GDC Plays Overland with Finji co-founder Adam Saltsman

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis the invisible voice inside your head here as always talking about interesting games and how they get made with the people who make them we are here today playing a game called Overland though we aren't exactly playing it unfortunately I have to give two disclaimers up front one the footage you're looking at is pre-recorded and the other disclaimer is that I need to give a trigger warning for today's episode slightly and that we are going to be discussing and looking at footage of that real footage it's game footage but like the footage of animals dying in this game the only reason they give that warning is that that was pretty impactful on me when it happened um so I felt I'd give two warning for folks at home in the lower left-hand corner of the screen is Adam Saltzman of Finn Chico is it Finn G or F ng CO or Finn G company usually usually just finchy because of like squatted

accounts and things we have a lot of sort of online identities that are Finn G Co but yeah just Finch is fine yeah so the first important thing we have to talk about this dog's name is potato and it has put on a hat yes important thing to discuss the second thing to discuss is Overland the actual game Overland is a turn-based strategy game kind of looks a little it reminds me of XCOM when I look at it because there's aliens and humans but the vibe is very much more walking dead in that the world is bleak the monsters are scary you do not you're not an amazing alien killer you are a bunch of fleshy humans trying and dogs trying to survive and you want a road trip across America trying to make it to the west coast you're going to see two runs here today from our gameplay yesterday they are really I think they're really good explanations of what the burn of the game might look like so Adam that's gonna bring me to my first question for you what I guess well I remember I saw a Rebecca Saltzman talk

at GE see this year where she talked about what the first versions of Overland look like but what was the first inspiration that you thought we can make I can make over me and my team can make overland and we can sell this game what was kind of the first thing that you were thinking about when you when that thought crossed your mind oh boy I mean it was I think it was a it was a very different scope of game when we started thinking about it for sure but you know I think it was my initial inspiration mostly came from other games I'm usually I like usually think kind of in terms of screenshots first which is kind of a weird process maybe but like it helps me a lot like to be able to sort of imagine what a game might look like and then I try to get a sense of like oh would that be kind of like fun to play I don't know and I was I'm definitely playing a lot of XCOM at the time we started work on this game like six years ago so the that

first kind of big XCOM reboot from Firaxis I had just come out and I was playing a lot of that on prohibitively difficult settings and game overing a lot and I was also playing a lot of and I still play a lot of Michael Bros mobile games and at the time I was playing a lot of a particular one called eight six eight hack which is this just very elegant kind of I guess procedural puzzle game sort of a roguelike sort of a dungeon crawl but kind of abstract but basically a six eight level is kind of a turn-based move through the levels app some guys collect some treasure kind of experience may be presented a little abstractly but it all plays out on this teeny tiny space I think it's like a six by six grid or something like that and it's just elegant and compelling and

beautiful and interesting and it was I felt like it was getting at a lot of the kind of things that were exciting about XCOM a lot of the things that are exciting about XCOM for me but it was getting at them in this very compact kind of package or presentation like literally compact like an ex-con you might which is a game that just just to be clear high adore you know the first 2025 minutes of a level sometimes are just this very very careful anticipatory exploration period and then you start making life-or-death decisions and that's sort of a maybe unfair generalization but eight six eight hack like the first time you swipe the screen and move your little computer chip or whatever I its that was a life-or-death decision and then whether to move left or up next is a life-or-death decision

essentially it's got that kind of like like it's been really really boiled down and I think maybe not in terms of trying to replicate other strategy experiences but that's just kind of the shape the game took and so is interesting to play like a like a bigger more maximalist more spread-out kind of turned a strategy game the same time is like a very very compact abstract strategy game both of which had generative elements both of which were these turn-based games with these big trade-offs for short-term decisions versus long-term decisions and that kind of thing and so yeah the very first versions of this were just kind of me thinking about trying to think about like you know if you mash these things up like what what do you end up with and the original sort of doodle of like what a screenshot of this game might look like is a very like

thinking about like old John Carpenter movies and like a handful of iconic characters out in the middle of nowhere at night trying to get some gas and get back in their car which is right now it's pretty much what's going on right here that part of the game has carried through since about week one a long long long long long long long time ago but that was the piece of it that was really interesting to me was like okay what if a lot of things like fell out of that it was like oh if this is teeny teeny tiny board and everybody on the board has superpowers that's going to be kind weird and also you know I tend to like science fiction stories that are less about some kind of super-powered hero character and more about kind of average people trying to deal with very uh Navarrete things and yeah and sort of a lot of different little bits and pieces

