GDC Plays Afterparty with game director Adam Hines

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am the invisible voice inside your head I am here as always uh we are here on the GGC to a channel playing interesting games talking to interesting people who make them today we are checking out after party which comes from night school studio based in Los Angeles and one of the people from night school is here in the lower left-hand corner of the screen Adam how are you doing could you introduce yourself because you can do it better than I can well thank you hi I'm Adam Hynes I co-founded night school studio about five or six years ago with my cousin Sean and I'm kind of the de facto game director and I wrote kind of 80 to 90% of the script of this game and then I had a ton of help with the design and the arts and they have the whole rest of the team built out you know I could describe after party I would describe it as a kind of comedy game comedy adventure where you're fighting your way

at a hell it's instead of fighting your way to hell you're drinking your way out of hell and there's Twitter in Hell which we're just seeing right now behind us Adam how would you describe my after party after party I would describe after party as a game about two college kids Milo and Lua who they just graduated college they've been best friends their entire lives and they think that they're about to kind of leave school and start their venture off into adulthood and kind of figure out who they want to be but turns out that they have died they have died tragically and have gone to hell and they do not remember how and they do not remember why but throughout the kind of the first hour where they get processed and it's kind of like a helper zone of DMV we have to stand in line and kind of get a accused of the things that you've done and assigned what your torture will be right before they're about to get a sign the kind of work bell chimes two six and the demons like okay I'm going on report

back here in the in the afternoon I'm like okay but what are we supposed to do until then and he's like you know this out and get your you know get your stuff straight because you're gonna be in hell now for the rest of the eternity and they decide to go to a bar and at the bar they figure out that there's a loophole and if you were able to find Satan and outdrink him and out party him he will actually let you back and let you back to earth so Milo and Lola specifically are two people who are not big partiers Milo is a guy who is kind of his his his whole schooling years and college life is kind of wanted to be more of a social guide want to kind of make more friends and so he's been a little hard for him and Lola's the type of person who just does not care she just wants to make a and an impact in the world that make up a positive change so she's been very kind of focused on her career unless she wants to do so they're both kind of untrained and really being a party and animals so of

course it's like the worst situation of limbs of falling because now they're stuck in hell so as the game is trying to basically be on the supernatural adventure bar crawl where you're trying to find Satan and out partying right on Alex I forgot to let you introduce yourself hi that's following podcast rules those thing How long could go at me just not talking hey what's up I'm alright i work on GDC with brian here I'm having a fantastic time Adam thank you for joining us this game is super cool I kind of want to start by just digging right into the writing I played a little bit and I'm just really charmed by these characters and the situation's they fall into like how do you how do you write funny characters that are a decade or more younger than you um it's a good question like people typically in writing themselves up is that they try to think of it in that way of thinking

of it like okay and I'm a 22 year old person with this specific upbringing and this is where I lost you described we lost you but I'll see the internet lag okay sorry I liked it yes no IIIi was the saying that I feel like people kind of trip themselves up in writing characters where they try to really result there is type of mindset where if they're writing like 16 year older 22 year old or an 80 euro and location would were talking and act and I kind of and we as a studio definitely just characters are not really caring if

they don't exactly sound like your typical 21 year old or 20 I / 16 year old it's it's it's one of those things where this is gonna be very random reference but I remember when Dawson's Creek reviews for that oh we're like no teenager talks like this like they talk to smart and I remember thinking why is that a bad thinking that's okay if the characters sound different than how you would naturalistically expect them to be able to express themselves as long as the stories are impactful and interesting and the characters are unique and engaging then you're doing your job and that's all you really need to worry about so yeah I just took a lot from my own life to and from just people that I knew and their own concerns and this is one of those things where particularly with these characters you just hear over and over again just you're afraid that you're kind of

missing out and it's that foe that that FOMO thing of just I don't think I'm ever at the right place that I want to be I'm not having as much fun as I can and with Instagram and the Internet this is kind of ramping up that feeling if you're only seeing everyone else's best times and you think it's are you if you're not having those times too then you're doing something wrong and that's definitely kind of Milo's point of view and then just how how awful everything seems right now with with just everything that's pouring out every day from the news I feel like particularly the younger generation I'm sure it just feels a help and just how to make a positive change and just where to even start so that's kind of where Lola is where she's at - nice yeah I mean unfortunately like the Internet does not want these secrets to get out so you got kind of choppy in the middle of that there no I'm sorry no it was great it's not your fault at all again it's it's higher flowers but like anyone missed it like what I got from that is that you really didn't stress too much about trying to write young people you thought you tried to write

