GDC plays Remnant: From the Ashes with design director John Pearl

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel once again if you're back from earlier welcome back if you are new to us today hello my name is Brian Francis I'm a contributing editor at Gamasutra comm I am a community manager for GDC I am here today with a game called remnant from the ashes it comes to us from just a little loud I'll let me turn that down comes to us from gunfire games out of Austin Texas and in the lower left-hand corner of the screen I am joined by the design director of remnant and that would be John pearl John how are you doing doing good great um thank you for joining us today John for those of you who are new to the channel there are two things you should know one if you have questions for John we will be taking them in twitch chat and we would love to answer your questions - she just did so if you hear her know that she is she's just very concerned parent human but I do that

because I'm streaming this game remnant from the actions ashes is a third-person action-adventure game that from an outside perspective feels a little bit like Dark Souls it's got that sort of dread based exploration in combats there's a big emphasis on dodging you frame like knowing the frames of your opponent's attack so you can dodge it counter it etc one big design twist for me is that there's a lot more guns in this game compared to previous previous Souls boring games John instead of letting me ramble though how would you describe remnant to someone who hasn't played it I think you did a pretty good job there it really is it's uh it was like a between a lot of inspirations obviously from the souls born games we wanted to try to make something different so that's why we went with shooting and I think the big thing that really differentiates it from those games is the heavy procedural generation of the world so if we really wanted to

make a co-op game it was they could be replayed a lot like a lot of times if there's a third person shooter co-op game you kind of go through the story and you're done and maybe there's endgame raids or something like that but we really wanted to to focus on making a game that you can come back to you could rear all your world at any point and you're gonna see something new each time you play and you play by yourself you play with friends you'll see different things so that was was a big part of the initial design philosophy for building the game that's really cool um let's jump right into it then for those who don't quite know this channel or what it's all about we're here to talk about the design and development of remnant so we're here if you have design questions if you have systems questions you have anything like that ask away we want to hear it from my part John let's talk about the the procedural design part the idea that every time you load up a you've load up a run there's gonna be different stuff in the world what was sort of the underpinnings of that design and what were the first steps that you

and your team took to go okay we can implement this even though it's a 3d world with 3d assets that have to be you know managed and such I mean really like it's it's actually it's funny because we made a game previously called from other Suns which was kind of a ended up being a testbed for this game in a lot of ways I was a first-person shooter for oculus VR but it was based on the concept of these these pre or these randomly generated tiles it was very much more mission focused where you would you would start off on a spaceship you jump in and then you get to like a space station or another ship and that ship was randomly generated and you go there and you finish this little mission and you go to the next one in the next one so a lot of the tools and the ideas were kind of fleshed out there and we we wanted to make something that felt more like a real space so that's why the worlds are a little bit more solid so it's not just mission to mission to

Mission there's the there's missions throughout every world but they're kind of tied a little bit closer together through the overarching story which really doesn't change and then the individual events that can change in between those story beats to try to make it more of a little cohesive story that goes through these different worlds right on um building on from that what were some other lessons you learned transitioning a set of tools and and and techniques that work for VR and making them work in sort of a traditional third-person game environment I mean really like a lot of the tool sets for character movement and as well as like the the tools the the the base level tools for generating the world a lot of that came over from that game but then we just refined over and over and over again I think that that was the biggest thing was the amount of refinement we we applied to the tools where it would just be like hey let's let's add these parameters go ahead and generator worlds like this kind of stinks maybe we need

we're seeing these two tiles too much and just IV no identify the repetition and feeling like it didn't have like you felt generic early on and then identifying the parts that we're making a feel generic and just trying to hit these like what we call like Pio eye tiles which like oh this looks interesting this one's not going to repeat or hey you know what this this tile always a corner tile for example we're always repeat let's make a lot more of those so really like it's it's been over the entire development of it it's been really refining the tools the the sets that we build the world's out of and you know what we can do to make the the characters didn't have it that world interesting and how they move through the world and as well right on give it a give a quick shout-out in chat to Bowser punch who who just dropped by to say it's John and indeed it is John oh yeah John let's let's dig into that I think procedural tile sets are our big thing a lot of developers are moving into procedural

space these days and I gotta say I think this is one of the first third-person adventure like kind of action adventure games I think seriously take this in it while mixing it with with such a carefully different combat it's one of the few I've seen in this genre anyway usually these these games tend to be a little more like fixed and handcrafted um what I know the general answer is just iteration but can you share any sort of guiding principles about when you're in there refining the tile sets and saying this one's repeating too much this one's this one's like this environments are being too much this event this enemy set isn't quite doing it what we're sort of the things that helps you make things more interesting so that every procedurally generated run would be different and unique as you went on if there's any other nothing else you could share about that yeah I think like the other thing too is the items you find in the world like those there's obviously like when you look at the tiles themselves like making sure there's a there's a visual flow that makes sense that the player doesn't get lost and you turn it around

