GDC plays Hades with Greg Kasavin

good morning everyone good afternoon if you are joining us from the East Coast or Europe my name is Brian Francis I'm a contributing editor at Gamasutra comm and community manager for GDC um if you are watching us right now thank you for joining us um you hopefully are familiar with the game we have right here because it was just announced last Thursday at the game Awards the game is Hades from supergiant games it is available on the epic game store in early access which is a first for the company that made it supergiant games with me in the lower left hand corner of the screen is great cassavan from that company Greg how you doing good as you can see I am this is footage of me playing yesterday afternoon unfortunately we can't play live so if you're watching from home feel free to mock my terrible gameplay some of these some of these runs you're about to watch we're not great some of them were actually pretty good but what I'm actually very happy about and we'll get into this is that all of them are

actually very fruitful even if they didn't go well Alex you're here you're flunking away it's something for you why are you here hey Gamasutra calm I'm not quite sure why I'm here that I'm excited about this game Greg will you tell me real quick if you can why early access and how's that going for you I guess there's a weekend already but how's it going so far yeah that's the second part is is faster to answer it it's been we've been really really happy with how it's been going so far thankfully the you know even given the early access nature of the game the initial like sort of and it's a computer game as well like the initial sort of technical issues and technical challenges and so on were pretty minimal and so everybody was for the most part able to get into the game and start playing the the response we've been getting we've been really really happy with I will never ever take for granted just like having a group of our players

just actually like the stuff that we work on I will never take that for granted so every every time we launch a game and and our players say hey this is cool thank you for making this I'm like I wiped the sweat off my brow and I breathed a sigh of relief and thankfully that response has been really encouraging as for why early access we we conceived of that aspect of this game like with kind of as part of the whole package right from the start it was a high priority when thinking about what we wanted to make next after our last game pyar came out last year we were really interested in a game that we could like kind of develop out in the open once it reached a certain point and and make it the best game it could be by by gathering feedback along the way by kind of building it in partnership with a community for us it opened up so many possibilities not just from like a from a game design perspective but also even

from like a narrative perspective like from my standpoint as the writer on our games being able to work on a game whose story could unfold kind of a little bit more serially instead of having to sort of put the entire thing in beginning middle and end right in that initial launch so we think of this early access launch of hades almost like a pilot episode of a series or something like that where it's a lot of the setup you meet a lot of the characters and you figure out what the conflict is all about but the kind of resolution of the story is not all in the game yet and we'll roll out new characters and more events in the story over the course of the early access period along with just improving every other aspect of the game with any luck right on I'm gonna really cook I'm gonna do some housekeeping before we continue our interrogation sorry Craig folks in chat we are taking your questions we've already got folks asking about what other platforms Hades will be launching on Greg's address that elsewhere and there's also an FAQ that

talks about the other platforms we've dropped it in for you and chat which brings us but if you have questions we especially want to keep them developer focus so that Greg can talk about how the how supergiant brought this game to life hopefully said if you're a game developer at home you can learn yourself Greg which talking about platforms means we want to talk about the epic story I guess would you walk us through like the decision in behind going to the epic store and what was different about it compared to your past experiences with steam and other platforms yeah so like a lot of it does tie back to the early access nature of the game and that being like really key to the to the whole design from our perspective that you know if we were gonna develop this game out in the open for a while and we expect early access to to last for for more than a year on this game from our initial launch we we need to be able to move on it kind of really quickly we so we knew we couldn't we we knew for sure

that we weren't going to launch early access on a whole bunch of different platforms at the same time that would severely that would basically make it close to impossible for us to update the game in a timely fashion just with our so our team size is fewer than 20 people maybe there are some teams out there who can kind of who are really effective at patching games on many different platforms all at the same time but that is not a skill set that we possess as a small team and we felt it was vital to be able to focus on a single version of the game until we get the game to a really good state and then you know during that process we could start to look at other platforms toward an eventual multi-platform launch so that's very much our plan we so as we were working on Hades we got in touch with the folks at Epic and started to learn about what they were working on with their store and we became really excited for it it just seemed like a really good fit given the experiment that we were

making and the experiment that they were making like one of the factors with Hades as we want this game to be highly enjoyable to to watch as well as to play it's just a game designed around like immediacy and replayability among its factors you just kind of get in there and hopefully start having fun with it and have a unique experience each time and have the action be kind of very very readable if you're if if a friend is next to you or you're streaming it or something like that and part of the thing with a part of epics focus just in general and I think with the with the store is to to help enable content creator to like streamers and YouTube content creators to sort of like get a essentially get a piece of the action you've seen you you've seen the fortnight creators what's it called I think supported creator program where where creators basically can just get compensated for their work and I think