characters who had meaningful concerns and meaningful personalities and just went from there and it seems to really pay off I'm curious because I find you know the art of writing a good writing in a game seems so mysterious like how did you check yourself on this did you play test it with people of a certain age group or certain places that you show it to friends did you like have consultants like how did you how did you verify that the work you're putting out was actually something it's like funny and entertaining to people who don't know you yeah so we are because it is yes kind of a combo well thank you yeah it's kind of a combo of things one is that yeah I I and Sean and Sean and I and the leaves of the studio kind of always have a very concrete and kind of very specific feeling that we want to go after and we're always just very honest with our ourselves if we're hitting the mark or not so it's just a lot of

rewriting and a lot of really just going over and over and over and and editing and being just trying to be very honest with ourselves if it's working or not obviously within kind of the time strains that we have to make a game and still stay and still stay in actual um but but um so you just kind of really just have a lot of faith in our abilities to make this stuff and also the the team who's playing with this this stuff I've been reading the scripts and um and doing they've been kind of really thinking a lot they're always very honest with us if they feel like a joke has gone too far or if a character is not getting enough room or just any kind of issues that they feel like cropping up where if I'm like writing page 600 of an 1800 page script and I'm just very very focused on okay this quest needs something X Y & Z if I'm if I'm kind of missing that oh I should know my lip a moment here or Lola needs more of

us or of a scene here the people who are just kind of making the game and implementing it will always tap me on the shoulder and tap us on the shoulder and say I'm really feeling this and that I'm really feeling like this is the mark or this joke is punching down or so we're just kind of always really trying to check ourselves and with these games in particular it's frustratingly hard to kind of put it in front of people who aren't actually making it yet to play it and play test it and really see how it's working just because these games are horrible until they're like almost done it's like until it's like the animations are doing the right thing and all the vo is in and the timing is there because there's so story focused that if but even if even if everything is in but just the voice-over timing is off then it's like that kills every joke and the feeling is very different than the one that being wants so it's tough to kind of put it in players hands until it's

almost too late to change too many things which makes it pretty scary when we're working on it but that's just why we always have to really kind of be really honest with ourselves and keep us in check about what's really working what's not and going back and if it's not working try and go through an iteration I guess on each section before you checked whether it was working statues at guesses you didn't rewrite the entire story every time you were iterating on a section we did not so yeah basically our processes that we'll come up with a story just conceit and the obvious one for this one was if you're stuck in Hell yet the outdrink a bunch of demons and characters that you'll be running into so it's kinda it's it's it's a bar crawl focused game with kind of a supernatural Bend and we'll try and think of different just pure gameplay mechanics that can support that and be built around it

and once we've kind of like kicked the tires on that a ton and felt like that about kind of moving on to what story then can kind of support the gameplay mechanics let me try and make a really strong outline of just okay these are the big beats this is like chapter zero chapter one chapter two chapter three and really go over that and debate it and argue and see how much that we need and how much that we want and then we just start to just jump in and we just write each scene and we'll have read throughs of each scene where the entire team kind of comes in and and and plays a part and then one person who actually played the scene meaning they'll like make the choices and will jump in the script where that goes and at the end we just kind of talk about it and we talk about what has worked and what didn't what jokes you thought were good where you were just that's kind of to know your goals and what you're doing and it may be so you can kind of surprise the

audience like oh I didn't know like I was like the beef the whole time but it you kind of have to know people being elements of narratives surprise so it's kind of a full act I'm just smoothing people from the scripting phase and then once we feel like everything is pretty locked in to a degree that we're confident that even if there are rewrites which there always are we can start building the big pieces then yeah then we just start to implement things and play it as we as we can but there's typically two or three more passes of rewrites once we start to play it and we see like this is taking too long or I don't know why I'm doing this this is confusing and we'll change in tweak nice yeah we should talk a bit about sort of the the way you overlaid a system of drinking on top of all that I think Brian's seen more of it than I have so I can't speak to of any kind of like hopefully I see it in a second but it's

