GDC Plays GDCA Nominee Outer Wilds with Loan Verneau and Wesley Martin

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am the contributing editor at guy I'm a contributor Gamasutra calm I am queen manager for DC and I'm here today playing a game called outer outer wild oh no it's got the outer wild in my overlay that's embarrassing sorry about that's I am going I am NOT gonna be able to fix that for the stream I'm so sorry about that oh he's dead yeah it happens oh boy anyway hi there I joined today after my embarrassing mistake in lower left-hand corner of the screen by two wonderful folks from obese digital those folks are alone for now in Wesley Martin and the also lower left corner screen is Alvaro who is a content

master for GC and also tributing in her Gamasutra Alex how you doing pretty good I'm sorry I didn't jump in earlier but I wanted to follow a good podcast etiquette and wait until I was introduced yeah yeah let's uh let's talk about this game this game's real good right we should probably let them which probably with them introducing those I think I'll surely Wesley Wesley lone could you please introduce clothes for our guests while I can have where the heck I'm going I'm Wesley Martin art director on Ida wilds and I'm Lenore no designer and producer on that allowance nice thank you guys so much for joining us today why don't you I think you know most people who are watching probably know this story but just in case can you talk a bit about where the idea for this game came from and sort of how it came to fruition sure yeah I started over eight years ago now yeah as a student project USC and as a thesis

project at USC and there were a couple of starting sort of like goals with it one of them was to create a wealth that changes over time drastically like environments that like yeah as you explore them they change in in great ways like Thoreau Hollow for example which is a planet that falls apart over the course of the game look as it's being bombarded by its volcanic moon and then the other goal was to create a game about exploration and like the real the the actual feeling of real space exploration so you know not going out there and shooting aliens and trading but feeling of trying to understand what's out there trying to

understand the laws of sort of nature and how it all works in a way where we are powerless to these massive galactic forces rights books I think you're falling down I'm working on it it's no ketchup right good moment to highlight the powerlessness player [Music] yeah that was sort of like how the sort of our goals starting the game and hopefully yeah we achieved some of these there's also sort of a third like smaller goal of creating a space exploration game that feels more like real space exploration where you know with NASA you're going out there to discover things just because you're curious and not a game and so that was

like a huge are designing a story and the mechanics yeah and I think in this final product it really comes through but you know the the development process the thing is kind of winding right I mean people don't know you know the original and original ver earlier version was submitted through the independent Games Festival and it won an award there and then you know there was like a development process through Mobius digital to get here if you want to talk about that I'd be curious to know more but that was like but also I'm really curious to know like what's it like now that it's shipped and released and you've had it out for a few months like how is it going for you guys like it did it you know like how has it been we do it Cornell chronologically yeah I can I can briefly go over like that history the project so you know it started as the student project was 2013 you know and Alex and low on kept working on it for queers and then IGF was 2015 and

right after that and summer of 2015 is when they decided to bring to mobius digital which is where they both worked at the time and that's when i got hired on was like okay we're turning this into a fully-fledged project and so we hired up on our team kind of got going we were did a crowdfunding thing and that did not give us enough money to last for more than like a year and towards the end of that year we started with you and or not and they've been wonderful to us ever since but basically in the course of working with them we were like you know we want to make like the true version of this game and so we scrapped a lot of our work at the time and kind of started fresh with the earth direction and really aimed for like making it a fully realized experience and so that's what we've been working on for the last four years and you as you move towards ship and then

shipped it last year on xbox and you know I think on PC and other platforms as well how did that go for you I always meant to ask like was it how was the launch I was the the run-up to launch like was it what you expected was it harder you know how did it how did it go first of all I'll give you a piece of advice if you if you press the jetpack up there's a prong telling you how to use the booster that will help you nificantly in traveling around there we go yeah I'm just trying to figure out I was reading somewhere now I'm just trying to figure I get there anyway continue please focus on the question my terrible gameplay will resolve itself yeah I mean the it was it was definitely a bit of a challenge to bring it to more platforms and we're definitely still working on that right now but yeah I mean it's it

