GDC Plays Creature in the Well with Adam Volker

oh that's left hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am a contributing editor at Comic Con I'm a community manager for GDC and I am unfortunately invisible as always hanging out whispering into your ears whispering into this fine gentleman's ears we were here today playing a game called creature in the well I can try and tweak something while we were playing here creature the will is a hack and slash pits kind of pinball me Zelda kind of game there we go okay it is as you can see here is my little my little robot discerning to navigate this desert it's sort of a top-down game what's gonna get really interesting unique about it is a the look which you can sort of see about right now and be this very it's got even though it's got a dungeon crawling kinda top-down design the mechanics you aren't fighting monsters instead you're knocking using

one of two tools - not both energy balls around to power up this Factory and also here's the thing that made me want to check out this game here is the 20-foot tall skeleton that is creeping around the background the folks at home who are new to the GDC channel this is a channel where we talk to helpers about interesting games that working on to share knowledge with you by making them so if you have questions for our guests you can ask them in twitch chat and I will grab them for our guests speaking of which I should finally introduce him our guest is Adam Volker Adam how you doing I'm doing well thank you and you work for flight school studio right I do I sure did I was this close to saying night school and I remember no way and I was like wait no and I was like got stuck don't know no there no I know their friend there their game is really cool looking and they're lovely people yeah oh my god oxen-free was really good yeah great loved oxen-free

anyway but we're not here to talk about oxen-free creature in the well Adam I just told them what creature in the well is what do you think creature in the oil is it what do you do or after the well that's a good question - yeah I mean man creature in the well is a pet project for my colleague Bowden and I been dying to make a kind of video game that we thought was a little different a little wacky and as beautiful as we can make it but I think you know calling it a pinball hack-and-slash is the quickest most succinct way to to describe what it is yeah for those watching at home the basic mechanic is on display here where I'm using one of my tools to hit the balls around soon I will get the other tool and that will let me charge up the balls but yeah as you can see it is those are pinball bumpers these are balls that you launch you know having a from room to room and you that again that the 20-foot tall skeleton is kind of your your nemesis here although I'll have some thoughts about him later Adam you talked with some other two

outlets about where this game came for our audience what was kind of the foundation of creature in the well and what was what did it look what was kind of the first thing that made you go oh this is a game we can ship as opposed to this is a great mechanic that's gonna take a swim yeah that's that's a good two-part question the we started the project as a sort of competitive multiplayer local co-op multiplayer game yeah it was gonna be like air hockey with with the character and we built that prototype and it was a lot of fun to play but we started to add like little pylons to it and we're like well these pylons are cool wouldn't it be cool if they were like pinball they had you know bells and bouncers and all that stuff and then we started adding more of those I'm like well maybe we just make a game about that instead multiplayer was something we were toying with but was a little too much to chew on and then you know like as we built these rooms we found that that was like really fun mechanically to mess with when we found out we could ship it was actually much

later in development you know like you can see the project where you want it to go much earlier than it actually gets there and it was some third-party feedback actually we got that was like I don't know that you guys have anything yet and it was a big moment in development for Bo and I to be like wow we really need to kind of dig deeper into what we've built and expand the mechanics that's kind of where the dungeons the eight dungeons that each have like a different mechanical theme all came from before that it was just a little less challenging there wasn't quite this much progression in it so I would I would call those two realizations very different parts of the development write your role in the project you're a creative director and also the art director right yeah and like I said it's a it's a team mostly of two people and so there's a lot of overlap but my principal job is to manage the style the story and then a lot of the level design right on yeah let's talk about a little

design for a minute um sure what's kind of the underlying logic of like we're right now seeing some introductory puzzles but we'll see some more complicated stuff later what was kind of the what's the core logic for building a pinball puzzle like this I love the right stuff right yeah so you go room by room we tried to make sure that everything was kind of like the puzzles would be built some players would walk into them and have to activate them have sort of a twist or a conceits in them and then solve them within a room so the progression was something we could also sort of plan dungeon by dungeon so we knew like let's put something that's just difficult like this room for instance doesn't have a lot of challenge but it's fun to like let the players just mess around and bounce a ball around every once in a while yeah but the but it's always kind of like activating the puzzle was a big part of like what we built the design around yeah and each dungeon as a mechanical theme so it was like what you activated would change and then there's a mana