that's always a key thing that we we had to focus on and we would find on tiles sometimes that they were almost too complicated where you'd come into a building go down stairs like go up three flights of stairs come out a high above an area and then backtrack around to the bottom of the building again sometimes there's a third some buildings like that they actually worked pretty well but there's other ones that it just felt like you were lost in this space because it wasn't a good visual indicator so a lot of that is just kind of playing through it and just how this isn't this isn't really feeling right or that the flow the visual flow isn't working and then finding like ways to try to encourage people to explore the nooks and crannies the loot that will spawn like the a lot of times its rings or traits or different things like that can spawn on a tile and making sure that the the system was like had enough to pull from to make it interesting so there's tons of like rings and trinkets you can put on so it really encourages players

to do that as well as picking up the scrap which is what they used to craft so I think I think that was the key thing to of finding ways to encourage players to move through the tiles that they knew where they were going but also explore all the nooks and crannies right on and chat to marceline 20 welcome thank you for dropping by let's move into how do you so I think one of the interesting interesting things about it Souls born inspired combat is that there's a really intense relationship with space alongside just sort of a standard dodge parry roll combo thing if I'm watching photographers highlight reel for instance I am either laughing because I'm watching someone who just rolled past an enemy attack and then the enemy finished their attack and fell off cliff and that was what the and that's just a side effect of the way space in combat interacting or there'll be a wild combo if it's a it's a Dark Souls and there's an invasion going on a player

will randomly swing around a corner and their invader will you know suddenly be caught on their on their weapon for instance like there's a it's those sounds sort of straightforward to describe but that's not how combat works in horizon zero dawn that's not how combat works in a lot of the other third-person action games I like how did you make sure that in a procedural setting like moments like that could either have I mean I guess procedural sort of is a promise that lots of those moments will happen but at the same time it's also a possibility that none of those moments were happen because it's it's random like that right I think like the the way we build that they're basically like these tiles and there are actually pretty big chunks of of areas so there is there's still level design that goes into each one of those and I think I think that's the key to any like again Dark Souls or blood-borne you know they're meticulously like laid out to set up these scenarios where you could you know get get the jump on somebody or you just set up as a perfect spot to like oh I can go over here and heal real quick I

think that's that's key and I think that that comes through and some of the it's it's almost like micro level design because the tiles are like still handcrafted but the way that they were organized in the world is the procedural generation yeah and then I guess the next element of the question is talk about the multiplayer part unfortunately I don't have any friends that's true I have a just a lot of my friends don't play video games it's just kind of a sad part of life you can play like you said you can play a remnant from the ashes with your friends and your friends can hop into a session and navigate those same micro tiles with you was there anything about filling a space for for chunky beefy explorers that you all had to consider in that process I was is three it's a three but yeah definitely like that's that's all that's keen and anytime you test them out is to make sure that there's there's enough space for people to to get to different places I mean it there is a there's a cover system technically it's

not like snapping to cover but you can you can duck behind cover and we definitely consciously built these a lot of these areas with that in mind if you conduct behind something pop out to shoot something and go right back into cover but there's like it has to be enough of those spaces for three people at any given point sometimes it's destructible sometimes it's solid so it like it we like to change it up and like hey discover was cover a minute ago but now it's not because you know the enemy you know broke through it or one of your friends hit it with their sword instead and they broke through so it does it does add this like level of interest of the kind of changing battlefield as like there's a couple boss fights where you think you have covered but then the boss does something now you don't have cover so there's definitely that aspect of it as well and then making sure there's enough of that that three people could get cover if they really wanted it or there's enough positioning that they you know two of them might be able to share cover and that kind of stuff that comes into a lot of the three player co-op and setting up a level

right on we've had a few more folks file into the chat room so I'll just give a quick reminder we would love to hear your questions for John if you've got them and they're about runnin from the ashes uh we want to bring him in John what about what else from a multiplayer perspective have you had to consider for us a design director um I do know that um you mentioned I'm really like like um I just had it up the the via the four player VR game that you all worked on the one you mentioned earlier oh yeah from other Suns three player also wow I'm really getting the number mixed up today um anyway yeah you you mentioned that your studio has experience with three player co-op action games but um what else did you have to learn going into this game to make a game known for work genre known for working for one player at work for three players I mean really like is is really just trying to find where you know that that point of challenges and how to escalate that and I really like we wanted it to be good

for both and that's definitely like it's a high level goal and I feel like we did a pretty good job nailing that because I do I do think there's something to be said for you know take a boss up by herself but I was also the thrill of doing it with a group friends it's really just trying to find that the right balance of that and again it's it's supposed to be a hard game so it's it shouldn't be the bosses aren't meant to be pushover so there's there's definitely a strategy to them and and trying to get around them and you know take them out it stand in the dynamic changes obviously as you add more players to it so it's just trying to find it's it's really just like a lot of just checking out the field as this field writers is this feel overwhelming or how does this scale so there's it like I said the flights were signed one two or three people so it's really trying to figure that that balance out right so the games often checking if how many players are in the scenario and then it pulls up whatever it needs to whatever you've designed to make it work for that scenario I assume this may be a

slightly dumb question but I assume the answer to scaling for three players isn't just taking going to your spreadsheet of values and multiplying everything by three right no definitely not there's a there's like we have an AI director that that will come into play so like it will it will spawn specific creatures hey there's three so you you know this has more likelihood to spawn this type of creature if there's three people because this guy's going to be tougher than you know the guy that would the guys that would spawn if one player so there's that and then the scaling of damage and scaling of enemy life and there's there's a lot of factors that go into it mm-hmm I guess I guess before we move on from this question is there any particular factor that you all discovered was really useful to manipulate on that scale that you didn't realize when you went in was there any like oh wow if we changed this the experience gets a lot better but we didn't think that would be the case when we started I think the the manipulating of the spawn of the spawn tables I think