was a lot of work from both the art theme and the tech team and as I mentioned we were still working on that side of things yeah there's there's because outer wilds is such an experimental game it was never really intended to be brought to this level of polish so when we made that decision like yeah we're gonna polish this game and make it like fully presentable and fully realized there are a lot of things that just weren't in the game like streaming assets or you know just like you say functionality that you expect because we hadn't needed it up until that point there was sort of a lot of back loaded work it's like okay we need to go in and like fix all the bones underneath everything in order for all of it to layer on top correctly yeah like a pretty big process with our team in the tech team to go and optimize everything properly and get it into tip-top shape yeah okay sorry oh and we

faced so many issues that most games don't face just because of the nature of the game being full place like physics simulation where whether you're there or not things still happen right the destruction of Barolo that you can observe in real time if you're on the planet still happens if you're not there like if you leave your ship somewhere like well you know it might get tossed up by a tornado or destroyed by a meteor like everything is always simulated and as a result like to us everything is made built on spheres which means creating new tools for that it was a lot of challenges that sort of like increased in complexity as as we increased the quality of the visuals and the amount of content yeah I can only

imagine how real quick we should've said at the top of the stream and as folks filter in and out we will absolutely take your questions from chat if you have any questions regarding game design in a specific game in general please put them in chat and we will harvest the good ones and relay them to ya because this game is good also and I bring that up because this game is sort of you is unique and maybe not unique but like it's very rare and the fact that most of the games discoveries are sort of tied to play so you know it's not that I think we're gonna get in any kind of spoiler territory here but like the meat of playing this game is the discovery of how everything works at least in my experience so you know we talk about things like brittle hollow being destroyed you know that's because the whole place gets blown up in 22 minutes also so we should actually let's talk about that real quick no let's let's talk about stay on this because I want to talk about the art direction and how you sort of came in especially us like you know one of the most remarkable things about this game in my experience is the way it models real scientific principles like physics and gravity and

that kind of thing and also like a phenomenon like black holes and white holes and I'm just curious like as you were you know revamping this games look and coming at it with a bunch of new tech and art you know what if anything did you take from real science to try and figure out how to make these look realistic and striking in the way that they are yeah it's it's a lot of complicated things interacting but I'll try and sum it up as smoothies pretty sure beyond we made the decision that like sort of one of the core things that makes outer wilds feel like outer wilds is that it doesn't lie to the player and you know that's a relative term because all video games have to lie on some level but like for example we don't arbitrarily limit where you can go there are like invisible barriers or things like that it's like if you can see it you can go there and so that was sort of like something that I think made the Alpha really special

and we didn't want to lose that we wanted to make sure that everything in the game felt correct even if it's not actually correct it needs to feel correct to the player it needs to respond in the way you expect it to you need to be able to test your hypotheses because it's a game about doing science and so lie to you then that prevents you from being able to test things and kind of ruins the whole experience so that led us to do things like you know we tried more complex visual styles with higher detail but then players would either get distracted or we couldn't have a collision so people couldn't climb on things and it just kind of cheapen the whole feel of everything so a lot of the art direction for our wilds was choosing where to use our detail and simplifying everything else so that it focuses flavors right what's an example of somewhere where you chose to really put a lot of detail I'm the village where you're right now is actually a very good example it's one of the more dense areas in the game in terms of

there's a lot of characters to interact with and a lot of things to learn there and so players would just spend hours at the beginning of game of the village not even realize it's a space exploration game and you know give up because they didn't understand was not as carefully tuned things like the lighting in the village that like lights or near points of interests we had to remove excess details you know we had some hmm normy that goofed you're doing great don't worry we had some mini games and things like that that we had to cut because players were just getting distracted from the important thing which is learning about space getting curious about space and getting launch codes and I feel like cut away everything and that's also one of the reasons why the game doesn't have like enemies that you fight or things that you collect is because all of that extra stuff distracts people from exploring to the sake of knowledge oh that's interesting were you ever did the team ever consider putting in collectibles or combat or anything like that no that was very

early a decision we made because the goal was on the design side definitely to create a game where players were driven by curiosity alone and so the best way to prove that hypothesis was by removing every other possible rewards right if you have upgrades if you have like collectibles if you have any of that players might be exploring for the sake of finding these so we from pretty early in the development process we decided that the only reward you would ever get in the game is knowledge there's no upgrades there is no tools new tools you get to unlock or whatever the only thing you gain is knowledge and sort of yeah hey so yeah I think and I'm so glad you brought up West a minute ago you were talking about having to tune everything

