of-concept to full game do you think other indie developers like could learn from for me it was potential so once I had made the demo if I feel this potential there and other people who play it feel this potential there it

doesn't matter if I can reach that or if I have any idea how to reach it if it has potential then it's enough because that's enough for me to get thinking about it more so when I transition from papers please to overt in during the film of the papers please I had collected a lot of game ideas I'm always writing down kind of game ideas and in notebook somewhere something just like quick off one-off ideas of something that could be from the game and the ones that I think about the most are the ones that I work on next so even though there's lots of ideas there some of them even without checking a notebook they keep coming back on my mind and I'm thinking about them so that becomes the next game I work on and it was the case with this demo that if I release the demo people enjoy it and they think it has a lot of potential and I keep thinking about it I keep working through my mind what that potential could be or how it could be executed then that's that's it that's good for me nice I guess really quick well I'm going through my question bucket I'm going to remind chat that you can ask questions

too and especially if you're working on a game of your own please ask them my game working experiences as I've got some but it's not it's not as much as I'm sure something folks at home have and we'd love to ask them for you that's what GDC and Gamasutra are all about which I guess I should I guess I need to get people Victoria that GDC and Gamasutra both owned by the same parent organization blah blah blah one question that comes from my good colleague Alex Waller who's normally with me when we're doing these streams but is sadly not with us today because the hour is late here in California what has proven interesting about the plebian and the mundane in your design you've now made a game about an insurance agents you've made a game about a border agents newspaper editors why do these genres catch your attention and what do you think what do you think it takes to translate

the boring into the industry interesting for game design for the first question I when it comes to design I'm a big fan of rigid core mechanics so something varies basic and simple that you're doing and you're kind of filling out a matrix of features or your make list of identities something like simple and core just as a kind of Oh slightly OCD engineer I like that so that's that's where I come from on the design side on the on the other side I I really like taking those things and making something interesting Adam story wise you know there are people around the world who do all kinds of jobs all the time and many of those jobs are boring and mundane but those people have interesting lives to me so I like trying to capture the interesting parts of the mundane experience and that's that works really well when you like mundane mechanics because the two of them go

together those two interests go together really well so it's kind of what directs me to pick an idea and to develop it and then they've all fit into a full game and then the second part of that question was um or maybe you explained it was sort of what is your mindset about taking those mundane parts or the interesting parts of mundane things and making them playable there's a nice challenge there I guess that I in every project I do I approach it like an engineer so as if there is a problem that you do needs to be solved so if there's no problem then I'm not that interested but if there's a problem if there's some restriction or some limitation then I'm interested suddenly and that that's why I have one bit that's why I have simple mechanics that you wouldn't expect mm-hmm to build a story out of I try to do exactly that just because that solving those problems are the most interesting and fun parts of game development for me yeah I guess that makes sense I guess like it wouldn't under that philosophy cuz it makes more sense to make games like this is supposed to games you know as opposed

to like a very polished 2d side-scroller that that can do well on ps4 I guess oh yeah I wouldn't know how to make that kind of game because I don't I don't understand the problems that yeah I don't see the problems that would be fun to solve their face away right not to slant that the my comment isn't to slam that genre of game of course cuz I really love those kind of games like owl boy is one of my favorites for instance but it just it was just a comparison I have more questions but we're gonna give chat starlit skies that says they work at IndieCade and they would like to know how much feedback from going to events has helped you out I I would stay later that question with how do you organize your event feedback so that it's useful and how do you make sure you know you're getting good feedback and not feedback from someone who's would never buy the game in real life but they just happen to be there oh right this scene first off hi star we've met a couple

times different events so that's a good question I I live in the middle of nowhere I was telling you earlier and I don't see anybody basically related to games for most of the time so I have an online presence but physically I don't meet a lot of game developers so or players even mm-hm so events for me are mostly about getting feedback I don't publicize that much when I go to event I don't do the marking right then I've set up a booth and I try to watch people play the game and so for me that's critical and that's not necessarily perfect showing the game in an event is very different than watching someone play it you know alone in their room or something like that mm-hmm but it's for me a good way to gauge kind of woods it's a good way to compare it against other games it's a kind of a our people playing this game compared to some other game so not in isolation it's not that useful except if somebody gets stuck if everybody's getting stuck somewhere okay I need to change this or everybody's confused about something

