GDC Plays indivisible with Mike Z and Mariel Cartwright

hello everyone good afternoon good morning welcome to the GGC Twitter channel my name is Brian Francis I'm a contributing editor at gamasutra dot-com I am a community manager at GGC and we are here playing indivisible from lab zero games this game just came out this week it's pretty cool it comes to us like I said from lab zero and two of the folks from lab zero are with us today in the lower left-hand corner of the screen Mike and Mariel how's it going in the center of the screen then yeah we're doing good right now I'm going to turn the volume down the game a little because I'm just now having to deal with two different voices one sec before I ask you guys to introduce yourselves I what I should do is ask Alex to introduce himself Alex we haven't heard from you in ages hey what's up how are you just following I'm all right it's following podcast

rule see I was gonna wait till you finished up good I'm good it's good to be back I it's been a minute so let's uh let's do this one up nice yeah I got a it's been so long I've forgotten I gotta log into chat so anyone who's watching live please know you can go ahead and drop questions for these two fine people in and we won't relay them we prefer questions about game design and development but what kind of take anything right my just appreciate being called a fine person oh sure I'm speaking of fine people Mike yes would you do is start by introducing her choosing yourself first hello I'm Mike V I did some stuff on the ski no wait that's Rob I did stuff yeah if you don't like something it was probably me you made a video game Ariel what is your what is your role on this game so it kind of changed over the

course of the project so I started off as our director and lead animator later became head of story and now because that's too many titles I'm just creative director in the world in the world of too many titles and too many things that we have to explain before we get started on learning more about this game how this game was made I'm gonna go ahead and do a tiny bit of disclosure individual comes to us one of the other team members to the other team members are Brandon Sheffield the math of Kumar who are great friends of GGC but they also worked on the game so we felt it with disclaiming you know hey they worked on but they work for us they work for the game that had nothing to do I guess I should also display my back this game on IndieGoGo way back when thank you right on that had nothing to do with us covering the game or anything we just I've been working I've been keeping track of games we wanted to cover and this was one of them absolutely did it had something to do with you covering the games if you hadn't you wouldn't be covering it right now that might not exist yeah I didn't

mean like bias wise I meant like if you hadn't given us money the game we're for sure yeah let's start there actually I mean let's talk about how this game came to be funded I remember you guys started on IndieGoGo right I think we were we were kind of coming off of finishing all the Skullgirls DLC that we did which we also crowdfunding on IndieGoGo so we wait how many characters did we release four Skullgirls okay so so we put out six DLC characters for school girls and and once we finished that you know we started looking ahead and thinking about our next project and I think we all kind of wanted to work on something that we all would like to play in the end just because no six characters is correct you're all right there's no fact-check anyway yeah so so we all just thought

like what's you know what's a genre that we could tackle that we think we would all like to play in the end and we kind of came to the consensus that it was kind of like this RPG and so we we started kind of developing this idea we were talking with like a couple different publishers but through that process we kind of put together this pitch and then we were able to take this pitch and bring it to 505 and 505 agreed to help fund the game if we were able to raise a certain amount of money through crowdfunding submit it yeah sorry Oh anything because I want to make sure that people can learn without saying yeah so so we had it up on IndieGoGo it was kind of kind of a stressful experience just because we had to ask for a lot of money so I actually I

apologize but we what we learned from this crowdfunding experience is that Kickstarter has won the war oh yeah we picked IndieGoGo because we were asking for a lot of money and IndieGoGo took less cut overall which when you're asking for like millions of dollars it was 1.5 yeah I think actually it was 1.3 no sorry we were asking for one oh yeah yeah right yeah like when you're asking for that much money losing some percent to overhead just from your crowdfunding platform sucks so he nigo go took less overhead but IndieGoGo had so much less reach that people kept asking about like I can't find it on Kickstarter hey I hear you guys are doing a Kickstarter right Kickstarter has become the kleenex term for crowdfunding right right back I

think expander yes so what we learned after that is like and throughout the course of the whole crowd funds there were people that were like I really want to back this game I'm not backing anything on the IndieGoGo allowed people to put up projects that were like whatever we get we keep the goal I mean there's you know pros and cons obviously and you know at the time IndieGoGo was the right choice for us yeah like IndieGoGo has been fantastic to work with yeah it's just the region the public perception of the two platforms is like vastly different and we learned that yeah yes let's let's focus on that for a minute I think even when you're on Kickstarter at this stage in the game when you're trying to crowd from a video game the market is so saturated and so full that I mean it's it's it's a

challenge every developer we talk to to get the word out about your project and keep people coming back to it so like you guys dealt with that on IndieGoGo I mean they're like four years ago now but you know as you were working through that like how did you overcome that problem like how did you get people to go to IndieGoGo and give you the money you needed I think it was just kind of like a like a chain reaction like we released Skullgirls and then once we did the Skullgirls indiegogo we had you know the existing IP of Skullgirls to say like hey just your funding more skullgirls and then once we had success with that I think that's only the reason why that we could go to crowdfunding with an entirely new IP like if we just came straight out the door with this game I don't think it would have been funded yeah I think we needed to have our existing reputation as a studio and someone that could deliver on a crowdfunding campaign and that's why it happened at all yeah another thing that really helped was we had the prototype which was a double-edged sword actually because a lot of crowdfunding campaigns are selling you there's the business

