GDC Summer Dev Speedrun - Yooka Laylee And The Impossible Lair With Chris Sutherland

[Music] good morning everyone my name is brian francis i'm gdc's community manager and a contributing editor at gamasutra.com if you need to refer to me in the third person i use the pronouns he him um today for our second day of live speed runs we're going to be running ukulele and the impossible lair with game developer chris sutherland and runner dave stereo chris and dave would you like to introduce yourselves sure i'm chris sutherland i'm a director at playtonic games and i'm responsible for some of the character movement work as a software engineer as well in ukulele and the impossible there and i am dave stereo i am a live stream live stream primarily on twitch uh speedrunning is the main gig i do everything from platformers to long-form rpgs uh pretty much any genre of game that interests me and uh

it is a privilege and a pleasure to be working with uh playtonic once again and gdc right on thank you both uh for the folks at home i'd like to briefly explain uh why we're hosting speedruns at gdc as i mentioned for those of you who were watching yesterday speed running is a fascinating and thriving part of the game community that feels closely connected to the art of game development runners become intimately familiar with the game's mechanical oddities rewriting the experiences in the name of completing games faster and faster unearthing secrets that sometimes surprise even the developers who worked on those titles if you saw yesterday's run which i think is arc archived in swap card and you can go back and watch uh you can see just how much you can surprise a developer especially when they did not necessarily work on the programming or level design um of the games we've picked this week ukulele and the impossible layer is a game that hues closest to some of the original traditions of speedrunning um you may recall that uh as recently as you know the 90s um uh or the early 2000s game developers who made platformers would include

rewards for players who could beat their game under a certain time i think i'm thinking of metroid fusion but there's probably other games uh that i didn't even play that did that um that's a practice that's evolved and spread into a number of other games uh chris sutherland has been working in these platformers for a long time uh and we're excited to see his thoughts on what dave stereo does to his game today um which is to say uh i am here because i can't wait to see the look of horror on his face um with that out of the way uh let's get started dave please take it away all right so i'm gonna start it in three two one all right so yeah you can leave me in the impossible layer uh within speed running there are different categories that you can do within each game uh we are going to be doing the 24 b's category so pretty much in this game the main goal is to save all the b's and then go to the impossible layer which is the first and the last level of the game

actually it's kind of intended that you sort of fail the impossible layer first time around and then uh return to it later because each b you save allows you to take a hit of damage within the impossible layer uh it is actually possible to beat this impossible layer with zero bees which would be the traditional what you would call the any percent category but the community sort of said that that category uh wasn't really the most accessible to uh form a speed running community on i mean like there are people that do the the zero b category but we kind of wanted a more accessible entry point into speed running this game so 24 b's tasks you to find uh half the amount of bees because there are 48 to find and you can either get them by completing chapters or you can um there are ones in the overworld because there's individual levels in this game as well as an overworld

right on um chris i'm gonna have a question for you in just a second about uh what dave just explained um uh i'm gonna go to the chat real quick and just give a shout outs to folks like uh takagura who's saying good night from toke good evening from tokyo um dave has some fans here like matt hatchet and uh a9a zn2 i'm also sorry there is a leaf blower behind me uh and i can also see that folks like kyle leclaire michelle and sean have all taken notice of my uh my co-workers up here lying on the cat hammock uh they will not be commenting on this run uh if they do you will hear them loudly one of them really does like to share her opinions um chris uh before we start pulling other questions from chat would you mind uh breaking down the bees system for us and what was sort of the original intent of uh the system that dave is here to exploit uh so the idea here is that you if you you played through the whole game you'd get all 48 b's and um what we wanted to do was really have

it so that um a player could as they progress through the game from uh start where they've got zero b's to where they've got 48 there's effectively for each bee they get there's a it makes it slightly easier to tackle the impossible layer so there's almost like well linear or roughly linear that it becomes more and more easy uh the more and more bees you get so that's what we wanted to do and that's the idea behind doing possible layers so when you go into the impossible there the second time not as as in here you'll have a shield with the number of b's you collected and every time you take a hit like they've done here you would lose a b and that would allow you to continue so you get effectively have 48 hits if you had all b's to get through the layer so we wanted to have a system where from the start you could play through it and complete the whole game like dave said but also um players as they progress through the game it becomes an easier and easier challenge so they can opt to try out the impossible there at

any point throughout the game [Music] that's interesting uh that's a pretty big difference um from the first ukulele game which was a big hit on kickstarter um this is also kind of a different genre for ukulele because the first game was a um uh sort of a love letter to the the banjo-kazooie games uh from from your studios you know former rare employees um but this one is very different uh yeah that's right yeah we so we'd uh mom herself had worked on a donkey kong country back in the day and so we wanted to kind of take a step back and say well if we'd have carried on building um games that were 2d platformers what would we have built and one of the changes we wanted to make was uh not just having the 2d levels but expanding things like the what you can use to think of as the map world and so what was we see in impossible layer is that the map world is effectively a 3d game in itself and so you have a kind of 3d exploration or top-down explorations zone um two and a

half d looking down camera looking down and then from there you go into the 2d levels play one of those and come out again so that's kind of one of the ways we wanted to make kind of a spin on that make it a bit different and there's a there's a number of other things we did as well right on uh going to chat uh speaking of all that um uh dave sabada uh would like to just say that this game was a joy to play through and that they loved how the overworld was designed and they loved the impossible their design uh matt hatchett uh weighs in with this game has a great soundtrack which i can hear right now it is great um that's right music by dave wise and grant kirkhope and our own two in-house sound designers um chat just a reminder uh if you've got questions for chris or dave we will take them if you're a developer who wants to know more about uh how speed owners do their thing throw them in if you're a runner or just a person who wants to know uh about working on games like ukulele and the impossible

layer throw them in we will ask them uh all right dave uh you got your first b it looks like yeah so like each in order to complete the level you need to break a bee free from the capsule so around halfway through that level i actually grabbed a snail shell that you can shoot out of yuka's mouth and i was actually able to snipe it from uh you know pretty far away to end the level early and uh yeah so that's be number one uh like i said you can get b's from either completing levels or solving overworld puzzles or skipping over world puzzles um and i'm going to be grabbing all of the overworld bees that are available and uh we're actually going to be doing some very unintended well intended all right yeah this is all unintended uh actually i think these the height of these fence posts are deliberate so that you can kind of kind of sneak around i don't know also i'm doing some unintended things here where i and this what what's this see this is