that I feel like okay I need to change that mm-hmm but it's more how many people are playing this game how many people are interested how many people come over to check it out because it's surrounded by other way cooler games and lots of people playing lots of different stuff so to me it's the value of an event is mostly in just determining how it fits with other games and as far as organizing that feedback I don't it's whatever kind of bubbles to the top is what I was think about and think of fixing I'll write down some things usually if people are getting stuck somewhere mm-hmm but it's more kind of a general feeling of how it's going and how how the game is doing to what people think of it and this ties in this is kind of a general philosophy of mind where I used to make game I made a game for iOS called helsings fire and back then this was in 2010 or something back then it was really important to get analytics to to record what everybody

was doing how far they got basically all this information that lets you design a better game and so I recorded a ton of analytics for everybody played this game and I never looked at him so after that incident where I put all this work into collecting information but never actually looking at it cuz I was I'm always on to the next thing I don't really want to make a Helsing aspire to and didn't fix everything I just wanna do something totally different so I kind of got into the situation where I'm I'm not gonna really I'm not gonna do the analytic thing basically which a lot of people do for design I'm just gonna try to hear the problems understand the problems and fix them as they come up and if I don't hear it then I never fix it you know which is kind of the downside of that whole thing but so far it's worked out okay and it will probably crash and burn for the next time once again in it that I hate to feel like I'm just overly praising but that was a like the way these scenes starts like they're really striking images that you bash into holy crap cow

like playing this game this experience that we're playing right here you can see me just freeze and just stare at it a minute before and sinking it in before like actually starting to move around oh that was one of the things that yeah about the very first demo that told me that this could work the way that the the basic structure of hearing the audio and then slamming in the 3d scene with the music at the same time I felt okay I could do some cool stuff with that from the very beginning um Cliffton be would like to know is the momento boredom it all inspired by the memory amulet from mist for I never played mist actually so there I know it's it's a game that I I wanted to play for a long time but if you just there's this thing where if you miss a game when it first comes out you almost never go back to it so that was my case with Miss unfortunately ever play it um I guess that loosely wanders us over to game game marketing because I assume you know it's very important for

you to get over it in in people's hands now because later there will be you know Red Dead Redemption 3 or whatever and not Oprah didn't um how much time and energy did you spend on game marketing since you said you didn't use events to market use them primarily for feedback and how did you set a sales expectation that you knew could keep you you know fed so that you could work on making papers please to Ilic Boogaloo let's see I didn't papers please so first off I'm not the marketing kind of guy I did marketers please at all and that was a huge success so already I'm being trained that marketing is not critical to selling your game and to having people play it mm-hmm and papers please sold really well and it still sells well and so there was no real

pressure on me for over didn't to say I got a market this this thing it's got to sell a lot and so I didn't and I I kept the devlog because I like to talk about this that I'm working on and when I work on different stuff in the game when I finish something it's cathartic for me to write it a blog post about it so it feels good and I like sharing that information so the devil log is really the only thing that I did that would I would consider marketing even though for me it was a more of an engineering thing than it was a marketing thing mm-hmm and overt in for me so I had papers please and it was selling well and it's kind of the only game I've made that's sold really well but it's still selling well now and so that tells me that if I can make the right kind of game then it's not something that needs to sell in the first three months only and then I don't need to make all my money at the beginning and I don't need to push this really hard just to to get it to sell or to make a return on it and so for over

ten I focused more on how can I make this game different enough from other games and papers please a sort of like this to make it different enough from other games that if you want this kind of game you pretty much just got to buy this one game you want a game where you check passports you got there's one game on the market that it's like that and it's papers please so if if you want a 1-bit mystery game based on deduction you know or whatever kind of category I wanted to put this in if you want that then the gut I mean there's over dinner and there's maybe a few others but really like I'm not competing with tons of different titles all the time that they're coming out every month so the urgency of selling immediately and of doing the typical big marketing push with influencers and and whatever they do these days was what was never really there for me from you know from internally it wasn't there from my own personal satisfaction and then I felt like the way I was making the game over these years also didn't require that kind of that kind of push right on I think it's a very valid answer

unfortunately for poor Skyy ask guys like no I do marketing so it's it's I I guess that I have I want to guess all Astro dongs quite a name just wants to say thanks for one of their favorite game experiences in years so and it felt like a game cater to their particular interests which kind of speaks to what you talked about of like making something that will appeal to someone and trusting that there are multiple someone's out there I guess that's be a lot of what you've said today yeah it's okay that someone has always been me first base yeah I try to make the game that I because I I do play a lot of people liking it and I love Triple A games and I play all that stuff but I I also really like these kind of very mechanical games did I make so I'm always thinking okay I would like this kind of game and I hope other people do too and that's that was kind of a distant wish originally but since

