GDC Q&A with Blackout Club developers Jordan Thomas and Michael Kelly

hi everyone welcome to the gamasutra twitch channel my name is Bryant Francis I and the invisible host inside your head once again invisible last time we were here together I was not you saw me and you saw Liam the lovely cat who is sometimes going to yell on this stream today but we are here on the GGC twitch channel doing what we usually do which is talking to game developers with the cool games that they are working on today we are playing The Blackout Club The Blackout Cub Club comes from the folks at question who were previously released the Magic Circle and in the lower left-hand corner of the screen I'll give Jeff Jordan a little more face time down there Jordan we have yeah just pulling Jordan over yeah well then might lose this out oh no I have to pick sorry oh it's harvest save it's Bioshock I guess we'll talk about Bioshock today

since y'all worked out anyway this is Jordan and Michael Jordan has the red background behind him say hi Jordan hello and that's Michael he's got the nice headset on and they will be taking your questions today basically The Blackout Club is a four-person horror co-op game which you are seeing we are playing the demo level federal disclosure this is pre-recorded footage so you can't yell at me if I'm messing up you can only just reflect on the errors I have made so we're gonna go through the demo level and then before we're out today we will get to see a couple full missions of the game because I did was able to find some very nice people to play with last night so we're very helpful I'm very kind you got a nice community oh that's very good to hear we're very proud of our discord community especially right now yeah I admit it wasn't it I just found in the lobbies anyway I guess to go honestly it's probably mostly the same beautiful tickets I guess I'm looking at this high-five machine first well as I offered a high-five the robot Jordan and

Michael would you mind explaining the origins of the blackout Club and why you went from making a game like The Magic Circle to making a four-person horror co-op game I think we should make patches explain this I would love to your your take on why that probably was for the record Michael dispatches although I still don't know up we lost patches his camp patches camera never mind I'll do that then yeah so following the Magic Circle which is an extremely meta game about game development yeah we had sort of our fill of two things one games that say exactly what they mean it was fun but we've done that for a very long time through several bioshock's and then the Magic Circle and then secondarily the sort of length problem major criticism of the Magic Circle for most people who bought it was this game is too short right I paid for this much I want a game that goes on for much longer okay the world is changing steam is changing we need something that we personally believe in which is the sort of cooperative horror thing but that dovetails better with the way Phil

played games on Steam it's getting involved with him and sticking with them over a longer period yeah and so I pitched around a couple of different things and the one that stuck was this notion of a suburban horror game where the friendship between these sort of the set of kids was going to be at center stage and that you would be scared but with friends and we were three people at the time we've doubled in size since we brought on Michael patches Kelly here who is now back and several others and we began to sort of bolt it together we're now in early access as you know and finally starting to get real feedback from people on how it feels to play and improving it every day right on patches before you quickly dropped out there Jordan said he wants to hear your version of your origin story for black out clubs so I want to hear it too what's here what's your take yeah sorry about that my internet is wonderful quality so let me think about

the actual origin of it when I started working at question Jordan had told me that they were working on you know we were trying to find a way to do a new horror game that was gonna solve our publishing problem I was just a small game dev you probably did answer so I kind of caught the tail end of Jordans answer so if I overlap but you know you're a small game dev you're trying to make a game that plays to our strengths right like we worked on to play games Steven and Jordan worked on Bioshock you know Cain came from Dishonored so the sort of first-person immersive sim genre is something we really like obviously I like working on those games and playing them as well so we were going to do that except for the idea was Jordan wanted to return to horror because that's sort of his strength you know from the fort frolic level and shell bridge cradle and things like that

from Bioshock yeah so I'm sorry for trawl exhibition in the original Bioshock and then shell bridge cradle was a level of deep three deadly shadows which is also very scary so Jordan does a good scary level if you have played this mission that we're watching footage of right now you would be surprised that as a player this actually gets pretty scary we've had people you know writing us on Steam community and unformed basically saying you know this I couldn't get through the intro and what looks like just walking around a house at night can still be can still be scary in the right hands and so you know I felt pretty confident joining question that Jordan had the right hands to make more scary experiences and I wanted to help him with that so that was kind of the origin of what became The Blackout Club originally we had the just solve the Publishing problem of typically what happens is you're a small game developer you make a game it's you

know you can only make so many hours a single-player content before you run out of money in time and then what tends to happen is people play it and then they're done and that's the end of your sort of community that's the end of sort of you know attention on the game as well as you know a lot of people will just put it on Twitch and then don't just watch somebody play through it and it's not that we don't want people to enjoy the content but it's harder to get the sale you know being honest it's it's hard to make a living and so you know multiplayer was something we knew could bring people back in but there's a real problem with horror and multiplayer that probably anybody asked or plays games like this could tell you which is you know the more friends you add to the scenario the less scary and and usually more absurd it becomes yeah so what worked for us when we were developing the blackout Club was we can lean into that because they're teenagers typically what happened like I'm a