kind of like grew out of that a lot of the games that I have made historically are not games where you're a very powerful person and they are often not games where you are fighting to beat something but maybe like running away from something and I think a lot of those interests kind of carried over into earlier versions of the game as well where it became more about like almost these little like nighttime heists like get out of the car and steal these valuables before the creatures get you and jump back in the car and drive away kind of a feel as opposed to like a you know go in guns blazing and kick all the aliens butts and wear their skulls for hats and collect their alien guts for treasure or whatever even though I enjoy playing those kinds of games right on it's worth then before digging another questions asking about I mean

just ask how Overland evolved his task have you spent the last three four or five years of your life because I saw this thing and indicated in 20 15 20 dish I'm good oh boy we're about to watch a very rough first couple of levels here so so if I'm gonna ask how this game evolved I'll ask you for a compact version of from that initial vision of compact Dexcom of elegant XCOM kind of fear based running away what did the development process bring out of that initial design that wasn't there before um I think probably the main thing was bringing in a bunch of collaborators who I think have kind of more interesting ideas and I and sort of bringing them to bear on this thing and seeing where that went after that so I think the while there

are aspects of the original prototype that probably would be recognizable in this game the you know a small group of people limited inventory limited actions every choice is pretty important even if it's not life or death and you know grab the fuel get back in the car let's get out of here like a lot of that focus has stayed intact but the thing a lot of the things that have changed have been like you know what is the actual mood of the game and what is the actual game look like and why and you know how do you go about trying to like one thing that you run into if you're trying to make kind of a a dense game you know a game where you have a lot of interesting complicated choices but they all exist in a small space is you get these kind of like information problems like how many hit points does that thing have and what's gonna happen if I do this and what are my options with this character

now and a huge amount of time was spent trying to figure out what we wanted to do with that and what made sense for this game there aren't a lot of games that are squad based where each character has their own inventory for example and in retrospect it seems like oh maybe there's a reason that people were avoiding that it's really hard to do well and so like a lot of iteration and development time went into trying to figure out how to just kind of like help people especially people who maybe don't play a ton of strategy games to roughly have an idea of what's going on right now and what's at stake so like the idea that you know someone who maybe isn't an expert level Final Fantasy Tactics player could see this screenshot that's right here and go like oh boy like that dog is surrounded by scary-looking

things and the road is blocked and I the car is damaged now and that's probably bad and I hope that they can get in the car and drive away and escape and be ok and that's something you can like extract just from one screenshot which i think is kind of cool there's a lot of strategy games where if you weren't really thoroughly versed in all of the pros and cons of the different stat systems and so on you wouldn't be able to tell even which like team was winning or something and I think it's a thing that Beck and I both love about minoo I think board games was another big inspiration for this project but pandemic in particular in pandemic is this kind of like major like risk except

instead of armies it's viruses you're trying to control these kind of virus breakouts around the world these epidemics and as soon as you know that the game is about epidemics the basic game board is really communicative even if you don't know a lot about board games you can see that it's a map of the earth you can see that certain cities have a lot of cubes on them you may not necessarily know right off the bat which whether or not it's good to have a lot of cubes but you can certainly tell that there are big differences between certain cities on this world map that you know because you can recognize these places they're real actual places and so I think developing especially developing the visual look and feel of the game was motivated by a lot of those concerns wanting a lot of the places in the game to be kind of recognizable and for the stakes to be easy to understand and that

all kind of is connected to I think the way that the gameplay evolved which was an ongoing increasing interest in maybe initially making what we felt was a a challenging strategy game but over time realizing that that was only kind of interesting because you were worried about these little characters and you wanted them to be okay and Beck and I started calling it um like tuning for drama which is a possibly ridiculous way of talking about this kind of game design but it was things like you know an older versions of the game the characters couldn't move diagonally they could only move kind of orthogonal II along the grid like a you know most chess pieces or like like all the sort of monsters in the game they can only

move up down left right and that seemed like a reasonable thing to do everything follows the same rules cars go up down left right monsters go up down left right and characters go up down left right and that feels fine because you know you want consistency and you want fairness but it turns out it's much more fun if the characters can move diagonally you get like you're seeing here yeah exactly and it's like oh you get really cool close calls now I guess it didn't matter in this case maybe but who is he gonna pull a move here I had a good run and he took care of that plant to the very end that's beautiful [Music] oh no it's fine but yeah like this moving diagonally feels like it's breaking rules and making the game

