GDC Plays Ghostrunner with One More Level

[Music] you're alive can you hear me they are already looking for you yeah sure hello everyone so my name is radhikratushnik i am game director of ghost runner relax your implants are still adjusting to the software i'm impressed everything is good except yours i believe i don't

[Music] another sector god your software is a mess i've rebooted your exam hi there i've rebooted your acceleration module you should be able to squeeze through that turbine you can use acceleration while in the air i'm talking initiating the sensory boost oh guess don't stay

focused oh i see i was still muted because i'm still getting used to my hi everyone back to the start of the demo let's pretend that didn't happen my name is bryan francis i work at gdc and a little website called kamasutra um let's throw the introduction again radik take us from the top how are you doing thank you hi everyone my name is radek katushnik i am game director of ghost runner yeah together with me we've got a couple of developers so yeah i'm the damian or damian and i work as a 3d lead artist at one more level hello my name is martin and i am a leader of the designer at one more level uh hello there my name is ian and i'm the narrative designer and writer for guest runner looks like we have a pretty active chat

today uh chat i can see your stuff uh we i did turn down the audio levels for you uh for the game um we're going to be asking taking your questions and asking them for the folks and ghosters no we are not doing speed tech you are about to watch someone who was playing the game for the first time is going to die about precisely 17 times uh i know that number because it shows up at the end of the demo um but yeah if you have any questions we're happy to pass them on to the team and we're here to talk about the making of ghost runner which comes out very soon all right radic uh what are we looking at here like why did you and your team want to make ghost runner um and what what how did this game sort of get started sure so uh obviously we are looking at you dying a lot of times oh yeah i get ready for that besides that he says that uh yeah so our previous title called god's trigger it was a game which we developed in unity and it was a top-down action co-op game heavily inspired but by hotline miami

so it was also one hit one kill that mechanic which is also here like in ghost runner this is like the core mechanic of our game so we decided to you know to push to a little bit to something new that we wanted to make uh take this uh one hit one queue mechanic and to deliver the game um which would be kind of different so we put it to the another perspective to the first person perspective which is something new for us because we haven't done any first person game before we've also switched to the android engine for which was also totally new for us but because it was the first game uh for many of us on this engine uh we are lucky that damien uh our lead 3d artist who is today with us who is amazing in in unreal and that's that was also our main decision that we wanted to push that visuals to the

next level to one more level let's say but yeah so what we wanted to do is to you know bring the new quality to that uh to to to our team that we wanted to have like a nice very nice looking game with this kind of in the uh creative vision that we are you know it's it's not like a triple a game in terms of gameplay in terms of what you are doing actually in the game uh we are free to do what we wanted to do we wanted to you know uh make that one hit me one hit one key mechanic something add something unique to that mechanic so i think that's that was our main goal i think at least at the very beginning but at the very very beginning it was just let's make first person game on unreal engine with in a cyberpunk theme so that was our our premise let's say at the very beginning yeah right on um we can talk more about

ghost runners like uh cyberpunk vibe and world in a bit uh damian i want to spin to you as a level designer um something i said before this meeting started and you're seeing me horribly like reflect it um what i think is interesting about one hit one kill is it means that even combat there's actually not i wouldn't say there's combat in this game there's just platforming um and everyone that you kill is just sort of like they're they're just a little platform that you have to reach in order to achieve your goal they just have to be positioned a certain way and they're trying to kill you um uh what was your like experience making levels for this game because i've played a little bit more of it i won't be able to discuss much more of what i played but i wanted to uh hear from you like what was your experience making levels where you know like like i said where it fits the platforming and where enemies are positioned in such a way that they guide players through these pretty high velocity situations without uh losing track of the situation as you will see me lose track of the situation but that's not your fault that's mine uh yes that's the i'm sorry that's the question for mark

