GDC plays Astroneer with System Era's Brendan Wilson

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am the community manager for GDC I'm a contributing editor at Gamasutra calm I am here today my being my little astronaut self on this nice lovely planet sort of got myself set it up here kind of on a weird like border of the planet between the green and the red and the blue that's not red I'm not colorblind I swear anyway we are here today talking to the Brendan from System era he is in the lower left-hand corner of the screen and also joining me is Alex waro Alex would you please introduce yourself hi I'm Alex somehow still an editor Gamasutra calm and very pleased to join you today on this special GDC stream but I'm pretty boring Brendan you're our interesting guest can you tell everyone a little bit more about who you are and what you do at System era yeah one of the original

cofounders of system era I was basically the lead engineer for quite a while and I still do a bunch of engineering on the game but I have transitions to be more just to kind of the studio ahead and so I handle a whole lot of things basically anything at the studio that needs doing that doesn't fill that doesn't fit into anyone else's job description that's that's what I'm right on so I think what's interesting about this game is it it just launched out of early access last week I think right the sixth yeah and you guys have been working on this for years I think a little over two right you you launch an early access in December of 2016 how has it gone for you this first week at one point I like what's been the reception husband of how's the studio been working like how's it going yeah a little more than two years since we announced the game that was October of 2015 I say and but the game has actually been

like from conception a game didn't progress for like five years and I think the reception had always been really positive really encouraging and it's it's kind of really been and we had to kind of go talk for it he wants to really focus on on getting the content ready an app and it's been our most significant update exerting all of our early access updates this one difference in the game from when we had in October to now it's been the most drastic and so that's was really really nice few players that kind of big jump in content and obviously there there are you know it hasn't been entirely smooth about lots of boats to fix and those are and performance to approve them in this that's currently our top priority but it's been very exciting for the team especially for most of the team what haven't been here since the beginning because we've grown quite a bit it's really exciting for them to be able to see a lot of work kind of you know

finally in players hands and get the reactions yeah I am I sort of I was ther look to my duties earlier I should have pointed out that everyone watching this fantastic stream can go ahead and drop questions for you and chat and we'll go ahead and relay them although we definitely prefer questions about game development or this game in particular and we already have a couple in a rat that are fantastic one of which from over Blaine is what's it like to be working on a gay and it's alive and actively responded to which is a very broad question but a good one so how's it been for you like working on a game this would have been open and in public development for years now is is hard I always say it's you know like that was it like doubles the challenge because when you're not you know when you're working on a game that it's unannounced or or at least you know it's just not in players hands you can you can just break everything every day you know and or something's not working just completely throw that we design it overnight when you're in an early access

even though the you know the ostensible point of early access is to bring players into a development process where the game is going to be evolving and changing potentially drastically over time the reality is that you're you're just a left life-support mode for a live game and you can't have to treat it that way and and it's still you know being on box event that we had to go through it was a very very similar to just being a fully released game you still you know we still have the requirement to go through certification stages to get updates out we had to be you know we had to have all of our ducks in a row in terms of in terms of publishing in terms of store presence and then you know you have a community to manage and even though you're in early access people have people develop their favorite features they you know it's a very becomes very difficult to make certain changes with a disappointing certain

people and so it's and then the the the speed with which you can this mean which you can work is in steadily slowed down because each and every update has to you know keep the game going you can't break the game to the greatest extent possible and we had throughout early access we have kind of a caveat saying like each update has the potential to disrupt your savegame we're not guaranteeing that everything's always fully backwards compatible it's like a few updates that were that were pretty big changes like when we completely changed the face builder paradigm at one point so I you know we had to write some some code that would actually kind of give you some credit for the old base that you had and so it's and that that takes that that's certainly a big toll on development I asked make that it took us probably twice as long to make this game that were playing today as it would have if we if we were not in office and we were not trying to sustain the game through monthly or every six weeks and have an

update was that something you were sort of aware of as you were doing it or something you've come to realize in hindsight a little bit of both I think we knew we knew that they would be it would be a toll and it'd be a lot of extra work going in but we didn't quite I don't think we realized quite how much yeah yeah so what was the value to you as a team when you were when you were like sort of working through this process why did you decide to stick with this sort of open development philosophy even though I was taking it more time well we the original the original impetus was was really it was the it was the only option or best option we had to maintain control over over developments you know without bringing the publisher or something like that and we have we have a really great community really like a very supportive community and and so it's been from that perspective it's been very nice to to learn how to work with our community and learn how to take their feedback and it's also given us

