GDC Summer Dev Speedrun - Star Wars: Republic Commando With Harley Baldwin

[Music] good morning everyone my name is brian francis i'm a community manager with gdc and a contributing editor at gamasutra.com if you need to refer to me in the third person my pronouns are he him i am joined today by shell games the vp of game design harley baldwin and speedrunner utsu uh harley and utsu would you please introduce yourselves hi i'm harley baldwin as you said i'm the vp of design at shell games and many years ago um 16 years ago i was a senior level designer at lucas arts um and had the great good fortune to work on republic commando um i uh haven't ever seen anybody speed run it and so this is going to be a fascinating experience for me and i can't wait um my name is utsu i uh i'm the speedrunner um

i i picked up this game a few months ago just because i always enjoyed uh commando as a game and as i looked in the run it looked more and more interesting especially since a newer bug got found a little while ago um and so uh so i basically picked it up and it's it's been fun to run ever since uh and if you need to refer to me in the third person my pronouns are she her roger that thank you um uh uh so for folks who've been watching uh our last couple speed runs um i've mentioned the last couple days that speed running is this incredible art form that sort of brings the the play and video game closer to the development of video games um today we are obviously as people mentioned we're running star wars republic commando a lucas arts game from 2005. republic commando is one of my favorite shooters from my teenage years uh it's a star wars game without jedi its cultural relevance is still felt

today as its heroes delta squadron were featured in star wars clone wars the tv show karen travis's books kept love for the club commandos alive and and sort of brought built out the commando group in the popular eye for a number of years um and just this year lucasfilm announced another upcoming series about clone soldiers star wars the bad batch um while republic commando isn't the only reason that you know fans have fallen in love with the clones and the different you know nicknames they give themselves and the roles they occupy in star wars um it's definitely a big it's a big reason for it it's why we're here it gave birth to karen travis's books um from a game side uh republic commando captures a particular moment in game design that's a halfway mark between classic shooters like doom and modern shooters like fortnite call of duty or apex legends um and we're lucky to be joined by harley who as she mentioned she was a senior level designer on the game to talk about what it was like making games in that era also we are here because uh there are some particular ways that u2 will be breaking this game that i really want to see how she reacts to

um uh with that in mind really quick i'm gonna look at chat we have folks uh like taylor d alex jacobson heath close thank you all for joining us uh ryan lippert wants to say this is one of the most overlooked and underrated star wars games this was a huge part of their middle school gaming days mine too um folks in chat if you have questions for harley or usu if you're a um and we're gonna ask to keep it on topic i know we've got some uh runner fans in here and i appreciate having you here but we gotta we're game developers conference we gotta keep it game development um if you have questions for harley about working on this game feel free to ask them if you're a developer and want to know uh about about speedrunners and speedrunning games feel free to ask them for u2 and i will grab them with that um i think it's time uh i believe uh the bat the the battle in the geonosis arena has kicked off uh the war has begun utsu take it away you wanted me to start from new game start from new game please all right oh i've got chills

welcome little one this is your first day your designation will be rp 0 i was just re-watching uh um clone wars and ton way was in a bunch of episodes that i featured in i love uh the design of these creatures you know they're they're influenced by the grays um episode two does a great job with like 50 sci-fi aesthetic and importing it for a new world yeah this whole sequence um was basically uh basically done by animation and technical art when we when when we realized like oh yeah we need a little bit of a tutorial just about how to how to use the twin stick shooters and they they got together and and essentially skunk works this

um uh to a pretty pretty final level of done um for you it was it was really amazing when we came in oh look this has basically already been handled yeah it's yeah it's kind of not a level but it is like a brief like you know it's in the narrative space it's it's not a it's not a cutscene because it's not pre-rendered and it's not a um level because the player doesn't move during it um although there is a brief uh like yeah this part the the tutorial this is really neat um i actually personally referenced this uh i was running a star we were running a clone wars rpg session using fantasy flight games rpg system and we had a bunch of new players who never played with the system before so i was like uh right clone wars handle uh republic commando handled this we'll just pretend we're on camino doing a training session real quick let's go to chapter and start taking some questions uh what's uh here's one from big law big law for harley what's the most interesting hitch you had developing this game

uh i think the most interesting one that we had as a as a team overall was that originally the the commandos were indistinguishable from one another they were clones right we figured they were clones and we were working under the in the context of the movie in which clones or clones are clones and so we have uh all four of them using essentially the same voice or voice of lights um and uh it became clear that that was difficult to know who was doing what there were the idea gamepl giving each clone a personality that stuff actually came in pretty late and it was only through the amazing gargantuan efforts of the writers the artists um uh uh etc that we actually managed to get the

four distinct commandos in um and to give them personalities and uh just everybody it was an amazing new feature and new conceptual feature that sort of came in without a hitch but um if i if i was on a game where that level of change came in at the late date that it did um uh now with the experience that i have i never would have tried to is there a way that i can mute the zoom audio feed [Music] that's a good question because i'm hearing the game twice and it's [Music] if our tech team uh simulates their way to mute that through zoom

uh sounds like we just killed the audio that's fine we'll be okay um uh what's your favorite level to run in this to do in this run uh like individual or like section because i know go ahead for the sections because there's only three levels if you look at it at the top level all right um my favorite one is the republic assault ship my very favorite is the party is the uh first technically second hanger uh that you clear in the republic assault ship the one where you have to like set up for the incoming droid dispensers yep all right with the run beginning uh let's go ahead and watch our first hack take place just a little jump over the wall which i think actually might be allowed but then hoochie's about to do something that when we were testing this

was already just like oh no that's not how you play this game there we go a little behind the geometry there nice we i have a fun fact about this level um the goal for the first part of this mission is to hunt the uh geonosian general sun fact sun fact has actually been uh he's still kicking around um the i play the uh fantasy flight games tabletop game x-wing miniatures and now that they've introduced the prequel factions um they've released the geonosian starfighter and sunfact is the most powerful uh he gets to be a character in that game because he's just riding around in the universe and starfighter also he sucks he's such a pain to deal with when other players use it so something you probably just saw me do there's a you probably saw the load bar go twice because i uh i quick save and i quit loaded during the load stream doing that from what i understand is um [Music]

the level triggers spawn after your character spawns and if you quick save and quick load before the character spawns it messes up the triggers so here i can tell uh six two to hack this console before i'm even told to hack it [Laughter] thanks i didn't even notice that when i was watching this one before um uh um harley uh i noticed watching this run you know um a lot of interactions are slowed down by the force timers on um using uh you know interacting with doors or uh ordering the clones to react with doors uh were those sort of meant to pad out the game a little bit they do like sometimes it's very clear that they're meant to make things feel tense but i'm curious what the some of the philosophy behind was that behind that was um so partly it was because uh we knew there would be places where you might have you know a threat on this side of the door that you have to deal with you're

trying to get through on the other side um i don't think there was really any any desire to pad out the game so much as there was to give uh level designers tools to create that feeling of tension right we discovered early on that if you don't really have to depend on your squad then you'll just leave them behind you won't pay pay attention and it's not going to feel like a squad game since that was like yeah like you are now um and i suspect that that's there's going to be a lot of that in this playthrough um it was really it was a pillar of the game to try to do that so um i also noticed though you don't need your squad because you're skipping a lot of triggers and that kind of stuff so you've got a lot of ai just standing there waiting to be told it should wake up um again a thing i think i'm going to see a lot of today so this is going to be the most confusing part so first i quick save and quick loaded here and then if you press the walk button the shift button while you go on a zip

line you don't go down the zip line so i get to just be up here which lets me do this oh no which lets me walk by the glass nice because there's no collision up there to kick you to do it because nobody would ever be up there yeah usually usually once you shoot the glass you got to go through this whole cut scene where you open up that door and then 07 has to shoot down a thing but because i quick save and quick loaded um i can just come over here to the exit door [Music] and leave so i could say with a mouse button during this uh this i have to do with a mouse button during these or i have to somehow press start before uh it fully loads to quicksave and doing that lets me quick load and i can walk around in this cutscene oh my goodness intelligence indicates that there are several factors i do love getting to look at these armors from from this angle in this cut scene uh you can really get to see how the i love like the hologram you know like the

the like all the ways that like it gathers and orients people in the scene you know like everyone gathering around waiting for orders um yeah we were talking before about how uh um the personalities for oh seven four o and six two got added late in the game um i've heard brett deville uh um a friend of the show brett deville who helped make this happen shout out to our guy um i've heard him talk before about how um that's sort of the reason that even though each clone has a specialty those specialties aren't really um reflected in in the gameplay like you know like seb isn't uh if i have my roles remembering right like um sev isn't really any better at sniping than any other clones um yeah that sort of sounds like it came from the same place right that like that late arrival well it did and it also like we did do some experience trying to figure out if we tuned them differently would it make a difference what we found was that there was so much cognitive load trying to figure out who to put on what that um that it actually frustrated players and so we we went with conceptually you

know who you want to use things and players who want to opt into that can and players who don't want we didn't publicize that there wasn't any difference obviously in fact it wasn't really well known and widely known until pretty late and um uh it was still like i i had i had people walk up to me for years telling me you know i really like using seb on the sniper positions etc um because it just your brain just convinces you that that's the way it is yeah that is certainly not unique to republic commando the the idea that you can you can let the players expectations fill in features that might otherwise be actually problematic to uh to implement yeah uh gabe gabe pacquiao uh pastor and chat uh wants to say that uh brent deville's oral history stream is great highly recommended uh also yeah i watched that stream too and i um i picked up a few facts that are in my note sheet from it because he was nice enough to grab some guests from he grabbed some of his former co-workers

i remember harley if you were on it um but that was a lot of fun i think that was like back in 14 or 15 because i remember watching it in my old job um i wasn't i wasn't on that i was on the most recent he and tim longo did a dev game club podcast um very recently where they played this game and interviewed a bunch of the people who were developers on it and i did get to be on that one it was great i highly recommend it if you're interested in the in the game generally yeah mariana mcqueen wants to say that they love these skips and so so do i mariana um uh heath close would like to know was there significance behind the names 0740162 uh not that i know of definitely 3 8 though um oh yeah there's a there's a tradition at lucasarts well there was a tradition when lucasarts existed of naming characters and rooms and things and robots and whatever you could after um thx 1138 which was uh you know an early and seminal movie

for george lucas and which um a lot of the techniques that he used to create the star wars franchise generally were explored early um yeah and and so and we all we all had i think a deep fondness for the movie so um reflected as much as we could uh by the way if you're a person who loves star wars but hassle hasn't checked out george lucas's film american graffiti i finally watched that late last year and i was blown away oh god like what a and it's funny because there's a one there's an 11 38 reference in that movie too um and i'm so hey you get to see harrison ford you know right before han solo and be um such a wonderful movie like such a straight like it couldn't get made today this is what i felt watching it and it was so wonderful to watch um ooh gabe gabe has another good question does the ai have a preference uh if if they point us at a snipe point and multi all the squad mates are available does the game default to sev over others

um i don't think so um but it's possible i mean they're eliminating the the ai programmer uh who worked on this john hancock um he spent the entire development cycle of the game working on it and and that could be in there and i honestly wouldn't know um his the the level of craftsmanship that he put into that into the squad ai was was truly mind-boggling and it's certainly possible it's also possible that you just think so because your mind's doing confirmation bias every time you see sev walk up to a state point right yeah you only remember those times not the other ones um the the load save hack or the quick state pack is really interesting i mean it's certainly standard practice in game development to figure out what you think your your your most airtight uh level load and and save scripts are and once you've got that you replicate it all over the game right so if somebody finds a way to hack