streamers and YouTube content creators have had such a significant and and overall beneficial influence on games over the years that it's really only fair that they should be able to benefit more from the incredibly hard work that they do so on a personal level that spoke to me I think it spoke to other folks I work with just as part of the the priority that but anyway that that's all stuff that better than I can those are just some of the reasons why it made sense to us to go sort of conduct our early access experiment off to the side because folks on other platforms who are familiar with our games are used to our games being like 100% complete we've said in the past that we really value the completeness of our games so folks on other platforms one day will get the kind of experience that they are used to from us and on the same timeline as we've delivered our games on in the past

where you know typically they take a transistor and and pyre both took us about three years to make so basically along that we expect Hades will be done on roughly that same timeline so we figured if you're just if that's the experience or accustomed to and the experience you want to have nothing has changed you'll you'll get to play our completed game hopefully wherever in as you know in as many places as we can support and make sense of once once we're out of early access but for now we if it tends to us to run early access on the epic gating store I hope that explanations reasonable no totally I am and we have good questions already in chat we'll get to them in a minute here before we get off storefronts entirely I gotta ask and you we understand you don't speak for supergiant as a whole but just as a veteran developer yourself how do you feel about the proliferation of game storefronts in the latter half of this year especially with epic obviously and discord and a couple others like how are

you feeling about the business that you're in exciting times are confusing when it is exciting times I mean I've been yeah as you as you may know I've been around the I've been around the block a couple of times because I used to I used to work in the gaming press way back when you know since so I've been I've been I reported on games for you know like 10 years or so more than 10 years starting in the 90s and now I've been in game development for more than 10 years so I think if you've been around long enough you know this stuff kind of goes in cycles and it's and it's aligned often with like the console cycles in particular like the what what happens in the computer game industry is sort of they're on the periphery of what's going on in the in in the console industry so new consoles are announced there's a ton of excitement and and but but as new consoles consoles sort of grow old then you know PC platforms tend to take priority for a while and they kind of hopscotch each other over the

years and the cycle keeps turning that way and new platforms rise older platforms can fall that's that's always in the way of things so I think broadly that we're just kind of at that point in the cycle when new platforms start to get announced and it's it's definitely an exciting time because you know you can't help but want to sort of start even if you're doing it only in your head you start to you know bet on whichever horses you think are gonna win the race and you start to wonder you know who's who's not the right who's got the right angle on what's going on who's gonna sort of thrive and prevail through all this and who might fall by the wayside but generally it's like it's it's absolutely a good thing like anybody investing in in the game industry creating more competition for the platforms that are out there it just makes things better for for everybody when when we have more choices as

players I think that's the bottom line so yeah I I think for me it's exciting stuff as someone who's followed the industry for a while it's like oh man what's what's gonna happen I'm excited by by the unknown in the game industry and I think that's always been part of the appeal to it for me that I despite you know despite how long I have been following and I could not predict it anyone who thinks that they could predict it I I don't I don't believe that person it takes many surprising twists and turns I think pretty frequently that's one of the truest things I've ever heard on the string I'm gonna springboard off of Spisak square you're launching or into early access early access has been a thing on steam for a while PlayStation and Xbox have begun to support it the difference between epic the epic games thrown other platforms is that it's supporting different forms of interactions between devs and players could you break down like what that's meant for you as a team this player specifically his physics like has

questions about the lack of a forum but I do know that you guys have a discord because that was sort of the first thing that was part of the trailer so so what was the difference in changing player communication for you guys I think they very much want for the relationship between the developer and their and their player base to be as direct as possible and kind of filter through them so and it's also a new platform right so it's not going to have like it just doesn't have as many of the robust features yet as steam has developed over what's it been 15 or 20 very long I almost said too long and before time and it's been we have our we've actually been we launched our official discord server earlier this year somewhat quietly we've been building it up a little bit over the months now you know

now I think players who look back at that decision it may make a little bit more sense to them but we've we've never liked Farrar we've never had our player community in a central location because because there are like the forums and other pockets of community you know in in different places on the internet or whatnot so watching our official discord is for us is a place where we you know we finally have our own kind of homegrown community there and if you play the game you'll see it's kind of right there linked in the main menu as a means to get in there and talk to other players or talk to us share feedback so I I think we thought about having like a forum and stuff as well but we we liked the vibe that discord provides and we already had enough of like a groundswell of players there I mean there's other stuff like I've seen folks point out it's like oh there no there no like user reviews on

