GDC Plays Superliminal with Pillow Castle Games' Albert Shih

hi everyone welcome today to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am the invisible voice inside your head I am here today joined as always by some of the wonderful folks who make the games that you get to play in your spare time but in the lower left hand corner of the screen I am joined by Albert Chi who is the lead designer on the game we are checking out today which is superluminal Albert how are you doing good yeah hello everyone yeah thanks for coming I'm inviting me to do this if you are not familiar with superluminal you are probably looking at the screen right now and wondering just exactly what's happening why am i picking up this cheese you I'm picking up this cheese because I'm going to turn this cheese into the ramp just by turning around superluminal is a puzzle game currently out on the epic game store where it uses your force perspective to change the size of objects or sometimes the the nature of objects as you can see this cheese has

gone from being the size of a hand to the size of a ramp Albert how long have you all been working on this game and I guess when did you sort of first come up with the idea for it yeah so it's been a while I think right now kind of Tally's around like six years or so of course you know I haven't been working on it you know full-time the entire time but it began when I was a student and I needed like a student project to do you know for the end of the year so I just made this like tiny little demo you know with just with one mechanic and like three puzzles and and you know a couple years after that run more people and the more people and finally you know we have two most six six or seven people when we shipped the game so yeah right on just for a quick housekeeping check in with chat we go folks like Christopher Lloyd watching thank you for joining us Chris we will be taking your questions if you

have them for Albert I guess the first question worth worth asking is so how does this perspective mechanic actually work and how were you able to build it out to fill out all these puzzles yeah so the general idea of you know when I explain it is things are the same size on on your screen but in space it actually kind of adapts to what you know how large it seems to be right and it's all based off the idea of like oh if you pretend to you know pinch the Tower of Pisa it looks that it looks like it should be you know a certain size and so in this game I'm just trying to fulfill that you know illusion in game however how it actually works to keep it consistent is the object that you're grabbing will be as large as possible and as far as possible as it can always be so it's always you know its projected kind of like as far to the distance so if

there's a wall behind it we'll try to find the point on the wall that you know it will be before it kind of collides with anything mom and then just do that mechanic then people can use that to solve puzzles mm-hmm and was the same part to your question oh I guess how did you start building out puzzles around this mechanic oh yeah so that you know what kind of history of this project has been a long one so there was a long process you know to get there but it started out like there were different phases like was a knob we just started out and just kind of went full throttle and just did a bunch of stuff I think one of the first big kind of milestones was you know yeah I knew that like this thing called the sense of wonder night it's like it's basically you know it's similar to the experiment

of game play showcase but it's at the Tokyo Game Show I knew that was coming out up there like great what if I tried to like flesh out this mechanic that has like two puzzles you know and so you know from there I just kind of tried to try to think of like the wackiest ideas I could use it for and just made one puzzle yi chin that no became a series of things that then you know slowly grew and grew mm-hmm right on what was kind of building on that question what do you think makes a good puzzle like this is such a this is such a mechanic that defies how people think although it sort of naturally fits into it also naturally fits into how people think like perceiving the object to be the size it is as opposed to understanding it's not that size how did you what was your philosophy for coming up with puzzles and what do you think makes it interesting to solve puzzles with this mechanic yeah so I think I think a lot of that is kind of like based on people's personal tastes there's a lot

of different types of puzzle games the ones that I found the most interesting was kind of like anti chamber you know puzzle games that were more about seeing something new and trying to think outside the box as opposed to you know something you know like a Sudoku puzzle right which is you know the mechanics email with elements but it's more about about mastery it's more about like a series of steps so I definitely try to try to focus on finding ways that would give players you know different types of epiphanies in that sense and that's why and that's why you know if some people play this game they might say like oh hey you know it's not necessarily like scratching like the master itch but there's like a lot of really cool and interesting stuff in it mm-hmm so yeah that's interesting response the epiphany angle kind of reminds me of portal 2 about how you

sort of be shooting portals and things for a while yeah and I really like I should have disclosed um the video we're watching today we're looking at today is not entirely it's not live I had to pre-record this footage so that we can make this dream happen but you're gonna get that I like it because then we get to watch all the little epiphanies that me if yesterday had like yeah they're where I discovered that I could actually pick up the the sign speaking of yeah speaking of Porto I think like one of the most interesting parts of portal one that you know I was like wow this really cool is when you realize momentum works through portals right yeah so like that's the the thing that we were like you know can we repeat this is it even possible to do and and that's what we try to shoot for so yeah it's kind of the same thing here right like instead of momentum its size its instead of momentum its size like you like it can take this little sign and I can make it big and I can make it small and that that's what lets me solve the puzzle by looking at right here

