GDC Plays The Church in the Darkness with Richard Rouse III

everyone my name is Brian Francis I'm a contributing editor at Gamasutra comic and a community manager for GDC I am also today oh no I'm in trouble I am deep trouble I am playing the Church in the darkness this is a game that comes from paranoid productions which is Richard Roush threes the Richard rs3 Richard rouse 4/3 games you don't have to say the third out loud yeah just just written just written Richard rouse is also the person who is in the lower left-hand corner of the screen he is a veteran game designer who we have seen a lot on the GBC her show floor we're here today Church in the dark just finally came out we streamed to this when we were when we were doing this on the gamasutra twitch channel a while back we were we streamed this with him then you might have read about the game you might have seen some stuff about the game and they were here to play the game and talk about its development Richard how are you doing and how are the other two Richard dresses oh hey

the other two Richard rouses are not with us anymore as it happens but what once it's been a while so it's it's okay to say that I guess but ya know is we're still you know we just shipped something like three weeks ago feels like they're looking at the calendar maybe it's four weeks ago not quite four weeks and we're still working on patches stuff like that also getting ready for a panel at PAX that we're doing with the voice actors oh yeah yes um I don't know if folks let me know if you can hear or not hear the voice actors in question John Patrick Lowery and Ellen McLain have lent their voices for this game who you may know what them better as the sniper from Team Fortress 2 and GLaDOS from Portal yes and they're lovely people at at trade shoes because you know if you're ever putting together a panel you know this being the GDC channel we can talk about this you know when you're putting together a group of

speakers you know you want to get people with good content but also people who are you know Chris Matic can talk on stage that sort of thing and the great thing about actors is that's what they do so there's no they will out class the most famous developer given the chance right on Richard I could introduce your game for you but why don't you do it what is the church in the darkness and why did you make it yeah so as we can see from from Bryant here desperately trying not to be detected it's a bit of an infiltration game with a top-down perspective inspired by some games I loved you know before I was in the industry and it's set inside a religious cult in the 1970s which you are infiltrating to look for your nephew Alex and it does a lot of sort of dynamic story stuff so there's a ton of different endings you can get we can talk more about those later cuz I could clarify some of the intention there which is a little bit different than what I've seen people taking it know the

games out but there's a ton of different endings you can get based on choices you make but we also change up the personalities of the preachers each time so you're making choices based on different personalities to the cult leaders and that sort of makes it a procedural story ish sort of thing it's also it's got roguelike qualities I believe you said you've been playing for a while and I've been captured twice already so if you get you get shot again yo yeah you're running into the hornet's nest here but you're also you know I've been playing this long enough that know that if you if you keep moving you can get out of many scrapes not all but many I can't tell if the alarm is going off right now I would imagine it would be clear yeah cool anyway you were saying Xavier that would be a different game but yeah so it's it's you're

infiltrating this group trying to find your nephew you know if you'd play your cards right you may want to go confront the cult eaters there are scenarios where you may agree with what the cult leaders are doing not think they're so bad after all cuz often you know when we hear about cults we hear about you know the the worst of them and groups that still would be described as a cult might you know not be dangerous you know they might just really be earnest about whatever they're doing I've often joke that software companies are often like cults particularly small ones or particularly ones that have a really strong leader at the center you know that when that person shows up in the room everyone quiets down and does what they say and that's kinda like you know what we could call a cult to be yeah so it's interesting sort of obviously this is not a software company you know it's a very different situation in a lot of ways but whenever people would say have you had any experience with cults I say well not exactly but yes what we talked about

this level so you and I've had a couple conversations about this game the first thing we can loop back to is I think what's striking about designing a systemic game around cults and cult compounds is there's a direct inspiration of real-life behavior real-life instances it's quickly comparable to Jonestown and the tragedy that went down there in South America what was sort of your first instinct for systemising the the sort of the the cult like the the central personality of the paranoia the backstabbing like what was sort of your first instinct for taking that and making it playable yeah the the thing that I mean there's two things like I liked the idea of a game that would have a narrative that was inherently different every time it wasn't just your choices making it different but also just the story had different elements that you would have to figure out sort of like a murder like