martian i'm so sorry damian i'm so sorry yeah yes it's it's okay actually the topic is connected actually damien can i have a break in the you know visual side and player more on that side but uh designing the levels yeah so as radix said our blimps game was it was leaguer and also was one kill so as a designers we had plenty of experience designing that kind of game to be fair to guide the player in the right way so actually to the details maybe you know we made sure that everything that is um interests the player like where to go and what to do is like mostly in front of you you don't have to look around that much and you make split-second moment-to-moment moment decisions seeing those things like you see the next element you see the next highlighted platforms like in highlighted here in yellow as you can see this is the one of the main colors that

guide you know the water runs earlier and you know how how much time passes before the enemy shoots it's indicated by the indicated by the particle so maybe i mean elaborating that also uh so in the area when thinking about the space i was thinking and every designer i think was thinking about the movement you know like this is one jump this is one slide this is uh one uh that's you know thinking about what's the move set to pass through this uh space it's it's like this specific space requires this and this so instinctively we connect those spaces with the tutorials so we don't stop the player too much you know everything is i think fluid in that regard yeah and basically also taking inspirations from the games like you know doom titanfall search you know all the good stuff that works and mixing it in with the things

we know yeah so basically that's that's the gist of it yeah this space is interesting the word that i'm running through right now as you can see in this footage this has a lot of this is where the game starts to open up and like give players more choices um there's like as you can see the curved wall i'm about to run on like like you said players are pretty like have some tunnel vision in this game that keeps them pushing forward how do you like still like help them like move you know they're essentially doing this in a bunch of cubes maybe they're long rectangles like but sort of how do you help players like get that yeah you know we place in point of in the vision of the player the points of interest so you can see the you see you see the uh yellow yellow signs the highlighted spaces you know and here you can see the grapples you know you look for the next look for the next enemy you hear the sounds you know and uh it's it's just you know it's a lot of testing too actually you know it's not just that you think it through and make a level that's

it you know actually this this particular level uh we were making like many many iterations before you know you you were playing what you what we see here yeah a lot of iterations a lot of iterations actually you know it's like i just count actually so getting a lot of play tests you know listening feedback and looking at the players what they actually do and where they look as you can see so they i know that they are not lost and do what what's what's supposed to be done here and go where they are so supposed to go and to be fair in the game so it's not punishing for you when you die you replace a lot of checkpoints that comes from the experience we're making previously out of checkpoints between obstacles in between combat spaces makes you makes you not regret dying buying is a part of the main loop

so you have the enemy placement if you don't see them you know ah there's a guy okay next time i know he's there it's in the first time if the level is more open we tend to use objective markers as you saw the previous arena you know so that's extra help for getting the player that's like the easy way to go yeah that's the cheap cheap way out but mostly yeah in the most important information yeah but you know also also you know it's important that we have the those instant restarts which is like you can immediately can come back to the action right after dying so we are not like breaking the loop it's like the part of the loop has mentioned as much you mentioned before that you are dying but it's we are not punishing the player it's like a part of the learning how to play this game and you are getting better and better so that was our our design for this that it's the same as we did on god's trigger

it's inspired by hotline miami of course this is you know you are in with this tension we are not breaking the music for example in the uh background it's playing constantly so you feel that it's like sometimes you can if you are fast enough you can uh just press r for restart without even seeing the uh death screen for example so yeah right on so before uh i would love to ping damian and jan for some questions um but i do want to get a question from chat uh while everyone here and chad is praising kevin i don't know who kevin is i've met kevin again um uh lucha land gd would like to ask uh what were some of the challenges creating the game um and i'd like to invite each of you to share one specific challenge you remember um that you would like to talk about with the with folks so like represent each of your fields so i can start i think so for me