like not expected at all yeah so you can ground pound on certain slopes which allows you to get a roll up top and uh right now we went from the chapter 2 area to the chapter 17 area but except we're going to kind of go out of here and we're going to go to the chapter 10 area and this is because there are things called pay walls and uh here i actually got to make sure that i don't fall out of bounds here or accidentally hit the water when i don't want to uh so there's five coins in each level that allow you to get these pay walls that allow you to open up different areas of the world map i need to do something pretty precise here fall into another body of water so i can swim underground uh but this is so that we can skip all of the paywalls this is this giant skip that i'm doing so i don't have to collect any coins in any levels and i don't have to watch any cutscenes pertaining to opening the paywalls uh in this 24 vs run there used to be

one pay wall that we needed to open to get into this desert area but now we no longer have to do that also uh i can mess this up to where i start infinitely flying up into the sky of the game and you will infinitely fly forever so i need to make sure that i can start this ascension where because i need to reach some loading zones that are above me right now so let's uh you'll you'll start to see the camera panning up in a little bit right now yeah right now and then if i can get into this loading zone there we go all right good i didn't fly away infinitely so now we are trigger just where that door is by rising up into it yeah and now we're going to skip this whole uh seesaw puzzle area by getting enough height on this guy

and then just kind of getting up there just to be able to jump over there he's supposed to go around the long way but this this works i guess this level actually has a pretty insane skip where uh we're gonna sort of utilize the speed that ropes give you that allows us to get so much speed that we can clip out of the boundaries of the level and we believe that it is frame rate dependent so i'm actually going to be enabling vsync uh to sort of modify the frame rate that a lot makes this trick a lot easier and that's going to be right here on this rope we're going to intersect it right at the top when it's swinging and if i can time a jump i will fly to the right side of the screen uh this trick is pretty precise pretty difficult and the speed that you get from the rope

is variable so i'm gonna have to adjust on the fly this might take me a few tries but it's worth it when we get it well we while we get the while we get this try going i mean for chris oh there we go yeah kind of took a unintentional death but i gotcha dave thanks for the the insights we're gonna we're gonna come back to you in a bit uh for more talked about that particular a particular exploit there the i can so i mean this is basically an hour of being beaten up for all the things we got wrong uh um but that one particular is my fault because that's interesting why because as a developer what i did there was the the ropes and you move up and down them they don't actually check for the solid collision at the top there's just a point where it says you've got to the top of the rope but of course if you're a designer you place the rope maybe slightly inside something and i think we you know we have the ability to set how far you can go up the rope but there is obviously a there's a weak point in some ropes if they're placed not quite right then you can when you

jump off the rope which you go with a bit of speed you can jump end up inside a solid collider which then the physics system will then imbue you with some enormous extra speed on top of the speed you've got to try and force you out because you're quite far in it and i think that's what's throwing dave out and so yeah it's it's obviously those things combined which will then fire dave off at some uh super speed and then across the map this is actually the hardest trick in the game and uh kind of throwing me for a loop here but we're gonna get it and like i said it's totally worth it when we actually get this yeah this is interesting this is something i hadn't really paid attention to because i'm mostly used to watching uh gdq speed runs where where you know you start learning like oh this trick's hard but we got in one go because they're really like trying their best for the run um but not that you're not trying your best but um uh both as i was watching our skyrim run yesterday i was like oh wow like it's interesting that because you've shaved time off elsewhere by you know doing so many skips like these these become the time consuming

activities um we are going to while you work on that dave we are going to go to chat uh so that you can focus on this while chris and i uh discuss things um uh dave sabato would like to know uh blending the 3d map world gameplay with the 2d levels was really cool any plans or ideas around further exploring that concept um nothing specific that we're announcing yet but yeah i mean we liked it as well we like the the fact that there's those two sorts of things it meant actually that there was a bit more work than we originally thought so dave's managed to do this now yeah what he's done is he's he's um projected himself outside of the map and into an area where there was some water and what he's using here is another exploit of again related to the way we program these some of these things so rather than saying a volume of water where we display as like we might say there's a box around and say this is a volume of water the way we do that is we mark up

the the top and bottom of an area of water by saying this is the entry point and so if you to get into the water you have to pass through the entry point um and so if you somehow bypass the entry and exit point you can you can whilst you're still underwater you can appear to the game like you're still under water which means you can effectively fly in the air so swim in the air and that's what dave's been doing now as an exploit mm-hmm um next question for chris well dave could see just a rainbow i don't know if i answered the last word question but no no no it was a sort of a yes or no um question for course what kind of qa testing goes uh into game dev uh games like this um do you look intentionally look for breaks that speed owners were employed or do you intentionally put them as easter eggs for speed owners to find that's a great question because you might look at this and think that we didn't have a qa team but in actual fact what happens is there was a a lot of qa on this and a lot of the things that um well maybe not all but some of the things you'll see

today as exploits we might have seen those coming in a bug but we kind of take a view on them that if it's something that for the normal player isn't going to encounter and it isn't going to spoil the game if it's not going to wipe the save if it's something that's quite unusual it's quite hard to get and yeah it it you know it gets them some excitement it makes it became more interesting in a way and then we'll leave that in because we know that speed runners will like to find it and i know you probably the same as me if you find something in a game you think yes i got around the game because they won't expect me to do that and actually that's a great thing to have so we do actually leave in a lot of these things and even when they're pointed out sometimes it's tempting as a programmer and you know you look at anything i should fix that and we've had to say a few times let's not fix that people have been keen to fix things and we just had to say no don't fix those um in fact i've about been about to fix things and people in the team who are speedrunning fans have said to me please don't fix

this this will spoil the speedrunning experience so we've actually held back deliberately after that um uh josh good would like to know what type of level design influences did the team pull from they've heard a lot of comparisons to donkey kong country tropical freeze brought up due to impossible layers use of contextualizing platforms yeah um so that was definitely an influence and we kind of looked at uh all the beauty platformers that were out there at the time like rayman and also back to games that we know that we worked on in the past like dkc and we tried to kind of pick the bits that we liked from those and say how would that influence our design of the game and how would we approach you know the same the the same problems that they set up how would we take an approach on that um so that was just some one of the things we've done which we'll see later is um when you place each of the levels here it's actually got an alternate state as a slight spoiler but it's not a big

one uh so you'll play through a level once and then you'll re-encounter it you'll be at some kind of transformation you'll make to that level where you'll be able to place it under water or maybe it's it's inverted in a different way and essentially it's a different level but and from the player's perspective it's it had something different done to it so um yeah so that would by having that again that's another twist on on what the expected norm is on on 2d platformers so you you go back into a level and you see the familiar bits but it's all really quite a bit different it is like playing a new level so there's 20 base levels and they are all got alternate states it's fun we talked about remixing earlier um uh um i think that may have been before the show but the remix like kind of the remix factory you know you as devs remix your own work and then speedrunners are further remixing your work for sort of the purpose of other people's entertainment that's right it's it's a very much like that we know why look at the stuff that dave's doing here and he's playing a lot of these levels completely out of sequence um because that's both fast but also fun