a gate I often compare it to clue the board game you know where who did the murders different every time and that's why you can play it more than once and so I just like the idea of exploring that and I don't think the game is replayable as clue but it's you know it's got some of those elements to it so so I've been fascinated by that and then looking at cults you know I've been fascinated by cults is a really interesting game topic because it's a scary dangerous place like that note you just saw has some overtones of danger to it you know that they're down and the you know how long was Chuck in the cage and it's that sort of thing it's an interesting place to set a game because I think people like to go to sort of taboo locations and explore them in the safe environment of a game but also because as I would as I was sort of looking more at cults it was interesting to me that they often start out with very altruistic intentions like they're trying to improve society by building

their own society or they're trying to make something more equal or they're at they're they're worried society is terrible in some way and they're gonna finally you know build the right version of society or you know their people might have drug problems or they might have other a lot a lot of cults promise sort of self-improvement things so it was interesting to me that these groups that we think of is so bad can start out you know in a really positive way or at least so everybody thinks and then by the time it has drifted into darker territory people are too trapped to realize it even let alone to leave and so I just thought that was interesting thing to explore and then that dovetailed with the how do you know if a cult is bad or not because a lot of cult groups in the world won't end in a tragedy they'll just end and they're people doing stuff until they run out of money and then they'll go home or something like that or they'll survive for decades which happens as well certain communes in the US are still going decades later so I just thought

was interesting to like put you as a player into it let you realize like here you're talking to Charles you know why did he join the group he has some pretty good reasons for wanting to join the group pretty good reasons for not liking the US or at least that's the attention that people could whether they agree with him they can at least sympathize with why he's there and then make you think you know I like I definitely like in all my media sort of challenging expectations of of what you expect to happen isn't necessarily what happened so often people think occult they're gonna be so crazy and then you get in a site now there's people trying to do something different and maybe it's going wrong and maybe it's not going wrong and you get to to try to decide you know is it is it as bad as as everyone in the outside world's as it is right down Charles is talking with the walkers that is the two cult leaders who show up in every run of the game that you make the walkers have kind of a top-down personality that informs your run which is that depending on what their moves

are in this one I can securely specify because I've been died a couple times in scene it seems like the the husband Walker is a pretty intent on getting apocalyptic with this and but his Hut but his wife I'm freezing their resumes I'm sorry Isaac and Rebecca she's meant she's made clear that um she's a little nervous about this and she doesn't want this to go down um could you break down from the top level like where how the the procedural design of this sort of works and how like their transitions every time change with the player experiences yeah so you've laid it out pretty well so far and I will say before going into that that it's always interesting when people are playing where they're like I think this is happening because I saw this you know I think I'm dealing with this version and and they're they're wrong as often as they're right particularly if they're just starting to play it so I feel good that it's like slightly complex enough that people are not always guessing

exactly what version they're dealing with each time but yeah basically the the cult leaders you know the thing we change up is not their dogma so some people sort of expect you know when I say oh the story is different they expect like well this time it's a UFO cult and this time it's a you know something some other wildly different thing it's like well no they're basically always the same Christians with a socialist message thing that that's sort of inspired by some some family members who who believe that sort of thing and of mine it's close to People's Temple right I mean so the the you know obviously People's Temple was an inspiration but sort of one of many and the the cult leaders are pretty different than the Jim Jones you know by the time Jim Jones was in the jungle he was you know he was no longer a Christian really he was calling himself God and said the Bible was used to keep people down and stuff which is you know that's

a I'm not gonna say whether you know I agree with that statement or not but the walkers here the cult leaders here well first of all there's a man a woman doing it not just a just one guy but they they're very much still Christians it's sort of interpreting the Bible how they you know how they see it leads to them building this compound in the jail but like the architecture and stuff like that is probably the closest to what you would expect out of it at Jonestown yeah do you get us back on topic the architecture of the the design was something I was asking about before right sorry I'll get us back on track no problem yeah so basically the cult leaders have a lot of the same Dogma each time but it's just how dangerous they are that we change up and it's not just they're both dangerous or both or not there's some differences beyond that so it's not just like two states it's more States than two I don't wanna say exactly how many states that are there are but some people figured out but

