GDC Plays Heaven's Vault with Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey

[Music] hi everyone welcome to the GCC twitch channel my name is Bryant Francis I am as always the invisible voice inside your head I am here today playing a game called heavens vaults it comes to you from the folks at inkle based out of Cambridge you guys are in Cambridge right that's right yeah yeah okay I'm gonna actually need you I'm gonna need to do something key down here real quick john is unfortunately you can't see John down there everyone but we have both Joe and John yeah there we go oh yeah the middle of your webcam is where we are if you want to turn it a bit more towards John I think anyway we're here today with some lovely folks in chat I already see Clifton be out there I think I saw someone else but I refreshed the page and I lost their name hi everyone in chat we are here today like I said we're playing heavens fault it is just releasing today it is a narrative archaeology game where you can walk around have great interactive conversations with people with great

interesting characters the setting is probably my favorite part of the game we'll get to that in a bit right now we are looking for the friend of the RQL of another academic type who's we're friends with so we're on it it's kind of a friend goes missing ancient mysteries kind of quest which is how Indiana Jones starts but this game takes a very different tack from Indiana Jones Alex I need you to introduce yourself even though a lot of folks probably know who you are hey what's up my name is Alex Faro I am contributing editor gamasutra comm and I help out on gec and most importantly I skipped lunch to be here and I'm just now starting to regret not to but luckily yeah no joke we have two very special guests here who can do most of the hard thinking for me especially us we tell everyone who you are and what you do please hey I'm Joe I'm a gameplay director at ankle and I'm John under narrative director hearing welcome

Brian where are you I forgot the planet name gonna be honest where's the middle of the Cyclones which okay so this games takes place in a nebula which is an ascent of moons in a nebula instead of navigating through it's kind of a traditional space setting you you um yeah I know that I'm taking this naturally a robot so instead of navigating space heading you ride these rivers around the nebula and we have made our way to an unknown moon way back in the sort of uncharted waters of this place beam down to the planet's surface there's kind of me and my robot pal art here looking for our friend we have a clue that led us here about this robe so you know lost civilization mystery so explore unfortunately for we're in chat will point out reading games are often some of the hardest to stream because I have to read and process information that I need to lose later and talk to our

illustrious guests so for now I am going to work on this gameplay and toss a question out to our guests would you please introduce heavens vault from your perspective I think you've been working on it since shortly after 80 days wrapped up right yeah that's right so 80 days shipped in 2014 the world was a normal and sane place and nothing quite well for us and we thought let's do something ambitious let's see what we can do that isn't just like 81 days or 240 days that's let's try and do something different and something special so we decided to do something graphical we started touring go to PlayStation make dolls and we could agree alene oh what else we wanted to do and then we spent quite a while kind of landing on a concept that really attracted us and kind of had enough yeah and I think we ended up with the concept with with quite a lot quite a lot in it

actually in the end about four years it was supposed to be a sort of ambitious you know maybe year and a half project and four years later you had we're now a studio of eight people seven people or we're here too so it's been quite a it's been quite a long and complicated process getting to the point but it's done it's actually done and it works out that my people are playing it I find this very surprising still because it was it was great it was cool it was a sort of idea that we thought might be possible and entirely sure that it was actually going to be the sort of thing one could actually do we thought we were gonna get halfway through it and then go now this isn't working we have to stop now so yeah yeah prize I've got a surprise yeah that always how it goes real quick before we jump in I want to

say now we have a good quorum going here and chat if you have any questions for these two please by all means drop them in chat Brian I will relay them and it would be a big help because like I said Brian's got some mysteries to solve so we need your good smart questions preferably about game development game design and this game particularly yeah I mean this is a launch day I mean we were talking for the stream it's it's late over there it's about 10:00 p.m. how are you guys feeling so far really just stepped in back into the office after going out for a launch dinner with the whole team that was nice where'd you go we went to a place called al casbah which is an Algerian restaurant nice and that bar is modeled on I mean it's modeled on places in Morocco really but like it's modeled on this this restaurant down the road that we

went to as good as anywhere else like that's all closes local reference we already have a good question here in chat and it kind of dovetails with what I want to get into which is uh you know I was so so striking about heavens vault is the look and the spaces that you you traverse this is as far as I know the first like really 3d navigatable sort of like game compared to you've ever made because the earlier games they were all based on like choosing dialogue options and moving through interactive stories and there's a question here from dainty rhino who wants to know what's the purpose of these faded ghosts that appear whenever the character moves oh the whole theme of the game is history and archaeology so he quite liked the idea that as an archaeologist while she's exploring these sites and maybe she's she's leaving her own footprint on the sites as she explores them because she's changing history herself so wherever she stands whatever she does she leaves almost like a memory which