as i'm also leading the whole team of one more level it was the process of you know switching to the new engine that was easier than i thought but it was hard it was like um not everyone were you know sure that it's the right move that maybe we should make another game in unity maybe we shouldn't jump to another engine for right away but it was a good decision for us because it really works well for us so that was our decision but we had to make it um uh who's next uh damien what was your biggest challenge yeah so yeah i guess the whole game is something new for us it's totally different from our previous title it's a totally new perspective so totally new art style totally different set of the tools that everyone at the team needed to learn obviously we are a

fairly small team and the game for that uh kind of a small team is very ambitious and there's a plenty of locations and interesting environments also different like uh different uh sets of assets for different areas right so it was very challenging for us to kind of get through the design process and the process of creation of all the art assets all the sad dressing like i said we are very smart but we i i guess we did pretty good on that front and even to this day we still tweaking stuff obviously like marcin said we put a lot of as a team a lot of work to make sure the game plays well and this is definitely gameplay first title so all the visuals serve to improve the gameplay to make all the action very very readable

so you never get stuck in the levels so this is definitely a challenge you have to consider all the lighting in the scene all the assets you place around the part of the player and uh yeah we still also this is not not my part as a team of people focusing on the visuals we still want to add to the story uh so this is also our challenge in this kind of a game where you definitely don't want to stop player uh marching let's third to you uh what was one of your biggest challenges so i will totally agree with the previous points that guys said uh and i can elaborate on this actually the story parts a bit because when designing the levels we were keeping in mind what was the dialogue there you know so uh basically as we talked before the stream actually a bit if you is uh fluid so there's

combat time for combat there's time for parkour there's time for exposition so you have uh you can breathe it's not just frantic action all the time you know it was and making the game fair and uh as you as we were as we were talking uh where to go you know so it's easy and fun to play where it has to be you know and challenging what it has to be not the way to be precise and well that that was the maybe the hard part to buy fields more specifics like design designing maybe boss fights you know what was a bit challenging because one kid makes it a bit challenging to design one but i think they turned out pretty well that's one thing maybe the other thing would be to survive a fall like that you know to make the game as fun as possible as uh as cool as possible you know

everything fresh you know because so that was the challenge to make it all you know come together as maybe right now and also upgrading system that was something which we have like you know how can you upgrade your character when you got only one health point that was also some kind of design challenge for our gameplay designers maybe if i can i could because there are no programmers with us so i could say that making the game snappy as radix said like the race pawn is instant it goes to them for making it like you know fluid and you could say you know the as you can see this is like the effect of the hard work yeah right on i want to give y'all a chance to weigh in yawn um uh obviously we haven't even gotten to talk about that ghost runner takes place in a pretty neat world you got this tower that's like the last passion of humanity um what was your sort of we're in a very

narrative set piece right now actually so what was your biggest challenge yeah what was your well basically basically diamond already named my biggest challenge because the game is very much about gameplay first so how to implement a story into the game that's all about staying in motion and rushing ahead so uh in a way there's a limited amount of tools you can use to deliver a story in games such as this because there's no really time to stand around to listen to people talk to read things basically you want to focus on the living a story that's uh you know engaging in a way that will grip you even during a fight during traversing the levels so uh martin mentioned the pacing that that there is some place for the fighting some place for platforming some place for delivery of the exposition and i think it came together really well if i do say so myself and i definitely can praise martin and other level designers for delivering the great facing but for me

it was you know the overall shape of the story for it to stand on its own legs and to be able to be delivered in this fashion during the running basically because most of the directions you have with the characters is not face to face basically they are just uh voices in your head so also writing the dialogue in a way that it's engaging and uh it's you know it delivers the exposition in a way that feels natural and it it it feels fun and complements the action instead of getting in the way of the action i think that's the best way to put it how to make the story you know stand on its own merit but uh complement the action instead of getting in the way uh guys i just want to say by the way chat is incredibly hyped for this game whenever we get to you know have a games community in the chat you know it's always fun and exciting you know when they're when folks who love the game pop in but these these folks who are watching with us today are uh just talking about how excited for