the system we're drinking changes the dialogue choices but which creates a third it sort of creates like if there's a dialogue choice it's usually two options there's a third option but I guess we can so far from what I've seen there's five different options for a conversation depending on what drink you get but you can only access one of the one of the 30 you only have three available to you but the it seems like you guys planned a total of five for these conversations like drinking game logic is fun how'd you come up with that and and what's the logic behind it from a structuring and scripting standpoint yeah we we definitely wanted to make drinking be fun in this game and be a hundred percent fun and not be a any sort of a a hindrance or penalize you because in in in every other game it had felt like you know you take a drink and like in Red Dead you'll drink in the screen oh good wobbly and like you can't walk and we really but we obviously can't do that with this game because the entire game is about about going to bars and having a drink and have that affect to you so

we came up with this concept where basically inhale these drinks kind of act more like a magical potion where the ingredients that go into these drinks are impossible to make here they're like it's a child's tears with the dollop of insanity and that makes this drink and when you drink the end every drink in in the game like you said every bar has four drinks and that basically comes out to about three specific types of personality traits that you can get per bar so for instance we'll go into a bar and you'll see the menu and based on the reviews we'll get an idea of what that drink will do so it might make you more angry or it might make you more want to flirt with people in the bar or might make you talk like a pirate or talk like a mobster or throw up your conscience and then your conscience is a little character then all your choices are bad so the the variety of kind of what the drinks continue to use is this is pretty R so we wanted so you kind of expand on

oxen-free our first game that that game for those of you who haven't seen it you always have permanently three choices whenever your opportunity to speak comes up and those come directly from what Alex the character you play as what her personality would just naturally let her or allow her to say this is just the the the the things that that person would possibly want to say are kind of your choices in that game and in this game we wanted to make it more like know you can kind of set what you want your personality type to be based on when you walk in the bar and you kind of survey who's there and what the bar is kind of like because we it was important for us to kind of get at the feeling of an actual bar crawl meaning when you go out and you're like now should I know I can't drink too much vodka because when I drink back I get pissed off or when I drink Jack I I'll

just end up passed out so but maybe you want to feel those way so you kind of drink in that specific way so we really wanted you to kind of have that in this game and it kind of dovetails into the puzzles and kind of how you want to approach certain obstacles and then goals like if there's a part in the game where some friends of yours go upstairs to up to a private VIP part of the bar and the bouncer won't let you up so you can drink a bunch of drinks and play beer pong against a other person and to impress them you can insult them based on the personality type that you have in the drink or you can drink a particular kind of concoction they'll make you more angry and then kind of rile up to people that are already in an argument into a fight and then that'll distract the guy and then that can get you upstairs then so we just wanted you to kind of be able to overcome certain chat challenges and

play these bars and kind of the person personality type that you wanted to and then also just to kind of feed multiple pull a through is just because every time you say anything there's some joke and if you didn't like the last joke if you wait 10 seconds was going to be a new joke so this is that type of game right oh yeah I imagine that must have complicated the production process like did it how did that change the way you guys approach designing laying out and sort of writing through all these different options um it didn't change it too much it changed it in in the way that you just had to know ahead of time that okay all of these events are going to happen in this bar so we want to make sure that the drinks that you can get and that will change your personality make sense for those types of events so for instance there there's a bar where you you go into and there's a kind of a light puzzle on a

conversation about trying to convince someone to at least make an effort with someone that they just broke up with and then there's other stuff that also happens in that bar but we knew then at least one drink that had to be kind of focused on romance just because that was going to be a thing that was gonna happen in that spot so it was just really a matter of kind of charting that out ahead of time and making sure that all made sense whereas in oxen-free or and other and narrative games it's very just contact space just the things that you say above your header and the menu are just exactly what needed to be in that at that time but in this game of course if you're drinking a drink and the drink makes you really angry there has to be an angry choice for every single possible time you can speak in that are and that made it hard sometimes because it's like if you want to challenge somebody to a fight we have to kind of let you do that and have it somehow get