fades as she moves away again she's all just there so it's just to give that sense of history and sense of memories and creating a new history herself it's a funny thing because like we we've been through a bunch of different takes on the animation style over the course of project you know we've had a lot of different ideas and we used a lot of different variants of cross-fading frames and at one point we took those ghosts out completely and we miss them we just missed them the thing I felt a little bit throw away it felt like you were just you know you have a video game character and they're just buzzing around an environment they're just running from place to place and they're just scooping everything up and then they don't really exist in the world at all they're just kind of they're just like a mouse pointer scrubbing across the screen and that's how we interact in through these spaces and it wasn't quite heavy enough like you're supposed to be in this world so that little just that little thing

that gets left behind if you would know though you really were there and you can't if you buzz around the level then it looks like she's doing something crazy which she is actually every time we took now it kind of looked worse so we kept putting it back in again yeah yeah I mean those bits of feedback can be interesting that way I think to me watching Brian play it sort of resonates with the game's themes which seem to be this idea that spaces can be so many different things and they can be used so many different ways by different people throughout time and people leave pathways right as they go about their lives and so you're seeing very in a very physical way and in a very like which seems like a resource a lightweight compared to like something like in God of War where you can like actually see the characters footsteps through the snow and incredibly rich detailed like very expensive technology but here you have this like very simple reminder that where she is it's like a a place in space as well as time I think that's really interesting oh man there's so many good questions you guys have a

second Clifton B has a question here that is sort of unrelated but I think it's fascinating how much prep work do you do before you jump into ink and what tools do you use in your process for I guess certain narrative design and implementing storylines for those at home game writing tool I believe it's out it so it's available for other devs to use because it's open source oh yeah when I I want to write I just write something and then as the structure gets more complicated you start taking bits of that ink and maybe putting it somewhere else or packaging it up in another wrapper so it can become part of a scene rather than just a standalone bit so a little like you're just throwing script around so it's actually very very quick no need to do so all of this stuff has evolved and evolved and evolved from very basic prototype scripts the original kind of first third

of the game you're just about at the end of the first third here the kind of opening plot section and that was originally knocked out as a script inning in one afternoon like these are the basic beats of the play all go through during that tutorial section and that's just a fold into place to come this 3d world within environmental conversations and all the kind of things that you do within that worlds so step by step by step so yeah I get quite dogmatic about this we don't do any kind of planning we do things when we need to do it so if I need to work out the flow of a scene or get a piece of paper and a pen and a nod or a flowchart to help my brain learn but we don't do any formalized process we don't have any kind of spreadsheet construction process or anything it tends to be whatever the level needs nicely Inc is the way it kind of adapts to what your needs are so if some people like to really plan in advance and

create flowcharts for absolutely everything then they can and then they can fill in the boxes and the right writing little snippets it's just we tried to make tools that kind of fit your any workflow basic same like to say that my writing workload is super so I mean bearing that in mind like how how did you approach the sort of conception and narrative design of this game as a whole you know like what was your like cuz I'm fascinated as I watch Brian play as I look forward to playing myself like this seems very difficult to construct like it's a it's a bunch of interlocking puzzles and and sort of interesting conversations and choices how did you go about structuring it from the beginning was it really just you just started going and then kind of made as you went along or did you have like a formal structure for how you create these narratives and branch them could you

lean forward and start that answer again you suddenly lost really Wyatt I just turn my volume way up I think when we started the project we had a very clear sense of what the player would be doing in the world they would be walking around and interacting with things and then talking about things as they interact with them and then as you will the next place you would be walking as you start talking as you walk from point to point that was kind of our core loop idea was walking talks an interaction plot and then actually working out how to author that in Inked was about a year's worth of work because finding a pattern which allows you to author it flexibly enough that you didn't have to think you could do whatever you needed to do but that wasn't so complicated but you have to constantly look up how to do it or break it the whole time finding a right sort of balance for scripting it

that was a really long and difficult iterative protests so I think we kind of had initial spirits within a couple of months I guess that did do that they did the walking around the talking but they were real paint or that they were food fiddly they were very very fragile and over the course of the project we slowly worked out things that we were doing a lot of that we could extract into other ways so for example the way the conversation in the game works originally conversations were tied specifically to rooms and things were looking at because that's the easiest thing to do right you go to somewhere and you have a conversation about it and what we have now is a system where they're walking around in the environment that the game is feeding conversation options in and from a bank of conversation that it has all the time which is triggered by the knowledge model that it's tracking in the game so what you know and what you don't know says well these conversations are relevant these ones aren't and all of

that is sculpted meaning all of that is crafted anything and yeah it took a long time to build that structure and make it work the question was now it was a really complicated engine to build but I think what we started with was a very clear idea that it ought to be possible to build this thing this way we just had to find a pattern that allowed the author the human being writing it not to get totally baffled by what they were doing yeah that that's the major limiting factor because I mean right from the very early prototype we had this idea that we could use the same text engine to basically not just produce prose as we did on 80 days but produce line by line lines of basically an interactive film scripts so each line is either a seam Direction like show this camera shot play this sound play this