turn they're selling the sizzle in that mistake right a lot of crowdfunding campaigns are like we're gonna make a cool game and you're gonna think it's cool and like cool means something different to everybody right so I wanted to make sure because like you are playing it now right and there's not an RPG that is like this or a Metroidvania that is like this because we did the battle system that's never been done and I wanted to make sure people understood what the heck we were trying to do so we had a prototype and the prototype was we worked for three months on a thing and like parts of it looked like crap and parts of it look great and parts of it played like crap and parts of the slate okay but it was like this is the idea we're going for and a whole bunch of people during the crowdfunding campaign were like there were there were two parts of it one of them was like well I can already play this I have to give you anything like you guys are basically done right and the other one was well if this is what you're going for then I'm not giving right yeah I mean because people looked

at it and they were like well this parts of this looked like crap so I don't want to pay for okay yeah that's like this right do you think you would take that approach on your next project where you put a like a playable beta or a demo this is probably suicide but I would I really yeah I would so I would like to reach the point where we don't have to crowdfund things anymore I like crowdfunding because it shows that people really believe in the thing that we're doing and like we get people that are along for the whole ride yeah it's extremely stressful and worrying and for a lot of other teams and for another crowd fun that we do like you don't always make it right and that experience was really harrowing yeah and I think also crowdfunding or not I think is this studio we do want to

embrace open development as much as we can yes so so just streaming sharing you know bringing builds out to places to test just just trying to be as open as we came without you know obviously just spoiling like story or anything like that maybe we manage not to spoil two-thirds of this game just being open about development I think we'll always try to do what are we crowd fund or not mm-hm yeah yeah I want to do sorry no please do I want to do betas for everything that we do because the public feedback is the best part and also it's a really good way to get word of mouth because people can play the thing you're doing yeah we did backer previews for this game twice throughout the development right those took a lot of extra work because we couldn't just chop out at the beginning of the game because we wanted not to spoil things so in the future I'd like to try to organize whatever we're doing so that we can do that in like a

manner that's not basically build a separate mini game for a month yeah but I definitely want to not one of those teams it's like we're working in a thing you're not gonna hear from us 14 years right well good luck with that I guess that sounds like it's a lot of extra effort to have to like worry about putting the other demos and taking apart things but I suppose the feedback is worth it definitely even just like seeing people play the thing that you're working on and enjoy it really helps you be able to continue to work on it because you know that like oh yeah people actually like this thing yeah let's take you to that I mean I want to come back and talk about the business more because I feel like your decision to go with a publisher or super interesting but let's talk about this combat in this system we've got a bunch of good questions in chat Brian how are you doing in there great you're like yeah turn it up there's doing the metroidvania kind of style like an explorer look around figure out where I can go to figure out what side question what's main quest the combat system which you just mentioned like the design of this game so you can see for those of you who are unfamiliar

with the stream which betting isn't a lot of you there was 41 great people out there and chat people like all mighty mints and Theotis streams y'all seem pretty familiar with this game but in case you aren't taught this may be that you right I think yeah vania II kind of part of the game where you're using abilities to navigate a 2d space and then as you just saw a second ago there is a combat screen where you are using the face buttons to pick moves for each of your characters those moves are then sort of manipulated by using different directions that effect the stuff so for instance I'm gonna get blasted by this [ __ ] Wow are we not being nice no no we're adults not that kind of 18-plus though yeah

well no no no I say let's get into some combat I want talk about the systems and there are some great questions in chat let's start with one that is directly relevant to that almighty mints asked any insight you can provide and how you balance combat for so many characters and possible combinations I know there's a ton right I mean they're mostly like well over 10 at least that you can get them your party it one time and there's a maximum of four so how did you guys think about adding characters and balancing sorry that you can get in your party you can have four in your battle and balancing is kind of the same way that we approached it for SG right so characters have attacks obviously damage is an important part but also in a game like this width and

size for the hits are important right like oznas sideways backswing hits multiple rows of enemies and like her down does lots of extra damage so we looked at the systems that we had in this game which are damage meter and how fast your actions come back and we basically balance things around their overall utility rather than just damage so like ginseng every time you do a neutral attack they serve their did you do it mmm-hmm thank you oh did you actually retweet it yeah so ginseng every time you stir their mortar it increases the efficacy of their next he'll basically exponentially so the next time you do an up attack you get way more health back um but they don't