there's that those states plus some extra sort of red herrings I call them that we sprinkle in that change up their personality but maybe don't change how dangerous they are as people and I thought that was interesting because you know if you look at something like a Jonestown you know a lot of what he said early on was something you could a lot of people could leave in and and seemed sincere and seemed like was addressing real problems in the world and it's just he went too far with it but imagine another group where he didn't go to these these two far reaches with it and and and really brought the group in the the track leading to the tragedy that eventually that eventually happened but you could imagine someone having the same dogma and not ending in tragedy and that's sort of what we're doing here right on so how do from the top down how does that change like how does the game sort of play out behind the scenes like without giving away everything that would spoil right right what's the what's the design yeah so basically once

we decided you know from from a collection of personality states that the game can start with for the cult leaders then that impacts the game a ton of different ways so there's the voiceover that you're hearing over the PA system he won't talk to you until you get the alarm reset by the way once if you've got the perma alarm going on because you've murdered too many people you have to go reset it by hand yes if you can find an alarm box you can go reset it now as long as that uh oh yeah watch out but what was what was I saying what was I saying before we got into what you're doing on screen oh right it manifests itself a lot different ways like the voiceover you're hearing that can change up in subtle ways based on which version of the cult you're dealing with that can you know there's also those notes and documents you were

finding those can definitely change depending on which version of the cult you're dealing with that time and then also the did you get it did you buy it yeah and since you've already been captured twice it's all over so now we'll get to see how the restart works um anyway so we change up the notes we change up the the voiceover you hear on the PA system there's different scenes in the game that will change and it's not again it's like there's there's always some dark elements to the cult where you would say oh that looks really bad but maybe that's not as bad as another version of it you might see and as you play it the game is designed obviously to be played multiple times you see some of these differences and has a shorter play time for that reason I really hope that people play it like four or five times I feel is a pretty good if you get four or five endings you've you've experienced a lot of what what is in there obviously you can go on

and try to be a completionist and collect even more endings but so we change up those things those that friendly character you saw earlier Charles like he'll say different things based on which version of the cult you're dealing with and obviously the cult leaders themselves will say different things when they capture you or when you try to confront them later in the game we can talk about this is kind of a solo dev project right it's you the voice actors and I assumed you might have had some contracted help right no yeah there were a bunch of people who worked on it um primarily in art because I don't do art so all are you're seeing here was done by someone who is not me but I did the design and the writing and most of the gameplay programming I also had a couple programmers doing like the console versions and load save system and stuff it was more technical but yeah mostly mostly I was the full-time guy on this for promotion of its development yeah this is something our audience just

gonna relate to a lot because there's a lot of India right in how was it sort of like how was your personal process for trying to trying to wrangle trying to wrangle your your design intentions and also being kind of the programmer who had to figure out and implement them right because it's one thing yeah oh here's a great idea for the if-then clauses and then you get dive into your own tools that you've made or you've borrowed or gotten from the from whatever tool store you're working with and then you're like oh no this is this is not what I intended yeah no I I hadn't programmed I programmed games early on when I started in industry and I sort of actually started with a project a couple projects very much like this where I was the lead programmer lead designer and and leading the project and then I went to work at bigger projects where I mostly focused on design but still did programming here and there and here getting back into doing programming was actually a lot of fun for me just from a it's like a

muscle I hadn't been using for a while that I enjoy you know I'm not someone do you want to have write your graphics engine or something like that or what I think I'm persistent enough at the gameplay stuff plus there's a lot of advantage to being the designer where as well where you can make those those trade-offs I think as anyone who's done small projects know you don't have to spend as much time on documentation and meetings and stuff like that so though communication is a lot more seamless on the other hand you know it's I I did miss you know some of the push and pull and variety of ideas you get like collaborating with a programmer or something can can definitely make things better in a lot of ways so I'm not discounting that or saying that's bad but and would probably like to do it again in the future but for this one it was just a very specific project that it was very personal to me and I wanted to get my hands fully dirty on so it was it was fun to do it's definitely I think I