moving on and just also giving a quick sanity Yesi man thanks for dropping by and we'd love that oh we briefly lost you there Albert are you know I was getting some strange noises from Skype that's fine we're gonna see this we're gonna see this games get sort of skit yeah we're actually interesting an interesting point of the game which is where the puzzles stop being just sort of test chambers like portal and you start to do that portal esque thing where you go outside the test chambers and outside the simulated environments and start solving puzzles in a way that sort of feel like you're breaking the get your quote-unquote breaking the game even though you're not you're just yeah the puzzles just now outside the narrative space a bit how do you did you notice anything while designing these particular puzzles about how players approach them and if they struggled in any specific way with when the puzzles began sort of to not be I guess presented in the same kind of structure

yeah I think it's definitely I think it helps with this game because there's so many weird things we try to do even early on so so and also I think there's parts part of kind of the shared language right like people have played portal and other weird games like this so when when usually they they they see this they're not like oh this is like I'm totally confused they're more like oh yeah I knew something was coming yeah mm-hmm but I think in general in games as long as you kind of set up expectation you can get away with anything mm-hm you know some people say in puzzle games like a lot of people talk about like oh how difficult should a puzzle game be but I really think it depends on kind of what expectations you set right like in Dark Souls is very difficult game but if you know that going in and if everything about the game tells you that this is gonna be a hard game then you get used to that and and you're not you

don't feel that sense of like unfairness right so I think similarly with any type of puzzle game as long as you set the expectations correctly and you say things are gonna be weird or like oh you have to you know think outside the box a lot then it won't seem as jarring when you do weird things that make sense it's kind of the difference between a an epiphany driven game like this and a um you mentioned a Sudoku puzzle game like if you meant an app for Sudoku games or like a even a match-three puzzler those are sort of in very constrained environments where you're trying to use the tools you have to to solve a new kind of a puzzle you already know but in this game the environments are not constrained there they aren't just like they're set pieces but they're not you're sort of not always told that there's just one way out I guess right which is yeah what makes it easy for players like me here to start solving problems based on that

yes dota came for a walk yeah one of the things we try to encourage is we want kind of like the space to be interest interesting enough that people will want to look around and be like oh what is this what is this is this you know part of the puzzle is this something you know because then that it makes the space feel a lot more more alive as opposed to just like I'm going from point A to point B I don't need to care about anything between no like you're playing around with with things here you're looking around at different kind of things that's why we try to add on little surprises or a little things that you could discover if you go out of you know off the beaten path mm-hmm god these moments really cuz they're not puzzle moments these minutes there's optical illusions yeah how do you how do you even implement this how do you like use unity and go okay I need this to look real over here but needs to look really fake over here yeah so it's it's you know some of it is surprisingly simple and some of the hard parts are like surprisingly hard the easy part is

if you're just trying to do like a a simple that looks like something else you just have a camera stacked on a projector right the camera takes the image and the projector spits out the image the hard part is actually where note like depth is involved because the projectors and unity' don't have depth so we actually have a graphics programmer called phil who's like really good at this kind of stuff he basically hacked some kind of like real ian system that uses you know shadow maps and whatever that ends up you know taking an account for death and all that but that like extra step turned out to be much harder than just kind of original prototypes you're doing yeah how does the resizing work while I'm at it I guess like what's the what kind of game logic are you using that makes make the resizing possible yeah so so again

it it's like the easy part seem hard and the hard parts seem easy the easy part is a actually like how do things look exactly the same the rules that is it the surprisingly simple it's like if something is twice as far away it gets twice as big and then vice versa and that just for some reason you know with computer with the computer and it's like no it's very specific math it just works so and it's weird it works and like different fo fees whatever I don't know why but it just does the hard part is actually finding how far the object should go because if you imagine like you have a very weirdly shaped object like let's say you have a sponge right and it has tons of holes in it and maybe you have a background that's really complicated and you want to make sure it doesn't kind of clip into any of the background so we just it's we did a lot of like trial and error and it's just like a very dense layer of raycast that