the opportunity to learn like it should be said that when I when we started I think when we launched into early access it was like system era was not a company in the traditional sense of the game company in the center we didn't have we didn't have like an office we didn't have anything we didn't have a QA team we didn't have you know like a support line there was there it was just it was practically a bunch of guys ya know like you know in a garage band set up acting and and so it's given us the time and you know fight by working through early access and putting out a lot of updates it's given us the process of early access for us on a frontier has been as much to build system and learn how to be system as it has to build the game right on yeah I mean it was ages ago but I remember we didn't interview with you guys remotely and there were three or four dudes in a conference room and ever did that was the cup team and if I

remember right like most of the team came from sort of big-budget productions you know they came from I think 343 inside you know Triple A to all of us yeah yeah I wonder like now that you sort of have this shift I mean it and you know there's plenty of people in the chat or echoing the fact that this is a well loved and well received game how do you feel about your two experiences or those two ways of making games which is sort of like closeted and and sort of hidden away from the world for years versus sort of being open and upfront and sort of just like by the seat of your pants do you think you want to go back to sort of a more closeted approach or is there just a lot of value in the early access open development philosophy no we certainly don't want to be as positive as most developers are you know we're like we were used to working on teams so I came from myself and founders we had met each other through working on halo at Microsoft three or

three industries the other co-founder he works at Ubisoft and we had an Reilly concern our Biff and our sound designer he came from working at EA Disney so we all were two huge companies with hundreds of people at these studios and at those studios you as a individual developer have have no interaction with the community at all yeah and you are you are told that you are not allowed to say anything and there are consequences if you go and start saying you're talking about the gamer or even what's the game people use just saying the wrong thing and so from that perspective we definitely don't want to go back to that and I think the relationship the kind of interaction we've developed as our community something that we cherish and we want to want to hold onto that as far as whether we'll do early-access again it's really it's just it's just a decision about when it's gonna be you know how we're going to be delivering the best the best products to to that community in the you know it most

efficiently we don't want I think I think in early access has a kind of a bad reputation now and I don't know it's a it's a it's a great I mean it was developing a better educational if he started it's gonna pretty for a lot of games that would start over yes never finish never come out of it you've had like people would say oh I'm just gonna you gave our money these guys and games dead we're never gonna see anything for it yeah but yeah I think yeah it really depends I think that if we do it early access again we'd like to shorten so sort of sort of shortened the cycle and try to present a game when it enters or the excess that's closer to the finished product cuz I think aster day was so I mean it's so much more when we started that you know and there was so many other games that have gone through really access yeah then we're more representative of a finished product that people were maybe I used to having to go through as much iteration as needed hmm yeah I am

III won't agree with you but it feels like the the public perception of early access might be changing and might be sort of more recognition that it can be a really valuable and useful pipeline for the right team I think games like Astra near go a long way towards approving that but unfortunately I have I've let this chat lapse for too long there's tons of great questions in here let me grab one for you Ross play interactive wants to know how do you handle your workflow is that cloud-based or over a network in-house oh yeah it's a combination when we started it was a hundred percent cloud-based because we just didn't have the time or the money to support any kind of server architecture or infrastructure I should say now we have so when we started it was we reused Amazon ec2 for hosting our perforce buspar force for source control and we use JIRA for task tracking which we adopted kind of a little later that's

all so that was all in the cloud and a you slack of course like sort of McAfee we use the slack nowadays sure and I thought thought of these and slack itself is kind of a difficult little useful tool for just storing a huge amount of stuff now that once we started to like once we moved into an office and we have a team a larger team on site that needed a lot higher bandwidth the bottleneck between the office and and the cloud especially for source control access when you're moving quite a large amount of data moving that for an entire local office through one external internet connections kind of a big bottleneck so we moved the we move the perforce server in-house so all of our source control we have we have enough servers now for our actual game content mmm but things like our production software slack and file sharing all that stuff still MacLeod yeah which enables

which enables you know people to work remotely a lot a lot more easily so I mean I mean I think working through the cloud is is totally the best and easiest thing to do and you should should just keep doing as long as you can and for us just absolutely became it's just a technical limitation where it's still you know you you really like it you need 10 people all transferring data or get give a connection you know your internet connection is not kind of just you she's not got hold up mmm yeah I gotta ask Brian why are you terraforming this beautiful planet uh I die uh because uh because it's there to quote the mountain climber guy I I'm on a mission to build a car and to build a car any more bytes - Oh more bytes I need harvest bytes which means finding little doodads on the forest and taking these big big chunks right here and harvesting them at my base so I was on a quest to do that and then it turned into

a quest of survival when I fell down that hole so to make my way back home now walking fast faces flash and I'm home bound yeah anyway so I I have been struck by as I play this game as I'm sure many people have been chat kind of this some the the way that like this art style kind of like responds elegantly to the shaper tool that you have as a player I'm curious Brendan if we're able to walk through sort of the the kind of the the code what makes the code tick on this on this sort of thing because I imagine you know your art team is sitting here trying to create like this beautiful stuff that can work in the procedural aspect and it was your job when you are working on the code for the team to make sure it worked so if you're able to give any insight on that I think our audience might appreciate it yes there's sort of two things that you touched on there one isn't be out of the artist actually generate the planets and