was probably the biggest one of just because it could get real messy real quick if you just if you just have like a base end I mean you're like well if there's one player you spawned two and if there's three players and you spawn twenty and then it's like that doesn't scale well but just trying to find like that median ground like that's again that's something we kind of figured out on from other suns as well of just like hey when when somebody jumps in by themselves you don't wanna fight like five brutes but might be okay and yeah if there's three people so it's really kind of behind that right on I think Bowser punch kind of has a question that's related to he's kind of asking to build on this what Bowser's asking what was the design choice behind the bosses having lots of ads which I think we just kind of talked about I'm assuming by ads he means additional mobs yeah I guess that's a really like we can dig into that decision to to use extra enemies to scale bosses as opposed to other tools could you do you have any other thoughts

about that I mean one of the biggest things is there is ammo which is is definitely one of the challenges we ran into over time of how do you get ammo in the players hands might I say maybe that that's one of the things that change the most in the last six months as we play tested more and more just figuring out like you know what how does it how's the player get ammo actually in a locked-in fight we we have several ways of doing that now we have the you can purchase ammo boxes for pretty cheap from Reggie at the base so you can you can use that as an item you know there's there's the cost of the animation of actually open up the ammo box and get Mammal out much like the healing has a very specific frame count for a while that while they're healing and the big thing we ran into was like you know not everybody's a great shot you end up spending a lot of shots on a boss that you miss or they're not hitting the weak spot so we did we said the best way to go with that it would be ads because they they do add a

challenge obviously but they also make sure that you have plenty of health or have plenty of ammo coming out so that's that's the big part of it I think also like it it forces players to especially in multiplayer games to kind of come up with jobs and or like a focus like hey I'll handle these guys you focus on the boss and it has a lot of strategy to you know coordination with your team to be able to like hey I'm gonna do through this over here you do this so that was that was another major reason for doing that in multiplayer but also making sure that the was was still plentiful during the boss fight because you don't want somebody who's you know their spec'ing out in range and they like a specific gun to be forced to just melee the boss like the last half of the fight that's not that's not necessarily fun if you're trying to play the melee class that's different story but if you're if you're if you're

out of ammo and you're primarily shooting then it kind of sucks so that was a big part of it I like talking about jobs during boss fights that reminds me of when I was playing World of Warcraft back in the day um you know on the Oh Nick see air raid like you'd you'd as a paladin like in one of the people with some decent amount of crowd control and area effect like you would be in pretty great discussions we will be discussing okay your job is to stun those ads coming in from the side while you know obviously if you're straightforward tank and spank happening up front that's a really cool conceit to like have more enemies as a means of like giving players more roles in the fight yeah rayji ginger 99 would like to know what determines the difficulty of public games that they joined that's a good question actually because I assume different players want different difficulty levels um they say every time they join a game it's a normal note mode never harder nightmare raging ginger if you were if if and when when I get back to this game in mind and if you happen to see me online rest assured my I will always have the

difficulties that on normal never harder nightmare what was the question sorry oh the question was what determines the difficulty of the public of publication they join whatever the player decided to choose so if you start a game and you decide to play a normal which is the default setting yeah it will it will just when somebody joins your game it'll it'll be that that difficulty and then we've done some stuff with scaling as well and I think it's in the last patch where basically a person who's we used to do it where if you were level 1 and someone joined your game and they were level 20 we would scale it up to 20 and we found that you know people people don't like that so what we ended up doing was we put like a cap on that of like plus 3 so it only go up to level four then for the for the players who's hosting so it's it's definitely a thing we're definitely

keen on making sure it feels fair and then people can play with the friends let's see we are slide you see you have a question that you just threw in we're gonna we're gonna get back to viewer questions in a second but we'd love to keep taking them just keep adding them in chat and I will grab them John let's talk what adventure mode it's not out yet but you guys you're we were just talking before the stream they were working on an adventure mode but apparently and I'm gonna go ahead and quote I will just say I'm quoting of the lovely folks at PC games to help me understand how this works um the idea will be that when you finish a pre through a playthrough you can roll an instance of each component area within the game and that way you can go specifically after weapons items bosses that you didn't see on your run what what are the challenges of implementing a mode like that and letting players sort of go on specific dungeon runs when you start off your game from a procedural generation standpoint it's

it's actually didn't prove to be too difficult it seemed like it was really just like making sure that it functioned I know there's some work had to be done to the way the world was being generated because in adventure mode it doesn't hit the story beats so some stuff in the game is dependent upon the story beats to progress to the next area in that it's a single biome it it meant that we had to make sure that it still worked so you'll get a boss at the end but you might not get like the same mini bosses in the same order that you would have a chance of doing in the note in the normal mode so I think that was basically the the biggest thing was to making sure that it felt like it feels like something that's interesting it feels like a different take and also as a way for people to specifically chase after items that they're looking for without having to reroll the whole campaign that makes sense that leads