we're doing to more or less estimate where it should land and even if it's like a little bit off it's a little bit closer than it should be it's it's fine but as long as long as it doesn't feel unfair right on this is a really interesting puzzle right here and I'm gonna be stuck here for a while but the reason I'm not skipping over this video is the problem solving process is sort of illuminated from what I was trying to do what's interesting is going on right now is I assumed that the that there was just an angle I needed to view the cube at like the last yeah but it wasn't and I and I thought I looked at there and I can see okay one lamp is styled like the box that must be part of it gap over there must be another lamp that's that's all I thought was that I wasn't paying attention to how I can see it now it's clear as day the lamps are clearly on the the raised out parts of the walls I just did not see that when I was planning it's gonna take me a minute for the past me to catch up but in the meantime I guess oh god I just walked right by the solution I guess in the

meantime what happened when in playtesting I'm sure moments like this happened on every puzzle what was kind of your approach for on here I am just trying to use the last place a puzzle solution to get through this one what was sir your response when players what enter moments like this where they just missed the thing that and they make an assumption and they miss something even though they they should not be making that assumption yeah um usually I'm actually a little bit happy when players like miss the most obvious things because I think that's a good case because you know like a player like you even if you you miss it eventually you'll look around enough that you'll find it right I think the opposite case actually that is when players go in the room and they immediately figure it out and that is I feel like there's less of a moment of Epiphany there some I'm actually totally happy that like you're you're you know trying to figure this out and you're taking time even though

at the moment I'm sure you must be to some extent frustrated that you're like why isn't this doing the thing right and alap you were like oh you know is there a bug here or you know is that supposed to look like look like that or or you know something that's you know not supposed to be blocking and actually foggy so mm-hmm real quick before I keep going just to remind some folks in chat we'd love to hear your questions for Albert if you we're making puzzle games or if you're making games like this we want to know what you think what you are what you're working on what challenges you're going to solve and making them sorry you were gonna say yeah I'm sorry to like kind of expand on that answer a bit more I think there are certain things that you know we're happy with if the players are kind of exploring as long as it doesn't it doesn't become frustrating to some extent right and and those things are typically things that seem like they could work but they don't actually work

so for example if you took that first box menu once while you try to get up and if you did that like 40 times because you're like I just need to be a little bit larger and it almost works like that feels really frustrating mm-hmm but I'm you know I'm glad in this playthrough you took took that single box put it over you you're like I'm not gonna make this jump so I don't even need to think about that doing that the best-case scenario you can just start crossing things off your list yeah and it says it sounds like you learned a lot from your playtesting about like what are acceptable like failed behaviors I guess yeah and it's it's always kind of fun to see what people get stuck with because sometimes you know you play with a lie and you're like oh yeah this mechanic it's totally makes sense but some people you know don't realize you can grab things from far that you can project things from afar and you end up realizing realizing that you know everybody will come with different expectations so you need some

kind of like gating process to make sure by a person point everybody understands the basic mechanics yeah here's an interesting thought I had will all solve trying to solve this puzzle is this is the there's a little bit of a clambering mechanic like I just triggered it there yeah but it only seems to after after I solve this puzzle I realized it's only seems to be functioning when the game is trying to like you know like to quote another interview I did like when it trying to make sure I'm solving the right puzzle right like isn't a jumping puzzle game you're not trying to time your jumps the game is just trimming nice to you when it knows you've done all the work but and here I was trying to abuse the Claymore mechanic to get up on my side how did you time that out and keep like like your your your you're helpful mechanics from interfering with your court gameplay yeah so the way we do is really simple we have a ruler and in our game engine that we can just pull out and it basically says you know this is this is how high your first jump is this is how high your first jump plus like will we

call like the mantling mechanic gives you and this is how I like to load jumps give you so we know that if there's a Ledge that requires you know at least two jumps it's high enough that you can't get up with just one object and that's mostly like you know from our designer Logan who kind of implement that stuff and made sure that we were that we were adhering to it you know pretty carefully because right because like you could ease if it wasn't there you could easily like get up there the other thing about mantling system is that I didn't realize it was you know thing that was required before but because so usually in puzzle games you want really discreet States right and and and what I mean it's like you want to know exactly when you've kind of achieved or or failed to stay you don't want it to be ambiguous so if they get it they maybe get it and if they don't they know they're not there what's difficult about game where you can

resize stuff and and then this is something I've also discuss with them Steve swing because you know he's working on scale is that it makes for example jumping on things much more difficult so like in Portal it's very easy to take one block and no that gives you a certain amount of height right in this game because scaling is on you know and I don't know weak odds it's on a range so it means that you know you're jumping can also feel feel uncertain at times like there's jumps without the mantling there's jumps that you think you can make but you actually can't and that just feels bad right so that's why and then we decided that adding this mantling thing would help kind of make feel a lot more discreet help make him more easily understandable when you saw solve the puzzle guy yeah