unfair and maybe making the player too powerful we wanted players to feel kind of scared and vulnerable but what it really does is it gives you all these opportunities to have even more close calls and even more narrow escapes and that started to become the metric by which we judged what sorts of decisions we were going to make about game mechanics or game rules or game actions or whatever it was like does this help you does this give you a way to it's kind of like you know what sorts of tools can you give the player to make them to give them ways to cleverly take care of these like lost little puppies and so letting them move diagonally and push things around and repair things and heal each other and revive each other and shove things away from you and sometimes you know really fight back or manipulate the environment by starting fires or whatever anything that felt like it was not just systemically

interesting and a good fit for the setting but also that played into these kinds of fantasies of taking care of these like lost little people on their road trip those started to be things where we felt like okay maybe this is a slightly unconventional decision in terms of like the mathematics about this game mechanic but it kind of elevates this you know squeaking out by the skinnier teeth kind of experience or either because it's an interesting mechanic like oh I can squeeze between these two things and barely make it to safety or because it's something that makes you feel sympathy toward the little characters like trying to come up with a good system for generating their backstories or when our art director Heather made sure that everyone had eyebrows like or coming up with a couple

of cute items that they can carry around like all these little all these little bits and pieces that make you feel more connected to the little characters those are things that help elevate this too and it seemed like it was these two things coming up with kind of gameplay opportunities for people to feel like they have agency and orchestrating these narrow escapes but also just taking time and effort to make the little characters feel like they're people that are worth saving and that like you feel like you want to protect and is quite an inter sorry did I cut you off oh no no that's a lot of answer I think I sort of don't have my immediate follow-up is to ask and for folks in check and they give a quick shout out to Sean people's to sample 11 to Clifton B

who I saw in there we are going to take your questions we're gonna for a minute though we're just gonna be focusing on this discussion about the games design Adam that leads to my immediate follow-up question which is sort of born explained by the the answer you just gave but why is this game so hard and why is this game so sad then like it's interesting because tuning fork because his narrow escapes you're gonna see it like we've seen a ton of these in the stream already and there's gonna be more happening like they get what you described is almost eerily playing out in echo with your answer in my footage which is just like I feel like I'm being haunted by you you know it's okay but difficult and sad or still the two immediate vibes I got when I came away from this game after this hour yesterday and I'm curious why is that it feels very intentional uh is intentional and I feel like um like I feel like I store

eclis like a lot of my game ideas are pretty gloomy and I think that comes from a few different places but partly like there are a lot of games that are kind of ostensibly about the end of the world and they are very if not upbeat then very like action-oriented or they're very I think an action-oriented they're still about conquering it's like there's one end of the world games where you win by engaging in the kind of like actions and morals that tend to bring about the end of the world in the first place and then that's how you win sort of so you know I think a classic like like a classic game loop that we

accidentally ended up not using but then I think retro actively felt kind of good about is yeah like a classic dungeon crawly game loop is you kill all the monsters on the floor that you're on and then you go collect all the treasure that all the monsters had and then you proceed down to the next floor which I is I don't know I feel like that it's something that makes you feel powerful which is a big part of what makes it fun for a lot of players it's also been done a lot and something that has been like a preoccupation for this whole project is you know what if you made a game that had the post-apocalyptic setting like you're maybe sort of familiar with and also had this kind of turn-based kind of tactical gameplay that maybe is familiar

from other games in the genre but the emotional palette wasn't that you were leveling up overwhelming power in order to save the worlds but instead you were just sort of there when the world was ending and what would you do and I think like the short answer is I think it's extremely appropriate for a game about the end of the world to be challenging and sad I think the world ending is challenging and sad I and I but I also think that it's not necessarily the only I don't think it's a one-note emotional experience like a lot of the mechanics in this game are reactions to mechanics and other procedural long-form strategy games where you know having a crushing defeat

in one level means your campaign is over and you have to really fundamentally have to restart the game in order to proceed and and overly and you can have a crushing defeat you can have to abandon your very favorite dog even though they're named potato and it feels bad but it does not end your campaign you can meet other people and you can recover and you can have another hard loss and you can recover from that too and I feel like I guess like I totally agree that it is a challenging game and is a game with a lot of sad parts but I think it has I think there's a lot of hopeful things in it and that the the palette is definitely not intended to be

one of complete hopelessness that there are good things to do and things worth doing and there are people in the game that you can help and there are you know positive things that you can do even though the world is ending I have more questions about this games design but I Adam I do think those were very eloquent answers about tone and designing for toning games I really liked your face earlier tuning for drama in particular I just want to add one comment about you said in there like you know in games about the end of the world you're often participating in the behavior of the world I think that even strangely loops back to your your bit about dungeon crawling and how the dungeon crawling mcglue is is luke things and then or kill monsters the things even