do a whole lot of damage and you do need healing very often so they don't have a lot of cooldown on anything that they do right whereas razz me can reach anyone anywhere can slow enemies and has really really good supers so she's way slower to recover all of our pips and like oznas down attack does almost twice as much damage as her neutral attack so it has a much longer cooldown and the cooldown is multiplicative each time right so you cost yourself like 20% of your speed each time you do it so if you except what you're doing you can deal slightly less damage but being able to do it way more often or choose to do a huge amount of damage in one turn and not get another turn for a little while yeah you're motioning oh who me yeah oh no no sorry sorry the main thing I wanted to say that we were bouncing around is we balance not around level

but basically around player skill right that was the main thing that we had to do with this game because damage is random and blocking is in random and all the rest of that stuff one of the things that we learned from the prototype and again her public development is really useful was uh to balance around block damage rather than hit damage because since you can block whenever you want assuming that people are going to be good enough to block all the time even if it means that they can't use supers very often was a big help because like the boss of the prototype when we first played it they were balanced around how much damage they did when you got hit but like when you learn how to block you didn't get hit at all so like nobody lost to them ever and it just was oh I'm blocking and then not caring for like two minutes right right so yeah I don't think it's a very defensive game I it's something that really struck me and you know this game you guys talk very

probably being strongly influenced like some combat designed by valkyrie profile which i confess i never played but in in so i know i got i'm a carbon even for a lot of reasons but no so I've been playing a bit of this game and watching in this play and something I've noticed immediately is that there are there's so much that I associate with fighting game design popping up here right so when you're talking about hitboxes and that kind of thing I noticed there are different levels there a high-cut looks like high attacks medium attacks and maybe even low attacks and there's all kinds up there so like how did you choose what to bring over and integrate into this design those seem like very conscious decisions yes so this game I'm gonna get a lot of flack for saying this because I don't mean art style or story or anything I only mean combat this game is what I thought valkyrie profile was going to be when i've looked at the box before I

played it oh yeah so valkyrie profile is the same like four face buttons to do stuff with your team but it's strict turn right so everyone on your team goes however many times they go and when you're done the enemy goes all all in a row and then you go again right and it's dammit I thought this game was gonna be yeah and blocking is yeah RPG randomness and all that so this game is basically the UH crew profile with Final Fantasy's ATB so you characters can go whenever they want and then everything else comes from fighting games so blocking is up to you because I hated it when it was like please just plug this here and don't die and then they roll it too and they don't block it and you're like well crack okay I've wanted everything that we did to be up to the player as much as possible the there are sorry there are up/down and neutral attacks that you can do with

every character so every character has three normal attacks they can do Ozma has combo strings and some other characters have combo strings but that's the basics um that actually came from dr. profile give every character three different attacks that they did in some order that you determined so they would do like a b c or c VAR whatever and how to give control over those things to the player it wasn't even it was definitely we want to give people different attacks but it was mostly figuring out like how to give you control over that that was a difficult part cuz giving you like forward and backward a lot of people didn't find it giving you up and down more people found it but the people that would find forward and backward so you have to tell people anyway yeah and then like a lot of the rest of it came from trying to make it feel as intentional i spy

Gamze feel when stuff happens to you right like giving you defense as your own choice there's even clean block which is like parrying or just offend so if you block at the last second with a character they're blue instead of pink and you get back a small amount of your action pips so you can go sooner and you won't die and as you upgrade your defense you actually heal more and more phlegm clean blocks but uh doing that and like giving you combos and making juggles matter and making how the how big a complicated matter and like what order you two attacks in putting in guard breaks that are fighting game style so that actually came out of like the way that you do guard breaks in this game is like very very fighting game like right if you play guilty gear which full disclosure a whole bunch of the meter management mechanics in this game are based on guilty gear oh yeah oh god I used to kill in here somewhere sorry bout a room cancel no yeah

actually I mean you can cancel attacks into supers whenever you want yeah or for its bending meter yes Brian could you show us how I don't know in the middle of your super super is r1 plus attack okay zipper okay yep okay so yeah the the meter management stuff comes fully from guilty gear right so if you want to attempt to block it costs bar hmm you can still do it when you don't have bar because that was really mean to not let you block in the prototype and like whole ya bunches of people died but if you want to attempt defense it cost bars the better you are at defense the more part you get back from it and the better you are at attacking the more bar you get from that so the better you are on defense them the more effective your offense can be because you have more bars to use and the better you are in offense the more useful your defense is

because spending bar doesn't matter as much that yeah it's like wild that was I love that part of guilty gear of like there was only one resource to manage and it mattered everywhere so I tried very hard to do exactly that same thing with this game totally let's um if you got a second let's talk about design the individual character there's a good question here in chat from Theo dos dreams wants to know when you were designing the game was there for character that was almost scrapped because the design wasn't working or you had to redesign completely maybe something to do with art was there any like characters that almost didn't make it cushy yeah okay she's character you meet a little later on and and she's like a girl that has a giant bird with her and I think Mike you could probably speak to this the complexity of like doing the two characters in one yeah so she's so you