how do they put their artistic touch into this procedural generation system and then also how you mentioned that the smooth response to deformation mm-hmm so yes and I was heavily involved in to cope with that so we staged Jacob and I were the first engineers in the project project we we worked on there was sort of the train systems gone through two major innovations the system that we shipped early access with back in 2016 was it looked quite a bit different than the system that we have now a system that we have now is way more powerful in terms of the artists getting the look that they want and allowing us to create all the permits that we that we have now so the early access game originally was you know we could kind of create a surface of a planet and we could create a layer of caves underneath the surface but we couldn't do much more than that not easily and it was also very very prone to it was hard to update without

just kind of like totally breaking people's teams games and so the new system has you know the planet is populated with stuff all the way down to the core and we can create really exotic kind of shapes and and biomes and it's also much easier to update so we can add we can add and change the algorithms that define to find the talent landscape without actually breaking people's savings so the system underneath is all publicity misdirection or some characteristics it's essentially it's a Boston system so it's you can think of something like Minecraft the entire world is made up of a grid of 3d voxels and then those voxels those muscles each voxel stores a certain certain data and so in our case it'll be in a density data that defines whether there's ground there or it's open air and then that's so that's a system that there's an algorithm that produces the voxel data and that's kind of like your I said there was two different approaches we

took to this but we defined the voxel data and then and then that voxel data so like in Minecraft you know once you have your voxels you pretty much have everything you just render a block or there's a voxel and the block has typically in a game like Minecraft would have an index to determine like an integer index that determines what type of block that is in our game it's a little bit because we don't have blocks we have kind of a smooth surface it's a little bit more complicated that they this little heavier so each voxel stores a the basic algorithm is that each voxel stories intensity value and that density value can you know it has a range and it can be positive or it can be negative it's negative it means that there's open air in that faison if it's positive it means there's solid ground in that space and where that where that crossover happens between positive and negative is what the surface is going to be and then we simply run that fossil data through a

polygamy of the algorithm we use one color marching cubes it's very very common it's one of the most common ways to do this kind of click notation and that that produces the actual geometry surface that you see and will generate occlusion for that and so forth and then so when you're deforming you're just modifying the voxel data you know where it smelt like we don't really have to look at the the actual mesh data we just have to look at the fossil data apply some transforms to it you know so subtracting or adding from that density and then rerun the polymerization before the chunk so the ground is divided into chunks at a certain granularity so that we don't have to rebuild the mesh for like the whole plan interview time just people the small area that you're standing on and that's basically how it works yeah I'm curious I mean in the years of development like you know there are definitely major stories about this game's unique art style and the way you guys sort of blend procedural content with sort of like a hand authored touch

I remembered reading a lot about the the biomes that you set up and tweak so then you're sort of assured that they will generate an interesting landscape I'm just curious you've put so much effort into making this very attractive art style that has I think no textures right and it's all it's all voxel based and it's very it seems very approachable but also very malleable to your needs as a studio were there any like major drawbacks sort of cropped up there in development to sort of made you sort of wish oh we wish we'd use textures or we wish we hadn't used voxels or blue bishops was like a hard course based game instead of this incredibly adorable colorful Wonderland we we decided to make the hardest possible game on all dimensions yeah because you know like the wisdom to keep it you know keep energy BC and you talk to a lot of developers especially any developers a lot of the advice is like take kind of one thing that you do that's different and focus on that and everything else just just just do the easy way

and we were like and we like in hindsight were like we picked the hard way on everything so this has been a very challenging game in a lot of ways it's been challenging because I mean it's procedurally generated with a challenge there is always how do you give players both like a different experience each time they play but also one that's not completely uniform to the point where it's just totally poor I mean in drab and once you see it won one area you've seen them all it's because it's so procedural and because it's and because you can deform all the terrain and a lot of the techniques that Triple A games use to make everything run super fast which involve in those those technically involve a lot of offline processing where you are if you know what your map is gonna look like and the layout of your level and all the textures and meshes that are going to go into it you can do it on a offline work so that the game is believed of a lot of

convocations at runtime you can do you know light map baking and stuff like that you can do offline visibility visibility analysis which means from every point in the level you'll know what the things are visible and so you have a really efficient you render we can't do any of that in a procedural game so it makes it really hard to sometimes to optimize to the extent that you would like to do yeah and then of course there's other things like you know we've got these huge environments that are you know you're travelling between planets the planets are spherical so we can't even rely like gravity gravity doesn't even happen in one direction which is surprisingly you think that that's relatively straightforward but like it's easy city priced it's one of those annoying things we're like the fact that gravity is typically like negative one on the Y or z axis is hard-coded everywhere so and

