GDC Plays Elsinore with Eric Butler and Connor Fallon

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am as always the invisible voice inside your head I just realized that I left the audio on this clip up really high I'm gonna quickly edit that I always get surprised by that yeah my name is Brian it is 8 o'clock here in California so it's a little early little a little tired bright isn't it a.m. early for most people yes they're on nor it's isn't that a normal start work time for most people yes it is but all of you still need coffee and tea so I see nothing wrong with that anyway I am here today playing Elsinore I should rather say I played Elsinore with me in the lower left-hand corner of the screen are two fine folks from the development team behind Elsinore golden clutch studios I have Connor and Eric how are you guys doing do well are you having a son good yeah yeah I'm doing good

what I guess I could try and describe Elsinore but do you both want to describe Elsinore it's pretty clearly if you haven't guessed by now there's some Shakespeare involved yeah so Elsinore is cliff notes would be Groundhog Day plus Hamlet's the idea is you're playing is Ophelia trying to find a way to stop all your friends and family from murdering each other but the problem is because they're all Shakespeare characters most of the things you do results in them finding different ways to murder each other but every time through you learn more and more stuff that allows them change the story in more and more dramatic ways usually usually we try to play games live here due to logistical complications we are looking at some pre-recorded footage but that being said thankfully because this is an interesting game so interesting things are gonna happen we can talk about it actually yeah let's get started we can talk about right here we're looking at the timeline of events which is really empty right now because we only know about one thing but this timeline

feature is really cool it's kind of a defining mechanic of the game that lets the player study when things will happen where that when they want to be in in in the game would you mind breaking down I guess I guess first off with how did how did Elsinore start development and how did the timeline feature start to come about sure I'll handle the first than Erik you want to talk about the timeline because that was like a la huge huge tech problem so Elsinore started a lot of us met each other through a club back in college called game creation Society and one month that club had a contest theme that was Shakespeare which was like hey make a Shakespeare themed game in a week and our team lead kt k torrontés came up with this basically the fundamentals of this idea during that and we were all and I was talking her and I'm like this is a this is a

great idea there's no way we're making this in one week and so we were foolishly we're like well we'll make it next summer and then we like tried to do a little bit like over the summer and you know we were still students it was not there was not enough time to do it so we shelved it and we but we kept returning to it and eventually you know like I think a year or two after we go graduated we talked about we had done this game jam with Eric that was the Molly Jam where we made a game called mecha mom that people seem to like it was a ridiculous like comedy controls game we were trying to hug your daughter in a giant robot suit and you know we started talking about how we should work on something to get a longer term and and then we recruited Kristin as well and kind of expanded out from there foul Duncan Wes the and that was kind of our core team and we've been working every Sunday to kind of slowly make progress on this game for the last six years yeah

and I was finally out yeah Congrats Eric yes the time yeah I guess why we need the timeline is take a little bit about what what the game is doing mechanically with why we need a timeline do you seriously like characters like see right there the hourglass on people's heads characters are running around and going to a bit so we like put it in a virtual space where they have to actually feel rooms at certain times and meet each other so the way the game works is there's this giant bag of different offense that can all happen predicated on different things and as if philia is talking to people and trying to influence them you change what they happen and so we needed just some way for the player to be able to tell at all what's going on and and what events were happening and that's that's what the way that you like necessity for the time liking about mm-hmm and we've spent a lot of time in reading and trying to get it right like the the forms you see here

I think it was probably like the most changed UI and the game since it I think it provides like the most useful information of all the things we actually made a huge rivet it was the we made a huge revision past shortly before release because we're like it's still not quite doing what we want it to do I think the big the thing that Eric didn't mention that I think is really impressive about the timeline is like so our game is a simulation right which means at least in the background like all the scenes are handwritten but like as Eric said like we're choosing events based on a bunch of variables and what that means is that simulation can change if you input new stuff and we can't ever be a hundred percent sure what's going to happen in the future and so the timeline shows you the future saying yes run it before yes always give you hints about what happened in future yes so basically we simulate the entire game every time you open the timeline to show to guess what will be happen in the future so we can show you future events

yes I guess it's like if you stand there it is what will happen yes you start doing things the timeline will change next time you open it right on I'm just gonna quickly let folks in chat now we are taking questions from chat if you want to know if you have something you specifically want to ask about making Elsinore quick shadows of Steel Fox those steel fox the one and only steel Fox able to presume for joining us we would love to see some of the folks a few have questions for Conor and Eric go ahead ask him I don't mind I guess as a follow-up so time with the time the simulation are really important to talk about because your web you know you sort of salt have sold this game a little bit as a point of click adventure cane but it's not just a point-and-click of entry and it's got that simulation element to what we talked about what is sort of the underlying structure of making that simulation function and how did you wind up making a work on a Sunday strictly Sunday schedule I guess that's a that's a quick way to put it