have a bird that you can tell to do things if you're standing on the ground but then if you hit up she gets on the bird and you get a different set of attacks including one that's really good against groups and one that is basically the dragon and jump from final fantasy where you leave the screen for a while and then come back and you have and all of your remaining tips to stay up and do extra damage that's good um she was probably top two hardest characters that we actually had to implement coordinating a completely separate sprite that needs to be like where it has to be so that you can get on it and all the rest of that is like really difficult in this game because we also have collision to deal with so like there was a lot of okay well the bird gets stuck on the ceiling the bird gets stuck on a Ledge like you can't reach the bird like telling the bird what to do um we actually ended up making one of those game design decisions that you

make a lot for fun over everything where like the bird can just go through all collisions because it solved every problem and actually made everything more enjoyable perfect yeah in terms of animation also you know even though they function is essentially one character you know we had to animate Kushi herself I'll tune the bird and then both of them together so it was like three sets of animation to create one you know how parent move set everything right like you have an idol for cushy on the credit yeah so there's there's a lot of stuff that went into it I think originally she was just cut as well as who not to z bhature also another like two for one character and then we got a little bit of an extension so we put the both of them back in yep nice the so like when you get cushy you will notice she doesn't have supers her board

attacks do basically super damage and have basically super cool down but she doesn't spend meter she generates meter instead that was a decently fun thing to have done but it also stemmed from the fact that we didn't have the resources to go and implement and lots of extra stuff for a character that already had lots of extra stuff right yeah I can only imagine and like we should talk about that because the look of this game is outstanding I mean it's striking it's beautiful its vibrant there's a good question in chat that leads us in here from art of Jimmy Chi they want to know the monster designs are cool so how did you decide how they attack and how did you come up with the designs and I would love to hear more in general about the inspiration for this art style and this whole vibe I know there was like a real Southeast Asian flavor flowing through it so like where did you guys what inspired look at this game and the design of the monsters in the world so that was something that that I think was

part of the idea early on we kind of wanted to do a game in a setting that we felt we don't see enough of the designer artist on skullgirls Alex Ahad you know was a big part of it he was the one that also designed all the monsters he loves Coco thank you yeah creator of school girls yeah so I think I think between those two things like kind of the influence that he wanted to bring on and you know the rest of the team was really on board with this idea and kind of like drinking and exploring and you know reading up and just just really kind of like getting into this world was you know a huge part of just setting up the world that we see in the game and I think you know it is it is very fantasy but I think you can definitely

see the inspiration and I think the setting does have a very distinctly Southeast Asian feel over other stuff right I do also want to point out that we got to make this choice because we were in a space where we could decide exactly what we wanted our game to look like but there are a lot of really talented Studios making games in Southeast Asia so if we can do a small bit to bring exposure to them that is also really gratifying for us to be able to do yeah for sure totally um Mary oh can you talk a bit more depth about your inspiration and your process for designing I'm presuming you you were heavily involved that maybe not but like the sign of the monster design of the characters how you sort of went through that yeah so so the monsters we did mostly leave to Alex that was kind of like you know you'll have so we took care of that but in terms of the the characters the

characters was very collaborative among amongst all our artists and so basically the way the way it kind of ended up working was when we had the crowdfunding campaign we had it was kind of crazy actually we had each of our artists just kind of come up with a design and we would throw it out there once we reached a certain number of like a certain number of dollars yes hey if you're gonna do a crowdfunding campaign you might want to plan more stuff in advance than we did yeah I think yeah we came to the point where it was literally like we need another character design because we're going to be coming up on the milestone very soon who's got what right so so it was kind of crazy early on we were just kind of throwing things out and then I think the problem we realized was that you know we thought we were just kind of tossing ideas out there but then our audience grew really attached yeah oh yeah which is which is great but then you know once we have the money and we

sat down to really figure out what this game was we were like okay well we kind of sold the game on these characters now we have to make them work so we we had a lot of meetings kind of getting together and and figuring out like who do we like who do we not like why do we like this why do we not like this we also had to cut down the number of characters from our original pitch ideas because we realized it was too ambitious yeah it's just off your numbers like we just couldn't make think that many characters right so let's do that real quick I'm curious like well further I mean for other teams like as you're trying to work through the process of winnowing down your your options to fit in your schedule and your budget like how did you decide what's a cut it's it's hard because it's I think it's kind of like this continual process the entire time

you know you you always think you want to start small and like scale up but I think what always ends up happening is that you you plan too much and you just kind of have to keep chopping as you go because I'm like well we should cut this thing but like one of these parts is really cool so can we fit this somewhere else and then we should cut this thing but one of these parts is really cool can we fit this somewhere else a lot of it just like which which then leads into us killing ourselves trying to get you know as much other stuff we wanted in you know in terms of like say cutting characters it just kind of came down to we know it'll take this long to make a character we only have this many months and then from that we just say okay well we can make 10 or 15 or however many characters and that's how we decide to