it's hard to describe like the last room had what we would call like an AoE bumper yeah we have just like boring deaf names for these things but area of a shack lumber yeah it shoots a yeah it's like a beam out in a line so when we were building one of the dungeons around like these ones here when we were building dungeons around that it was like can we put them in a cross and then alternate with ones that you know go horizontally bow made tools for me to set timers on them so I could make them fire in rapid succession to try to move the player around the room we wanted to make sure that we weren't letting players just kind of hit the ball and stand in a corner and let the puzzle win itself so it was really important to like put the ball where you would get the dispenser like had to be in a dangerous area or had to come from like something that would shoot the ball at you providing a ball to the player was another huge challenge making sure there was always one available making sure they were responding at the right speed making sure that there weren't so many

that you you could get them anywhere mm-hm yeah I'm going to loop over to loop over to chat real quick give folks a chance to get some questions answered I'm told that the answer to when this game can be played the answer is a soon although you might have seen it if you dropped five packs or GDC or e3 recently it rocked would no like to know what is the roughly the play through time on this game and are there plans for DLC which I guess is like Alou if you could answer Ed's question that'd be great and then my follow-up question would be when you're planning a game like this how do you gauge out what the light right playthrough time would be for a game like this yeah so we did a bunch of testing in our discord server we had some players come in at about 10 hours mm-hmm that's not necessarily like a hundred percent complete content but that's like through the story mm-hmm

Bohdan and I take about half of that to play through now when we play through so I think it's safe to assume somewhere between five and ten is what like an average play through that game will take as far as extra content there are some mechanics that we haven't used in this game that maybe we would be cool to putting the stuff later but there's nothing official about that but yeah like I think we wanted to make something that offered players like a main through line where they could complete it in a shorter amount of time but then a bunch of Secrets they could also discover if they wanted to you know extend how long you know they're there play through the game was right on I also want to highlight what I'm sure you're you must be like shouting at me like we'll just walk over and hit the glowing thing yeah I like how like the game is clearly telling me go hit the glowing thing and I just walked away from it and walked into town for a minute moving on from that question Thank You ed rocked what I would like to

know there's kind of an element in this game of the fact that puzzles can be skipped you're gonna see later on that like there's just moments right just I've had that I've had it I've got enough power I mean the puzzle what was kind of your design decision for making like kind of creating this broader players don't need to make every clear every puzzle to advance what was kind of yours is the thought process around that yeah I think this is sort of a two-part answer the first part is kind of a difficulty question so like if there's a puzzle that is either like not communicating well how it's supposed to be solved or it's just too difficult or maybe you're underleveled we wanted players to be able to opt out of that and still progress through the game and then I think like the second part is about resource management so every time you hit a bumper you'll see numbers pop up even these bubbles here and that's your currency of the game and managing that currency isn't super important maybe in the first dungeon but

definitely in the later dungeons you'll have the ability to spend that on teleporters to make the dungeon run back to the boss fight easier you'll have the ability to spend that currency to level up in town and then so managing that when the temple starts to branch and the exploring becomes a bigger thing is a lot of why we allowed players to like skip forward some of the rooms they didn't want to spend time in yeah there are there are places where you know we'll let a player sort of well reset the bumpers they're all on a timer so each of the rooms reset and we'll let players if they want to grind out to get more power to like level up everything unlock everything you know unlock all the teleporters but we wanted to give them the option to do it or not do it let's talk about the camera perspective for this game how did you and Bo kind of come together on like there's sort of a lot of ways this camera could've gone you could have literally just made a set fixed perspective of pinball like would

make you look like a ball table sorry for the any frame hitching you see in the video by the way that's my recording setup not the game itself right what was kind of your thoughts on designing a camera for this game one that could keep everything clearly visual for and visualized for the player yeah good question so the way the camera works is that room by room I said it though right some incredible tools like there's a camera volume so in unreal like I create a there's a box and every time the player enters the box I blend it from the camera or the gate I don't bloody the game blends if the camera was in to one that I set I can set things like fov distance rotation and all that other stuff and so what I tried to do was find a nice hybrid between like a shot that I wanted to compose and then what was good for gameplay we found really really quickly that the game is super crappy to play when if the cameras low because aiming is really difficult so like as close to directly above the player as possible is

better for gameplay but I've always you know kind of wanted to like you know make it more cinematic both bow and I come from a film background and so there's a few hallways in a few rooms where like to really take the camera low and have it track the player as you're planning to try to get interesting shots and make it feel dynamic but what's cool is like we can fix it room by room so if there's a particular puzzle that the camera I've chosen makes it too difficult it's easy to just go in there and fix yeah and there's also a setting on it to decide how much the players tracked so I can like lock it so it doesn't move and you'll notice in this room it drifts a little when you move and that's just another like cool value to tweak as we make the puzzles so when I would make a puzzle would be like load up an empty room and then fill it with a design set a camera play it a bunch of times have bro play it and and just kind of tweak as we go right on what's kind of is there any kind of effective like broad guideline you