I mean yeah we're trying to reason to combine the choose-your-own-adventure in the simulation and like that's I think what got me relations in the project and that was the first major hurdle and so what we spent a lot of time on at the beginning was coming up with a good way for Katie and Connor of the writer and designer to control this and like thinking about this how these events could be served it and how like what the relationship between the was it went through a lot of iterations where at first it was like he was just writing some JSON files being a go this event if it happens then this other event can happen kinda like a standard choose your own adventure chain and it just like didn't let us get the simulation bits we needed and so eventually what we turned to is a model where the game state and all the events we've built on it are built on top of like sort of like mentals the mental states of the NPCs so the things that you are changing as a player and the things that the events are predicated on the things that they change are like what Hamlet knows and

what Hamlet wants to do is only Kayla wants to investigate us Hamlet once you know his dad was to appoint Hamlet's and what we did we built a scripting language and a bunch of like related tools to control that in all the scenes and specify how every single event changes of what they accept and what they don't so I've actually spent a lot of time working on that aspect is there like most of my time was spent building these tools used to control the simulation yeah and there be that you know there'd be things where we thought we liked mostly headed down and it's like oh no wait like we really need a way to be like hey if you're on a pirate ship you we shouldn't trigger any of the events that are happening away from the ship right then you're going to get dragged off to the castle was actually it just fixed a bug where there was one that we missed like um it's just you know there's a lot of interesting like spatial stuff there that we had that we kept having to like iterate over the system and be like what are we missing like in order to flesh it out a

little bit more from a narrative and design structure the way we approached creating a lot of content was we kind of had two terms we use for events which was spine and like plot clouds and the spine events was like the the original spine was is basically hey this is the play of Hamlet right if you do nothing these events are all structured to flow into each other without any input from the player right and all right just as a clarification for my own understanding so the spine events happen because the behaviors were set up triggers the spine events of Hamlet yeah not there's a fix it's not like say to say um you know like like the phrase hard-coded like like yeah no no it's not happen it's the the core the core motivations of Hamlet yeah yeah go on there so you can see right here probably in the scene I think because we're about to share something and the last thing it's going to say something like Gertrude now knows XYZ poor Ophelia now wants to yeah those

things right there what it's actually showing you is the gamestate that's changing yeah that's then changing what the events and I was all those events were scripted in terms of those things yeah we had yeah we had a we had a quite a bit of discussion about how not computery we should make those because like they've defined me what they're doing is they're exposing the computer system and the more the the more or less computer we make them so that was a concluding sentence but anyway the the less obvious it is that it's actually a systemic thing we're showing you right so yeah this is what we ended up here was like somewhere in the middle right where they're they're written out but it's still like you can still kind of tell that like it's it's reporting a state back to you yeah no no I'm watching what you're doing in the stream you're talking to to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern yeah Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern are two really fun characters there's presidents for having fun with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and we definitely had our own brand of fun with them and that they're like they are they get up to the you know they're kind of disconnected from the main conflict and so they'll end up like having their own weird side stories that was actually a big part of the fun of working on narrative and design for this game was like even when we're talking about those events that flow into each other by default there's a bunch of them that aren't in the original play right because you had to answer the question of like we're gonna do those in the later in the stream by the way we're yeah that's not the original play yeah oh yeah I don't know there's a time once you start actually changing things but even if you don't change anything there's a lot of questions like what does Gertrude get up to when like she's not on stage in the original play right like Britt and Irma are two characters who would be around the castle the cook and the handmaiden but like they're you

know they you don't see them in the play so there's stuff around them oh yeah so this is this is part of what we did in the first loop which is like originally when we were in very early stages of this game you were able to immediately like start changing everything yeah and the problem we ran into very quickly with that is players would think they were responsible for stuff from the original play yeah and this is this thing of like if you're in a time loop trying to change something you need to understand what you're changing yes so we went through a lot of iteration trying to figure out like what's the right amounts to like still we still want the player to get that sense of like they're able to change stuff and you are able to change stuff right but like in this first loop getting through the main events of Hamlet and getting a sense of what the stakes are and who the main players are enough so the second time through you have some action items instead of being kind of directionless yeah yeah that's it yeah I noticed that too because like like when you when you

start up this game you get to go through and I thought it was actually very touching it was very touching uh since you get to see Afilias perspective and hamlet in the the sense of being locked and railroaded torture on death is a really good thumb attic note to start game on because it's a very good incentive for her to fight and strengthen scramble against that yeah I I would love to keep diving into my own design questions and programming questions I'm gonna quickly go to chat give a quick it's a VTech vtec-e recognize VTech from shell games giving you a quick shout out hello Mike yeah I was gonna say it's here on Norfolk yeah my yeah yeah yeah skyliner 12 would like to know why was Hamlet's the source store for this as opposed to other Shakespeare stories or other literature I know Katie we we we have to give a lot of shoutouts to kiddie game coronis in general when we is a corona Church I Ronis I known her for a long