we do this all multiplayer so right fully co-op what could go wrong yeah it sounds like a lot more work than I expected I have so much more to ask but there are tons of good questions coming on I want to get some of them in please keep them coming there's one here from chunky spaceman and wants to know how does System Error deal with programming burnout did he go rotate what they work on do you allow people to work remotely or how do you deal with that kind of stress experience programming for help personally so I'm curious but what it looks like exactly ice I think I think in our case most we've had like six seven nineteen years now on the team and because because of what I just talked about because the game is this pretty first small team it's a pretty big game technically complicated game there's so much to work on and everybody like there's more there's more areas of like

there's more potential areas of expertise that we could apply that we have people on my team so you get to kind of rotate around a lot and there's always things you know if you're a person that works on rendering optimization there's gonna be an opportunity to work on gameplay vice-versa so I try to make sure that it's kind of one of my jobs in the team is to try to make sure people are satisfied with what they're doing and constantly checking in and so if you know somebody we try to make sure that people are working on what they will be what they really want to work on for example I have one guy on the team who really wanted to work on UI from which I was like that's amazing they want to keep you forever it's not really hard to find programmers who want to work on UI code yeah something Jim just a loss that you want an engineer yeah I can see that there is um there's a question here from James 5ch it's just like when you're gonna add a bunch of story which it's sort of a it's an interesting

question but it is sort of this is what I want to ask which is that you know when I look at the success of Astra near and I look at sort of what are similar games in the industry like it's hard not to look at something like no man's sky and to watch the journey that that team went on and that game went on you know that that game seems to be in a really good place and it seems to have a really robust story and and a bunch of other stuff going on there and I'm so impressed that Astra near has stayed from the start purely co-op sandbox experience I'm curious like over the years like how has the team thought about the idea of trying to add in story like what is any potential value to you the water that what is the hassle like how have you gone about thinking about that aspect and to quickly quickly just have a kind of a dev clarification I guess when we asked about story we should also be asking about what is essentially authored content because you could you could you could totally skip over you could totally maintain the idea of a emergent narrative or whatever and still have authored encounters in the game that are more scripted that's a girl

that's probably a more broad better answer because I will III could go off on a narrative tangent forever so I just wanted to rein this in into something that's very that I think a lot of devs can relate to the question of authorid versus emergent yeah so Brandon what about authored content what's the deal what's the what's the risks what are you thinking about I mean that's something that we that we talk about quite a bit and I think when we start at the very beginning of the project with just four people it was the decision to go much more procedural was partially because we wanted to create a game that you could put a lot of hours into but would be tractable for us to actually achieve so if you want to make hundred hour game and that's entirely authored content it's that's impossible thing to do but you can do it for a game

that's that's more that is more procedural and it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a sandbox game so if you look at a game like FTL which is made by two guys that's that's a procedural game that feels like it's it's narrative and so you know we're like you wanting to replay it to get internment experience each time and you're kind of making up that that narrative in your head and that was sort of where we were going the past year afternoon in the beginning something that I definitely think that we didn't achieve my master near so far that whattup likes to was kind of more what Ryan talked up talked about which was injecting some more of those authored slightly more scripted experiences within the procedural framework so things that you could encounter that create a little mini quest for you is something that we're still very much

interested in and exploring but maybe you put a lot more pressure on on on creating that content it can be expensive to make and people will produce them quite quickly so you're kind of always you're always having to create more and more of them sure I think that's certainly a direction that the game could take nice I am there's a lot of questions here and chat about something called the big purple but I think maybe we shouldn't talk about that I don't know what that is Bryant you know what the big purple is no okay and I apologize for any visual like folks are saying it should we've got an Xbox hooked up to a capture card here so unfortunately we're a little limited on the tech side that should be us I don't I don't want to throw the poor also I guess it's my tethers they're saying my tethers are contributing the phone just generally trying to stay out of like the forests any any like high particle areas sorry you guys you seem well tethered that's there is a

central question you say you can't you can kind of can beat the game and those those things relate to that well I'm sorry if we spoiled that for anybody but it sounds incredible I kind of wanna let me talk to you about just like the general design and UI and we touched on this a lot but it's it's sort of the the big striking point of this game I keep watching Brian just zoom into his backpack and I love it I just I want to watch you do that all day it's so smart it's and that's been there I think since the beginning right Brennan like that was one of the big deals I remember when this game first like started getting some buzz it was all about like the the gifts of these like beautiful sculpted terrains and these very intuitive like UI elements has that ever been a hassle like have you ever really regretted committing to making everything so intuitive and like not not traditionally menu-driven the way most games are yes so yeah I mean it has been