observed about the games camera that liked anything you're interesting you learned about implement that that you think another developer could benefit from um I mean if they're making a pinball hack-and-slash game and got a lot of specific advice I I think like aiming something really make my I'm so glad you got this on the first try nobody gets this puzzle on the first try yeah pro gamer Brian Francis yeah bro gamer like that like I said the top-down thing was really important I had to figure that out as we went blending it from like more than a 90 degree angle from room to room was really really caused us a lot of bugs that would be something I would avoid we'd end up with cameras that would literally like whip around 180 degrees if like I'd set something incorrectly and like you know I don't know like the entrance to the room was on the right side and the camera volume the camera needed to be on the left and it was coming from a room that had the opposite setup the camera would really struggle

to spin around so it's just kind of like stuff you can't really find out until you you know you run the game as intended I do want to get to but before I do you talk to more before about using camera to control the mood for this game yeah I don't know why I came back here to the door pass me oh yeah I guess I was trying to see if I could control that ball for the door um anyway so the the question I have about mood you mentioned some other interviews that you're super inspired by Mike Mignola and this does kind of have a Hellboy BPRD look about it awesome from man I got that on the first day - yeah those are those are difficult shots to me yeah what I want to know is this game has kind of like you can see what between the numbers bouncing up and the the kind of high score opponents but there's kind of an hour KD component to the game but there's also as we've seen like this very moody deliberate aesthetic going on like they kind of you I think in another

interview described it as Oscar the Grouch as a bad guy yeah it's kind of one of your inspirations like this kind of there's kind of a deliberate mood about this like weird apocalyptic setting here and can you talk about the decision - not to make it stylized in the single and not just kind of a high score and charging single-player experience yeah so hmm that's an interesting question I think like I think a lot of this Wow how do I answer that Bo and I build the prot we're building the game piecemeal and it had a lot of inspirations when we started but it's kind of like one step at a time like that's working that's not working yeah and and so like what you end up with as a final product is just an amalgamation of all of those little decisions along the way I think like we wanted something really dark and moody the character who was speaking to the player out of a trash can turned into the creature we needed darkness to put

him in but we didn't but we wanted to feel large and scary and like every time we would make a decision the whole game would sort of have to adapt and grow to that decision and all along the way we're just trying to retain you know the mood the feeling the camera and the arcade enos that we wanted hoping that all of those elements would speak well together and not be you know not compete but that they that they would harmonize so so it's interesting that you're pointing out like it's Arkady but also really moody hopefully those things work well together but it wasn't really ever a decision to try to to mash something disparate with something that wouldn't blend with it you know I can now grab nap rack assist question obviously Bo was obviously sends like he was kind of your tools guy he was doing a little more the programmer saying what kind of engineering challenges did you face excuse me with a game like this this is an unreal right yes it is yeah it's in ue4 yeah so yeah I like like you

you're correct Bo is the tech side of the development so I'll do my best to answer on his behalf and I'm sure if he's watching his rolling his eyes already but I guess like one of the things that we did was was he really wanted to get right was player movement that's something that he iterated on a lot how the animation like how quickly the animation responded you know how aiming worked whether we routed the player which we do when you're charging the ball how fish how fast the dash operates all that sort of stuff was was a huge was sort of a huge challenge to ongoing thing character control is like really important to him the other thing that's kind of anecdotal which is cool as we originally made the game to handle the dungeons procedurally so beau built a bunch of tools for that to work and then later in development we decided that wasn't the game we wanted to make and and we have a lot of those a

lot of that work but we're still able to keep like the way the rooms connected so my job was to build basically these art boxes like I built this room without any bumpers in it and then I would set doors and where they connected and what type of door they were and beau had written all these tools to create the dungeon so that anywhere I connect I could connect any two doors together and then any room could hypothetically be connected to any other room but in all some of that stuff carried over from when we had originally you know made the game is procedural before we changed it to be you know handcrafted right on this is I'm actually really glad you finished answering right there because this is a great moment to talk about that was the first time I died in this game and I got grabbed by the titular creature in the well there's the creature there's the well there's the anyway this death loop is really interesting to me because you

