GduX.me 2020 | Day 2

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[Music] ah [Music] the world has changed game development has changed in 2019 g-ducks was created as a platform to give a voice to all game developers it is a virtual conference made by game devs for game devs it was a groundbreaking idea however this year everybody their mom is throwing virtual conference

well what sets tree ducks apart from all these copycats is that we have presenters telling their story not just about their wins but also highlighting their hardships to become successful for three days straight from june first to the third anybody with the internet connection can tune in to arm themselves with the best tools and advice to not only survive the industry to thrive we have speakers that will teach you how to survive long term and demystify marketing come and learn how to protect your own work and your brand we review a case study from an indie game and understand the conceptual process behind it overall look at the game industry and move forward with a business mindset and teach you how to navigate that world through the lens of an artist we discuss important topics like the emerging market of user generated content and what that means to us developers from a legal standpoint furthermore take measure the tools that

we have thus far and talk about how to move across different industries outside of games we will acknowledge how game development is evolving and how we can remove technical barriers to make games faster but that's not all we have amazing developers that will be streaming gameplay live and provide behind the scenes commentary of the development of these games such as scott the children of light big creep a new the distant life finally to cap off the best spiritual game conference ever we'll be doing technical breakdowns of amazing personal art projects to get you to approach your projects with a bigger purpose [Music] for your own well-being i hope to see you there on june 1st this is an official call for all game devs to report to gducks.me immediately blue champs over

[Music] [Music] [Music] good morning the time has come and gdex has finally begun i am your host brandon fam and for the next three days i will be here modeling or moderating our panel of amazing presenters that will be bringing you raw truths about the game industry and telling you about their hero's journey this will detail their guide to success and highlight what their hardships were and how they overcame it so welcome from wherever you are streaming

us from this is day two of a three-day live streaming event i would like to remind you at this time that we do have an active discord channel open throughout the three days and thereafter so if you want to conversate with each other with other viewers or interact with the presenter themselves after the presentation feel free to jump in there and check it out you can also in addition if you'd like to be part of gdx history and be part of the show i will be opening up the caller hotline which is located within the discord channel throughout the day in between speakers to chat with you directly bring you on the show and kind of conversate and have a discussion of what is like out there in the real world as always you can ask questions in any of the social uh channels that you are in right now i do have my moderators out there doing recon to get those questions over to you uh or over to me and get you those

answers another way to help spread the word and stay engaged is to tweet at gdux me and blue champs so you can see all the information here on a nicely one over this uh one-of-a-kind desk plate so please please go ahead and tweet at me and i will read them also as part of the fun i want to mention the good fellows at uh masterpiece vr who is sponsoring this event they are vr software that makes game development a lot easier for you and quicker so if you want to check them out and enter a raffle that we are partnering up with them for the next two days where we're going to have 10 indie licenses for one year hand it out to you guys all you need to do is go to gdux.me gdux.me and look for the instructions there

where you can sign up to our mailing list and just tweet at both g dux and me and masterpiece vr and go ahead and uh tell them how how much you're enjoying the show and then winners will be announced at the end of the show so if you that's a lot of instructions so i know go to the website and they're they're clearly uh written there so for you to kind of look at and follow along so it's been about a couple days one second here this is part of i'm starting to hear something one sec anytime i do that magic cut it's because i'm i'm fixing something so i'm still here with you i'm closing i'm not closing the door uh on purpose on you guys i'm just

making sure that we're running a a professional uh show here so lastly i am truly a one-man army what you see is built by my blood sweat and tears so if you can't tell gtx isn't controlled or backed by any major corporation i'm in the motel room for god's sake so any donations greatly appreciated so put into the organization of the next gedex event so go to gdux.me and hit the make it rain button at any point in the live stream cash will literally fall from the sky and into this room seriously so one dollar goes a long way two dollar goes a bit further and so on and so forth so throughout the day in between our great presenters i'll be displaying [Music] one sec throughout the day i'm in between our

great presenters i'll be presenting uh and sharing information here with you guys to see what the landscape is looking like using how game tools are moving across different industries had moo and more than ever before game developers are using our knowledge to work in enterprise companies so i'll be sharing some unchained reports with you guys which is what is what's our next clip right so hopefully you guys are hearing me just fine and as i am introducing this keep those questions going and so on you know the game industry or game tools specifically are being used in all these other industries like architectural or um

animation movies we were seeing the mandalorian using digital sets of unreal to kind of help uh not bore the actors right in front of a green screen so we're seeing like these revolutionary ways to work now and uh being integrated uh so so importantly in these industries are you seeing like this influx of other developers that have been coming into substance tools that are using uh not used to it or now like loving it and discovering it along with all these other tools uh that we we game developers have been using for years now oh oh we can't hear you oh yeah we got cut off so i'll go ahead oh there we go no no no i'm here i just i was just muted uh do you want to go to to give some examples uh to dive into that journey or

sure there is there is um a ton of examples i don't know if i can if i can talk about any of it because uh a lot of things is confidential but there's there there are tons of we see tons of of like from said industries that um that come to video game because that's where if you want the best visual quality with the best uh feedback iterative loop uh you need to go with real-time solutions and and all those real-time solutions come from the gaming industry so we see we see tons of of other industries picking up unreal um unity game engines uh and and and game tools um to build uh for example vr experience but not only also they use it as you said for vfx uh even in the design process of consumer goods like a lot of luxury brands for example uh use uh or car brands we'll use real time in the design phase while they build a car they build uh they conceive they design a purse um and so the the the game technology allow them

to reduce those iterative look uh extremely to extremely fast turn around um obviously it looks better but also just saved them money just because of the fact that instead of um designing a purse instead of actually actually having to source the leather and uh build that purse in real life to see what it looks like you can just design it in unreal or any other package and see it pretty much as close as possible to reality so you you pretty much every every kind of industry in the world is looking at real time to to basically save money oh i can't hear you anymore i didn't sorry it definitely sorry i muted myself our poor friend uh it definitely helps um you know with eliminating well not a living it completely but always uh limiting the

post-production process in what these industries or other industries are pretty much used to and they're kind of changing their workflow and stuff um in my experience too i want to kind of throw this back at you jeremy like you know our game development tools have been in uh evolving for the last 20 30 years you know going through i always track it to the sony console generation it's just easier the ps2 the ps3 with normal mapping and then moving on to lighting and rendering and retracing now [Music] game developers have been kind of there every step of the way but like now these industries are kind of going they're kind of have to fast learn all these tricks basically um how have you been wrapping their head around this concept of this game development i mean how challenging has that been it it depends on the industry i guess and and each it industry is different and each player in the industry is different uh we'll

see some companies uh picking up those new technology super fast and and creating stuff that is that is really um crazy quality uh in in a short amount of time and you'll have industries where we've been trying for years to to bring um to kind of evangelize um real-time 3d and and game tools and it's it's still hard it really depends i think i think it depends on on how critical that that transition to digital is for each industry um and how far they were in the first place uh we see some like the design industry there are people that are that are just really very proficient with 3d already and are picking up these tools just because again it's a it's a it's a pipeline issue and a cost issue that they need to address now uh other other um other uh industries like for example um architecture are a little slower because