kind of sequence or its actual lines of dialogue so and then the engine takes these line by line and presents them in a visual way and that never changed that was and we changed the high-level structure quite a lot in the in order to fit the the continually evolving game design but that general approach stayed consistent throughout even from right at the beginning when it was basically it was a it was almost a 2d game with like static comic book panels we choice it made dialogue choices in a kind of static 2d comic book panel and then it went from panel to panel but fundamentally you know John was writing in the same way then as he did towards the end it's just that the whole game has changed in between here yeah I guess but when we're making this stuff we have a really we have an ongoing discussion the whole time what's in the game and what's in

the ink and we see those as two quite separate views so the ink is it should be in control of all the narrative stuff and all the presentation stuff and all the sequencing stuff and all the stuff that wants to be flexible depending on what the player might or might not have done or the fiddly stuff but lest you so that when you get to the end of the project you can redraft it so that when you get to the end of the project you can make this particular line of dialogue not actually appear under that specific circumstance because that's the sort of thing that inks pretty good and then the game side has to cover all the things which are systemic which we don't want to have to bother authoring specifically every time so like when you're talking to another human being it drops into a two-shot which sort of going over the shoulder between each character and that within the game code because you don't want you have to worry about that mean doesn't even want to have to tell the game that that's happening the games being they're talking to each other time for a tutor which is kind of exciting because you can just write a load of dialogue without any scene

instructions at all and it will present it in an interesting way in the engine which is yeah great about that is then I can take a dialogue sequence which was written for one location I'm picking it up and stick it in another location and it will just work and the game where you can have the same conversation with the same character in five six different places in the world just depending on how you happen to meet them right from a mark with you at all yeah that's super H that's so cool like that's magic that sounds like magic I'm sorry like that you can write a scene and then have the engine sort of programmatically figure out the the shot reverse shot of it with and then not worry about like like from a direction perspective that's so cool yeah it's incredibly liberating as well I'm like all these games games like The Witcher do this you know games like this Assassin's Creed Odyssey do this they have programmatic two shorts they use to

cover or like programmatic uh names that that are kind of brought in just to keep seemed alive when they haven't authored something specific to override it and ideally you never notice that they're doing that but I'm absolutely sure that they are doing that we have the advantage of not having because we don't have voice acting we don't have continuous animation we can cut between procedural stuff and scripted stuff incredibly fluidly without it being particularly noticeable so we can really push that so quite absurd extremes so you can have the same yeah you can have the same conversations with the same people in wildly different contexts and the gear oh I'm sure them before we move on to go on the did this this games design development influenced the design and development of ink and if so like how has how is the language changed as a result of your work on heavens well remarkably static we've developed it over time but most of the major advances

that we made in ink happened at the very start of this project has been like one or two extra features that we've added yeah it's worth noting that a lot of the design of happens valve comes from the design of sorcery despite their fact they're very very different games a lot of what we're doing in heaven is just taking something we've prototyped in sorcery and pushing it really really far so also we have basic knowledge modeling and seems dropped in contextually if they happen to be relevant right now haven't taught entirely after that source we used it pacific places but but there were a few features like them those lists yeah ink has a data structure called the lists which I think when we when you first I had no idea how I was gonna be sort of that we don't you were like yeah but we can do it no like I build everything out

basically their genomes or flags but they're so much more powerful than that they're kind of also bit like mathematical sets and the way we use it it's for state tracking so whether it's your inventory or all of the things that you know about or whatever and we just tracked kind of pools of these facts essentially Chris reminded a talk at GDC this year about the fact system that they had in fire watch hey I only caught the second half but I need to catch up on the vault but I was going insane listening to it because we have a fact tracking system in Heaven's vault which has something like three and a half thousand facts and every single line in the game is sort of saying do you know these facts but you don't know these facts in which case this line is appropriate this is how the whole system work oh yeah fine it's very very much double because they were so you just look up onto the relevant yeah

definitely was a feature that we were building originally using quite happy system that I got wrapped into I don't know if we all remember it's been a journey but this question started sort of out of a question about how you how you sort of create that how you you process for writing the narrative of this game before we move on I want to get the last part of Clifton beats question because it was kind of interesting they wanted to know basically like they always have their narrative super solid before they start implementing and they want to know like do you ever realize things you've missed after you've started implementing a storyline in your editor and if so like how does that shape your game design whether it's a game like this or a game like eighty days like how do you how do you figure out what to incorporate in a game even when you're say six months from ship and you've already got most of the narrative written down like the thing that the whole so this business of building a structure where

we we write the ink and the game code processes that was very difficult but the payoff for that is two weeks before we ship I was playing through the game and I found the scene that I didn't like I just didn't like it so I took half a day and I rewrote it entirely every single line of it was changed the entire flow of that scene was change and I just took the file rewrote it tested it swapped it out and then it was in the game changed like we were already in lead to testing at this point like already I think had sent a code up for Playstations of QA process you know numerous late in the process but it isn't dangerous because actually it's very easy to test a scene in isolation in ink and make sure that you're really very happy with it and actually there's no cost to it I don't need to talk to anyone else I don't need to talk to the environment people or the character people or the animation people or anyone else like I can just go up and do that on my own and come back with it and say yeah that's better