coward I'm a scaredy-cat I don't like playing horror games by myself alone in the dark and I do it because it's the best experience but I always you know scare myself and so I typically like going back to like Resident Evil games and stuff like that back in the day - I tend to play like over the weekend with a friend on the couch and we trade the controller or something so that playing a scary game with your friends experience is something we thought like okay here's something we can lean into it's a little bit of a better I movie that I'm telling you too much sales information but this is you know the GDC kamasutra so I feel like you want to hear this we do you know yeah we were like how do we how do we make this something that you can actually you know it's a bigger audience right it's a there's the horror audience but then there's the Friends of the horror audience that you're bringing in and slice well will you know I like watching my friend play a scary game but usually I'm too much of a coward myself but if we're both playing and we're having some

fun in the way that you would like left for dead or bourbon tired or any other sort of like co-op game then I've got something to do and you're here with me and so we're brave together really quick this tree this tree scared me so much that we just saw a couple minutes ago yeah that one yeah tell me more I'm sorry Michael do you have anything else you want to add it's kind of how we got there was the idea like how do we do a multiplayer co-op horror game and being teenagers in this scenario we knew that there's a lot of potential for great horror because you know the genre tells us that but team's first monsters is full of lots of great stuff we loved and wanted to pay tribute to when you talk about that later but yeah yeah anyway so that's that was the origin of from a gameplay standpoint we were trying to find like let's take that [ __ ] experience felt like let's find a way to get your friends involved and then looking around at other popular multiplayer cooperative games if we do

it as cooperative we're in this together against the scary thing we felt like that was a good you know a good game a good premise and we think it'd be something people would want to play but also you can't spoil it as much if people are streaming it because the magic is is your experience with your friends right right that's what's fun about it and I guess some of the streaming and there's also the argument that like if if people aren't playing they're watching other people play it's like watching a horror movie it's like watching people be trapped in a horror movie making dumb decisions which is what I will see plenty of times in the stream because you're you get to watch me making terrible decisions in a horror movie if I can if I can moot asked about both of you about what happened after that first decision sort of that cognizance that you wanted to make a horror game and you also want to make a game that could maintain a community what was the first architectural and design thing you had to do to take that very loose very I'm sure very like not it's not exactly I mean you could say

it's left for dead but with two kids and then build that out but I'm sure it wasn't quite like that when you're building it how did you go from sort of those fundamental roots of game of game business and game design to making what we're looking at right now there's a combination of the first task was to switch from unity to unreal unreal has a built in multiplayer architecture which was a lot more robust and it was got us up and running much more swiftly mm-hmm originally the game pitch was that you would be underground the entire time trapped alone in the maze beneath the streets soiler there's a maze beneath the streets we'll see and you were you would band together with people but in a sort of more journey esque format where your sessions would merge and then and then part kind of seamlessly it was interesting but we transitioned pretty early on to a session based model where you're able to actually experience the

kids neighborhood and suburbia and and then we weren't bound by the rules of a persistent world like we would be in something like Bioshock yeah and so changing towards that made us more left for dead like and honestly to some extent those earmarks that people learn to look for like I like games like this we needed a few of them and we were willing to say like okay yes let's be as familiar as possible from the surface and then Surprise them once they're in and so we developed a sort of world Bible it was by now very far out of date we developed a series of mission pitches also super long in the tooth now and not highly relevant but they got us off the ground mm-hmm and we began to hire and so we brought on patches Jayson Mojica from the payday 2 team Jeff Flake from dishonored and prey and David Pitman who had done eldritch work with us on

Bioshock 2 and we're also working with Patrick Waltrip who did audio for multiple bioshock's and many others and in any case we're now actually seven but long story short it became a process of trying to make sure the vision made sense each time a new person came on the hiring sort of forced us to reframe what the hell the thing was as each time somebody new would come in and say like okay well what what is it you want me to do and it it has been a vast growth process it has been challenging we've also had help we can't really talk about from where but suffice it to say there are people who believed in us and helped make the blackout Club happen and honestly it wouldn't have without them and so as a combination of working with them from afar and also building our own team that has I think been our primary challenge the actual game you know there's a lot of creative challenges but suburban horror the sub teens versus the

truth monster genre is something that everybody's got their favorite yeah from pop culture and their head we felt like it was something that people would be able to drop into easily so we can be as weird as we want but you can always fall back on well I basically know what I'm doing it was a long answer to your question no that's a good answer Michael do you want to add anything yeah to repeat the question though moving I followed I'm follow Jordans ride but I didn't know we started you don't know what train station we started at what was what was your experience moving this game from idea to execution so when I first came on the project we you know the so I came from a production background you know I was an EP on the bio games and topspin and a bunch of other games at 2k my old life and then I did mobile games for a while and so when I came before I joined question and so when I came on you know my first instinct is okay we need a road map we need a plan we need skeleton you know