the epic game store I'm sure I can imagine something like that might be added at some point we're an early access game III know I think we're of course very open to folks reviewing it because we charge the same twenty dollars that an on early access game might charge so we stand by the quality of our game and so on but you know if if you want to find reviews and opinions on the game yeah you'll have to look elsewhere besides the actual storefront but I think personally I think it's not difficult to find opinions about products on on the internet if you have to if you have to turn elsewhere but I so overall I don't have a ton of opinions about like the direct feature a comparison of the epic game store versus other platforms we we felt it was a good fit for what we were trying to do but you know as with all aspects of the game if that's something that players have feedback about I'm sure we'll be hearing about it as will the team in epic no doubt yeah I am there's a good question

here in chat I wanna I want to get to before I forget it's from miss Jim cloud and they want to know what was the vision you had when you first came up with the concept for Hades what is the where does the sort of driving goal here sort of as a game like what was the goal to beyond one to get an early access was it just to make a game that had been on someone's mind for ages or was there a specific thing you were trying to pull off with this game yeah because it doesn't it doesn't quite work that way around here but but in my role really I'm one of the people who helps formulate the ideas that we then pursue and one of the things I look for as the highest priority is like what what is the overlap of preoccupations on the team what what do the most people here want to make the most passionately

that's the game that we should make so we started having very soon after pyar launched like within a month that game spent three years in development we were already eager to go on and figure out what our next thing was going to be so we started having many many hours of conversations and some themes started to emerge from that and one of the one of the ideas I already spoke to is like wanting to develop a concept that we could continue to build on after it was out there a game a game idea that was extensible and not just like a kind of a one-and-done game similar to our last three games so that was a high priority for us and we were very intrigued by a design around replayability kind of for lack of a better term like a more a modern design sensibility than maybe some of our previous games that are just like kind of have a more linear campaign structure you finished them hopefully they'll stick with you you

know forever on an emotional level but they're not necessarily games designed to be replayed many many times we were really drawn to making a game that felt very immediate that you could pick up and play in short stretches or played you know kind of for as long as you wanted wanted and still have a compelling experience around that and then we started thinking about what theme would align well with that we thought about you know do we want to revisit one of the worlds that we've created in the past cuz we love those worlds and that's you know stuff that's like we've never returned to one of our past games it's not something that we are like morally opposed to or anything like that we just you know don't want to do it unless the time and circumstances are right and and given given our other priorities it felt like once again let's let's make something new let's make something that really really fits this set of design goals and and we looked to Greek mythology in this case as a source as in

one in one sense a well-worn theme for videogames but in another sense something that we felt was both a perfect fit for what we were doing and also in some ways like really under explored in certain in certain respects particularly our our angle we think on the I was as as the person doing the writing I was very drawn to a particular angle on on Greek mythology that I feel is very true to the source material yet is often sort of lost in the shuffle of how this type of material tends to be adapted which is the gods are a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in there you know I think part of the reason these characters have survived for thousands of years is because they they relate so strongly to so many people and and they relate not

because they're gods but because they're human so we wanted to explore some of that it felt like a really flavorful it felt rich with with with potential for us so yeah we started we started making it so that's a long answer but yeah you know I have a more like we wanted to make a roguelike dungeon crawler where you defied the god of death you know health exciting to us to figure out what that game was going to look like we love playing roguelikes we've been really inspired by some of the early access successes over the years these games like darkest dungeon and slay the spire and dead cells games that started off really strong like from the moment you dropped your you know $20 on them that was like money super well spent and then they only got better and better there so we're like oh man what if we could what if we could pull off something like that that's kind of what in our minds I felt like the right way to do it and we felt that if we knew it's gonna be early access from the

start rather than doing it it's kind of like oh you know oh god we ran out of time let's put it in early access if we plan for it to be early access maybe that improves our chances of handling that kind of process properly yeah look man this is video games no mad at you for making a roguelike dungeon call also like I I really I really value games that feel like they have kind of a reason for for being like that just don't feel like they're you know just kind of the same as other games that are out there but IIIi think what we've made has has plenty of our you know dirty signature all over it heavens who has our has our particular marks on it to make it feel distinct it has Jen's Jen's ease really good art all over it to Jensen she III I think she is I I don't know hopefully she's not watching this

but I think Jen's E is one of the greatest artists working from the industry it's a huge honor to be working with her she kind of reinvents her style on every single game we've worked on she's of course just one member of our art team though she does create the the the overall sense of style on the look and does all our wonderful character designs and everything so I think her work the work of Darren core our audio director does all our music and contributes key voices to this game and all the sound effects he is a man of many talents and his his work has of course really helped our games always stand out over the years and I think this game is no exception so it's always exciting to see what what my colleagues will do on each new game and that's I think for us it's been part of the fun of kind of choosing a different theme and setting every single time I'm gonna I'm gonna springboard off of