it has been part of the game since early access since the start of it and it certainly has been a hassle but it's been a good kind of hassle like I mean it is something that we cherish about the game you know certainly not regret it it's a very important game but it does mean that's what would be a pretty straightforward addition or decision in another game just add just a DUI element just add an extra item in the menu is a much more difficult process in our game or something like the backpack which is kind of why we like you know we we talk about hey literally like just hold it to scientific rule diegetic meaning meaning maybe we don't know that mean isn't worldly interfaces we had discussed it being very strict about that so that even like your settings menu would be in world but just the idea just the idea of having to actually be factored the in-game art for literally every UI change or you know without that was quite difficult and it also means that

for wherever you have text being displayed you know we're localized into 14 15 different languages so that if you you can't big you really can't bake the text you know for example into a mesh without having to actually have different meshes per language so it's like that becomes almost very between very difficult even tractable yeah we know the game now has kind of a mix of traditional UI for things like the menu front end and some certain some some things like those those tooltips that you see but a lot of the yeah a lot of the just the way that you engage with the world here to be sure if you're actually interacting with items in the world that's that's also so Dietetic and we really really that's something butter again that we love think it something about the game that makes it unique and it kind of it creates for us it was important because it creates any sense it heightens the sense of intimacy in your world in connection with it we thought it went

along perfectly well with the fact that you could deform all the terrain it just just yeah it just felt right to us right on I wonder let's chill down into that for a second if other deaths wanted to try something similar and try to approach a game with a similar kind of die Jetix design what what specific advice would you give them that you learned during development like were there specific things that were exceedingly difficult like like I mean text was a great example of weather with their examples of places where it was initially very easier than you expected and more valuable or what advice would you give after two or three years of trying to figure out how to do this well yeah is a big one yeah so we really don't put any text in any diegetic certain locations you so even when you bring up your your catalogue to look at your research tree that's kind of a traditional UI presented in a diabetic

element so we're not we're not shy but we don't shy away from sort of building a traditional you ice cream that we can then render onto a surface in the game that's it totally we don't really consider that a cop-out we're just like you know our rule is that if it's something that the the Astra Mir would themselves look at through some sort of digital interface then that's that's cool we can present it that way um one one you know sort of technical thing is that scales scale becomes a really really tricky issue and so when you're when you're interacting with things like with your mouse or your your gamepad you know you need things to be of a scale that's that makes interacting with them possible and lets you see as you've seen those things acceptable and so we played with scale a lot and people may notice this that like the the the resource nugget in in the backpack right now it's a size it is super tiny it's not at all the scale that would be in there in the

world so if you take that output actually scales up we playlist go quite a bit and we don't we don't care to be consistent in that regard it's just sort of things things get scaled up and down yeah I needed to make it make the interaction more more pleasant or just just possible yeah that seems like I wrote like a necessity if you're gonna start making planets you gotta have a planet that has giant mushroom trees you gotta have like a giant flower planet you gotta have just just the weirdest scales you can possibly imagine there's a super good question here from shadow echo if you got a second they want to know can you talk about the challenges of development for both console and PC they know for instance that there were some issues with the UI that were difficult to see on a TV so let's talk about like how did you guys handle trying to split this across multiple platforms and get it ready and what are the unique challenges of console versus PC players they're very I mean the I mean the main challenge was the interfaces so making making the game

he as equally playable as possible on both of us keyboard interface a game that interface certainly adds to the challenge especially the digest and so for initially made the Xbox version initially was created after the PC version and and so the very first interface we had was it was kind of like the best we could do with the gamepad III the gamepad controls initially and you know we made something that felt pretty good for movement and then the inner a lot of interaction was like well when will you hold a button to bring up a cursor you know kind of like destiny UI style through and then we've since we've since continued to made a move to make improvements that make I think the game a lot lossen with her to play with better shortcuts for gamepad but there's all there's always it's always difficult you know but the control scheme your ideal control scheme or for most and

keyboards always don't look very different than the gamepad so that's that's always a challenge and then the challenge one challenge on PCs is that you just have and this is this is an age-old thing is that you just have a hugely like just a massive variety of hardware that your game needs to run on when we launched early access the very very beginning like the first couple of days we had some issues where people with certain old CPU is just couldn't even start the game because we have kind of inadvertently included certain instructions that were not compatible they were compatible with for example the Xbox one compatible with older CPUs so your level of your the level of QA you know burden that you're undertaking to make sure that you're achieving you know an acceptable compatibility level is a lot higher and when you're working with PCs and then you just have this

huge range of performance like your performance envelope it's it's so huge so you know might run on my my development PC you know our game thread update might be five milliseconds you know on my PC which is three years old and yet you know on the Xbox is 20 milliseconds so that's just like it is so you really ideally I don't want to have a person dedicated to each each platform you're working on yeah boy really yeah it's while I'm still be talking about that like I thought that's been a thorn in game developers sighs for decades just just trying to make PC games work but I don't know you still do it it's incredible I am talking about pcs and sort of all the different platforms I gotta ask how you feeling about the epic store are you guys are you gonna launch over there are you gonna go to Congress there's a lot of opportunities now to get off of steam when you're looking to