they are when this thing when it comes out they're actually also talking about um speed running which is a really fun conversation we can move to which uh kind of affects all of your work um uh speedrunning is a different kind of way to play a game it's you know it's about efficiency it's about skips it's about uh runs and percentages um and uh um i'm curious what your experience was like prepping this game and sort of going oh hey like this might appeal to the speedrunning community but we don't want to make them the only people who can play our game like do you have any thoughts about building games that are popular with that crowd um so yeah so it was like we knew that this game had potential for speedrunners just like our previous one god's trigger there were also uh some some that there is there was also some potential in terms of speed running worth goes on when we first showed that up on last gamescom last year it was gamescom 2019. that that was the place

where we showed the game for the first time and there were a few guys who were just over all the time they were just you know coming by and playing the levels and they were starting to you know uh putting their own phones and recording their times and stuff like that and when we were looking at them when they in like they were playing like five or six times in the role through the game and we we saw that oh my god they are starting to be better players than we are of our own game that was the moment when you oh my god this is the potential for this game and after you know releasing the demo on steam where the community of speedrunners showed up and they really enjoyed the game they gave us you know very valuable feedback uh we knew that this is something we should uh you know work with because they found their own tactics on how to

move our character and we didn't want to you know remove it from the game or fix it because they really enjoyed it and at the same time we were trying to use their own techniques when we were playing when we were testing the game and we at the same time we were really enjoying it too so that was a new way of playing the game right now we are we have we are also pretty good at speedrunning this game oh that's fun no yeah uh damian the merchant okay so real quick guys so the demo uh i've got uh we're just gonna look at the menu here for a couple seconds it's a beautiful menu and then you know what we're having a good conversation i'm gonna run the demo back to the start folks like cube0 and chat are asking who plays a demo five or six times in a row guess what it's going to be us today except i'm not playing it this is pre-recorded footage because it's really hard to play games and talk to people at the same time um damien and marchand after after experimenting that you know watching people speedrun just your demo um uh um oh my god metal live says they're sitting here with 70 hours in the demo um uh so i hope you all are excited about that but yeah what's your

experience like okay now you know like this is sort of how some people might play your game and it's a very high level very different from the average play how did that impact your work as you got ready to finish this game uh yeah so maybe i i'll start uh so yeah definitely there was a lot of unexpected ways to complete the game at least that i noticed when watching people playing the game uh so it definitely changed the way we thinking about addressing the levels how how we approach uh approach thinking about the paths the player might take we definitely try to waterproof kind of other level so the player can not or can but we it's more in a designed way go through different routes for example yeah so we obviously pay more attention to details like that i'm not really sure it kind of affected

the way we kind of construct the visuals i guess when someone tries to uh get the best time on a particular level they're not really interested about the visuals when they replay the level so yeah we kind of still try to make the game appealing to every player so you don't have to worry about that if you're not speed ranked but i'm i'm sure that there's not much that will get in your way if you try to get the best score like we said before this is gameplay first game so you don't find like constant stuff that constantly block you so yeah i would say it's a very very speedrun friendly game definitely yeah we're trying to fix some out of

bounds yeah yeah yeah but not like something on the main road but you know we want to manage to to know to close at all it's like it's impossible okay so so maybe i can elaborate more about about that as radix said we were in contact with running community actually and yeah when we were designing the levels we were thinking about ways you can play them faster you know it's not it's not just about you know doing a speed runner it's just about you can figure out some a bit of shortcuts you know it's not like a major problem and yeah yeah we we were thinking about it and also as damian said uh this is a game not only for speedrunners you know if you if you are not you know running around you know doing out of band stuff you know you i think you will enjoy