papers please I realized well okay there are enough people out there who like Lee same kinds of things that I do that will that will buy the games basically that will enjoy them just a fair warning for folks at home Liam has entered the room Liam do you want to say hi yeah camera day everyone can actually say hi to Liam for once he's here he's yelling he has opinions you may hear him any questions any questions cat I as a quick follow-up it's interesting you talked about how having there's only one passport checking game on the market I guess there's two now because I don't know I don't know there might be more I guess maybe a bunch of other people have jumped on the papers please train that you built but um for sure we streamed not tonight forgetting the developer name but it was published by no more robots which disclosed or my boss Simon helps them out we gotta do a lot of disclaimers on the show we're just trying to you know keep no Liam don't you that I need that controller please don't do that hang on come here okay you joining the

stream you okay um was there ever this is something a couple other Indies have been worried about now for a couple years like donut county um was there ever any worry about about another debt at other companies swooping in and like also doing the one bit thing or also doing the detective thing hmm no no I mean yeah I for not tonight for example I mean I'm happy to see that kind of game I'm happy to see all the games that were basically ever schools and I you know wish them all the best and to be clear I'm not accusing not tonight of stealing your style I'm just play yeah right they are and you know when I said the only passport came out there I'm speaking of when I started over Dan and went you know for the last couple years there are other games like it now but originally if you wanted that kind of game you had to buy papers please so I get a couple years of you know the only option out there which is what I was hoping for with over 10 and so if other people make one bit games or detective games totally fine I I will probably

just do something totally different next time anyways so I'm not competing with them or myself or anything like that later so I personally I I have no problem with that and I'm sort of another level when I make a game I don't necessarily think about how it would make how it'll be for someone else to make this game but I do think about what other games could be transformed into this game and how hard would that be and I'm not aiming for somebody totally different because I'm always thinking I don't want to compete with other people I'm sort of always thinking how can I do this thing differently than someone else would do it and that puts gives me a little bit more of a buffer between my games and other games I think as well right on I'm gonna I'm gonna quickly check it thank you all and chat for your love for Liam he appreciates it he's a sad boy no couch I would like to know how experience for you and unity when you start a development and how much of the games development time was spent

learning unity unity I'd never used before this game like I said the title screen was the first thing I ever made in goodie I have written my own engines know C++ engines and I've been a programmer for a long time in games so picking up and using unity was actually very quick and that quickness and speed with which I made the title screen convinced me that unity was definitely the way to go for this project and it based on my experience of making tools for Triple A games and kind of working with lots of really good engines over time as that unity is amazing and especially for me on the editor side the fact that you can add features to the editor and change things and then just alt-tab back to the editor and in one second it's compiled and updated and you can now use your new tools was a revelation and so learning unity was easy because a lot of people use it and then using it was was basically what allowed me to make this game even if we talked about how long it took it wasn't because of unity unity

saved a lot of time off this game and a lot of energy and effort was saved by using the Unity base player and I've extremely happy with it mm-hmm right on we're moving on to a next subject of conversation I want to follow up you did say that you had to put a lot of work into making me 60 characters happen at the top of the stream 20:18 has been a 20-17 have been years where developers have talked a lot about crunch they've talked a lot about overwork I think I think it's interesting in that the reason I think these two years of discussion have been practically notable is that it seems like a two years for a lot of developers big and small they're trying to make concentrated efforts to say it does not take a hundred hour work weeks to make interesting video games like they're trying to unhinge you know causation and correlation there what was your work like work-life balance like working on over din and did you learn anything from your previous games that helped you take

it easier on this project make make right decisions about working long hours what was your experience well I am I worked along this game one of the problems with this game is that when I started it I thought it would take me three to six months to finish so vastly too quick yeah unrealistic like I'm extremely bad at judging deadlines like that or judging progress so imagine it six months I'm basically crunching for a while to meet that first deadline I sailed past that and things cool down a little bit but then I say okay I just need another six months and then we're good so the next six months I'm crunching again for a month try to hit that deadline that I'm and I miss it so things cool down again and imagine that repeated for four years so I I crunched a lot on this game and I worked a lot on this so this is unfortunately not a poster for for easy work you know it's one person did everything all the