can you know you die you get a moment with the villain of the game where you just sort of like it to stare down each other a little bit and then you walk back through the dungeon you're gonna see it happen a couple more times but it's kind of it's a death loop it's interesting that flipped me because it's not as um it's not you know as roguelike like oh you died like some stuff gets retained but you lose other stuff it's not it doesn't have that same like loop function to it but that's still like that looping failure back into into the flow of the game feels pretty good here and it's an interesting decision especially when later as you see like I actually fail and then I have to walk a pretty significant ways back and I have to take a long walk back through where I've been how did you sort of come to the decision to implement it that way yeah so that was about storytelling for us it was kind of making sure that the player interacted with the creature and that we made them feel like he was always watching I think it makes you feel really vulnerable for him the villain to like pick you up and physically move you it reiterates that he doesn't want you

doing you know what you're doing and fixing the Machine and going back into the mountain and then we just you know we encourage you gently to read the dialogue we wrote the story parts of the game and so all of that we just felt like I'm glad you I'm glad you feel that way because all of that we felt like was was reinforcing like the relationship with the creature of the story and like you know all of that stuff the run it's interesting that you mentioned the run because that is another point that we really really wanted to we really pay close attention to right after you died you actually walked up to a door in town I have a red print blinking light later in the game once you complete more of the dungeons that door opens and makes your run back much quicker and then this room actually turns into a teleporter if you spend money later in the dungeon to unlock it you can teleport right to the boss room so both of those devices were ways that we made that easier for

players they wanted it to be the run to be a little shorter but we felt like the story when we were getting out of having the creature pull you back to town was cool interesting thing you talked about in another interview I was watching we may talked about making sure that rooms don't beat themselves yeah I thought that was kind of funny what's the danger of like setting up a room like that and why was it something you wanted to avoid well I think it just makes for a boring game you know if like a player can just bounce the ball and then you know nothing you know they don't have to do anything if the game's solve it like in design like if a game is solvable that's really bad meaning that like if there's a only one solute to beat it and that solution is really clear to the player at the beginning and there's not a lot of thinking then then it's not as interesting to play in etc etc so a couple ways we tried to handle

that was to make the puzzles activatable like I was mentioning before there's also a lot of engineering under the hood about how long a ball will bounce without you interacting with it so you'll notice the balls changing color that's based on the player level makes them more powerful they'll they'll complete a bumper they'll fill a bumper with power and less hits but if you don't hit them they'll they'll slowly lose power and then they will only bounce three times and then they'll disappear so like churning turning the balls into these like sort of abstract energy things was it was a big part of like fixing that solve ability apologies for the folks at home we are having you we did not get to see that entire puzzle because unfortunately this is a great game with some high particle with some particles moving very quickly across the screen which means that's what causes load on the CPU when you're trying to record footage those are kind of our

like breakout Plinko rooms where like if you get if you sneak a ball into the back of it the hole it's like that really satisfying where you're playing breakout and you can get a ball to bounce up under the corner yeah yeah that's a good breakout like that's a good game to reference here I think yes of course when we through development that was one of our major references yeah I really love this room because it feels like a batting cage yeah you talked somewhere about speed games done quick SD SD Q you know and how you were working with speed runners for some testing on this game what was kind of we we've done an article about this in the past we've been interested in how game developers kind of learned from high speed players what was kind of the thing you learned like working with speed runners to test your game yeah and again oh this is a boat this is a boat question because this is near and dear to his heart but I will try to

remember all the things he was saying while he was making the game as good as it is it's it's kind of about like if you were it's really difficult to look at a game that you're making objectively obviously you spend all this time laboring over you know trying to design a puzzle that like you think is really cool and it might be bad you know it might just be boring or not interesting or whatever and so I think when we when we would always talk about speedrunning but would say is there a way a player will skip this because they can do it faster a different way and that was a really good question to review what we've made with so it would be like yeah I mean he would be like I know you spent all day on this but I can just beat it you know by cheating quota code cheating and standing over this dude doing it this way and I would we would have to change it for that reason right so I think when we when we think about like doing it quickly and trying to optimize its but it's a bit like optimizing the

gameplay right that's that's when speedrunning and and that stuff comes into play like I said you've taken this to a bunch of shows is there anything you've learned about just playing it shows like packs and stuff and getting feedback from players that helped you guys out on this game oh for sure I think the first time we showed it was at GDC and you know we had a demo version then but we definitely went back to the tutorial it's always the beginning of the game it gets iterated on the most I think we went back to that part a lot after we saw you know we put the game in the hands of a bunch of new players we try to do as much testing as we can with friends and family you know in the middle of development but showing it like officially announcing the game and all of that you really you really learn a lot of new stuff about what assumptions you've made and the mechanic is so different and new that like teaching it is really really important and so that those first three or four