that they've essentially got a backdoor into the entire game which is what you're using right now um something that i wanted to say back there is that if you didn't see it uh so following props if you quit saving quick load uh will just be frozen in air where they uh where they where the quicksave happened until they're interacted with again so that let me skip to uh bomb planting portions what that also did is it displaced this uh this bridge here oh no oh so so if i try to go the correct way the intended like walk through this way yep so to get past that you have to do this oh my goodness know where the bridge was oh fascinating and upload the factory schematic yep i will analyze them for a week all right and that would have been that would have been a um an optimization of physics because back in those days

having any kind of physics simulation air game was incredibly expensive and so we had to find ways to turn it off as soon as we possibly could you know if the player's not looking at it etc uh from chat uh uh big law big law says that's goofy as heck i agree um uh harley i have a question for you while we roll ahead um feel free to just interrupt us if you have a great hack a great hack or skip to show off um what are their games from the time of development uh were you sort of inspired by um as a level designer oh um well i mean you always start with half-life right yeah um that's there's but but everybody does um uh we were definitely looking at uh at early uh multiplayer squad games um definitely looking at um at other

uh computers unlocked sorry the repeat of that makes me feel like i'm in the in the matrix uh and kind of hijacks my brain um it's hard i struggle with this so much i don't know why so what i'm doing here is uh you can climb to this window but i can't remember the i can get this but i just can't remember the correct angle to go at it it's a little hole in the in the collision somewhere that you can just hit i gotta use this console to access the factory's main computer this is something we discussed in one of our earlier rounds sometimes these these hacks because you're just burning so much time elsewhere it's it's okay to like you know run these hacks over and over again right right yeah this one i can't really afford to just not do either because it saves so much time yeah so you just tap that to i should have access to unlock doors

once a link is established it's so interesting the way that you play this game um is is not at all about trying to create a sort of coherent narrative and i don't mean the story of the game i mean narrative of what you're doing um as as the player as the character it's really about creating a narrative of of how the game was built and how you have have sort of packed insight into the way the game was built um i feel like watching speed running is a thing that people who want to get into game development should do because it just shows you so many of the secrets of how we if we do this stuff yeah um harley you you didn't work on juno's specifically uh we're going to see your your own chinese levels when but you were helping you know other designers work on

these early levels um do you have any memories about like uh obviously not about obviously not about trying to make sure players didn't do this but um you have any memories about helping your your teammates figure out you know what this game should feel like in the early stages um uh we did have a really um we spent a lot of time on the bridge that the falling bridge that you skipped earlier um because it was so much about establishing place establishing enemy um uh establishing how useful sniping could be um you know there's a there's a sort of half tutorial half cut scene early on with the bridge where you're supposed to snipe a g in ocean um and um just restarting the whole one just in case that's good yeah that's fine because we were learning so much about establishing place and uh and character of a level we spent a lot of time as a level design group looking at that and discussing it and playing it

and giving feedback and seeing new iterations and stuff like that um it was a very early level to come to come forward you know um the way that essentially the development on this game worked was that um uh one level would be running out ahead trying new things uh trying to meet new goals whether those were technical or experiential or whatever sometimes tools um to make sure that that would work for other people so that everybody didn't get stopped by a by a um oh no that's not gonna work moment later on that you'd already had time to work that out and so this was one of those levels right and we also knew that because it was the very beginning of the game we were going to need to be able to build it then build the whole game then come back and make sure that it was supporting what it needed to support both in terms of tutorial and and uh story uh narrative context so um it got a lot of got a lot of that

stuff um also i think one of my follow notifications went through through my oh yes oh interesting um uh really quick uh taylor d first wants to say you got the zutsu um so you got some support taylor would also like to add in from a long time speedrunner watching speed running has to be done with the proper mindset if you're a game dev we often like uh not having these types of tricks patched out and in their experience devs will often use runners as free qa which isn't fun um both of the other developers we talked to this week definitely acknowledge that like you know they see a bug that shows up and runs and they do their they actually go out of their way not to patch those out um because they it doesn't interrupt the main player's experience um and uh um uh they definitely that but i also could see i could see some dev watching gdq or whatever um and being like oh no we have to eliminate that bug for some

reason they feel is valid but i but i understand where taylor's coming from yeah yeah it's it's interesting what i have taken away from um from things like this is well okay so sometimes a book comes up and it's in the player's favor right um but it's going to be rare on some kind of a vanilla play through for me like i mark those will not fix and and i do it with a kind of a joy because i know that a curious player might find that and it's not going to break anything else that they're not interested in having broken um and and they get to walk away feeling like they've outsmarted the developers that being said i absolutely am not claiming that we find all the bugs and decide not to fix them um certainly uh speedrunners find bugs that we haven't found but it's also true that probably every game you speedrun has a few of those little love letters to curiosity in the game um it is our job to make things that people enjoy um and and and

it is also our job to keep a wide variety of player types in mind right um yeah you can make some games for a very narrow player type only people who whatever like to collect everything or whatever um if you can there are situations in which that can happen but especially when you're talking about triple a games you have to appeal to a wide variety of player types because you need those sales um uh so you know i tend i i always look at bugs like that as i like do we have to fix this if if people who are sort of just playing through without looking for stuff like this won't find it or be bothered by it but people who really really value it might might find it yeah and have a great time i'm not asking this from a from a hurricane perspective but i just want to know would it help you if it was okay if we skipped ahead like as much as i want to see this this hack uh i also don't want you to feel bad if you if it takes a while to do it see the issues i don't know if i can

just skip it oh wait yeah i can let me give it like five more tries this isn't that hard i have literally no idea why it's this difficult it's just not cooperating with me yeah hey hey look it's it's these in these uncertain times uh we just don't have to roll with the punches yeah um as i've said 20 times it's entirely possible that i'm the one who put the bad geometry here you know at the end of at the end of any dev cycle once you've done all of the creative stuff a level designer spends a lot of time just going and trying to put in geometry to keep people from doing stuff like this and if you're a tiny bit slap dash or you're or you're um your verts aren't snapped or whatever um you know it leaves a hole yeah um gabe would like to know again uh did the team explore multiplayer with ai squads like in single player if not why uh if so why if if not why not or if so why didn't it make it into the game yeah we didn't and the answer is

actually really simple uh with the with the uh hardware that we were running at the time both the pc that people pcs that people had in the home and the original xbox this game released on there there wouldn't have been a way to make a decent looking multiplayer arenas and still optimize enough to have all of those characters in the game no no oh no yeah oh i just i just did the uh the bug where you stop the zip blind and that whole uh ship isn't solid so i can just jump through it that's sorry it was just sometimes when you watch it you're just like oh no like oh no my brain uh i just progressed to the next mission which is literally right after that level what you missed was me jumping through the window dropping down to the very last uh uh bomb plant and then jumping over a gap and walking to the end of the level

there's kind of a weird hack with these turrets too right like you just walk by one um i've seen i walked like i mentioned there's uh i think there's a hack oh yeah uh the the turret isn't for actually a tiny bit here these uh these these later uh parts look a little bit similar you know what's kind of funny about this is um this looks a lot like what it looks like to see a level designer play their own level um some of these it's not like we deliberately leave exploits in for our own use but you look at them and you're like well nobody's gonna find that right it's only it's it's only something i can use because i know it's there um and so when you when you're doing what we call a smoke test where you're just checking to make sure the thing you just changed didn't break everything you know this is how you run your your level really yeah um uh harley did you want to add anything else about the conversation before uh for gabe's question sorry i cut you off because i was just so i'm sorry i i i can't remember what we were talking

about so if you remind me maybe uh ai for multiplayer squad like putting score on multiplayer yeah no it was it wasn't something we ever would have really been able to consider just because of the optimization requirements and we want to have it have good looking arenas there was a long long time when when the reality was you could have about five characters on the screen maybe up to eight if they were really optimized and that was going to be it and so with the numbers of players in the arena just wasn't going to work out that's again um uh speaking of optimization uh what was it like like uh you've been in development for a long time what was it like optimizing this game for the original xbox um and then later pc um uh i forgot if it was simultaneous or not but you know the original xbox is sort of what i'm curious about yeah versus compared to your experience uh helping your team optimize their games now oh well um so we developed on pcs that were built as close to the original xbox config as possible at the time if i remember

correctly um and so we it it wasn't until pretty late in the game that we had it on the xbox um mostly everything fit and worked okay there were a few there were a few problems in terms of textures texture memory i i remember being a real problem um and that we had to sort of punch and scooch specific textures that showed less down until everything else fit and that was a long process um geometry wasn't too bad uh the thing that was a real surprise uh i think was um i mean it was a new console so you just never know this i've seen this happen with other new consoles as well um the problem of uh streaming um you know this is this is unreal two i believe um uh and and its streaming capabilities are one of the reasons we we decided to use it um without having to write our own streaming engine

but um until you're on the on the target hardware you can't really know how fast you're gonna stream in and out and there were some places where it was like oh no we are not gonna stream that fast enough we are going to have to figure out a way to tap dance right here so that things have a chance to stream in in some of the the kashyyyk tree as you go up the tree you'll actually see some of those and and uh yeah there are a few of them where um we weren't supposed to have a chapter break but we had to have some kind of break or the it wasn't just gonna just wasn't gonna be able to do it that makes sense uh looking back at chat uh heath uh says uh from the from the skip from a few minutes ago they can't stop moving in their seat uh to help you get uh to get over that rock um uh colts own games just wants to say hi hey colt zone uh i've seen some of your tweets at gnc summer this week i hope you're having a good time i think you are so i'm glad you joined us um uh gabe are our br is just

throwing great questions one after another um one of the things they remember desperately wanting when uh they first played republican there was a level where you operate the turret find airborne transport uh was anything like that ever prototyped and with similar optimization constraints applied yeah um i we did some early prototypes about a variety of different things where you might you might uh be on a moving platform vehicle etc um but at the time the state of the art uh and and the level of physics stimulation we could do it was so prohibitively expensive that we weren't able to make that work and make things like enemies work um uh you know these days it would be pretty um pretty simple to do um but uh he was asking a lot of the machines we had available at the time i love um i love when you consider um the technical limitations of any art actually whether it's film music

or games and and you dig into sort of how the art is informed by the technical woman you know by those technical limitations you know like um think uh um the how lenses physically morph the look of film or how games you know depending on what how much memory could only fit could only ship certain features even if something may have been executable uh on the perfect machine but not you know in every machine i love it i love thinking about games like that because it's always like then you once you understand the restrictions you sort of understand the art i feel like yeah yeah it's also really interesting how in in any console's life cycle um you know early on you you get a bunch of games that are trying to take a big swing at what this new console can do as teams get really good at pushing the console to its very limits you begin to see some really amazing stuff and then with the next console life cycle that stuff is all you know just de rigueur and now now you've got teams pushing new stuff

but you know there are conversations that happen at the end of that five years um that are conversations that would have been completely shut down at the beginning because like we just don't we just don't have the time to do that oh we've learned this and this and this and those three games we can put them together and make make something possible um playstation 2 was very much the the apex of that because it had such an incredibly long life cycle um you know you had you had teams fully dedicated to making games on it for 10 years straight and people really really knew uh at the end of that that that console's life cycle how to how to put it through its paces and make it do stuff it was never actually meant to do oh that skip over the rock there too was incredible that was really fun to watch so something i didn't mention is uh so you saw me get on get on and off the turret what uh what that does is for some reason i don't know what exactly causes it but getting on and off of a turret just makes you invincible to everything but explosions

yeah i know why that is um it's because uh we couldn't make the turrets um uh collision impervious to shots because when you want to take somebody down by shooting them on the turret and and you know you can see past the shield or whatever you want that shot to hit as a player right but if you're on the turret you don't really have the same uh situational awareness and so they can just run up behind you and shoot you and you can't you can't know that that happened and that turned out to be a huge feel bad in in play testing and so i'm sure we just made it so that no if you if if you want if you're on a turret you have to be able to see the threat and that threat is going to be something that will explode so it was it was essentially a way to make sure that the player experience matched what their perception was while they were on the planet that's that's so cool like uh i just love like the little you know okay