modeling design programming so anytime that I got tired of doing one thing I could switch to the other thing conveniently right it's great could keep working all the time but the unusual thing here is that it worked for me I love to work it was only near the very end of the project when I had when I could see that the game was pretty much close to done and just need some a little extra work to finish or some final polish or some play testing that's when it got really hard but every other time I I loved working on the game and I worked that was you know I I define my own schedule so because I love working on the game I wanted to work on the world and then there was this other issue for me personally of this is my follow-up game after paper please which won some awards and everybody else enjoyed it so how am I gonna follow that up basically so that I can't just like quickly release some some game I'm not happy with I need to make it something that I like and I hope other people will like and that's that ends up taking a little bit longer to

tell you so yeah I think the only sort of bright side of that is it I define the schedule I'm the one who decided I'm gonna work all these hours and personally I work at home so I could spend time with my family I wasn't leaving them behind all the time I could still just pop downstairs or into the next room and spend some time with them mm-hmm so these long work hours for me or something that worked it was something that I didn't regret in the end I think they were important to making the game even in four years even though I made different parts of the game many times over and cut many things and three with a lot of stuff out I feel like it generally worked okay for me and I have some regrets about working that much but because I am at home working at home a lot of that stuff is just not as bad as it could have been if I had to go to office somewhere I guess I was gonna follow up Easter events in there like I guess there's there is a palpable difference between working at home and

crunching for yourself versus going to an office and crunching on a larger companies behalf yeah I mean you can imagine like a hobbyist imagine you some hobby you really like yeah you just do that all the time you're not killing yourself I mean it's hard physically as you get older but you still enjoy what you're doing and that's kinda what was my situation yeah did you do the music yeah I did the music the cymbal crash I was gonna say the cymbal crash that happens every time one pops up the the spirit you know wanders around the ship I was very impressed by that um speaking of people who want to talk about features they're impressed with Sasquatch I'm assuming that's how you say your name wants to say that they like the shake of the magnifying glass it helps clarify its use same with the stopwatch and the fade in time which you can see the stopwatch sort of doing that right now Talas maniac would like to know were you inspired at all by the vanishing of Ethan Carter no theme is

back on camera say hi to Liam did vanishing of Ethan Carter influenced your design at all here uh that's a good question so when I released the first demo well I think maybe when I started talking about the mechanics in the dev vlog people asked me if I was basing this on Ethan Carter and then didn't was cryostasis if this is based on cryostasis was the two games I've never played so no I've heard good things about both of those games though and it over the years let me say it so working a lot on this game I had very little time for other things so I would give up say playing new games and I have a huge stack of games that I'm gonna try to get to now that the game was done and two of those games of cryostasis and composite and Edith's bench as well I would want to play that so all those games have similar concepts but I was not influenced by this I never played them I think Lee knows he's on camera cuz he just walked off camera but he's still hanging out here sorry this

is the most this is the most engage he's been with again I think he really likes you Lucas yeah cats when they hear my voice man my cat to hear that voice he starts yeah yeah Liam Liam belongs to my good friend Kelsey we're cat-sitting him so unfortunately he's gonna he's not gonna be here permanently but he's a very good pretty boy these are very important discussions happening on the GDC Twitter channel right now I have more questions we'll take some more from Chad as they come I remember I think I was reading through one of these things I was doing research and the dithering to go back to the art and the dithering thing since I think that's something you know a lot of Deb's are curious about with this game um how does you said some there was a challenge early on I think in some other interview when it talked came to like compressing video like and being able to make trailers for this game how did that how did the the one bit resolution effects like you know like okay like it looks great when it's running on the computer but it's time to put a trailer up and oh no the the Amazon smart machine woke up

um the like did that I did that have a thing at all is that something you had to be worried about with this yeah for sure I this is one of the things this is a really cool problem for me actually to have to realize as a problem there and then to have to figure it out you know I've got a I've got a low-resolution one bit game with high contracts so that does not compress well in any scenario so I need to think about ways to fix that and the first way was the first thing I did was so be kind of technical but there's Bayer dealer which is a pattern bidder and there's a blue noise civil which it kind of looks like random noise dithering mm-hmm and Bayer performs really badly for compression because it's a regular grid that happens to be aliased with the compression blocks of a video so if you try to do everything the Bayer did that pattern dither then it conflicted the pattern of the compression and it looks really terrible but if you use noise to there then it still looks terrible but it