they've been doing 3d for a long time but kind of an old-school 3d and for most of the time it still works fine for them because it's it's static and they may not need or they may not feel the need to have a real-time um real-time 3d in in this industry so it just it just depends they're all kind of more or less slow to you to adopt or fast to adopt um but i think in the end every industry and every single company in the world will likely use 3d real time 3d that is definitely i kind of want to throw this back over to francois i think you're about to start but uh i want to hear your thoughts about this yeah sure um my take is that [Music] they have been 3d in other industries for a while but mostly for manufacturing processes and of course automotive or our architecture has been using 3d for dozens of years

but it was for a completely different purpose and today they are discovering that visualization in 3d is something that is using different methods and if you really want to to achieve high quality and interactivity and be able to reuse easily your assets for a lot of different purposes um you have to do that using the the techniques coming from the game um and also what what it brings the the the the real time thing that is happening these days uh as you were saying uh with the new console generations and all that is that um in the past interactivity was was at the cost of uh visual quality but it's it's not really the case anymore for a lot of use cases you cannot unless you're a

specialist you cannot really make the difference between an offline rendering and real-time rendering depending on on the use cases of course but for a lot of use cases the difference is not that big anymore the gap is not that big anymore so it means that previously as a creative professional you had to work in a kind of abstraction and you were you were working all day long on something that was an abstraction of the final product the final media the final sequence or um it's not the case anymore now with real time you can iterate directly on the final product and it is changing everything and this is also why adobe is embracing 3d today because um

if you look at the other tools uh to adobe they are all real-time tools i would say when you're working on photoshop you're not not working on an abstraction of the final image you're working on the final image in your if you change a pixel you change a pixel in the final image in 3d until recently you were working on something that was an abstraction lower quality simplified geometry simplified lightings simply find materials and then you had to render and this abstract phase they meant that people who were not specialists were unable to to predict what the final result would look like it's still completely the case for a very advanced 3d like vfx and you were talking about mandalorian or of course when you're at this level of

extreme quality um you still have a difference between the final product and the different steps before but for more everyday purposes 3d i would say now you can um you can go real time and you can iterate in real time and this is we see this happening in many industries in the game industry obviously but also in the other industries and it's changing everything well speaking of changing everything i kind of want to dive a little deeper on that of course increasing workflows increasing speed um can mean two things right it means that we can get quality faster but it could also mean that a producer want more things at once right and so i i kind of want to talk about that like um uh what type of uh workflow changes that this is creating for all industries right now do

you think um the the quality of product of course with large teams are gonna get better but that being even true or with the smaller teams even because now tools are so accessible and can you're using essentially the same tools at bigger studios to produce the same level of art just depends on your time i want to hear you guys thoughts of how the last two years especially just influx of great tools like substance uh and and other tools uh how has the changes uh been for for from your perspective so i would start rapidly with saying that um except since we don't differentiate our tools depending on the level of proficiency or on the cost of the tool it's it's very important it's a very important choice we we made and students today get sepsis for free

and it's exactly the same product as what aaa studio would use um so there is absolutely no differentiation in the product so the accessibility of the tools is key um to to spread them but also to make sure that the um the industry has enough um [Music] enough people to hire and uh and that that the know-how can fluidly go from the bigger studios to smaller studios from students to to to students etc etc um i think this is an important choice we made on the samsung side and this is something that is um that is part of our success probably um today and yeah the the result is that small studios have

exactly the same tools as big studios so yeah creativity wins in the end yeah that's pretty good news for everyone for sure uh uh so i want to ask you jeremy like um with all these tools being better and um we're talking about you know the uncoming new consoles uh that are basically gonna up up for quality and output uh in at the end of the year right so my question is that um with with all these tools coming out and uh especially every console generation let me kind of go back a bit every console generation is defined by the lighting and rendering pipeline and and texturing right um from the normal map to where you're tracing now so uh what is the next leap that we're going to be seeing with the next console generation is going to be more quality stuff or are there different techniques

that you feel and i i see substance being at the forefront of defining what what our quality and next leap is um what are your thoughts on that yeah i think there are some some just obvious things like we'll have higher resolution uh textures obviously and higher poly counts and and more complex complex meshes um but but i think we'll probably truly differentiate this this new um this new uh generation i think we we saw it with the very few images that we've seen of next-gen stuff is um first the shading uh i think the last generation we had the the pbr shader the advantage of ppr shading and that kind of caused a big leap in in the realism of materials in general and games um but it's still it's in most games today in the current generation it's so fairly

limited you basically have you have a color a roughness of metallic and a normal map and that's pretty much all you have in your initiator unless there's some specific cases um i think the next generation we're going to see materials um gets much more complex with a much more complex material um reaction like sheen and clear coat and and um thin film there's all sorts of of um physical properties to materials in real life that the simplified ppr model we use in the current generation does not account for and um i think this will really um bridge the gap between the rendering you see today and and what could be seen as um like a real-life uh object or photo um that's one thing and especially applied to characters and that kind of object i think we're going to start to see characters that are a quality in artisan cinematics maybe not in gameplay but in cinema in real time cinematics they will have the same quality as what you would find in in vfx today

the second part is also also i think linked to characters is uh i think we're at a point where we finally have the power and um the knowledge and the algorithm to do um proper hair fur and cloth simulation in in a very realistic way which was kind of um we had some of that uh this generation but it was very um kind of approximations and tricks and kind of cheating i think we're going to get we already see that with some there's some papers from uh in unreal and in frostbite there is already some some uh interesting um interesting work on that i think we'll see in the next generation characters are really lifelike i think that will be the be the big leap

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all right i'm going to try to tell me if my if i'm too loud sometimes because i tend to like lean into the mic too much so my next presenter is matt burns he's a writer composer and game developer and he will be discussing in studio zektronics latest game eliza the research design and writing process in this talk we'll take a look behind the scenes at how igf grand prize nominated visual novel eliza grew from an initial idea into its final form we'll take a look at creative inspirations the research stage initial prototypes and the writing process with plenty of insights and takeaways for how to approach complex topics and overcome creative challenges in your own games so matt you are

live people should be able to hear you now awesome man great doing okay doing all right all right man thanks for being uh at least kicking off the day two event of g decks and uh whenever you're ready i'll let you take it away certainly all right i will um i'll just get started so today i'm going to talk about eliza which is a visual novel that i made with the team at zaktronics first who am i i've been in the games industry for about 20 years now in a variety of different roles um i didn't really join with necessarily a specific role in mind but over the course of my career i've found myself drawn time and time again to sort of the narrative side of things and the sound side of things and performance side of things so i've been really interested in story and narrative design and the ways that games and interactive technologies can um can explore this kind of stuff so um