how what's how we gonna allocate our money and time and budget and all that stuff so that was the first thing we did and we I you know this was also an opportunity to sort of test you know when you're an AP coming out and production land you know it you are not making any decisions you're just enforcing other people's decisions so I had tried early on to try and say like well I've always wanted to if leave very strongly that like a small playable prototype is the best money we could spend you know dude don't worry about it being pretty just make it fun and we called it ugly but fun this isn't just my idea like the team is very I would say you know Jordan correct me if I'm wrong but I'd say very flat structure you know everybody really does have a say we're small enough that it's just not worth it to try to impose much of a hierarchy other than obviously I'm not gonna do the art that's devious good at that you know I'm not writing C++ but in general we sort of hashed out okay what

would be like a core experience what are the things we know we have to have and so and it takes a while to get up and running I mean you know we switched over to unreal we weren't in unity anymore all the code had to be more or less started over from scratch and so you know it's like okay let's make an locomotion takes a long time you know even and unreal just to get it exactly the way you want we knew we wanted to do you know this kind of combat where you're getting up close with people we knew we wanted to have a closed eyes mechanic for the shape I think that was a prettier concept in this games development and still stays pretty core to the identity of the game you know an enemy that you can only see with your eyes requires you know some engine modifications it's not just you know those tricks and so we kind of did that and then the lastly the recording mechanic I think was another big one we worked on pretty early which was you know you're gonna have this phone in your hand that phone actually shows you you know a screen capture of

what you're looking at you can see it there at the bottom on the left on the record screen capture and then we had gone through and then iterate you know like figure out what's fun about this so cuz the idea is you know one thing but actually making it fun his game development so that was kind of our first six months I'd say maybe a little longer was really just prototyping prototyping prototyping we had a little map Jordan gray boxed you know we did a bunch of art tests and then it was okay let's you know get you know we coming from Unity the last couple years you know the question team had to sort of change the mentality to get back over to real because it's just different we're working mm-hmm getting perforce set up just kind of all the nuts and bolts stuff didn't you do starting a project was five or six months or so on the project and then yeah once we felt pretty good about the prototype you know

we changed a lot of things in the core design because you're like oh this is more fun better than thing didn't work it was perfect it was perfect yeah we've never changed our minds and so we changed our minds a lot we worked on a bunch of different ideas but the the primitive the reason you don't put a lot of high quality art in yet and really dive in on even sound design and things first was because you know you want to be sure that the game is a game that you want to play for a long period of time and so we had some other ideas that we wanted to add later you know the procedural fishin stuff didn't come on immediately we had to sort of determine what makes a mission you know what does it mean it's just dumb stuff like what is it active okay it's a Kino like you have to kind of deconstruct games and put it all together so we did that we felt pretty good about the prototype and then you know you you flesh out okay what is the Minimum Viable Product what's an MVP

people call that like a vertical slice or a horizontal slice or some slice what are the features we know we want to have and then what is the stuff that you know adding on top of it will make it better and you sort of prioritize your work from there like what is the stuff you know you can't not deliver I just realized that orb in the middle freaked me out a lot more this time watching my own footage than it did the first time I saw it right on MP knt and chat would like to clarify a P stands for associate producer right that's correct it could be assistant producer places to you know it's not yeah how does the testing they would also like to know how does the testing and iteration process go for a game like this compared to the single-player games you all are more familiar with it's a lot harder you know we are a small team getting four-player multiplayer means you know more than 50% of the team needs to be testing at that moment which you know normally you don't normally it's you know you everybody has

their own I got a large triple-a scenario you'd have a dedicated on-site QA team you'd have an off-site QA team you'd have them embedded with a designer or an engineer working together mm-hmm with a clear test plan we're our own QA for a lot of it we do have an outsourced contractor we used you know especially to help just kind of nuts and bolts functional QA or format QA our terms you probably heard of but it's just the you know can I clip through the wall what happens if I jump off the ledge you know just normal testing does this feature do what it says on the tent so our our test process in general is you know kind of evolved over time but in general we all play the game as much as we can all the time you test a lot an editor before you check in work and and we have to sort of rely on the fact that everybody's pretty experienced you know this isn't anybody's first game so we you know we do test

but I will say you know being small it means that we can't test as much as we need to to ship the game and so we've also done you know a lot of internal friends and family testing and the beta test for pretty much from July through the end of October this year that it came out that's where our discord community was was built through a series of closed betas that patches ran very well and and they were just instrumental in teaching us what was wrong with the game and what we needed to improve before early access yeah a lot of a lot of people you might have met online are probably coming for that original commit which has been wonderful I mean the fact that people would have played our game you know at this point does it's a dozens of hours well before it's done it's you know awesome and that's that's turned into a lot of our sort of early access community as well sort of helped on-ramp people because you probably know this but you know for your listeners tutorials or one of the last things you add in a game it's the same it goes back