doesn't look as bad so that was the first kind of realization and first fix and that gave me hope for that maybe this could work in the end it doesn't actually work that well but whatever it's good enough I don't don't don't play the movie theater yeah I kind of liked the idea that the only way to really see this game as it is is to play it on a computer you can't watch a video there to play to play the oh yeah I guess that's weird like it I think a lot of I mean on the one hand twitch is good for marketing games on the other hand story-driven games you know people devs wonder if they're losing customers oh yeah no I wasn't like then people won't play it because it doesn't look good I mean that if you want to see it as it really is you've got that you can't just keep cranking up the video res you've got to play it on a real computer which is it's kind of cool to me yeah I guess you could say you need to play it on the smallest like machine possible maybe yeah a 9 inch screen yeah I have a Windows surface in the background I should I should play it on that and see what happens

okay fine it's 1080p or whatever actually about that compression a little bit more what I realized at some point during development is that compressors work a lot like the Iwerks know that if your game doesn't compress well then there's a good chance that it won't like it won't work well with your brain basically so that's what led me to my second round of during fix which was to try to keep it there from moving while you're looking around right on diving back into the chat really quit um albino gorilla I mean that's the first part of your question because we already said sort of talked about the second part but how do you stay motivated as a solo developer long enough to actually finish the game well like I said earlier it's always games that I'm interested in upon Simon Christon so if I'm not interested in it that's a problem but so far I've been lucky that I've kept my interest in these games long enough to finish them and I'm the sky I think I think at the front well

you see earlier you mentioned Luke as you mentioned a couple Mac games so you said directly influence this game but what were those again so visually beyond dark castle and dark castle we're really an influence on these shadowgate was also a big influence and there's no one called fool's errand which is was the one it's like really just beautiful all the screens there's still screens but the artists who created those was really really good and that's always been kind of a a milestone of what you can do with one bit for me right on um I'm gonna dive back to my question sheet as the cat offense freaks out of a dark castle um I never heard of that game before to be honest you can't play it now it's unplayable now unfortunately but at the time it was I just mean the concept design concepts are too hard to deal with but at the time it was really really good and it used the mouse and the keyboard in a way that made you feel like I owned a Macintosh and I'm special because no one else can play this sort

of game right on um I I think I'll show it later in the video like I said this is pre-recorded so I can't just call this up on command but also with fraternity oh burden you can pop into the options and change specifically what kind of monitor this is which mostly affects the color and shading it doesn't change doesn't even change a lot for gameplay it's just kind of a it's a taste like what's your retro computer of choice I guess um why'd you do that how'd you do that and was it worth it what do you think was really valuable about that I probably don't think through everything that well actually this was a case where I'd released a demo and then people said it would be cool if they could choose the two colors black or white yeah I'd choose two Mac plus style colors basically mm-hmm and I thought okay well I don't want people choosing from like an RGB control they're two colors because that's a lot of work to make the control and also most of those won't look good so I'll just pick some

colors myself and then well what colors could I pick the default colors are based on that quest so I'll just pick some other monitors cool old monochrome monitors from that period mm-hmm and I cheated a little bit because the Commodore is not monochrome but I used the two commodore colors blue and cyan so it was more or less just trying to add a few in there and I researched a lot of those monitors and then weren't that many color options so you know kind of stopped where it where it was there and looked and it was easy easy to put in it's only changing two variables in the shader so it was trivial to add it and then it adds a little bit thin why do that when I when I was playing the game and at the end before shipping when we tested a lot one of the ways to sort of change it up for me anyways this is to change the color filter while I play through mm-hm I was gonna ask why do you think why do you think people wanted that like why do you think why do you think developers should know that people wanted it um that's a good question I think probably

because it's a PC game PC gamers want options you know they wanted because you can you know you on PC you can open up the game files and do whatever you want so just throw that sucker in the menu and save us all some trouble right on um let me see here uh uh I'm gonna grab some water real quick I'll be skinny like ten seconds oh go for it yeah I guess I'll just hang out with a chat um everyone I guess is talking about everyone's talking about dark castle and being able to play it again another another platforms Cliffton bi yeah I kind of appreciate that too this is one thing that really separates game dev from software dev some things just sound like a cool idea they don't need to be focused tested to heck before yeah if you guys want to count right now liam is Liam's just off-camera helium and grunt whose actually my cat she walked into the room and she walked out of the room so alright I'm back welcome back yeah I guess maybe now that we're on GDC twitch maybe we'll get some