time but somehow that question just scrambled my brain is like it's Girona part of the reason we're streaming she she heard some questions about this on her own yeah atrophy I would strongly recommend for it's about but Connor maybe you'd like to tell that tale yeah I mean it's it's it's basically like one we were both Katie and I were both humanities majors right you were you were I think at the moment of this reading doing a class where we're talking about Hamlet a lot yeah so it was prominent in our minds but also for Katie personally like she's told and and this is the story that you kind of told on her Twitter like she little room she when she first read Hamlet she as a young kid she always felt like Oh feel II got the short stick which she did her role in the original play is to like have her heart broken and be harassed by Hamlet and the die right and like and yet there's all this like litter you

know all this literature and all these people who had studied Ophelia and read into her and basically it just felt like it was it felt like a good opportunity to give her a new lease I guess right and also Hamlet is my personal favorite Shakespeare play so like it felt yeah like that's I think a reason to pick it it's not as oh a good reason another reason that I think Hamlet works very well is there's two very clear characters drive the conflict to in this case are not you which works very well for simulation engine style style gameplay right it's buddies in Hamlet and like and that means that like you're kind of you're in the middle of the tug of war between these two characters and and that lends itself very well to the game that we made yeah hi Eric do you have anything on to add to that or I think so yeah yeah Eric actually the world talking was swinging back to simulation engine I think we can swing back to you

we talked before about how the simulation engine is driven by everyone's wants and needs which is kind of appropriate this game started development I know you weren't part of the original team but I would say that a six year game development cycle means it's been a lot of other games have come out with the interesting simulation engines in the interim but even before that we had Dwarf Fortress as kind of the one of the ER simulation engine games you've got I guess there are some way back I might I just want to quickly correct that notion Katie and I were like tinkering with Begley Elsinore ideas but Eric and Kristin and Val were very much part of the team from like early enough to be the original team yeah so like yeah six years ago is when the team formed the initial tank ring was like eight years ago but you're talking about four fortress installations yeah yeah sorry my bad yeah no that's a good thing to correct like it's been a lot of simulation games have grown and grown watchdogs Legion is now like like Triple

A games have decided that simulation games are going to be part of their bag this was something I was seeing a lot of it through this year how do you feel well not I the question was weirdly veering towards how do you feel about everyone else doing your thunder it's not what I want to ask Eric it's more like what do you think is becoming more possible with simulation games and what do you think other developers should know about working in this field based on what you've learned as a programmer I mean I put well I feel as I'm really happy more than we're showing up so yeah the I had hinted at this earlier like what the like the interesting problem in this space is controlling them what I really loved or porter's equation like it a bunch of the other ones I don't a lot of the paradox games to which I think Paul this category of kind of like he's just open-ended simulations where you do stuff and they will sometimes tell you interesting stories and the main challenge with those is that sometimes they don't sometimes it's just boring stuff and so the question is is a designer for me at least especially with

this it's like this kind of game is how can we make it possible to build like this simulation game but kind of force it to constantly be showing the player interesting or exciting stories yeah like as often as possible yeah and this game was an exercise of how can we best balance a choose-your-own-adventure sense of control of the pacing and what's going on but with an open-ended simulation to like actually get like a pretty rich state space of things that could possibly happen it yeah the fact that one of our objectives was just constantly skewed towards tragedy helped a lot yeah I actually said it about like material makes some other day is a game just sort of like maliciously makes the outcome as bad as possible no matter what you do in a way that's like technically compatible with what you know so far like so just a side story baby maybe that's just the Richard the

third simulation you use the same engine to make a richer the third play and everything ends with people getting cooked into pies yeah it was like there's a lot of actually working like both Kristen and myself come from academic backgrounds like I just finished doctoral degree and there's a lot of work in that space on these kind of nears I have to give a shout-out to her advisor recently he wasn't involved in this project but he's in that kind of space of intelligent narratives trying to get the computers to be a little more a little more a little smarter about how they're presenting a narrative use you can try to do these things like intentionally keep the story exciting or try to make those toughest like compatible with the facts that you've been given so far mm-hmm try to lead to particular outcomes and so there's a lot of people working on this at very different levels not just in game development proper oh yeah I'm excited for like a lot of stuff in future yeah one thing one thing that we're about to wear I don't know if we're sort of experiencing right now in

this playback but um you just pitch to something interesting which is like keeping interesting things happening I think I think something interesting about the simulation engine kind of game is the concept of I guess you would call it did it dead air which is what is happening when essentially not nothing is happening you later on this playthrough I can call it out if we if we're still on a tangent to this it's kind of a point we're always sort of waiting for something interesting to happen and you guys obviously you have the clock featured to speed things up but I'm sure during development you were getting a lot of feedback saying nothing interesting is happening right now what how can I make the interesting things happen what was your what was your after you designed the engine what did you guys learn about teaching players to find and instigate the interesting things because one half of the game is the stuff playing out the other half is walking up to someone and telling I saw Claudius confessed that he killed Hamlet's dad like we're seeing right now and Bernardo is just like nothing I can do about that yeah so part