gears question and Chad foger sort of was asking about is this a roguelike and I think you just sort of answered it by comparing it to those other games I wanna I wanna he vote gears asking about like kind of the depth of comparing and comparing it asking if it's comparable to binding of issac into the gungeon I would like to ask you how does supergiant games define depth and in kind of a like how did how did you sort of build yourself a template for the layer like we're sort of looking at some of the systems right now that you guys used with the mirror how did you look at your design experience and say this is how we can make depth that will update that we can both like layer with what we ship first and then update over time in kind of the way that Vogue airs talking about yes I think works on many on many vectors so we have we we aspire to having gameplay depth and we aspire to having narrative depth as well and

hopefully the two together create an overall very very rich feeling experience but III think you're referring more to gameplay dev depth so let me speak to that I I think like we we look for we really really value in out in each of our designs for our past games the sense that you can kind of discover different successful play styles as you go so we we really favored designs that let you experiment that give you sort of the latitude to experiment that encourage you to try different things and and kind of experiment with different tools within the context of the gameplay and then you know just when you find what feels like a perfect combination like a kind of a very effective set of skills and tools and abilities and so on maybe you get nudged into a new set of tools and abilities that is is even better or maybe just different in an intriguing way so I think if you look to each of

our previous games they've all done some version of that but in the case of Hades I think it like really synthesizes a lot of what we've a lot of I think our best ideas from our previous games in there was this goal around the immediacy like it's a game with very little preamble you just pick it up and start playing and we wanted you to get right in there with Hades and just just immediately get it just fit you figure the gameplay out like a very low accessibility barrier but but at the same time it merges together an aspect of transistor that was very exciting which was this idea of combining different abilities making for thousands of different possible combinations and that's very much at play and Hades here where you have the The Olympian gods essentially provide you with different blessings kind of like power-ups that you you can't necessarily control which of these gods you encounter but you can choose between the blessings they

provide so each time you play you're sort of like building out your character in a unique way so sometimes you'll be able to play and kind of go down a specific path that you really want like oh you're using the bow and you know that Poseidon happens to cause enemies to get knocked back away from you and that forms a very powerful combination that you could use but other times you know you're not going to be presented with exactly the options that maybe you were hoping for and you'll have to make do and that also I think feels feels true to work we did and transistor and pyre where it's about kind of like making the most of a situation that you can't entirely control in some cases so when you find that that makes for that kind of that kind of structure can make for gameplay that continues to be surprising and interesting over time and just defining enough overlapping systems that can interact with each other to where you know something the richness

emerges from the play experience and in our own play testing we find that we're not having the same experience over and over where were compelled to start new runs that's all stuff we really really look for nice I am I can't not think about the fact a question or two ago you didn't say it out loud but you were we were talking about moving early access and he almost sounded relieved this idea of not having to wait three again three three games through years to put out a game sort of get it out quickly get it started integrating on it I'm biased by that math three games is nine years Alex yeah exactly so like I wonder how was your process changed internally both for you specifically I don't think you deserve in the team working on a game like this where you've sort of got to be ready to go yeah pretty early as opposed to having having the luxury of three years to crunch on a masterwork or something so like tell me how is your process change practically as a writer and developer yeah it's a really good question our process has changed a lot in anticipation of this and again it all

ties back to like I guess I didn't say this specifically but like a really key aspect of this whole game for us has been that we've we've just planned it more in general and part of it is anticipating an an early access launch and sort of I almost equate it I hope this is like doesn't sound too obnoxious as a as a ecology but it's like it almost felt like training for a marathon or something like that where we we've basically moved internally to a monthly milestone cadence so every month we we have a milestone where we have certain goals and and the month is divided up into certain phases so we have at the beginning of a milestone is when we could make more major changes to the code and so on and then we we lock the code down we could still make data changes so fine-tune things you know from my standpoint I can still be adding new narrative events or changing the the

voiceover and stuff like that because that's all that's all part of a data-driven system and it's not like fundamentally you know altering the code by me adding or subtracting events and then toward the end of the milestone were were then you know testing bug-fixing polishing making final changes to get everything ready and then at the end of that we play tests and then we kind of do it over so we've been doing it we've been working this way for for a number of months now knowing that basically once this game is out there we're just going to keep doing that and those major updates become major updates that we're like committed you know we're committing ourselves to if you if you quit out to the main menu you'll see right there like on the main menu that it says when our next major update is coming that basically is aligned with our internal milestones and when we we think we'll have a whole batch of like from our perspective cool new stuff ready to go so that really has