guess going back to you know having more of a team that's a team that's full-time there with you can can really help with like keeping the project balanced and you know helping prioritize things and of course everyone's gonna have their own opinions on that but then you discuss it and come to some sort of consensus and that can be very valuable so you know there are advantages in terms of communication to a small team and that you don't have to communicate as much because you're right there but you know you don't get the variety of viewpoints and and stuff that can be really cool on a larger project right on my next question as I read this document sort of like you went into this project thinking this this kind of design was going to work one way and then it will end up working another way do you have any examples of that you could point to yeah the biggest change probably from what I initially hoped for or thought of

for the game was it was less about the friendly characters who you meet at the beginning I think the early design they didn't even exist it was gonna be purely the voiceover and the notes and documents you found and there was just enough people who were saying I wish I could talk to some of the cult members that made me say okay we can add some cult members they're still fully voiced so that sort of limited how many we could do just in terms of budget and stuff but we got enough of them in there that I think it provides a little flavor of who you're meeting in the group and we actually didn't add the conversation system that's in there was added really late where before when you went and talked to them they would just sort of talk at you for a while and you weren't interacting with them because you know I'm not a huge fan of conversation trees so they're just kind of like you know making me press a bunch of buttons to read all the stuff you know sometimes but I maybe I decided in the end after getting feedback from people that you know having having them felt

better than not having them like having some control over what what you're navigating this conversation felt better than having none even if it's sort of fake control if you know what I mean and so that was that was a pretty big change from what we originally planned yeah let's take into that your honor you do a lot of great GDC panels about like sort of theoretical design hypothetical design and tips were designed so what do you think about dialogue trees like because it's a very commonly used mechanic as a designer what do you think is there sort of strength because you eventually just opt implement them is there some kind of stroke right what do you think of the weaknesses did always need to consider winning design creating them yeah I mean I think they're fundamentally not as interesting as other mechanics that you can do because the dialog trees are basically often and you can do more complex things with them than this so I applaud those but the most basic implementation is you know

here's four options press one of each one and you'll eventually hear all this stuff right and it's just and it feels very canned it doesn't feel like I can ask them anything you know which is kind of what I want to do like when you're wandering around this world right now is it player you can go anywhere you want you can go news building so there's just a ton of choices all the time about what you're doing the conversation tree we limit it down to like a pretty small number of choices and that's like less interesting to me fundamentally but on the other hand if you're having conversations with people it's kind of the best thing we have right now and I think it you know there are differently conversation systems that have been done where that was more of a focus of the game where they would have you know trust levels and like a wider swath of dialogue possibilities and and more of a simulation element to the dialogue and that can be great but was not something we had enough time there but that can be a very time-consuming thing to implement and

not something we we sort of had the time to do here so I think it's thing to think about that I guess the takeaway I had why they ended up getting implemented was it just felt better than not having them even though it is renewing the choices down to this very small thing at that time it doesn't feel as robust as the rest of the gameplay in terms of you know choices per second that the player is making it's still choices and people still like them so you know let's you do the thing people like even if it's not like your best possible version of a feature and like choices per second as a phrase because it just feels it just feels like a speed like how many choices per second is the player making Oh No yeah I know and I you let the choices per second I've used that to talk about you know games that have really long cutscenes like there's zero choices per second going on during a cutscene often right so and that's you

know makes you not want to replay it as much because you're kind of watching the same thing or the same you know you're just not doing that much when you replay that was something we did in a patch actually that is coming out for the PlayStation version later this week but isn't up there yet so you're not seeing it in the in the Steam version and soon in the PlayStation version and the other console versions you can skip the dialogue on replays so you might come up to Teresa on another replay she's saying slightly different things but maybe you just want to read the subtitle and go through it faster because you've done this before you now can do that in the newer with the patch so that's an example of we implemented it but we didn't implement the ability to skip it was on the wish list and then a lot of people asked for it after we shipped so the option to skip is an interaction per second in a way as well playing fireman three houses and the the choice to skip or not skip or like let like what am i observing what is this part like am I getting anything by watching this full animated scene versus blazing through the