we solved this problem it's good and then years later runners are like hey wait a minute uh we're gonna go to the chat again while we wrap while uh we open this dot flip this dial um uh big law big law wants to say that there's that seems to be a recurring measure with pc releases around 2005. uh one release in particular enter the matrix has its vehicle speed locked to the clock speed and cpu and as a result modern pcs have the vehicles move far faster than they should um taylor d says that there's a lot of runs like that where frame rate is tied to physics and then unless it's emulated by the gate unless it's emulated uh the game is absolutely broken um gabe says uh sorry for standing questions they just love this game and the chance to hear from the dev is amazing gabe don't feel sorry about spamming questions we're just trying to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask questions um but yours are great i'm glad harley can answer them and i hope harley's having as much fun as i am like this is this is gold this is just chef's kiss every five minutes

how many times do you use the turrets also something you missed there was a there's a whole section where you wait for a bridge to extend for about a minute but you can jump off of the console around the corner onto some collision just walk over to where the bridge is supposed to be oh yeah i just leveled i saw that when i i checked the one out you aren't actually supposed to get up there but if you use that console then um you can get up high enough um yeah i mean speaking of of optimizing physics absolutely the cheapest way to do physics is to have collision where the player will be able to walk later and have things animate into that space right and i'm sure we did that a great deal here um i'm trying to think of a place that i'm sure that we actually used simulated physics to change the path

i might be able when when we get to the levels that i actually put together i might be able to find one but oh i am i cannot wait for us to get the sheet let's just say that so here's something uh kind of neat uh this geonosian elite can not hurt you if you uh enter this hack uh from an angle fascinating also something i've noticed about some of these uh demolition charges some of them hurt you and some of them don't some of them like you can be right up up close to and you'll be you only lose like a tiny bit of shield some some of them like that one uh you'll explode it like right up to it it'll just kill you interesting so the ones that back up from those are the ones that actually do damage the ones that i just shove my face into i don't care about sounds like it sounds like some um inconsistent parent-child relationships in the prefabs and unreal uh that's fine i know about the technical

thing but you're just like oh it sounds like some inconsistent parent-child relationships and i'm like oh boy i've been there hey well both as a parent and a child um uh yeah so one of the things that i did on this game besides level design um was uh helped set up the technical art pipeline for the um the maneuvers including the door breaches and stuff and when you have assets like that that are used over and over and over again heal heal things etc if the way that it's built in the engine is very hierarchical so that you have different elements that you can add onto the model to make it work um and if people copy that for some reason because you know they want to make a broken one or whatever um you can get into a situation where people are using very slightly different versions and then you think you've made a decision about this is the final version it will or won't kill like people when it explodes in front of

them but they're number one you can certainly get into a spot where um unless you're extremely careful with what is deployed to the level designers you've got different versions available after that um uh going from chat uh utsu we have a question for you alex jacobson would like to know uh how well do you know the process around how a lot of route skips are found in games like these just keep them a lot of what skips how well do you know the process around how a lot of the route and skills were found i know next to nothing for this for how they were found in this game since i showed up again only a few months ago when um all of this stuff is already found there's been very little found i think the only thing recent that's been found since i showed up which again the the community isn't very like together

in like the sense of like there's a there's one singular discord where like erik is a big community everything there's just one gigantic star wars discord that uh oh dear um so it actually took me a while to actually even get resources for learning this run i don't even remember if i knew that you could shoot those containers down okay i'm gonna do something for my sanity i was gonna say i wonder i was like are you actually playing on easy difficulty because i am uneasy but i think something might have gone wrong with uh with me hitting new game because usually runs are started just from a save just to skip the intro cut scene oh i see and it's felt like this whole time that i've been taking just way more damage than usual yeah i was noticing that because i watched uh like i said i was like that's more than i saw before um uh going for questions in chat again uh jd

four would like to ask it seems like with so much going on in terms of action gameplay um sometimes i mean we the way that levels were made right we we essentially did a block out of the level first and said okay here's where we're gonna fight and here's where we're gonna narrative stuff and here's where we're gonna have a rest um uh and and i know that um as we got deeper into the development um things like door breaches you know sometimes we deliberately put them there so the players would have a chance to take a break and rest and or so that your squad members could say things that that contributed to the narrative um uh so most of that stuff is pretty well blocked out before you before you end up uh hooking up you know the bulk of the action gameplay uh there are certainly times when it doesn't work and you've got to figure out what to do there um those aren't usually

bugs so much as it just feels really weird for example to go from this great big fight into this sort of quiet introspective cutscene or whatever um uh and and sometimes you know you do things like okay well let's try routing the player around and in levels like this where the hallways are pretty modular it's not super hard to take the modules you have and build a new hallway or regrout a whole way you can do stuff like that pretty easily um but not late in the game once all this scripting is hooked up because this scripting gets extremely extraordinarily complicated um you want to know all of that stuff pretty early utsu i've seen you do this hack with the spider droids a couple times reading to get uh into their spawn point before they emerge into the proper combat area um would you be able to describe that that hack for us well that's not even really a hack it's just walking towards it before uh the game intended for you to even be there yeah um it's the simplest the simplest hack walk in the door and act like you

belong um uh josh good would like to ask were there any constraints in unreal engine 2 that limited the team's vision for level design um yes absolutely i mean every level has constraints that limit the vision right the first thing a designer uh asks themselves is not what what grand vision do i have but what are the constraints that i actually have to pay attention to um uh and and this one certainly was no exception trying to think of specific stuff um uh that version of unreal um and and honestly just the hardware that we're running on again um you it was very difficult to have a really big arena and also any of the connective tissue to the rest of the level so you'll notice that we very often have a short hallway and and you know that there's the the

hallway takes as long as it takes to load door closes and you can never get through that again right that's that's all um uh you know given our druthers most level designers would prefer not to have arena hallway arena hallway gameplay but it's pretty difficult um to do that when that's sort of the way that the software wants to be run um so there are a lot of different tricks that we use to make it feel less like that um but certainly it does come up in this game um uh next question michael gibbs would like to ask harley what made you want to be a level designer it seems like you get to wear multiple hats of programming and art and gameplay that's basically what made me want to be a level designer um i i started out as an art tech in the industry and i really liked art teching you know it's it was um i really liked the system design aspect of it the technical aspect was fun the team aspect was great

um but i saw level designers getting to take portions of every discipline and and put it on a plate and arrange it in a beautiful way to serve up players and that's that's that's what i wanted to do um uh and um uh you know there's something about the crux of your game play being uh architectural rather than systemic um that just really appealed to me um uh it made me think about places in a in a different and deeper way um and um and and having been a level designer at a reasonably large portion of my career i still think about places in in a in a different way it's affected everything in my life honestly from from the way i set up my house you know my house is set up with systems for um optimize optimized efficiency in a way that i think

few people do you know they're thinking more is it pretty and i'm thinking how many steps does it take to do this or that or you know etc so um i think also the fact that i had a strong technical background as a technical artist and a strong art background because i went to school for photography really drew me to something that let me integrate all of those things at once and then also you get to be in the play test if you're a little designer and being the person who actually gets to be there live and watch people um not necessarily do this because you barely get a speed runner and play testing um but watch people be the first people to enjoy the game or hate it um it has its own kind of gravity roger that um uh uh i i uh i think it's interesting um does this a couple times in the room is the chooses to be the actor that's um

interacting with uh the you know like the big potential the tents making uh uh timing thing where you just hit the terminal for like a minute um and it's interesting to watch her do that uh as the player instead of doing what most players do which is hey clone go do it now i'm down juggle my my soldiers as i stand the situation um as a designer what's it like to sort of watch a player make that choice to like look away from the combat and look away from all the spaces you've built and uh um and and just stare at the wall for them by themselves for a minute well i mean it's it's watching somebody who's gone through the looking grass right um so much of making a game like this is smoke and mirrors right and so if the player chooses to put another squad member on that thing you want to have essentially a play unfold in front of them that they get to engage in in terms of defending that person on the console but if they are on the console themselves you definitely don't want them feeling like i just got shot in the back 100 times and that was no fun

um and so watching somebody make that choice in this game is oh you understand how there are times when we're essentially doing a stage play and there are times when we're actively doing what combat that you as a player engage in and you've been able to perceive the difference between those between those times um does that make sense yes something that uh something that i compare that uh that whole one-man hacking section too is a the scene in the amazing spider-man where stan lee is a librarian and he's just kind of dusting off and cleaning books while all the action is happening behind him yeah yeah i i do so three it's just hacking away and behind him it's just explosions and and robots dying and i was like i'm hit like oh there's the code it's cool ooh this this section of the game is interesting we're going through a whole level that is just um uh the clones exploring a um an abandoned uh

uh republic capital ship um and uh the interesting thing to me is that there's a lot less skips in this section at least i noticed a lot less when i was watching a previous run in part because for a while you're separated from the rest of the phones and you can't send them off to you know handle something while you stand by the door um uh so what are your sort of thoughts as a runner about how this part of the game feels compared to the first and third disgrace i like this level this is my favorite of a whole lot more because uh in terms of the run it feels a whole lot more true to the uh intent of the game because i i've always said that every level has a theme geonosis has the like rubble climbing and hopping over over things this game is just this level is just uh pull on uh organizing your squad just making the best use out of them as you possibly can are either of you close enough it's

really interesting to hear you talk about the themes as um as basically player verbs rather than narrative themes or sort of um higher level interactive themes it's fascinating that the lens you bring to it which which makes sense given what you're doing we'd love to talk about lenses when we're around shell games because that's what jesse's whole book was about uh jessie uh show game the show of show games um we're gonna go to chat real quick while uh we let uh the story begin uh um uh me uh sorry i'm far away from my screen misha samarodon uh would like to say it's funny how level design can apply to real life um taylor d uh back again would like to say that speedrunners make excellent qa by the way uh they know that naughty dog hired uh oven donkey an uncharted runner to qa test uncharted 4. they actually had um dave actually popped the question for us yesterday we were speed running on the ukulele

uh harley what are your thoughts for like runners you want to get into qa or anyone in general who want for people who want to professionally play video games all day and every qa person just tried to shoot me from afar um from wherever you're sitting um what are your thoughts about uh getting in and succeeding in that field so i do think that um there are some real strengths to being a speedrunner if you're looking for a gigasqa right you've already proven that you can successfully reproduce games that you reproduce bugs and you know what those reproduction steps are it's super important to be able to communicate that in a in a way that devs can understand um and to be able to represent what's important to the player and what's not um and again right you've got that wide that wide range of player types that you've got to be able to represent for um but uh uh i i wouldn't monitor each other i

wouldn't think it unreasonable to uh if you're trying to get in uh as as qa and you haven't held that position for you know to to sort of rather than showcase a whole speed run uh show how you've found and repo and made reproducible above in a company's game and then written up those steps so that they can see how you would go about communicating about that um you know even how you describe the gate the bug and its impact is important there um so yeah um i can totally see companies being really interested in that especially if they've got a game type for which that matters right there's there are game types that it doesn't matter much um it seems viable yeah uh heath while on the subject of a career um keith close again would like to ask what are the most important skills to have when looking for a level designer or wanting to become one

oh the most important skills uh probably the first one is communication um a level designer is the person who takes and showcases the work of every person on the team on screen in front of the player right um and so you have to be somebody that the whole team can trust and can talk to about uh the situation uh of how is their work gonna look and how is it going to be um uh showcased rather than uh rather than made to look weird or strange um uh that's that's the number one uh second i would think is a pretty decent understanding of architecture you need to know how people move in space and how they expect space to move around them uh in order to do level design well less so if it's mission design you know you get a space shooter architecture doesn't come in that that relevant um uh but architecture is super important