and we constantly do that so I think if happens well has a good story or has good characters or have good good moments it's not because we plan things cleverly in advance it's because we plan something that's okay and we've got a really good system for trading up so every scene in this game has been trading up to make it stronger or tighter or better or the bits that we didn't need we cut and all the bits that could be stronger we developed and the freedom to do that as a writer like writes its script writers on films do this all the time they have constantly rewriting screenplays on the day of shooting that's all in the film industry in the games industry you're supposed to unlock your script six months in advance and still be happy with it by the time uShip immerse a hell of an art yeah breaking that assumption definitely comes with some compromises in terms of the fidelity of what we can achieve but the

payoff in terms of the fluidity of the narrative I just wouldn't do it any other way like it's the reason that 80 days was good is because we were adding it editing it up editing it right up until the last minute and the reason that sorcery was good the same reason happens well I think it's it's it's true there as well when we're massively taking advantage of the fact that we don't we're not fully voiced we're not fully animated so we were kind of we're abled for all of our energy into refining the core storytelling it's a funny thing because people looking at it sometimes say oh it would have been nice if you go you know what actually if it would be a funny voice it would have been a significantly worse script l say I also want to chime in on what fully voice can mean for developers or from the players side fully voiced often means like I'm often sitting I can't read the conversation my own pace I have to read it at the actors pace and often there's some very very great you know

performances in there but that like I figured what I was playing oh yeah I was presence they were done I was playing the other day and I was like we're just resisting the urge to just keep - just keep skipping past cutscenes because I wanted to you know hear the dirt the drama of it but that's another thing that I don't think I don't think I don't hear it said aloud a lot that like yeah we're always talking about this and I think you know there are solutions but the solutions are in the whole game design I kind of see that like the voice that you have to listen to occupies a small part of your brain but then the rest of your brain is left unoccupied and if you can fill it with other related gameplay like you know Firewatch and games in that kind of genre you know it works because you're able to explore while communicating and listening to the dialogue if you only have to just sit and listen to the dialogue and do

nothing else it wouldn't ears playable and so yeah you could do a fully voiced heavens vault and that kind of style of game but you'd have to find ways of occupying the rest of the players brain while the doctor log is going on I don't know that I even agree with that entirely I think there's a there's a question go as well like the amount of information you can communicate in text that you read in your head it's just a lot higher than the money you could communicate when you're doing voice acting stuff and it it depends on what kind of story you want to tell and what you want to talk about but like delivering exposition through spoken dialogue is one of the worst things in the world like films try to avoid it as much as possible because it's just deathly dull then you could put it in prose much more effortlessly but because people just read it and they drop it and it's gone and like if you understand

your medium you can take advantage of that and you can do things with it and yeah this this idea that we we should just be making the flashiest version of everything so I didn't impact the content that you can deliver and seems to need to be a bit wrong heavy as a writer I'm very happy I would like to steer steer the conversation a little bit towards this is a really compelling seeing some time until reading it but I need to get this question in dev raw is asking about how their question is have you met her contractor Jordan McNair during the development process considering this has a last Express vibes I haven't played last express myself so I can't testify to that I wanted to ask you about the setting in general because there's a few key things beyond just sort of the Asian East Middle East Southeast Asian kind of vibe of the game is also this very strange intertwining

of a mystical and scientific world because you have robots that are dug up from the ground you have a nebula where people sail in it like the river um there this is cool this is really cool and while I think it would be nice to hear but if you did talk to mr. McNair I just want to know more about making this setting in a in a world where game developers I feel like I have to fight for interesting settings with every game or they risk feeling like you know a knockoff of some other game that's already existed - Jordan - but the last Express is my favorite game of all time like it's just an astonishingly good piece of writing and wonderful wonderful concept funny how this it's almost like look that we ended up being similar to last Express I know it you're like structure I'm sure it's been in terms of the art style like it takes a lot of well you can say it

takes influence we came from a totally different direction I think I remember a point when we were talking about this and when we tried this and we drove back we tried the other and you were like I'll bloody now let's just do the last escape look yeah yeah if you want to if you want to dive into how they cooked up this setting yeah a setting was hard actually when we simply we'd always worked on all other ideas previously so obviously 80 days is an adaptation of a night and sorcery is - and Joe is very keen on making our own IP and I really didn't want to do I knew it would be difficult it's a lot of work but I think we it was it was a really long and torturous process I think we started with a few things that we were sure off so we wanted that the nebula the rivers in space was a core idea that we started

with which paint some kind of landscapes that you were yeah yeah we're just thinking that like usually when space is represented in games it's kind of like this black void of emptiness and like hard steer real hard sci-fi and not that idea you could create a version of space which is more like one of these beautiful nebulas a yeasty through the Hubble telescope that beautiful colourful rich and dense sea as you've said more like the natural landscape of rivers and mountains where the mountains are like cloud banks yeah and that coupled into an image that comes from Egyptian mythology of the gods singing bhajans through the rivers of stars yeah she's having the way that raw travels across the sky and that felt like it now felt like a cool association to play with but not necessarily a concrete piece of world building I think it was about maybe even