cut stuff like that yep I think a lot of it does comes down to making like planning out each task and actually seeing where it fits the schedule and then once you see you know you have too many tasks for the time you have to make it then you can feel like okay well now we've got a prioritize what is going to be you know what's kind of the core reason we're making this game does this task serve that purpose yep I'm gonna cut it back that way there was a lot that triage was really useful for because it forces you to take a hard look at the thing you're doing and be like okay this bit is really unimportant as much as I like it we can skip it and there were a bunch of things that I wanted to have in the game that we skipped because it was just like you know what it's not core to the thing that we're doing and it'll mean that this character doesn't get done or we don't have this boss or whatever or we don't have cutscenes right you know a big one I think actually is probably the party select yeah and some move right we

have two characters that are fully animated that will be added to the game that didn't make it for initial release because the choice was actually finished polishing the entire rest of the cast or implement these two new characters anyway yeah that's kind of a no-brainer and like real quick like we said right yeah I think a lot of people and I remember this I mean pretty sure this was the Skullgirls thing a few years back like a lot of people don't a lot of people who don't make games might not appreciate how much time it takes to implement a character like that you could polish you know tweak and like double check the entire roster or add two more and like that is such a significant amount of time and effort for something that can often seem so so simple on its face the person playing you should totally switch targets to the eggs because they'll kill you first thank you yep killing it yeah the party

select like we had yeah we had a whole mocked up and completely implemented character select screen that had a carousel and everything else oh yeah and it was never quite as good as the like the box version that you got for this game that was in the prototype yeah as the first version that we made and we spent a lot of time on it and we really tried to make it a thing that could work and in the end it was slower to use it was more difficult to use and it was entirely less clear even though it was prettier yeah it was it was very like pretty it had all the characters animating on the screen it was like glowy and yep yeah everything like moved but but it was it was just kind of like too much to look at yeah it was kind of confusing actually using it as the character select was way harder yeah

thing is it I think we also cut it because it would make loading easier on the switch right yes we cut it because primarily the tech reason at the end is in order to have that screen you have to have all those threads loaded and those sprites are created big so saving memory on the switch meant if we could cut that screen then the switch can only be forced to load the NPC's that are in the level and the sprites that are in your party currently right and like that really helped so it was that wasn't like this whole reason but it pushed it over it like that was the point at which we were like okay this is we just gotta stop trying to make this work yeah and it was sad because we spend a lot of time on that screen right I don't think anyone you ever even saw because it wasn't in the backer preview this

maybe maybe it's too soon but like as you look back on everything you did on this project do you have a better idea of how you might avoid spending a lot of time and effort something like that that ultimately just doesn't work out like is there a way you would cut it sooner on your next project or is it just something you have to feel out as you go I feel like it's kind of both you know like there's always gonna be things that you just can't predict like I always say you know we've made a ton of missteps and mistakes on this project and we'll never make those mistakes again but next time we'll just make a bunch of different mistakes that's game development is never making the same mistake twice but always being able to find anyone yeah yeah excited it so it's weird because like there was some stuff that was cut really early and there were some things that was like like one of the things we had in the funding campaign was we had different weapon sets and we tried that for platforming and for combat and it was way less fun than giving you access to

everything all at once and I still get people that are like oh man I was looking forward to switching weapons and it's like we had that for like six months and it was really not enjoyable to do during the platforming sections you know we unified all of the stuff that she could do into one control scheme which took forever but that was like really early on this is not working and we can't do it the character select was more like we all wanted it to be there it just didn't work no matter how much we pushed at it and like sometimes you have this sunk cost fallacy right where you're like I spend so much time on this I should just try to finish it up and like that's the thing that you really need to learn how to avoid in game you need to be able to objectively look at something and be like it's not working yeah right it might have taken us you know two months of like aggregate time but it's really not working and the character select ended up being one of those yeah I think you're right I think um a lot of those we talked to really appreciate outside perspective on

problems like that whether it's you know play testers or publishers and that kind of thing some curious let's talk about 505 and the partnership real quick what what what drove you to seek out a publisher and sort of why did you choose to work with 505 yeah we didn't think that we could make a full game off of just crowdfunding money and we kind of wanted to really like level up our team we wanted to kind of expand on the games that we could create and we felt that the only way to do that was with like actual funding from publishers and there are things that smaller developers definitely can't write they have global reach they have on site and global testers mm-hmm they have people who know how to contact first parties to do things like we had first party context at the end of skullgirls but getting all of those was

largely a matter of like we happen to know people who now work at Sony right before instead of like we have a department that can do these things right also for serious like we couldn't have asked the public for the amount of money that this game ended up actually costing yeah I mean we spent our whole crowdfunding goal and all the backer stuff which is 2.1 million plus the publisher contributed that amount and more yeah it wasn't as much as a lot of other games of this size yeah I I will not mention any names but like we couldn't have asked for what this game actually ended up costing in terms of development time and resources and money there was no way right I think also you know working with a publisher again gave us access to like we we have we have testers that are really great and we have a QA team that you know like we