uh some kind of good understanding of dramatic uh dramatic rhythm um whether that's uh you know having having a background in uh in playwriting or uh understanding tv because you're not only setting up the action you're also setting up storytelling right you don't you don't build the cutscene um but you make sure that the cut scene is is produced for the player in its optimum way and and from the perspective uh where they walk in the room they can't miss it and also it doesn't feel weird right we've all walked into it into a room cut scene and it's like oh this isn't this isn't quite feeling right or you moved me 10 feet to the left and i understood whatever sometimes you're forced into that but you know the more you can take care not to have stuff like that happen the more your team is is going to appreciate how you're showing them where yeah i just realized uh something else

these turrets are not really hurting you too so uh no no they are so uh something that uh i want to show off so you saw how i walked in this was just a whole big battleground cutscene yes deluxe model is the only thing standing on you well i'm just going to go into that quick safe quick load bug and it doesn't happen anymore oh my goodness that nice it it just kind of something in the code just never goes through to spawn everybody and engage the battle so you just kind of get to walk through these guys spawn just fine but not uh anything else that's fascinating [Music] set of triggers no it's all right interrupt any time yeah we want to we want to celebrate the like i said we want to celebrate the the line between what was intended and what what what's there um uh harley i have uh before we get

back to chat i have a question to talk about this level um rewatching this run i appreciated how the setup for this level is to get this spooky feel gabe and chapman since that separating you from your squad adds to that you know that nervous feeling that you know um that tension before going into a space um yeah uh it's interesting where this level goes from there because there's kind of this mystery about you know why are the trade oceans here if you're a star wars nerd like me transitions are a uh lizard race they're really into the slave trade um that that do not appear to be aligned with the droid army at first download this level circle shows they are later on there's kind of like an ambiguity to the whole start of it that sort of uh doesn't feel like to me as a player like a full like like that ambiguity never has like a big reveal or anything but sort of make their way into the story um what was sort of your your thoughts is it what do you remember anything about what the team was discussing at the time with this level and playing that ambiguity into into the game also i appreciate how this part of uturn is just waiting for everyone to

walk in they got a spot right you can't just spawn them right there so yep um yeah so uh this you're absolutely right that removing the squad was um was a big thing and and like he had just done a level in which having the squad have your back was super important right so having that having that feeling of being sort of out alone um was important to the tension uh the question of the trend oceans it really comes down to this was an interstitial plot point in our minds between two movies right and um and we wanted to make sure that you were able to discover something that maybe is obvious in the second movie um but you were there for understanding that uh that um uh when those two factions ally um we wanted we wanted it to feel like oh well yeah you started out just

as a clone and you're just you know running around doing your thing but you stumble into a sort of conspiracy of enormous proportions um and so this is this is the beginning of that like these guys don't belong here and and and what are they doing overall um uh it doesn't make a lot of sense uh the reveal might be a little bit um extended mm-hmm uh you know um ambush man this is this this the the environmental storytelling in this level is just so good i i remember the first time i played it i was like this is just great and i i played the game again recently a couple of months ago and i had exactly the same same reaction and just just both both in the moment saying the environmental storytelling in this level is so good um and also uh remembering that feeling of wow the environmental

storytelling is so good and this is this is how to do it um we'll get back to some questions to chat but i'll just finish off with another god of star yeah i actually didn't sort of fully realize that this is kind of interesting because this whole game winds up in kashyyyk um the through line which is at the time was like it made in a lot of star wars things material was how the trend oceans were sort of the mortal enemy of the wookiees and they uh enslaved them and that leading to kashyyyk which is a big set piece from episode three revenge of the sith and just as a natural flow from uh from geonosis through this transition encounter on the ship to um i didn't fully appreciate that before and something something that i really like about this level is that this part here yeah an elegant weapon for a more civilized time huh i missed that every other time you just let me turn right and there it is and he references episode four the only lightsaber in the entire game i

was looking up trivia and i mentioned that you can find one in the game somewhere and i was like i wonder where it is it's actually kind of funny um this is the same kind of ship uh just to give a shout out to the devs that respawn this is the same kind of environment that um uh spoilers for those who haven't played jedi fall in order three two one there's a level where they flash back to order 66 and it's placed on a ship like this um and you get to the way they navigate that space and make that feel you know a very orderly space suddenly feel like threatening to a child um let's go back to chat because y'all are here to chat with harley and i'm just talking about oh go for it actually um so first of all you saw me uh a quick save quickly at the very beginning which uh let me blow up a wall before i defeat the the big guy and something you've been seeing is a i will press the reload button with a full mag you know cancel animations so i can come up to these which usually have to blow up and just

hold your position here it comes [Laughter] nice so how that works but i guess this is 40 is just gonna be yelling at me like don't worry keep holding them off i'll be through soon i don't just be here like like yeah yeah i i i got you i don't don't worry buddy that's awesome [Music] um let's go back to the chat uh because like i said i'm just i every if i nerd out about star wars i nerd out about star wars um gabe would like to know did the holographic hud elements present interesting rendering or tech challenges probably but i wasn't super involved in setting that up um by the time they got to me um it was really just these are the assets that you're hooking up to the to the prefabs and unreal um and making sure that everybody knows which prefabs to use for which situation

um uh i know that it's i mean you'd think that we wouldn't keep remaking these um but you know you need to with every new console generation the the holographic stuff in star wars is such an important important and iconic ip element um that uh that now it's it in some ways um it is a really tempting uh uh thing to use as both ui and a way to guide the player and etc etc um and so from a game design perspective one of the things that it one of the challenges it can often pose is you initially overuse it because it's such a great way to give the player information atop the world um but if you overuse it the players can't tell one part from another and they they again load gets really high there's you're essentially spamming

them with information that they can't process all at once and and so you have to hurt back um uh but yeah the temptation of well it's just an overlay on the world you can put all the information you need in the world yeah it's easy to lead yourself down that path kind of interesting because it weirdly like it's a faux uh augmented reality experience even though i'm sure if you pop the camera out from the player point of view they would still be there um but that's sort of yeah i'm sure um i'm sure actually for people doing augmented reality design like that's something worth considering because it's a it's a foe um there's a weird overlap there yeah yeah i mean and and that's that's exactly like that there there is a great deal of care and craftsmanship that's gone into the whole idea like this whole hud conceptually in the game is the helmet's display right it's it's not it's it's real in that it's ar in the in the game um and uh you know

just took a great deal of thought and iteration um from from the ui designer but also a huge amount of input from uh both the rest of the team and play testers uh i will point out before i get back to questions from chat that we did see a few minutes ago u2 using the turret hack again um and it's interesting how the speed up component there is by eliminating the damage variable um is just able to roll ahead and start completing objectives all the transitions are running around kicking uh three-eighths shins something you saw right here uh in that blue area there's a if i quick save and quick load and then immediately push w uh d and crouch i can sort of clip through an invisible wall and let me walk through which lets me skip a uh a door blowing up sequence which also skips i think a lot of enemy spawning and and turrets

turning on which lets me immediately uh rescue 6-2 and to go off of the like helmet thing there actually is an option in game to just turn on a sort of me hide yep ooh i forget if i played with this oh i feel like i did yeah because i had the i recognize this health bar yeah this is that that's how i first played the game but as i tried to run it more it just kind of got more in the way it makes sense especially if you really are trying to understand everything in the level uh as you move through if the helmet uh was uh stationary it'd be a bit easier but uh it just kind of gets annoying shaking around as i move mm-hmm um speaking of ui uh alex dudman and chat would like to know uh what was behind the decision to have the ammo represented on the weapon itself as

opposed to a hud element which i think a lot of games were experimenting with this at the time you can see on the shotgun right now the 24 and there's like a light counter down there but uh the other weapons that the commander uses uh have little little indicators of how much how many shots are left yeah absolutely um i mean the reality is in a first person shooter very often the character that you're playing from your own perspective is your gun so the more you can have your your gun reflect the state of your character right now the better right and it was as simple as that we just really wanted people to to be able to without having to look at the hud in any way i understand what my gun am i using what state is it in does it need to be reloaded how many how much ammo do i have especially in a game like this where you're essentially scrounging ammo all the time you know knowing how how long it's going to be before you need to make sure you break off combat and ghost grand jam that was incredibly important josh good would like to say that uh blocked over seems to have become a popular outlet for demystifying the

celebrity of level designer so that we so often see attributed to players do you feel that the deconstruction of level design to its most basic components has given both existing and prospective devs a common ground for evolving the profession yeah sure um i mean the as an art form it doesn't advance unless people deconstruct it and put it back together and we don't get fresh blood to have new ideas in level design unless people are finding new avenues into the into it right so um yeah to me it's as simple as that now to be fair it's been years since i actually did level design um and the moment moment-to-moment and daily concerns of a level designer are no longer mine i i try to use my best memory there but it's a little bit uh it's a little bit like trying to remember younger versions of yourself

that's that's such an interesting sentiment um chat seems to really uh gel with the comment you made about how the gun is your character um uh i guess you know with the with the knife popping out every now and then is it like first-person shooter characters are secretly just like a pair of arms uh sometimes um they pretty much are yeah um optimization wise if you pulled this camera out you're definitely not gonna see a character right because you can't afford to be animating and rendering a character that the camera doesn't see especially when you're pushing everything to its limit which we definitely were in this game something uh something i'm gonna do here is uh so i just quick saved i'm gonna quickly again which lets me move in this cutscene but my favorite thing about being on a move in this cut scene is uh you can kill the advisor oh no oh no oh no oh man oh no my brain broke but yeah so for this whole uh dialogue

that they're explaining to you like what the trained oceans are doing here and stuff and uh what you need to do next you're just kind of running to your next objective so you basically cut the time of the level in half um alex jacobson would like to know uh was there any thought in places in qa or even with yourself harley about finding skips within levels like the ones that uh which has done oh absolutely um the numbers of skips i mean that's that's ninety percent of a level designer's job once you've got once you you're at the point where you're only fixing bugs is qa goes in and finds skips and they and they sho and you like you just can't believe some of them right um uh it's it's just a huge enormous part of that of that process um some of these i find myself wondering and and i can't tell if this is the developer's bias or if this is a

possible possibility and it's real i find myself wondering if difference in processors and clock speeds and hardware made things possible now that weren't possible on the machines or running at the time and i i honestly don't know the answer but i want it to be true because we worked really hard to get uh this as uh as bulletproof as it could be and some of these are just a little bit like oh come on we would have found that i think we would have found that we should have found that um let's see here uh um walter walter uh giannuzzi points out wasn't that a premise of uh early id first person shooters that you uh you didn't have to render the character um i'm not super familiar with some of the design history uh of ed's early days uh however john romero uh did a talk about the early programming principles of id and you can

if you have a conference pass you can still go watch it uh because it's archived here on swap card uh for a little bit you can just pop in watch it it's like you were there um uh let's see um alex dudman is replying to gabe that uh um it's programmed that the you know the advisor shows up in the game as a hologram but they're still treated as a character by by the game itself yeah yeah that's obviously the very simple explanation for it but that was just very funny so so there you saw a little bit of my uh squad organization i put 07 all the way back there on that sniper terminal yeah so that i could uh tell him to hack a uh console that was basically right next to him gotcha i love the sort of forethought about if i've got him there that he's right next to it um kind of stuff that's why this is my uh my favorite level in the entire run

just overall the assault ship just has a lot of that like playing the game in the way that the devs truly wanted the player to be experiencing these clones yeah um i'm gonna actually put something up this level um this is levels of detention area uh which the clones joke about like is the transitions of the heat um this is also a label that visually um maps itself to uh the aesthetics behind um a new hope in the detention area on the death star um uh harley i'm sort of curious because uh how i know that like some of that is also the art team and um you know how they choose to make it make an area look after you all gray box it um uh where when you're working with an ip like this like like how do you navigate these opportunities and you sort of realize like hey we have the opportunity to to draw from an existing art slide or an existing space to help players contextualize it oh and i guess you drop into a garbage shoot too duh um uh and what's sort of your thought