rooms in the game you know are probably like the newest rooms in the game yeah right on yeah actually speaking of like how new and different this mechanic is there's a lot of you know common language in game development like a sword when you swing a sword like this it should do kind of this alright your game does things differently in specific ways but it's also you know there's like there's some conventional aspects or some unconventional aspects what have you learned about like designing game elements to help players understand what they are like kind of these these orange things are an interesting example because they're not enemies that you hack and slash to kill there are energy things that can be dispelled with the ball like this yeah warm you and add pressure like like what have you learned about like designing in-game elements that are abstract but like you know like they're pinball it might be pinball the in conventional and pinball that they might not make sense and of hack-and-slash yeah that's a good question these those particular enemies are still kind of a sticking point for me and Bo I think like we we decided to make them killable by the ball and not the sword because we want to make sure

that the player is thinking about the ball always yeah but it is it I have noticed like a player after player find that not super intuitive so it's it's it's a difficult thing to answer i we sort of operate on the design philosophy that we've stolen from a filmmaker his name is Steven Spielberg it's just some random filmmaker he his company Amblin entertainment you put out this idea that like audiences like newness in a sort of like a 70/30 relationship to things they already know so 70% being things that people will understand with a twist so it's our world but there's an island of dinosaurs or it's suburban California except there's an extraterrestrial that lives with a small boy or befriends a small boy and so we were like it's a they're sort but they don't behave the

way you expect or it's a dungeon crawler but it's full of rooms with pinball's mechanics I think like if it was all super abstract and new we would have a lot more work to do to tell people about it but I think like it's important for players to look at the game and go oh I can see how that would be fun yeah and I understand the format of how I'm going to play that and that's really important to us so that you know it's not just it's just fun you know you should be able to like under speak the language fairly quickly even if there's a lot of newness so so like that's why we went with swords and that's why we went with dungeons and and rooms and connected boss fights and connecting him all that way do you think that's helped you I don't know how hands-on you film with any of the marketing for the game because you have some support from pop agenda and stuff but what do you think that's helped you like explain the game to people as you've tried to like get it out in the world and convince people to

buy it when it comes out looks at spreadsheet soon yeah well I mean I basically just say whatever they tell me that's that's how I know it's good and appropriate but really like a lot of the messaging comes from players the first time we played it at a GDC somebody called it a pinball hack and slash and then the next taxis show we've brought it to somebody said pin brawler and and like it's its players being able to tell you you know like oh this is how I would describe it to a friend it's been the best way to continue to talk about it because Beau and I have all this baggage about what it used to be what it used to look like it used to be a multiplayer game it used to be have a lot more orangie and it and stuff like that so it's it's kind of just like about listening I think 2530 minutes left in our show here you got questions

keep them rolling we'd love to flexible studio also does a lot of work in VR development you all have a cool World War one experience with hardcore histories Dan Carlin out there I know you didn't work on that one specific court I don't know if you didn't mention that oh okay yeah you did you have said you've done some work in VR I know this is sort of a tricky question but I'm curious how have you as a developer like joining a company that's doing work work for hire on VR project support doing interesting like what's that been like working at this company compared to other game design jobs you've done before um so I think what's cool about what flight school does is that our media we work in all sorts of like real-time mediums whether it's a reality or virtual reality or just gaming and we it's it makes our team look at design and abstractly yeah and so some of the

VR stuff that I have done at flight school has been both narrative and gaming oriented but we try to ask really fundamental questions about the way people use those devices and what sort of thing we want to make and oh it's would be best on that device so wouldn't you know like one of my pet peeves is like joysticks on phone you know those digital joysticks yeah I feel like we try to avoid things like that I'm trying to say this in the positive way we try to design for the platform right yeah and so it's been really cool about coming from that VR background is we're always asking like those big questions throughout as much of the development process as we can so that's really let like when we started making creature it was like well if we're gonna make a game it needs to feel like it belongs on the platforms that we would want to play it on and that and that affects the way it looks in the way it plays in the