into a question sort of about live games we I'd like to ask in developers level these days because even though single player game still value it feels like more and more players are making a third developers that even if a game is a single player experience they're hoping for updates or or interaction with the team after the game launches like the game isn't just a finished product now right when you get it out the door there's there's a there's a life there's a life spin in a community that that is meant to exist especially for a game where players are meant to get together and fight monsters together in a game like this what have been your thoughts about making sure that remnant could be updatable and you would be able to add new content going forward after this well definitely think that the because it's it's procedurally generated it actually works a little bit better like we could theoretically drop in some content on earth for example and if you reroll the campaign or your ol adventure mode you're gonna see you you have a chance of seeing something new so in those cases that seems like pretty cool

to me as a developer like hey you know what people really like Asia for example the last the last biome in the game they would love to see more content that's something we could consider at that point as opposed to like maybe a normal single player game that's very linear in its story we had that has very specific beats it's a little harder than to revisit places without them feeling tacked on and because the whole loop of the game is really like reroll and try some different stuff or play with your friends and see something different doesn't feel alien whereas like if like in Darksiders 3 if we were to add content like right in the middle of the the story a it would feel weird in the story mode but then it would require people to start a new game and play it from the beginning to the end to see that new content which feels off because that's not how that game was presented it was presented as here's a here's a linear story that you could new game+ and play through at the same time to see the content it is a little a little harder that way games where I remember

assassin 3 2 and Deus Ex Human Revolution both had deal sees the chip that like when you were playing if you bought the game when it launched you just had a minute where the the character said hang on like there's a skip in Assassin's Creed 2 it was a skid there was a skip Matias memories in Deus Ex Adam Jensen went on a ship and then they slotted in missions later that were taking place during those gaps that's kind of um that's like you said if you if you bought it at launch you'd be stuck on replaying the game to get to those moments and if you did not buy the game at launch you might be okay you might be better served you might be having a better experience than the people who want it launched so I guess supporting replayability makes sense then in that case yeah cuz that was the big thing is like I said like the idea that it's a replayable game it's it's it's kind of a long game but we've heard lots and lots and lots of people like hey I'm on my third reroll and I'm enjoying the campaign a lot it's just

fun I'm seeing new stuff so just that like that the fact that the game is that is it is pretty exciting for us because that was the intent and I'm glad people are seeing it like they're not seeing like I finished it I've done where's more content it's more like oh I didn't see all the content I know that so I'm gonna go and try it again so it's definitely that's exciting that it's working the way it was intended arsalan 20 I will get to your question now they would like to know what was the biggest difficulty you faced making this game we've talked about a lot of things weren't difficult but I guess I'm curious what was difficult um I mean it every every game has plenty of difficulties I think the biggest thing for us was just hmm it's just there's there's a lot of content and making sure like I mean it sounds generic but like just wrangling everything to make sure everything worked together there's a I think actually okay let me back stuff on that I think actually the biggest thing for me though I noticed was we had ways to test specific like quests or in

encounters that occur in the game which is cool it's like oh I can see this encounter that seems like it's working like we were able to do that we had a lot of tools that let us just jump to specific spots in the campaign however when it came to like okay look before we ship let's test the game out there's no way to like force events to happen so there's events like in the retail version I still haven't seen yet that I know we are there but I just haven't rolled in my world so it's I think that might be the hardest thing is to see like hey does this actually work because it wouldn't show up you know you can do like three playthroughs and you might not get a specific thing you were hoping to get so I think that might actually be one of the more difficult things is that testing content ended up being a little bit challenging that way we got pretty lucky and we're able to do a friends-and-family a couple weekends so we had more people banging on it to see more of the event so we were able to kind of like hey did that make sense when that showed up kind of get get a little bit of a sense of of how it feels when people who play and even like we

had a little discord for it as well and people would talk back and forth like hey did you see this like no I didn't see that and then and just kind of you can kind of gauge like how much or how often these things are spawning because like they're like loot actually where they have a chance to spawn so there's some events that have a very low chance to spawn so you might not get them and which is it's kind of a cool side effect is I'll see people like on forums on a different social media and say hey I just got this this quest or this this event everyone jump in my game that needs it so that's kind of a cool thing it's almost like it's almost like hey I'm gonna go run a dungeon in WoW is anybody up for it because they need some loot so it's kind of cool to see that yeah that kind of thing Klee happen and it's not about um and what I love is that when you roll in the dungeon and wow if it's hey we need to run this it's because you're trying to get that chance for that specific loot table to roll in wow I like the encounters always the same you can you can maybe with a couple exceptions and maybe this change in newer patches because I complete wash and before 2010 in your game this their

players are looking for encounters they're looking for content they're looking for game content which that's so cool that like like just to hear that players are kind of banding up and looking together like oh hey it's like seeing a why I don't know it's like seeing a a month like a weird animal out in the woods it's like hey guys let's go come look at this weird animal together that's yeah very odd way to describe it but that's a really cool thing you hear about it following up on that what I doubt this has happen because it sounds like you've had a pretty effective testing regimen but what was kind of your your guys fear if you you implemented some content and for whatever reason as the drop as the as the dice roll happened or maybe there was a really hidden bug somewhere what was your kind of fear if game launch to retail and you tested everything you could and then someone event just wasn't appearing and you were getting reviews and you were getting player feedback about everything but like one or two events and you just couldn't seem to find it anywhere I don't didn't happen that I know of I