though those settings are not apocalyptic you're kind of creating an apocalypse for oh you're at your and anybody who lived in the dungeon is having their world ended by you definitely I think that's an insightful I hadn't thought about that before which isn't to condemn that kind of mechanic it's just to I understand you I think I you're framing goes broader than you stated originally Clifton B would like to know what's one feature you've had to cut for some reason that you really wanted to keep in the game ooh I think we didn't well oh boy good um good question Clifton yes good question there were there's we got pretty lucky in a bunch of ways one is that there wasn't that much stuff that we ended up cutting there were a lot of things were planned but never actually got started

one thing that was in a bunch of the early prototypes was basically like a dirt bike so for especially for like doing solo runs through the game it was this sort of like weird vehicle that you could drive all over the map and you didn't have to stay on the road and had a bunch of weird properties compared to the other vehicles and ended up feeling like it was gonna be a lot of animation work to get all that setup and feeling good and be it kind of we playing with that vehicle and exploring that thing would kind of miss out on a lot of the sort of hunkered down inside the car in the rain while things move around outside feelings but I it was kind of cool and fun there was a bunch of planned stuff that I think would have been interesting to investigate we might still get a chance to do my favorite one was I wanted to put horses in I like you

could ride horses from place to place and they wouldn't need gas but you would have to like find grass instead and like get off and like defend the horses while they munched and then like hop on and ride some more and I was really jazzed about that right up to the point that I realized it was like almost completely separate game than the one we were building and that probably we would have to set that aside I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of other stuff but those are the two that come to mind overland one you pet dogs Overland two you pet horses it's it's still pretty tempting oh man Overland expansion pack there's a there's a lot of ways you could implement horses Clifton thank you for the question I'll just share a few other quick comments here Chris graph that gamma so trader chief is hanging out in chat I had a perspective of from our comment earlier about world's ending

fallout is a game where you nuke the world in response to the world being nuked showing up in chat making geometry jokes sample of em has a question how does one get good at Overland Zappala van I would I would say that this current stream is about 40 minutes of decent gameplay advice for getting good at Overland so maybe that'll help you I hope it does we'd love to we'd love to do gameplay advice but I think that does the finchy discord has been a good place for that right yeah there's a pretty active community of players on there and there are I think you know when you start building a game that is about not nuking the world in a genre and a little bit more broadly for this genre or this some you know both gameplay genre and story genre you end up with kind of like different mechanics and different things

that you're trying to do and those are not always intuitive and so I you have things like oh it's really important to protect the car cars are not a completely disposable asset that you can simply lose and carry on the game as if nothing happened that's new idea to some players but yeah hopping on the discord and talking to the players on there and we also like some of the design crew or on there from time to time as well and super happy to help give tips and feedback and hear stories about how they thought that they had left Harold behind but in fact they hadn't and were very upset to see him later let's talk about procedural generation Adam I think we've had a good chat about like mu tone vibe and like

making making specific arts just aesthetic and design like interactive choices to drive that mood but this at the end of the day the computer has to dive into some base of logic in order to make something procedural spit out would you mind outlining how that proceeded the Overland procedural ISM works especially like actually I'm gonna dive into one question how does the game know to say in this in a level like the one we're looking at to spit out a house that takes up like a quarter of the fifth of the map I don't know an eighth that's like one two three four five six seven eight and a ninth of the map it takes up a ninth of the map and effectively says this area is not place-based how does the game know to do that and what is the game trying to do when it makes procedural stuff yeah so we went through a few iterations on that also but the current system the base system is one that I'm really happy with and I don't know if other games do it or not but basically because we know that every level is gonna take place in this

little nine by nine space we've got like 81 tiles there I think you could do this at larger scales too but it's a little bit more manageable at smaller sizes in terms of defining these things but basically every object in the game we give them we call them placement masks but they're essentially gradients based on existing level features the primary ones are where are the edges of the level and where are the roads and we can sort of make a little kind of blurry gradient out of that information and then start to overlap it with the placement masks that these different objects have so for example the placement mask for houses as you know what these things really do these things don't look good if they're in the very bottom corner right there in the middle of the camera taking up the whole level they also don't look good when

they're in the road and they don't look great if they're too close to the road something about it feels off and so we can define a placement mask for the house that's like you should be at least this far away from the road and you should stay out of that what is it southwest corner of the level and then the level generator can oh we have we also can keep track of how hilly the terrain is and so we can have it kind of check you know is this on a is this part too slippy or is this part kind of flat enough to believably place a human domestic structure and then so the the I guess the very first step is the terrain that this level takes place on is actually quite large this road goes on and on off the screen both ways we pick out the slice of it that we want to use first and then we start populating it with objects so once we've cut out that little square the level generator will