that's why i am i've been in i've been in a lot of different roles like i said in a lot of different studios aaa and indie studios and other other play and the game that we're going to or the topic that we're going to talk about is eliza as brandon said the inspiration for it the initial attempts that i have made to try to talk about this subject matter um how it was eventually really made for real and then kind of like the personal uh stuff that i took away from it which i think um i hope is useful for people to see because i think that a lot of times we we talk a lot about technical aspects of things and um i think it's important also to talk about our sort of our journeys as creators and as creative people and and think about the work that we do um from that lens of like you know why are we doing this and and what's important to keep in mind as we as we move on in in our careers

so what is eliza um this is a little this is a little uh write up of the the premise but basically it's about um it takes place in a very uh realistic world a very modern day world in seattle um where i live and it's about an ai-powered therapy program where people go and get therapy from this ai if you have something like an amazon alexa in your home you know you that something like that might not be too far off like you might come home one day and just be like oh i don't you know hey alexa i don't feel very good and alexa might be like that's interesting tell me more about that like that kind of app for for these kinds of things doesn't seem that far field one of the things that one of the twists that i use is that the therapy is actually read to people by other human beings which is sort of how i am able to get players to participate in those therapy

sessions anyway so this is about kind of this um this topic which is technology for mental health um it's told in the form of a visual novel and it has a lot of different characters in it who kind of uh come at this from different angles like there are some technology executives there are normal people who use it for everyday life and sort of the the ultimate goal is to sort of help this main character evelyn decide what she wants to do um with the rest of her life basically and how she wants to contribute uh to to the world knowing what she does um this is this is a kind of the typical screenshot of uh of the game when you're in uh mode you can see you the player have have donned this sort of uh ar headset and you're giving therapy to this guy uh who's you know who's under a certain amount of mental distress and you have these

metrics on the on the right side of the screen and this sort of debug view on the left side of the screen um but you don't really necessarily have much you you basically don't choose what you get to say to him you have to say what the um what the system tells you to say and that is a choice that i made that i'll get into later of why why that's the case and why this is a very uh linear visual novel for for most of its uh duration so what inspired me to make this story which is that in 2014 i actually saw a demo for this technology that really was an actual uh virtual therapist uh there was a real person sitting there in front of a in front of a screen and there was all this like kind of face tracking stuff that was going on on on their faces there was like body you know computer all this computer vision stuff and then there was this um computer therapy avatar person who is

the kind of sims-esque second life-esque character you can see sitting in that big chair who would say that's interesting tell me more about that and this was a really this is a really interesting and kind of striking use of technology and when i saw that demo i just couldn't i couldn't get it out of my head i was just like that's that's such a therapy we talk of this kind of of things a lot of the time and then and then we're kind of like run up against this like weird technology that may or may not actually understand what we're talking about so um this made a deep impression on me and i just kind of had it in the back of my mind i wanted to tell a story about it um and so uh i started researching the history of technology for mental health and so a bunch of the research that i did one of the things that it led me to was the the eliza chatbot program uh the original eliza chatbot program which was

created in the 1960s uh by a man named joseph eisenbaum who is a professor at mit uh that's a whole history in itself that i could go on for a very long time but suffice it to say that like in the 60s this this sort of like technology for mental health therapy idea got started and then throughout the rest of time since then it's been this idea that goes on and on um and you can see on the in the lower right of this is just kind of a funny image from some of the some of the research that i did of like investigating what if you could like touch someone and get like virtually touch something and would that help you just a bizarre uh image from from the history of this type of research and so while i was trying to develop this into a story that i wanted to tell like a creative story you know i used twine um twine is a great text-based tool for anyone who's interested in interactive narrative it's kind of this choice it's this you know

um choose your own adventure sort of style thing where you can um you make these nodes as you can see on the on the graph on the right you and and you go in between them so depending on what choices people make or locations people are in you can move them around between these nodes and it's a it's easy to use and actually pretty powerful once you start getting into some of the scripting and stuff like that and so i've used twine for previous personal projects that i made um just uh like short stories basically uh one of which was called the writer will do something which is about playing as a game writer in a in a meeting and um so i decided to explore the idea with twine this was my first uh attempt at kind of it's like doing this therapy thing um as you can see it's very uh dystopian it's got this like apple ii sort of

look with the with the orange font on black and stuff like that and it's uh i didn't think that i would get any art support or any kind of like budget to do this so this is like me thinking that i'm going to make a small twine game uh with no resources and that was kind of interesting for a little while but you know it is hard to keep it up for for for more than like 15-20 minutes because it sort of like gets the point across really fast and then you're like okay but then but then what it's hard to keep it complicated um this was my second twine prototype and if you look carefully you can see this is actually if and if you're familiar with the way eliza actually turned out this is actually pretty close to the format that eliza is in there's a scene that starts here on the left with you on the train you can look around the train and then you can continue to work and then you can see maybe you can see on the on the um right side there then you're at work and

you're in the office and you can like look at the emails that your work sends you or you can do a therapy session and so this was where i sort of teased out the structure of how the game would operate with these scenes that you could maybe look around in a little bit and then these therapy scenes where you basically couldn't really do much and so i started writing and i was just kind of wrote and wrote and wrote since um from 2014 to 2019 i guess it's like a period of five years i was just kind of like working on this in the background um between my day job and other things that i had going on um i tried to start with the characters that i wanted to tell stories about and and sort of generate their um their whole outlook on life and you know what they want and then go from there and so the conflicts in the game come from what the different characters want and um how they sort of butt up against each other and what i did was i once i had kind of the format of like what the different scenes

would be in i started putting everything in trello as a trello card so every little piece of narrative information is a trello card so whether that's a scene or an email or an im conversation or a moment to explore that became its own trello card and that was really uh useful because that let me sort of drag around the cards in uh i needed in order to be able to like make the make the uh the narrative work from there so it became very flexible i could say oh that scene should probably take place before that other one drag it around like i see the players have this information at this time then they get this email about this and and so forth and so it was very useful for like kind of structuring the entire information flow and narrative and so this is where zektronics comes in i would have been working with zaktronic since 2015 maybe even earlier

i contributed music for their game infinite factory and then i started contributing more narrative design and writing and music and sound design for their more recent games uh shenzhen i o and opus magnum and exa punks uh and i was talking with uh zac barth the founder and creative director of zachtronics and i was telling him about this idea that i had this is always going to be about like therapy and i'm thinking it could be done as a as a visual novel and um it's you know about this virtual ai stuff and zach said why don't we do this as an electronics game and that was uh first of all kind of surprised to me uh this electronics is not known for this type of game it's not um this sort of very narrative heavy game zektronics is is if they're known at all they're known for these very um hardcore pc programmer puzzly types of

games uh that have a very niche audience i would say like some of them like tis 100 you have to like actually just do programming in order to to solve the game so they have a pretty good audience for that type of game but again it's very different from the type of thing that i was building in the story of eliza and but very much to his credit zach was just like well let's give it a try i mean you never know like this is something new for us none of us wants to just do the same thing over and over and i think that here's where we come to one of the maybe the key lessons of of what i'm talking about today like this is this is something brand new for zachtronics this is brand new for me too let's try it let's see how how things work out and so zach's kind of uh openness to trying it was a huge key reason for why eliza exists so having taken the the story and themes