conversation getting the points the finer points that's definitely something I've been thinking about with other games there's another developer horizon zero dawn I was talking with I was talking with the guys from who heavens vaults not Heaven's Gate heaven's gates as a cult Heaven's vault is a game I was talking with them about my experience playing horizon zero dawn and after revisiting the game and coming back to the DLC I realized the dialogue was just so much like it was good it was really good dialogue what I was like I want to get back to hunting jumping climbing right and skipping through it helped me get through it fast so the design implications are certainly there's subtle if not the kind of quality of life I guess yeah yeah I know and it's it's it's it's that trick where if yeah once you have a part of the game that you really like and then they shift gears into what feels like you're just in another game you run that peril if of either they want to get back to the first game or the new game

you've put them in as the one they want to stick with and then when that ends you're like oh I like that other thing it is a sweet there's a sweet science to figuring out you know how to how to balance how to balance those things so it doesn't feel like you know two games grafted together or something folks who are watching if there's anyone out there feel free to give us a shout Richard making games is hard selling games is hard that should be I said it like it's them how profound but it's blindingly obvious I think to everyone who spends time in games how have you felt about communicating this game's existence to the world and how have you felt what do you think is done right what do you think you if you could have done it done differently I'm curious to know what your thoughts are about this because this is a cool little game and it's definitely just doing something different than what a lot of other games are doing out there well that's a lot of

games yeah the I mean there's definitely a few things that you know it's well it's among the like well we knew about this but we didn't have time to get to it that have that have come up like the skipping dialogue thing like that was on a wish list but we hadn't done and then enough people asked for it just like great let's do that and I think that's always the case that you've got your list of things and things that I thought were like oh this is the first thing I should patch we're totally nobody complains about also I'm you know we're not doing it you know definitely something we're focusing on is getting people's replays of the game to be more different every time to guarantee that and sort of the random miss say for example in the the dialogue that plays over the PA system right now it is random within the game you're playing but if you start a new game it's only random within that game so if you played a game and died within five minutes that start a new game there's a chance you might hear the same dialogue again pretty quickly and that sucks so

we've implemented the system where that won't happen anymore that's a patch I'm sort of in testing right now and hoping to get out later this week yeah that's one thing it's definitely some stuff where I was so close to the controls on the game that they felt they I mean I I sort of knew the controls weren't as good as I wanted and again that was a thing on the feature list but it was you know not it's the person's first time experience with it is not what I hoped often with some of the control things particularly firing the gun is something that I think needs some work so we've got that on the on the to-do list for a future patch as well so some control stuff some of the repetitive stuff and then maybe just you know we're looking at ways to like vary up some of the gameplay on repeat plays too so it's a little bit more different things right now mm-hmm right on I think I appreciate the way you're talking about you know like sometimes you just got to just got a

time to say go like it can't work on it forever yeah cut bait and run what was your thought process like this is kind of a producer brain question is what is your thought process for this musics very nice by the way um what is your thoughts for making sure you're not bogged down in those like on your that magical list and versus being able to look at something and say hey this is great we will work on it after launch but it's time to go or after a milestone or something yeah I mean that's the million dollar question right is how when is it done enough and I don't know that I have the perfect answer for that I think you know when you have a bigger perfect answer for that at a bigger company that has money to spend on things like that is like doing a lot of usability testing and doing it with people who can actually play the game for an extended amount of time because like some of the repetitiveness stuff is not something that people complained about before we launched because most people played it

would play it for a couple hours and you don't really notice it it's when you get to the like you know the sixth or seventh hour or something you're like hey why am i hearing this again I mean it's we have plenty of voiceover that you shouldn't be feeling that way but it's just making sure it happens so like in a larger company that had budget for people to play it for ten hours each or something that stuff would have come up and we could have addressed it but here we were you know having smaller resources we did have people playing it but just not for that long period of time and that's just something you know next time I would definitely figure out how to make sure that happens before shipping just to catch some of those easy fixes that you can do to make things a lot better we've run it up as a design question in theory every game is replayable you just pop it up on Steam and you play it again whether it's shovel knight whether it's it's the older public whether it's prey to which I was recently replaying they actually they've been it a they split up