to that ugly but fun prototype mentality you know like don't spend a lot of effort on something you're gonna throw away and rework because you know things change so the last thing you want to put in is here's how it works so as a result our early access is out and it's not everything is tutorial eyes do you know this prologue mission you're watching does a really good job I would say but it's not perfect it doesn't have everything it needs and you know certainly there are a lot of concepts in this game that are you know we we started with the idea of like a first player you know stealth immersive sim type game but once you got cooperative once you add a mission base structure with sessions once we add multiplayer plus a lot of other weird ideas we have in this game that kind of make it unique you know there's just a lot to teach and so it's been nice having a community that did play through the beta test because they can kind of help on-ramp new players that we don't necessarily have the bandwidth to do you get to what now you get to watch my some of my

struggles right here with them not not the art of not being heard Jordan I'm gonna wall I'm struggling with the dark forces in this I'm gonna ask a question for you what was your thought process like teens versus the unknown seems like it has a very clear footing obviously what was your thought process for making this horror like like this undermining like horror cult a like thing that's going on and kind of this also the sense that like the parents are in on it there's sort of some implication that happens here at the end of the stream that like like it's it's it's almost like the entire town is like engaged in this weird like mysterious stuff you're saying and how did that influence you know making things creepy and scary for players at the granular design level no let's see I said that's a multi-faceted one I guess I was really interested in building a kind of horror that worked on

at least two levels a kind of primal level I think when you're an adolescent in particular your mind is being broken and reforging itself in real time uh-huh and so you are constantly questioning your reality because it's important for your previous model of reality to blow up in order for you to sort of slowly grow up right yeah so things like what if my family is true is out to get me what if my my dad is actually evil like that kind of stuff floats of the average kid's brain as they as they grow older and so it seemed like a sort of ripe age to talk about learning that in fact you are at the heart of a a grand lie of some kind right and yet your own family could turn against you I feel like everybody can understand that on a visceral level whether or not they understand anything of what the team mocks me by calling the deep lore and on the other end of that spectrum I wanted to build a kind of mythology that didn't resemble anything else yeah that when you got into the

maze under red acre or Virginia here in the National Radio quiet zone where there's no kind of Internet signal no no cellular access you would see something that could plausibly exist in the modern world but made you think of some timeless era that you were suddenly dipping your toe into without understanding it and so you know people folk float around worlds words like cult but I hope that as they play they become kind of burst in something even stranger than that and I don't want to go deep into spoilers but I the game states very little of what it means relative to something like the Magic Circle for Bioshock because we want that part of your brain to constantly be grappling with that that fuzzy unknown edge outside at the edge of consciousness and and it is it should feel like a nightmare but a nightmare that operates by a a strong inner logic and we hope that our players slowly

puzzle that out right on I think kind of building on that is um what was its the teenager element issue to me because the the teens are very not good at what most videogame characters are good at like they're not good at fighting they have they can grab and pin which doctor thoughts and chat says they're a big fan of that mechanic but they can't they can't you know shoot monsters this isn't left4dead shooting zombies they're they're sort of they're they're really good at grappling hooks which it's probably something I wasn't good at when I was a teen but how did you design individual interactions that you think fit the theme that we're both like thematic and good game play and also like wouldn't make patches over here look at you in horror when you pitched it to him oh it's another good question with many answers and I will try to keep them concise we had a few creative pillars of the game and I won't go into all of them but one of them was that movement was a reward yeah trinsic we sort of kind of viscerally satisfying

and Cain shin our sort of technology lead who joined us late on the Magic Circle and then sort of saved us frankly is is big into that he plays lots of games where movement matters and so he kind of made it his personal baby and I think that he's executed on it beautifully that these kids are way that are at parkour than I will ever be and so with that established we knew that we could say okay well that means that combat is not going to be a thing grappling will be a panicky and Pyrrhic victory at best if you get away from somebody it's going to hurt unless you use an escape I open item and in which case that still has a cost and so we wanted to focus on the idea that horror is at its best when vulnerability is maintained right and so we spoke to an age that seemed reasonably vulnerable and that allowed us to unasked questions about why don't I just fight back why don't I just use

martial arts and and defeat all of these adults one by one like you would in thousands of other games and so it was hard to say no to ourselves for a long time we have made many games where combat was a main feature but we felt like between the sort of guerrilla tactics the the kind of clever outwit your enemy's tactics that began to develop through the other systems the player has access to and that movement we could sell to the player the idea that you can either be very stealthy in this game because we built those before or you can be loud as long as you keep moving and in no case are you gonna stand in place and defeat all of your enemies you have to move on get your mission done take some footage of something forbidden and then flee speaking to that that part of horror in your hometown and all of those to be perfectly honest are are willing to