and and the writing that i was working on for eliza and then bringing it to zachtronics allowed us to do two really important things and one the first one was uh use art resources and put professional artists on the game and the second was um the voiceover resources and doing the voiceover recording um and so the art process was really about like working with uh the zektronics artists to find a style that kind of worked with the type of game that this was visual novels i think a lot of times you know are associated either with like anime style art if they're japanese visual novels or this sort of more cartoony style of art uh even in western visual novels have a more um abstract cartoon sort of look to them usually um and so because eliza is a serious story we were thinking it needed a more serious style of art but not necessarily like this

photo realistic style either because it's um it's definitely a fictional story and it's telling uh you know a story that takes place in not necessarily exactly real life but a kind of like a version of real life it's like an interpretation of it and so we spent a good amount of time and i think it was it really paid off of like finding this art style that's like painterly that's realistically you know based but not necessarily um anime or cartoon like either it's sort of it sort of like tries to weave all of that together and i think it really pays off in the characters um one thing you'll also notice when you play the game is that the character portraits don't have uh emotes something that happens in a lot of like more anime style games is that like they have lots of different faces and they their facial expressions uh change based on what line they're saying on a line-to-line basis but these don't and that's a deliberate

decision on our part we tried to put all of the characters kind of expressions and meaning into their singular portraits into you know the way that they look um so you can see like like sauron uh dr sworn like rose who's um the second from the left down there he's kind of eyeing the the camera with a slightly air you know weary slightly superior uh look to his to his face and and you can see um gabriel on the on the left on the right i'm sorry uh you know with that with that look on his on his face and i think that these are very expressive looks that that sort of encapsulate these characters and i think that that worked very well and then the other half of of the zektronics resources was doing the casting and recording this is a fully voiced visual novel and we've gotten a lot of great feedback on the voice acting in the game

and i think the reason why the voice acting works is we just invested a lot in it into trying to make it work uh we did an open casting call with our wonderful casting director chris brown uh she sent us over 1200 auditions uh to listen to for all the different characters which was uh an enormous amount that you know it took me like a week to listen to them all and then there were a lot of like really excruciating choices to have to make when you have so many amazing auditions and and reads for these characters and you can only pick one and one of the reasons we were able to get these really great actors people asked you know like wow how did you get such and such actor there were several actors who were pretty pretty big in games who decided to work on this and i think part of the reason is that the um the material that we had for them to read was was really interesting i think for if you are an actor here's an example of

of dr soren lloyd rose's uh kind of monologue that we sent out to people and you can see it's a it's a very juicy monologue you know you can really get into like performing it and i think that actors respond to chances to be able to perform so if you're interested in working with actors which i encourage everybody to to do and gain some experience with um you know give them a chance give them a chance to perform give them a chance to show you what they can do and where they can take the material because they'll really add to your material in ways that maybe even surprise you in a very positive way sometimes sometimes in the negative way but oftentimes in a very positive way so now i want to talk about the uh the narrative design choices that i made for this game uh eliza a lot of people notice is very linear almost the entire way through the game with some very limited choices for probably the first two thirds and then

the last third opens up a little bit more and you can make more choices um as you can i just included this screenshot from uh shibuya scramble in the lower right there just to show kind of the norm is that to for to tell players that like you are affecting the story by making these choices like like you are deciding where the story goes and that's kind of not the case in eliza eliza takes you along a very long path and then at the very end says all right so what are you gonna do about it and that was a that was a choice that i deliberately made um there wasn't like this big web of like cause and effect or anything like that i what i was really trying to do was i wanted to set up a complex situation uh that you know had a lot of different facets to it and one of the best ways that i thought of to do it was just to show show people

um when we you know when we have like when we take on complex subjects uh in things like novels for example novels are entirely linear but they can represent very very uh complex systems and entrenched systems and i was sort of inspired by the way linear works like that are able to do that i did that knowing fully well that some people would criticize it that as a interactive work as a visual novel you know it should have more it should have more choice in it but i was kind of suspicious of that i thought like maybe like choices in a visual level are kind of like fake choices because they're not really choices you know i don't know uh you can argue about that a lot there's a lot of discourse about that kind of stuff but anyway that's a choice that i made with this game and we'll talk about how that turned out um of course making eliza the way we did meant that it was kind of like this weird um it was this weird thing it was not

necessarily a very gamey game because it's this linear narrative um you know listen to people talk kind of game and you have you really just have to like click through a lot of conversations you have to be on board with what i'm what i'm doing you have to like kind of be like all right i'm i'm ready for this and and you know place yourself in my hands um it's also not a visual novel that's like really for conventional visual novel fans you know it takes the visual novel format but it does stuff that most visual novels don't do if you're familiar with the genre you know that you know many of them are straight up pornography um or they're about like dating they have this kind of like lurid pulpy uh approach a lot of the time not all of them of course but uh many of them do and so here's this like kind of like serious visual novel about real people talking about their lives and ai and therapy and like you know will anyone

respond to that and so while i was working on the project i was convinced that you know that it was important but i also was afflicted by a ton of doubt like why am i doing this like am i making a game for nobody it was the phrase that's kind of kept popping into my um into my head and uh you can see self-doubt matthew over there on the on the on the right and i think this brings us to maybe my second major point um for for people who are working on their own games like this this this moment of doubt which is like i don't know i i don't know why i'm doing this or like who is this for i'm not necessarily quite sure um but the game came out uh in august of 2019 and uh it actually did end up connecting with people uh and that's i think was really um was really nice to see uh there were some

really really wonderful write-ups of it in in publication rock paper shotgun and and paste and giant bomb uh there were a lot of uh people who who wrote in to me and to zachtronics who just said hey this was really you know this gave me a lot to think about you know i felt seen by it uh which is really really amazing um the criticisms that i that you know i knew were going to happen were there it's too linear you don't really have any choice it's boring you just hear talk people talk about their problems all the time uh one of the ones that he didn't anticipate was it doesn't have a viewpoint which i i don't know i think you know i wanted to talk about a complex subject and include i wanted to include many viewpoints in my work that doesn't mean i agree with all of them or none or that i don't have my own viewpoint and personally i believe that my viewpoint is all over this game but i guess if you don't you know if you

don't know reading comprehension you might not uh you might not see that um so what did i learn uh from making eliza well i want to keep kind of making new things like this was a good experience in trying something wildly different uh for me i'm not like a visual novel person who's been making lots of visual novels this was the the first one i've ever tried to make and i want to keep trying like things that are new to me i think it was a great experience to just dive into something that i wasn't necessarily familiar with a format i wasn't familiar with and just see how things work there um and i think that i'm emboldened by my choice to make a very linear visual novel i think it was the right thing for this game like it's not going to be the right decision for every game or even every visual novel but i think that like leading leading people along this path for that amount of time is the only way i could get the sort of effects that