sell to PC owners how you feeling about that stuff yeah when we talk about you know and when I talk about my games old friends but like what's new in the industry I'm pretty interested in like how is you know house how is the way that people buy their games gonna change I think that that's one area especially on PC that just kind of us hasn't changed for many years and it's and you know it's pretty well known by now that steam is is outrageously profitable to the extent that it's there's definitely a competitive opening there for somebody to come in with a similar platform and just try to undercut them which is exactly what you know Tim Sweeney and epic are trying to do you steam just has a I think fur or it's much easier and like you're already seeing this ship started happening with the Triple A developers you're seeing a lot of big games not appearing on Steam yeah and because it's you know for the for the big companies that have all of

their own infrastructure that they can they can do that they can just try to figure out how to distribute the game in the way that maximizes their own their own revenue hmm and they can do all their own marketing and they have all their own multiplayer back-end infrastructure for a smaller developer like us a lot of the value in steam is not it's not just the distribution that's also that it provides a platform that to reach people can connect you know multiplayer and you know and all the other features and the storefronts and sort of it's sort of built-in marketing because you can work with valve to try to get featured on the store and so for us it's it's as we build out our own capabilities as we add where we are working on our own server support and we have a lot more sort of back-end service set up and we did when we launched and so it it's it's becoming

more possible for us to exist on different platforms the main reason that we've never been on a on a PC platform aside from steam is is we didn't want to split the player base in terms of multiplayer because right now you just you just connect to via your your steam accounts we don't have like our own account system and our own servers so that'll be and so twice a week of the driving factors if you don't want to slip split prepare at the player base so if we can explore when we reach the capability to be able to run the game on from different distribution platforms but still have all those players be able to play together that's something we're gonna take a lot more seriously nice I uh I have a lot more questions about that but I feel like it's kinda like a chat Brian how are you doing that cave that looks rough no it's okay I just forgot that like somewhere between the tutorial and me actually playing the game I forgot how canisters work and now I don't have any canisters with which to build a ramp you can store full of dirt and I

just need to like figure out how to get my way out of here this is very silly and doing great yeah that's what your that goes there is a good question here we may have touched on it but I want to make sure we get it just in case over boy and asked are there any sacrifices you made to get the game working on controllers well I don't think we made sacrifices I mean we've never like so if the question if the question is implying did you nerf the mouse and keyboard interface to make work on controller I think the answer's no yeah the game is the game is still very much I think a mouse a most friendly interface and I think the controllers controller players still have it more difficult time in terms of interactions or something that we always wanted a group but no the answer is like we've never I don't I

can't remember a time when when we've been like we just can you totally can't do this because of because of gamepad I think the only thing the only consideration that we always keep in mind when thinking about controls and gamepad is the number of face buttons and are available on a gamepad so we we definitely don't still the keyboard with like shortcuts you know some games better a lot of usually a better better exclusively designed for a mouse and keyboard will just like use all the ones just like use every key on keyboard yeah yeah why not generally don't do that that's that's like a lot of us forward thinking restraint I think I remember that like the 90s when every PC game came with a map a keyboard map I'll show you here and the ones that so like I think it's just sort of wise to try and keep controls as elegant and minimal as possible especially with a game like this there's one other question sort of

honestly beyond my knowledge but I think it could get some an interesting answer which is some people keep asking about something called the true flat what happened to the true flat was there it's at some point a different system in place where they were true flat landscape options or something might be you shouldn't wear light on what truth I wasn't no demonstrate because I got a canister with yarn it whatever surface you're announcing over you can extend surface in all directions and and the players have discovered that there were certain like very specific angles that were kind of universal absolute angles in the game space so they would change relative to its surface to the planet as you around it but certain absolute angles that seems to get like perfectly flat

surfaces where there was absolutely no absolutely no visible called polygon edges in the inside that surface and those tended to be on either the I mentioned that the games on the voxel grid so either like the any any surface that was aligned with that cute face for certain divisions so it's sort of 45-degree angles between those faces would produce a surface like that we didn't we certainly didn't and then so players have noticed that since we released the new game it's been harder for them to to find those those angles and those services we certainly didn't do anything intentional to affect that as far as I know the code is basically the same but it is something you know there have been selected with the voxel side this is something you V totally changed but the polymerization side is