to watch and it is like somebody's taking your game and it's a bit like they've kind of put it on the decks and they're giving it a bit of a remix and they've kind of gone actually the way you set it up that wasn't as fun as doing it like this and you know it's almost like a meta game the speed ring is like a meta game on top of everything else i kind of almost think of it it's like you know when you're in a you're in a city and you know all the streets and lanes and the sidewalks and then all of a sudden you know that there's there's an elite group of people who can get really up high on the top and these uh these peoples who do parkour can navigate the the city in a completely different way and that's what we're seeing here is that dave was now on a place where he probably didn't expect anybody to go up and stand um and yeah it's yeah it's quite amazing the kind of things people are doing dave i know you're involved with gdq uh the next time you do uh gdq please make uh shouting parkour park parkour park parkour a uh donation tier

um for one of your runs oh you got it you did uh dave um we do have um a question from chad for you uh from kyle leclaire uh are there any specific games or genres that you feel are a bit difficult when it comes to speedrunning but you'd like to see more of [Music] anything in particular that i would like to see that is difficult so like i kind of said this in the intro but like i'm into so many different genres of speed running uh all for different reasons like i love platformers because it's highly execution based and uh you know i guess not a whole lot of like randomness um but i also speed run long form rpgs you know like 100 hour rpgs that you can beat in a single sitting and it it requires different kinds of skills um and that's that's what i like about it but for genres that i feel like need more hmm

i am actually not entirely sure because you you find that speed running communities sort of pop up within all genres like what i like to say is uh you know if anybody comes and chat and ever asks like hey um is there a speedrun of this game my answer is like well can you beat it because if you beat it there there is a speed run of it and uh one thing you really like to see is uh you know develop devs like playtonic where like they will leave in things for you know they're like hey speedrunners might find this useful uh that is super appreciated because there are entire communities that will form around these styles of play and uh yeah it's just super appreciated yeah i do recall that um when i did an interview with um some devs uh like uh i believe it was ryan clark um uh i could be wrong uh it was him or the axiom verge thomas happ um there was talk about how you

know working with speedrunners helps them do some bug testing but also um it led to them leaving in things like in-game timers to help runners sort of do run run their timers and modify their timers based on their needs in the game but that was sort of the extent of what i heard for like oh how can devs help speedrunners and runners are just like uh um bubbles del fuego had a great comment yesterday which is like you know it's sort of like you can't say what makes a game good for speedrunning it's like saying how do you make a good movie you just make a good movie um which i thought was helpful um uh real quick michael gibbs and chat would like to know chris how was your experience developing ukulele uh different from that of donkey kong country but with modern development tools oh yeah that's a great question because i think one of the few things i noticed one of them is we're building with uh an engine this time so we're using the unity engine here and one of the things we had was whereas back in donkey kong country era you know you with a lot of the work was done by the

engineer who was decoding systems and puzzles and and enemies whereas there there's a limited amount of tooling for the designers whereas now a lot of the game is built from uh designers so we've got a design team will put together all these levels and we kind of build the component parts for them to do that uh so you know whereas a lot of it relied on you know and the last phase of development was used to be just solely on uh engineers and everybody else could go home and we'd and we'd just be there trying to fix everything and now it's actually the design team are actually fixing as much as as the engineering team and so they're going in and fixing bugs and changing things around or sometimes they'll move things around just to stop a bug from happening but um that's been great from the putting so much pressure on the engineering team uh but it's also meant that because they have hands-on time with development they can iterate with things so much quicker than having to go back and forth to an engineer and go how can you move this here can you do

this can you change this and they can make those changes themselves now dave you're doing actually something interesting here that i i wanted to highlight which is that speedrunning isn't just you know breaking the game it is also knowing the timing of how some of these games work like platformers having it down to a t so that you can sort of do what we're watching now which is just this would be beautiful ukulele gameplay even if you weren't uh um ground stomping on the ledges uh back in the overworld um how do you sort of feel as a runner about sort of like the two different kinds of techniques you know breaking it you know looking for those exploits and versus just practicing sort of these these moments in order to optimize your run yeah so like um i kind of unintentional death there but you know we get to hear more of the awesome song um so i the one thing that i really like about ukulele and the hospital layer as a speedrun is uh you know like like you said there are the mixtures of uh like the the platforming elements where it's just pure movement and figuring out like okay how do you utilize the enemy

placement and whatnot because all of the enemy placement is very deliberate to be able to uh you know to do some of these quick movements and uh i'm sorry what was the original question like yeah like balance how do you feel about like you know sort of the two skills you have to master you know finding exploits and also mastering uh twitch these twitch skills oh yeah like you know we started to talk about this in the pre-show but like i love discovering what is capable within the software like it's it's almost like discovering like the new laws of the universe um so like like that was the thing that fascinated me with speed running at the beginning wasn't so much the moment-to-moment platforming but just like discovering like you know some of the crazy glitches that can be achieved within the software um so it started to stem from the love of that and then when you get into the actual practice of speed running you get kind of addicted to like the fluid movement and whatnot

and uh yes honestly it's sort of like a 50 50 um but yeah like that to me that's what makes it an awesome and awesome speaking is it is conceptually awesome uh whether it be like with strategies or glitches and then just mechanically it is fluid and uh just feels good to play before i get back to questions from chat chris i have a question for you um uh i have something i've noticed watching the parts of speedruns especially in this game where players are doing things a little more conventionally um is that how often they will deliberately um take damage from enemies you know which are supposed to be a punishment they're supposed to slow down the flow of a run and and work against you know the ways that you want players to navigate a space but for runners they're a way to um cancel frames they're a way to uh get past a certain point efficiently um without having to wait for a enemy cycle to clear an animation cycle excuse me um what are your thoughts about that

watching i mean like i know sort of you're under the philosophy that any way players get through levels is good but um i'm curious about your thoughts watching them sort of go against your design your core design rules yeah i mean a lot of the things like dave was saying a lot of the elements are set up so you can go through if you hear the timing right you can you jump at the right places you can go through in a lot of places the first time but there are places where that isn't the case but yeah you can take advantage of that and particularly here with um gospel there because when both you've got yuka and lady together if you get hit then laylee flies off and she's flying around and you've got an opportunity to try and catch her which is a feature we added to try and uh give some kind of uh kind of panic in the player because you're then going to make a strategy choice you've got to decide do i carry on with yooka and maybe find a bell in which i can re-use to regain lately or do i um risk trying to chase after laylee and try and pick her back up again and so you can take a hit lose laylee and then carry on