been the biggest shift in our internal development whereas with with a three year project our milestones at this point in the process would be much longer would probably span you know two and a half or three months and be somewhat more nebulous in nature I would say so it's a more I think in a word it's a more disciplined approach that we're taking but we've always valued planning and production discipline at supergiant I think it's been key to our success that we've been able to just you've heard from many developers I'm sure that finishing a project is really hard it's really hard to decide it's time to wrap it up and to make those really tough choices about about finishing your game so it kind of we've learned a lot about that over over nearly ten years that we've been working together as a team and and so this this project sort of puts that forward and of

course it's a little scary to commit to like major updates on a regular basis but we we've been practicing at it we think we think we can do it obviously Alex can I slide him with some folks from chat and absolutely not no I was going to just keep talking I was gonna just no and I had five please no please by all means go ahead Roger we can we can sort of step back to your good old creative director stuff Greg the Lord Gersh would like to talk about the themes of death and rebirth that have showed up in all of your games um Hades is literally about death and rebirth as you have seen on the stream where I die repeatedly and then get reborn and die again what other outside influences like you talked about why you laid it on Greek mythology earlier but what what you looked at in the real world to make you think about telling stories around death and rebirth like that that's what Lord Gersh would like to know it's

really it's really tough too it's tough for me to pin down because it's my entire it's like it's got to be my entire outlook I seek to work on stories that bad feel that feel meaningful to me and I think that's the only chance I have of those stories connecting with other people out there so there has to be something there that that I feel is true and that I I can spend a whole lot of time just trying to dig for to uncover like if it's something with just a simple answer like a simple world to me that's not sufficient for a story because there's just not a lot there but in in this in this games case you know I don't know that death I wouldn't death and rebirth for sure I can see how that would be construed as like a recurring theme

through our games mm-hmm but Haiti is to me as a game about family and and I look to my own family experience and the experiences of other people I know and other people I've heard about and of course the family experience is described in the world of Greek myth as as one of the kind of most fundamental sources of inspiration for for the kind of stories that this game will have of course itself you know that sounds may be I don't know how openly I would admit that outside of like a GDC livestream because of course we want it to be it's like an exciting hack-and-slash experience on the face of it but are these I think if you know if you're familiar with our games you know that our stories are always about something more than what's there on the surface I think it's pretty clear pretty early on when you you know meet Cerberus

or whatever that's like an old family dog that you know that this is kind of like a there's there's a bit of a family drama or a family comedy I should say underneath the surface of this game but I mean I I can't I can't tell you I can never answer like what are my inspirations it's too many things I play a lot of video games I try to read I try to watch movies I listen to a lot of music like I don't know I'm the sum total of all the experiences I've ever had and that informs that informs my working right on well I would love to know sort of how your work has changed in the last couple of years as your team watch me I don't even know so there's a question here in Chad that has to do with team size and bringing new folks then can you talk a little bit about how supergiant has changed since you've been there and specifically since Peyer launched last time we talked yeah so I think one of the things were really proud of that supergiant is all seven of

the folks who created Bastion together we're all still here now working we've worked on each respective game in our same relative roles so that's I mentioned Jen and Darrin and it's myself a mirror who's our studio director and essentially like our design lead and Gavin and Andrew who are our engineers and then Logan Cunningham who's provided a major voice or more more than one any more games so each of us has continued to work together and since Peyer we've been so I should say after Bastion we were we grew from seven to twelve people and we were joined our art department expanded with Camilo Venegas and John and Josh Barnett and and we and and basically we like have more we have more of a support team and a business development team and folks like Michael al Shai who just handled so much of our day-to-day operations at this point so we we became more of like a complete

team after Bastion but we stayed at that number 12 for many many years and and that will be changed after after haier last year we realized with given our plans for Hades that we needed it was it was time for us to grow a little bit and to shore up what we felt were like especially some of our weaknesses at that point with and and and so we have more we have more design muscle now we have more art muscle and we've grown from from that number 12 to closer to 20 at this point that's ice that we're gonna stick to because we think that being small is like really fundamental to how we operate or like I mean who knows who knows what the future holds but we all know for certain that if we we like we couldn't even this this space that you see we fit everyone into this room like this is our space if we we

just don't even have room for more people so we but rather constrained our ideas to achieve with this team here than just like half a mindset of growing bigger and bigger because we think that a lot of our best ideas are really only possible because of our small team size it's just how we work and and how we sort of negotiate through through creative ideas as well so that's been a big and really exciting change over the last year to like have have new blood and and see how much of an incredible impact these folks have had across across the board and you'll see them there their names are all in in the credits and hades and and they're all on our team page and everything you can find out more about everyone who works at the studio that way nice so that's a good opener for a letitia's question which is I don't know if they're a developer or a fan but they want to know what's it like taking all these new people into the team versus starting