so that people would spend too long or too little time in a certain place this whole game feels finely tuned in a way that I kind of struggle to comprehend from though I throw the macroscale the 22 minute loop to the way that different planets have different gravity scales and different movement speeds and I actually like as you play this game and play the loop over and over you start to realize that at certain points in time certain things will happen and you need to be there to see it or you know do something about it and all of that I imagine must have been like at least haphazardly planned and timed out if not carefully - it's like it what was that like can you tell me what your guiding principle was and trying to sort of nail down formal a 20-minute time loop and how you what challenges you faced there trying to get that just right I guess yeah lots and lots of play testing we played tested like once every two three weeks let's say three weeks to be safe counting vacation we played it once every three weeks or you know three

years basically as soon as we started at Mobius their regular play tests testing you know whatever we had just been working on as well as like their stretches that the game for new players oh don't forget your spacesuit yeah yeah I did this yesterday yep I was like I would never forget to put that on and I immediately time we're learning so much today I guess the spring Bravo let's look Pete look the organic this is the moment um play into that I think a lot of games that look at that moment ago oh no like I can't let the player do that and I said you guys seem to have gone hell yeah the player should be able to do that every time they should be able to what kind of setting a good spacing on every run they should be able to tie right when they get into space um you you ready mentioned that that was this is really honor or curiosity and learning and and you know the player should some point get stopping in the cloud and figure out they need to put on your spacesuit but um what other

additions did you need to make to complete that vision and make sure it wasn't just like a weird hog horse I guess that but that would only akin sometimes ain't for a lot of that fine-tuning it's just we as developers are kind of obsessive about it like sort of made sure that everyone who joined the team was just as detail-oriented and believed in the vision and a game just as much so you know everyone from the creative director all the way down to just junior artists who were hired for a brief time they were still on board with like yeah we're gonna make sure that this piece of art or this a bit of level design or this lighting in the way that it interacts with area none of that is going to trick the player into doing the wrong thing we're never going to fake anything and so it was just really just a lot of hard work and dedication to that principle of we make sure of that

where's your playing that's for the right keys I don't know you can give a quick shout-out to auditory who said they finished the game a couple days ago a little bit so much thanks yeah Alec said we'll throw the question back to you now that I'm done dying in dumb ways no yeah have you correct incorrect oh man I just like this game so much I could just talk about any one of these planets for an hour I also have you guys played the outer worlds at all we did it we did us good at - for the record if they play yeah yeah pretty pretty BC yeah so is that I'm just curious like it doesn't sometimes it can be hard to tell from the outside weather like funny goofs like that when you know two notable games share a great name or a great launch window whether that actually you know gets on anyone's like mine or whether it like you know affects business at all did coming out so close to that game and showing such a close

title like have any impact at all on your launch strategy or was just kind of like a funny goof I think we were definitely aware of it as you know we've had the name add miles for a very long time and so I think we saw when they registered the domain name or like huh that's just was that they don't actually use that when they announced it we're like okay and so that was something we were aware of but ultimately like the games are of such different like scales and such different target audiences that from our perspective it was like probably just better for both games because the distinction and like the controversy around the naming you know just got a lot of press for both of us and so I think it about being just kind of like this funny thing that was good overall for exposure for both games we probably benefited more because we're a smaller studio and you know we're not already done but I think it was definitely helpful about yeah I hope so we got a good question here in chat from Lu Zhu who wants to know

during those play tests was there any specific things mentioned that helped you a lot or on the flip side was there anything that came up doing play testing that you ignored also thank you so much for what are their favorite games ever so yeah play test interesting feedback that shaped the course of the game or push back that you chose ultimately not to go against because it sort of conflicted with the vision I think generally that the main thing about play tests we're not like like a number statistic you know we don't use play tests like in a statistic way of like how many persons flavours riches a and does C and whatever it is more on qualitative side of things and as a result I think all feedback is useful though it's not to be necessarily interpreted literally like you know a player might find an area too difficult or might find