process behind that i know you didn't directly work on this level but uh it's awesome i mean before you and before you sit down hopefully before you sit down to even do your paper map of the level the very beginning you understand the area that the level will be in so that you understand the sorts of architecture that you can you can use to direct the player um we absolutely knew that this was gonna be a detention area um i do remember uh some discussion about whether it was cool to actually go down the garbage chute um but but you know it wasn't um the reality was um the the conversation was about is it cooler to be able to actually experience that um or is it more tropey and maybe maybe would make people feel like oh yeah here's another garbage shoot and and we made the guess that it would it would be cooler to be able to experience that it was absolutely born out in

in play testing right but um that finally getting to do what han and luke and leia do at the beginning of new hope yeah yeah everybody wants to do that right we were all we were all eight when that was oh yeah no right and now here the real adventure begins yeah it's where the it's where the movie becomes a creature feature and not just a uh um running gun right in terms of how you how you navigate that stuff generally like when you're working with a known ip the more recognizable your areas can be the more players who know those for those ips are going to be able to navigate your level design again your architectural they'll be able to make sense of your architecture without having without being super confused by it um if this room didn't have that great big open uh open to space window out there so that it reads as a hanger you wouldn't know where to look for the guns in case an enemy ship comes in etc right so all

of that all of those contextual clues are things you can draw off of in a known ip and especially you're talking about an ip that's likely to have fans playing the game because they saw the movie watch the tv show read the book whatever and they already have innate knowledge about the function of a space um that's that's everything you want um that's that's just gravy where your players get to walk into a space and feel clever in a way that um you would have to work really hard for otherwise i really appreciate the the hanger example on another point is because it's a big wall of space even if you're not a star wars aficionado and you're just here because you like a good xbox shooter um it's a wall right like it's just a wall like if you walk up to it you're not gonna get sucked down to the vacuum or the the this level i'm playing now this is my absolute favorite uh portion of the speedrun immediately it's not even that fast it's just

really nice to just sit through because it's so optimized but um something that just happened there that i have no idea why it happens um when you go down that little ramp into that little shoot for some reason your squad will always shift into search and destroy for some reason and i have no idea why i can tell you probably why i i'm not not 100 sure that i'm i'm right about this but but i'm pretty sure i'm right um one of the earlier you asked why what were some of the what were some of the the pivots that you ended up making when you made the game um and putting the squad defaulting the squad into search and destroy was one of them we had a play test where we had pretty much everything working pretty much all the levels put together um uh you know there was polish and stuff to do but uh but we we understood what the game was generally we had a play test and we had a team play through and and

and some of the feedback that we got that was pretty pretty concerning at the time was it doesn't really feel like a squad game like i can hear them but i never see them and i don't really feel like i'm part of a squad and the directors so when they they would er maybe not every milestone but periodically they would do a sort of a half day off site where they'd take feedback like that and they'd really think about it and hash it out and come back like okay here's the plan um they took that that feedback away they came back and they said we think we have the right answer i think the plan is to just basically every time you move into a new section of the game to default to search and destroy so that they'll run in front of you you see your squad do stuff you remember they're there you remember to put them on the maneuvers etc and it worked beautifully it was it was an incredibly simple code change and we've been discussing some very complicated solutions but it really did the trick in terms of reminding you you're in a squad showing you what your squad can do putting you in context of what they're

gonna do this is my favorite level this section is my favorite section of the game yeah so the reason why this is my favorite is because you pop a uh one of the mines on one of these things here over there so at the moment that the normal droids come out of there they um they blow up all four of those and immediately kill their own drop pod position these guys here so they're just in as far away as they can be and then you put someone else right there so they're right next to the the force field power generator so at the moment that's available you can just tell him to pull it up and then he'll just be right next to it yeah that's playing like the level designer like absolutely it's so nice and choreographed but it's funny it that's my favorite section of the game as well but for totally different reasons i love the fact that i have to play spam for what feels like forever and just not not mess even one thing up in order to get

through it that was a boss by the way he was so hard little environmentalist male storytelling he's running at me i love how this is the part of the game where you start to notice like there's actually like when you're in those hallways there's like these lines at the top of the camera and they just feel that they feel like almost like they're yanking you forward uh there's such an interesting like psychological like you're watching when you're watching someone else play this little real and not playing it yourself you realize that there's psychological things that pull people around um your brain grafts on to even if you aren't consciously grabbing onto it yeah i wonder if it'll be irrelevant i i i want to chat a little bit about um way back there uh you turned right and you saw a dead jedi with a with a lightsaber um one of the things that reminded me of is that uh um the the job description or the when when they put up a job rep for a

new level designer lucasarts part of the job description was always do you know why players always turn right instead of left um it was a it was a very specific and i honestly don't know if it's true but i still believe it because it was it was just it is known uh amongst the level designers of lucasarts that people always turn right instead of left and then and so you have to put an end of a hallway there so that they know to hang a left which is why we put that there we knew everybody would see it because that you know conventional wisdom was they're going to turn right oh that's so fascinating uh because uh hey because um i was talking with um bill gardner of 2k a while back about uh t sections in um level design um and his uh his thoughts about those um uh i i know that when i turn right as a player i'm often like okay well that's the way forward i need to look for the goodies but i feel like that might just be like a follow-up reaction to what you were designing at the time which is which is response to what players were doing before

goodies were being placed it's it's certainly possible i mean you know you put a goodie at the end of a thing so a player knows that there's nothing else there right it's yeah it's not necessarily to make sure they have enough ammo though you do have to do that as well um so i i don't know where that loop is a little bit of a chicken and egg question do players turn right because they know their goodies there or do we put goodies there because we know players are going to turn right yeah oh my brains broke a little oh my god that's like it's like a kind of which came first chicken or the egg yeah it's it's it's secret it's like it's like you said secrets of the unit uh i know dave was not saying yesterday secrets to the universe you were saying through the looking class um yeah if we're going game development terms i guess it's uh we've crossed the magic circle um good old turret hack coming up again um uh chad is also uh oh my goodness yeah uh david has an interesting consideration question is it true in the uk australia where turning left on the car is easier than turning right i don't know if anyone's

from the uk or australia yeah i think attic will answer that but i guess i wonder if that has something to do with our perceptions of left and right across different you know countries yeah i i don't know the answer to that but it would be uh interesting i wonder if you could get a grant for that study uh funny enough this tank that's coming up right now popping up on the elevator i have a little lego i have a lego one of those down there on my left one of the i think it's the first one they released from the revenge of the system line um it's missing a few pieces and it got beat up in the moves that we had to do but uh this game is just such like a visual like feast for like oh yeah i remember when like this was my obsession when these things were like what i love thinking about yeah this is the only full-sized i don't know if this is the only one in the game i don't remember you might be able to see them from a distance um and maybe i know that on kashyyyk you see like the torrent fighters uh yeah for the first time it's so interesting to see them rendered because because they show up in the

clone wars tv show so much now um like you know there's like that the way they look there is burning my brain it's funny to see the same silhouette um but just you know like rendered in ue2 um as opposed to the animation of clone wars like all the little details like that where it's like oh we made this one asset for this one scene and it looks this way and it clearly looks like the thing that's in the movie um i actually now don't even remember um so i know this game would have shipped right you know in between the two movies uh and now i'm just having a star wars nerd out like i don't remember if the torrents were in episode two but i do remember that they were in the first animated tv series that aired on cartoon network with like the little short micro episodes um so now i'm just having a whole bunch of like wait when was this when was this show what was this show yeah i i can't go that deep into that nerd rabbit hole i'm sorry it's okay i'm i'm in the rabbit hole by myself and yeah sometimes you end up there um uh oh uh

jd four were there any elements in the level design ladder or excuse me were there any elements in the local design like the latter on the tank where you had to extrapolate from the cannon um or from what lucas film handed you to realize it in the game world um because that ladder is definitely he's right the ladder that you climb up into the tank is that like oh of course there'd be a ladder all right but it's not something that i think is shown elsewhere i mean yes uh i hate to generalize so much but in some ways that's what level design is right here's a here's a room with a function now let's put a fight in that room and how do we use the function of the room to give coherence to the fight right um here's an object with a function etc uh the one that um that i think uh in my memory it was the one that really i had to think about a lot was the elevators in kashyyyk um it seemed really weird to me that

wookies would need elevators but we're not wookies and we have to get up and down somewhere right um and uh and it didn't necessarily feel like it was going to be a great choice to have a huge amount of shoe leather uh in order to just go up um uh by shoe leather you mean like ramps on stairways well yeah yeah just just a lot of walking and running right um yeah shoe leather is is like unless you can fill it with action nobody wants to walk forever right and so and so we ended up with with uh elevators and it works out fine and they actually work as a pretty nice progress bar through that section of the game okay going up another going up another elevator oh i'm going up another level um but uh initially um i remember being convinced that wasn't gonna work yeah um bradley ellis would like know uh when you designed levels what was your philosophy for designing cover that's a great question and i love it um

me personally it was give the player enough agency that they can do what they want to do with their squad right we had we had these mechanics where you could essentially have three extra guns going at once and i didn't just want to have well here's three cover spots where uh where you can put your three squad members and that'll help you i wanted i wanted players to be able to really choose how they were gonna take on different different challenges um uh that was partly because i had the um advantage of getting to play nearly complete levels before i even started making mine because i came onto the team i wasn't on the team during pre-production i came on as production started so in terms of the player being able to use cover uh i at the time tended to be a real run-and-gun player where basically my play pattern was find all the ammo

and use all the heal the heal stations so i probably actually uh in terms of philosophy probably my philosophy was don't put enough cover in to keep people moving um the mail so that feels like sort of a remnant games changed a lot in this time cover got a lot more important um compared to the doom days where uh cover was cover doom what no you right it's rip and tear baby um we're coming up on kashyyyk uh for folks in chat just a heads up we still have a little bit of time left in the run but if we will be coming towards the nia so just start asking questions harley when we talked before uh the show you you you told us that kashyyyk uh the camp that's coming up and then the the tree at the end of the areas you built by hand so feel free to just go in and start telling stories uh if there's anything you want to tell us about making sure getting this barbecued creature was a was a major coup for me i really wanted to show um uh i wanted i wanted to show the

trend ocean's relaxing as a way of letting you walk into this space and be relaxed so that we can do a little bit a little bit of ramping up the excitement but it was late and uh there really wasn't a lot of budget or scope for uh transocean food um but somebody did me a huge favor and made me that barbecued lizard creature for which i will forever be grateful i always think about that and when i'm interviewing devas about games because i'm always like keeping an eye out now after hearing a story from uh tj fix me about insomniac about how something that like if you think about it like a physical object yeah sure we could probably like make a fake trans ocean creek you know like just a bit of barbecue or something like some gross meat like yeah we can whip that up in 30 minutes in video games in our you want me to do what for one thing from wow uh ambush which you basically skipped most of just to see

oh that's why i got so excited when i watched i'm just what what this run looks like on kashyyyk is so different from the is the most uh we don't care about your effort we want to go fast level exactly i keep wondering why that is under the hood like why does the gunship you know why does the capital ship have such linear sections versus kashyyyk has open worms but i don't want to speculate uh i'm kind of thinking it's mostly just due to the opening tower nature of it all the the ship is kind of closed in so there's nothing to really climb on while um [Music] wow this has a lot of like hills and uh that you can climb and stuff like that yeah we definitely wanted to change the feel so that you felt like you were outside and so some of that stuff comes from from needing to be able to do that for sure

that's one of those explosions that hurts you i wasn't back far enough oh yeah i love how giant the lookies are in this game yeah it looks like you you want to make it count right hey go to galaxy's edge when it's safe to again uh and uh you can do that there because chewie wants to do that so something fun i'm gonna do in this next level for the longest time they could figure out how to get the press the walk button to make the zip line stop moving you to work on this level but once this uh oh what's this uh what's the quick quicksave quick little thing was found uh they they finally found found the way and now you're gonna pop and you know through this level you kind of go all the way around rescuing wookies from yeah this is my carefully carefully