handshake with the fact that we have strong constraints as a team our size it is best for us to control our scope through various creative choices that don't necessarily [ __ ] the experience I didn't keep that short but you get the idea no I mean a short ancestor not a as someone who asks long questions I'd probably earn long answers if you hear some me out is not the blackout club that is Liam returning to us and making his presence known he's glaring at me right now because I won't pay attention to him he's in the other side of the room yelling at me Liam is a cat I want I want to add animals at the game but that is another thing that we had to say no to ourselves about for a while Oh I hope cosmetic cuts to be good as long as it doesn't need like a skeletal mesh with rigging nai that sure yeah as long as it doesn't need to appear alive if it's a prop problem just a cat that it just sits like a cat model that just follows you around yeah everything my

reaction to your joke proposal for just adding a cat is basically my reaction to everything anybody proposes all the time on this game which is usually like nope we're a small team nope we're a small team so it's a good instinct that has gotten us still plenty of features III will let him know that his request for playable cat back to serious questions just a quick reminder for folks in chat you can ask your own questions of our guests so that you can learn more about the making of The Blackout Club let's talk about early access but school is in a minute here we're gonna get to see the we're gonna get to see the multiplayer stuff after I'm done with this bit let's talk about early access how is it going for you all like really access is complicated because it's pitched as you know a chance to test your game before

you can make it in reality for some Deb's it is their first and only launch and then if they are if they play it right they'll get a second launch when they go what has been your sort of your guiding light through steams dark waters I suppose that metaphor was darker than I intended it to be but that's the game we're playing isn't it so I you know I did not do the earlier like the Magic Circle didn't come out on early access I was not on that project but that was largely like a you know do used for hey the game really is coming out just in it another extra week or two uh-huh and I think that was a really good strategy that they did but this time you know it kind of feeds into my earlier point of reply about QA mm-hm you know we need we need people playing the game to know a lot of things you know like well how is the economy work you know what if you've got a weird computer we haven't tested compatibility on yet you know we can afford only so

much you know PC compatibility lab testing time where somebody with you know 20 different rigs tries your game and you know gives you frame cap and things like that you know there's so much that we just being a multiplayer game can't test all of it and so we had we knew we had to do a long early access period well we did a long beta test right like we we did beta tests we told people we were announcing this game you know in at the end of February that it would be out of 2019 but by summer of 2018 you could already play it in a beta test yeah if you're on a newsletter and then you know we slowly let it more rounds of people after that from both the newsletter signup and then eventually our discord community yeah and you know we had plenty of takers which was you know we're very fortunate that the idea was strong enough that a lot of people you know that were hyped enough to want to help test and beta

test cuz I mean a beta is not a finished game and you know some people it's difficult right because a game like fortnight is on season 4 of early access yeah you know and kind of becomes meaningless for larger games that will never leave early access because why would they because they don't need to and a lot of other games that we really enjoy I mean I'm not trashing that approach but we knew that we'd at the end of the day still want to hit the date that we set out to do you know we still want to come out in 2019 we want to come out you know ideally early in 2019 and so early access is our best chance of pulling that off and it's because we need that QA attention we need a community to sort of vet a lot of design ideas we're trying that are certainly novel and how the community sort of reacts to a lot of surprises we have in store for them I think is going

to inform how ready the game is for full launch if that makes sense but mainly it's just it you know it's the best way to actually do what early access was meant to do which is hey if you're excited about this game and you want to help its development and feedback on its development early access is wonderful you know my hope is that this will this will be a positive experience for us it's you know the first couple weeks have been pretty good we've got another update hopefully coming out the end of this week before the holiday Thanksgiving holiday for people to enjoy while we're out at that we did a week one update you know it's certainly a lot of prioritization of bugs came has already come out of the early access from people who weren't in our beta but just picked up the game for the first time aren't you know dozens of missions in and they're first-time user experience is very different than the beta testers worth so you know I think the pick-up-and-play nature of our game

between you know day one and week one was pretty significant just in that first update and I think it's gonna be pretty noticeable again with this week's update we're trying to react pretty quick to that stuff and then the hope is right that people feel like we're not ditching them because there is that fear on early access you come out you hit early access you say here's an incomplete game will totally get to finishing it and then you don't we certainly attempt to finish it so that's the that's our hope is that early access our you know long-term conversation with the community is not that long-term because there is a there is an actual you know you could see us trending towards full launch and that we had full launch right on we're about to hit the multiplayer parts so Jordan I'll have some questions for you based on my experience here first you can watch my character creation quick chat oh I was actually pretty impressed with this crater because it was a very simple tool that let me be pretty like I could see

how different people could express themselves in different ways in this thing in pretty important ways like it's pretty easy to make a character who is gender non-conforming or of different ethnicities pretty easily you know we're trying to yeah trying to sort of let you define what you want to look like with your eyes or other than with sort of labels yeah although the as you I tested this for a minute the the dark skin looks really dark yeah yeah it looks like your gamma is also pretty different I think we need to be a little more aggressive with our camera tuning anyway we are just looking looking in chat just some quick shadows - snaps the bunny Velox ization and Caine asylum thank you all for joining us remember you can ask some questions of our guests Michael and Jordan I assume some of you are actual developers on this game so I'm sure you can just yell with them in your own time at your whatever questions you have summer I cannot make this a team meeting as much