a yeah where I would just wake up in the morning trying to do some writing but why are there rivers in space why are there rivers in space no it's the madness and then at some point I have an idea for why there are rivers in space which I'm not going to share because it's a huge spoiler come on but from that everything else followed and then the most of the rest of the building of the setting water that's trying to stick to a couple of basic ground rules so it's usually inspired by the work of Ursula Gwyn and Gene Wolfe to be Morpheus for us to news master all because I think you just passed yesterday yeah one but they both the green stuff is incredibly empathetic and I love very banged around humans do and how they shape things and Wolf stuff is not particularly and pathetic but one thing that he does very well is that he

tends to have one core magic in the world that then manifests in multiple ways that the people in the world don't realize are the same thing which is a neat trick for building a sci-fi setting because it makes everything feel connected even though everything is also disparate so you get a sense of wonder but a sense that it all comes from the same it somehow it was cut from the same cloth mmm it bridges the line between magic and science in a way oh yeah exactly is the problem with magic isn't it arbitrary the problem with your you're kind of Harry Potter is well next week Harry Potter might get a spell to do something else completely random that you didn't know existed in this world and like well why doesn't Dumbledore just ask the win the game spell and then everything's fine and that's a problem if you want to kind of make your world compelling especially if the player doesn't understand it in an explore it but if you if you lay out there like lots of technological rules in the way that Star Trek does you end up with this incredibly complicated world it's very inaccessible for people coming into it new so

do you have his two rules with interesting consequences and that we tried to do that we tried to make all well flex up in a way but the fat would follow and everything in the world comes from these two technological ideas that we had we kind of come out in lots of different interesting ways and that led us to natural places in the narrative and then you think well how can i express this narrative and it all kind of twists around itself and you bring in things which are interesting in your company arm there was lots of research that kind of inspired variant Queens and moments in the game and they have to work out why they make sense and every surrenders up to be really hard you don't have just have to build a world in the present you have to create history [Music] in order to write this locally that's

that's a very tiny they're very tiny on that screen there feel free to enhance are 720p broadcast to try and pick out a few pixels in the lower left hand corner with our moderately okay encoding yeah it was a really long and difficult process and I think one thing we've had we've seen a lot of reviews today and one thing that's been common across the reviews is people saying you know they really like this well feels like a really fleshed out real world and that's incredibly good to hear but I think the thing that makes it hang together is just we we have tried to shave it back at all times and make sure that it does really genuinely make sense with itself so there's a lot of places where in the game that there's it like symbology that just works so in the beginning of the game you're introduced to this symbol

called the eagle and Sun which is the symbol of the Empire that was around in this nebula before sort of before a Cataclysm happened and it was destroyed and one of the questions that the game never explicitly asks is what the hell is an eagle what the hell is a Sun Nebula but I guess the answers to these questions and they're in there and they make sense and like the fact that Trax is not an accident but it doesn't make the world feel robust even if no one ever talks about it um yeah John I have a question as someone who's I've done some work you know I know that the other process of writing different kinds of games can go what it is very easy to fall down the trap of building out loads and loads of beautiful lore and knowledge and information about your game you you are all lucky in that you have a game that wants to use that lourd knowledge but how when you only have so much time to make a a game that needs to pay for your you know your meal your family's main

you know how do you properly categorize you you can make an argument that you know all the writing work you do even if it gets cut is worth it because it helps you to do something else but how do you make sure you're not like falling down a rabbit hole when you're in the space like that I think it's actually the same as designing interactive fiction in general possibly the same as designing games in general but you have to think as a player and then you also have to think as a as a creator so you have to think as a writer and you also have to think as the reader so as a writer I say well I've got my law and I've got all this thing but I'm interested in they're already cool but as a reader I don't give a damn about your law at all and what I want is the characters the adventures the motivation the mystery I want to know what's happening there and if you'll or isn't relevant to that I don't care about it and I shouldn't care about it and there will be readers who do but they're not the important one the important reader is the reader who just wants to be told a good story and then go home and then player your game one

who just wants to have fun that's all they want to do they just want to have something to do and and both you have to flip between those two viewpoints all the time like it's no good to go away and write out a great big law book and then be really proud of yourself because you've basically you've just entertained an audience of one and that's it you've got to think about the performance the whole time so I try to as little or as possible all the time but be thinking about the way that seems what I can play or what will actually happen in the game and then when I realize I don't know something then I go back to the law and I kind of construct the law all that makes sense within that and then I go back to the gameplay and flip-flopping between those two you eventually reach a point where both you're satisfied I think that's true of all of our designs you know like if we're designing the translation game we're thinking about well how does this work as a language but how does it work as a thing the player can soul and both

of those things are fighting and you're trying to find the tension the balance between the two because if you go too far one way you end up with something being comprehensible and you go the other way you end up with something that's just trivial and neither of those are correct you know that's the whole job like that's not is not anyone can have ideas like really actually anyone can have ideas and it's a question have you make ideas that you can play things out in an interesting way is what that's what we're doing it's nice yeah no joke before we move on there's a question that dovetails very well with this which is from statutes now they want to know how much background research on archaeology history etc did you do to help build these worlds I mean we start