crafted uh bsp well at least you get to see that the entire level is actually spatially coherent which is a little bit rare and that it all fits in the space that it's supposed to fit in in real space i'm going to say cheerfully this is awesome another fun thing i'm actually going to run through this in the intended way uh just to give viewers at least a perspective for how much this is skipping so oh yeah so we get to see yeah thank you thank you too that's really nice of you i actually absolutely love that stuff i absolutely love the noises that the wookies make in the sound they all they always sound so sad they sound like oh why is this happening i was having a good morning so here i'm gonna click save what you're supposed to do is just come to this window see grievous

the amount of time that i spent making sure that you had to see grievous before you could continue on you would just be flabbergasted but yeah so so you do that you come through here you know there's that guy there so you see tarfall and you know you you blow this up and i wish the sound i know um i remember brett got the sound team on uh some of the sound folks on his his run and uh they were talking about some of their work and i'd love to know like which of these were were pulled from the lucas archives uh from ben birdsworth and which of these were

cooked up or inspired by it so you you do all that but what you what you do for the run is uh you you do not look at grievous it is very bad to look at grievous don't look good don't scare davis do not look at grievous just step over here don't verify grievous's presence on fishy yeah you acknowledge charcoal exists yes of course you do because it's the cut scene of grievous yeah you you tap that on there you throw that and then and then these guys just stand here and let you spam them not usually you have to use the uh the shock grenade uh stun them which is interesting because the shock

grenade it's also damaging you right or it's supposed to be so you don't want to stand by it it is but it's pretty insignificant compared to yeah like that it gives just the thinking of how how i would have played the second you know i don't stand by the grenades i throw where i try not to i mean i do an apex legends who am i kidding like i get i get you know i blow myself up um uh but runners and other fast oh god the fighter has no collision it actually does oh right here in the center yeah um it's fascinating i i i can verify i'm pretty sure that that's an honest hack that shipped in the game um having having been the one who tried to set that up to be bulletproof yeah that was yeah these scavenger droids are the worst to deal with now this section uh was not my level i did help a little bit with bug fixing i don't think i helped with optimization at all so there are parts where i'm like yeah i know this plate part really really well because i ended up you know painstakingly doing a thing

well now i feel bad but not not most of it most of it i'm just gonna be able to enjoy it without the uh without the no don't feel bad right like we do this because we want people to have fun and fun means different things to different people it's all good um jd ford uh in chat uh says watching someone just slip through your meticulous design must be equally parts frustrating and morbidly fascinating i mean i just want to go back in time and fix it that's all i do oh god yeah um gabe wants to know if you can kill grievous with that pack no you grievous does not have a health bar or anything like that grievous is just a uh he's he's the moving equivalent of a prop that's right hey that's true in real life too in the movies hey is is horribly pathetic in the movies

and the clone wars compared to his 2d clone wars variant yeah go for it i believe 2d clone wars came out was out about the same time as this oh hello army good to meet you um was was out at about the the same time as uh as this and so seeing grievous was like oh shoot it's that guy oh oh man we better be careful around him but uh and then he came out for three and uh for three in the the clone wars and uh everyone was just like he's not as scary as he's supposed to be okay i need to deal with these guys gotcha setting up the grievous guards was one of the most fun things for me as a level designer um uh they were just so fun they were unlike they operated unlike any other level in the game um and and for me that stuff is always really interesting right take take a new ingredient and try to try to

blend it in dish that's already being served as it were going down yeah the magna guards are such like an interesting design component because they're they're not jedi characters but they use jedi-ish weapons but they're droids uh but so they're melee but they're melee fighters and this is a gun game but they're um so watching different games like try to figure out how to put them in there we go oh no oh no oh nice or off the map you have to know where you're going um are you using sound to navigate no i'm using this wall here and i i wasn't hugging it quite as well as i should be gotcha here we go um uh alex jacobson wants to weigh in with a lot of glitch hunters than speedrunning communities actually have a lot of knowledge about how games work whether it's dev experience or qa experience and how that's how they find a lot of exploits is wondering

if someone uh i wonder if someone forgot to stop this at least that's too um alex is not large it's obviously not true for all runners absolutely right um and even if you haven't worked in the industry once you've found a few of these you start seeing the kinds of ways that um that we think and and you know it opens up new horizons um i'm sure this isn't consistent across the discipline but in my experience a lot of level designers are super organized thinkers because you have to be able to manage huge amounts of data and you have to be aware at any time of like what is the player's objective what tools do they have you know what do they know what do they not know etc etc and so that's gonna lead you to setting things up in a specific way that people who have uh who have less of a tendency to organize stuff in that way are going to be able to exploit you're going to leave holes in the way you've got stuff set up

um uh let's see uh i'm looking at chat uh matthew matthew oh no go for it so there you saw me do the quick save quick load to be able to skip the zipline portion and here i'm actually using the i didn't do that right i'm actually using the games physics to skip uh packing this console here that uh that has the crane move i did that too early so you just shoot this and they spawn release it and then it drops it onto him rather than meaning to come over here and hack this which you can still hack this and still move the crane despite there being nothing on it anymore that's good implementation right there chad is discussing uh how come the clone advisor was killable um but grievous was not um

uh they think grievous is different because he's unique in the game and there are plenty of clones of health bars and hitboxes elsewhere in the game because they obviously interact with uh the the droids and some combat scenarios okay we're just walking through the lad again i see that doesn't even save time or anything it's just fun for messing around this level is what i call a whole w level a whole w level you just hold the forward key because there's no skips or tricks just kind of walking through it i hold up the pistol here because it just doesn't use ammo and the most combat i do is against the little scavenger droids i guess the pistol also um uh it uses less camera time so if you're trying to keep an eye on the environment yeah i i thought at first they did it because it makes you move faster but no i kind of wish that was the case though i feel like a whole lot more uh unique movement would also come into play sometimes with just pulling out the

pistol um harley i don't know if you remember anything about the cell we can jam on like like the pistol game i remember games from this arrow very like okay you have your your general gun you have your situational guns uh that play your like maybe guns with higher skill uses that can then be used more broadly um like this game's sniper attachment um but the pistol is always like the fallback for when you run out of ammo and that convention has changed a lot um but it feels like a leftover thing from doom where the pistol was just sort of you know your little backup if you could not find ammo and you needed to get great do something yeah absolutely in some ways it was um it's also worth remembering that um this game was a game that was intended to be um reaching a star wars audience not necessarily a shooter's shooter audience we expected to include shooters among them but there were a lot of star wars fans at the time especially new star wars fans that didn't necessarily have a really sophisticated shooter um uh skill base and so we

needed to make sure that um if push came to shove and they had they had uh wasted all their ammo or used it on on on something that they had a way to try to get to the next ammo drop to try to get to the next load etcetera um and uh and so you know as as you do when you're making games you look at existing games and you say how did they solve that right um we did not think we were going to be able to solve it just with the knife thing coming out of your hand because it's actually a pretty difficult skill in and of itself and there are enemies that it's pretty hard to kill that way though as you've proven today you can kill anything that way if you know how um speaking on something about designing shooter stuff um something i was paying attention to on uh actually weirdly lines up with an experience i have playing uh response apex legends right now i'm just getting all the laughter oh yeah this is bad this is this is something this is okay you can just

climb up here and why really i don't know i don't feel like playing this level today i don't like this one some something something is happening where every time i'm about to bring up the very specific question i'm about to ask who's just like okay let's let's break let's break everyone's brains visually a lot of that's a lot of these levels unfortunately there's just no real times for uh breaks too many uh you'll notice i'm leaving them behind a lot here despite nothing really that like would affect them going forward that's because i need them to be at full health it's very important that they're in full health fascinating interesting for the upcoming bridge section that they keep bringing up yep right that section is the hardest in the game i think so yeah we'll see how you can break the last level it's actually really difficult there's it's it's got a lot of uh financing and strategy to it yeah here you'll see you really have to have the whole picture

uh for this bridge level and be fascinated to see how you take it off it's it's very choreographed and it's really frustrating sometimes because uh sometimes uh droids don't go the they don't dance the dance so you're just like you you're not in place what are you doing um i'm gonna bring up my question really quick what we got going on the bridge um uh when you watch uh utsu zoom in with the assault rifle or aiming on the assault rifle you see like a pretty significant muzzle flare there um and i've begun to notice in shooters when the flare is so bright that i actually have trouble seeing my opponent especially in the pvp game um harley do you remember any discussions about that uh in that animation effect uh when you were working on public commando i don't i don't necessarily remember anything specific to that um uh we played the team played the multiplayer uh portion every friday for like the second half of the day we needed to make sure they were as they say these days eating around dog food i don't think

that's what we called it back then um and we gave a lot of feedback about how stuff that was working in the in the single player portion of the game might be getting in the way in the multiplayer most people on the team were pretty avid uh you know multiplayer shooter players um but i don't remember that one specifically um it might have been because i think we have it we had a tendency and this will not surprise you knowing how much love we put into uh oh seven story we had a tendency as a team to be uh either sniper or um or whatever the heavy i don't remember what that what that thing is called um anti-armor uh the dc-17 yeah yeah um we uh and so i'm not sure that that would have gotten the uh due diligence that it really really uh needed to get that level of

polish if that makes sense i actually know some spoken to some other developers that muzzle player is often tweaking it as an intentional thing sometimes um but yeah um uh bradley ellis like you know was there an enemy that was hard to design around based on their difficulty to the player um yes it's a surprising answer i think i'm the only level designer who got to use every enemy in the game in a level because of the last level it's basically an old home week for for enemies um and honestly the hardest one to design around was that when the geonosian young things that come out of the eggs they're surprisingly hard for players to hit uh they move fast and they can do a lot of damage especially if you've got more than one of them uh surprisingly quickly and so um being able to put enough of them in

the room that they that they feel creepy enough commentary to the amount of damage they can do to you very quickly actually turned out to be quite a challenge something remember we're past the bridge we sort of just rolled past it but the uh something i appreciate and the way that sequence plays out is that you know you go to blow the bridge you click the button the charge doesn't go off and everyone panics and that feels like one of the most authentic uh you know everyone from the clones the advisor panics um and i feel like that broad spread like wait what do we do is one of the neatest uh games in general i love it when like oh you complete an objective but something went wrong and now you have to upend it like it's such a good tensions tension crazy i definitely really like the uh the dialogue in that part i was actually just thinking about that as it happened i really like how uh how just genuine uh 38 sounds when he's just like what misfire who packed that charge yeah who is the idiot who did that

yeah uh mike stanley who wrote a good portion of this game's dialogue really did just an amazing job when we came to him and said okay so we had this huge challenge where we had essentially a character that was one character but now has to be differentiated and you have to feel like you're part of this brotherhood blah blah blah can you do it and you don't have very much time um just did an amazing job um you know as a level designer you come up with this is the function of this line that i need as you go through your level you send it off you get it back um and i i can remember so clearly getting my lines back and being like this stuff is great i absolutely love all the dialogue and just the voice i love just clones in general i think clones are way cooler than stormtroopers i think they're cooler than rebels i think they're cooler than joy they're just my favorite uh military form in the entire series um uh i remember um hearing a disney infinity designer saying they ran into a

really weird problem when they were making a star wars disney infinity product um which was uh they hit a weird age gap between how some players approached their levels because obviously depending on where you were which which line of star wars they're making content for you storm troopers or you were fighting with clones and they hit a they hit a point where younger players who grew up with the prequels in the clone wars um some people slightly younger than i think me and utsu um were were struck were not as they didn't view white armor as bad guys by default um i forgot the full context of the phone so i'm paraphrasing but i was like that blew my mind because i was like you know to me white armor is by default evil and it's not like you know when the clone wars came around but like that like the link between these friendly clones and the stormtroopers was something i appreciated but didn't you know internalize but if you go up with the clone wars and like captain rex was like your action figure or something that's that's different than what i had yeah oh yeah visual language just go ahead i'm gonna skip a trigger that makes it