man there's nice Kim we know that I'm so happy we're past that cuz there's some puzzles that I get to show off to the audience it's really cool that you are getting to talk to Steve Swank about this I saw a scale at indicate a while back and I'm still working on it so we're gonna how does it I guess how what is it like Quinn um this is not designed related I'm sorry but what is it like to like get to like have someone out there be working on a similar mechanic as you and getting to share notes like that yeah I I think it's I think it's really cool and I think it's like you know a healthy process and and because it's a lot of times it's you you're not just dealing with similar kind of design problems like oh no you're you're talking about you know how to design puzzles both some other times you're also talking about just like you know what kind of art do you want to put in what kind of story do want to put in how do you make things cohesive and it does help to have someone to bounce off ideas

with that kind of exists in the same space so like you know Steve likes to talk about like you know practices that help you kind of work better you know just in terms of you know he talks about like deliberate practice and stuff like that which is really interesting so yeah this puzzle will so no it sums to me for a moment but then it gets super interest this puzzle was just so interesting especially I'm gonna point out there's a red there's a window up to the top left that I looked at briefly I don't later figured out I could make a thing a platform to go up there but I didn't and I just proceeded onward and I'm still wondering what's up by that red window because I didn't get to explore when I was doing this puzzle myself diving into my question ball pits first-person games like this first on the one hand first-person games have been super branded on we know a lot of things about

making first-person games that we didn't know ninety-two for instance one of them which is a big deal for VR is motion sickness and I have to confess I felt a little bit motion sick playing this game and I think that had to do with just you know the human brain is very dumb and when things change on us that aren't supposed to change they start getting weird what did you all learn about something around motion sickness and did that come up like early later playtesting like was it a bigger problem than you expected I'm just curious about that just because I got a little bit motion sick yeah I I think this is always an interesting question and then I think one of the big ones that we're actually trying that we've implemented that would probably be out in our next patch is an fov slider right because a lot of times you know most people's motion sickness also depends on kind of how far they are from the screen and what the fov is and whether that match

is kind of their net their natural fop besides that we've tried different things like because we've also wondered it's like oh there's something related to this game right is it because you're grabbing this item and it's hard to identify whether whether it's far or close and if that's kind of messing up your brain one thing we realize that is that adding like a cursor in the middle actually does help because it helps keep people focused on kind of one point at least that's one thing and then that'll be slider as well yeah besides that you know we're still kind of trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work I you know I used to have pretty bad motion sickness but also just like because I needed to work on this game so much I kind of like lost a lot of that so for example you know when I play Portal I would have to stop after every like hour so and take a nap and then go back but so part of it I think is

somehow like VP exposure right so I feel like people who haven't played video games also tend to have that to a larger extent or somebody who's like watching over your shoulder mm-hmm yeah I mean I love this I love the solution of this puzzle portal 2 that's a interesting answer let me see I'm going to ask about what have you learned about teaching play like this is an interesting moment because like teaching players what can and can't be grabbed teaching players what can expand and what can't you're gonna see some interesting variances on this in the next 30 minutes or so what did you learn about sort of like about about that teaching process and about helping players like understand the new things they can do with this scaling power yeah so there's a and that's a good question that's actually a kind of design problem that we struggle struggle a lot with right cuz it's it's in this

game in particular that is and this game in a big part is about thinking outside the box and giving your you those kind of unexpected surprises when you see things so we try we also can't use you know very obvious things right so for example if every gravel item had you know a shimmer to it you know that would call it out then that also kind of destroys part of the surprise when the blame game so you know this is the thing we've talked about Charlie but we and we've tried basically two basic things that together they kind of help make the problem a little bit better one of them is is through color right so there's things in the world that pop out a little bit more there's things that don't and generally we want people to be able to be like oh that's the thing that's interesting I should be able to interact with it and you know

theoretically they should right so if they see like oh there's a vending machine like because we see this a lot it's like oh there's a vending machine that's really interesting people walk up the other one like press button so we do let them do that and we've realized that it doesn't really need to be every item that looks interesting you can grab and resize it just needs to be some like something happens right and if that happens then people are satisfied and they know that they've done a thing kind of reacted to it and then they can move on as opposed to they try and then and then you know they're a little bit disappointed the other thing that we're trying to do is is kind of you know play with size a little bit right so you know we've talked about like color and trying to like blend things and things that don't really look gravel probably aren't and same with size smaller things that look like you can grab your hand generally our gravel of course there's