of that is is presentational like a lot of the things usually like in that in the map there's nothing on it right now but sometimes the rooms are blue on the map and you try to surf this very strongly where the things were happening because that was a really big problem like but I would be playing the earlier prototypes it's like what do I do I guess I'll just follow Hamlet around all day which yeah well sometimes do interesting stuff but a lot of it you're just following Hamlet wandering around all day yeah so we try to like there's like our glasses on people's heads you see them walking places there's the events on the on the map there's the timeline for the things you know about so we try to present this very strongly to give you a sense of where can I go right now at you find stuff there's also um I think a lot of just trying to create little things when I was talking about plot clouds we also had like flavor events right which are like little things that aren't important to the overall story but develop characters right like just a litigant up to when they're not doing something else and

those are kind of designed to fill in gaps in the schedule and be shifted around freely so like we tried to lean into those a little bit and that like there usually if you're if you're waiting for the next big thing there's something to do whether it's characters to talk to you or things to look at an environment to like do you lock you PI your time and then of course once you're in the later loops at that point you have a very strong mental model of like yeah that you've learned how to kind of manipulate the system and then we see people using the fast-forward feature more right like going to specific events they want to go to but a lot of those things I just talked about help bridge that gap early on in the game like you can see here you're just talking to everybody and like yes a lot of those things don't have results but it's better than you're just standing around right like and like you even then like if they don't have simulation results you're getting pieces of information that inform like your mental model of the character that could help a lot of those give you like hints

on like how you'll solve future things or how you'll deal with future scenarios yeah this Britt this Britt moment is actually about to be very telling about that I'm gonna go to chat for the aptly named Marcus Aurelius they have a question they've played a few hours and they've been enjoying the romance subplots and options that are shown up and they wanted to know if that was something you knew you want to include early on or if it came later we knew fairly early on yeah yeah if you're if you're going through a loop over and over again one of the questions you're gonna ask yourself is who can you smooch and like so we let you smooch a bunch of people uh-huh and other people smooch each other yes yes there's there's there's plenty of shenanigans that go on and it's for daily live there was actually an interesting Katy's talked about this a little bit because it's a four-day loop though there is sometimes we have to like fast-forward the romance a little bit right it's like and and it's just an interesting interesting scenario that's were right around and I

think she did a pretty good job she digs you did a really good job but it was a really hard writing problem yeah there's a there's a minimum whirlwind romance yeah yeah kick up thank you for the question questions from chat folks we will gladly take more throughout the hour what I am going to ask about now is so something that has interested me about games like these is what happens when you sort of make outlier events that are sort of like you know like combinations of things that are not going to statistically fire very often because they require complex sets of variables what was sort of your guys plan for testing and implementing those in a way that felt organic I guess that like you you could implement it in a way that like okay with the when players really work themselves into this corner it will fire but then when it and it will

actually fire instead of just suddenly putting a fox in the middle of the room or something or some other weird bug that's that's that's a question I think I would like to know more about yes I guess there's a lot of little tiny things like we can talk about we did like one one thing for example is that the events are not static and that the events themselves in a ton of like little variations inside of that based on the state so a lot of the events can accommodate vastly different yeah things like sometimes the events the work you even have a bunch of the characters that are supposed to be an about die we did we did a big pass to be like hey a character's been mentioned are they alive another thing we did was try to intentionally make the simulation resilient to wind a particular bad scenarios so some of it was using sort of like shortcuts to help control it like for example one of the pieces of stage that characters to become upset or shattered as we call it in the game and it's just sort of a proxy for life

this character is effed up enough right now that most of their events are kind of bad so like most of the main events are pretty ended up not being upset it's a good way to kind of like control that at a wide level you know another interesting thing I want to mention about how we did this is the simulation intentionally tries to sort of prioritize important events like Connor mention kind of like there's these background flavor ones there's actually like a kind of like a hierarchy like there's these background events above though there's kind of like typical events that would be for these like plot clouds or you sort of like some works and then there's the spine ones up top and the simulation know said it's like not supposed to start one of these less important events if it would conflict like like the characters of the room with one of the spy events in the near future so that way like the mid like it never just like completely jumps off the rails it kind of like stays on track with his mine before we had that like there were you could get things like oh yeah you managed to save everybody by just making it so the play never happened because you kept pushing