back to the main plot and not spiral out of control to this whole other game so that that was the hardest part was just making it feel still like you're able to customize the experience as much as you would want to but not naked game that has 800 hours worth of content yeah it's crazy like I think this game is pretty funny and and comedic timing you would think you know making a game is hella hard but you have full control over like everything you can set the timing you can set the speed of the dialogue you can pick the actors you would think it I'm pretty easy actually it's incredibly hard you would think yes it would be very easy idea the tough part yeah particularly with comedy is just the timing if the timings off even a bit then yeah the joke is killed and particularly with with the game that we really all of our games we really want you to always have just control of the character as much as possible so there's very little times where the will will

force you to like stand here a force you to lock in or the camera will move in and will force secure cool to walk around we definitely need to do that more in this game then oxen-free just because there's way more going on on the screen and it kind of gave oxen-free a cool feeling because you're just with one other character kind of in these very spooky empty outside and I have environments for the most part and it felt good to let you just kind of be running around and climbing trees and jumping on logs and stuff as you're having a conversation and not really care that it doesn't really look like you're looking at the person you're talking to just because you're walking and you're going on hikes and things but in this game you're like sitting at bars and you're leaning on stools and you're looking at a billion characters on screen and we really kind of had to tweak that a bit just to make sure that the timing there and the voice acting kind of all worked but yeah but it was still hard at times we'll watch people play it oh my goal here comes this brilliant

joke and then the like walk off screen like right when it hits and like oh okay but you but you just have to like let that go just because of course the the freedom of being able to control it is with so much more than like now you got my dumb poop joke that I put it in there so yeah I don't know if Brian if you want to walk back to the bar for a second but like how many how many drinks that you have to come up with for this game it seems like a lot of four right there there were very good ones just talking it might be able to but yeah and the naming the drinks were a ton of fun [Music] yes yeah just cuz yeah I was sure and given these horrible things oh yeah nice I am I want to jump back to chat real quick and then quick reminder we didn't say at the top I don't think but if you have any questions specifically about game design or game development general please throw them in chat and we will do

our best to relay them statue sets already on it and they want to again this game reminds them of about how a little bit so they want to know were there any particular games that inspired you or the team it was definitely I mean for me at least the two games I kept referring to in my head it was the Space Quest series from Sierra from the 90s yeah and the old salmon max hit hit the road so these are two adventure games and they placed a lot of emphasis on comedy and Sam and Max in particular just the timing and the cartoon nature of it and those conversations between the Sam and Max is just it's just it's like movie level quality because everything about that game and that was definitely our bar that we wanted to hit and the Space Quest series and the The Monkey Island games - they they do a lot of fun things

where they always kind of break the fourth wall and kind of poke at the player and we wanted to do that a lot with the sister Mary warm horn character which I think you'll eventually see in this playthrough but this is the the she's the personal demon that you get assigned early on and she's there to kind of be pokey in the games world she's there to kind of be tormenting you in the hours we were not being physically tortured so that means that she brings up like your past and mistakes that you've made and will point out choices that that the player had has done and kind of made and kind of makes fun of you just for even playing a game so we really wanted her to kind of be that fourth wall breaking type so kind of like her and Satan are the only two characters in the game where they like know they're in a game and kind of talk around it and kind of allude to to to that so those are two big kind of in in instance burg right

and we talked about you know coming off of oxen-free and Mike jumping into this but like I feel like I don't want to gloss over the fact you know you guys did at least one other big game project which was the mr. robot mobile game it's just like significant thing so I'm curious like whether any things you learned in that process or that production that influenced the way you approach designing this game mr. robot it was a unique game and that it's that one we really wanted you to feel like you're just texting and you make it feel like you are texting another human and that everything on your phone kind of should reflect that and it should be this very kind of seamless thing that you almost forget like you're playing a game and with that one we yeah we really kind of leaned into the actual physical act of that so it's like you'll see the text come in and you'll see like you like you the person that is choosing it like you'll see them like make a mistake you know erase and then we write it

again and and really kind of play with just kind of how people talk on text versus how they talk in real life yeah so if if if anything it kind of just like was a good exercise and just thinking and totally outside of the box before jumping into another very real time thing but yeah and then to that was done for a friend external partner because of course we had partnered up with the mr. robot team to kind of make that in that game sure so just like hearing kind of what they were interested in and it was funny like when we first started working on it you know like with oxen-free we you know we're kept pitching our idea for this game of play ok so it's all gonna be on your phone you'll text and and and local and like in oxen-free you'll be able to control the story and you'll have a million different endings and I'm like no no no no no we don't need no mr. Rifai this is a set thing you will not have multiple endings that have a very specific and a thing oh yeah okay and it made my game like oh man are