their player character into two different characters for to encourage that what do you think oh let's people design for replayability Richard yeah that's a that's a good question for sure there's you know there's two types of replayability in this game in particular less like the narrative replayability and there's the you know core gameplay replayability right and I think you know just having enough I think I think you have to have enough variety to the mechanics and the sort of challenge types that you face that can lead to pretty good replayability in that I think is something again we're gonna be working on in the future so there's like just having enough depth there and enough you know it's combination of authored and random in depending on the

nature of your game if your game is meant to be roguelike need to have enough variety to how it generates each time that that you feel it and that's again something we're working on you know in terms of narrative I feel like we probably do a better job at that other than those easy wins that I was just talking about in terms of dialogue repeating when it shouldn't and stuff I'm things that are almost bugs they're so annoying but you know in terms of replayability I think you have to have when you're looking at a narrative no I like to say that in a lot of games that want you to replay for the narrative where because you can make choices get different endings often you're playing you know it's it's less common for games to have a story that changes every time as we do and so often you'll play the game once the way you want to play it make the you know narrative choices you want to make and then the second time you'll basically play the game how you don't want to play it and you'll be all you've got capture dean Daniel you'll make the opposite of the choices you made before which is kind of not as fun I think but you want to see the content

so you do that here we're actually changing the reason for you to make the choices so you'll actually see the different content because the world has changed and people have complimented the game for that for that type of replayability and I think having you know another thing that you know how the game presents narrative is not as how to say it's not in a conventional way as much like you get little scenes like that one you just saw with Isaac capturing you and that's not if you've been captured by an antagonist in any video game before when he talks to you and then you get a chance to break out and it's not like oh my god how is this Neri that's a very conventional almost like a cutscene but a lot of the way the narrative is told in this game is just through the environmental storytelling and being in the world with these these people living their lives and hearing the PA and finding those documents of the things a lot when I get captured yeah see there's not super good at breaking out

sir the key is when I tell you the key here is to break out when he's not looking and now I'll tell you this is the hardest one to break out of all give you I'll give you some tips we'll see if we can walk you through it now that's fine I can we got to talk about but yeah the game is nice but the key here is to you really have to time it right so once the guard comes up to talk to you or look at you he'll turn his back and that's the time to break out then you got to run up and get him right away from behind yeah don't do that that's that's not gonna it's like it's just gonna wear out your cardio in yeah there's no cardio thank you you were very close to putting a cardio system in weren't you it was brought up a couple times and someone whose feedback I trusted was like nobody likes the Sprint meter nobody they just put it into annoyed players though I am yeah I kind of agree there's there is a version of this game that has a sprint meter that that is okay it's just a choice we made

not to do that meters yeah meters are weird I probably should kill that guy um whatever I'm gonna put on the cage there you go meters are what are the tools that you reach for is a designer when you're trying to create a like this is such a game that speaks to like this is something that real people have done if you go watch there's two great you can either listen to it like some of their great podcasts like last podcast on the left it's one of my favorites Thursday um there's a drunk history episode about the children of heaven which it children of God not children of heaven I'm getting culture mixed up in my head children of God is a good one like real people have done this how do you think about simulating like real realistic sensations and experiences and games like this how do you how do you like the sprint meter represents you get tired when you're running but yes but me reserved there to annoy players you just said so yeah I mean it's like a health bar is

also an unrealistic thing but we've got one of those right I mean it's realist it's an approximation of a real life event right like a spring a meter is like it's like that's not exactly how cardio works but it's close enough that it feels like it it was just one of the ones we decided not to do and it's interesting that the game definitely has gamey systems to it like those sight cones you're seeing and the the you know the the health bar and some people really don't like that um I've seen like people say well why can't the people see me in this case and why can't they do this other thing and I'm like well the end of the day you know we made choices about you know how realistic the game was gonna be like I think narrative Lee it feels pretty realistic to me like this is really how you would go about going into a cult versus if the game was a shooter or something right you would just murder everyone in the cult and then you find you're out you find your nephew at the end right but here that's impossible because in the real world that's also impossible right here if you