that i do get in the later part of the game so i think it was the right choice i know that it that some people were you know didn't like it but i think it worked out in the end um and so i think it's important to to make that trade-off i think it's important when you are being creative to say look this isn't necessarily like the most this isn't going to please like 100 of the people but this is important for us to do this is important for us to make um and then the other kind of insights come around like what kind of creative that i am i think for even though i've been working in games for about 20 years now i'm still trying i'm still kind of figuring out who i am as a creator i'm still figuring out like where my you know where my whole deal comes from and i think that eliza really helped me realize this that i'm i'm not necessarily the person who's gonna make the thing that's like this huge hit probably not i because i'm too

interested in like sort of more slightly more obscure things and um but the the flip side of that is that when people do connect with eliza they let me know and then that's really important to me and so even if eliza wasn't necessarily like it wasn't this huge commercial success or anything like that many people still haven't heard of it um i absolutely appreciate all of the you know the recognition that it's gotten but it's not necessarily like a big a big indie game or anything like that um but i think that the experience of like having those things has helped me realize like what's actually important and that my biggest goal is to make these things that you know wouldn't exist otherwise and that have a a big impact on the people who who do experience it and who are in the right frame of mind um to experience it

so uh that's my brief description of of uh how eliza was made um eliza is available on steam and it shio for pc mac and linux you can also get it on the nintendo switch on the on the nintendo store and uh here's my contact information feel free to you know reach out to me if you have questions or anything like that to talk further about this uh like i said i could go on about how this game was made for a very long time so um and i'm always fine with people reaching out about it so thank you thank you very much for listening to me talk about uh talk about eliza all right man thanks a lot matt when we leave the screen on so people can reach you throughout the the question portion of this and uh this is actually a perfect opportunity for uh reminding anyone that is watching this to ask your questions throughout the social channels wherever you're watching this from we do have our moderators in

there to kind of pull these questions over so to kind of get this kick started i'll go ahead and ask my own questions man and um i want to thank you for your time for for coming on to gdox and sharing your story and one of the the best parts of g ducks and meeting so many presenters with a different background is that they define success in different ways and i feel like that is very important because in the end if your first reason for making a game or a piece of entertainment isn't about um you know self-serving in a way it's like does that make you happy does that feel uh i mean what level of success really makes you feel successful uh i think uh i think you're already setting yourself up for failure if you're going for other reasons um other than that i mean has this this this realization um has it was it realized in what stage of your career where you felt like you know

there's a certain part of me as a game developer where i actually appreciate the ability to wake up and just make games and not be starving on the streets you know i when i when i started in games i wanted it all right like i wanted i wanted monetary success i wanted to make a game that everybody loved i wanted artistic success i wanted to make a game that you know was was like like artistically important i wanted everybody to know who i was you know the and and i think that over time i started to learn that that's kind of an unrealistic and unrealistic goal um you can make something that a lot of people like but isn't necessarily uh you know the the biggest um money maker or you can make something that is like very broadly popular but doesn't necessarily have much to say

um it turns out there's a lot of trade-offs in terms of like what what success actually is you can make something that you personally don't believe in but that you know the market likes you know in a lot of indie spaces a lot of discussion is about like what's a game that i can make that a lot of people will like so i can stay in business as an indie and it took me it took me a long time actually of of like being in games and working on games for me to to kind of like start to settle on how i define success for myself like what what are the actual most important things because like i said when i first started i wanted all of them but sort of working on many different games in many different capacities i've started to kind of like realize what's really important to me um and it turns out that like making something on my own terms that has artistic integrity that i personally believe in turns out to be a little bit

more important than you know building building a business or whatever but that's me i think that that's something that everybody has to decide for themselves like what you know where the where the uh the balance is for them there are some people who who work on like aaa games who who are just fine with it you know and there's nothing wrong with that um like like they would be fine with just making like cars for forza or gran turismo and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that so again i think it comes down to like you have to like figure out what success you you know works for you if that makes sense yeah that totally makes sense man uh this is a question from chromacat what was the biggest challenge in the development of eliza was the story change throughout the the development um so the story actually very luckily kind of

was developed in such a way that it was pretty well set by the time we went into producing the assets and and like making all the art so that part was actually pretty smooth i think the biggest really the biggest challenge was um just getting to that point where we could where we could like say okay this thing is is ready to to be made and that was really just like doing a lot of the writing and sort of getting my head around what this what this thing was going to be um once we had the idea of like it's a visual novel it has this you know the specific um these specific beats and these kinds of um assets and we know we need this to finish it i think um it was pretty smooth although there was a pretty big load on me to both finish the story get all the voiceover in do all the voice over sessions and then i was also the composer for the game and so i so i wrote all the music for it as well and that was um

that was tough finishing in the summer of of 2019 and that was yeah yeah it was it was it was tough um and so that was that was tough but um it wasn't it wasn't horrible actually i don't want to i don't want to like be dramatic about it or anything uh but of course that's that's from like you know crunching i've experienced crunch like in in aaa settings um early on in my career and i i kind of like learned very quickly that that's that's a bad way to do things and so i tried very hard to like pace myself and and work in smart ways as opposed to killing myself which i think if i hadn't had that experience that bad experience um of crunch on aaa i might have gone overboard on on this i i definitely empathize with you i think it's so crunching and and

you know that the tough parts of being in the industry is something i i feel um i think we can all for future generations uh for the younger generation we want them to avoid but there is a certain certain line that i i feel like most developers should experience to know the limits right i think it is healthy i don't know all right that's too far yeah honestly i think like even in even indie developers end up sometimes crunching themselves in unhealthy ways because you know they want to get things done and hopefully hopefully everyone gets that learning experience of like okay this is pushing myself too far and i think it's a okay so try to find what that limit is uh for yourself because like different people have different limits and so i think you know if you if you push yourself a little bit and you're just like okay wait that's not that's not healthy that's okay i think you just have to like pay attention to yourself pay

attention to your uh body physically you have to pay attention to your mind um your mental state and all these things and just just keep an eye on it try try your best to to to pace yourself and and be healthy about it you might make a mistake that's okay um but yeah it sometimes it does take experience you know to really know to really understand definitely so this is a question from uh god's plan good name uh can matthew can can can you talk about the use of the phone in the game how you chose what apps to include scope of the phone functionality yeah i can't uh the phone in the game i think came from wanting to so i was thinking about you know when i when i thought about this visual novel form i was thinking about all the different ways you can get information one being the um just a scene of two people talking

another being um like the therapy session you know different modes and eliza is hardly the first game to have like a an in-game cell phone that's a pretty common uh trope these days to have like your your little cell phone in game and i wanted to have um corporate emails and stuff and um you'll notice even in the twine prototypes there's like a terminal you go to and you get email from from your company and that's that's sort of based on my experience of like working in companies like the the specific voice and tone of corporate email that you get from your bosses or whatever and so the phone was a way to sort of consolidate all the emails that you get and the im conversations that you have and then once we had the idea of the phone it was like oh well we should probably have like some extra app icons on there to make it look like a real phone um and then we thought of like so what are some what