people gonna think it's boring if it's too straightforward and nobody really care they just thought it was a cool fun things though and you're able to make enough choices within it to still feel like you're picking apart the the game so we took that lesson too from in here and not focus so much on being able to every single thing you say be able to branch and dovetail back in dr. Pillai's just kind of focus on making just a really good story that you can like there are a lot of different kind of endings and halfway through the game and after a party it's it kind of leaves it up goal you want to be not to spoil things but kind of change the beginning of us have to get out out of hell and it becomes more of a complicated life and what do we be really right I wonder

she's getting away okay good does your computer have an Ethernet port good neck is actually unfortunate if I if I unplug it or move it my gills are shut off because my battery is completely dead I think we can I know your game we're gonna ask for your brain is a game director for a moment how do you and your team prioritize creating you know I think like a lot of narrative games sort of starting from in order to be truly compelling they need to be end to end with content and end to end with interesting places to look in the game

how do you and your team like sort of process like we're looking at us standing in a room now that like has a lot of unique stuff like the guitar the art on the wall the demons like kind of mingling in the foreground and background like the people I guess some of the people get reused but what's your Studios process for working is a small small team and still making something that feels like it's loaded with personality and you're sort of able to trade on more than just worked alone yeah we had to come up with a very smart system early on because how to make a lot of characters so he kind of came up with this demon and human making kit where we were able to kind of make a lot of different heads and arms and legs and body types they kind of come almost uh smize and then for the bars themselves yeah we just really tried to plan out things

very well ahead of time in terms of what each bar would need and what each bar the feel with would would would be in the art style and just make sure that we kind of stick to that and once we're sticking to that not make a lot of changes after the fact but yeah because we're so small and we have a team of about four artists and yeah they just had to make every single thing that you see in this game so we weren't able to yeah say like oh if it's not working in eight months we'll kind of like pivot and change things like once we're kind of building things we have to be confident that that's what we want so it was really just a matter of kind of making it really solid outline for the story and then an outline for the game mechanics and the overall design early sticking to those things nice I am what do you think makes a good story um what I think makes a good story is always kind of specificity specificity in terms

of how characters express themselves I personally and with cliches like I feel like Shakespeare's rightly considered like the greatest writer of all time and no one says like man is plot twists are so great or is because every story that he did came from something else but just what makes those stories great or just how the characters put how they're feeling and I feel like that ultimately is what makes a good story is just the it's hyper specific to what the writer or the team or the artist kind of wants to talk about or wants to say and having the characters kind of expressed that in a very way in in in in a way that is unique to them um and all kind of all I'll happily watch any story about anything as long as I feel like I'm seeing new perspective about the same old stuff wait that's so interesting I mean that that would seem to flow directly out of your work on mr. robot where that fear about not having

like a panoply of endings sort of like winnowed down and he focused more on characters and character interaction and and that kind of thing there's another question here in chat room statutes that they want to know like so just what do you think about companies game companies specifically pushing back on people spoiling games you know like it's been a while but I think they're referring to stuff like when persona 5 came out and people were like don't stream it don't talk about ironically they were limiting streams a lot like which ironically said is we're streaming after party and spoiling the second hour yeah you make narrative games how do you feel about that oh noes no the internet just shut them guys like no can't these opinions get out the PR team jump in here and sabotage in the stream or what guys Halloween comes really today I am Q Internet Adam if you're still if you can

still hear me shoot me a message in Skype and we can try and reconnect to you man it's also kind of funny cuz its face just sort of froze this is really awkward in the meantime what's up chat how's it going out there do you guys play this game you like it yeah it seems good conceal my laughter over here cuz I've been laughing out loud some of the jokes I'm serious man he was really hard to do in games that's why this game outer worlds to like the writing and the timing it's just mm-hmm it's hard work where this you just keep playing I don't see where this goes yeah he probably moved it probably got so excited about