it back with all these little like small like oh yeah and they needed to go for a walk they were we had a we had one way back when we're like the entire invasion of Denmark would be delayed because like Gertrude and Horatio were like talking about their lives in the grounds and the patient's like well I'm supposed to be in the ground so therefore I can't happen the money Python level comedy Oh No but when this at this point the games like pretty like we've watched a lot of people play through it and it's hold it holds up pretty well but there there are sometimes extreme edge cases where I'm like well that's a hotfix right and they're always at this point very entertaining because they're really out there which is why I only see them like I've seen them and I think in one stream out of like 50 that I've watched yeah Avis would like to know what are the funniest bugs you've all seen oh that's

a big let's see I mean like the ones that show up now they're like the main kinds of bugs that are you can still see and the live playthrough that we're passing now is where we didn't consider all the things in the in all the possible states a scene could run in and so yeah he's some totally just nonsense things players say referring to dead people I think somebody was playing or a funeral after their funeral happened yeah this is I would I didn't want to talk about this one because it's still in but we're figuring I have the fix but whatever Guildenstern if it's certain insert under certain things she'll plan her funeral and she'll be like it's a great plan and then if she finishes that you talked to her about one of the other things that triggers that initial plan or funeral again and I think you can get a planner funeral like three times in one loop like yeah well yeah yes the the way that this loop just ended the like one of the things we did with this structure this game is a philia does not kill herself yes that

that just doesn't what is what is it's kind of actually ambiguous in the text whether or not that happens so this is like a compatible with Shakespeare's Hamlet intro creation what's going on because it's just like really weird to have the player character forced to commit suicide for a lot of reasons Oh and so what happens instead is she's murdered by a mysterious figure and kind of like the first like Ark challenge for players to overcome that's presented to them now is to like not get murdered at this point figure out what's going on and stop it so you can stay live long enough to watch everybody else kill each other instead yeah we're we're leaning on hundreds of years of academic conspiracy theories which one of the things that was great about working on this game to return to the why Shakespeare question is like there's a like we didn't you know we were very much forging our own paths and making our own decisions but there's definitely like a lot of decisions we can make good

point you like oh yeah well there was this paper if we wanted to and it's like and they believe that if Elia was murdered by Gertrude which is not the game anyway and moving on yeah I mean that's that's kind of the interesting thing about the about the staging of the text is oh yeah now we're getting weird into like what does it mean to stage Shakespeare cuz you guys are checking which states and Shakespeare even though you're not Houghton Griffith Park with the light with coyotes howling in the background didn't yeah come on yeah actors and miming your um but even in those interpretations like there's a lot of leeway like I watched a production of um one of the comedies last summer that ends and everyone getting married but in the Shakespeare play there's definitely one character who's still screwed over in the middle of it they ended it with a not original dialogue but they used a dance number sort of to turn the moment around into the litter you know recompensed but it so you guys get sort of get like permission to do that too and the yajes you know to remix fits

already on the page yeah the way we viewed it is if there wasn't anything and even some things that were explicitly on the page but like anything that details that weren't felt in we felt we were willing to fill them in like in ways that would make the most interesting story yeah I mean that involves like you know giving characters a lot of different backgrounds that come up and coming to play in the story had developing relationships between characters that never spoke in the play like we're about to see like Horatio well you ratio and Gertrude I like talk to each other a lot things like that this the quints the play masters yeah time to have track time looping gremlin himself yeah we needed a character for you to talk to about what was going on because otherwise you're kind of like you you've got no you got no one to confide in Yeah right on we are halfway

through our era we are still taking your questions about the making of us or um thankfully also thanks to my past self things in ham we're about to go really off the rails yeah during this next half hour so I urge you to pay attention moving my next question Katy sharona's has also tweeted about how your guys Kickstarter backers are really cool and great great you went to Kickstarter you managed to raise some funds to help you develop this game what was working with Kickstarter like for you to and and because it's sort of a thing I've talked to a lot of antov she talked about how it's changed a lot their development process a lot like I talked to one guy from uber entertainment a while back and he was like instead of having one publisher we now have 5,000 publishers yeah we don't we don't we don't in fact have another bigger publishers it's nice I will say so what I like just to give context for

the Kickstarter I want to say that we are in the extremely fortunate position that all of the primary people in the dev team have different day jobs so none of us needed like funding to eat during the development of this it needed a lot more if that wasn't the case yes our Kickstarter was to try to help us raise money to pay for the things we like had to pay for the development so we could have so we could like actually make it possible yeah um but we didn't have a guy said like there wasn't like the stress of like if this Kickstarter fails mm-hmm I'm like in a lot of trouble and have to get a new job it's like if this Kickstarter fails we have to dramatically scale back or change or maybe abandon the project but that's like it's a difficult thing so so I think that that heavily employed like how I felt about it Johnson 2020 14 there was never there's