so you can go in that sense you can you know barge your way through something if you're confident enough and what your neck the next steps are you can you can do something like that yeah can i also touch on that a little bit sure like the whole damage boosting uh but first i actually wanted to ask uh chris was this known about that you could do this here to get up there like that i don't know that that was but um that's it looks like if we did we would we definitely left that in but that's an interesting one that's a side effect of what you've done there is there's a there's a drawbridge that comes up there but you've um as you're approaching going over the drawbridge you've turned around fired the the thing from your mouth onto the switch which has triggered the switch and because it's the drawbridge is made from a physics object in the game then you're able to stand on the end of the drawbridge as it lifted up and then from by sitting on the top of that drawbridge you then have to jump up onto a place where it looks like you wouldn't be able to get to otherwise

yeah so like uh i guess i should explain uh the there are secret exits in some of these levels and that's how you're supposed to get some of these overworld bees is find the secret exit within a level except we're actually not going to touch a single secret exit unfortunately but they are fun to find um but going back to what we were saying about damage boosting uh that's one thing i really like about the categories of this game is uh you know if you're doing 24 b's or 48 b's for uh ukulele the impossible layer uh you have that many or that much opportunities for damage boosting within the impossible layer to kind of just like you know go past all the hazards and whatnot and not really care because you have uh many hits to deal with um i like 24 b's in particular because it becomes a big risk reward of uh like do you want to go for damage boosts or uh do you want to save bees for the end also this is a very cool uh little

glitch that we have here where we're gonna do another air swim gonna get out of bounds and there are a lot of death barriers though uh so i kind of need to swim up far here and uh i'm swimming in a very particular manner to avoid all of the death barriers um i used like these kind of lines on my left side to kind of gauge how far i am before i start turning inwards towards the level um but yeah this one's really cool i like this air swim i mean these must take a lot of trial and error to to find because like you said there's if you go to the wrong place then you might just die yeah you need to like figure out how to navigate all around it and uh yeah it's definitely trial and error to uh and then like coming up with visual cues when you're like seemingly in the void yeah um i will say uh as an observer of this i love how whenever dave exits the level um hey i like suddenly get an appreciation for um like yuka's animation swimming animation

like because there's nothing but his little shimmying body um and also some of the background assets you know seeing how they're staged in the 2d game like this with this 3d element i'm like oh that's so pretty and like in a way i couldn't see before um so that's just a that's a peanut gallery comment for sure um chris a question from josh good hey josh uh loved having you in our run yesterday too um did the team's engineers end up creating any custom tools for art and design uh i.e was there a custom pipeline for managing game models textures etc um i guess uh we we rely a lot on the unity engine but uh we built on top of that so from the designer side of things they use a visual scripting tool which we use node canvas for that but we also built upon node canvas so we we did that in the first game we built upon it again in this one where we have our own custom nodes and uh basically what are the things that they need to do a lot and often we're going to build something custom for that so we have that running

as well as kind of standard code as well that makes sense um uh kyle leclair would like to say that they find it interesting that a good chunk of early cheat codes were tools used for play testing purposes to help make things easier and they were left in afterwards and now developers leave in bugs uh instead of making it uh more challenging for speed runners to conquer yeah that's right yeah i mean i think there's been yeah there probably have been games where people have left in skip codes and all sorts of things by mistake yeah easily done probably from i don't know if you remember anything from rare i do recall that i think i think donkey kong country had some kind of i forget if it was only accessible through um you know game gear and those old cheat cheat tools seem to remember um maybe the first version i think it was a very early nes game that uh captain skyhawk i think had a cheat code left in where you could maybe not select the level like if i recall correctly it may have only been the first version of course then you couldn't update things online but

there would be a subsequent rom that came out yeah i do recall um uh i recall a certain point because i grew up in the game boy era um when those codes were you know it's like oh we're gonna give them to players because that's how you once you beat the level or in the code that's how you can get back to that level if you die um from the early game where and then save states were implemented um but yeah uh kyle i appreciate your comment like linking you know those two little weird oddities of of game development history um dave would you be able to update us on where you're heading next and what we should expect yeah so you kind of see me constantly fast traveling back to chapters one and two this is because since we actually never use any of the traditional paywalls the areas of the world map don't open up on my map so i actually only have fast gravel for chapters one and two throughout the game so i constantly need to re-reference chapters one and two um but back in the chapter 17 area we talked to a frog that opens up the alternate version of

chapter one which i actually thought that was pretty cool so like you get introduced to alternate chapters i believe in chapter three and um just the fact that the the first chapters alternate version is unlocked towards like the the later parts of the game i thought that was really cool because you're kind of left wondering throughout the entire game like alright like how do i get this alternate chapter one uh and then you're just rewarded at the end of the game or endish part um but yeah so we've i i believe we're at 13 b's now this is going to be our 14th one that we're getting uh so we're about halfway there [Music] after that i was just gonna i was just gonna chip in i love that when we're calmly discussing you know the rules of uh these games uh we've been so so normally saying oh we're gonna gather some bees today like it's a perfectly normal thing um oh you know we talked to a frog back there and he did this for us yes because talking to frog is something

we all do in our everyday lives um and if you if you are talking to frogs i don't object just you know maybe let the rest of us know what are their secrets do they know things let's find out um chris do you have any um this is just a question from me uh you know watching dave like sort of get through this part of the run um uh as an engineer is there anything are there any observations you've had about about this process and some of the exploits we've seen about and sort of how they intersect with your work um yeah i mean well one of the things i see a lot is dave using is the ground pound jump so you can um when you do a body slam we call it which is like a ground pound move and when you hit the ground you can trigger into the fast roll um and we added that move in but when what we didn't realize actually until a few weeks after we put it in is that because when you're in a roll you can jump then the consequence is your grand pound you go into a very fast roll and you can also press jump at the same

time and then you'll actually have a a very large and fast forwards jump and dave uses that quite a lot you'll see him ground pound jump and get like they're just there he had a great boost to speed and you can use that although we don't actually rely on that being used i don't think in any of the areas of the game or hardly any players can we left it in and because one of those things we thought oh this is really cool it just seemed a shame to take out and also it wouldn't make sense to take out because because you can jump from a roll then it wouldn't make sense to you to not be able to jump at that point so it felt like we had to leave that in yeah i think it's interesting that um uh there's sort of you know an upper boundary for even though your movement system is capable your traversal system is capable of such speeds um but the level design doesn't build around it versus if you compare to games like celeste i don't know much about celeste speedruns but i do know that just playing that game as a normal player was oh my goodness like trying to achieve some of the the physical skills needed to finish that game was

it was something else um yeah i i love that you brought up celeste because i am actually i i've had i have like you know maybe two thousand hours like i i've speed run celeste a lot and that is another game where like uh just the casual play is so different than than the speed run but yeah like it's designed the entire way for you to play both ways yeah but but for yooka uh the whole like it was really cool in like the early days of of speedrunning this game when it first came out because like you know we didn't even know about the uh the buddy slam uh jump roll or like you know using the buddy slam to get uh high speeds and then then it was like so like if you buddy slam and you just continue to just normal roll and you don't chain jumps in with it you will actually uh kind of default to a sort of slower speed so like just just the act of like discovering uh the fact that you need to chain jumps with the the buddy slam roll and uh