are some like extra little apps we could do to make to build out the phone so it feels like a real phone uh zach loves to build solitaire variants so uh every recent zachtronics game had as a zack has designed in it as a mini game uh it's just kind of like a hobby for him he'll just do make a new solitaire so that's where the solitaire came from and we themed it with um the japanese kabufuda cards because uh an ongoing theme is evelyn kind of like thinking about um her japanese heritage and and integrating you know where to go with that um that's a just a personal thing that i built into her character um and then that kind of relaxation app that she has and then these other apps that don't do anything that are just there to kind of like fill out uh the rest of the phone that um if you try to go into them there's just a message that she's like oh i shouldn't do that i shouldn't play that anymore one is this like very

obvious like kind of like match three just play more of it compulsive you know free to play thing and she's like okay i'm done with that and so that became like a way to both fill out the phone and make it feel more real with more app icons and then also kind of tie that in with the story which was like she used to be like just compulsively playing this app but but now she's like moving on you know so that that helps sort of reinforce where things are with the story i hope that answers the question about like the phone and stuff the phone was a little tough to figure out too because like phones are you know phones are vertical and and so the the screen is like this right but the phone is like that so like how you can fit enough information on there and make it feel real was uh kind of tough and and doing all the fake ui stuff uh phone uis are actually very complicated and and doing that but that that actually took a fair amount of time to figure out i hope that answers your question about the phone yeah i think it does if not follow up

following the questions so this is some shadow monarch uh in the five years of developing eliza how did you overcome your doubts about the game and that it might become a game for nobody what made you overcome those doubts well when i was first you know the the first part the first whole like three years was me just working on it as like a toy game with no stakes like i was just thinking it would be like this text game that i put up on hio just like my other free twine games and so there were there were no stakes to it so i didn't have that i didn't have that doubt coming because it was just like well i'll just put it up for free and people will react to it or not and and that actually was probably a pretty important time now that i think about it like that was important for me to be able to develop it without worrying like is this commercially successful you know like will people like this or not

it was really when we started spending money on it or when tektronix started spending money on it that i started to be like oh no like like now we're like paying people to do stuff you know and now now we're like spending money on this game that means like there's this expectation that the game is going to make its money back and that's when the pressure started so i think it was actually very lucky that eliza started as just this weird idea that i wanted to do that didn't have that pressure on it and i was able to develop it a certain way and then say here's here's the thing that it could be if we spent some money on it and then zach was like okay let's do that um then that's when kind of the doubt set in especially toward the end when it was coming together as a product i wanted to believe that it was really great but i was also just like i'm not sure but by that time you know the game was already going to come out like it was it was already well well on its way so i couldn't just say like hey let's stop making the game

because we had already been we had already made it so in a certain way it was more like just hoping hoping for the best and kind of stoically you know using stoic philosophy to prepare myself for the worst i guess is how i dealt with it this is a question from nightwolf how can you pitch a visual novel or have it up for review without a non-disclosure since since it is mainly selling a story or is it best to self-publish in the genre it really depends i mean i was lucky in that i had i i knew zach right so so we had a previous um relationship so i was just talking to him very casually and i knew that zach wouldn't steal my story because i knew that you know zach's zack isn't gonna make his own visual novel about about therapy and stuff like that um i'll say that in the case of eliza if i had brought it to other publishers

or or developers i would not have asked them for an nda personally and the reason for that is because even if even if they did steal my idea to make a game about therapy and ai and stuff like that one that's a really weird idea to steal in the first place like it's so it's so off the wall like i can't it's hard for me to imagine someone else like taking that idea and doing it but then two even if they did take the idea they would have made a very very different um they would have made a completely different game out of the same concept recently there were two two indie games two indie narrative games that came out about driving a taxicab uh one was called neocab and one was called night call there's actually a third one called birds of tokyo or something something

some it takes place in tokyo i forget the third one have this premise of like being a taxi cab and and slightly uh you know noirish dark streets and things like that but they have tremendously different approaches and different subjects and things like that and so i think that your basic premise of a visual novel you know if you make it it's going to be it's going to be yours and so this is this is just my personal sense of it like i wouldn't i wouldn't worry too much about ndas as far as like these are my this is like the the basic premise of my of my story you know um sure people can people can steal your basic premise i guess but they they won't know what to do with it like you know what to do with it if that makes sense yes so uh this is a question from god's plan again who made the decision to include the game in a humble bundle

did that casual audience uh that wouldn't normally seek the game out have a positive effect or or not um so the the humble uh decision was mostly mostly zach's uh since he's the head of zachtronics and he's kind of acts as the publisher of the game though he did ask me you know if i had any objection and i didn't and uh i think the humble deal was actually really good it really did put the game in front of a lot of people who wouldn't have normally played it and in fact we got uh several emails and there's there are a few reviews on on the steam page that you can find that say if it hadn't been for the humble uh i wouldn't have played this and i'm glad that i did um it also put the game in front of a bunch of people who are just like what is this i don't know what that you know like they didn't know how to deal with with it and because they weren't properly ready for the type of thing

that it is uh which is fine i think that like there's there's a certain amount of that when you put something in front of a large number of people um some people aren't going to know how to react to it i think the the humble deal was largely very positive because yeah a lot more people saw it and were able to experience it and many people at least from from what i could tell had had a surprising uh a surprisingly pleasant experience with it this is my personal question so this is a i always like to pull people especially our presenters and guests who've kind of moved across big and small companies and kind of felt out you know what the industry is is like out there and i i would love to kind of hear your your your expansion of that uh of your opinion of you know what what has been what have you seen in smaller studios that you can do at bigger studios

and vice versa at bigger studios in terms of resources that you know you're you're stretched thin on on smaller studios that's a really good question one of the cool things about a small studio is just that you can wear multiple hats like i mentioned i you know i was doing the music for eliza as well as like all the other stuff that i was doing for it and i think that that while it was a lot of work it was also very important for me creatively and it was cool to be able to um write a line and then write music for when the actor is performing that line that's not a chance that you get often in larger budget productions um so i think that like there's a there's a creativity and a kind of a flexibility that you get in in really small studios which is really um

which is really nice it's very difficult for a large studio making a big game uh to kind of have that kind of flexibility working on a big aaa game is like to me the feeling is like being a really large ship in the ocean you have to you have to build a lot of you know momentum to start going some in a certain direction and then it's very hard to steer the ship you can't just necessarily just like zipper you know zip into a different direction if things aren't working you have to start pulling the ship in a certain direction and there's tons of momentum going um as for you know the things that that they can learn from each other i think that there are many things in common uh with respect to like how creative things work out whether they work out or not um how long to pursue something that is working or not um but it's it's a little bit harder to

to coordinate all that in a larger studio just to be completely honest like you there's so many more people there's so much more communication that has to happen it's just um it's just a little bit slower so i think that like for for larger studios i would say you know a big question that i would ask is like how small can you be and still make the game that you want to um i think i guess that's that's a good question for a studio of any size but like keeping it small i think over the course of many years like keeping things as small as possible has has turned out to be something that i think is actually pretty important um because just throwing people on a project is not necessarily the best thing for the project or the people and it certainly doesn't speed up the production of it but that's what a lot of studios do so i guess that's one thing um what small studios can learn from large studios i think