think people found pretty much everything that's actually in the content at this point just because you have enough people playing and it's just exponentially that number goes up compared to like our our for internal testers and even our our dev team it's under 70 people so it's definitely like you know you've got thousands and thousands of people playing it day one it's definitely a lot you're gonna hear if something's not there or if something's broken so I mean that same we didn't ship with that bugs we've definitely been we've been a very diligent and very uh very communicative as much as much as we can on pretty much all the social and forums that we can and trying to track down stuff and doing patches so it's there's definitely I don't know I definitely think like the system is it as I said it was is a little bit more matured from from what we didn't from other Sun so it there wasn't a don't think there was any cases of like hey this just never showed up because it's it's all built into a chance table there's stuff that like I

said has very very low chances to spawn but at the same time those are almost like oh man this is an epic event because it you know has a rare chance to spawn which is pretty cool right on Bowser punch would like to know is the quote can of force an event to test a tissue something that will affect you post release or do you think your tools have evolved to the point that you'll be able to force whatever events you need and I guess they're also asking if you plan to let players force events which seems like something you wouldn't want right I mean we can like if we have it build we can always force events it's more of just like playing just like hey I mean I'm gonna try to legitimately play this game and then not spin the event is is more of the the challenge I felt we ran into a lot where it's just like hey has anybody seen that it's like no I haven't and then you know somebody will force for spawn in their bill and like yeah it works so that is definitely one of the cases but yeah I don't think currently any plans to lead players like forcefully want fortunately as finally

said I still think there's like we feel like that's the fun of the game is like what are you gonna get and then with adventure mode that's meant to at least help people down and at least focus a little bit more on a specific zone because again I think like unless they're very active on forums or following the game very closely a lot of people don't know what's out there so I think so that I mean there's those people out there that will say I very specifically needed this this event to spawn because this is the last piece of armor I need or whatever it might be I think a lot of people were just like just having fun like come on this is new this is new and I definitely think if people like a specific zone a lot maybe they love ROM feel like a cool just see what all ROM has to order it has it has to offer just keep keep playing adventure mode and ROM and scene the nice thing is I mean you have your campaign character save and and you take that into adventure mode it doesn't it doesn't affect your your current your

current progress in your campaign so you can go finish a couple of venture modes and go back to your campaign if you want and and keep that everything you've taken or everything you've gotten from adventure mode comes back into your campaign step away specifically from questions about remnant from a second or for everyone in chat we would love to keep if you keep throwing your questions in chat I will keep finding ways to ask them but John I want to move away from the design part of your title and into the the title of director as remnant is kind of the studios for it's been the gunfire has made a bunch of VR games and made Darksiders three so remnant is kind of the first game that's sneaking into the unique triple-a like it's a first new IP triple-a like standalone title for kind of something that was new and a little like this what was your process for communicating with a team of like you said 70 people communicating effectively with your

co-workers to to get the vibe across because obviously it's not just you sitting there magically making decisions it's a it's a whole talented team of people but from the top down what you think was effective about getting making remnant happen as opposed to a different kind of game I definitely think that like our game director and our president he's I mean it's it's it's been his vision for a very long time this is the kind of you wanted to make for years I mean we basically started the studio to make pretty much make this game we tried like I said a couple different times and we did we did like kind of a light version of it with from other Suns but I definitely think that like just getting people to understand like what the intent is of like hey you know what this isn't this isn't a lunar shooter this is this is very much like an exploration dark souls loot type of game I think that's that was one of the bigger challenges I think early on is like well why isn't there more loot and

it's like that's that's really not the goal it's really like finding each piece of loot is it's supposed to be this unique interesting thing that it feels different than the other stuff two-degree it's not like hey is this gun slightly better than this gun is this you know oh this is blue and this one's purple it's really not that game and I think because so many shooters have gone that way I think that's been the biggest hurdle is like even externally like a lot of people are saying this doesn't look like has enough loot to be a looter shooter it's like well it's not supposed to be so I think that that's the better the challenge is because people are used to that like you've got division you've got destiny you got Borderlands 3 coming out it's it's very much like shooters now aside from like Call of Duty and I mean guess Call of Duty's a little bit too but like Call of Duty single-player and your single-player isn't isn't as focused on getting loot it's more about the the gun and getting that gun and this is this gun functions differently it's you not chasing different colors

and different stats of like slightly better this is slightly worse like you're not mid Maxine the same gun over and over again and then also the idea of like how how the randomization would play along with a like a linear overarching story and how how much fun there is to be had in that idea like because there's a lot of events that are that are super depend upon each other that may spawn like there's there's there's the the I came out his name is there's a there's a guy with a one of the root masks and then there's a there's a tree that's basically talking to him you could meet that guy but never find that tree or you could find that tree and never meet that guy or you could find him take the mask from him forcefully and go talk to that tree and you can understand what it's saying so there's I think like getting that idea of like there's these little pockets circular encounters that are that have no bearing really like on the linear