enjoy it too and yeah yeah we were very surprised and very happy about the result you know the demo gave us plenty of feedback also plenty of things to think about yeah so yeah we were thinking about making the levels appealing to many people actually not just be droppers yeah marcin before we get off speed running and also by the way i now understand who kevin is so watching chat say hi kevin uh uh i get it now um uh i saw him and i in my head i said hi kevin i just had to let you finish your thought um so the the so what what is a skip that you obviously want to patch out and what is a skip that you think oh we should let that stay in there's actually a little skip that i developed for myself you'll see it later on now that we're running back through the footage again um yeah where i there's a point where you're supposed to grapple and i just accidentally kept dashing through this spot um but i'm curious like what's a skit so what's a skip that you need you go okay that's good that's high skill and what's a skip

where you go that's not fun we need to get that out or it's going to like we don't consider that something like the game yeah that's a very good question you know it also it depends on the situation actually you know there are plenty of out-of-bound situations or missing collisions stuff like that it's like you know it depends on the situation you mostly you you fix that but you don't have to like touch every hole the main thing is to keep the game fun if you are having fun and you are not breaking it like going crazy making bugs you know we don't want to stop the player asean said and uh and the guys you know there's there's there are no men not much plenty of captions here so you know it depends on the situation actually yeah it's like more like when someone is trying to break the collision like you know when we have like a wall and the floor and let's say that they are pushing into the collision and

doing that they are out of bounds so this is something that we are fixing but for example when we have like a normal gameplay situation but you can for example skip some enemies or or you know when you don't have to use for example that grapple but because you are you can jump use using the ledge boost jumping you can jump on the really you know big distances this is something which we are not patching so you are you are able to do it using all the speed runners techniques you are able to move pretty fast and you don't have to use like all the walls for example which are indicated to use you can skip some some some gaps some some uh some walls etc so this is what we are leaving as it is chad would like to know if you guys are getting rid of the triangle skip each card has a built-in lock i don't know what that is unfortunately because as you're seeing i am not a speedrunner i am not good at video games

uh i'm okay at apex legends but um uh yeah whatever triangle skip is they would like to they're concerned it's gonna get patched out yeah we wish to fix it to be honest actually you know it's not that simple yeah yeah because so maybe not for the release yeah but we will see gotcha situation into the elevator yeah i get it yeah yeah yeah we stole it like 17 seconds or 16 seconds in the first level so easy to fix actually here not so fun well hey maybe maybe it just gets too hard you know maybe maybe maybe it just gets put off for another day uh um chat's got some great fun i'm so like it's so much fun to see

players just like get so excited about something it's like like something from a small team that's not out yet um you know like it's like ubisoft you know like big companies your ubisoft's your activisions they they you know can spend thousands of dollars on marketing and these guys this this chat is full of people who are just like oh wow like y'all have played this demo for hours and it's like their enthusiasm is infectious um but i uh so as much as i want to answer other questions from chat i do need to get through some dev focus questions because like i said we're kind of a dev focused channel um uh though they do want to know about merch so i'm gonna suggest that for any questions about merch you take that uh full for if you guys have a discord for social media um i suggest that question for sure um for my uh damian i want to talk about a 3d art thing so i was shocked by um uh um uh i am only running an i5 processor on a gt970 uh which is not a powerhouse machine i'm working on i'm going to do an upgrade soon um but i was i got this game demo running and i you saw me foots with the settings at the beginning and i went oh

this is running great like the footage we have is really smooth um uh it's thankfully like my cpu is even handling like the all the stuff we're doing right now okay it's giving me some trouble and other stuff lately what um when you're making art like this i know one challenge is make you know for these vibrant beautiful 3d settings it's making sure that they can still you know uh making environment assets that also don't you know especially when speed is involved especially when the frame rate you know is something to be managed like what is sort of your what was your practice as this game's 3d artist for a first person high speed game to make sure that like stuff could be beautiful but also not be a memory hog or not be a um yeah not be a hog on resources and not be too expensive you know so that players can play this game on cheaper uh machines so there's no simple answer to that question but there are a couple like maybe main parts uh main main areas where we focus obviously texture density and the amount of texture we put