usually go through and roughly from largest to smallest will start to populate the level with key items so there are many arrangements of roads and hills that will prohibit the appearance of a house entirely and so it simply won't happen and then it might go through we usually prioritize your kind of mission critical resources so this is I think like a scavenging level probably and so will go in place in a few objects that where you can go and open them up and get some items out of them a and each of those objects has its own placement mask so smashed up cars usually show up near the road or on the road sheds usually show up kind of back toward the edge of the level with their door facing outward fences tend to be arranged along specific lines near the edges of levels that kind of thing so we're able to give that information to

those objects which is great there's a few special cases where we have some code that does a little bit something a little more complicated but most of the placement is controlled by those things but the ingredients that it chooses from are all based on where you are in the game and what kind of level you're going into so on the stream here they're going to a level where you can get a hopefully undamaged vehicle with a little bit of gas in it and maybe find a cool upgrade for a car - this is a special set of ingredients where we're saying okay you're in The Woodlands that means we're looking at these kinds of ingredients for the level we know that you are a little ways off the main road so we're going to use kind of a medium difficulty levels enemies set instead of a high difficulty enemy set we are going to also oh it's nighttime okay we're gonna make sure that in this zone maybe there's a streetlight that you can activate that might be kind of interesting and then also you're suppose to be scavenging a vehicle so somewhere

on this map we're also going to place a car that you can maybe collect and drive out of there and somewhere down the chain you can also have kind of like wild cards so wild cards are sort of these late stage modifiers for the kinds of ingredients that go into the level so it might be to populate the level with a forest or to add a little like farmhouse vignette or - it turns out you're in kind of an open space with a lot of dry flammable things and there's a fire in the corner so on and so forth but those kind of sort of I guess like a cascading overrides for the kinds of situations that you might or might not into plus these placement masks plus paying attention to where you are in the game and what kind of resources you're getting those are all factors that feed

into like how it generates the level and where things go really this is such an interesting bit of game we're seeing here because in into the fact that the game is going to keep going after this one is such a testament to the the work you all have put in because it in an instant the the light of the explosion showed me where the car was my principal character who I started this run with was killed by one of these creatures my dog goes on a rampage in inventive vengeance and my new job patches patches is a good dog and this other survivor is going to get them both out by the skin of his teeth ooh Sam sample van Sam van would like to know how do you deal with some of the feedback the oranjee of the game can feel unforgiving and I have a follow-up question for that but I'm gonna let you answer his question first uh I think

it's a super understandable response that I sympathize with to a great degree there's a lot of things in this game where you learn by doing there's not a huge formal tutorial process where you have to read lots of text before you go out into the world it's a lot of sort of you know actually thinking about what you're doing trying to make good guesses and also like paying a lot of attention to what happens but those are things that are hard to do and like not as a not saying that this is like the right way to make a game obviously but there are lots of games where that's not really a thing that they demand that you do you know there are a lot of games where the I guess progress is determined

mostly by you know doing one very straightforward task at a time and and that's how you move forward and like I play a lot of games that are built that way and I enjoy a lot of games that are built that way and I think there's a lot of people who don't need a game to ask them to think really hard about what to do next that's like that's not why they play games I think that's a completely fair stance and it is something that Overland asks you to do and I think it does create a little bit of a gap between two player bases where one player base feels like wow this game is so attentive from feet just feedback we've been getting like this is a attentive detailed game and almost any situation you get into if

I you know you can figure out a sneaky way to escape that's so rewarding this is the kind of game I've always wanted to play something to that effect right and then you have another audience of people who are like well I had a big car and I rammed the thing really hard and killed it and then my car blew up and I got game over and frankly this isn't fun for me and like I don't know I guess I feel like that's a pretty fair reaction to a video game but I also think there's a little bit of a culture of like really needing or wanting to assign that dislike some you know something that sounds more like justified or intellectual or something in film theory this is sometimes called like at least like in like pop film theory like there's this idea of tangible details

and tangible details it's like you're watching a movie you're not really gelling with it for lots of different reasons and then there's like one scene in it where a character has a really deliberately stylized costume or something and you'll start to see a lot of feedback about this movie which is like this movies look at this costume look at this one specific thing about this movie that is just like completely preposterous and this is what makes this movie bad is this costume choice when really it's like maybe a you know just not your kind of movie and there's a lot of different reasons that you feel that way but you've found you have this one thing that you can kind of say is like oh you know what it is though it's really this it's this one thing it's a you know there's one simple reason that I feel this way and I think for this game so far there's definitely like a subset of players who have decided that