story that stays the same but there's these little side events and how compelling that could be for people I think was a big thing too is like you could say that sounds this is gonna sound cool right and then people don't really get it until they actually play it and see oh wow yeah I didn't get that and that totally changed that experience right on that's really cool what I'm curious like to give your team just to give Shenton lid and your hard-working coworkers for a minute um what were some of the cool ideas that your team sort of surfaced obviously that made its way into the event system I mean a lot of the like the the quest stuff were just like hey can we do this with the system let's try this and like pushing it the dense of like is it to push the system as far as I can go and then in Kate in some cases like adding to that system and again like the click the the root or the the guy with the root mask and the tree that that's a really funny one because it's it is so independent and then there's mud tooth which is one of

my favorite characters and there's there's a little secret with him if you if you do the right things that will then impact like a boss later down the road if you if you do those things and it's I think those are just a lot of cool stuff that that people found interesting ways to tie them together and really make these these little vignette narratives just through the quest system and it have been really cool right on so finally my characters made it out of the tutorial as we can see so we're finally getting to get some live gameplay footage to talk about we're about halfway through the honor raging gingers wants to toss in that mud tooth loves us too I have met the tooth yet I assume John that's exactly what mud tooth in his stew is all about I guess I'm curious like you now that we're getting to watch me do a little rootin tootin combat we can go to Bowser punch this question which is what was kind of what did you learn there stood there there stating

something I'm not sure as a fact so I'm gonna skip it which is um but I will ask how did dark Sarge three which is kind of a game you know that was an existing franchise you were sort of building to existing design pillars how did that game influence run it from the ashes I mean I it's kind of hard to say there's like some ways that we we kind of learned like it's really affected it more from a tool standpoint there's such different yeah in a lot of ways I mean we actually started actually started on remnant before Darksiders 3 was even a thing and I think it was we were working on from other Suns we started like early preliminary stuff so I rune has been definitely in development for quite a while I mean definitely we figured out from a I think from an art standpoint like some of the stuff that works and doesn't work Darksiders and we were able to kind of apply a lot of those as we finished up some of the you know post-apocalyptic

city stuff because we always seem to do that a post-apocalyptic city is kind of like our bread and butter for a lot of our games let's let's dig in let's lean to the tools about that like what do you think makes what what do you think is essential about the tools that you that you brought into remnant you know that we're home by your work on from other suns in these other games what what do you think it was about these tools that enable remnant to be possible I mean really the the procedure generation things probably number one being able to set that up and the interface for it and and making that whole system work was it was super key and Foss sorry from other suns we always caught internally because it's a mouthful but a lot of that stuff coming over and then you know identifying like well how would you do this on a larger scale because again like I said it was usually like a space station or spaceship um so how

would you make a city out of this or how would you make you know a much more cohesive campaign out of this and finding like you know we're finding those tools the event trees for how you interact with characters we did a lot of like the dialogue options like we have in in remnant we had in we had a little bit in Darksiders but a lot of it was the same stuff we did in from other suns so like finding ways to refine that system and really like make it a lot more robust and and what can we add to this system and trying to think what else and I guess like one thing that we learned a lot from on Darksiders 3 was just the the cinematics tools were still kind of early days for a lot of Darksiders and we got updates because we use unreal so they were updating that system as the sequencer system as we were working on Darksiders 3 so we don't have a lot of cutscenes in Remini comparative Darksiders but we did actually learn a lot we were able to

kind of refine our workflow throughout the process of Darksiders 3 and then applying a lot of stuff to remnant as we as we finish that up right on team zoom would like to know if there are any plans for skins for players that's definite time we talked about we have the system in place for we did pre-order skins so they there are some if you preorder the game but we're definitely looking at like how we want to do that system of like like what do they begin lockdown missions or would they be found in the world like trying to figure that system out that's definitely possible right on I'm gonna I'm gonna loop back into my own question pool and talk about those vignettes you talked about earlier [Music] revin from the ashes is moody revin from the ashes definitely has a like perspective about how where this world is and what it's like for its characters but when you're telling stories and games there's always the challenge of what

when your player is most useful verb for interacting with the world is shoot or slash like you see you've seen me for instance like I walked up to that house earlier and smacked on the door to try and get in because I thought the door might be breakable it wasn't and then I was worried if my if my the banging of my hatchet would attract the monsters nearby and that's that's an interesting small narrative moment but it's not but it's it's sort of or emergent as opposed to something you guys were crafting what have you all learned about making making those moments that we mentioned you know we've we've now mentioned mud tooth and others what have you learned that's effective about storytelling in this world when your players are mostly focused on danger and survival and such I think really just giving getting their goals in front of them fast as possible so that we try to like some people love talking to the NB C's and it's great because I think all the all the voice actors did an amazing job there's a lot of interesting lines there for people that are looking for the lure but I mean

one thing we try to do is like hey you know what some people come to this just to shoot stuff so like streamlining like if you just click through talking to NPCs we just get you through through that a lot faster and that's that's one thing we learned was like there's some people in the studio like I just want to get get back to the shooting just let me make this I have to click through too many things let's get through that I think that's the one thing that I think it's a challenge for telling us interesting story because some people just want to play that way and it's like you just have to assume that well but they're not interested in no matter what story you're telling but then also we wanted to make sure that there was these story elements there's I mean we kind of followed like like a lot of things in the game we followed the dark souls path of you know what there's there's weird NPCs you can talk to and you can get some information from them a lot of them are kind of like later in the game a lot them get more cryptic and a little bit stranger and we wanted that like feeling of like well I really don't know I I am in another world right now I don't know these what they're talking about exactly or I kind