a mechanic confusing but the way they will express that might be you know might not be in such such a manner so it's a lot of interpretation so I don't know if there's anything we ignored per se as much just like you know sometimes people complain about something and we're like but actually the problem is here but making them feel you know but yeah I mean tons of things one week one real quick example just because you're here at the moment a lot of play test changes we're just simply like adding more lights to things like players weren't planning for people let's do you want the key entry points for each planet that has an escape pod and so like yeah just adding that big glowing border around the door all of a sudden players see it and they go through it and a lot of times it's just as simple as that is like hey this person played for two hours and they didn't find anything that's supposed to be obvious

how can we make it more obvious without like beating people overnight hmm yeah oh go ahead please one of the playtests things that we really impacted the game a lot and that was a lot of fun for us was when players figured out solutions to puzzles that we hadn't thought of there is like for example a place in the game where you're supposed to time things in a certain way to activate something I can't spoil it too much but then apply earth tried to use their ship to sort of like protect them from what was affecting them and we're like oh this is a really clever idea we should implement it so that that works and so a lot of times players came up with really clever solutions and we

decided to make sure that these solutions would be like sometimes these solutions worked already but we're a bit janky so we're like okay how can we make it you know more consistent so they don't feel like it's weird and you know so that was really great the fact that there's now multiple solutions to a lot of the puzzles yeah because we saw players that try things and we implemented it oh I'm so glad to hear that cuz I think you know one of the striking parts this game I was telling Brian earlier this week is that it sets up because of the way it's it allows for emergent gameplay it you know but all the systems interact such it sets up opportunities for like emergent stories to emerge that mirror like you know gravity or contact or Apollo 13 or something where you're just trying to figure out how to get your spaceship back in the air or something like I had a situation night or two ago that's very similar where I had you know there was a thing coming that I had to avoid and I

basically it was like a timed event and I used the ship to survive it and I think that's like a really striking part of this game was that it's so crazy to me that came out of the plates isn't because it seems so the core and integral to the to the concept of the game but you know I'm impressed to hear that yeah I just uh here's the I'm sorry Brian you're gonna go back in the black hole again no no no no don't all those actually a good example of a place where there's a lot of like weird ways to solve problems because if you're really good at using orbital mechanics you can use the black hole to slingshot yourself to all kinds of places that you're supposed to get to it you know less crazy ways so then yeah have fun testing in the game was like hey I wonder if I can get there with like a good well-timed slingshot and we always enjoy seeing speedrunners figure out weird ways they can use the physics of the game to know yeah it's it's really

remarkable there aren't more like and I imagine because it's so difficult but there aren't more games about playing with gravity and just link shouting around in space yeah there you go a classic for sure so what I meant to get on there before I got distracted by Brian's fantastic journey is we were talking this week also that this game has so many opportunities for storytelling and it also this it has a real character and atmosphere to it that is you know warm and convivial and like almost melancholy and you know very little that comes out of the game design or out of the actual planets it comes so much out of the music and the bits of writing and the bits of art design and so I'm curious to know like can you speak to the process through which you try to enrich this basically orrery with a character and mood and atmosphere like how did you create those feelings and emotions in a game about space it's a really good question I think there's a lot of different factors that went into it

I think from an art point of view we knew pretty early on that that was sort of the tone we were going for because it was already there even back in the alpha version of the game is that sort of camping in space I sort of like the end of summer and you know you're sitting by a campfire right so that sort of wistful like this is all coming to an end but it was a good run yeah and you know feeling like you're you're in this friendly outdoor setting that's all about exploring you know enjoying what you have while you have it and I think that was that was there very early and as we were revamping the art style we tried all kinds of things you know making alien stuff more alien or you know changing the scale of things to make it more epic or exciting and really in the end we kind of had to dial all that back because it ruined that feeling of camping in space and so in the end it was like alright what kinds of things do

you find at a camp what kinds of things do you see in a National Park and we referenced a lot of like the old national park add posters like the sixties which is also when NASA was really big so it's like fits really well with the NASA aesthetic and so a lot of it was just making the decision to make the art less exciting visually in order to make feel more comfortable and familiar which sort of enhances the alien feeling in the end is because it's that contrast but it's sort of counterintuitive that took us a while to figure that out yeah I'm embarrassed admit I didn't pick up on earlier there is a real like this is camp the down to light that makeshift uniforms and the patch together stuff and everyone's just kind of taking it easy a Casey Yano here in chat with a shout out there a big fan of that 3d boost II HUD thing that UI is great any was that tricky to design implement to give people a sense of how they're flying through space I imagine it must have been hard