is the same algorithm so there might be some tuning changes that were made that have affected that so it's something that we'll look into you can you can definitely there was a time in development where I guess I've been over as we were like how it it should be fine now because there was a development we're a flatten tool if you work on one of these kind of true flat angles you really couldn't get anything even resembling a perfectly flat surface it would be it would be like let game play plateaus and you can kind of walk it wouldn't look perfect like some you get some noise and we during the early access last year we made some improvements to that so that on almost any angle you get get with what is I think to uh to an untrained on would look like a totally flat surface but I think the players who are really astute creative players can you know have been pointing out that there is no getting it

isn't the true flat that they are they consider two flat so it is something that we're aware of and look at it's not the truest true flap that sounds pretty true flat to me I kind of want to know how this game has done such a great job of building and maintaining a community over the years because I remember when you started you got a lot of buzz from those gifts it's a very attractive very very difficult game and at the time there was like really nothing like it but that was like two or three years ago now and yet here we are you've launched into 1.0 and you seem to be doing quite well and you've got and you've got a great community here in chat you seem to be good on Twitter and everywhere so I kind of want to know you know even if you weren't directly involved in it like what did you learn about what it takes to grow and sustain a community around a game over the course of years of development I think treating everyone as much as possible with as much respect as possible is that this kind of your first and golden rule nice we yeah the community was built

initially from I think the biggest things like our hash tag speech on Saturday poses like from like three years ago and yeah I don't know I think we like we really respect our community and we made an effort to reach to them through things like our blog which kind of brought people into the studio and introduce them to the team as individuals you know to allow people to get to know who we are and you know like how how a day maybe looks inside the studio which gives people more of a you know a sense of a relationship with us we we also you know we have we brought in Joe Joe tirado who's our who's like a community manager and these I splendas responsibilities and so you know that's a full-time role in the team and so he is his job is to is to make sure that

there's someone always somebody engaging with the community while the rest of us are are working and making sure that we Phe he gives us very regular reports of like what people are saying so when you're on the forums and your and your and your you know Ivan saying something is great or you're complaining about something you know we we definitely hear but we're not ignoring and we get like you know Joe's Joe is fighting for you he's always everything like business look business this is the baby that you're under communities my you think about and we came that stuff very seriously I think it's helped us a lot that the game this is this is a non-violent on competitive game and I I think that it's the type of people in the community reflect that and they are just really nice people and I really love this community right on I am we're getting to the end of our hour here so please anyone if you have great questions please drop them and chat and Brian go ahead so I did mean to talk over you I have no questions I was

just saying this I think it's always cool when when when devs I think it's the most cool thing about that to me is that when devs recognize that the cut the content of their game informs the community they get and it's cool to hear that like you know you probably didn't say oh we're gonna make a non violent game we'll get a non violent community a non aggressive community but it's cool that it's it's cool that relationship is out there and that understanding anyway I'm gonna try and get the smelter up and running it there's a good question here from Chuckie spaceman who wants to know well with this game being procedurally generated are the purple landmarks totally random or is there some kind of system like a grid or a latitude/longitude that chooses exactly where they spawn marks are not actually there one of the few things in the game they're not really procedurally chosen so their locations are not random they occur at they occur a specific kind of geometric points on the planet so if you think of the if you think of it so there's I don't give them too many details so the

players aren't so given that so I'm not giving everything away but you can think of the planet is like a D&D dice okay back on either Alex just I would talk into 2012 d8 how you feel okay discover all right so I guess so I got so excited about teach one is there from and I lost the the actual answer the question if you think of it as a d20 then then how does it actually know where to put those that's good yeah someone chat says it's a polyhedron that's the word you're looking for thank you spinach video thank you very much anyway I kind of want to know and I think this question has been going through chat as well and I sort of held off because it's unfortunately abroad but like where do you go from here I mean this is this is a solid 1.0 release it seems like a

totally like respectable dev time do you are you gonna like stick with this project for a while do you have a thought for where how you build out a game like this that is so sort of like it says it builds itself out in so many ways that it's hard to understand how you would immediately expand upon it so like do you intend to stick with this game for a while or is there new work going on at the studio where are you going from here there's a lot of support planned for it both in terms of improvements and fixes and new content I think it's like Cyprian it's a sandbox game towards it which means it's super easy to just have new things like you can play with you know we really look at it look at it as a toy box and so we just want to give people things to cool things to do in to play it mess around with and then and then and then beyond that we certainly don't think that this is the the master near and that will see more more and more master interior in terms

of more significant stuff whether that means whether that means like major expansions or you gain don't know yet good police not really talked about it yeah fair enough there's a couple other really fun small questions that I I've overlooked here in shelf we got time I want to throw them out jdl E&L wants to know still want to know who came up with the icons for the resources by a super cool artist named John Kay mm-hmm it's like a friend of John King and you actually works if you guys know fangamer yeah right yeah there's a lot of inner stuff as well so there's if there's similarities in style there that's why I'm sure real quick I'm going to just swing by a chin Edie's question chin Edie would like to say that an industry where color blend modes are not a standard there are a lot of games where I can struggle to tell things apart props the dev team on great labels and icons were a colorblind mode just isn't necessary for me I also want to