spoilers that he knocked his laptop over and it shut off let's give a couple minutes if he comes back and then we can call it yeah I'm just gonna post message you're gonna see something weird on screen for a second guys okay did you ever get out of helmet Oh something happening you're in denim or did you just hear us like talking for a couple seconds about how we couldn't hear you yes it was just a live at me shouting like can you hear me no no I'm sure it's just because I'm in a very weird corner something as awful year but um so yes so the question was about the spoilers right somebody frickin spoilers yes so yeah I definitely feel like or I did feel a beginning that spoilers would net hinder at least someone's desire to

play a narrative focus game if they're already seeing how the story is going along but my time at telltale when I were when I worked there in the UH in like 2012 2013 all of their market research had actually showed the exact opposite that the more you kind of show people what the story is the more they'll want why this is they'll want to make their own choices and I've actually heard that a lot from trailers to that that's you know us the author the audience complains a lot about like trailers that give away too much but apparently studies have shown that if the trailer actually gives away a lot it makes people want to see the movie more which I don't really understand but I you know it's hard to argue with I guess I mean I'm and I person him someone who's not really bothered by spoilers and that I feel like if I'm hearing the big building blocks of a story it's still not spoiling what I like about

movies and books anyway which is again just the details and how the characters are talking in just the way that they get to those points but yeah I feel like streaming and showing the game is really only a good thing and only a this thing and and the people who want to avoid spoilers can kind of do that at their leisure and that it's only kind of a bad thing if an article like Springs of spoiler on you that you didn't want but just the act of showing the game early and showing the entire game honestly I think it's only a way to kind of spread the word that the game is out there and this is the thing that you should try nice um this is like a really outdated question but I haven't talked to him about it in years and I just wonder what it's like do you remember like two years ago when steam started doing refunds and there was like a brief moment where everyone who made a game less than fifty hours just like oh no yes do you do is that ever still a concern for you and the team or did that never prove to be a real problem um I

think it was a concern mostly for yeah games that were trying to get one over on you and where it's like if you play it for a half an hour or for 45 minutes and then you've seen every single possible thing that that game has to offer like I might be concerned there but with a narrative game where you know what you're getting into and the people are going to know what they're buying yeah honestly it was never really a discussion with us or a concern just because it just seemed something that it seemed mostly fair to us just in a way of like oh if I was purely a consumer that would be a thing that I'd be happy that I could do now and also just nothing that we could really control like it felt weird for us to almost have such a strong opinion about it like no once you buy the game you'd there's no refunding sex yeah yeah so yeah we

honestly never really were really concerned I want to pick your director brain again I think one challenge for selling narrative games and in 2019 is people are interested them people talk like they get it they're really they get a lot of press journalists there's just and them There is obviously demand like you see on Steam like sometimes it's these things sell like hotcakes like plague tale innocence earlier this year but I think the challenge for any narrative studio is that scaling and and keeping costs and cost management works totally different than for other companies where if say your multiplayer game is getting bigger and bigger you want to scale up to have people to fill roles to keep the multiplayer going but narrative is definitely on a project basis I guess there's like there's a list of aliveness to it there's a list of uh what are your sort of your thoughts for running night school especially in the city like LA and keeping it so that you guys can keep making games you know and keep making the next one even if after party you know oxen-free seem to sell well you made your way to the store I'm always

seeing it featured in the App Store which is probably a good sign but I guess what are your thoughts about making sure that when after partnership you guys know and just be a - oh I've been asking the question for a couple weeks at a conference but and before I was saying one game studio but I guess now how do you guys make sure you're in a two game studio and able that will still work at the size you're at yes yeah yeah with question this big of course there's a couple different factors that kind of go into it for us I think primarily it's about making sure that we keep the studio as small and as lean as we can and may hire the people that are absolutely filling kind of multiple holes like everyone in the company that wears a couple hats and we all kind of take a lot of ownership and responsibility over the parts that we put in so that just helps us yeah this would be overhead and just the amount of just heads in the office of course but

then to its kind it's it's also a combination of doing projects that we either have deals ahead of time with where we know like if everything explodes like the mr. robot game if nobody buys this at all we still got paid we still got the money that we needed to keep the studio afloat for those months and weeks and days and then also doing the projects like oxen free and after-party where we're funding it entirely are ourselves based on profits of other things and just making sure that we kind of always have a balance of future checks coming in and making sure that we just have kind of always multiple kind of irons in the fire because with anything and particularly in LA it's like you can go on a hundred whoops and we lost you even 100 you started drinking