like just sort of how that that reroutes your muscle memory uh for the levels and whatnot it was a really cool process to to practice it and get down that makes sense um we're gonna dive we're gonna scroll back through uh chat for a question from matt hatchett um this may be a little bit outside your purview chris but uh um did uh playtonic have any particular inspiration for capital b um uh he gives matt serious gru vibes i assume that from uh despicable me so um that carriage is created by steve males who also created banjo-kazooie so um he's got a pedigree of creating a great set of characters so um i don't know what was in steve's mind when he created them um maybe he'd been watching too much of that film but i think it was it was more that he wanted to create something that was um intimidating and was obviously a bee and so i think you know that was his intent there's also the sense that um well from

the last game capital b was a a kind of a large he was a big boss in the sense that he's big but he's and he's a boss but he's also a boss in terms of cooperation as well as a boston game so he had to fit all those ideas into one um so yeah that's how that came together but i don't know exactly where his source of his inspiration was gotcha i assume uh i assume um illumination will not come calling uh about any particular link um uh chris josh good is back with another question what was the weirdest or most intriguing bug that the team encountered during development oh um i think we're probably seeing some of them today you get some of these ones where you jump and you get propelled and to the other side the map and then uh and then you're you're suddenly underwater that's those ones are pretty weird um i think yeah i think those ones anything like that where there's physics involved or that those can be strange ones and you know if there's a genuine

bugs they're often the ones the trickiest to work out because there's some weird physics interaction as there's two objects that have been placed too close together and you get stuck between them or something um so yeah those those are the kind of weirdest ones i can remember um uh from my part uh chris i would like to ask kind of kind of a question where the engineer games engineering and aesthetics kind of line up um both ukulele games have this incredibly polished sort of very cute uh aesthetic um that that goes hand in hand with you know this very precise uh 2d platforming 3d for the last game 2d for this one um uh as an engineer um you know the while the art team is working on these very you know pleasant and good feeling animations and sound effects um how what is sort of your role in like making sort of making the game feel you know the the interactions you have on the controller sort of line up with this sensation um because of the sort of a thing that that crops up especially when designing movement or

or jump reactions etc yeah there's a lot of things that go on in terms of you know i'm working with a team of people who is probably um so we've got an artist and a designer as well and we'll work together to determine what the correct visual is and sometimes we'll put something in and it it will look good but it won't play good so you might have you can i mean the great example of this common example of this is if you when you jump it makes sense from a pure animation purpose that you would say oh well he'll squat down first then he'll jump but obviously from a player experience point of view if your character had to wait before they took off then that would be quite frustrating it might look great because they'd be crouched down but for this kind of game it would be quite frustrating so you have to jump immediately so which means you kind of have to do you might have to modify the animation to make it look like he he is coming from a compressed position rather than actually he has been coming from a compressed position so that's one example but there's a lot

of those kind of little things where you have to tweak the the way you do the animation because it it's just better for the player and what's interesting is there might be another game where you know the the crouching is a good mechanic you know but it's it's just not a fast you know a game where you're trying to aim where you're jumping or something but but that's like uh that's where the animation and the gameplay might line up more but not for this game um uh let me see here uh folks in chat we are still taking your questions and comments if you'd like to know more about breaking games you'd like to know about more about making games uh we have two folks here who are excellent at each of those um let me see what do i want to know more about uh dave is there or uh not dave sorry chris is there anything about our current uh state of the run that has you uh is there anything you're sort of gonna be taking back to the office and going oh my god i didn't fully realize this but after this run this level is interesting i mean i love the music on this level it's one of my favorite um pieces of music but the the thing

about this level is it's actually really difficult well i guess that's true all of them but this one in particular is because it throws at you uh a lot of these little red minions or those little minions characters which are you can't really see them here but when you play it normally they're just it seems to be an endless number of them always coming towards you and but dave's just going so fast he's just he's blitzing through and they're not even getting a chance to catch up so you can hardly see any and there's one there actually no i got him so those ones yeah so those and those characters you can't roll into the reason they're challenging because they've got big chompy mouths uh you you have to jump on them or hit them from the behind and i i just want to say it's kind of funny that you know this level is uh fairly difficult because it pays homage to donkey kong country too because it's called wild web woods and webb woods and dkc2 is a notoriously

uh difficult stage uh yeah i i also speed rando at donkey kong country 2 for a hot minute uh that that's my favorite game in the trilogy and uh yeah it's true to the webwood's name um dave uh michael gibbs would like to know uh what is the most challenging dave's going to do something he's just i think he's trying to get that um there's a bee that's in the overworld he's trying he's trying to get it from by throwing a bomb across let's see that which is normally you'd have to get there for a secret exit i think but he's trying to just do it by throwing this bomb across let's see if he can do it he's probably gonna be able to who am i kidding there we go that's set my precise button up getting it um before i get back to michael's question i just want to say something i i've been paying attention to this run is how each of the bees have like a slightly different art model and how they lible i think we saw leb lee and lib lee b ann um you know

a variation on leslie ann you know one of the that's from our name more common in the uk yeah so the names of the so the bees that you collect they are actually named those of the 48 there's uh some of them are the dev team and some of them are actually some of them we've ran in competition for people to become part of the game and they could become a b so i think there's a three or six i can't remember the exact number of people who um follow us on twitter and we were able to they entered the competition and um they were able to get chosen to be in the game so that was like bees yeah yeah um uh we're gonna get back to michael gibb's question dave what is the most challenging exploit in any game that you've performed oh what is the most challenging oh okay uh are we gonna have to like stop the run and go play a whole other game so you can dance i'm gonna have to like think about that but okay so one of the things that i'd like to tell people about is like okay you take a game like final fantasy vii

a game where you think the fights you get into are random but like what if i told you they weren't actually random and uh that is manipulated across the entire seven and a half hours of the run and it's based on perfect movement uh by walking or running because you can walk or run steps and it affects your your danger value differently uh so like needing to have perfect movement for seven and a half hours is pretty challenging like i love the game long manipulations uh those are pretty challenging and uh very uh satisfying to hold um but and that's just one aspect of it where like we you we use it to so like to such an extent that it's kind of hard to explain but like let's say you have a fight that's supposed to initiate on a field but if you were to initiate a

quote-unquote random encounter on the exact frame in which that that story fight happens the game kind of freaks out and cancels both fights out so like if you force random encounters on exact frames running in a 30 fps game uh you can do other skips with it like just that level of precision with uh certain glitches and skips is really that that's what i like it's also interesting because those are not um you talk about precision and all that and those are not games where movement precision is normally a skill that the developers are trying to orient around but you know that's what speedrunning does uh changes up the skills um uh dave follow-up question on that before i go back to chat um uh are there any particular um i know there's a lot of like rng sort of exploits you know where you're sort of hoping that the game poops out the right number um in order for you to get something done at a record time otherwise you have to do a reset or or try to re-trigger the thing are there any of those that um uh stand out to you in the games you run