mechanic I think that's part of where the arcade enos came from and it's definitely where the visuals came from and since sort of stuff like that right on does that does that mindset I know you didn't just sorta designed this with a Nintendo switch first in mind but does that does the Nintendo switch is a device like make you think about making games differently than it does oh yeah they steam yeah for sure I think like you need like because like I play my switch a bunch on docked at home but I also find some of the most fun I have with it is when I'm on the go making something that was graphic that could read it a small size was huge you know like I think we weren't you know developing and putting it on the switch like every month or whatever but we did have it in the back of our minds as we were developing we started up the game on PC obviously and and then when we put it on the switch it was like a lot a lot

of review of the UI a lot of like tweaking of the colors like it was very easy to get back into these dungeons and say like let's make this a little brighter let's make the contrast a little higher so that you can see the player that sort of stuff with stuff we tweaked you know with all that in mind but yeah it definitely affects it you want it to you want it to look good where people are gonna play it so it's it would be foolish not to review it that way write on comments from chat malabo would like to know if use the touchscreen on the switch which is real really interesting weird feature this which has that touch screen it is cool we don't use it yeah I don't I don't use it a lot when I'm playing games on my own because I don't want it dirty on my swim it's weird like the screen it's not like the D s which sort of like gave you permission to tap away on the bottom screen like the switch feels Delic more delicate than my iPhone in some ways yeah so I don't want to like rub my dirty fingers all over it but it's so wild an attendant was like oh no yeah we're gonna keep like mobile touchscreen

functionality I guess that's helped them like port you know some companies port mobile games to the to the platform sheriff's just me pontificating John Noble would like to know what was the most complicated part of development for you getting the design right I the sort of that third party who came in middle of development and was like I'm not sure you guys that was really hard feedback to get but was really really really helpful at that point we you know we had sort of maybe rooms like this but they weren't this was probably the best of the design had at that point we sort of had this big moment where we're like okay let's gut everything that we've built and beau made as he said he saved me again as he usually does he made eight example rooms what he did was just kind of like okay I'm gonna stop what I'm doing for the week and make and tried to take the game and create a really really unique puzzles that all have different super different mechanics and he actually ended up having to

create a bunch of new stuff for that but it was really good to to really try to take the pinball hack and slash mechanic and spread it out as wide as it could be so that players got something different after they played through the whole game and it wasn't just hundreds of rooms of the same sort of stuff and then once he built those example rooms we reviewed those for their uniqueness and then I tried to build the dungeons based on his example so all of those that's kind of how our design process works is Bo would be like I think this has something unique and this is what I was going for and then I would expand it into the dungeon and then you know we would obviously be bouncing he'd have an idea to make a room and then we would find tune each other's designs but that was really one of the toughest parts of getting something that felt like a whole game you know it was it was kind of always a prototype until that moment I think talked about this mysterious

stranger this mysterious third party who came in and said there wasn't a lot better I guess they're gonna remain unnamed but um I don't know I don't know Jim can I mention who was yeah so it's not a guy named Nigel from devolver oh yeah and and we were talking to him about the game and he was like it's cool but I'm not sure and I really really appreciate the feedback so shout-out to Nigel really quick the where I was getting to with that is as a designer I think I think a lot of game designers new developers are very used to whom critical feedback you're used to you know every ideas aren't precious they are meant to be worked on and then moved on from yeah but when you get feedback like that you've been working on something you're trying to find a vision for it you're trying to find a future for it you described a very good reaction to that to that fruit feedback which is what UUM boded which we're trying to realign like how don't progression and dungeons work but what's kind of your your mentality for getting that feedback and saying

this is proactive feedback that I can use to make this better and not oh no this means we should stop working it's not it's not good enough like what's kind of the difference to get you across that threshold I think it's a little more abstract yeah yeah that's a tough one yeah no definitely you know sometimes you don't want to hear it and sometimes it doesn't matter yeah how much you're like I know it's bad and people tell yeah I think that Wow like how stubborn is you want to be is kind of its kind of question you have to ask yourself you believe like you believe in something and you have to decide whether like you're lying to yourself about its quality whether it's something you like and maybe a lot of like people generally don't I think that we really really take we really watch new players play something that is new for us and we and we say like is there genuine excitement an interest in in what we've built or

are we lying to ourselves about like something we love that maybe isn't resonating with people I think in the case of Nigel's feedback it wasn't that like this isn't a game it was that I don't know that this is gonna scale to a full experience was his specifically what he told us and so it wasn't and you know we're reading between the lines because I think for him it was kind of you know it was a first blush at the game like he hadn't played a lot of it we we're in the middle of development it wasn't you know so I don't even know that he knows how important it was but it was it was kind of like we had to decide yeah we had to sort of the first part of the conversation was like do we think that there is a game here and the answer was yes and then it was like okay well how do we address this feedback and I think we decided that because we've been taking it to a local indie meetup