oh yeah yeah we we tried a lot of different iterations for that and I'm glad that one works because that one was one of my little additions to the game they used to be like I think it's fun more and I was like what if it was just like a 3d like every axis was represented you could see in that direction and we tested it out and we're like oh yeah people get it now when they're flying up or down so glad you noticed nice yeah it's fantastic I something I've been wanting to get on to and maybe this is a good time to is sort of the business of how you get the word out about this I mean it seems like having the the buzz around the IGF and then now the GDC a must have helped but like how did you get how did you get this game in front of people who you thought would like it like did you was it a lot of marketing was it someone else's thing or did you guys do a lot of social media and stuff like how did you find the audience for this we weren't lucky enough that we had a really amazing fans

from the Alpha it was a it was a really amazing community to have that was absurdly support it was great to have them as sort of ambassadors for the game so I think we we had that massive advantage from the start and then an opponent of course like defects coming as an opponent as an opponent game you know it immediately gives a certain respectability and in the scene and so I think a lot of people just not like these two audiences sort of like helped but yeah I know it's players from play as you know monster Xue er yeah that that maybe I think it's also you know Annapoorna made a lot of

really smart decisions and I think one of the best things for us was being on game pass at lunch as he like he you know no one's heard about the game and it's the kind of game that you really have to dive into blind to experience at best press was really good for getting that initial wave of people who would advocate for us yeah you know those people are all spreading more to others just wonderful but that initial like people giving it a shot I think largely due to us do you think I just okay oh wow this is Bo Hollow it's full partner in from me yeah that's good right yeah every hour this game is like that you're like oh oh it's so good yeah thank God speed listen so yeah you talked about game pass being big I'm curious like do you think this

game would have done as well if it hadn't had access to a subscription service like game path like if you just put it out just like a so straight up pay to download title do you think you were done as well it's hard to say I think that it's possible it would have done as well eventually if my game pass definitely sped up the reception a lot yeah in terms of just it's the game that has to spread by people talking about it and he passed as a way to get a bunch of people talking about it really fast so it could have had a streamer it could have happened by chance my game pass was sort of a way to ensure that it would happen more quickly nice yeah I asked us like at the office we talked about in the industry talk about like house efficient services and sort of game pass esque offerings are gonna change the way people play games and find games and I'm always I'm always on the edge between whether it's it's it's

a wonderful thing to have access to those services because P can discover things without a lot of barrier to entry they can just dip in and check it out and at the same time it feels like maybe it might in a long term to value like the value of a game you can just get 200 for a monthly subscription I how do you guys think about it as this happens right in front of us I mean there is something to say about like particularly for a game like at a whilst this very experimental and that's best played not knowing about it like game pass is just perfect you know subscribe subscribe services are very useful I think there's definitely an interesting I think it's gonna push a certain amount of innovation and experimentation because if you have access to that many games maybe you don't want each of them to be just a slight twist on a previous game like you

might be more interested in shorter experiences you might be more interested in things that you might not have tried before because you weren't sure you when I joined them so I think it's gonna open very interesting avenues for games and in particular maybe also hopefully mean that we have less of a monopoly on you know selling games on different platforms yeah that'd be great um you keep calling us an experimental gaming and I totally agree like so much of what you've tried here in the systems and the way they interact is very experimental and it's like a wonder in some ways that it all works so well does but at the same time it just feels strange to hear you talk about this game that way because it's it's a game about exploring space and that seems like a fundamental category of what interactive entertainment could be and yet when I think about space exploration games or games that remind me of this game the

one that comes to my mind is like lunar lander which was decades ago so I mean it's it's hard to argue with you there aren't a lot of games like this there aren't a lot of games that try this blend of exploration and that kind of things like why do you think that is and and beyond that like do you think you'll continue to I make games like this going forward the quick aside it's also worth noting that when the project started in 2013 that was before things like elite dangerous a no man's sky and right love these new space games it's kind of been a resurgence that were now like a part of but what project was conceived they were like no space games for a long time yeah yeah yeah no it was a date and also like at the time games were a lot more hand hold II like the project started when [Music] Zelda Skyward Sword yeah just came out and so I think that that shows sort of