work into getting custom emotes for all the cats who show up who might show up on camera that might be fun yeah simply aj we named grunt after grunt from Mass Effect which I guess in seven day was yesterday so happy n7 day if you're a Mass Effect fan like me let's see I'm going to quickly check my notes to criminals um Lucas I guess I talked to a lot of developers lately and I've been talking them about you know maintaining companies and you know figure you know keeping them like being able to successfully make one game after another a lot of developers I talked to talked about taking techniques code gameplay lessons like they take a lot of when they move from game to game they are adapting things they learned on their last game to their new game either for marketability purposes because they know that their company's fans want like similar but different or it's because it's the way they can keep the costs down as they don't have to teach themselves you know going from a 2d to

3d for instance is something that one developer might choose not to do because they know a lot about 2d and 3d will be very expensive to make um with your with your style of game making how do you what do you retain between games that you think has proven most valuable yeah I don't because I make different games every I try to make different game every time mm-hmm there's nothing like usually nothing like code there are some snippets of code that I keep around and I I reuse but and it's not assets it's not much of the production gets reused but some concepts get reused I will say on papers please one thing I learned is that game has a certain level of jank to it where some stuff is just a little bit not great and that was because I made the game in nine months and I wasn't thinking long terms it's gonna be a huge you know success so once that happened to me I realized that a game does not need to be perfect to be good

there's the sane I think it's perfect is the enemy of good so and I also learned that at Naughty Dog in uncharted one mm-hmm where my previous self before working there I would say we gotta fix all this [ __ ] this is just totally to janky and looks oh crap but now I would say this is fine this is I'm not trying to to make it perfect basically I have it what I have here is good and if there are some janky things or slightly inconvenient things in this game but leave it in don't try to fix everything because a lot of times when you try to fix things you break other things are you in some way you're messing with what you already have so that's something I kind of I learned through the years and I keep with me marketing wise you know I'm not thinking what I okay I'm a little bit thinking that I didn't do much marketing that worked out okay so I don't need to do marketing next time and the same is true of publishing as well I

used to work with publishers no I was in the late 90s when they had the print discs and I worked with them on Helsing's fire for iOS and one of the things I did with papers please is I decide I'll just self publish it valve is their steam is there now it got through greenlight so this makes sense it's easy technically and so I saw published that and then for over din there were a lot of opportunities where I could have had could have worked with a publisher to do it and decided well okay I'll just self publish it again it's a lot of work and it's hard but there's a certain amount of satisfaction there just doing everything yourself so I did it and it worked out ok so that's another lesson that I kind of tested and it worked out ok and so I'll probably be self publishing from now on kind of thing right sky sky kind of agrees that publishers I think I've just changed so much you named three different eras of game publishing and I think there's one thing I've learned interviewing developers is that each of those eras the the art of publishing and self-publishing is so different you know

public companies think we're created in the seating era I don't don't know anything about mobile etc etc tell us maniac and if you can't share this you know feel free to not feel pressured to share it but tell us many now if do you have any steam analytics on the average age of your purchasers they are curious if it's higher than other games average no I don't know make this team tell you that I haven't looked I don't know I don't know I haven't I've the only stat on Steam I looked at was how long people play it's about above average I don't remember even the number now but it was above average for steam games which was satisfying nice let's see we were coming up I can't believe it but we only have five minutes left in our hour if you're like me and you're on the west coast you're probably either eating dinner or thinking about dinner if you're on the East Coast thank you for sticking with us if you're in Europe goodness its go - did you wait just wake up do you need to go to bed still in any case we're we're thankful that you've

all joined us now is the time to get your last questions in because we try to get as many as we can't answered ricardo DSC would like to know what kind of software did you use to make music I used a Logic Pro X on on the Mac and let's see there's this Orchestra library called the capo by so no kinetic which I use for all the most of the orchestral stuff I use some of the logic built in orchestral sounds as well and see I use an Roland Integra 7 for some of the orchestral leads and I think that's it MX bug would like to know they say the one grip one bit graphics for a deliberate restriction but did you find it liberating at the same time like once you pin that down did it broaden the scope of what you felt you could do graphically yeah definitely and one other thing up is low resolution so the game does not have a lot of particle effects which is a common sort of