it's the RNG so I guess our floating point numbers are not the kind that they want a game like this to have which I don't know I guess that's I think it's a totally valid feeling to have and I understand how people get there if they haven't sort of discovered all the things that you can do in the game or sometimes I think it's just like this reboot like the thing we're talking about about like I actually you know what let me put it this way if you're a some totally reasonable assumption on picking up this strategy game is that you're going to kill all the monsters get all the treasure and proceed to the next level the RNG in this game probably feels very unfair I because that's not

what you can or should do in this game so I guess yeah I think I would stop short of saying that people are wrong or misinformed or you know entitled or anything like that I don't think those things are true but I think if you turn this game on fully anticipating something very similar to a game that you've played many times before and you start playing it that way that it probably is going to feel unfair and that is a completely intentional design decision I don't know that it's the best one for every audience or anything but that definitely is a I guess like we were talking about before like the we wanted to tell stories about the end of

the world and I think it is I think it's pretty appropriate for those stories to not be stories where you obliterate everything and you get lots of awards for doing it I don't know sorry that was a bit of a roundabout answer but I like roundabout answers because I feel I feel genuinely as though when when people are making around abend answers they are letting us share and the thought process that I hope make these decisions happen because at some point you know you had to ask yourselves that question because you were talking about X comment talking about that hack game earlier which definitely yeah and it's funny because like my relationship with those games is very much a relationship with trying to understand their approach to randomness like one thing we deliberately omitted from this game was percentage to hit that was a thing that I wanted to not be

part of the equation for a wide variety of reasons and I you know there's a lot of I think pretty stuff that I hope I can reuse on later projects but sort of ways of thinking about like oK we've got a compact space how do we make sure that once people have learned the ropes that they do have a ton of agency and that they can interact with all the random systems in this game and a valid and interesting way and what does that mean for for example we do want random events are great technically they create a good sense of anticipation and surprise and they ask the player to improvise and all of those things but like how do you make those feel fair once you understand what's going on and I think a big part of that is things like delays so you know a big big mechanic in Overland is

that if you choose to fight off these creatures or you're forced to fight off the creatures they usually make a ton of racket and it attracts kind of reinforcements but reinforcements showing up is a big deal in this game like that's a really bad thing to happen to you all you play even if it's frequently necessary and so there's like kind of this big stepped out delay there's like two or three turns before the creatures actually appear in the level and you can see exactly where they're gonna appear ahead of time and trying to maintain we always thought of it internally as like proportional distance so if something was gonna happen that was gonna have a big outcome on the gameplay and it has a random element to it that you get warning you get some kind of proportional warning in terms of turns or steps or distance or something right you'll almost never have something actually random happen right in front of you with no way to react to

it and no way to engage with it even if the way to react to it or dodge it is not wildly obvious right at the outset Wow genuinely when I started the stream I did not forgive me out of my DS were not the answers I expected about Overland at all and I mostly just comes from wookie talked about earlier which is player assumptions about a game coming in versus what the game actually is Adam I am going to briefly turn back to chat and let folks know we only have we started late today so we only have about I'd say 15 more minutes let me see but how long is this video been running for yeah about 14 minutes left so we've only got about 14 minutes left to chat about Overland if you have questions drop them in chat look at them in Adam I would like to know too many questions okay I'm gonna prioritize a question that I saw Chris Kraft ask more before I move on to my

question this game launched on I counted it at four platforms if the number is five and I forgot one but you guys launched on Apple arcade which is a brand new platform for everyone and the switch is still relatively new for everyone - trying to figure out how to make and sell appealing games which is certainly not an easy thing what did it take for a small company like fin G to be able to make sure this game worked on all five of those platforms because it's not as simple as going into unity and pushing export despite what nobody believes nobody believes that right right little maybe slightly straw software issue it was tricky so we launched simultaneously on Apple arcade PC Mac Linux switch ps4 and Xbox yes yes and it was and also

liked only three different PC store fronts so either either by platforms or store fronts PC as was its own complicated beast for sure it was tricky we had a lot of help so Mike Lee from lococo has been working on the Apple arcade version of the game full-time for months now we get to collaborate with a porting studio in Austin Texas called 22nd century and they have full-time engineers there who have been helping us build the console versions and Mike spend a ton of time doing performance profiling stuff for us throughout the porting process which started months ago at this rate and our lead architect and engineer Caitlin Kohli and I spent