with research but you start with research that inspires you I'm not very good at researching the research is safe I tend to you like drop in and out of stuff so my starting point on this project was a 1960s book of archaeological of schlock archaeology called Citadel's of mystery which goes through twelve archaeological sites and comes up with some crazy theories about what they might be so it's like machu picchu was a test village in the mountains and it was built purely to see if people could survive up there and they didn't this is not a very plausible theory but this is the theory in this book and it's brilliant because it takes real archaeological evidence and it plays with it and has fun and that inspired me a lot and it's a superb book and I usually enjoyed it and that was my primary research but to say that I just read this one book and wrote the game is also not true like I know a ton of archaeologists my dad is a an anthropologist I've met them all my life yeah like it won't you you end up

bringing together a lot of sources that you didn't deliberately look for because we chose to write this game for a reason you know I think that across the team as well like Tom used to talk a lot about religion learning that was something he was really engineering bringing to us like like contacts and that's definitely fed through into the game right now there are more questions that chap that are very very good but I have one that I've wanted to ask since the start so I'm just gonna throw it out there what how tricky was it to put this into a 3d context this is your first 3d navigatable like game to tell me a bit about how that went for you because it must have been tricky at best like a what what engine and tools did you use to build these 3d worlds and like how did you end up deciding how to build them as these kind of quasi 3ds storybook spaces that they came out as so we built in unity and we basically started from the point of as I said

earlier we want to make a 2d comic book essentially for the dynamic interactive comic book and what that would mean and pod pods the reason we wanted to do that is because we loved we loved 2d character illustration because they can give you a unique character illustration can be really expressive so we wanted to draw our characters from lots of different angles so that we could dynamically compose these panels and we constructed our environments in 3d they were initially a lot simpler than the environments kids is because we wanted to create the sense of a background rather than construct entire worlds in 3d but as we created this and we created the main protagonist the lair and we drew her from 12 different angles a call pose we just loved the overall effect of moving

the camera around 3d because we created a system that basically has a database of character frames and depending on the cameras angle and certain tanks that's being applied to her character like whether she's in a particular walk or a talk or some emotion then it would pick a different overall body frame and also taste the different facial expression over the top so we could get all these different effects and then yeah the 3d basically came out of that as we were experimenting with what you could do because we wanted it to initially just be to the comic book panels but then seeing seeing the effect of all of that in 3d we just thought it looked really cool interesting I imagine how did that change the way you did your sort of how you structured the pace and flow of the

game like how much how much of what you might call level design went into this game and like how did the decision to go full 3d change the way you structured it if at all as soon as you go full 3d you can you get the ability to poke around in all of the little tiny corners at the level it's like me other 3d game we've kind of we've been through an evolution to get back when it's at the beginning we had very limited amount of interactivity in that it was kind of a visual choice based narrative so that the narrative was really driving it there was not so much exploration at all you could only interact with whatever it gave you choices but as we opened it up like we were talking for a while about having through the environment but maybe you you have a completely fixed camera angle a bit like acquaintances like

adventure so that within which from that particular camera perspective you poke around in these corners but it wasn't for the interactive but as soon as you can swing the camera all the way around there's just so much more scope for where you can go what you should be able to interact with it cause it's right there had an impact right down into the script because then suddenly you're branching narrative script needs to be able to cope with the player who walks over to one side of the room and does one thing walks over to the other side of the room and there's another thing then walk back the first side of the room again which is not a branching tree structure even slowly it's different because in in sorcery like when we have waypoints on the on the the mini maps we can easily just say we don't want you to go back in that room so we'll just remove the choice to go back into that room and we can directly push the player in different directions yeah like depending on how open or it you want it to be we can enable and

disable choices to go in different directions but we're always in controllers yeah I mean we do do that in heavens up we will quietly turn the door off over here if you're way over there but hopefully in a way that you never ever notice and then you lose a lot of that potable so I think that you are level design and I think that are the things that really took me by surprise on the project was there was a point when I realized we actually needed to do level design and we needed to know what we were talking about with level design which we hadn't originally intended to bigger thing that we needed tonight we were really lucky when we hired Laura dill away who's our lead embarkment artist we've done some level design on a little big planet ESP amongst other titles and she's working a base station and saying I've worked and so we ended up in a process well I would kind of write a seat and say this is what I think the characters are doing in this scene and this is roughly what I think the dama tree needs to be like it may not work and then she'd take and turn that into more of the level design space

than the space with better vistas and better lines of sight and things and I would take it back and say well I think we need to put more time in here this that's too quick too slow too long and between us we could kind of Thresh out a 3d space in a way that the narrative was happy that the 3d design of it was me too and actually that process was brilliant and I think one of the things which really nice about it is that being a team of seven people like we just sat either side of a table so the iteration time is incredibly thought we were just bashing geometry around between us and coming up with these spaces that kind of flowed in really interesting ways I think that yeah something we hadn't expected to have to contend with but actually it worked really well but as level design go it's a fairly simple problem compared to something you know like a proper stuff again or an adventure game where you really have to think about all of those parts and all of those like all the time and we did a little bit more freedom simulator the games name you know it makes a lot of