of stand what they're talking about but I don't know if they're telling me the truth and then also we spread a lot of lower throughout the world in like again like the darksouls way of doing it on items but then also you'll come you can find Diaries and some computer terminals and some of the human bases and then you actually are basically the the crux of the game is pretty quickly you're learning you learn that you need to find this this guy named founder Ford who is like one of the founders of the ward 13 which is where you're hanging out at the very beginning of the game but you basically go to his hideout is where the city section you just played here started and you find notes and diaries from him throughout the game and you're kind of like seeing that you're basically retracing his steps throughout the game and kind of like his perspective to read his perspective on and like oh I die I saw that too that's interesting that's that's how he felt about that so I think like we wanted to make lore and interesting story that that people when

they came to the game if they want it they could seek it out but we didn't want to like we don't do a lot of cutscenes and force people to like sit through like I'm not interested in the story I just want to shoot let me just smash through this so we made it more of an optional path right on there was a follow up Oh actually wanted to point out this is actually the building that made me realize this is the building that made me go oh wow like this game feels special the window that I just am walking by right now a couple seconds ago I ducked into that building to try and sort of force the enemies to conga line a little bit so I could take them out more easily and one of them through attacked me through the window and broke the glass and then proceeded to climb through the window and as a not very good Souls born player and as a like attempting to try and get this you know kit this footage for today player like a little oh [ __ ] I had in my head was was just that strange little detail that made me go oh this is this is really

students um one for me right now man I got so confused by this checkpoint here cuz the icon came up I want this door and press square and all my normal game logic for trying to get through wasn't working so I moved on I was not sure what happen was going on here yeah so that's a backtrack door so basically it's kind of telling you like hey there's third if you look at the map there is a there's a point there for sure but like you it's again like I guess like a Souls game would do you kind of make your way forward around and then you loop back and then you basically open that door so now you have a shortcut back through the area yeah I guess the stop sign right there should also in a clue that I need to stop yeah anyway the other side basically yeah teen zoom those are some great questions you were asking however they also are kind of spoilery so I'm going to hold off on those for our players who may not have gotten as far as you have I would also I for that kind

of question I would suggest dropping by the gunfire games discord I assume you guys have a discord right yeah it's uh discord GG / remnant game yeah I'd love to uh I'd love to get your question answered but I said I bet they'll have better answers you over there for that kind of question moving back let's talk we haven't really dug into combat John what do you think makes your let's watch a commenting category of my ass kicked eventually but what do you think makes good good like how do you design good combat from your top down in the studio like how do you just sort of go looking at souls born and go okay that's great but we need to make our own thing as opposed to just sort of copying and pasting soul board right I mean obviously like you can't copy paste right reasons they don't make a shooter version so we I mean honestly what we do really is we we look at successful games and games that feel good and see what they're doing and really like take it like just take it apart piece by piece and see you know like what you know how

many frames is are they in the role for and how many you know high frames are there one when you do roll you know how fast when you go in to aim down sights does it go and you know what like we spend a lot of time like just just getting that stuff feeling good and just polishing that over and over and over again of like you know is it snappy enough is it feel responsive I think I think that's really key like I think you can make a shooter pretty easily but making a suitor that feels good definitely takes a lot of time as and we found like that overtime of like hey you know what it's technically a third person shooter cool but then we just like doesn't feel as good as this game or that game so we just like well what what are they doing that makes it feel right so it would just be a lot of like kind of a to be of like okay well they're doing this and they're doing it for this reason you know does this feel they're doing this because they want this responsiveness here so it's like okay oh cool we should we should look into doing that and see how we you know put that in our game or you

know the weapon switching like how long does that actually take and and things like that like words we've like really like I guess hemmed and hawed over like very like over frame counts like pretty meticulously like throughout the course of the development of like it's just a little too long here or this is you know this is this is quick this feels good and just like the responsiveness I think that's the the biggest thing is from a player standpoint like making sure that the the player is feeling like their character is doing what they want them to do it at any given point because you don't want him to feel like well I told it to do this and it didn't do this so it's the games fault so I think like a lot of people when you make a responsive game they realize oh I died because something I did the game the game did what I told it to do and I died I think it also like I think a big part of it too for us was the to make the shooting feel good especially is making sure that the impacts feel good on enemies because I mean if you're going through a shooting gallery and

guys aren't responding when you shoot them it's it just doesn't feel good you want to see like just really just they're taking hits and they're they're kind of snapping you know the shots feel like they have impact to them we a lot of the characters will have specific directional impact so if you shoot them in the shoulder they kind of flail back or like the little little root hollow guys will you hit them and they kind of roll backwards so there's just like getting that like moment to moment like as you shoot guys get that responsiveness on the enemies to make it feel like hey that that felt good you it feels like a little reward every time you shoot them and got them and then they respond like you should you can shoot guys these guys like don't like / when you shoot in the legs they could fall over so hey that's that's a strategy where it's like you shoot him in the legs I'll fall forward and then you can take them out while they're on the ground and just just giving players that like responsive feedback constantly I think is a key to like making shooter