stuff like you know don't be afraid of um don't be afraid of doing stuff like voice over don't be afraid of doing stuff like working with an outside artist or like bringing you know bringing in that resources to really punch things up um this is this is the opposite of what maybe what i said would like make it with as few people as possible but what i do mean is like work with other people who really know what they're doing in their domain like we did with uh you know the eliza voice over uh and and bring that in and you can do uh even more amazing things than than even you thought you know um so don't be afraid to like uh reach out to other professionals and and have them add to your add to your work okay the next question is from jerushi so i think he's asking he's saying how impersonate but i think he's how do you

balance many viewports uh viewpoints with consistency and staying genuine across those viewpoints so when i was writing the different characters i mean i i think of the so one of the characters in eliza is named ray and she um she works for the large tech company in the game um and she's pretty she's pretty gung-ho about technology and working for this large tech company and that's kind of a lot of people think she's like super she's going to be like super evil because she's like pro big tech company but she over the course of the game she turns out to have a little bit more of a nuanced perspective and that's kind of based on just like people that i know in seattle like there are there are a lot of people who work at you know amazon or whoever that if you live in seattle you might meet in a in a

bar or something or at a at an event or whatever and they're nice people and they have like you know outwardly good politics and things like that and they say all the right things but then at the end of the day you know they work for amazon or facebook and it's like so how do they reconcile that you know how do they think about what they do versus like what they're contributing to and so that's kind of the thing that i try to represent which is that like people are people are pretty complex and they're not always internally consistent and so when i when i represent these people in the game who have like different viewpoints i'm not trying to um make everyone's viewpoints 100 consistent and i think that that's realistic because people in real life their viewpoints are not 100 consistent with each other so just you know saying that these people haven't resolved these differences in

their own characters i think makes them complex already and then balancing them was just a matter of like kind of making sure that they didn't overlap each other that like that you know these different characters all came from their own place of what they wanted to do and where they um where they wanted to go does that make sense yeah of course man you always make sense [Laughter] this is a this is a question from green gift sorry some of these are so small so uh what lead to the decision to make a game and not a short web series if it is as linear as you say do you think that this decision limited your reach yeah that's an interesting um that's an interesting question and you know if you look again if you look at the scene if you look at the negative steam reviews of which there are thankfully

only a handful but if you do look at them there some of them are like yeah i wasn't this a novel whatever and i did think about that i honestly did because um when i was making the decision that i was talking about and the talk of like this is going to be pretty linear you know so then why couldn't it couldn't it just be a linear story and um ultimately i think there's a difference between uh playing the game playing eliza and clicking to to get the next line and then seeing seeing therapy from from that first person viewpoint you know um you wouldn't really be able to get that in a film in a film we would probably would see the main character interview the other character right whereas um in this visual level it's this first person perspective we're talking about you you are sitting in this position and so there's that idea in a game where

it's like you are playing as this person you're not just like watching it happen um if you know like filmed entertainment that's like all first-person perspective is a little bit weird um and so games allow us to say you are experiencing this in a way that i think film doesn't and so i think it's slightly qualitatively different to experience at in the form of this visual novel even when it's completely linear yeah take that this is from nightwolf again how important is music to a visual novel can it be a large draw i think so i mean um i think music is important i think music is tremendously important to games just in general and i think that music in a visual novel can be a huge draw you know um

the the danganronpa series if you're familiar with that is i think a great example of like amazing music in a visual novel um phoenix wright if you count those as visual novels like the you know tremendously good music i think in those series have become such an important part of them and so you know having good music and and paying attention to it is um super super important i would say i'm biased because i do music but i think it's super important so this is actually a pretty good um follow-up question to that and i do want to dive in to your music background because it sounds very uh it's unique man compared to all the guinea brothers but um so specifically let me ask this one is from shakeel1001 he asks you what kind of software do you use uh for your music okay so i'll talk a little about my history too

and then like fold that in with the with the technology question um i've done music like i always had music as a hobby for a really long time and then i never i never really did it professionally until until quite recently actually um it was always like a thing that i did on the side as a hobby i always had like some synthesizer i was playing with and stuff like that and it came into my job a little bit once in a while because like when i worked in triple a i was like i worked in the production department as like you know a producer and so sometimes i would be working with the audio department but i never like made music for triple a games or anything like that it was more like i could talk to the people in the g and stuff like that um so then when i started working with zachtronics more i was able to just like start doing music and then i i think developed some more skill just

because like i had to in order to figure out how to make all that music and that's how i ended up starting making music for zectronics titles and then eventually eliza as well as for what i use right now i use logic pro on a macintosh and i have um a bunch of like native instruments stuff um and uh spitfire audio libraries those are i think all the main the main things that i use so i'm not too fancy wow sorry you're being a musician on the side of being a writer is a lot of hats already so i do want to ask you it's like is obviously does is music something that you've always um grew up with and what specific instruments do you did you start with and you play a little bit of everything now

um no i i'm i'm a keyboardist now i started with uh with piano lessons as a little kid um i think that's a pretty common uh asian kid thing but uh you know um started with piano lessons and kind of you know didn't didn't really go very far in terms of like the performance of of piano but became much more interested in like composition and like making your own making your own music then from from piano i started to get into like uh electronic music i got very deeply into like synthesizers and analog synthesis and stuff like that doing all that can be very expensive so i i usually do just plug-ins and and software the hardware side is just takes too much room and costs too much but uh i do like all that stuff

so it kind of went it kind of went like piano like classical piano typical that stuff when i was a kid to like being into electronic music and and synthesizer stuff and then getting more into like scores scoring you know that like kind of combines that sort of classical and electronic stuff um and other of course many other influences i always like to dive into your hobbies and now your profession aside from game development because i feel like uh it's those experiences and those combination of experiences that makes your your output your your expression uh that much more interesting um being around game developers at big or small studios have you noticed your input have been a little bit just a little bit enough different to kind of add into uh your games

yeah totally i think that you know all games are kind of like end up incorporating something of like the teams that make them i think on indie games that have smaller teams you see that a little bit more uh readily you know you see like like the kind of a quirky whatever like sense of humor that the developers have end up in the game in some way or whatever their their um world view is um i think that's actually also true of aaa games it's just a little bit harder to see but even even aaa games have these have these kind of of moments of personality that come from the team that make them whether that's like an animation that somebody made or just like a weird turn of phrase that a character ends up using or the way something is laid out in the game or the way

something looks uh games are just the sum of the output of the people who make them right and and the people making things put themselves in in the game and kind of encode their personalities in the game um almost even when they can't help it you know even when you're just trying to make something neutral that doesn't say anything you end up saying stuff just because of the choices that you make you know like do you think that like this character should be just like wearing all black do you think that like someone should say something in a certain way or what is true about the world that you're making you know it's all it's all based on like your your personal world view whether you want it to be or not you kind of end up showing who you are when you make stuff definitely well i wanna thank you matt for for coming on and kicking off day two uh for g ducks and uh it's always a joy kind of talking with you have a very soothing voice and you make me feel calm and and then uh it's a perfect way for