sense I am we got about 10 minutes left so if anyone has questions please get them in now or forever hold them there is a really good one that will take us over into the archaeology system if you have a minute because I want to know how that whole thing works and there's a good question here from dev RSW who wants to know did you experiment with other difficulty modes around the translation stuff I've been playing a lot and I wish the game had fewer clues for those of us that love a challenge nope just the right amount of clues thank you from the pressure I also love the challenge you went through about 24 2 types of the translation mechanic all sorts of different mechanics and all sorts of different ways of solving that high-level and generally speaking that the window of a good game design there is incredibly tight because if you make

something which is too easy where the player can brute-force it or they can just make random guesses or they don't have to do any work or there's no insight or there's no structure then there's actually nothing to do and I we had a lot of early first actually you just loved words into slots and then event me alia would say yeah that's it and you go it's a complete waste of time but on the flip side of that it's extremely easy to make a problem which is far too hard and in fact the system we have right now it's very very easy for us to give you a translation which is impossible for you to do we just use the more complicated words in the language and there's a lot of work that went into the game to make sure that it never does that or it very very rarely does that so that you don't just get translations that you have no idea about because then the player just disengages and says well I don't know that could be anything a bit like I used to do in French class you know what that was the very memory sorry

yeah I think if people are feeling confident about the in the translation game then that's nice and if people are feeling that they could do better with the translations in the game then okay fair enough but language has a problem which is that it does get arbitrary quite far like what a word happens to be in really just what it happens to be yeah so it's quite difficult to make a challenging language puzzle in the sense that you might mean it because actually the challenging becomes basically random or impossible very very quickly and then it's not really fun at all you know we definitely rather err on the side of you know without explicitly telling you what the words mean just give you a great amount of clues to whether it's you know where it's written what the symbols look

like and/or how a words relates to another word whether there's similar symbols if from that you ensure it's something quite easily then I kind of feel like that's a win that's a win exactly even if it feels slightly too easy that's way better than the alternative I think the other thing that people need to realize is that it's a 12-hour game and by the end of the game there are long and complex and intricate words that you will be looking at with deep constructional reasons behind them and the tutorial realm is kind of gentle that's probably for the best so yeah for 1500 who want more challenges I I think they're there plenty of challenges in there even if it's just look back through all of your translations and even for ones where you know the words can you work out why the word is the way it is mm like what is

the construction there Howard the symbol to put together to form that word because there's a lot bad to kind of decode I mean I think for us like me you know it was a very iterative process and one where we we settled on the translation like mechanical after about a year and a half of work and after we found it and we really found it from experiment we dug it out of the dirt and were like wow this works and we tested it on so many people in so many context and it's held up for two years or something for us as being I'm pretty sure this is the one I don't know how we could make it better at this point because like yeah it's it's it's remarkable having seen the versions that didn't work it's remarkable how well this version works whether you like or not is up to you but oh my god the other ones were a lot worse yeah for sure um we're coming up to the end here I always like to ask and with this game more so than most how did you get the

word out about this game to people that would you thought would enjoy it most it's such a tricky game to sum up easily or to very quickly give someone a sense of what they will be doing so how did you how have you gone about marketing and sort of trying to get this game in front of people has it all been like YouTube email reviews like what have you what's worked for you well yeah I mean you know ones we have a PR agent who helps us in terms of like she she she has a specific focus on adventure games and shows she has a good amount of contacts in that space the other thing that helps is you write a really good game everybody and then you email for the same do you remember that game you liked we've made another one and I think that's pretty pretty fundamental actually it's also taken us a long time to work out what the hook of the game is we were we've been excited since

about all the kind of tonal aspects of the game like characters the world mechanics but it took us a while to find out through securely through experimentation and talking to people that it was the translation mechanic which really liked people's interest and so discovering that getting that down and always making sure that when we talked about the game we made sure to mention we have an entire hieroglyphic language to decipher and just began the thing that we always it's like a one-line picture of the game is an archaeological narrative adventure with an entire hieroglyphic language to decipher like I've said that far too many times oh yeah okay and but a lot of me wants to say oh yeah with this incredible massively adaptive narrative that totally responds to everything you do there's completely nonlinear that lets you explore this massive where are you going why why have you gone yeah that's what that's what carries the game

that's what if you enjoy the game that's probably what's making it good you need that initial hurt that's what is nice about reading the news today is that a lot of them have gone oh there's this world and there's people and there's characters their mysteries and you go yeah all this stuff was that you know yeah it's not just the language puzzle game but I think then that goes back to something that might Rose I used to work with I was interested which is what makes me go cook in a kicker and look and you have a kicker and I'll a hook is the translation game and I'll kick there is the mass of the adapted narrative with the interesting characters and all of that stuff and it can be really hard to package your game up that way because the kicker is probably the thing you care about and the hook is probably the thing that you're kind of done with it's the developer that you've got over it by the time you're making a game but but it is a really good way to think about reclaiming your project up the people like it the hook is working they're interested in the kicker is what makes