so i don't have to blow up that door nice because i quick save and quick loaded uh-huh and i'm coming up on some uh really uh really fun just uh parkour that skips a little bit of fights uh which the jumps look really really hard but they're actually surprisingly easy jump kit the wookies just did yeah all right go marshall here we go oh my goodness nice and here it is yeah just these droids are like all right let's get this quote what is he doing where is he going what these commandos are weird uh um i always like i always think of game

ai as sort of being like you know like a working schmuck in a way because they're always they're like okay we got to pretend to do the thing um like the very wreck-it ralph like you know showing up for or reboot the canadian animated show and and that and to speedrunners especially uh like like just a player who is absolutely disregarding um setting up fiction and it's amusing it kind of makes me wish a little bit that this ip had allowed us uh fictionally to do blood gates but it wasn't a thing i mean a few places we did with hacking consoles and stuff but um you know it doesn't really make sense very much in the ip uh blood gates do you mean like the key card hunting of doom no i mean basically like we're just not gonna let you out of this room we're not gonna let the exit be openable until you've killed everything in this room that needs killing right got it yeah god of war that's it yeah like you have to gather the resource from the enemies to kill them yeah yeah um and it just puts a cap on

that yeah yep um oh no to your your comment about um white uh white stormtroopers being evil or not evil um those are the kinds of details that uh but usually an ip gives you an advantage on right everybody knows the visual language of this thing and so you don't have to teach your players to shoot the guys in white or not shoot the guys in white because they all know they all saw the movie but when you talk about a movie that has a history that or an ip that has a history that spans that many changes in the universe and and people being more or less familiar with different time periods uh it's really hard to get a shared context so that you can take advantage of the ipa in that way and it's interesting because if you think about it from like a writing and thematic standpoint like everything that happens is so functional but like the movies also aren't free from you know relying on visual language they need you the audience to understand you know morally or thematically what's going on um and there's conversations about what

the prequels you know sort of they're trying to do well do less well um and the fact that they did you know get a generation of kids to sort of attach to these characters it's um culturally uh if you go on what's star wars tick tock and you watch like kids even younger than the prequel kids you know learning about star you know growing up with star wars and making their videos and jokes and references hey they're hilarious um i love that such a thing exists as star wars to talk yeah so sorry to interrupt but uh so here i'm doing something kind of interesting where uh i'm jumping over a trigger that spawns super battle droids um so that tarpauld doesn't die and i'm also making sure my uh my troopers don't uh don't come in so they also don't hit the triggers because uh clone troopers can hit the the squad can hit trick this is not this hard to jump over it wasn't wrong with me um leaning trying to get you up over it

i want to see i know this isn't this isn't that hard i know you can't see it also but sometimes when you do a thing that um that i did a hundred times or you don't do a thing i'm like doing this like especially when you when you trigger an explosion and you're right up in front of it i'm like leaning and leaning away from the screen yeah so um so yeah so you skipped the trigger uh tarfal can't hit the trigger that spawned supervisor joints oh shoot i didn't click save uh let me do this again okay there you go i remember watching this section and seeing how difficult this whole thing can be i mean at least it's not um not a bug you can just stumble into you really gotta want it yeah i feel like those ones are more forgivable like the ones that you really have to force there we go um yeah so tarfal can't hit uh triggers um bottom floors all closed up so you come over here you jump around

this and you can just kind of skip this room a little bit by just shooting this a lot find and harley i'm pretty sure those those barriers were just meant to say the players don't come over here don't come over here pretty much yeah right you'd have to come in in some no but now you're getting triggers these transitions have a lot more health than normal trans oceans i don't know why they have so much more health i don't either uh probably to make this a little bit of a mini boss fight with the uh grievous guard there i the first time the first time i saw this enemy um you know uh i think i had not been believing we were going to be able to

pull this off so i mean it still had still had a lot of bugs and a lot of work to go but the first time i saw this enemy with what the animators and the ai programmer had managed to do i was just so excited i couldn't wait to make this guy hoppity jumpity flippity around my levels watch i love how u2 like uh in the in the record run that u2 holds you can watch her try to get this guard to actually jump down because oh i i don't have record at all i have fourth place so my recent playthrough which is on the same difficulty i just looked it up right before we did this is eight hours to be fair i am a very slow player right i like to look at everything and i go around i can't stand it if there's any ammo that i didn't pick up etc um that's just my play style but um so this is this is less than a quarter of my playthrough uh on the same difficulty uh you saw me there go to the menu and uh and just know the chapter

because that um that spawns me with with more ammo and it puts my uh my squad at all full health right and that's a dead sheet i believe right because we needed to be able to um uh to just pop in and try new stuff out and have your squad be healthy um i think at some point we actually had to ask for a dead cheat to give a sort of random amount of health to your squad so that we would know what it was like to play through the sections of your level if you had done more or less well did you in terms of keeping them healthy was was cooperative play ever something that you experimented with in this game not really um yeah i don't yeah i don't i didn't think but yeah just kind of something that like pop in my head like and then and credit the chat chat's actually asking me a co-op for a second i just sort of we kept getting on other topics sure

uh there's talk of the sequel which um i believe has been discussed that a sequel was considered and then canceled for this game and people in chat were asking oh would the sequel had co-op and it's like well it never got that far so that's not a question we can really have an answer for you know the sequel could have had it could have had lat commando sections where you're riding in the gun ships and shooting things for all we know i would so love either a sequel or a remake a remake was like modern day mechanics would be really cool yeah like uh there's been a lot of interesting remasters like resident evil and final fantasy that have been revisiting old i'd love to see this with like a sprint feature added maybe some uh maybe some stuff from the new uh battlefront that commandos are in now yeah the commandos have uh made the journey to um battle ea's battlefront too harley so yeah um uh the folks dice dice does those lacie they're still they're keeping your your boys alive excellent i'm so happy that uh

the creators of clone wars loved delta squad so much that they made them canon before disney's uh declaration of non-canon yeah the the the reckoning the splits the legends creation i i appreciate i appreciate that as a star wars fan that like especially when they were heading into an era that the books had tread over so thoroughly um i appreciate that they just needed to come out and say like we can't maintain this guys this is really hard um we need to start over um you know like i know delta republic commando isn't canon anymore but that's never gonna stop the fun i have with it well rappon commando now is canon because um because of uh of them being in the clone wars tv show which thus my connection makes this game canon i believe oh god i don't want to do more nerd discussions right now i believe like officially like this is legends because the events of kaukashi because sheet battle started had been rewritten elsewhere it's like how if you um but enough halo has the same problem they made a whole

book called fall of reach and then they made the reach halo reach the video game and they play out in drastically different ways even though i actually really like the fall of reachbook um it is it is really hard to keep the universe consistent over time especially i just want to insert very quickly you're back in my level and i'm so so glad to watch you grinding your way up these ramps the way that i uh that i hoped people would have to do even in a speed run i actually hadn't been uh i haven't been managing my ammo well so i'm actually not taking out these super androids as efficiently as i could yeah um yeah you you really want heavy armor for this i noticed in the recorded run that you rely on uh you're constantly like it's interesting to see where you burn time to go back and get your grenade you know like you officially manage the grenades and stuff too um like there really is a beaut if if anyone here i i found dudes running on speedrun.com if you want to watch uh utsu like really just like show what what's going on there's obviously other runners in there you can watch and appreciate you i just don't know their names

um but uh uh the view the balance of like and like the weaving between them you know the skips but the the ammo management like like there's really um every runner we've had on this week uh bubbles delphi go dave david dave this is a skit and i've been treating this like this is a skill this isn't just like asking someone to come on and play a game um that's how i've been thinking uh and i've been appreciating that this whole time this whole week it's been such a class watching you walk up and stab that drug dispenser to death is like you're just stabbing me in the heart harley uh do you have any other memories about working on this particular section uh so this this whole section what i really wanted like after this not the next step but i think the step after you finally get to see the sky again right and i really wanted it to feel essentially i was drawing a little bit on them on lord of the rings i wanted to feel like this is the section under the mountain where you're just really slogging

through and then and then it opens up again um and also it's late game so i wanted it to be really hard um uh the uh the opera the space wasn't really there to put as many um as many maneuver options as i wanted in um there's just you know in order to get all of your squad on screen firing um it was pretty difficult gotcha so so there i just jumped over a trigger that spawns more transitions oh yeah i wonder what was going on with these little um uh the little like jumps over the barrels and the rocks because when i watched you run i didn't fully understand it yeah that is uh that's just 100 making sure that more enemies don't spawn this guy this yeah this guy likes to not get flashbanged i don't know what that is yeah i don't know why he just kind of

doesn't sometimes which is really frustrating because you throw that and you're going fast and then suddenly your back is full of bullets yeah and you're just kind of like excuse me too much power that's interesting because it hits the normal player too you know who might be trying to rely on flashbang grenades yeah i wonder i wonder if he might be inside some collision initially that um that uh you know a few more seconds it would be fine uh but he's inside collision and so from his perspective he's not getting hit by the collision of the of the grenade when it goes on back into the other room um uh harley we have a question from chat dave pacquiao back again how does it feel to watch people i mean you sort of said this uh when they're melee choosing the droid spawns but how does it feel to watch people melee cheese other enemies like the super battle droids or the droid dekas i mean uh sometimes especially when it's a thing that i'm like oh man i know exactly what i could have done to fix that it you know it's a little bit hard

but mostly it's just great to watch people um uh taking this this bit of software and finding new ways to to have fun with it um the the idea that somebody would care enough about a game that you made to spend as much time as you would have had to spend to just gain the knowledge let alone the skill to do this is pretty great right um just just imagining the many many hours of of somebody working to get this far we are now in a um part of the citadel which i believe makes we're moving closer and closer to the end of the game uh um we've got a little we have officially 23 minutes left in the schedule uh so just a reminder but i don't quite know how that relates to where utsu is in the run um reminder for folks if you have questions for harley questions for food too throw them in chat we are still grabbing them even if

utu and i stop every five minutes to geek out about star wars um uh because you can't stop me um gabe throws in that the droid because in particular have an exploit where if you run up to them they can't shoot you because the guns stick through your body ew so that wasn't working correctly so i'm loading just an auto save real quick a lot of things just haven't been working right in this yeah i don't know i don't know why look it's it's gdc summer it's it's it's uh every unexpected thing that can't happen will happen that's right uh this is how we do gdc this year is everything going wrong um in these in these uncertain times we are all learning to be the most flexible version ourselves there we go oh i know what i was doing wrong i was i was quick saving pressing even quick loading when i need to press e then quick save quick load uh so

is it is this a hack or a fighting game combo uh so this um i'm uh so g and ocean elites are supposed to spawn here um but they don't i don't remember exactly the reason i was told the reason one so i don't remember the reason why um but yeah so this is hacking and also uh i'm i'm not holding it this is just this is just going nice let's take a break i will be i'll be 100 honest with you this room is my least favorite room in the game so the fact that you figured out how to skip it it's all good man yeah so the g notions don't spawn uh but when the when you finish this hack he gives the g notions a death uh command so what happens is the game is just like here you go you're like oh thank you i didn't get to say this earlier i appreciate whoever on the lucas arts

animation team modeled this and animated this gun because the little the little fingers little little just like click clicky right there when i played this game there's something satisfying about having that weapon out yeah i i was wondering what those were at first and i learned that those are actually like this this gun runs off of like gene ocean blood so oh what it's doing is it's trying to stab into your arm and take your geonose and blood but you don't have gnosian blood that's why they run out and and you can't just put more ammo in them that's it that's yeah and that's why geonosian elites can just kind of keep using them over and over again you're like when are you going to run out of ammo when i kind of wish there was a mechanic where i understand this game was made i thought about but it'd be kind of cool if there was a mechanic where like the the more they shot at you with it like you'd see their health like slowly going down or something um it's pretty good narrative mechanical resonance there honestly the little