buckets at I'm just I'm trying to figure out how to I get this game running as smooth as we could on as many things as we could I think the Overland's presentation I think is like pretty elegant and pretty clean thanks to our art director Heather Penn but I it is not necessarily a super game engine friendly sort of target visual I in the sense that you know it's a procedurally generated game that usually imposes some tricky performance issues one way or another on some platforms but in addition to that it was you know one of the big goals was to make a game where the procedural levels didn't necessarily look terribly procedural we wanted to have something where there was a certain amount of

composition and to a point where I guess speaking to earlier things about procedural generation and level generation once we got the level generator working well enough to create valid gameplay scenarios almost the like the second half of working on the level generator was to push those playable scenarios into being pleasantly visually composed scenarios so for example this scenario here there's a bunch of like grass and weeds on the ground those have all been dynamically colored at level load time to match the terrain but the Train also is on fire which is spreading at the moment systemically through these dried patches of grass so we actually need to dynamically recolor everything that's on the ground to match the new burn to ground color or else it looks wrong so that's a whole nother like stack of

the tech but then also the diorama effect is done dynamically and non destructively and at load time also so this piece of terrain extends far beyond the nine by nine boundaries here but we need to present it to look as if it's you know nice clean kind of model train diorama sort of situation and doing that was interesting that was a trick in and of itself the when I was googling around for advice about how to do it I finally found a link to like a unity forums post asking about diorama cutaway tech cuz I was looking and it needed to be non-destructive for a bunch of weird reasons but the post I opened the post and there was a screenshot of an older version of Overland and the person was asking hey how do you get this effect to work and I

just like oh this is hopeless so yeah it was a little bit terrifying that's one like kind of like all caution to the wind and started trying really weird ideas and the way we ended up building this is pretty odd but works really really well for our purposes we don't have time to either a you see talk about it or be we've got to mention you're on the GC board man I'm good at this oh yeah or B if you're able to blog about it on Gamasutra our sister yeah I can I can share a link I blogged about a part of the stack a year or two ago and but yeah there's a lot of things like that where there's like you know game engines don't like cutaways of 3d models it's not what game engines are designed to do game engines don't like you dynamically recoloring everything in the scene to look just a certain way and there was a

lot of uh a lot more I think work to support that technology in a console friendly way across the board then hopefully is obvious hopefully nobody notices the ideal situation as people turn on the game and they go oh nice and that's the maximum depth of appreciation they have for the kinds of weird things that we had to do to get it working but yeah there was there was a significant amount of experimentation and sort of new approaches behind the scenes to get something that could be you know I you know we love game consoles but a lot of them are like four years old now or something and I you know weren't exactly the most powerful computers in the world when they came out anyway and so trying

to try to put something together that breaks a lot of kind of basic game engine art rules in the first place and then also you know runs at a nice kind of satisfying 60fps clip-on kind of medium and consumer computers from four or five years ago is I found it tricky at the very least right on we're coming up on the end of our hour and sadly it's sadly we're coming up in the end of our time with Russell here Russell Russell about to make take one for the team guys I don't know okay I was gonna try something really weird here for Russell but so my next question then because we only have a few minutes left nothing wrong Sean P Prince my next question that is with a game like Overland oh there's worry I simply have my dog get out of the car good job right how do

you make sure every when every time the game opens up and it starts generating like what a player's run will be how do you make sure that that run is 100% beatable like say I was a player who was so good at this game who understood every logic and every time and I understand it's part of the game for it and tragically like it's about to see poor Russell that gets left behind but he has a car with no guess I wrestle how he's definitely not gonna make it Shh tragedy is well though this is actually good point like in theory this is the where the game you just said earlier this is where the game should go the game should go through the heart which there is no acing this game maybe if you're lucky you can do some kind of version of a hundred percent certainly you should be able to make a run from east to west coast but how does this designer do you make sure that's still possible because to me it feels very it feels almost like some runs are designed to be and as a player my bad perspective

is sometimes it feels unbeatable but I also know I've watched the stream again and I'm like I made so many mistakes right right um so yeah like sort of coming out and just telling people it's a lot like as a designer it feels very like faith-based like I'm hoping that they maybe you know that we've indicated through being very very careful about the art and design and controls and all of these things that may be you know it's okay for them to have expectations about how careful we were with other components of the game but it's really um I think something that people have to you know figure out for themselves or hear from a friend that they trust or something like that in a lot of ways but as a designer like especially for Overland that was like the easiest part of this game like you know like you just like just on the stream right here pull up into a knight level horrible monsters