you know one a couple places that we try to break this rule so our puzzles don't you know get destroyed but we try to kind of abide that by that as well so it feels kind of a little bit more intuitive yeah this is a really interesting moment we're like like you're just getting all this messaging about perception is reality all of a sudden then you walk in the office you looking for something to grab and you turn around other thing was right by the door when you grab just like the least puzzly thing but it's Rangeley like you can't unless you know it's there you can't go grab it yeah this little yeah this level is fun cuz this level is kind of like a really fun kind of twist on the on the other levels mm-hm cuz one kind of one thing that we're playing along with it's like the idea that you know in a sense we are are trolling the player but in like a very tongue-in-cheek way right it's like if you see none of the puzzles in this particular level are super super

difficult but they're more like things are you expect things to look totally normal and then then they're not and that's kind of just a general theme of this level right on coming up on the half hour mark for our conversation I sound like a broken record but I genuinely do we love hearing the thoughts of art developer audience just God that this is when I started to get screwed up when that I grabbed that die right there I was like wait a minute so we'd love to hear your thoughts your your questions for Alberts I'm going to slightly tweak my line of questioning for the moment Albert so you took a mechanic that started a student game and then you and a bunch of friends got together you got you got a team together and you said okay if we want to make this a shift commercial product a lot of developers get to that it's a really cool thing about this industry I don't know why I just wanted to play around with this what was it like and what steps did you think makes your transition successful

because there's a lot of us who transition like the thesis games in the commercial projects and it just doesn't work out or they have to go take a day job or something and how did you sort of make it all happen yeah I mean um a big a big factor of that is time and of course I don't think I don't think I did the process perfectly I think one is time that's why the game took no you know six years from beginning n is because there's a lot iteration there was a lot of no there's a point where I got some contract worked in in order to make things work it wasn't you know of course if I'm saying like if we just sat down and we were you know totally funded and we got a full team you know we could have made this game a lot faster but because of those basically kind of like kind of transition moments indie games in general I feel like and have taken a little bit longer the other thing though is just remembering kind of the initial wave of people who were interested in

this game and so you know I was worried actually maybe like the first year or year in half Oregon game that if I didn't get the game out soon that people would just forget about it and then somebody told me that no people are interested in something once they will be interested in it and in it again you know after it comes out or after the full thing is revealed so I was kind of like hoping that you know I hope that's correct I don't know but you know we'll test it out and see so a lot of it is that confidence that no this mechanic in this game would would be interesting enough that people would kind of be attached to it again if the full thing ever came out right in that confidence I think especially you know when you're making indie game does help a lot because any any amount of certainty kind of makes things easier mm-hmm in a

sense right because when you're doing it you know as an indie you are on your own there's so many things that you're trying to tackle with or there's there's so many kind of you know doubts in your mind right whether whether you'll ship the game and whether you know the game will even do well and stuff like that so the more amount of certainties you can grab kind of I feel like the easier that processes so you're saying the certainty year will hold on to was like we have we have a mechanic that works people are interested in it and we will write that would that work for us tomorrow the same as it works today yes yeah even if I showed somebody who'd never seen it before they'd be like oh wow this is yeah which I admit that was me haha I feel like III think I got a confuse the scale when I first saw it because there's a house puzzle you that there's a house yeah on that is sort of similar to what's going on with scale but yeah moving on from that I guess as an indie how did you manage your sort of quality of life in that time because you know six years it's long time work on a game I hope it wasn't six years of long hours

on one game that would have been very hard yeah um I'm I I don't think I'm the best person to talk about this cuz I've been horrible and I kind of keeping a good work-life balance and to me because because there's different types of people right and some Indies can just you know roll out of bed in the morning and get to work and just have their productive day I have personally like I have more trouble just like having a super productive day so that's what I always heard she for and when you're at asn't you know doing this as an indie or by our own it's always hard to say like oh I need to wake up at this exact time and I need to you know do these things and then after this then you know I can take a break and forget about everything and what I realized at least for me is that you know having a team of people around me know people at our co-working

space that you know I need to get up to bed to me and to talk with that really actually helps me and my process right some people need that some people don't I think having other people kind of on your team having P other people that you know will be blocked by stuff if you're not there you know people that rely on you and people you can rely on is is part of the process as well mm-hmm man solving this puzzle was very strange for me because they just sort of add on to it yeah working with your team I guess like let's let's give it let's celebrate your coworkers for a minute because there's six you know team of six yeah that's the only person making this happen what are some of the interesting things work what's some of the interesting work they did that you think is worth calling out yeah so okay so there's I mean it's like where do I start right yeah yeah so first of all