in Montreal and having people play it you know super development builds sort of as we went and I think the response was genuinely positive and we had to trust in that response and have you know that players were like yeah this is cool cool this is cool and so we knew there was something there we just had to sort of expand it and find it I think that if like you have a core mechanic like in the in the basic version of it players are either confused by or they don't find it fun or whatever then you then you've got a much bigger mountain to climb up I also think there was enough of what we built that was just mashups of things we already knew worked I think we trusted that breakout was still a game people had fun playing on some level sneaking a ball behind a bunch of bricks and watching it bounce around was still satisfying Plinko is still satisfying and pinball is still satisfying that we could trust that if we could capture what worked there and add a little bit of zelda to it then you know we trusted that that

would still make a game you know and I actually think that those references gave us the we're kind of part of the decision to be like well do we do we even keep going yeah because you're right because you know the the question is good because it implies that like not what Nigel was saying it's kind of like you shouldn't you should re-evaluate what you're making and once we did we were like what we still know that these other basic games are fun so we could there's something here we just have to work to find it we would still love to take questions and chat from folks bring them on we we invite them we want to know if you're a game developer if you're a game designer and you have questions for Adam please toss them in Adam let's have some fun uh I don't know like it's something about narrative and move things in interviews sometimes because yes sure you're better off serve just playing the game buddy in the game tell you what it's about but I think creature in the world the reason the reason that I specifically responded

to your PR team's email and said yeah we want to stream this game is I looked at it and I saw that ten-foot skeleton and I saw the vibe of a little robot here when I was like oh yeah that's my jam like that instantly clicked with me as a player what was kind of what other kind of ideas did you want to get across like you talk to Mike Mignola's a source of inspiration but like going deeper into that what was kind of year with the food the story what was kind of your vision for what this adventure needed to be about because Zelda there Zelda for instance is very safe that save the princess go on a hero's quest and this is a little bit more Dark Souls II right as you look at it below like you you are there yeah I think yeah yeah I know what you mean yeah so the story of the game is kind of like for the protagonist it's about figuring out what your role in the world is and for the theme I think it's about being insulated the town of mirage is stuck in a sandstorm it's been stuck in a sandstorm for so long that the people

don't know that oceans exist they don't know what a trees they know trees or forests are and they think their entire world is just the town of the mountains and the creature likes it that way because he lives in the well and they wish to the well and they you know he gets to control their lives I think he sees the room you as a threat because this machine might change all of that and so automatically everything that we wrote the way the town's folk react to you the way the creature with creatures goals are and what your goals are what Danielle and Roger the end the sort of main NPCs of the game are all about it's about sort of like perspective it's about like realizing the world's bigger than yourself and and the dangers of being too insular with all of that mm-hmm I mean I'm trying to talk about it without telling you how it ends yeah but like I don't know if you walk

up if you walked up to any of these houses in the game but like you'll see that the people of town like you know they're afraid of you and they're that way because the creatures told them you know like don't talk to this engineer don't talk to this robot he's you know he's threatening to change your way of life and people you know can be afraid of change yeah and and so that's kind of what the story is about Roger is is helping you out because he's really excited about knowledge and the thing that he really geek sout about is the machine he knows that his family was it was part of making it but he's not totally sure how and then Daniela's is cool with you because she's old and she knows better and and so those two are the only two people in town that are really willing to help you on your journey against the creature but that's like you know we tried to build the theme around that

idea and build the characters if it would help you you know making sure we were really clear about how they felt about that theme and you know all that is there anything from your personal life that sort of drew that theme into into the story like the sense probably a town that was until there not wanting to respond to people yeah well I mean I can't think of like an exact example but I think you know the the best writing in the best storytelling you do has to come from something that you've lived but I but I can't think of like an exact moment arguing with my grandfather or something about his point of view or anything like that no that's fair let's see we are 45 minutes into this chat we got a few minutes left here Adam I guess you you know you're coming close to finishing this thing what's been one of the most exciting parts for you this late in development like what's been a mollusc set what's what's been exciting about getting here yes showing it to people is really the best