never any danger of us needing to tell the backers that we ran out of money which reduces a lot of pressure that I think a lot of kick starters run into because we're like we we have our own streams of income and like we spent all we spend all the money for on like you know voice acting and like composers and all those things but like we could sustain ourselves for as long as we needed to finish the project but we did have to tell them what did happen yes obviously yeah optimistically hoping to get this out three years ago it was always net early next year yeah um but because we were in the position of not needing to ship this game at a particular time for the we always took the approach of like making it good enough to release like making the thing we felt that like would make players feel the best about playing it and not just like getting something out at a particular date yeah we try to be really communicative with the backer community about what's going on at the whole point

show that we gave them sort of like a sorry we're late beta build in 2016 or 17 a big yeah yeah did you to update to see the current progress and yeah uh which we and then would get great we actually had a feedback form in the game that people could submit notes and that would also help illuminate like what are some of the things that jump out the most in our simulation of like not quite working or what are what are the things that are already working pretty well well I start like having the access game yeah honestly except literally just like with our backers like a big early access period with her backers and they were all that super great yeah for like trying it out you know it's a whole ton of book I remember like I think one of the verses we shipped just like didn't even start up if you have a save file cuz it's been crash and they've been like Ally forgiving putting up with us and it was a lotta like really great feedback that bug was specifically engineered so none of us could catch it it was not only if you didn't have a safe file it's if you never had a safe file ever okay so we

can do either save file and not run into it so in other words a new put a brand new player yeah yeah it's yeah it's been wonderful I think yeah we were just we just tried to update them anytime something happened right like and again it was like we tell them like hey like they all knew it was the nights and weekends project right so like if we give them an update it's like hey like Eric and Kristin are getting married we're probably not going to get any work done until they work well yeah like they were always very understanding of that scenario right are kind of unique situation because we were constantly transparent about it as well yeah makimba B would like to give a shout out to YouTube real quick and chat I don't know I don't I don't for once I don't know who that is I know who that is that's that's plumbing you also worked at me at Shell I think I could be wrong right down

moving on from that question so we talked before about how this is a part-time develop game six years of part-time development I I think a lot of like I I've done a lot of like in my own time work I sort of got started in doing this kind of games interviewing devs work as a part-time work for sure but I'm I'm really impressed by the commitment to one day a week of dev work for your team obviously with you know exceptions for weddings and events yeah that kind of thing and for such an interesting result to kind of pop out of it like there's parts of this isn't this is me like giving feedback before answering a question I guess like giving like feedback as a player sorry it's it's it's interesting like playing it I can like sort of just like weirdly tuned to these things like I can throw it alike feel like Oh like I can I can sort of feel out here like this is kind of a thing that if this was a full-time project for a team yeah trying to make like this thing here would be something that was felt a little more polished or this thing here

would be like something that would like you know like sort of but at the same time what I'm playing from afar time here I'm like this is cohesive and and thought-out and like like the art polish alone makes it feel like it could have come out any year in the years that you all were working on it like any year it came out it would've looked fresh um and anyway the writing is sharp so then a year the writing came out the writing would have felt fresh what but at the same time you are sort of in a weird bubble where you're moving this project very slowly forward across six years while watching some of your peers whether you're working with them professionally or just friends with them shipping work you know sometimes six years six years to see their work game or two or three games depending on who you ask or six games or if you're Romney and game dev dot world that's 100 million games not game - excuse me I meant meditation it's meditation so what I meant to with Romney is no shadow to Romney yeah so so I guess where I'm at is what

was it like sort of sitting in that slow-moving bubble I guess like moving this forward and and as they trying to reach an endpoint that you were comfortable with I mean I think I think one of the things that's notable is like we we would frequently like underestimate how much progress we made and then go play an old build and be like oh wow it's way better now than it was like three months ago and also because we all have day jobs we were kind of shipping things which probably helped us not feel like oh no we're trapped working on this one thing right we also had other things going on yeah so what's amusing to see like the rest of the like industry like if I like the rest of the meeting was a groovy little path like there was some point where suddenly a bunch of time looping games came out yeah it's just III like to time looping games where now and outer wild scream out it's like well time loops are in now so the lead artist of Elsinore as you as you wish the art you'd like the leader to those [ __ ] also sleet artists were out a while so he's jest time we've been games in a

month yes and and he got hired on outer wilds I think partially based on like his work on Elsinore which is just that's how the time line worked out I think oh yeah I'm like I was really happy you got I'm really happy we chose your side we did yeah let's that's okay with it's a little just hand-painted which is why we used an isometric camera yeah so that way it wouldn't be tied to like I mean this is like the only thing that made sense like how can we make a game that looks great with this level of polish with a single artist and the answer is you have to do our dates yes you are this yeah it's uh it's I know it's it's it's a whole it's a whole hundred increase from what Eric was saying but it's a 2d painting that's projected on a 3d model which is kind of neat so that's how we do like the real-time shadows and stuff yes like a 3d world and then Wes painted on top of it football back yeah