there's Logan who's our lower designer he worked on the game right before this I was called four-sided fantasy which is also + claim but he also worked on the stitch pen game called perspective which is this 2d platformer / 3d a first-person game as if that sounds interesting you should go check it out it's on Steam right now so he was like the perfect candidate to be know a level designer on this game mm-hmm you know couldn't have picked anyone better other people like we have two artists on Team Ryan and Steve they both come from kind of more of a triploid background but of course they've done some indie stuff but they've have like tons of experience on it under the belt they've worked on know what of Warcraft and and Mortal Kombat and stuff like

that and you know far more experienced than I am there's Phil who's who's our graphics programmer you know he's working on his own cool little game that it's called snow trick sorry there's two games there's snow Trek which he's released but there's also Cascadia quest or cascade store the name was change at some point sorry Phil uh-huh that uh has a tons of cool stuff in it too and yeah it's tons of experience now he worked at Microsoft for a while but now he's like doing really cool graphics so for a game there's you know chris chris floyd who you know used to work for mega booth uh and you know done tons of cool stuff there he's also doing some stuff oculus and there's there's al alex who's

also programmer he's you know i think a theme here is that because we're in kind of this collecting space we can find interesting people that we know to help us along with the project it's like alex is somebody we brought on you know a little bit late late on game but he's kind of provided a lot of that kind of finishing touches in terms of the programming like the UI and controller and all that stuff that we really didn't have kind of a lot of time to tackle at the end so you know it's always nice to have like that kind of emergency kind of like programming you know muscle court oh I guess that's oh that's weird way to put it of course there's and last fall there's like Matt Christensen who's doing the music for the game and he's like this F mod guru who also teaches no jazz on the side so you know that's why you know we

brought him in because a lot of the music in this game is based off of like very cool piano Janice you know mm-hmm and that was a kind of interesting atmosphere we were trying to build so hopefully I didn't forget anyone right on yeah as I limit my past self for not being able to solve this puzzle I guess I can move on to my next question which is um it is one thing always you know to ask talented smart people to come up with interesting games but it is another thing to then take people who are you know skilled at one aspect of making a game like you know in your case you made the demo and then to ask them to also lead a team is there anything that you particularly thought of that or in the last six years is there anything notable about like leadership and working with other people that you've learned that you think other division know about yeah I mean the past six years for me at least it's just a

very long learning process and and I'm still trying to learn trying to figure you know trying to figure things out I'm a monden like one of the big ones is at the beginning maybe let's do this week like at the beginning I had a couple of assumptions that you know turn out to be more nuanced I think so for example coming in you know maybe in my student years I would have said you know what's our goal it's just to make a really really good game so I'm sure you know all of us will be able to make great decisions and saying what's good game what's not just heading in the right direction right of course that sounds like it if that sounds like a recipe for disaster that is it's because everybody defines things a little bit differently right if you say if you ask somebody what a good game is they have different ideas and and that doesn't necessary mean anyone's wrong it just means there's different ways of seeing it right there's so many types games so there's so many different types of types

of ways where things can become good if that makes sense and that a lot of times that requires emphasis on different aspects so an artist might say hey to make this part good we need high fidelity or we need like some really cool interesting you know one-off art piece here but - does this designer they may it might say like know what it's arts not super important to me I just want something that's easily manageable you know I want to build out levels quickly so you know everybody kind of has different expectations and if you're leading the team the thing you're supposed to do apparently is to try to get everybody on the same page of what's important what's not for it mm-hmm and you know that's a process in itself and for that it's difficult cuz then that you need to know where you have to have to have a good idea and a lot of people you know end up

needing to like I don't I can't really explain this perfectly but you know based on my gut we should probably go in this direction yeah and a lot of it ends up being that way so that's what I think like part of this process is so hard cuz the other thing though is also realizing that you know you're working with people who are really smart so generally though make the right decisions but that doesn't also because people have turned tastes that doesn't mean that you know people will make the right decision really quickly so what do you need what can you do to kind of like help move that process a lot right I used to maybe go like hey I would keep it open oh so like hey just you know do something cool that you really like for this area but now I try to go well I'm trying to do this you know here's an example of this you can improve on it that's cool but you know if not maybe we should do something you know simpler for this area yeah something on two slides I