with the very small team and passion so how is the how was the vibe and the studio workflow changed now that you bumped up to 20 is it been a noticeable thing or just just feel yeah it's it's it's noticeable for sure I mean one of the things one of the reasons we approached the process of expanding the team like really with it with a great deal of caution and I and hopefully care is that we know that even if you bring in the most talented person in the world like the absolutely best artist or the absolute game designer the the best game designer in the whole world joins her team it still can have a profound it can and will have a profound effect on the culture of the team and and that has to be approached carefully like you have to look for I I don't mean to be prospective prescriptive in our case it was really important to bring people on board who who who enhanced our culture who contributed something more than just

their work because they like it just each new person who joins changes all of the social dynamics here so we're aware of that and so we just try to do our best to make the right choices right and and thankfully those choices have worked out really really well and the reality is that we have new blood on the team in folks who are you know more more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and and people like me who've been you know whatever been doing this stuff for a long time it invigorates the rest of us right like find it when done properly so that's thankfully that's how it's worked out and we've always liked in the past prior to some of these folks joining we've actually been pretty the word monastic has been used to describe us we were just gonna plunk our headphones on and work away and then leave at the end of the day like I think I think folks out there may imagine us to be this like this group of people will you know hang

out and have beers after work it's like we're not we're not really like that usually where we're pretty focused on on our work and a lot of us have lives outside of work and we really value that separation so at the end of the day people go home and go go to the rest of their lives so it's been really helpful to have new folks on the team who have like liven things up and you know more people going out to lunch in larger groups and that sort of thing that's just maybe made things more lively than they have been in the past and I think the proof is in the pudding as far as the actual work because we've been working you know Peyer launched in late july and now we have this game in December and and III think some folks have expressed surprise are like have you been working on this like all this time no we didn't we didn't get started on Hades until after we were well finished with pyres so we've just it's only been possible because we're bigger now than we were nice yeah

there's a good follow up here from twin dome who wants to know sort of what are the core values at your workplace culture that's like a kind of mission shout out the chat for being really interested in like just like life quality of life and yeah thank you guys those are questions that we are very interested in as well and in fact so it so here I hope I can rattle these off off the top of my head so we an interesting thing about us may be interesting you for you to decide we did not have stated values as a studio until the last year and we've been around since 2009 so we didn't do that because we were like dismissive of it it's just because I think I think it took us all that time to truly understand what our values were and to have some really to have some really frank conversations about it and seeking

alignment around it so like one of our one of our values for instance is we we iterate on everything that's that's a core part of how we make games an iterate and iterative development process is is just how we do it and and it's important for everyone here to embrace that and and to like understand that that re-evaluation and criticism and feedback is is as part of the process and and that mindset is part of what enables us to I think go into an early access launch I think with a hopefully with a healthy mindset we also say that that were our work is not our lives are not in competition with our work that our work contours to our lives so that's our view on how to manage a work-life balance so here we have as a small team we we have flexible like we would rather

work around the challenges of people having flexible hours and working remotely you know coordinating remote meetings and stuff like that then then requiring everyone to strictly be here always at the same place at the same time we would rather enable everyone individually to to position themselves to do their best work and to find the balance that works the best for them while knowing that their colleagues are there to support them through that decision-making and and that that we expect for for people to be able to to be to be honest with themselves around it and and and the team is as always reciprocal around that as well so like around here when someone people are responsible for their for their own work here and their own like kind of what like for example on on the writing or something like that it's like no one's gonna tell me no one's gonna

like assigned a bunch of writing to me or something like that like I'm responsible for my own work but but that is a that is a big responsibility where we we are all actively involved in our own scheduling and knowing the value of making sure that everyone has a life outside of work we schedule accordingly and and try to schedule like very very conservatively to make sure that there's time for everyone to iterate and to do their best work and do not feel like they're just totally under the gun and again it's like taking us you know a long time working together together to figure out what what is a good balance there I think that's always a challenge for different developers to sort that out for themselves and in general so those are a couple of our that that's giving you an impression of what some of our values are but yeah at this point we have you know they're not values that we like publicly print on our website but that's part of them being true to us they're not like

they're - they're not there as an advertisement for us they're just how we have grown to understand ourselves and and and understand our relationship to our work and to each other yeah I mean yeah well that's great and forgive you for this neighborhoods question but I think it's something that people think about when they talk about things like mission statements or values did codifying and making those explicit meaningfully change anything about the workplace like did it make it easier or simpler that it speed up meetings like what did it do anything it really in in our case it was really valuable for me personally it was really valuable like like the stuff I just talked about of work contouring to your life it really my own personal mindset toward toward my my relationship with my work and and and just like how how understanding that it's not one size fits all was something that for me just like clicked once we once we did put that put that particular statement into words it's a phrase that