the the shadows the the shadows really weren't like the shadow of the Great Hall especially I don't know why the little details that just made me go oh wow that looks this game looks great yeah that wasn't very happy yeah yeah it's been happy with that how that works yeah yes this was like it was it was a contest of like balance guards coming up with like what are the things that would be the gleich he's like manageable for its really small team to do but like give this huge impact it was like finding the like handful things to make that work on this budget I guess is a nice thing about working on a working every Sunday it's like we don't have a lot of time to like actually build stuff compared to full time job but we have just as much time to think about it and so a lot of it a lot of the development process was like a lot of different than other stuff have done and that you would think of idea and be like well that's great maybe I'll get to that next weekend and if I'm next weekend rolled around your idea had like mature enough that you realize it was

dumb and you should throw it out and this like save us a whole bunch of time in a bowl I spent yeah uselessly building things you start them it's easy to point out like to notice like things that would have been like yeah we might have sunk more time into polish for working on it full-time it would be a very different game if we were full-time because like there's a lot of risky things we did that would not event you know if we're our lives were depending on them for my you know we might have avoided but there's as Eric was saying like the design really there's a lot of systems that we were like we don't need or we iterated on or that that we got because we had the time to really reflect on and like and just think about what we were doing Katie I think had this great quote way back when where she said like one other things she's most proud of is because of that time like every time we could have done there like we had to choose between the easy thing and the interesting thing we picked the interesting thing and I I think that's a very much a product of our you of our work schedule yeah that's

what's interesting to me about that is developers talk one of them you know one of the shortest tortillas I hear a lot when talking to you developers about developing games is iteration iteration iteration make things break things throw them out yeah and this is not this is not anti-reflective that entirely you made things you broke things you threw them out in slow motion yeah so but yeah it's like there's like also the phrase ideas are cheap yeah etc etc like but weirdly you you this is a more mature perspective on that idea which is ideas are cheap unless you invest time in them I guess which is what you did you invested time and idea it's the same way other developers at this time I just did it differently and like you said slower in slow motion yeah yeah I mean they're gone oh really I find I found that like this process the importance of thinking about what you're doing what you should

be doing next is like really critical is that's the way that like it was when I was doing research where you're kind of like bumbling about in the dark and it's like you can just work as much as you want but the important thing is to be constantly reflecting on just like the work I'm doing right now the most important thing for me to be doing is this the thing that's going to push this closer to where I think I want it to be in the future like what's the question I need answered now and like the kind of approach we ended up taking because of the work schedule yeah it's worth noting that I think a big part of why we were able to do the once a week thing there's two two key things one is we that's actually very much the structure that we had in game creation society where we were like making games in that we were making them openly of course semester but in order to get things done when you have schoolwork you kind of had to have designated work sessions right and the other one is like we instead of just meeting and checking in we actually had like we're all sitting down and working over skype

together so that we can talk to each other we all know that we're making progress and and that was that guide again was like part of why we were able to sustain this for six years instead of being like sort of burning out right yeah and even in that regard we were very lucky privileged in that like a lot of us were close friends calling in like my wedding party was basically Nilsen or debt was paid more or less and so hanging out once a week was like a good excuse to keep up with friends I never see any of the different parts of the country and I think that was kind of like really important like I don't know this would have worked if I had just formed a group with some strangers as well or would I have to both had to have been approached differently yes spent much more energy trying to like keep the pace up because it was very important that almost every Sunday we made some amount of progress just like a little bit of promise yeah Mike in chat from shell games also it says they don't know how you hold yourself to only one day a week seriously that's discipline and it

shows it doesn't the game does not feel looking rushed at all yeah I mean there were some times when we do two days a week there were some times I just I'm really excited I'm putting the scripting language I'm just gonna do that every day this week one day a week was the baseline people would sneak in time here and there like I would I would I bust to my day job I would sometimes work on it on the bus right and that's like half an hour of like extra like scripting time but yeah moving on to the question pile we have about ten minutes left in the chat if folks want to get them looking at look at what's happening trying to remember if I had any interesting thoughts but the game as this was happening um uh I guess one of solute to walk back over to design and programming world of it oh yeah this is gonna be real fun yeah this scene good timing Elsinore really succeeds as

a game when the player feels like they're really pushing the boundaries of what's going on in hand lettuce but if they're from I guess if they're familiar with Hamlet it's a I don't know what it's like you've never read Hamlet gonna be just gonna be honest don't know read him you early to test that you're gonna have to interview someone else get so or get someone else interview um as designers what was kind of your instinct for getting players to feel safe in pushing off the path like they wouldn't wind up in a fail State I guess it helps like knowing when you're gonna die is one thing but like what was your impetus for getting players and really try messing with things I I would reframe that slightly I don't think it was ever our goal to make players feel safe pushing off the path cuz pushing off the path results in like horrible deaths but you feel encouraged to do so because you're learning new things every time you do so yeah about these characters in the world and so it encourages you to be to push past those boundaries into those that dangerous territory if that makes