into the game among triangles and i guess overall level complexity also the lighting is very important so we use unreal which is using kind of a mixed way of writing stuff so it's not all real-time writing likes that are not that important are break and it's pretty cool because with that you can get like a very nice looking global illumination which is very cheap for your hardware basically you're taking out light maps and these are stored like a static texture yeah so that's that's something that really optimizing optimizing is optimizing the lighting we make sure that we don't go overboard level geometry however modern hardware can handle a lot of that stuff and uh we have a really complex scenes uh in the editor we kind of uh made like uh

over uh basic guidelines how many draw calls and how many triangles we want to put in as soon as some things are more comp demanding on your hardware definitely but we test the game on the wide array on the of the target hardware and try to get the best possible results with that we also optimized the game for the uh consoles so that's give us a lot of like performance stats and profiling obviously uh yeah there's a lot of stuff that our programmer is constantly working on when it comes to the optimizing ai optimizing a lot of enantiomeric times and stuff like that and more complex stuff that i don't really understand yeah yeah so we basically we play the game all the time we have a

lot of performance stuff we have a lot of feedback from the players that play the game and thanks that we can really put a lot of work into optimization and making sure the game runs the best as we can it's also very important due to the fact we also support ray tracing so with by tracing when you turn it on it's a additional cost for your hardware so you want the base game to run as well as possible before adding that additional performance hit yeah so that's another reason that we put a lot of hard work into optimizing the game yeah we don't have like maybe i will go back into the asset art asset optimization part we give people a lot of freedom and this is also the reason why we

was we were we were able to create this amount of uh level art and art assets in such a short time as we we have very experienced people working basically we made already a guts trigger together so we kind of a small team and can communicate very fast so if there's something wrong with the game uh you can we can directly communicate and uh basically in the matter of hours we can fix stuff so there's uh not much overhead in their communications so so yeah i guess that's the reason uh that's that's uh the reason as well right on yawn i'm gonna pivot to you because i have a question i've played a little bit more of this game so i've gotten to see where some of the narrative goes and like we were i was about to tell you before the call i'm uh there's things that hooked me as a as a story lover in games already i i have this thing there's just these games that come along every few years are like these really great first person like

motion games um god i'm forgetting the name of the other one i have but it's on steam uh uh and it was one of the first games we streamed on this channel i'm like wow these games like actually like do a lot to hook me in and pull me in but one of the challenges i do find in this genre is um uh obviously like we discussed before like the game it's gameplay when your gameplay first one hp like um uh there's not much opportunity to stop sit and stare and just story though we're going to see a narrative sequence that happens later again and we've already seen it earlier in the stream um my experience was i was impressed by how like some pretty impactful dialogue was coming through later on and it was timed well enough that still like it like i got through you know i was rushing through a section of a level pretty confidently and the dialogue didn't rush past like i didn't rush past the dialogue it didn't get cut off so i'm curious what some of like how you can still what are your thoughts on getting character and getting important story bits through without um uh sacrificing you know in those short amounts of time

like what are your thoughts as a narrative designer about accomplishing that well basically that's the main challenge and you have to play and replay and replay the level over and over and tweak and tweak and cut stuff out and move stuff around and shuffle it until you're pretty confident that it works and when it works you can feel it and uh i think uh well it also has to do with the pacing that martin mentioned because if you don't have any moments that you're able to uh say for 100 that all right i do have some time here to tell something important that won't be missed by uh by the player uh it's important to have points like that so for example what we're seeing right now is the cyber void section and uh in there there's uh less stuff happening you're not in immediate danger so it's a pretty safe bet to assume that

the player will be able to concentrate on the dialogue more and that's how we use it many times throughout the game as a sort of section that is able to deliver exposition and deliver the story in a more safe manner you know because it's as depending on how how fast you're going and depending on how much attention you're paying it's easy to uh you know just skip or overlook some uh finer points of the plot and uh those sections that are without without any fighting uh that they are a platform that we use to deliver the story in a more laid-back manner but as i said it's all about going back in there and tweaking it and seeing if it works and reworking it and uh well coming up with with the sequence of dialogue and putting everything in place that uh