uh yeah so particularly in in like rpg speed runs uh you know that's that's the whole name of the game i i like to say that um rng is not the main decider like rng kind of opens the door but execution allows you to walk through it is what i like to say um so things like damage roles or if there's like certain drops that are certain percentages or like oh i need this person to target uh this character that i have and it's a one-third chance um i will say though in ukulele it is very nice because and i think chris can kind of talk about this a little bit more but like the actors and stuff they they sort of load in when you get closer to them so like it's a very consistent game uh and all of the the movements are like the same and predictable and uh it's really nice for a platformer to have minimal rng yeah that's right so we

tried to make it i think we were talking earlier so that when you play you can play through and there's a kind of certain smoothness and if you know the exact timing you can get through first time in order to do that it means that those things have to be ready in that pattern when you encounter them and so like some of them will activate if there's a set of them that you need to get through in a particular sequence that set when the first one comes on screen that whole set will activate with those um otherwise it's generally when they come on screen but if you you didn't do that or you didn't have a whole level based um synchronicity then it would be a it'd be a kind of a weird experience because every time you play it it would be different and so it wouldn't be consistent and so we wanted it to be consistent and feel like oh i can just one more go and i can get that done otherwise if it's random you just feel like you're not quite sure whether you know one time it was more difficult than another it doesn't make sense gotcha um tim uh tian gerber would like to say in chat uh that they like the

direction uh that playtonic took an impossible layer compared to the original game uh they're a sucker for donkey kong country type platformers uh and they would like to ask if you're looking any other genres or sub-genres or sequels and spin-offs but as far as i know you haven't announced anything yet so i'll tweak the question to be chris uh is there another genre game from either your past dev experience or a game a genre you particularly enjoy playing yourself that you'd love to play around in hypothetically we don't need to you know pretend that we're confirming anything here yeah i mean there's i suppose there's an um i mean i've always been a fan of uh platformer games anyway and 3d and 2d so that's kind of always a draw for me but um i think there's no i wouldn't say there's any particular area we'd not go into i mean we're not going to probably going to bring out a gritty shooter who knows cut to one year from now and i'll be saying yes gritty shooter is now release

ukulele gritty shooters now uh grey green graphics yeah that dots that could be next year um no um i think i i mean i'm kind of happy on on most games so i think there isn't anyone that we would in general straight uh stay away from so um it could be anything really in my uh i'll i'll uh i'll help nudge the question along in my in my in my past experience i've gotten to work on forex strategy games and uh you know i would love to work on something in the rts genre maybe because i grew up on those games and some of the stories in those games uh dave you're a speedrunner if there's any particular game genre you could like contribute to as like as like working on in some capacity i don't know what other what you do outside of speedrunning but uh i'm just curious what genre you'd love to work on i would like something that's sort of like i've been sort of craving a game like this that molds like a rhythm game you know kind of like a guitar hero

with maybe maybe like a a zelda or a platformer um kind of we're like we're like the battle system i mean like not not sort of like crypt of the necrodancer style because i mean that is an amazing game that blends like you know zelda and uh uh like rhythm game aspects but like i sort of want like i guess maybe like a turn-based combat game that or a platformer that uses like sort of bursts of uh rhythm game challenges as it's combat that's sort of like an idea that i've had just like bouncing around in my head um like i don't know i it's a good answer it's a good answer yeah i love how dave can can talk and play this game at this speed i can't even play this game at this speed uh let alone talk at the same time that's the secret when i throw questions to dave is that like i'm trying to see how

how uh how much i can make him think and move his hands at the same time so far uh the answer is uh mostly pretty well um let me see here uh we've got about 20 minutes left in the session which means we must be coming near the end of the run uh-ish uh yep roger that so dave has thankfully uh confirmed that um just a reminder for folks uh watching if you have any more questions for chris and dave feel free to ask them uh you know if i i'd say uh for any developers in the crowd if there's any particular problems you've had while working on your games and you're curious how chris would solve them throw them at us i'd love to ask those kinds of questions um uh chris i have we can swing back qa is sort of the the specter that hangs over uh the speed running genre's head because unfortunately sometimes you'll you'll watch eq and go and and i'm sorry to say sometimes you'll just hear like oh lazy devs or ha qa missed that and like the best intention runners you know sometimes it just slips out and

i've i've heard it but like well but the truth is like you know a making games is already hard and b you know so many bugs that chipman games are known by the developers and and it was fixes just didn't fix didn't fit for one reason or another oh i guess we're going up against capital b um chris what are sort of your like from a resource management standpoint uh um how with with the millions of bugs that can pop up because you are mishmashing code and art and animation together like sort of how does uh playtonic prioritize uh bug fixing and how does it sort of manage you know what what could be like an unmanageable unmanageable past yeah so i mean it is the case that games do ship with bugs that are known and the the reason is often that sometimes the impact on um most users is quite small if you think if you've got a load of bugs and you and you you don't generally end up fixing all of them that seems that's the actual reality people might think who are not game developers may think otherwise and they

think we'll just fix them all but fix them all you know your game would be taking months and months longer well in reality you don't tend to fix things that they are very some of them very minor obviously um sometimes things were if even if they're more significant if then if you have to go to a particularly unusual area or somewhere nobody will ever go and as long as it's not game breaking um experience then sometimes those are left in and you know like we talked about before if there's sometimes the left will leave them in if they um if it means the speed dragon community would benefit from them as well i was trying to make it sure that i suppose the casual user doesn't encounter them and don't feel that the game is broken as a result if that's the case then we'd fix it but otherwise you know if somebody feels good as the result of finding a bug then there's an element of thinking well maybe we should leave this in roger that uh i was actually going to follow that up on uh because you've been in game development so long you've sort

of seen the cert requirements for consoles change uh so in so many ways over the years um and especially with another generation upon us though don't feel free to that's not i'm not prying for information about the next consoles if you know anything but um how have you watched you know what what companies want out of developers uh change when it comes to sirs yeah i think uh certain requirements from my perspective seem to have been kind of loosened off in the sense that maybe there's less and less rules i think that's just feedback from developers because over the years developers have said hang on i've got all these rules from this platform and all these rules from that platform and so what platform holders have tried to do is say well we want you to develop on our platform we're going to make it really easy so we're trying to be trying to minimize them down to the things that are really kind of showstoppery things things that are bad and what you tend to find is i don't know if anybody will actually tell you this but when you go into certification you know there might be a certain set of things that say you will fail on those the reality is it's kind of like a