them stay and the great thing about that is you can you can be constantly experimenting with that every time you explain walking walking onto it person you try explaining it to know from way see what makes their lot eyes Intel yeah yeah and we we've totally found that since we found that way of describing the game then it's just in a question of like what have we done we've done coastal imager we've done Twitter stuff we've done interviews with the press we've done demos various thing some things about traction some things I have no traction but in general that those concepts that that hook concept has been has always worked it's more than that like when we've had success it's always been it's been the same book and the same kind of payoff nice well I hope it works out for you guys this game seems incredible I think we're just about done with all right here Bryant you have any burning questions you had to slip in here a lot

of for the language system inaudible start that off everyone from Kail Woodbridge is just super con 22 thank you all for dropping by and sharing your love for heavens hall with these folks I guess for you guys I've been asking a lot of developers lately because we talk to have been building their companies on and you know the future of their game making lives alongside their debut games y'all are a few games in right now that's you know you're not on the same place you know how to build tools and recruit people and sort of do that what there's a lot changing in the world of game developing right now in that there's a more pressure for games the making of the game to be as much of an entertainment as much of the product I guess as the game itself and I'm well I wouldn't argue that every game developer has to jump on that bandwagon right away someone in here was asking chat was asking about updates for the game and where what have you been thinking about in the way that like these kind of

story driven games can exist with with a world that's that's expanding into into games that are more persistent which thankfully a lot of those games are still narrative and storage writs thankfully not a narrative or no dared if it's how is narrative presented that's that's a quiet there's a question in there somewhere there's a question mark yeah I feel like - doesn't mean a persistent evolving games because I look at something like that involved and like it's crafted it's got a beginning it's got a middle it's got an end the idea of adding anything to it terrifies me because like the narrative sticks together now and if I add something to I'm really not sure it would stick together anymore in a way that actually is much more difficult than say 80 days repose 80 days is made out of you know lots of little individual pieces that could sometimes call to each other and like remember certain facts between certain cities that you visit but Kevin thought it's so just like it's tight it seems to

be tight everything reacts to signing in the core plot so I feel like if we were ever to do an update for heaven thought it would have to be a sequel where as I still kick myself on 80 days that maybe we should have just released a lot less of the game and made it a sort of script and then just new cities and journeys every month totally could have done do seasons or maybe we would have just like hated it within windows I don't know but yeah I think what I want to believe is that it's still possible for us to make game's narrative games that are so efficiently made that they sell that they justify themselves that they don't need to be persistent game we don't need to have people were coming back every three months and paying another $20 for the next bit we don't need three million players we can get enough players who are happy with their $1 their one-time purchase.that wig we're good we're falling and that lets us make the kind of games that we actually want to make

and craft the experiences we want to cross without having to try and Bend like the narrative into a shape that it doesn't want to be all well like make games that are not really end like I hate it when narratives don't have proper endings it really irritates me um and I can see that in most contexts narratives are moving towards stories which don't end because then you could make another one and like Marvel are doing this right now extremely successfully and George RR Martin's got his own solution which is just not well I have to do that sorry the sickest burn I think we've ever experienced on this channel hope John I hope you check this game out of before I'll just let

super Khan get blessed commons in how you did 80 days perfect the basic game was amazing in the updates for it made them even more happy you somehow made a great game even better and capable woodbridge would like to say as a parent hooray for short finishable games i will just add I guess like a keyword that stuck out to me there is efficient like having game making be efficient seems to be something that I think everyone is trying to figure out at all times and I hope I hope I hope that the I hope that heavens vault has struck that balance for you I I cannot arbitrarily say if it has it's certainly a lot more efficient than if we've done it in other yes is like we have made you know 12 to 20 hour game that's full-on narrative all the time that doesn't have any downtime in it and there's seven of us yeah and it

start any ramp up from - yeah I still feel like that's relatively yeah well unfortunately had a really heavy moment in gameplay to end this on because I believe we've just discovered a slave market we did that's bad okay wish we had time to unpack that we do not with that I will start working everyone to do thank you all for joining us on the GGC twitch channel this is a place where we try to talk about the art and business making games and often where they intersect just just like we discussed in this moment if you enjoyed this we would love it if you clicked the follow button we would love it if you checked out heavens vault which is the game we're streaming today because you know it's a cool game we try to check out cool games on this channel and we try to always be talking with the developers and give you an opportunity to ask though of course about how games

get made because we're also GDC even we encourage you to check out the rest of GDC we have the GGC vault up open right now you can go check out all the talks of GC 2019 we have a YouTube channel where those talks also wind up so you can go check that out too and with that Jonah Joseph if they have any questions for you where should they ask them Twitter is probably the place we all have it also have a discord server Maria oh yeah I don't know how you find it oh yeah oh yes yeah alright so our Twitter is a tinkle studios and you can find us there and yeah please do take a look Evans well it's on PC and ps4 and today mMmmm gray one is the best day to play them for sure all right either