part yeah it's it's funny like you know the end of the process is very technical and very tedious and it's mostly on both shoulders and I'm trying to not annoy him too much because it's it's just you know getting it on all the platforms and like making sure it runs different things break on different parts of it but like really you know getting to talk about it is it sort of a huge milestone at the towards the end of a project announcing it and seeing how people react is such a huge thing you know development now isn't quite as sort of like announced release as it used to be like people know about games a lot earlier than they are released and that's been a weird thing to sort of adapt to we used to much shorter productions and so this is kind of the first time when I've been working on something for this long it's been announced and it still has a long time before it comes out back in March I mean when we announced it and and so it's

just been really cool to see people actually be excited and actually anticipate the release which is soon I promise and and so that's always super satisfying you you work on something for so long and you love it but you're not sure anybody else is gonna love it and then if people do it's really nice oh no I heard I had a question and I think I think it's a bit of my head it was something about died again it'll come to you yeah this was weird something weird happened here and it's why I'm gonna skip the pause when we get back it's like the room the puzzle like completed in the bouncer was there when I got back but it was still like wanted me to oh that's interesting okay you'll see it when we go through I skip it at the end oh there was something yeah oh yeah I guess some when it comes to I guess like on some level you're concerned a little bit with about selling your game and getting interest for it what have you have you thought anything about how discoverability and how this game like obviously like you want your game to look I didn't heal up when I okay thank

God I healed up have you thought it all about like what it takes to make a game but other people like will care about which sounds kind of vague but at the same time it's the question that everyone's asking like you can make a wild unique game doesn't get anything or then you can make slay the spire and suddenly you're one of those popular games on Steam have you've been thinking about it at all about how your design process is affecting that yeah that's a slippery slope I think we talked about earlier with the 70/30 thing yeah it's a bit of that a lot of that comes in but I think you know you do have to you could you could just make a br game and you know try to try to like compete on that on that scale like what's what are people putting the most up right now um but that's what I say it's kind of a slippery slope where here it is yeah see the bouncers yeah yeah yeah that's interesting you activated the final part of the room but it wasn't completed I think you know we have we trust her we have to trust ourselves a bit mm-hmm I'd say cuz Beau and I play a lot of games so it's like what do we

wish we could see that we're not seeing it's kind of where we start the seventieth or anything definitely comes into play I think you know unless you unless you give some players something to latch on to the newness might be too new it might be too difficult to get people to to check it out at all and I and I think we also decide to play to our strengths like you know we we haven't worked a lot of time but we've been working for about a decade and so we know what we're good at and so we tried to pick projects that highlight the things we know how to do well or work with people who are much much better at the other things than we are and so I think we try you know the best thing is the solution we've come up with is just try to attack that attack that problem like as logically as we can but you know it's a gamble it's a gamble like you you have to trust your instincts like if I like this maybe other people will like this let's use

enough of the genre stuff that we know people do respond to that like will fit within those games let's lean into our strengths and then let's try to make a big enough twist where we actually get some attention because people like that looks different right on that is a great note I think to end the stream on unless anyone has any more questions so I'm going to start the wrap-up process here thank you all for joining us on the GDC twitch channel if you have enjoyed this conversation we'd love it if you hit the follow button because we're gonna have more interviews with cool developers long you know long as long as the lights are on we're gonna keep doing them that was grimmer than I anticipated but don't worry I was I was trying to lead into hyping up we've got some really interesting interviews coming your way we're gonna be talking with those lives behind age of Wonders planetfall which is out this week we're gonna be talking to them later this month we're trying to talk to Richard Ross the third game designer spends a lot of time at GDC about his new game trips in the darkness trying to make that happen there's some

other great games coming up this fall that we want to be talking to the developers for and hopefully we will do it with you right here on the GC twitch channel if you are a game developer yourself and you want to know more about game making we encourage you to check out GC if you've got a great talk idea you can actually submit a talk for G you see right now the may the the core concepts talks are still taking submissions Adam if you want to submit something that would be really cool maybe I should yeah but then also look out for the summit submissions will be opening up soon later this month if you are a VR or a our developer please join us at X our DC this fall in October you can check out X or DC calm calm I just put that in chat for you guys so that um you can check that out if you want actually I'm funny enough Adams co-workers will be there with their World War 1 game that I'm blanking on the name of more remains it's called war remains more remains you have war mains with hardcore history Stan Carlin they'll be showing off how they made it at XR DC so check that out too and

that's all I've got for now Adam if they've got any questions about creature in the will where should they ask him you can follow creature in the well on twitter at creature well creature in the world com has all the links to all the stores and all that coolness and that's it right on okay with that everyone I hope you have a happy Wednesday I hope you hope you're enjoying your summer stay cool stay hydrated and with that have a good day bye fine