scales so sometimes you'll um you'll be able to pass as long as you can there's certain rules that they will let you break uh if the rest of the game is fine i mean that's not something that they may not officially say because it's it depends they'll take a view like like we do which is what's the consumer what's the effect on the consumer and they think well actually it'd be better to have this game now and have this minor little thing uh which is an issue and they'll flag that out for you and sometimes they'll say well this is an issue but you know when you resubmit it you're gonna need to fix it so if you know the patch or something make sure this thing is fixed that's really interesting to hear when i used to work for a mobile game publisher i sat next to the qa people and i heard you know worked both on our games a number of other uh games and i heard some stories about working with different platforms that sort of line up with that you know about what was sort of allowed to go in um uh but obviously just like you uh that's all got to be anonymized because we don't want to get anyone in trouble

exactly um but i will say this i appreciate uh i appreciate the various platform holders of all stripes um have done more and more to to uh um use leniency as a way to help more developers uh ship more fascinating games uh definitely not not that i would look back at the older gay marrows and go oh like they were too strict like it should it should have been more accessible like you know like you can't ju like i definitely can't judge for things when i was either just a child or not even born yet um in that sense there are other things you can look back at history and judge you for so let's be clear about that but um that's not uh you know game bugs are sort of low priority on the historical ethical scale um kyle leclaire would like to know uh how long did it take you to crash the to craft the titular impossible layer and how did you decide decide what sections and challenges to include that is a great question because the the impossible layer you explained the concept and the idea that you know something you can take on at

any point and we wanted it to be well it has to be relatively difficult because it's important possible there so the challenge was how do we make it how do we how do you do that how do you make something that is impossible yet it is possible and that was something we didn't even know i mean it was kind of right towards the end we tried lots of different kind of ideas and and setups and in the end one of it was kind of looking at some of the harder areas that were in the game and some of the other levels that we we decided to take out and we said well maybe we can build something around those and so that's how it formed that we wanted it to be something that felt like it was doable and so it's really it's not like any one section is impossible is really really difficult i mean you know exceptionally difficult it but there are there's a lot of difficult sections chained together so you have to know oh this i got to do this jump and that jump and that jump so when you're um you know once you've done it hopefully or once you've got half part way through and you think oh i failed

here hopefully you can think oh if i just did this i'll get through next time or if i learn the timing but just to go back on that point one of the other things we did in the in the impossible air section as well and here is a bit like this is we tinkered with some of the timings of some of the objects so whereas normally in parts of the other levels you can go and go straight through and it's kind of there's a hint to the player because you want the player to kind of do the thing that makes sense so there's sometimes a gap i mean this one's particularly difficult but it doesn't look difficult from where dave's playing flippy platforms here and you're trying to go up and down these moving platforms and dodge things but we wanted to make it we actually the timings of some of these things is actually very challenging uh deliberately like this one here this platform that dave's on if when dave jumps the platform will go down so what dave's got to do is trying to not jump but at the same time he's got to avoid these spikes and sometimes you get caught because they're yeah just very difficult to

get past them um so there's lots of things to to take into account but yeah some of the places where there are timings there's i think there's some cases where you think oh now is the time to jump obviously but if you jump in that obvious point you'll find that the way these things sequence and come back is then puts you in a really bad position so sometimes you actually have to go when it's the wrong time roger that um uh uh i had a thought uh i was going to you said oh yeah oh go for it dave go for it oh like so like just a random question um if you guys could answer this how would one get into qa if they are interested oh that's a good question for chat uh as well um if you have chad if you want to weigh in for anyone else who's here uh chris what's your thoughts on that yeah i mean i guess qa starts people i mean we i mean we have a i guess we have a one qa on uh full-time but we often have qa teams who are uh contracted in or work with our

publishers got a qa team so it might be that you've gone to a publisher if they've got a qa team or maybe there's a sometimes let's say there's independent uh companies who are just a qa and you can kind of contact them and talk to them um i guess it's a slightly you know it's a people i'm not nobody here would think this but you know the general public i would say oh yeah qa that must be great because all you do is play games but of course um what they don't do don't tell you is they're playing the same game the same level every day the same way again and again and again and so it becomes you know it can become not as fun as it sounds but same time you get to play all the cool stuff and you see it sooner before it's done and actually sometimes you'll get things back from qa and they'll suggest things or or ideas that you think oh we've thought of that we should do that so that's another good reason uh to to augment chris's answer so i haven't worked in qa myself like i said i've worked alongside them but i've talked to

some of my friends in qa or or co-workers uh about that process um uh the first one is that so many of them you know want developers who don't want to use qa as a stepping stone to other parts of development although there's nothing wrong with that there's just a lot of people who say oh you want to be like a narrative designer which is something i i do as well um and that you get you get a lot of um oh we'll just start in qa and work your way over and then the qa people are like but then we don't get people who want to be qa and that's its own skill set um uh but augmenting that is that um my uncle who's a software developer sort of once encouraged me to uh you know uh um uh get training in something like uh ruby on rails for instance um and then um go to job fairs to get qa jobs at other software companies you know like smaller software companies um because uh obviously when you think about game qa you might go oh well you need to be good at games to do qa and what i know from all my qa friends is well being good at games helps but being able to do reliable testing to organize a testing methodology that

fits for your company uh those are sort of skills that um are top tier for for especially entry-level qa you know being able to prove that you're not just you know here to play games and that you're approaching it from a software development mindset um that's my understanding uh externally uh chris if you wanna yes and anything i just said feel free to no that sounds that's great advice actually yeah definitely i'd say i'd agree with everything you just said yeah um and i'll only augment um chris's point about qa contracting firms which is that sometimes the the way qa for games is hired is not you know the traditional hr process for the rest of development studio whether it's outside contractors or temporary workforce places like i worked for uh in los angeles so what's the target cw is the firm that i briefly staffed for one point i know they did some qa for other not just game companies but other software companies in the la area so i hope that helps um my question was going to be um chris from a uh what was sort of your intent

here was was uh when you when you started development on this game was the impossible lair the idea that you know the player would start the game off in this very difficult scenario and then go through a traditional um you know a dkc type adventure was that always where design went or did you sort of go or to design sort of uh uh start from somewhere else and you realize like hey orienting the game around like sort of an unknown end game a final mountain you were trying to climb was that sort of where uh did that come later or early in the process it was it was relatively early on the idea of the impossible there came that we knew we wanted to build a 2d platform um but we wanted to kind of think about what would be interesting and unique and so we came up with this idea that well what if you could just complete the game right at the start and what if it was and then that you take the idea of well if the game is impossible and they think well it can't be impossible but then if it's it seems impossible and then yeah at the end of the idea well if you take something it is seemingly impossible at first but then