a mirror our studio director but put into words you know having spoken to me and others about where everybody was at with respect to their work it's like what what's the pattern here what are our expectations are we asking everyone to just slave away you know we're a small team should we just slave away constantly forever no we can't do that because sustainability is our goal we've been there for close to ten years and we want to keep going if we just burn the candle at both ends forever we're not going to make it so how do we find the balance of making high quality games that we can be proud of while still living our lives you know and because the rest of our lives like empowers our ability to make the kind of game we make you asked about my inspirations before my inspiration ain't gonna be just like crunching on my last project you know like that's not gonna make for a very interesting video game over time and it's not going to make for a lot of a lot of content variety so it's really

important for us as a group of people doing creative work to find an appropriate balance we all care a lot about our work we love doing the work so I think one of the challenges in the game industry can be for people to even just like pull themselves away from work no one to do that but that's where I think a lot of our experience over the years comes in we as a team we we all try to support each other I catch each other when you know what we're we made a whole game about this it's called pie what made so yeah I think I think we've learned a lot and I hope it I hope it's expressed through through this game that we're working on now yeah power was an incredible game sorry that that was a really intricate answer um folks in chat we we're gonna

wrap up in about ten minutes so feel free to get your questions in I do want to get you answers for those questions so we're gonna sneak one in before I want to loop right back to the discussion point we're on there are folks asking about like Kenna Kenna guy and others who are asking about content after the 1.0 launch Greg do you know if they'll be like just if will be continued content updates like there are an early access or you said earlier you know once the products launch it'll be the equivalent of a three year baked supergiant game from before the project so I think I think it's fair to expect that we will continue to I mean it's all but certain I would say to the extent that we are able we will continue to support this game for as long as as players have interest in it that's something we've always done with each of our games so I think on since since we

do expect or to last for more than a year we were reluctant to make a ton of promises about what will happen after they say you know it's reached the 1.0 phase but I think I think our goal for sure is like if you know if if players are still enjoying the game will want to keep supporting it in the ways that make in the ways that makes sense and and at that point we would expect it to be available in more places and be positioned to be able to support it in wherever wherever it appears I'll just quick do another quick last call for questions so we can try and get him in Gregg yet like I said I wanted to loop back on that thread about studio life this has been an interesting year to talk about that I've been trying to do my due diligence and ask whenever I can talk to team leaders whenever I can because this has been a year where we've had stories about Riot Games Rockstar Games telltale games we've had closures we've had stories about employees

mistreating other employees through a culture of harassment sorry I'm not asking you to comment on those specifically but which is what I'm building to but I guess as the industry has talked more about this how do you see like and it's sort of sort of impossible to ask every company you do what your company does with regards to your values how do you think other game developers can work to improve their quality of life in ways like that just because I think now more than other I think a lot of developers are very concerned about this because in some cases they feel sort of their health and their lives are on the edge a little bit which is a bit dramatic sorry should we studios should be concerned why shouldn't they be yes this is this is about people's lives so we take it seriously yeah you know I have a certain point of view on this because my mother's a neurologist she like helps people with really severe severe issues

right so I just work on video games so I can like on the one hand I can put my work into perspective but but having said that it's really like people work day in and day out on this stuff and a lot of people's lives do revolve around it better for worse so it is important and Studios owe it to themselves and so that people work there to be introspective and thoughtful about it in their own way but but have it but apart from that it's like I can't be prescriptive about it ya know there's a III I'm actually very personally like very eyebr it'll at the idea that there's like a formula there's like a prescription like studios must do this must be the work hours that this must be the culture I think it really depends and there are different Studios in different parts of the world and with different team compositions and so on that where it doesn't there isn't like a one-size-fits-all solution for them and

they're there studios of all different shapes and sizes that have succeeded and that have failed and and those are all unique cases with something for people to learn from I'm sure so you know in our case we're we're doing the best we can here based on our our experience and our observations of what other folks out there are doing our discussions with other teams our discussions internally they're kind of trials and tribulations that we go through but you know we when we started in 2009 I don't know that any of us would have assumed we'd still be around by now you know having launched our our fourth game we would we might have been optimistic about it but I'm sure we wouldn't have expected it um so I think I think the truth is everybody is making it up as they go and these discussions that that happen out in the open are really important discussions that that I think if they cause other developers and studio leaders to like

take a hard look in the mirror or ask themselves if there are things that what blindspots they have what are they not thinking about that maybe they should be I think that's all good there's a lot of responsibility that comes with this stuff games have like a really big impact on people they're expensive they take a lot of time there are ethical issues around them these are things that people should be thinking about if they want to make games I'm I hope we are bearing that burden ourselves as responsibly as possible and I know that there will be people out who tell us if we're not doing that so and I'm and for me it's like I'm in the grand scheme of things I'm glad that that's the way it is that that I think I think there are forces in this industry that will that will keep you honest and and I and I value that a lot as someone who comes from you know a background of reviewing video games for a mother yeah