love hope with a serial killer ii ii this is yeah that's all Logan nice nice job Logan yeah I hope you I hope I hope I hope you got to hear that compliment kind of way right on once I guess like something that actually kind of can get overlooked you mentioned having two talented artists on this game what kind of art style did you sort of realize you needed in order to make sure that this puzzle game could be both like easy to read and also something you could fill out with like the sense of space in there to which I don't even think we're gonna have time to talk about the narrative today but like there is kind of a there's kind of an or there's kind of a something like it's not you're not just doing puzzles in the abstract space this whole wandering through a dream facility thing is really suitable as well intention is there anything you've figured out is working with your artists that you really need it that in this process yeah so you know we took we took a look at a lot of indie games like no

let's starting with antechamber we like we don't want to do something completely early abstract even though that makes things read a lot easier right and part of that reason is that when you're in actual mundane space it's just things are so much funnier if you make them if you if you make make things surreal and like if you move you know make us can of soda ruthbarz like that's a kind of funny moment that you can't have the curly abstract space on the flip side we also didn't want a very busy looking space right because as you mentioned yeah that just ends up distracting and especially a puzzle game that draws you to a lot of false clues that are exactly there so in the end we kind of went for this art style that you know are one of our reference points was Wes Anderson because things are kind of clean and clear but there's still this interesting surreal tone going on it's almost like a heightened reality right

like you wouldn't necessarily see these colors in your life but they could exist so there's that it kind of lies on that kind of line between surreal you know something something that's possible but also a little bit magical mm-hm and and you know similar with with the mechanic as well and and you know the items in the game and puzzles that's kind of the line we're trying to hit and I and you know I think that feels a lot more more funnier and more serial than because then you know the extreme right there's the other extreme you could go to that we didn't go to is if made things very fantastical mm-hmm you know that would be like you know if you're in some kind of fantasy world and you're you have this mechanic because you have like a special you know magical ancient magnifying glass or something you know mm-hmm I don't know but it's

just a lot of it cut just kind of depends on what kind of game or tone you're trying to shoot for yeah so yeah for the looks you know we were referencing Wes Anderson you're referencing you know things like James Turrell which used a lot of kind of pastel colors there's this great kind of subreddit called accidental accidental West Anderson it's where people take photographs that look like Wes Anderson stuff and then you know they just post it and ensure and basically we kind of like took a lot of those elements and we try to analyze how those elements worked right and and a lot of this is about the color and about the level of detail yeah and then I'm really glad that you know it came out in a style that we we could

work with design boats also interesting would look like look at right on this is where unfortunately a portal past me started getting a little confused about what's going on lastly I guess we can as we head into our last part of our chat we can talk about the epic game store a little bit this is a big new store or developers are still trying to figure out why they should be shipping on it if they should be shipping on it exclusively some developers are trying to figure out how their player base is potential player bases will react can you walk us through your process about chipping superluminal on the store if there's anything in particular you think other developers need to know yeah I don't think there was too many things that like ran into of course there's a couple of kind of features that aren't there yet and that's both the blessing and the curse right so Bruce for example for a ship we didn't need to put in the achievements and that's great because that would have like you know took us

another you know week or two to kind of kind of like put everything in testing um besides that I think I think the the kind of general process is streamlined enough that nothing in particular was like incredibly different and I'm glad that's the case that you know we you know different PC platforms that don't feel like you're porting to a completely different console or anything right like there's no super long process that you go through it's basically similar to more or less similar to how you would put a game on Steam so yeah what are their experience did you have putting a game on scene if you know I mean asking like how it like that you're able to compare it against yeah so basically well you know before we go out we've gone to that game store we were on Steam for a little while and that was a

way that we could get the game kind of tested and playable in an easy format so we we're actually using steam for a little at a time before we did that and you know the process like each storefront will have their own process right but it's more like region you need to go in and figure out but after you do generally it's it's relatively straightforward mm-hmm yeah you know it's not straightforward this puzzle yeah just really trying to click my way this is one of those interesting cases where where I could tell I was just trying to brute force it but I didn't know what the elegant with the bragging solution was so we will see me in a minute here I this was me like I just gone on and I watched a youtuber try to solve it uh-huh and I think he'd come up he'd actually managed to get this this sort of solution to work you just to click it up the hill oh yes yeah I've seen people do things that were not intended but are very interesting like

okay that's actually something about new things but some of them you know yeah are just cool when do you would you draw that line when do you fix something that you didn't intend as a puzzle and when do you just let it be yeah I think that really comes down to the player experience if it's a thing that you know leads them to be more frustrated generally we won't try to fix it but if it's like a cool thing for example a lot of people like taking items and try to like find really weird kind of looking crannies in the game that they weren't supposed to and for that we do want to encourage so we will be kind of patching the game and adding more Easter eggs and things gonna discover that you know encourage that sort of behavior right because basically when players do that you know I feel like they're putting you know extra effort into the game and be nice if no as a player would be nice if I was warded if I did this crazy thing that