guarantees you or at least gives you the best possible chance of uh working humanity yeah yeah uh radicand young is kind of a two-parter for you as a as a kind of like vision for the you know like what like you know you've made a world for your game you've made characters like we're finding out here about the relationships between some of them um what's kind of your interest like why why go for cyberpunk why what what what kind of characters were you hoping to explore with this like sort of what you know you've made a really cool like again great mechanics great levels like there's a lot of cool stuff happening there but what kind of excited you like why even tack on a story at all and which is to say like what kind of story were you interested in telling and what were you all really passionate about in this space because i could also see this game succeeding as just kind of an arcadey experience with a good like visual but instead you've you know layered on some pretty uh uh functional narrative stuff and i'm curious what we were passionate about on that front why can't this place yeah so for the let's see cyberpunk

worlds that's i think the reason that we decided to do it it was your subject just because we made you dive we are huge fans of that cyberpunk genre let's say that renaissance which is going on right now that we have a cdpr game cyberpunk 2077 we've got we had a new blade runner movie that was something that we we wanted to be a part of it to be honest uh just by the being uh you know gamers and fans of this uh of this genre that this is why we wanted to make a game in the setting but the other thing is that it really corresponds well with the gameplay which we had that we had uh this kind of cyber cyborg ninja character who can run through walls who can you know dodge the bullets slow down uh time let's say by you know because he's so agile he's so fast that he can dodge the bullet or deflect the world so this that was the first reason

and in terms of building the world why we even add a narration to this game because we just we wanted to be to be uh for for ghosts on it it's supposed to be like something more than just arcade game we wanted it to be something like not a triple a experience but that kind of indie premium experience that you can also enjoy the visuals that there you can also enjoy the story of this game so it's not like that it's not important part of this game it's like it's also an important part but of course our you know premise is gameplay first so it's like it's served to the gameplay that's what i think uh ian mentioned before yeah yeah you can also add anything about the world itself because it's also pretty interesting what we have here was not something like a usual like a generic cyberpunk stuff

oh yeah if i might add something i'd say that uh i'm pretty sure that we came up with a very um particular kind of cyberpunk because of the setting the dharma tower is um you know when you place the entirety of the game inside one mega structure you already are drawing a pretty powerful picture you know this is a mega structure this is one very particular place it's got its history it's not somewhere in the world it's this this place and this place is history and it came from some beginnings and already you know the story begins to write itself really when you come up with the visuals when you build this world the questions uh ask themselves and then you try to explore them and you learn more and more about this world and it begins to unfold in a way so yeah i wasn't with the project from

day one so uh i can't really speak for the for the first decisions being made but i was very happy to be able to join the project and uh well yeah for me it was very appealing from the start this vision of this giant structure this mega structure that's uh that's the whole world really and uh the stories that uh come to mind immediately when you think of a place like that well this abundance of that that's cool uh wow okay we're nearing the end of our time with y'all so i'm gonna get one more question in from chat which i think is a good design question uh before we go when we let this question play us out um where can they if they have more questions about this game where can they ask them where should they ask them oh totally our discord channel uh i mean it's right now very popular but you should join it of course right on um okay uh for our part uh we are game developers conference we are a place where people who make games get together

and talk about making games um if you'd like to learn hear more from us our facebook and g and twitter info is at the bottom if you want to see more streams from more cool game developers just hit the follow button on this channel for our part if you yourself are a game developer um uh like say these folks from stardust dev zero who i kind of want to get their question to so we'll see if we can squeeze it in um uh uh you might be interested in our master classes that is a new thing we're trying out this december um it's really cool you can take a class have some one-on-one time with great instructors like jonah loeb who's a great character who's a character artist who worked on games like skyrim and fallout um you can get narrative tips from people like susan o'connor um so that's kind of oops we're just gonna we're gonna leave this menu up for the last part of our stream if it would yeah there we go nope did it again okay um uh here we'll just leave the menu right there uh yeah so we're gonna get two more questions and like i said if you wanna check out this master classes you can check those out on our website um uh for jnssg would like to know what