as I would like to it just eavesdrop on team meetings for this game um moving honest and full authorization are two of our kind of star discord people nice welcome Jordan I'm gonna have some questions about hora design for you in a moment but I just want to follow up with with Mike on one question related to I'm so it's really like I think a lot of dubs you know are sort of fear like user acquisition is one of the giant biggest questions that everyone is talking about how so how did you get folks how did you what was your method for getting people to sign up for the beta and then early access we are you know question is this not our first game we already had a newsletter for the Magic Circle the company already had you know followers on social media I can imagine it is that much harder if you can't say hey former Bioshock developers do X clearly all of our old colleagues are doing the same trick I think it's the right move to make shout out to the molasses flood and

yeah anyway so it's a user acquisition right now when we started was we have a newsletter we have social media account some people follow those things you know personal accounts also bring in followers we were lucky in that you know again the credentials of the studio brought people around we have a PR agency we work with who did outreach as well to press so the usual stuff right if you've if you've worked on indie games or if you've worked on Triple A games the technique is still more or less the same right a PR agency or you is gonna reach out to every outlet you can find and every possible you know journalists who might be interested in this you know try not to waste their time you have a press kit you say here are screenshots and images and you know basic information about the

game here's how you can reach us if you have more questions let the world know that we have you know an announced trailer and the announced trailer we worked on for probably almost a month you know in between normal work but there was definitely at least a good work of no really this is an important part of getting people to pay attention to us to get that trailer done and that was even you know Patrick Paltrow who does our audio and also did some audio at molasses flood did you know a very cool treatment I think if you listen to that teaser trailer announcement that we did it's it stands out not just because of the great art and animation that Stephen did but also you know Patrick's work on audio I think kind of brings people in so we had a good trailer we had some name recognition and that got us you know a five digit number of newsletter signups that was enough

certainly to populate a beta test and that's um so we had that we got on Steam as quick as possible some people could wishlist us and that that gives you like a nice you know just speaking from a production standpoint you get like a nice snow ball effect of just over time more people tell people you know they tell two friends and so you get like a trickle of wish lists coming in and then just any news announcement so you know we went to packs to try and get some news and coverage but also the bit I think the bigger benefit for us with packs you don't get quite as much news coverage as maybe I thought we would have gotten but you do get a lot of hands-on time with real players and that was a big deal we got to hearing a scream and they can ask the questions that we don't think of to ask ourselves so you know it's a gauntlet it's way too long and I've hit okay it's like four and a half full days of just like non-stop hey have you heard of The Blackout Club but you do get a lot of

people who have now heard of The Blackout Club and want to ask you about it and some of them you know we had people coming back for days just to play the same demo again that's really validating and goes a long way just a team morale but also helping us hone the pitch and also you know people who then got beta keys and joined our beta test and got a t-shirt and hopefully are wearing it around and okay you know just kind of stuff like that that helps us find a little bit of real world validation and also gets the word out and you know you can say that you were at these shows and you could point to footage from the event you know we met nice influencers like Jesse Cox who came by and said nice things and talked about us you know so we we met a lot of we made a lot of good contacts in terms of user acquisition at the moment you know early access we did basically the same thing we do for announcement right we had a new trailer new press release that kind of stuff I also think that the beta

test during that time you know key giveaways was a way to get people interested and you know because people are spreading the word and inviting their friends who may also not have paid attention to us yeah and it reminded people that we are a game that even though when are coming out till next year there's already something you can play now so even though we weren't in early access yet people could at least anticipate that we were a real product and not vaporware which you know I've worked on that in the past too and it's at some point you need to finish the game so we're doing a very nice show of proof that no really does a game and you can play it and so but with early access right now I mean our user acquisition strategy is pretty light if I'm honest we want people playing the game during early access but we do want early access players and the distinction meaning in this case you know just a step above a beta tester we really do

want people who expect a broken game that's totally not you know not done with content and and will be iterated on based on feedback from the community and most players are not that so we will be ramping up user acquisition later when we get closer to full launch to do like the normal you know launch rollout well pretty we're pretty critical with ourselves about that issue like we QA pretty aggressively internally and we don't want to release something that is unplayable or that won't let you get XP and level up your character or anything like that like broken in the sense of there are imbalance things you can pull off or you can make an AI look silly that kind of stuff but we try very hard to make sure that at the very least the if you buy the game and play it right now you're going to have an interesting experience and an experience that has a loop that completes but that you're gonna we welcome your feedback on how to make it better and we have reacted to that already with our first update and