I'm glad I'm glad the conversations are happening they're really they're tough conversations right it's tough all the context and and it's easy for stuff to get taken out of context sometimes and and people don't really and it could be awkward and but it's it's it's for the best for some of the stuff to get out in the open in my personal opinion yeah well I mean that begs the question did the team crunch on this and how do they compare to the crunch on Peyer and the crunch on Bastion I mean what do you define define define close yeah right so it's like did anyone did you feel like anyone was had to put in extra hours I guess above and beyond what they were willing to do in a way that negatively impacted their social life or personally not beyond what they were no I don't like they they they there is never there's never been a moment in the history of the studio when it's like like now your hours are this

but I think I think that crunch is much more insidious than yeah like this sort of force to work hours it can it can often be that someone is in a situation where they feel compelled like no one is telling them or forcing them but they feel like it but they know that they have this deadline and so they're like triangulating the work that must get done in the amount of time so they force themselves to do it before we folks here I've worked hard in the past for sure but part of our growth on this project is to is to diffuse some of that work across more people to so that so that it doesn't fall on this phew shoulders as maybe it has in the past but you know so so yeah I mean I hope that III think the part of it is that I should say is like it was extremely like like every for example we we worked we worked on on Saturday this

past Saturday were launching our game on Thursday we all knew we were gonna work on Saturday for months in advance and we took the previous Friday off and stuff like that because we we knew we had a weird week coming up with a with a launch on a Thursday night so we did we we did a whole bunch of planning around our launch week just to give you an impression and and we what was the yeah the other the other part of it is knowing we were launching into early access it was extremely important something that we talked about and and I think made good on over and over to make sure that people went into this week as well read and like unlike with a previous game where there can be a temptation to crunch toward the end because then you're just gonna like kind of get a bunch of time off here the early access launch is just the beginning so we we can't afford to be all kind of all tired and at our wits end and stuff right now like because the

most important thing with a game like this is is the follow-through on the launch not just no one's gonna remember Thursday last week in a few weeks they barely remember it now what they're gonna remember when they think about our game is is our pattern of being able to maintain it and for that you know that's back to the kind of marathon training analogy I made before it's it's really about finding a pace that that is healthy for us that we that we can maintain comfortably and take the time we need and we think we're well positioned to do that yeah man I would I would kill to have another hour I would but I I can't take it ya know yeah we need to get a couple of these questions rapid-fire before we let you go [Music] oh no there were other questions miss gym club we're gonna go back to you what was the greatest challenge that's

developed in this game outside of the work stuff like what was really great like challenging in what we're seeing on screen right now I think I get another question yeah I think it's a whole it's an entirely new game each of our previous games has been designed more as like a linear experience there's a lot of branching and games like pyre and there's a lot of like reactive voiceover in all of our games but generally speaking there's a beginning middle and end and you go through it in a succession so reappropriation ik for us it's a whole like different mindset in how it's a it's a whole new genre for us despite the superficial similarities in the combat game to something like Bastion approaching you know both the

gameplay and the narrative knowing that this game is designed to be replayed is a big shift in thinking and a big shift in the entire like underlying architecture of the game and that was like that was like a bite the bullet moment really early on in development whereas like wow this feels really different but let's let's keep going this is exciting let's see what happens that was like it was the biggest challenge and you know a big source of excitement as well just just to work all that out right on I alright thank you all thank you Greg so much for joining us that was a really great conversation if you're at home thank you to everyone watching at home oh man we yeah I'm getting a warning about we were about to keep rolling the GGC twitch channel we'll keep going with some great GGC talks if you're an aspiring game developer we would love if you stuck around and just you know learned more about how games get made if you are a professional game developer we hope you find something in there that's useful

for you if you liked what you had today we would love it if you click the follow button thank you supergiant community for showing up and ironically you could if you heard too closely you heard the bastion music playing because my phone went off in the other room shout out to Darren thank you Alex and Greg I suppose for Greg I will if folks have questions for you I would recommend you check out the supergiant games discord you can literally see it when you boot up the game and I'm sure the link to its on the Twitter as well or any other their website and with that have a good day everyone watch GGC TV