everything slowed down sorry we lost you after hundred you get so haunted we're still if you heard did you catch any of it we lost range as I'm sure you heard sorry we lost you after 100 oh man each one's from another no no I'm sorry normally this is fine oh yeah maybe the LA uh fires are creating yeah no joke

maybe like just this answer is cursed you want to just move on or you want to try after 100 yeah well the very short version of it is to just try and make sure that it falls apart we always have something else to kind of like keep the studio on that makes total sense yeah for sure maybe we talk a little more about business if you're up for it I'm curious to know how the launch has gone and sort of like what your thinking was between putting it like I know it's on the epic game store now and steam like how do you feel in general about where game storefronts are at these days and what shaped your your decision to put the game out where you did oh no oh no [Music] well it's worth a shot that's fun dance show yeah I'm sorry buddy you cut up again it's we lost you

it's just a frozen face oh boy and I gotta hit some face pads this was the day before Halloween and all through the internet call up oh yeah are we good we got a little bit of you yeah we can hear you I'm playing yeah that's fine okay so I yeah I I did not hear that question whatsoever that's all right it was just like you know I'm curious to know how you feel about the state of game store fronts these days and what shaped your decision to put the game out where you did I noticed it's on EGS and Steam and console so how you feeling these days about the visibility of India's and how is the game done yeah so the game is doing well I honestly have been kind of waiting hearing too many details about what piece Hills are like I'm gonna wait until this weekend but I've just I'm

just like kind of tapped Sean the other co-founder and studio head just like is it going okay he's like yes good great so it seems to be doing well I've been more focused too on the reviews as if they've been coming in but but yeah but then in general just about these storefronts I definitely like can understand the complaints about having like too many things that you just don't want to like install on your PC and have to deal with and like ways to get games and and I feel like a lot of that is holding into the conversations now about Mike is it a good thing that there's like a Disney streaming thing and a Netflix and an HBO and an NBC n is are we kind of getting through the point now where it's like people will start going back to cable just cuz it's an easier I just want it all I'll just give it to me I'll just pay the one fee but at this

time it feels like a minor hurdle to be able to really customize how you want to get your games and which games you specifically want and not have to kind of pay for something that you're not that you're not necessarily going to use or see so yeah my feeling is that that the industry as a whole is generally moving into a better space than it was and that you're just having more options now of just how you want to get things and there's definitely more options for the independent studios to just stay afloat where it feels like there are these massive massive games like for tonight that come out and generate just untold sums of revenue and then those companies are kind of able to use that as a comfort and able to kind of take more risks and take more Gamble's on in these studios that they want to support and put up more kind of like these more just cooler kind of experimental things and

I've heard that it's kind of the same way in the book publishing world where it's like so something like Harry Potter and these giant massive books that we hear about kind of make like 99% of book sales and that's what funds everything else like the things that when the all the prizes so that kind of feels like what games are right now and at least for right now I can't really think of a better way to do it I mean that's just kind of what the the public kind of jumps into and what these these organizations and the companies and what the Indies are able to kind of do who and how they're able to serve five but yeah I feel like it's kind of arcing towards a good thing yeah it's interesting you mention uh you alluded to cable there is like people just want this big package and I hadn't really thought about it before but there's a lot of that in games now between Apple arcade Google play's subscription the humble thing where you just get games every month in this whole like curated collection there really is more and more space for people who don't want to deal with having to sift through the marketplaces and just get a curated

collection is that something that you'd be ever interested in doing with your games yeah yeah I mean we yeah we're kind of always interested in even apart from the business ass just where the games are showing up but just being in a bunch of different ways that you'll experience it and just a bunch of different like clays dials like oxen-free an after party of course or meant to just kind of you sit down and you play the game and you're there for an hour or two but it's interesting being yes seeing kind of the Apple play stuff and things where the play style is much more you kind of jump into this ecosystem of many games and you're maybe expected to try one out for five minutes or play one for ten minutes then hop out and come back in and to really kind of think about what an interesting storytelling mode would be for that it's just an interesting like creative challenge so yeah we're just kind of always interested in just how to tell and how to kind of make these games just