like where the industry was up and where the sort of like the most games sort of like gravitated towards fairy and holdy linear approach to things and it's really exciting I mean delay to sell that being proof that I find E while we worked on out allowance a lot of other people also gravitated towards open exploration and more trusting the player and I think that that's a big thing that games such as Dark Souls have brought to to the scene it's this idea that as designers we can trust the players not to be you know now we don't have to tell them what to do at every step every step of the way we can just present them with fun environments and great mechanics and they'll experiment and try and they can figure it out on their own Lewis great UI and a lot of play tests

to make sure it is understandable but I was talking to UM Hugo Marco Martin amid software kind of about the same thing he was talking about how well you know again fighting that instinct just make everything easy and yeah right say no there was a trend where games couldn't be hard which is worse isn't words you should go in there please go in there oh please please go in dark ramble please fine fine it's for the stream this is fine anyway yeah oh yeah this is interesting just cuz I've heard Triple E Deb's talking about the same thing a different way and it's interesting that like the Dark Souls lesson was kind of that alright I'm in yeah the Dark Souls lesson was good yeah man good luck in

there yeah I think it is certainly interesting to see this to see what feels like a renewed and reinvigorated wave of teams you know Studios and developers trusting players and not sort of hand-holding them through the game I wonder I wonder if we'll ever go back around the other way you know like will there be a backlash where suddenly there's a huge emphasis on intuitive tutorial design or streamlined tutorial design or what have you oh wow Brian you nailed it good work yeah so but for now what I kind of wanted to get at was do you do you feel rewarded by pursuing this like philosophy of game design and like we you are you excited to continue doing it like to you are you still interested in making games that are about exploration and not holding the players hand about discovery or are you excited to work on something that is maybe a little less experimental I think we're all kind of

everyone's was a very difficult game to make we often joke that it's exactly the type of game you should not make like our advice to people is don't make our wilds it's really just not a good idea okay it's just there's a lot of tools in game development that are built around assumptions like the assumption that you're going to make things flat because that's what you do you're gonna have a flat plane and you're gonna build everything on that flat plane and when you're building these spherical planetoids there just aren't tools to do that and see you guys yourself it's a lot of little things like that like game engines are built around static objects that don't move and anything that it like interacts with physics is marked as not static because it's different and needs to behave differently everything in ever Wilde's is not static so we couldn't rely on a lot of things that static objects can do and optimizations that

apply to static objects because nothing is static well lighting lighting yeah we you know lighting is all based on like either lights or everywhere our lights are localized but we wanted lights to be spherical and that's you know not really how they're built and so a lot of the game was just like okay we need to do this thing that every game does because that's what you do in games but we can't do it because game engine or a 3d modeling software just doesn't support spheres or movement unlike a fundamental level yeah I get so that's like at least from an asset creation from an art side of you that was like that biggest hurdle that we had to overcome is that just the tools are not there and we had to make tools to do it all right did you this is a silly question I guess but did you make those tools available to anybody else they sound useful or is it all internal it's all internal we've

talked about maybe trying to package them to make them accessible to more people yeah you know like any internal tools there's a lot of shortcuts that you use and we realized that would be a lot of work we haven't done there but if a lot of people asked honestly like that that is something we would we would happily try to take the time to do I would love to see more spheres and video games here's the best Frank get in there nope nope nope don't be chicken get in there wait just just fly inside the planet it's good that's a good look I'm back see flying come on let's go yeah well uh well then III hope you uh I hope you find something there's a little less strenuous to work on your next project navigator thing the

left-hand corner position well you know it's great Safari I'm yeah that whole UI is great we should talk about that but also unbuckle and look down to your bottom right to find the eject button because you're gonna want that eject button at some point no is this on the console down the console there's like a little thing you flip up nuts to the left this this is good just a good closet anyway there's an eject button on the console tell me about that eject button who put that in there and why I'll take partial credit for that please I spent a lot of time working on the ship and one of the big goals for the ship was to make it feel like it's it's sort of twofold it's both the players home we want the player to feel like it's a safe space and that they can you know like have a lot of useful things there so it's not just jump out of it and be on your way but we also wanted the ship to interact with all the systems in the game and so at some point we were like hey we should make it so