everywhere no thanks I'm driving away you can just leave yeah and a lot of strategy games aren't built that way especially like a you know these dungeon crawl scenarios where it's like oh you have to go from this entrance over to this entrance and you have to make sure it's navigable and that there the number of monsters and power-ups are balanced or whatever and really all we have to do like every level you come into the road starts clear except for one our boss levels are the only exception the kind of blockades at the end of each zone and so those were their own kind of design problem that is kind of almost separate from a lot of the other generative stuff that we're working on but you know every level that you go to initial the road is clear and you can leave if you need to and I that as a procedural designer I feel like gave me like a huge amount of wiggle room for what to do with the level designs I think we tried

as much as possible perversely like not wildly dissimilar from Wilmots but like a lot of Overland levels are levels where you make your own problem and I it's yeah if for example you have this situation right um and I think it takes a little while to sort of like feel that out and get a sense for like whether or not you know what what is kind of like your culpability and exactly what's going down here but I think a great example our community manager Harris Foster was running a stream a few days ago and he got stuck at the blockade in the mountains when things do get I think legitimately challenging at that point of the game and he started the roadblock and it was a catastrophic failure he had level restart turned on so he restarted the level and started making different choices and got a completely different

but equally catastrophic outcome so he restarted the level again and made different choices and got a completely different super successful outcome so I you know this is this is a game where there are a lot of feedback loops and if you're not careful you absolutely can back yourself into a corner but I think the the basic building blocks of the game were essentially like we will never back the player into a corner on our own that is not the game's job players can do that for example very effectively we don't have to back them into a corner they can handle that I would Adam we could keep going but I literally only have about 30 seconds of footage left so unfortunately this time to wrap things up thank you everyone

thank you in formal attire stay mighty Sean people's Chris Kraft thank you for dropping by Thank You Adam for joining us today Overland is out now you can play on all the platforms we mentioned earlier if you yourself for a game developer a game designer we would love to have you at GDC next year we just closed our some talk submissions so unfortunately we aren't going to be able to do take your great talk ideas but if you submitted a talk to the indie summit Adam Saltzman in December board member will be reviewing it has reviewed it maybe that that'll be tricky I am NOT an indie summit board member but they might let me peek at the talks anyway I'm on the design and business tracks for the main conference but because of putting this game out they graciously allowed me to take a year hiatus which is great I don't like I've been on the board for about ten years and I do not like not being able to give the talks the

attention that they deserve and that was just going to be impossible this year but I'll be back next year and I'm very eager to see everyone's design submissions then right on sorry about the confusion folks yes so if in the future you are submitting a talk to GDC and it's in the design or business track Adam will be helping you make it better talk with that I'd like to just shout out for folks or give a quick shout out for everyone in the chat if you liked this conversation with Adam we would love to have you follow us on the switch to your twitch channel because we're regularly going live trying to have the conversations like the one we just had to learn more about how games get made how games gets sold and other tough topics of conversation you can read more you'll be able to find the stream video for this on Gamasutra in our own twitch channel after this on our youtube channel - and we would absolutely love to have you at GDC next year keep your eyes peeled registration will be opening

soon trademark with that that's all I've got Adam where if they have more questions about how this game got made where should they ask them Oh welcome to ask on Twitter even though it's the worst website in the world we have a count for the game called Overland game and the official Finn G is at Finn G Co at Finn G Co but I'm a lot more likely to hang out and talk about game design on the Finn G discord which you can probably google at this point by just in case you can also just type in discord dot GG / Finn G and that should take you right to a little invite page and it's probably it's our community manager and community designers biggest project since we hired him and it's become like a really marvelous place for lots of folks game designers and otherwise to kind of hang out and have a cosy place on the internet that is not

horrible and yet not we it is a completely not see free hangout and it's just it's become like a really nice online community so especially if folks have a little bit interesting game design or working on small projects we have a channel that's kind of just for that and we would love for people to stop by and talk about game design and share the stuff that they're building and we have a couple of dope emojis that's a thing I guess so and there I I was about to say they're important and that's not true but they are fun right on maybe well I believe we're in the business where fun is important Adam but I'm not going to tell you how to do that you literally sit on the design board with that I wish everyone have a good Wednesday I have a good week happy October hack be spooky season make your make your Twitter handles if you have them if you're on in the health the Nazi infested hellhole make them spooky

celebrate games and we will see you all next week hopefully maybe maybe next week yeah I'm trying to get something for next week if not it's gonna be later this month because at some point I'm going to Sweden and I can't stream from Sweden have a good day everyone bye