have a producer over at 5:05 a couple producers you know who are really hands-on with the game and just making sure it works and like basically they they make it so that we can actually just focus on the development and not worry as much about the peripheral stuff yes like they have a submission to you right so like we don't have to have someone who is talking to Sony and getting reports back and pushing the button to put patches up and like scheduling releases and all that stuff right it's a help nice there are there always are with dealing with any organization but like it's been exceedingly helpful I assume it's what they're healthy were able to do as many ports as you're doing right or where those always part of the plan which definitely wasn't cuz it didn't exist for me right yes they've been really helpful as far as like being able to provide deaf kids and getting us first party information and like helping us

find to do the switch port and us not have to worry about that as much they've been really nice to contact by the way maybe it like yeah we go ahead oh I have no dollars to say nice people are good I appreciate that yeah cool nice people are good I wonder if you're not comfortable or not up on this we have to talk about it but you know you mentioned you know making some changes to make things work well on the switch I'm curious we haven't talked to many people about what it's like to try import games to the switch have you can you talk at all about the challenges you faced or any changes you made sort of make it run well on that console no worse I would prefer you not to be murdered so the ps4 and xb1 sorry yeah I'm not a gamer anymore had 8 gigabytes

of memory and give you most of that the switch has four and gives you about half of that mmm just on that alone we've had to do a bunch of things that we didn't have to do for other consoles like load things earlier and unload things earlier and not keep stuff around that we just didn't care about keeping around on the other consoles because there isn't the space for it right it's it's hard it's not quite as hard as previous Nintendo consoles word support for actually but it's hard in many ways just seems like the easiest center console to pour to yet but who can say Brian I've been kind of steamer one over this conversation you have any burning questions you wanna you want to squeeze out here in the middle of this yeah okay that's good

all right let's see uh here we go a J M games dev wanted to know let's talk about level design what challenges that you face when laying out these levels going from math but Wow place the place on a map is great but what do you feel is the level design philosophy of indivisible level design is something we actually did have a lot of trouble with just because I feel like we we weren't equipped early on to really take on the level design that we intended to do yeah just just because the nature of Metroidvania is is you know lots and lots of backtracking lots of finding hidden paths and kind of you know like they're big maps and they were much bigger to start with we own your

mistakes right we were extremely inexperienced at level design but the level for a fighting game is it's the same size great yeah so initially when we started doing level design one of the things that I really wanted out of it that we actually ended up keeping much to everyone else's chagrin because you can by the end of the game you can walk through the entire world everything is connected hmm you can walk well I mean walk and ability right around the entire world without teleporting anywhere so that meant that every level had to be connected to every - one on each side of it at least right yeah which meant that they there needed to not be like this is a side with nothing in it and that was a giant challenge for everybody we went through a huge number of passes of designs for what each level was going to

be they were all way too big when we started I i will specifically say matthew kumar and JP and earl like went through and did a lot of work to get the levels down to a manageable size while still keeping the goals that we initially had about that i will specifically talk about one of the things that Matthew asked us when he finally became part of the team was yeah for each level like what are the important things for this and what are the goals that you want people to get out of this level which is like I'm dumb and we never thought about that and it became making each of the giant levels that we had like desert which you're not at yet was four times as big as it is mhm and it was just confusing and gigantic and like horrid right and there was never the question of like

what do you actually want out of this level like what's the important feature here right I think in addition to that you know just tackling level design which is something we hadn't done as a studio you know we also had to beef up our environment our team because we didn't you know we had individual artists on school girls just kind of like handling each stage but now we have an environment art team lady artists really what wasn't really there and yeah so I think trying to find that balance of like okay we want to make you know that's level design as good as possible we want it to be the right size but we also like we couldn't make it too big just because the environment art team couldn't keep up with the scale of the levels that they were you know early on it was just too much to add art to because our artists are basically hand placing every single object that you see in the background you know we did have like some prefabs but a lot of it was

just built from scratch yeah so so finding that balance between you know fun level design that kind of like helps the game feel long enough overall also kind of fitting in the story like where the cutscenes were in the level and then actually arting it all it was just I don't think we knew what we were in for I do want to offer a special shout out to our environment art who basically never complained the entire time and we're just like okay what do you need Wow yeah I mean same deal what they were never like you need to cut this part of the game explicitly because it's too much environment art like we ended up having to notice that and like ask for being told that yep

they were pretty gung-ho to just do whatever result it looks amazing yeah gorgeous yeah I mean the whole look and vibe of this game is as outstanding I was gonna ask you know what can just jump up that by the way like out that you're outside yeah well you so you have low gravity so you can just jump that whole way nobody's watching or anything to something don't worry about it right I was yeah I was gonna ask like how did you you know what did you prioritize when when polishing your level design but it sounds like you had to figure that out as well this you were going yeah so let's see we have so many [ __ ] good questions here in chat let's see nope nope nope alright Bryant is there a way we can get rid of the mouse cursor stream on that yeah it's a I'm gonna this here has a good question about sort of like organization and and times back in art