apologize to Cheney specifically I made a rough joke about being colorblind at the start of the stream and most of that was me riffing on me stumbling over words and I and I did not mean to offend offend you Cheney sorry about that anyway so good chop on the not needing color blend mode I guess style is that we can use profile the objects a lot more to disambiguate them yeah that begs the question what kind of thought if any have you as the team given in to accessibility options for this game I mean it's it's a it's an important question and we keep it feels like every year do you see there's three or four panels they're like hey let me just just just think about color blindness and and accessibility and that kind of thing so like how has that been a factor in astronauts development yeah it's but sixty lines would be no meeting

me I know I don't think that we did as good a job as we could of thinking about accessibility more broadly and since we launched get some feedback about the control layout and you know where where you have to use maybe multiple inputs at a time or hold down buttons being quite difficult for players who you know may not be fully believed able-bodied and so and that's something that we've like taken to heart and so we're you know we're gonna do we're gonna try to do a better job to think about that as far as more options in the controls so that you mean that tends to mean like wherever you can have an option to change something from a whole tour toggle things like that alright go a long way so we're gonna take more like that stuff nice boy we have so much good stuff in this chat I don't want to ask any questions cuz this is all fantastic um thank you guys thank you guys for helping helping doors up for us I guess you're asking great

questions that help us learn more about game development yeah actually I want to talk about sales cuz we did talk about that I just kind of curious to get your take on it Brendan when when you started out you were such a small team and you know I can't imagine that your estimates for this game went out this far but maybe they did tell me how has how was the reception of this game and the sales of this game so far met with your initial expectations for the project when you first started out I mean well so we when we first started out we we told her we would tell ourselves that we would never expand beyond ten people and the team is now 21 people in total and that's just been what we felt we needed to support this game and so this you know and we've had the sales to you listen to support that team at least at least for now stole her mother but yeah

it's one of the things that we knew of our minds we when it was the handful of us at the start I think we were six people when we actually push the launch button early access and I was like if we sold 40,000 copies that would have been like ended up for us to scrape by and at least like you know you know wouldn't it pay back anything that we'd already put in but at least maybe it was away put the food on the table and continued yeah scraping by that year so I was like okay we can stop between 40 and 80 thousand be nice and and so like you know since I think we sold almost almost a million copies in the first year it was it was crazy and and I think that that put us on the 101 and of course it's amazing and it allowed us to build a company and on the other hand we've totally failed and planning for success in that way and

I think maybe a more experienced team would it like looked at the social media response level that we were getting and known like okay this is gonna this game is going to succeed and have it and had we known that my my biggest regret personally is that we didn't kind of prepare for that we didn't start hiring until after the game I come out to early access we really kind of work on the back foot in terms of the number of players that the amount of interest that demand for new updates which meant the beginning we were quite slow kind of getting off the ground just cuz we had all but like all the infrastructure of a company kind of put together yeah so it's it's been it's been an amazing you know all we all we ever wanted was to come together and and build a little company where we could make the kind of games we wanted to make it sort of the cliche story but we're super grateful that astronauts made that happen for us yeah it's always great to see it work out it's a it's a it's a rare occurrence but it's fantastic Brian you got any

last-minute questions you want to sneak in before we wrap this sucker up nope I think it's think it's a good time to feed you someone's I need to put the damn medium windmill on a platform so I get more power okay yeah I'll work on that huh learn to play it great yeah I don't know my little base it's moving along so I can just a god it's just such a peaceful game and it's just nice to just poke around and like figure things out um although one tethers as many tethers as you can and just want some aluminum tether oh boy yeah streaming is always the streaming is always like kind of like oh we're here to talk about game dev but I also have to not suck anyway thank you all in chat for watching you've been a wonderful crowd thank you for your good questions Brendan thank you for joining us today yeah some mild plugging that I have to do for those of you who are game developers yourselves or interests in the art and business of making games we would encourage you to check out the 2019 Game Developers Conference it's

going on next month March 18th through the 22nd you can get registered if you scroll down and click on the button that says register for GDC there's all kinds of great talks with programming talks new writer talks community management talks wherever you want to do in games it's a really cool place to check all that out and then you know Alex and I also do things with gamasutra so you can read yama Sutra as well for more of these kind of answers to these kinds of questions they are on we are owned under the same haired company which is why we're able to do this kind of work [Music] it looks like Joe is dropping or someone dropped the discord for Astra new year in so I guess that's it and I think all y'all know where to answer those questions so with that Brendan have a good day I think thank you everyone bye space no one can hear you drop a tether I don't know