gameplay feel fresh and keep keep them interested questions for John we would love to get them in before we wrap up for the day John this has been a really great chat I I feel like I've learned a lot about how revenant was made if there are any key is there anything something I that happens to me when I'm working on a big project is there's something that I learn and realize and like I swear I have to go tell it to every person like don't go like basically kind of like I either don't go here this is a big danger zone warning of working on this kind of project or if you use this this will save you so much time is there anything like that for you on this game is there anything you'd like your fellow developers to know about when working on their own Souls born guns 'likes yeah you guys are the gun you guys are the souls birth remnant 'likes no boy anybody ever says that in real life that's a you just herpes standard

through it oh man I mean I feel like really like don't like don't be afraid to just spend the time on the stuff that's really important like I mean we like I said we've worked on this game for quite a while and it like for a very long time it was really just like getting getting the game loop in and making sure that that felt tight and it's like once you have that like everything else can kind of fall into place like if it's if if you're making a shooter and it's not fun to shoot things then focus on that don't worry about like the story or the quests or you know the world design because many people come to shooters first and foremost to play a shooter you know if the guns don't feel good it's not gonna it's not gonna feel good I mean it same thing goes for that we have melee a melee system in the game as well so it had a lot of refinement to in the last couple months that it just it should feel good if you have something in the game like make

sure it feels good and don't half-ass it me like how this will be fine cuz it really won't players will tell you very quickly like this doesn't feel good and it's really just like being able to just take the time to focus on what's important like figure out what what's the most important thing in here and then let you know let the time that you have be focused on getting those things good some questions come in here at the end so I'm gonna grab these they're all kind of based around what future updates for the game so I'm gonna group them together I'll just say these come from team ginger shooting raging ginger team zoom and dark Willy 90 the basic I guess the starting question would be is there any plans to like release a road map to help players know what's next for on remnant which is a more popular thing with devs these days public road maps maybe it's really like we're trying to we're trying to figure it out ourselves of like what we want to do obviously we want to keep supporting the game because

the community's just been awesome and it's it's it's I have to say like the like the positive comments about the game has just been like overwhelming it's been really awesome that we I don't know I don't wasn't expecting you know that that level coming out of the gate I I think everybody here knew we had something special but it was just a matter of like how do you launch a new IP shooter in 2019 like it seems like an insurmountable task and and I guess because of that like we're looking at like well how what's the best way to support the game so I mean we might have some loose stuff in the coming weeks to talk about obviously adventure modes around the corner we don't have a set date on that but it should be very soon we're testing it currently so it's it's soon and then we should have something else hopefully soon after that but yeah we just need to figure it out kind of and see like what's what's possible and you know we're doing patches a lot

easier if it's like hey we're doing some balance or we're just tweaking this we're fixing bugs that stuff's you know a lot easier and a lot a lot of times you don't want a roadmap for that necessarily cuz it's kind of hard to tell what's gonna go in but from a Content standpoint we definitely want to support the game ongoing but it's just a matter of like figuring out like what that looks like and when we're ready to talk about it we're done do you think just that kind of covers a bunch of questions in there but just to give raging ginger a little a little something to leave with do you think there'd be any plans to expand the list of public games to say what world the player is in or the what difficulty they are what the ping response and the server would be I mean they're all those things are possible I don't know why it we I mean it's just a matter of like again we're relatively a small team and we're four even for 70 people we're really small programming team so as those folks are just like superheroes to be able to like support support all

the stuff we do but it's definitely a case of like yeah that's that's something we could definitely look into there's a lot of stuff we want to look into it's just getting the time in there and like first priority is like you know addressing crashes people having or kind of like any kind of you know stuff that stops their game I think we're getting think we're gonna do a good point with a lot of that stuff now at this point a lot of its balance and like just refinement and making sure the game's a lot more stable for people but it's definitely we can really look at exposing more stuff to people as we go on for sure right on well just as my character sits down at the campfire to take a rest I am going to also go sit down at a medical for campfire thank you all for for watching the GDC to its channel today we would love it if you clicked the follow button if you do you will get notifications when we go live and we are trying to talk to a lot of cool developers this year there are so many games coming out and there's so many great developers to talk to John among them we are trying to get the folks with control in here from remedy

so hopefully pollow up with them we've been talking for a couple weeks now big thanks to John for coming on today big thanks to all the folks who helped get the stream together John you already mentioned the discord if they've got questions for you about making shooters like this where should they ask them I mean I'm always on the discord so where a lot of the other devs but yeah that's probably the best way to just in there or follow me on Twitter for random stuff at a p-funk pearl we're done and for for my part for GE sees part if you yourself are interested in how games get made we do encourage you do check out everything from the GGC vaults of the GDC YouTube channel if you are a developer yourself who would love to have you at GDC next year and if you're a developer who has a good talk in mind for making games we would like to you to know that the summit's the GDC summits are now taking their calls for submissions so there's a whole bunch of different summits it's narrative it's AI it's community management it's audio if

you work in any of those specific areas we'd love to hear you talks and with that John I'm just gonna share one nice note for you for you from dark Willie dark really wants to thank you for taking time to talk to the community awesome yeah thanks for having me it's been great and hopefully people enjoyed it right on with that I wish you all have a good day have a good afternoon where you are in the world and goodbye