fit those the the delivery system and kind of the best way yeah right on I am we got about 10 minutes left in this haunted stream if you have any questions anybody get them in now because schedule today Brian you have a question go ahead my fascination with your games that you guys made do interrupting really well like characters interrupt and talk over each other in a way that when most other games do it someone literally has to they'll be talking and then and then the next line of dialogue pops up so you guys do it a lot better how do you do that [Laughter] so the sadder answer is that there's just a lot of writing there really isn't like a trick to it I'm like is how how you make the the interrupts work is that you just put a ton of bookmarks in the

conversation so that what that means is that when we know at any point you can cut off a line or cut off a thought now that this has to be three or four or five different lines then that can feed right back into what they were saying so it's like if Milo is like man when I was six years old and then you click on a demon that you want to talk to and you have a minor conversation with him that the game kind of keeps track based on that bookmark and will know milo wants to get back to talking about when he was six years old so let's go back down to the next kind of version of him talking about that that's in the that's that's in the in the sequence so so then he'll say anyways i was talking about when I was six years old and I do mean swept them again there's even more versions of him kind of getting back to to that so it's just a matter of just writing a lot of different versions of the same conversations and allowing the game to kind of dip in and out of any of them in any order and this kind of

keeping a kind of mathematical track of exactly what points in the overall story or you're at this cuz for me it's a big thing I never really want to hear repeating dialogue and the game just because it kind of breaks your immersion you get that a bit in and after party just because you're able to kind of challenge demons to beer pong and lose and you have to be able to reach challenged them in situations like that where we just can't write infinite versions of okay again beer pong so you just have to hear repeating stuff there but as much as possible I like it to just to feel like it's just a natural flowing talk but yeah so you just have to write a lot unfortunately questions so I'm going to start wrapping things up thank you everyone for joining us today on the GDC to it you know no mince words jumped in with a second other questioner got answer at hyneman's words they're

curious have Adam has a philosophy about what kinds of stories made school wants to tell oxen free and after party of similar protagonists with supernatural contexts and they wonder if you see these as signature elements or if you have ideas about what else you might explore on the future um yeah we always like Jean rrah blending stuff so I don't think you'll ever see us make a hundred percent comedy a hundred percent horror honor percent action oxen feat was very kind of like a teen coming-of-age story that could very much be stand by me except we added in weird spooky creepy horror things it's a ghost for at the same time after-party could have just been a bar crawl and you're dis out with a bunch of random people and you're getting out of college and you're thinking about what next to do but we wanted again something kind of crazy to edit so we just put you in hell so we're always gonna kind of have kind of a mix of things and we just like the kind of counterbalances that those make and I personally like always like a end

enjoy a mixture of tones and movies and books and things were laughing and you're scared and you're crying and you don't know if you should be laughing but it's kind of funny and where it's just always kind of keeping you on your toes but yeah we are it's kind of like things that ya just have a lot of kind of 80s Spielberg Ian Amblin entertainment bike heart feeling at the at the core but that's that's that's probably always what will like a mess oh thank you someone this is this this island you're on is huge I think this is OK Mintz thanks for your question that was a really fun level of afterparty Adam thank you so much for joining us sorry about the demons haunting or no I'm sorry I am sorry yeah but it kept blinking in and out I hope you understood ten words of Asus we got

some good answers we harvested we harvested content we party our way to hell and with that I'm gonna leave everyone to have one whole day if you are out there in the audience and you were yourself a game developer we would just like to remind you that registration for GCC 2020 has opened if you go to our website you can get your pass we have a lot of different options for developers of all different backgrounds so whether you're a triple-a developer looking to pick up as much as you can across the game deal in spectrum we have something for you if you're an indie developer we have lots of great choices for you as well if you want to rest in the expo floor if you want to see the talks on Monday Tuesday if you want to see the end of the week there's all kinds of options and we'd love to have you at the show if you are not a game developer or if you just or if you can't make it to the show if you're otherwise just like making games or like the topic of game development we would love it if you clicked the follow button on the stream so that you can get a notification we go live we're rare two streams in one week this week because tomorrow we're talking to the

folks over at obsidian about the outer worlds and we're actually gonna have oh god I hope we get their names right Tim Kaine and Leonard Boyarsky our ski we've confirmed them if you're here today come back tomorrow because that's gonna be really awesome and I'm so excited for that with that have a good