our upcoming one as well yeah pretty much pretty much the early access feedback has like really changed the priority of how fast we were gonna roll out stuff cuz it's like oh wow this is an issue that people care about immediately let's kind of drop everything and get a little bit better support in for quality of life stuff you know it's the things that as devs you work on a game for two years you don't think about it and then you realize like wow our subtitles are really small nobody can read them Jordan I'm gonna switch over just cuz for halfway through like my successful run oh yeah this is the great part I saw them I saw the shape and then ran about you know designing for horror and multiplayer one of the biggest things that we sort of said early on is that there would be almost no scripted jump scares yeah that if there were jump scares they would be entirely emergent out of systems interacting and so the closed eyes mechanics where you can see that you're

closing your in-game eyes therefore people haven't played the game before and revealing this this boogie and figure the intent was that you would have a jump-scare just simply out of what you didn't know right and where you're physically were positioned you have to close off this major channel of information which is the world around you to see this one thing which is this invisible figure and we've had a lot of people Yelp like crazy in a way that seems like another scripted game but in this case it it's there's no two nights that go exactly alike yeah and all of that is well a lot of that not necessarily the shapes effect specifically but that notion of dynamism is is down to David Pitman working on the the procedural mission system we're trying very hard to make it feel like a deck of cards where we shuffle and you play a game with a blackout club and you were dealt an interesting hand and the next night you'll be dealt a different one and so if patches for example or Jason implements a new mission that's like a new card that we shuffle into the

deck and it will just sort of seamlessly make the experience more varied as we keep updating in it sorry I'm sure you had a different question but both honestly I'm glad you chimed in on that just because that was important to call out yeah the my follow-up question would be what is what makes a good mission it felt like to me you're about to see me embark on a second mission and it'll go horribly wrong like we were exploring a similar space if not the same space but we were trying to get to a different location what's sort of the underlying psychology behind like making a good procedural mission in this game well that's something that we are certainly learning in real time Jason coming on the team has been just miraculous in that run both in terms of just kind of altering the layout to allow for more multiplayer style movement among players and more inroads to the same space right where if a mission suddenly calls for you to enter from the absolute opposite of the opposite end of the map that same

space now serves all of those masters and he his advice coming off of payday 2 I think has helped a lot the biggest thing that we're noticing is that there is a very fine line between designing a mission that is simple enough to be instantly parsed by a player who's dropped into a session they've never played the tutorial they were invited to play on Steam by a friend and so they they just need to follow the crosshair and do the thing that the game says and the other end of the spectrum which is these very advanced players who want a range of expression who don't want to be told exactly what to do who want to want out to poke around in dark corners and get lost for a while and we have you know a certain bandwidth between those extremes in the blackout Club right now and constantly kind of trying to find the right balance we're even playing with with ideas for ways to handle advanced difficulty sort of with organically within the experience whether we pull that off you know TBD

but the biggest thing has been clear entry and exit conditions that can easily hand off to one another so the way it works right now is there's a category like steel and so the kids are there to steal something and the description of the mission says okay we're gonna take something back from the bad guys but then the specific thing you're asked to steal can be radically different mm-hmm in this case sevens bags in this case it's evidence bags but when you finish the evidence bags mission it might might swap to a radically different different card in the deck to extend the metaphor where suddenly you're asked to steal this bizarre sort of wooden head that sings every time you move so it's kind of like t-rex vision in Jurassic Park or something like every every time you move there's a problem and so one player has to sort of be that person who does a burst of movement stand still while the other person runs around and runs scout for them saying okay let's go this way there's a there's a lucid which is one of our bad guys yeah this this direction

so follow me because I can move without making noise and so coming back to the point of procedural that objective would just link up under the broader category of steel and so it sort of feels generally like you're doing something that has a narrative frame around it but that there's a certain amount of dynamism as that which objectives you're asked to do that night and then the kids are told to go home and that objective is always the same and exfiltration can often be one of the hardest parts so it is at the moment you tend to be asked to do two things a night that may extend to three to four kind of shorter things that you might be asked to do in a row all part of the same category and we're actually adding new categories I'm in the upcoming update as well and the hope is that you get to know the blackout Club and the kinds of things they might do through the broader kind of buckets that those those categories represent but then inside the bucket or you know different sort of collections of fun valuables and each

night you you you come home with a different one and right now our biggest burden is content we want a lot more mission types a lot more scenarios and little enemy behaviors things like that and we will slowly let them creep into the build and hopefully take early access players by surprise dr. Ellis says shape boy is gonna be here before we're even in the maze rip yeah this one doesn't go so well god this moment when that when that when this jerks run jump through that window I was very pleased I was a lot of work you know props to Kane who is I think in that chat right now yeah the windows a lot just our general mental movement really quick um so what's interesting about this is um dying is complicated in the blackout Club you don't just get dinged and all