special effects thing you see in Games one particles everywhere but because it's one bit and because this low resolution it allowed me to use dots instead just like one pixel particles but you don't you don't see in a lot of games and that opened up a lot of like ideas about how to do effects and how to make things look in the game when when you're not working from the same palette is everybody else i it gives me a lot of ideas about what I can do and one this one bit stuff was definitely a different palette right on and I guess I guess before we go uh-oh we've got albino gorilla again are the raw assets created in monochrome or they fully colored and textured and then down raised they are they're created in RGB but I use the different channels for different things so for instance the texture would only go in the B Channel and then the orangey channel would be used to define the de thering type or to define where the outlets are gonna be so I mean if you look at them my development view was this kind of multi-coloured view of the chip at all

times but it wasn't there was a code and you can go to information in those colors it wasn't necessarily the north normal tones you'd expect from the textures that's interesting so the colors were sort of like when you were working in unity the colors were there to tell you at a certain other thing was sitting under the color yeah I mean the shader itself yeah well look at the different channels of the texture and say okay for this pixel I'm gonna use this dithering for that pixel uses this other day learn or they would define the edges of where the outlines are gonna be so if you just look at it it's hard to see that stuff because it's all combined into one RGB texture but the shader can suss that out very cool with that I guess um I guess my last question it's not different than when I ask a lot of different than when I asked a lot of game developers um I guess what do you kind of hope you know people pick up over didn't they play over didn't what do you what do you sort of hope they walk away from the game with when they're done I just hope they enjoy it yeah as I said I made the game mostly

because that's the kind of game I wanted to play so if other people like it that's a bonus on top yeah I hope they enjoy it you know and and one of the kind of lighter elements I tried the show in this game is if there's a lot of people on this boat and they're just names and faces but by the end of the game I hope that you kind of have a sense of that they're people with their own lives and stories and and stuff like that I mean that's not a main sort of force of the game or focus of the game but I do I didn't want to show that that a ship full of people from all over the world can can't both get along and fight and that they're all you can be interesting and that grows out of not knowing detailed stories about them but sort of what you assigned to them and in your own playthrough so that was kind of a thing that I tried to add to the game we're trying to make try to give the game this sense of you first come on this and these are just names and you don't care but in the end you kind of know

recognize these people and and see them in a different one right on albino gorilla adds that they appreciate that aspect of the game with that thank you all for watching today thank you Lucas for coming on and talking with us yeah it's great my pleasure thanks everybody in the chat you've been and you fry up hey I'm just here I'm just here to put the cats and ask the questions um you've been watching the GGC twitch channel thank you all for joining us on this new adventure if you know us from the gamasutra twitch channel please follow this channel now Gamasutra is mostly just going to be hosting this for the time being though we'll still you know we'll still use that for discussions whenever the gum editors just want to get on the horn and talk about you know how things are going in the year we would love it if you get that follow button because if you do you'll get notifications when we go live and you can find out when you can ask questions to game developers about who

make the games that you like um in the next couple weeks we've got the blackout Club we're working on a chat with the what's this game call it's a mutant Year Zero it looks really cool mutant your zero Road to Eden that's it I'm talking to some other PR and devs about getting their games on it's been an interest you know to end of the years always interesting because big games come out and obviously those developers kind of want to go home and take vacations after they've launched their games but there's a lot of devs who are down to talk and we're trying to talk to them right now oh yeah quick shadows to chat okay how cliff to be sasquatch about a gorilla ricardio but Ricardo Ricardo Diaz si says thank you from Brazil Thank You Ricardo thank you for tuning in from so far away I honest to God Lucas you're in Japan I'm in California Ricardo's in Brazil if there's one thing that I've really been excited about doing these two extremes that we all get to talk together about making video games even though we are all literally far away on the planet and

then the awkward pitch that follows up on that is that GDC will be March 18th to 22nd in San Francisco and if you'd like to join us at GDC you can scroll down and click the button and the you can register for your pass there's all kinds of different pass options for people from different backgrounds we sincerely hope to make sure no matter what kind of developer you are wherever you're coming from the world that when you come to GDC you're going to get something super useful out that will help you make interesting and successful games with that Lucas and I always like to give gift as a chance if if if the folks at home watching we'd like to ask you more questions about making this game where can they contact you twitter twitter on twitter twitter find them on twitter i think it's duke pope sighs Duke Oh Duke oh that's how you can find him on Twitter um with that have a good

day everyone or good night good day wherever you are I