get into a gunfight with three people you're in real trouble whereas you know in a shooter that would be something that happened every minute right right so here it's like we have meters and things that are a little gamey and that it's why can't the guy see me past this point well he can't and some people can't get over and except like some people would accept that in a game that was more like a cartoony setting or just a fantasy setting or something like that but in a game that's otherwise realistic that feels doesn't it to them to me it doesn't and some people it certainly doesn't so it's an interesting it's an interesting reaction that I didn't expect to get quite as much as we did you found a body but I just heard the alarm box hopefully that works out okay yeah see that's only each alarm box so someone no one can set off that alarm box now but if they find another one they can send another why do they have more than one alarm box yeah more than one alarm system in their

house yes it's also a games like the way the alarm box is is also a little gamey and it's certainly like there's you know I think for me there's like a limit to how many vectors you can innovate on for sure and here we were putting it more in trying to make the narrative replayable stuff whereas a lot of the core gameplay here is like oh I kind of member this from metal gear or I kinda remember this from Castle Wolfenstein the very original Castle Wolfenstein doesn't mean I think a lot a billion years ago and still like but you know it was just a choice to like not innovate in that space but we could have we could have said well we're trying to make the whole thing realistic so how would like a really interesting health model work here and what could we do with that and again that would just been well though we're gonna spend time on that instead of spending time on making a more narrative choices or something so usually we bias towards the narrative stuff when we when we came to those those Forks I was like continue to migrate this world which would let's

talk about more fun game design things I think morality as a game design tool know we're all familiar with I'm a big fan of Kotor world fan of light side and dark side bars in this game I the option to I was just mulling over the kill don't kill of of what I was just dealing with that you could I tend to play games like this less kill II I'm kind of of the opinion if a game if a game gives me the option to not kill I am bound for the most part to to do it's I don't know quite why it's not like a super great moral code I love shooting things in other games if the game is the only shooting and killing I'm all about that see my apex legends obsession but how is you as a game designer is your players of sort of it's definitely made clear over the years they want interesting games they want interesting systems they want to make tough moral choices what's your thought for designing them this is there's like kind of a narrative component here but I wouldn't mind holding off on narrative for a minute cause I still with character and relationships and stuff and just talking

about like systems and bars and meters and punishment etc yeah well to me you know the I see the morality system is just hopelessly intertwined between narrative and gameplay both and you can't really not talk about them both at the same time to me or way I think about it and you know it's often like you know other games that are lovely but are different than this one we'll have like you know there's like a more of a wrist slap for every bad thing you do right we definitely have we definitely try to balance that here like if you get captured you know if you get shot you get captured and then you can break out and keep playing unless you have murdered a lot of people in which case they just kill you right away and that's a negative is a wrist slap for like a gameplay negative for having made that choice but it also makes a lot of sense right that they wouldn't take a chance on you if you had not done that whereas

there are other you know there's a there's like if you do non-lethal takedowns people get back up again in this game which is more yeah which is go ahead that's an interesting one because like for me that system always frustrates me but you're right it's very realistic the middle here does it I was like realistic right and certainly there's nothing like Dishonored I like a lot but I believe in that game if you do a knockout on someone they're out for the rest of the level basically and again that was just a case for me of well a how does it's a knocking someone out actually work you know if you put a sleeper hold on someone they're not asleep for that long usually they usually wake up pretty quickly like within a minute it's like doesn't put them into a blissful night slumber right it's it's a different part of their brain but so it made sense that they would get up again and I just wanted again to have a benefit almost to taking the negative route there where if you do you know actually break their neck and