detail um actually the game was made in 2003-2004 i think we were basically done by 2005 right right yeah um jules blumenthal says even though we commented on how you know things just things have been go it's 20 20 things go wrong uh many things have gone right though in this round you'd say that's a big thanks to you and then i know i'm gonna thank you profusely again at the end but uh um i just wanna hope folks and chad appreciate you you know we got some speedrunners out there in chat so i know they appreciate but from the development side i hope folks appreciate that uh utsu um what has been showing off today is something you know that took a lot of practice and time did we appreciate having your weather um do you usually are you usually uh in a position where you need to talk and play at the same time when you're speed running itsu uh not if i'm not like wanting to uh my current uh personal best uh i was quiet for so that doesn't surprise me

we um we stream games on the gc twitch channel and we do so while interviewing developers and i have after a couple years of doing it i have a process now where you know i make sure i check out the game first and then check out how intense it is and depending on that intensity i will either grab a co-worker to help run the interview or i will um uh pre-record my footage for the game because uh i've played games while interviewing the developers before sometimes very intensely and after every time the developer goes man like we have to you know like when we're doing press interviews at e3 or whatever and people want to interview us while we're playing the game it's impossible i don't know how you do this i'm like yeah i don't know either i don't remember the interview yeah totally i i very early on in my career i realized i have to say look on demos or whatever i can either play or i can talk i can't do both oh yeah this wookie has to die [Music]

he should have just given me that rocket launcher to begin with fair enough it's interesting because you probably um harley were you working on this hole again yeah which means you probably put them in there like oh we'll let's give the player a friend to help make this fight feel authentic i thought he was probably going to get killed but i didn't think he was going to get killed by the player okay i'm going to kill my own squad too unfortunately yeah but they can be revived right as long as you're still alive that's all good stay focused it is like god this is just one of those moments that feels like um these grievous spirits just aren't cooperating like they're they're bouncing around and out of position yeah usually they're all supposed to cluster up like around there and then uh and then they'll um i'll be able to walk on the rocket launcher and kill all three at once but they just weren't having any of it fascinating

uh going to chat real quick alex jacobson would like to say they've never had a chance to get this much insight into game development as a speedrunner so this is a cool opportunity as a runner and they're watching their friend run a cool game oh thanks alex thank you for joining us uh matthew miller would like to say every time someone interjects with chat comics they expect to hear about donations then they remember it's gdc and not gdq game development done quick uh which as dylan watson points out it's just a game jam um uh i will say i think gtq is going on later this month and i hope folks who have the opportunity to do can check it out and donate uh to that event because it's a neat event uh without them organizing things uh you know we wouldn't have i just don't think we would have found pizza or the other runners we've had um oh we have a question uh john krachowski would like to know uh how were the levels coordinated with the story team were the levels made first in uh story tacked on vice versa or a

mixture of both i bet it's a mixture of both i'm interested to see how hear how it played out a little bit of a mixture of both mostly though um the story team uh led by tim longo who is the creative director wrote the story overall and then split the story up into gameplay parts and handed those gameplay parts to us saying okay your job is to make it fun with gameplay and also make sure this part of the story gets told so we're coming up with a final level here on the tree part yeah the tree climbing yeah the tree part where i if you thought i was wait what do you mean my squad's unavailable they're already right behind me huh no oh that's that's not what i want i'm gonna load auto save that's a different kind of speed run bug um but uh oh wow i'm all the way back here interesting all right i will remember the auto save for a quick save um but uh this is next the last level is probably

going to hurt you a lot if simply destroying these uh joy dispensers has hurt you because i know the last level is supposed to i like you drop off your uh your squad at the turrets in like reverse order of the way you got them and stuff and well you'll see what we kind of do we while we get back to that section gabe would like to ask uh did did uh the lucas art seemed to ever get any pushback um on concepts like back to implants or new weapons based on them not fitting with star wars which i think is just a good springboard for like conversations about how you work with uh ip holders and how you try to you know build a good partnership with them yeah i mean um i was i was at lucasarts for seven years and worked on a number of games um and and for every one of those there was always a negotiation with with um with ip4 stuff right because we were always wanting to and trying to push game mechanics sort of through a narrative sieve if you

will right um and uh so we'd come up with like oh well we could just make this happen and um so yeah there were there were always intense negotiations about that in terms of this particular one i don't i don't remember that there was were any any uh particularly vivid conversations um i know that we spent a lot of time mechanically working on how do the back to tanks work you know we started with just regular health pickups like like like many games didn't do at the time um uh and uh i don't exactly remember why we arrived we arrived on this because we really wanted you and your squad to feel like you needed to help each other out health-wise um and it it didn't make a lot of sense to be trading uh um health you were doing a look at trigger thing aren't you

yeah um this is kind of finicky at all it's a little bit of rng so i know what's about to happen i think that's good sorry i've hijacked my brain i was probably in the middle of a word and i can't oh no no no i actually harley i would appreciate if you watch this part because i i have to uh yeah i have to restart actually i have a hard save so i can load that next time if i don't get it but uh yeah this this part is a little bit of rng um since uh the barrel has to it has to fling in a way where i can both get on top of it but it's also high enough for me to get somewhere oh that's the wrong kind of that's the one kind of made oh whoops okay here let me load my heart safe

also these uh textures are so just a little uh low graphics that uh it's hard to line up sometimes because i'm just kind of going off of a vague smudge here we're gonna try to get this by a hair no that's not gonna work this is this is the most finicky part of the the run but the skip is very much worth it yeah again hardly like i said i went in i was like oh she worked on these sections i watched these sections uh oh the um the textures are actually probably lower res in this part of the game even on the same objects than they are in other yeah i think this will work this might work um here we go here we go here we go let it go let it go

so you walk up here can't hold it back anymore and uh lovely look at all that unreal engine 2 goodness yep bradley ellis would like to know what was your favorite level to design harley and why i think it was this one um i got to play with every enemy um i i actually didn't start it out as the level designer for this uh kevin schmidt actually did the paper design and had worked with the artist to get the layout um but then he transferred over to be the lead level designer and brought me in to finish it and uh and so i had this whole thing where i wanted i wanted players to face every enemy they faced um with a squad but uh but to be able to use what they knew about the enemies to face them so six two is over here now but oh 07 40

are still back there i'm gonna quick save here because this one this egg here in particular will sometimes fall on your head as you're trying to run through or that one also will land on your head as you're trying to run oh no gonna look up i'm just trying to make the most uh straightforward path through here because you don't kill all these eggs until the very end of the hallway yeah and that's how i played this game as well when i when i was doing it um yeah it's interesting because it's kind of like it's kind of like you're kiting the whole room into a to be enough that you can use your area of effect uh actions to to handle them as opposed to like grinding straight through and dealing with all the little swarms yeah if you do that you're just gonna use up all your ammo and be really sad is it a different feeling uh oh well

actually we're at the key part of the game here i'm going to let this play out sorry alex we'll get to your question keep it up i have a question about this turret yeah it its fire rate feels so inconsistent it doesn't have like a set fire rate or anything or ammo count or anything because sometimes it feels like it takes like five seconds for it to start firing again after a burst and then sometimes it feels like if i wiggle my mouse it starts to shoot again yeah i don't know the answer to that um uh it doesn't have a set ammo count because we needed people to be able to shoot this thing until it was done because this is the end of the game and you can't finish the game until it you know it's done you like my awesome destruction there yeah and that was nothing like that that's it that's when uh the run ends oh no because you have to do an evac right yeah yeah so hard to see scorch spawn not a trace of it oh hey scorch if you look on my uh my ally counter you'll see now there are two 40s because these there's it's got

two arrows because uh 07 and 40 are still back at the beginning of the level but it also spawns a 40 and a 2 as if they are rendezvousing with you [Music] i haven't i haven't remembered trying to script the um changes in the hud up until now we wanted to show uh sure yeah you have to go back and time would end there yep yep and now we have the epilogue where sadly uh sev gets left behind and oh man um i believe canonically in legends uh sev survived uh i think star wars galaxies uh patched him in as a uh like an amnesia clone or something that's it that's the end of uh star wars republic commando um utsu thank you so much for doing that run and now the invasion yeah i had a lot of fun i i missed some stuff that i wasn't expecting to miss but

that's all right i mean it was awesome to get to see you do it to get to talk to you while you did it um and uh yeah i know how hard it is to play and talk so i think you did an amazing job um before we get out of here we have a couple minutes left in our session so we will take some questions from chad um first one is from alex jacobson uh is a different feeling like seeing a skip of a level you made using a bug that would have been a mis versus uh that would have been a mistake of a different part of a team so i guess it's like if you worked on the level but then the bug is someone else's responsibility um does it does it sort of feel that versus you going oh i did that myself yeah it does i i'm i'm much more inclined to forgive somebody else's bug than my own right um so uh there's there's um you know earlier i said i wish i could go back in time and fix them that only applies to the bugs that i know i left in there um and heath close would like to ask you mentioned paper design what steps did you take to approach a

level around this time uh so i mean i think this is probably still true across the board paper design is a really important step right it helps you understand the scope of the game it helps you have conversations with other disciplines about the efforts they're gonna need to put in um i think that i did paper design for the levels in this game in excel because early on i discovered that i would get really particularly fussy about making things look pretty given a tool that would allow that to happen and that that was it was just an unbelievable time sink for me and so i started using excel because you could use ex little draw tools in excel and there was no possible way you could make it look pretty and so i could let go of that that need and just really focus and iterate on the concepts the ideas the layout the architecture etc of the space um uh i kept using that trick for a long

time um that's that's one of the downsides of being of having architecture interest is that uh you know architectural drawings are gorgeous and um and there's really no reason to spend the time to try to make your drawings that pretty um unless you're a trained architect in which case it comes naturally right on uh i'm gonna start wrapping things up then uh for folks who watch this thank you so much for joining the speed run of star wars republic commando thank you to utsu and harley baldwin for joining us utsu and harley um if people want to follow you like learn more about what you're doing now uh uc your other runs harley your work at shell games um where should they follow you where should they find you online um you can find my twitter it's is uh at utsu made and um my someone else followed my dummy twitch what the hell um and then um i'm actually gonna just stop that stream now

and then uh what is it um you can find my actual twitch is a twitch.tv forward slash utsuwu i would definitely for the folks who followed who somehow found the dummy account i guess probably because we're one of two accounts streaming republic commando right now maybe um uh i didn't think of that um uh make sure you follow uts's main account harley where can they find you uh i'm miss harley baldwin m s harley baldwin uh on twitter um and yeah all of my all my uh shell games work and also some of the stuff i'm playing and struggling with and etc uh we'll you'll find it up there right on thank you so much for watching please make sure to rate this session give any feedback you have whether it's about uh uh the sound the the video the audio what was discussed do it um uh uh thank you dylan for noticing my uh psycho masks behind me from borderlands um normally i would try and show off my cats but i had to change cameras and

this one's actually on a narrower angle um uh with that um i think that's about it all i'll say is um uh this is our last speed run for the week we're wrapping up gdc summer today thank you all so much for joining us we sincerely like we've worked so hard to try and make something fun for you something informative and seeing all these comments talking about how much people learned from this game really makes me feel better um uh uh all i'll say is that other than that um uh i really do feel like like we we got to see something special here today with you know u2 and harley and i know i sort of did this partly to torture whatever developer whatever developer i could get um i was like oh i want to break their game and see how their face goes but at the same time um like i said this is speedrunning is is where the line blurs it's where players approach a game literally as the software is implemented not figuratively as the developers intend and um i hope it's not our original idea uh double fine and ign and other folks have done runs like this so please go check theirs out as well um and i can only stress enough

like thank you this is cool this is special um uh and uh yeah this is this has been a lot of fun um that's it's been great all right take us home everyone bye