design how much do you let your staff provide creative input how do you organize staff input and how do you keep that input from clashing during production i I think everyone has say I have a question yeah yeah that was that was exactly what I was gonna say and I'm I do not mean to speak over you sure sure well I was just gonna say everyone we encourage everyone to speak up just because I think a lot of the issues we ran into development we we were able to kind of like avoid or circumvent because someone spoke up and just just gave us an opinion that we weren't expecting so we do try to encourage everyone to speak up as much as possible but I think like Mike you and I we're both kind of like the vision holders so we know that what we want out of the game and and so you know we're always listening to feedback but ultimately once a decision needs to be made it's gonna be made by URI essentially I oh wow it's actually the

end of his beam from outside I thought it'd make longer nice okay I should remember about that right that that was the thing I was gonna say is like we are as far as feedback goes completely flat and I don't want us to change that I've worked at places where it was like you say you would say something about art and the artist would be like well you're not an artist this part's been really frustrating like just playing it because I'm arting this part and the designer be like yo you're not a designer so shut up get in like that sucks because the feedback that you get that's usually the most useful is from the people that aren't in your discipline right because they notice things that you are not trained or are trained to not notice anymore and like I try to listen to absolutely everybody from everywhere at all times and then like the way that I

put it on skull grows was I'll listen to everybody but the decision is mine right yeah and we got a bunch of good features on SG actually like the hole to pause the whole whole thing start to pause the game so that you can't accidentally do it by brushing the start button while you're playing came from a random person on the internet I mean he's not gonna think he's random but who had a bunch of other suggestions that got ignored but that one was amazing so you never know where an insanely good suggestion is gonna come from I mean that one got adopted by fighting games all over now and it's the same from your development team right you you never know who's going to suggest something that's totally gonna change the way that you were thinking about something but I still believe that the best games come from one person's vision or one person's vision for a part of it right if you if you have a collaboration for everything it'll get super watered down at the end so you need to be able to give people

ownership of their parts yeah I've often thought that the way that you get a really good game is by having someone who has a vision at the beginning but then can properly communicate that vision to a team of people who will then believe in it and help you execute it right because it's not just about one person knowing what they want it's about one person being able to explain to other people so that they also know what they want yeah if no one knows what they want you're not gonna get anything but if only one person ever knows what the team wants you're also not gonna get anything because that's gonna be micromanaging hell yeah that makes me want to go up outside I'll help you I'm here because we have less than ten minutes left so if you have any good questions for these two good people please put them in chat within the next 8 minutes or so before we get out of here I will kind of want to know I mean I want to know how it's doing yeah you launched recently and hopefully it's all going well but I also

want to know what motivated your decision to sell the game where you do I mean where we talk to designers now in developers so often a major point of contention is which storefront to put the game on and which service to put it out on and that seems only likely to grow more contentious in the years ahead so tell me how did you think about how to sell this game and sort of why did you put it out the way you did I mean I guess you're referring to like Steam versus epic now is kind of a discussion that we're having right I mean I guess I guess for us epic came so late in the game that it just didn't really impact our decision at all I mean it just some part of it was that we already had a Steam version that worked right yeah yeah so it you know consoles uh in PC Mac Smith Linux yep was just basically it at the time you know that we made the decision steam was the thing you know so that's just kind of what we followed through so we

haven't been to know what's watching about the epic store like that they give your information to their Chinese because that was a weird thing for a minute I recalled sorry it was a weird thing for a minute I have no idea whether it was actually contained because we didn't come out on the epic scare so yeah I don't I don't want to I'm not trying to defend the epic story here I'm just trying to make sure our claims do you know we're on a livestream here so we don't we don't have the luxury of an editor so like some have said I think the bigger point is just that you know steam was our option when we were deciding and so that's what we just stuck with yeah steam was also really damn helpful are

nasty and some part of it is I already know how steam works like it a lot some of it was we had a steam build at work some of it was we already worked with steam so we know how to like put things up and test them and distribute them to everybody and all that we're an epic showed up really late in our development cycle that's right up here I do want to get in before we go Mariel we've asked about we Loki asked about the art style for this game I'm going to say something that is not true which is a dumb what I call my call it dumb gamer thought sorry gamers is that 2d art is easy because it's not 3d art and even though the characters moving in the 2d space that therefore is easier than a 3d space because there's a whole other dimension again not a good thought mm-hmm what is it but I mean I get it I

get it um so so 2d animation um you know it is hard I think another thing that people don't really know about it is that it's not cheap yeah and and especially the type that we do where we are actually hand animating you know we're drawing every frame by hand essentially I think there are ways to make 2d animation cheaper like if you use you know flash style animation that are kind of like more like puppets but I guess for what we specialize in as a studio we really care about you know hand-drawn animation and we're we're doing every frame we can kind of make everything as expressive as we want we think it it looks great you know challenges for sure one is just that there aren't as many 2d animators that do this kind of stuff as there are 3d I don't especially I think 2d game