was the decision behind removing the dash ability from the cyber void level which you just saw a couple seconds ago when i was in cyber void yeah the question is quite good because we decided that we don't want to give people as players as much you know speed running mechanics there because uh we wanted them to chill out a little bit on that sections where you can listen to the story when you can uh you know think about it a little bit uh it's mainly the pacing reason i think that's why we uh we like delete this dash ability and also wall running is not present in uh in cyber voice levels so that's the first thing i think the second thing is that we wanted to keep it constantly consistent sorry consistent

because we've got many types of vr levels over here sorry that's our code name for it but yeah but for for cyber voice levels in our game and you are doing many different things over there during the gameplay and we wanted to keep it consistent that you are not able to dash and you are not able to wall run over there so i think that's the main two reasons i know if martin if you want to add something yeah basically you got the point uh straight so yeah so that's that's the way it was designed to shield out the player and make it a bit different so so the play style of the cyber void is not the same yeah so it's not so rush you know that you don't have to be in such a hurry as in normal gameplay yeah chat seems to agree with you and uh um i i uh like i said i've gotten to see

a bit more of cyber void so i i think the reasons will become even more clear once they play the game but i can't talk about that because there's an embargo um anyway okay so we're gonna close out uh on a question from stardust dev zero uh they seem to be a newer game developer uh they would like to say that they're making a 2d puzzle platformer and they've never designed a full level before um what do they do and how do they tell when that level is fun what's your guys advice for uh stardust just give it to your friend and watch them playing that's our main i think advice right martin this is what we are doing so basically my advice and uh the main thing is to give it to somebody who doesn't know the game and actually it's not an expert you know and see what they do if they do and go where you want them to go and they are having fun you know you can

see it they will say things but you don't have to talk to them to know this you know you you see the what hands they are using what what the way they go where what do they listen to you know what's their emotions what's the most finger think about the player movement you know the level is good when those things click in and one thing comes from the other so when you show the dash then you use the dash in a different context so one thing comes from the other and the pacing you know so there's not too much stuff and to convolute it you know or too much action you know you know basically play test it play test it play test it and yeah yeah tweak it tweak it and then play to test it more let's tweak it more maybe it's basic advice but i don't know if it's that common that you know you you should start testing your game on something who is not involved into

the development like from very early days of of development that's our main advice you know we were in like a six months in the development and we had like first open play test i think yeah this this is something like that because we were starting at the beginning of the year and on august we had like a demo on on gamescom pretty pretty fast oh wow yeah also if i may not one thing don't don't be like attached to your design ideas you know if it works it works if it doesn't try something new you know it's yeah also something you might you might watch for is to not try to make levels look good at the design stage because you probably will have to scrap everything and start from the beginning yeah just uh some white boxes are fine right yeah yeah you

don't need graphics or anything you know and beta's like pretty immediately if it's fun without the graphic without the art it is good yeah right on uh well folks and chad thank you so much for hanging out with us uh uh tron devolta tron volta jnssg meta live uh it's been great hanging out with you uh the game is ghost runner it's out on the 27th uh that's correct right 27th sweet yeah um that's correct yeah yeah uh and it's a neat game and like i said i hope that some of you joined us in the future when we check out other neat games here on the gdc twitch channel with the people who make them that's one of our that's always what it comes back to gdc is it's the people who make games we want to give you the opportunity to hear from them with that have a good uh day everyone for y'all in poland have a good night uh thank you for joining us so late and thank you that'll be it bye everyone bye