over the course of the game you make it more and more possible um so that's kind of where that started to come from and that's how you're going to kind of got put together gotcha i also just thought of something that may help you dave or anyone else looking to get into qa i'm also aware that some game companies in different spaces uh um bring on it's kind of it's an interesting space what they do is they'll bring in play testers from the play community who are uh at the upper end of what their game does in order to check for for experiences or solutions it's sort of like not full qa because qa is obviously about testing um much more specific things and this is sort of hey play the game normally and let us know what you know um but play testing is a good uh from some developers i've spoken to that kind of player-focused qa testing is where some of them got their start um partly because of the relationships they built with developers in that process i just thought of that sorry uh uh i think uh dave this is our last uh encounter with capital b right uh correct yep and then after that there's a sort of like escape

sequence and yeah that that's gonna do it oh the classic uh i love them metroid you know the classic like you beat the final boss get out you know yeah i love that uh chris um how do you make those good i guess like how do you make like the you know they're kind of going for the player like congrats to beat the hardest challenge but now you'll die if you don't get out like what's your yeah i mean that's valuable exactly so this i mean this section here is particularly difficult because you're on you've got conveyors as well which are disorientating because they've switched direction whenever the capital b lands but once you get beyond this year you get to a section which is the escape section i think i know some people watch this you know it was sad to see some people online when they said oh i just got to the um you know they get to this section and they they they think they there was then they found out there's another section and and they thought well they'll never be able to get through another section but um the next section is actually quite a bit easier but because it's placed at the end and because you know you've had to get through the

rest of it until then your heart is racing when you're in the next section and so um it's a bit like the i'll think of it as the end of halo relates to the metroid examples that you you what you're facing is a lot of smaller challenges and they're a lot simpler but at the same time you know that there's still a chance you could make a mistake and it's that fear of that mistake particularly because we've got a counter that's going to count down in the next section as well it's everything's in there to try and make you slip up and try and just make that kind of you know that you're on edge and trying to make that mistake go for it i was just gonna say like because you constantly see like all the hazards behind you like the level collapses in behind you uh just all of these elements the music the timer uh the fact that it's at the end of the end of the level you might have like one b left or sometimes even zero b's uh it it's really good at creating uh attention yeah this is oh yeah this is i can already see it one of my favorite one of

these sequences i think is in the ori uh or or the first ori game from moon studios i'm blanking i'm getting well i can't remember before the will of the whisper or i can't remember the names right now the water section yeah yeah like the the last you know the end of that game has one of these two that's and because the score on that game is just so incredible like god i can't get over how beautiful that game is um uh it makes this moment it's a really special take on this moment actually because you know we just sort of talked about three different side-scrolling games that use these you know metroid has a science fiction angle it sort of gets to use like you know like you blew up the bass and uh you know it's exploding around you so that gets to be part of that moment um ori ori has this kind of heartfelt story at the center of it you know about family and and the monsters that threaten you but how their you know the monsters have pain too um so the catharsis of these moments is really something uh um and this is more of a obviously a goofy example of that because capital b is just running his weird corporation here in his weird factory um so we're it's a different take on it um what a good yeah blind forest oh my god thank you a9 a

zn2 i've only played blindfolds i haven't played willow the wisps yet but we'll get around to it uh at some point hey we're all we're all staying home that's i should get around to it at some point well dave congrats it looks like you finished the run yeah thank you yeah i think good job i think that was about 55 minutes based on the the show timer we have going back here which i don't know i have no idea what the record is but you know what beating this game in 55 minutes is something i can't do so congrats to that well done thank you thank you and hey shout out to the devs they're getting you know we're gonna let the credits roll here i think while we wrap up our conversation um with five minutes left we're gonna go ahead oh uh matthew points out it's a fire escape at the end of blind forest um uh um if you've got questions or comments feel free to drop them in now i know i'm a lit we're a little bit ahead of you but we really want to get um uh you know you're here at gdc we want to help you learn things that's that's the core of what we're doing here um dave and chris do you have any questions

or comments for each other before i go to chat um i just amazed at dave's skill at playing this game so i'd like to thank him very much for all the just amazing uh techniques and exploits that he's he's been able to do very good man thank you thank you i appreciate that you know given you know we had a couple deaths here and there but you know it it was uh it was all in good fun and uh you know i i gotta extend the thanks to you and uh the rest of the playtonic team for uh giving us something really special like that this game kind of just came out of left field for me it's like i i enjoyed the first ukulele and then impossible air comes out and like instantly this game clicked with me and i was like all right this this is something really special and uh yeah you know thanks for giving me something really fun to spend my time with um i have questions hmm i mean i guess my question would be how

how long did it take you to get through the impossible layers the first time with with zero beast i know you've done that yeah that uh zero got the zero b that that took me at least a hundred two hundred tri and maybe more um and uh it was so funny i remember um trying for about like an entire weekend just attempts doing only i wasn't even streaming i was just doing off-stream attempts because i wanted to get a gdq submission actually i couldn't do it and then monday rolled around and i i hopped on stream and ran i was like you know what let's let's let's do a zero b attempt and it was the first one the the first attempt of the day i got it and that was the first time that i did the uh the impossible later it was uh it is exhilarating and uh you know i get massive like breath of the wild vibes from this where like zelda breath of the

wild you can go to hyrule castle at the start of the game in your underwear and just beat the game and like to have that like that sort of like beat the game at any point in a 2d platformer and the way you were able to contextualize it narratively you know with the bees and then also mechanically with the b shield hey we got sub hour in the in game time that's pretty cool um like i don't know this game is an achievement and i really like it i really like it uh we do have a bunch of questions from chat coming in but we only have 90 seconds left so i'm gonna grab one final question before we get out of here but before we do that i'm going to ask everyone please make sure you get leave a ready for this session uh before you leave um that helps us out a lot if you have any specific notes about how this was run let us know we'll use it to improve the process we also like getting feedback um uh dave and chris we're getting so many questions coming in i'm going to encourage folks to reach out to you afterwards to ask a lot of them uh but i would like to know where should they reach out to you where can they find you at how should they contact you

um i'm on twitter as chris underscore sub um you'll find me there dave yourself dan likewise you can just find me on uh twitter.com dave stereo i also stream daily on twitch uh yeah to twitter is generally the spot or if you want to come into the twitch channel to say hi right on uh chris uh our final question the day for the day is for you how many dreams does joe jones crush with the balance sheet that sounds like from one of our dev team members that's from michelle and zovino don't know i don't know what i don't know that i don't know that she might be friends with joe she might be friends with joe yeah probably yeah how many dreams can you can you quantify the number of dreams um many many all right well folks thank you so much for watching thank you to folks um thank you to matt hatchet uh and all these other folks brendan luchan asking questions the last minute like i said if you um have any more questions for these two

find them at the links we just gave and with that goodbye everyone thank you [Music] bye