your health goes down you're done you can see my poor friend there over on the left who has the the face above their head and then that's what happens when you're sort of taken out obviously you can be dragged before a door and exposed to the shape which turns you into that but during all that way there's a wait there during all the time there's a way for your friends to get you back in the game by tagging you and pulling you you know back to life you can see us try that later it's gonna go badly this this run goes badly what was the mindset behind that and even though horror is supposed to you know be about the threat of death why was it so essential for you to give players a lot of ways to get back in control before dying it's a combination because once you have fully failed there's a certain loss of your time investment you know you have to restart and because you might have been asked to do several procedural objectives in a row we wanted to make sure that it wasn't too frustrating and so that

notion of partial failure is a lesson I learned all the way as far back as the thief series when I was working with Randy Smith and Co I don't know if you've met him oh yeah we've interviewed Randy I think on this stream before I imagined you might see III just guessed that because of GDC etc but you know he talked a lot about the the role of partial failure in games that even claim to support stealth right and even though ours is not stealth only that idea of okay the game is really fun and really scary when I'm almost screwed but not entirely screwed can I pull it back up before the mountain can I recover this situation so there's a lot of otherwise you get poor stealth right where it's insta fail like a lot of a lot of action games I try to have the single stealth mission where you're you just kind of feel like you've been slapped on the wrist by the hand of God and and then secondarily there's also a narrative reason the villain who is taking this

little fishbowl town of red Acre Virginia where that where the citizens can't get the word out of what what's happening to them the villain values life kind of yeah and will do its utmost to try and preserve the bodies for purposes but if each individual kid is caught too many times then they are deemed to be too large of a risk and then it's curtains and so I don't what is happening here why that's me right there we're watching me now watching my friends who are my new friends who are trying to get us out there's a you know just a gameplay standpoint you know if you think about like I works on the borderlands there the first Borderlands and like the rescue mechanic that last ditch mechanic you know added a lot to the game when they finally put it in yeah and and sort of polished it up right like not just you know the demo version and the co-op are like probably the you know hundreds of hours I spent

testing that led to just kind of an innate assumption about cooperative play which is you know if you can't save your friend you know it's look at what they did think you're is a war as well right like saving your friend is just a big part of the experience and reviving in general is a good part of like we're in this together we're gonna get this sorted and so a lot of really interesting things came about when we said okay your friend isn't dead your friend is a sleepwalker your friend has now become a dynamic challenge yeah the game changed it's like the whole experience flips and suddenly you know you're it's not over and it's also now become a little bit more interesting yeah exactly exactly on that note that this genre that we're sort of trying to build the first major game version of the bond between the kids and and the sort of vicarious experience of kind of wanting to be one

of those kids and having friendships that strong is a big part of the the thrill it's not just the horror it's not just the the notion of them sort of using curse words for the first time at each other it's it's that that that notion that their friends to the end that they that they would die for one another and that is in the the deep DNA of this game we've really wanted you to feel like you were part of a group that your friendship is all you have and one of the things that's kind of funny about The Blackout Club is that we don't strictly enforce it you can absolutely not just fail an objective but as long as you succeeded at one objective you get some experience failure failure sort of teaches the club but then on top of that there's a bonus for leaving with everybody everybody not sleepwalking everybody intact and it's but you can you can go through hundreds of missions and level up your character without doing that you can abandon your friends and it can be fine but nobody does we've

watched so many people play this game on Twitch and so forth and they always want to go back for each other even when their play with randos which we find deeply heartwarming and it feels like the themes are working nice well as we're about to see my my run here is about to wrap up I recorded footage about to shut off for the day but yeah Jordan and Mike I guess patches can I call you patches oh my yeah Jordan and patches thank you so much for joining us today this was a really cool chat and I'm really excited to see where development on the blackout Club goes going forward oh it's our pleasure thanks for having us yeah for the folks at home if you are watching if you are interested in more streams we would love it you hit the follow button because we're going to be talking to a lot of other great devs the rest of the year into 2019 and as we get ready for GDC 2019 brief disclosure this will be going up on gamasutra later today gamasutra and gamasutra and GCC are owned by the

same parent organization which is now informa on that if you are interested in going to GDC I would like to robic Brent you scroll down and click the register button we are it's now right now is the best time to register because these are the lowest prices blah blah blah my bosses are not gonna like hearing me say blah blah blah about our darn show but yeah anyway this is what we're all about we're trying to you know talk to game developers learn more about the art of game development share that information with the other game developers liz's a new you just got here don't worry we're gonna archive this and put it on gamasutra the the vaad will go up on the touch channel we're gonna make sure you can watch it and you know see what you missed out on but that's if they have any questions where should they ask you guys I assume that this chord channel is a good place to go yeah it's easy just go to discord GG / The Blackout Club all one word yeah also yeah are on Twitter

at The Blackout Club I'm at at null speak we can't we tend to engage with Twitter quite a bit just because we get questions there that don't make it to discord if you if you just find the blackout club on Steam we try to be on that discussions community hub as well although I'm not as good at that as the discord we're done with that have a good day everyone yeah thanks for having us