sense yeah which I guess is a way of feeling safe anyway but yeah yeah yeah but it's like not the safe was not really the feeling we were going for right that's a different way to put it I think you're right it's not about safe is about to me it was about scratching an itch I was like yeah I need some curiosity yeah right like like what will happen beyond this this threshold if I if I go for it because I can just always try again and that is where a little bit of safety comes from but but what the things you trying are often dangerous things it's really trying to sort of late so I'm not I'm not amazing I'm not a literary theory expert but like one of the things I think I wasn't trying to hit with this game it's like part of what makes tragedy compelling and then like Ratchet it up a notch so I like what really basic way to describe it or like when I'm watching like a Greek tragic play or whatever's

I'm sitting in the audience screaming at the main character yeah yeah see exactly how their tragic flaw is going to get them killed and I'd be like if only you knew this information Oedipus or whatever like you could do something different it could be better and there's a mini game where you can go tell them that information yeah and then they'll do something else stupid with it scream with them some more and then just do some a loop yeah yeah over again I remember way back when when I was in college before I even started at shell games Jesse I was in Jesse's game design class Missy shell and he was talking about how tragedy is they you know it was tragedies extremely difficult to do in games right because there if something bad happens you just try again right and like this game is kind of in many ways it's the direct like challenges that yeah like it's like challenge accepted like yeah it's like you try again and that's kind of part of the tragedy instead of a no way to escape the tragedy player try again I would not no

no screw you just that's an interesting challenge I mean I was at show games when we did the Kickstarter and like so we talked about this again at then right like was that was one of the he's actually a gravestone in the graveyard where somewhere in here they're getting mad at me for saying screw you and you literally no no you back to it yeah yeah yeah yeah a lot of the graves are like people who backed right on we are wrapping up here for Conor now because when we're done at some point I'm gonna go back and just play more of this game at some point do I have any more questions um oh man you saw something in there about tragedy that really got me

like proud she's yelling at the screen and thinking yes or just do thinking people would do what you expect them to do if only they knew what you knew that's the engine that kept us going on this project right it's a really compelling problem I guess I guess not to spoil the ending of the game but like there is Chi Minh I think there is something there isn't it like this game isn't sort of Dwarf Fortress like you just keep reloading the sim just to generate new interesting results somatically where towards the end of the game where were you heading as far as like what happens when the player has all the information I guess like is it is it that the POE feel like oh is it that ophelia kind of gets to have a rush yeah yeah I will say that we do not lose our theme when we get to the end got it that is all I'm really going to say yeah with no more frankly if a player were to just play the game forever and then eventually just resign themselves to like this is sad and then put it down

that's pretty good thematic ending - yeah anyway with no more questions in chat I am going to start winding this down this stream with perfect information I will prevent the tragedy of keeping you guys from your day jobs you've been watching the GGC twitch channel thank you for joining us once again thank you for putting up with my slightly tired coffee only just started kicking in shenanigans we love having game developers on this channel we love getting folks questions to game developers if you click the follow button on the lower left-hand corner of the screen you will get a notification when we go live when we're talking to game developers we're talking to the folks we're trying to talk to the folks behind age of Wonders planetfall later this month I'm reaching out to a bunch of other cool folks about other cool games we're trying to pin those schedules down on top of that if you

click the follow button you will also notice that the GDC twitch channel does keep live during the day with a lot of great talks from GDC of years past we've started taking talks from the GC volt and putting them on Twitch also the YouTube channel where if you go there and if you click on the YouTube channel you can obviously get all the great talk to the uploaded over there I need to update the banner that you're looking at because as you can see our logo the logo on the top left is shiny and new but this is 2019 GC GC 2020 is coming up if you are a game designer game developer watching this channel you might want to know that the call for papers for next year is open and we do want to see your GE talks right now it is for Wednesday Friday which we're calling core concepts so if you have a talk about the core concepts of game development we would love to see it you can go to GDC calm calm which is there's a link to that somewhere on this page I'm not sure where but if you go to our

website you can submit a talk for an extra-juicy and if you're not and if you're want to get into the summit's which are on Monday and Tuesday if you've been to GGC before and you know what those days are that call from papers is opening I think later this month I'm pretty sure it's later this month if not it's definitely next month that'll be opening up soon for the that will include the narrative summit the animation summit all kind of that those that group of things other than that Eric and Connor thank you so much for joining us thanks for having us yeah we're wonderful Congrats on shipping Elsinore thank you marcus aurelius and chat we'd loved having you and with that I wish everyone a happy Wednesday it's only Wednesday man but happy end of July happy birthday Harry Potter it's Harry Potter's birthday man bye everyone bye you