you take them down they're not gonna get back up again and that might encourage you to break their neck because you know often there is wrong mechanical benefits doing terrible things but you're doing terrible things so then that makes it almost more of an interesting choice like if the choices like things always go badly if I make negative choices then I guess I won't make negative it has to be balanced of like there are some negative consequences to doing good things and there's some positive consequences to doing good things and it's sort of tricky to the side you know you have to decide as a player what you're willing to put up with and how important like getting an ending where you haven't killed anyone is quite difficult and that's another interesting thing is how how the range of how difficult people find this game continues to fascinate me because some people will like this games too easy and that's that's always that's always the case that some people find it easy and some people find it too hard but I think

it's worse in this game for because of the nature of stealth mechanics maybe and just like learning how the if you figure out how the systems work really well it becomes a lot easier and if you just struggle with them it stays hard you know so there's a little bit more of a hump there than I wish there was so that may be something we look at in the future as well in terms of like slightly better tutorial for that stuff towards the end of our hour here we've only got a little bit time left with you I guess I'll just start off by asking what what's next for you is the game designer you've you've got a nice you know story you know you've done some really cool games with companies you've struck out on your own as an independent designer you've shipped a game that was kind of a passion project what do you think is next for you on the horizon yeah that's a good question that I do not have perfect to answer to I'm sort of right now focused on these things that I wish were in this game that aren't yet we've got packs coming up and the panel we're doing there and things sort of leading

up after that and I as I said I see benefits to working on a large team that I really liked and missed and you know working in your office by yourself can be really isolating in a lot of ways but can also be really rewarding because it's more your personal thing so I see pluses and minuses and you know I can't say for sure which I'll do next sort of depends what opportunities pop up but I'm definitely starting to think about that well right now just wishing I had finished this patch already so yeah and for those at home were just dive scootaloo to call Thomas we are playing the a ps4 version of the game which is no sir just a that was my own request because it's how we can basically make the stream happen as we play these games on console the game is also on on some other systems Xbox switch and NPC and matter how do you feel about the switch we've been asking a lot of devs about it I mean it's it's sort of it's been a couple years now so it's not quite as hot new but uh how do you feel about making games for the switch yeah I mean uh it's it's a

delightful device I mean my favorite thing about developing for the switch is I can go play my game on the couch like literally play because it which is the same thing that attracts a lot of people too it's still like a full-featured modern console experience if a little less powerful than the other ones but you know when it's time to go do a playthrough there I can leave my desk and go relax somewhere while testing something so that's fun for it as a developer you know it's a it's a different system so it's like I'm definitely glad Nintendo didn't just make you know a system that was exactly like their competitors and I think that's always good for industry and in tendo's probably the most visionary at that they don't always hit it but when they hit it they hit well usually so it's cool you know definitely wish it was slightly more powerful but but it's cool

[Music] so Richard I'm gonna take us out a little early if you don't mind that's just fine yeah Richard if they've got questions for you about making games are about the great GDC talks that your pan panels you've been a part of where should they ask them yeah so I'm on Twitter at Richard rouse III and you can come find me there I try to respond to as many people as possible though it doesn't always happen so you can always hit me back usually not in my DMS unless I already know you but sometimes the questions better there that's fine too you can also you know the game has a website at paranoid productions.com slash Church we got a mailing list there there's also a discord run by the games publisher the game is published by fellow traveler a lovely publisher of a variety of narrative indie games they have a discord that you can find on their websites if you go to fellow traveler dot games as their URL up on

their the community button and that'll take you to the discord and I try to get in there and answer I'm not on they're constantly definitely had some really fun chats with fans and other developers on there so come by there if you've got questions that's a good place for it probably slightly better than Twitter but Twitter is good too and you know those are the main places or you know come come to a talk at GE C or just come up to me in the hall at you see if you happen to see me right on with that I'm going to take us out if you're new to this channel we would appreciate if you toss the follow our way and if you are not new to this channel you know you can join us at XRD see you later this year if you're interested in VR content or if you are VR AR and beyond or if your press conference next year March with that I'm glad you got to the pigs right at the end yeah I've found the favorite things in the game they're very important of the pigs pigs are very

important bye everybody