animators because this is something that I've given GDC talks about you know just the the specificities of game animation is different than just animating for a movie or TV show so it's like a subset of a subset and finding people that can do that really well is really difficult and then there's a lot of technical constraints like we can't really have skins we can't you know we can't apply like if we wanted to do the equivalent of a different outfit you know or like swap a skin on a rig like we can't do that we just have to redraw the entire thing the extent of the customization we can do is like colors yeah we can do attach things to carry yeah that requires going through every frame and adding a point for the thing to be attached and then animating the thing for to have a frame that is in whatever attitude it needs to be for as many different versions of it as we need to fit the character yeah like a good

example of that is in Skullgirls we have this character Beowulf he's a wrestler and he has this this folding chair that he can have either on him or off him and for every frame of animation of Beowulf we had to match it to a frame of the chair and then designate on the frame of the character where the chair went yeah so you can't you can't just like attach it to the character that's all hand-done whenever any of the battles end and the increment go back inside house you know they go back inside her forehead that meant going through every frame of her and putting a point on the forehead so that they had some place on that art that they knew where to go right I will also mention I think you talked a bunch about the art side of it 2d is not any simpler as far as tech goes and in fact it's more difficult than basic 3d for tech because graphics hardware is designed around giving me a

whole bunch of textures all at once leave them there and then use them Yeah right like texture this guy's chest and texture the wall and then like leave those textures and graphics memory and send a new model that sends that puts the texture somewhere every frame in 2d since you have a texture that is changing basically and all of these frames of animation definitely do not fit on a graphics card at once you have to update a texture every frame and graphics hardware is really bad about that especially when it's a large texture so we had to do a huge amount to like decompress and update everything more much more than we would have had to do if we made the game 3d also the the short version of 2d is easier than 3d is look at guilty gear excerpt right yeah they made that game look to the via 3d and it was way more work than just making it look 3d but it looks baby friendly we've been giving talks and publishes published papers on how much

more work it was so TD's more what right on yeah no more you but in equivalent amount a dumb argument to get to sure it is an argument we have heard a lot yeah I think my favorite is when we initially did the school girls crowdfunding campaign people were so upset over the cost of just doing a single DLC character so we would get comments like you know why does it cost this much this cost as much as my house I can do this I can do this for free in a weekend and we were like please try could show people like y'all are talking crap about game development this is what we're actually doing yeah yeah the the this character cost more than my house was my favorite comment out of

everything because that doesn't even have anything to do with game dev that was just like okay try paying 12 people for three months it costs as much as your house yeah right yeah what those people are even doing it's wild I mean dispelling the myth suppor on gain development as half the reason we're here so I mean yeah I can stop I can summon my 13 year old self who was arguing on for the way summons her friends from her head sorry to cut you off everyone in chat thank you for your wonderful questions I hate to do this everyone but if we keep going we're just going to turn into this is one our stream is going to turn into a two-hour stream and I would normally like that but someone has to transcribe parts of it so I want to make that someone is sometimes me with that thank you all for the five hour stream from all my team in talking extra life is coming up anyway

so thank you all for watching the GGC twitch channel the GGC is Game Developers Conference we as you can see from our screen we are gonna be happening next March and from the 16th through 20th I've said okay my own confirm the dates well if you were yourself or a game developer we would love to have you out there we are past the point of talk submissions unfortunately we really hope however that you come out and check out some great talks if you stick around this channel if you click the follow button you will get to you know sometimes we just roll some talks on the channel wall our old interviews you know you can up but also more importantly you get notifications when we go live with people like Mike and Mario which thank you both so much every time we have a stream where the devs just talk and don't stop talking I am so thankful because a it makes playing the game easy and B it makes asking the questions easy and you didn't have been a a fountain of knowledge today and I'm very thank you very helpful you can the one bug and I

we don't have a good metric for how long it takes to complete the game yet so an hour for him on it was pretty helpful right on and also I I tossed Muriel I showed Muriel bug earlier that I stumbled on but it was small oh yeah very much everything anyway alexeiev are if they have any questions more about we got some so many great folks in China asking questions where should they ask them where's the best place to actually get an answer because apparently my expanded Twitter oh I have a Twitter I'm just bad at every Twitter that's not mine yeah I mean we we have we're active on our steam community page you can tweet us at love zero games if you have complaints as a backer please email us IndieGoGo at Lancome we'll try to get back to one of our almost a thousand emails backers right now yeah just feel free to reach out and we're we're around for sure if you have complaints for me specifically you can add Mike V says as

easy on Twitter I'm I'm at keno cakes at on Twitter why takes oh that's fine yeah I mean I don't I don't chat back much to people but I'm always you know watching and thankful for all the positivity that comes in visible it's out on PC and consoles we should recommend I reckon I personal statement I recommend you check it out even though like I said I backed an IndieGoGo and I have we have friends who work on we have friends of the show who work on the game it's just cool that hope that a whole hour was just cool that boss fight was cool even though it made me want to pull my hair out thank you everyone have a good day goodbye [Music]