the ship can't like break apart so if you slam you know one of the sides of the ship it can actually get pulled off and you know your ship can damage and you end up with those cool Apollo 13 moments where it's like you're spiraling out of control and so we took a lot of effort to like go back and make the ship modular so that we could break it apart and you know have it actually systems can break individually and all of that and while we were doing that we were like hey we've just made it so the cockpit can just like pop off the front of the ship I don't we just put a button in that does that just for fun okay pressing it too much so we kind of had to hide it a little bit so it wasn't yes but this object see what does see this whole planets so good yeah and also like I love the eject button I'm so glad you put it in these little these little light-up indicators on the HUD he's like very analog thrust indicators where

those also yours or was up with him as a result of playtesting her so I can't member those were in the original build or not know the original alpha ship was pretty bare-bones yeah I think a lot of us on the team are a big fan of diegetic UI stuff that's like built into the game itself and not just on the screen so that's why I like a lot of the HUD elements only appear when you put on your helmet just because it's actually like a thing in world that's being projected we make an exception for button problems just because they don't learn how to play the game and that's makes sense for that to be in worlds but yeah we we took the we went the extra mile to make all of the ship and all the player tools communicate information physically instead of just something popping up on screen because it makes you feel like an astronaut you feel like interacting with these instruments and you feel like you're a part of the world and you know that's the same reason why I could put your body in the keys when you look down you see your feet is to make you feel like you're there which

heightens the sense of space hmm did you learn anything fun about physics or space exploration while you're making this video game what seems like a fun project to work on if you're really into NASA oh yeah our technical artist Logan programmed all the shaders and so things like the atmospheres around planets that's a shader that Logan wrote and a lot of research went into like how do atmospheres work yeah because it perfect it to look it's too pretty much just receive light in the same way and so a lot of times during the project we would take a dive into something like that it's just like all right for the black hole and burn a hollow like that's just actual black hole mass yeah that's what that's so exciting to me like maybe it's childish but there just aren't a lot of opportunities to put your face inside a universe and see what a black hole does and this is one of them and I'm so glad to hear you guys put

some work and research into actually making that look what it might actually look like balls good luck I was about to ask Brian distract me with this beautiful planet shucks well anyway we're coming to the end of our hour we got about 15 minutes left folks in chat if you have any questions about this game or about its development or about what their deaths are gonna be on sue now please put them in chat and we would be very happy to relay them Brian you're doing great do you have any pressing questions no yeah yeah well you're killing it you're doing great what could go wrong how are you guys

feeling about all these all the awards and coverage and stuff do you feel like that was a right well see I love you Grover yeah I would be happy to so after winning the IGF a few years ago and now I believe you're up for game of the year at game developers Choice Awards the Best Debut best divine best design innovation and the narrative war that's that's a good slew of honors how are you feeling about all this awards coverage and what it has done for the game has it been just unalloyed good has it been worth the effort of investing in that kind of coverage or has it been in any way interesting awesome to be considered that sort of awards and yeah it's been it's been the reception both critically and playerwise has been wonderful

personally like I mean it's a huge honor to receive Awards being some of the fun letters we've been receiving and just heartbreaking wait wonderful that they would be personally my the greatest reward is like hearing about like you know parents playing with their kids and their kids wanting to learn about science or becoming astronauts and that sort of thing has been incredible yeah I'm so glad to hear it what is it do you have any strong concerns at this point about supporting this game I mean you're talking about porting it and something like it's still a lot of work as you continue to work on a bike in terms of support is it just patching and bug fixing now or do you have anything else you want to do with outer wiles as a piece of media we've we've actually made some changes posts launch maybe maybe

more changes than we should have oh how come tell me about it we we've tweaked a level design in several areas to try and like help players figure out some of the in-game solutions to things because we just didn't have a test data and once everyone's buying it get more data I added some like fun little features like the ability to doze off at campfire surpassed time a little bit more quickly we just met we always wanted to do but we didn't have time to release so just we're still fiddling with it a bit it's definitely it's hard to put down nice the I know this is not necessarily the first game for all of you I'm sure you have a variety of experience on your belt but this being having its origins as a student project and now hitting this so much far later it feels like there must be some like well-deserved like honor and like like pride but also like is there any is it are you stressed