wasn't supposed to happen and I got somewhere that you know I wasn't supposed to go and if there's a sign over there that says like you know why did you do that you know that that's kind of like an acknowledgment that it happened so we try to kind of that's the problem with doing some of these like recording stations you just look back at what you're doing you're like I get it now there you go Albert I guess is there any particular lesson you know this game developers conference we do things with other game developers in mind is there anything we'd like other tankers to know before you wrap up today yeah there's been getting more frustrated I mean you

not that much but I think if anything I just want to talk about kind of like the pre-production process and I think that it's actually kind of a very hard thing to figure out I think I think kind of games in general aren't super good at that because just because of how games are like you kind of need to make something in order to figure it out if it works but I feel like if you can grab on something early on like you know even in a very broken state yeah of this game there was something there that we could point you and say you know that's something people will be interested even I don't know like four or five years later when the game is complete having that and having having something like that and having the confidence kind of does help you along the way and yeah and just like try to try different things during pre-production it's not

necessarily just now keep on building the game sometimes that's taking a step back sometimes it's building a different kind of prototype or in a different medium you know going to paper or or something else we're talking to people in order to kind of get to where you need to be in order to really start production so yeah I'm just saying that because we we kind of want the production and production a couple times before realizing where that line was at I'm surely know a lot of people have been in similar situations man I love the loading screens real quick this is when I realized the lure getting weird um we're gonna tie for 20 has jumped in with a question um and I think we've sort of covered this but we can I can ask it and we can sort of revisit the topic for a moment was this game designed to have only one to answer per

puzzle or did you ever want people to solve the puzzle through multiple means they comment that they were thinking about Zelda shrines in breadth of the wild not something they're not called Zelda try and stairs called shrines there they're trying and Legend of Zelda birth of the wild and how they've seen multiple solutions to be strained I'm gonna layer on that question by pointing out that sometimes in those shrines the multiple solutions are often people like gaming the the wild physics mechanics of that game my mom's and this game is different it doesn't have wild physic you can yeah I guess what was your I've noticed that there seems to be only one solution for puzzles what was your thought process behind making that decision yeah we were also at some point trying to figure that out right do we want this to be more of no estrella puzzle game or do we want it to have no more freedom and more sense of creativity and more toy like and then we said no no

creativity for you ah-hum but i think the real answer is it depends on kind of what you really care about and for our game we really cared about giving people kind of moments of Epiphany and that's harder to do if you have multiple solutions right because what you end up doing is maybe you you know have a different Infini and you skip this moment you skip this thing that we're trying to tell you and in the next puzzle you get stuck so for us at least we've kind of chosen the one solution per puzzle way but if people do you know similar to the Zelda shrines that people do find like a crazy solution that they're just ahead of the curve we don't we try not to penalize them for that so going and I love reshaping the sizes of things and going on like taking that's the small thing and making it big we've

taken the small bore making it big yeah it's very Alice in Wonderland exactly yeah normally I would not use it as a compliment but here with that I'm gonna start wrapping things up thank you everyone for watching the GDC twitch channel today if you didn't catch the whole stream don't worry it's gonna be archived see look at this look at this tiny door I have to figure out happening to this this has been our chat with Albert she of the pillow castle games for work the game superluminal you can check it out on the epic game store if you want to play it for yourself for our Park GDC is coming up in March from the 16th to the 20th to be precise you might have noticed that if you looked at the screen for two seconds um we would like to invite you to join us at GDC in part because you know we we cater to game developers we cater to people students professionals indie developers we like having you all at the show because it's

a lot of knowledge sharing this networking and and it's a lot of stuff place it's place we got a lot of conversations like this conversation where you just try to learn from the people they can great work in your field if that clumsy sales pitch did anything for you you can scroll down and click the button to get more information about registration and if you are otherwise just interested in the way games get made we would invite you to follow the GGC twitch channel so that you can keep up with the other developers we're gonna be talking to this month and next year this month I can promise you if you stick around you're gonna be hearing from the developers behind the new MechWarrior game which is out later this month we're also gonna be talking to the folks behind Age of Empires to remaster definitive edition not remastered definitive edition and if you want to hear about from those folks just follow us and you'll get a notification we go live Albert thank you so much it's been a lot of fun superluminal cool game I hope you have a lovely day thanks so much for having me awesome with that I

will take us home bye everyone [Music] you