at all about making your next game after this it seems to have done very well it's certainly being well-received by folks like us and now you guys are gonna have to move on to something else is there any like wait about a sophomore slump or any concern about what you're gonna do next or this is just all good vibes and optimism yeah it's a hard thing although I think we're all it's a little bit of both right because the the positive response to the game mean we we found an audience that wants this type of thing which is the type of thing that we want to make generally speaking yeah so that's super excited to see that there is an audience for a weird game like a lot it's but it's also like our wilds was a seven-year project and a lot of blood sweat and tears went into making it and it's very daunting to think of going

through that process again and Tia di I can only imagine well we are Oh actually Bryant you were looking at that writing a minute ago we should talk about this writing it's great yeah right so like let's start with with the writing and go from there like what can you guys speak to what influenced the design process for this kind of like totally to me at least being very uneducated an American like relatively novel way of writing and flowing sort of curlicue scripts like where did that come from if you know we you know we work very closely with our writer Cal State patient we all the writing in the game and one of the sort of like one of

the prompts we had the idea of making text something you would explore the same way you explore everything else in the game huh so we wanted to make it spatial we wanted to make it explore and Kelsey had a year of sort of like using her own way of sort of like taking notes and sort of like so this drenching kind of like forum style interesting well you sort of like this linear writing it's more of a like you know it's a branching form of conversations that was yeah that I think he was mentioning it was kind of influenced by her own way of taking notes and so we did that and then played with the visuals and I think we looked

at a lot of difference influences and me ended up picking spirals as the best way to do that but yeah Chelsea's done an amazing job creating the writing and building like so much so much characters into the story is right because none of the writing is just backstory all of the writing is usable useful information that you can actively use in game yep really important for us to do that and we learned that as we develop the game but like there is such layers are so used to see writing as the lore as you know bonus thing that you just read if you want to when you have the time right and so like we had to sort of teach that suppliers and you know make sure they understood that like know everything you read has actual like

you can use it it actually talks about something in the world and you can use that but as a result you know it could have made the writing very dry and so we really see was difficulty we need so much like character and humor and drama and romance into that writing that is about you know telling you dry facts about the world yeah no absolutely I think Brian can attest I can I can sometimes be a harsh critic of writing in videogames and I think like the writing in this game is is really affecting for how sparse it is you know it is so much just like info on the walls environmental storytelling yet nevertheless whoever you know the writer was able to like really bring a sense of character and like pathos to these wall scribbles it's a like I think that's great and I don't understand no other game developer has has not paid for this

goal is you guys take the ancient civilization trope and manage to flip it on its head and instead of all the writing either feeling like it's coming from scientists or that scientist if it feels like if ancient writing feels like it's come from inside a world it'll be scientists or something or people who would be leading logs or it's it's presentable intelligible gibberish be reinterpreted by the character you're piloting it's here it's people just feels like people it feels like notes that could been left five minutes ago and the translation I can't doesn't get in the way of that and I've got a lot it makes me want to learn more about these people instead of and to say it a tuba favorite game series Robledo series both that both my time each annually and metaphors got more less and less interest in the more I learned about them because everything felt very sterile and and I will start wrapping things up today I'm a little

tired my ship is gone error doing great yeah thank you all for watching the G shouldered appreciate it if you click the follow button to get notifications about when we go live with some great game developers uh you check our archives we just wrapped up a stream earlier today with the folks from control at remedy and you can watch the developers Choice Awards on March 8th starting in the evening that even because I don't have the exact time yeah I don't I don't think it's March 8th you want to support them yeah yeah I'm tired Oh Bert yeah so if you want to attend in person if you have a GDC pass everyone can attend if you want to watch online in this comfort of your home you just stay tuned this twitch channel um and that's when you hit the follow button other than that that's all I've got for today thank you to bone and

Wesley for joining us and if they have more questions about the making of this game where should they ask them nice we're still waiting for it I'll put it just go don't we have a small team so we do see your emails yeah and we also we don't participate a lot in it but we check that some as well at a wild Severin cool very cool anyway with that I will go and have a nice day everyone by skin is great