me to kind of get this thing started so um as a send-off uh i want to remind everybody that i know there's a lot of questions still coming in that uh maybe matt can can hang out with you within our discord channel and i'll just go over to matt's tv here the discord link is actually right underneath his his face but if you can't type that in real quick you can go to gdux.me and you'll be able to uh join discord that way and conversate with him in addition i want to hand over the mic to you matt to kind of give attention to shout out and tell people how to continue the conversations uh besides discord and and speak with you directly yeah um like i said i think um twitter is probably the easiest way you know to to get in touch with me uh my twitter is matthew sagee

m-a-t-t e-h-e-j-i there's also a contact form on my website which is matthew sagee.com and you can email me there um i will i can participate in the in the discord as as you don't have to we're not forcing you to uh this is here but they can ping you if they they they feel yeah absolutely yeah yeah now i enjoy talking with people and you know don't don't feel bad about reaching out to me if you have questions or things like that um yeah i want to thank you again matt for for coming on and uh uh we'll be in touch man i feel like i check in with you every every six months or so so i'm gonna continue the conversation then what else yeah sounds good

yeah yeah exactly yeah so i hope everyone stays uh stays safe and um i think you know now now more than ever like it kind of shows this is you know we can make games that uh that speak to real world issues i think that's a that's an important thing to think about and keep in mind so if i uh leave you with anything to kind of think about that might be something to to consider all right um so yeah so i'll hang out in the in the discord for a bit i um i think i'm gonna uh end the video stream but i'll i'll be in the discord if anyone wants to ping me there uh and i'll be able to answer people's questions say hello next time we're going to bring you on and play some music dude maybe that's [Laughter] part of the program it'll be nice i'm a bad performer i'm more of a i'm more of like a lay the notes out you know on the on the grid kind of guy these days i used to i used to practice and i was i

was bad at practicing like i didn't become a great performer i'll do interpretive dancing i'll be i'll be the visual okay all right man have a good one dude thank you all right everybody so before i introduce our next presenter uh in between each presenters if you are just joining us i like to do an unchained report these are pre-recorded interviews that i've conducted the last six months to kind of integrate within g ducks to talk the biggest topic so the unchained report theme of today is mostly centered around the rise of the solo developer and the how the future of game developers are actually getting younger and quicker and faster and pumping out amazing quality so the next unchaining report is about zheng chengcheng

he is from china he's a 23 year old developer that created a triple a quality game all by himself and has been getting a lot of notoriety for his game bright memory infinite uh he's created a studio called fyqd studio this is a game that easily became a highlight for the recent xbox series x gaming pressing event and easily one fans overthrew the gameplay demo and his unique story zhang's story ushers in a new generation of game developers who literally have no barricades to create whatever they want at a caliber of triple a quality it is both scary and exciting to watch his incredible success and i spent the time last month learning about his work and his process did you try to kind of put a small team together before going solo um

uh uh i did that i thought did cross my mind but when i first already started making the game in pre-production and in the early development i was already doing it by myself and i figured i'd see that through um for bigger projects or for the larger parts of the future of the games i make i may will probably branch out and look for a team or

individuals to come help but for right memory especially i really want to see it through on my own so as you were uh beginning this project what was your focal skill set and what did you have to branch out and learn to complete this project [Music] um

that's been a constant uh it's been very difficult in terms of picking up new skills i do have about nine years of development since since 2011 uh 2011 i have about nine years of game development uh background so i did have some preset skills already but it's still been a pretty difficult path learning new things

a big part of it was uh kind of learning the ins and out of unreal and that particular game engine and kind of troubleshooting and learning how to do the ins and outs of that engine and essentially figuring out a problem a lot of problem solving issues with it in terms of scripting and alike but um that's kind of been the learning process of kind of learning what works and what doesn't work with unreal [Music] was there was unreal from the get-go the engine that you had in mind or you think of unity

and um if you were thinking about other engines why unreal at the end unrealized foreign i initially looked at unity 3d but a lot of unity requires a lot of really complicated coding um unreal i ended up

settling on because it has a lot of the built-in blueprints and a lot of like kind of the ease of use that allows a developer such as myself to really um go through much easier and with a much easier barrier for entry [Music] as you were looking at that can you kind of paint a global um picture of the development of bright memory just in terms of how long was pre-production development and to a point where you're you're you're you're finally able to share and promote like what was that uh timeline uh

so it initially started with a lot of the environmental stuff making sure we can get the environments right before we

moved into the uh game uh the actual game side of it and then making sure that all that worked together as well as the coding for it uh before i just really kind of narrowed down the idea of um the characters and everything else a lot of my focus was on the environmental aspect as that has taken up the largest portion of my um of the production schedule um before we uh were i was comfortable with kind of showing off the game um making sure everything looked the way i wanted it to and interacted the way i wanted it to and play the way i wanted it to so what was the um main inspiration for bright memory that um as far as your pre-production i'm sure this is an idea that you had for a while and and finally wanted to just go with it right um what were the games that really heavily influenced bright memory

uh it probably all started with my favorite game which is uh call of duty and i really looked at a lot of the shooting mechanics of that game and the gameplay mechanics before i started looking at uh other aspects of games

like bullet storm and shadow warrior and kind of brought in a lot of the uh different elements of those games that really inspired kind of the way uh bright memory ended up becoming i see um my next question is of course uh the biggest biggest thing especially this year right with everything uh covid related um has it affected your uh marketing plans and development plans it seems like memory is pretty much done at this point did it uh make you pivot to another strategy uh because of this unexpected thing

um [Music] [Music]

uh i think there's been both good and bad uh one of the good things about it was that more people are have to stay at home and have more time to essentially be exposed to and play the game in china after the initial quarantine the amount of steam users rise almost uh quite exponentially so it's a lot more exposure and time online for people to be exposed and play the game however the bad of course would be our in-person exposure at uh conventions like gdc that has all been cancelled and our inability to really market the game in that way has really uh hindered um the marketing of the game in that particular senso has been a great focus

on the online space in terms of the marketing hey what's up everybody so uh i do see larry they don't hear you yet but we might have to do some technical uh oh there we go i think i see it now oh then it's gone so while uh while he reconnects with us i do want to remind everybody that uh give me a sec here

that this is a perfect opportunity to tell you guys that you can connect with us on discord uh if you want to donate to this free event at any point go to gux dot me and see money and cash fall from the sky and this is going to help me and the team to contribute to the next g-dux event so at any moment you can press that if you don't believe me feel free to contribute so i will take a small break while help larry get the screen up we do see you larry oh there we go i think we're good now okay let me kind of pipe you in and let me go right after you uh to the audience here so we'll be discussing uh the business of games larry a 20-year veteran of the game industry will explain how a

business mindset can help you be more successful this presentation is about more than making wise business choices it is about developing a framework for financial decisions all right everyone buckle in so i believe i am ready on this side so whenever you're ready larry i'm ready i'm ready are we all all good are you good on this brandon yep the show floor is perfect thank you so um let me start off with an introduction let me start off by telling you what i don't do um i haven't written a line of of code in over 40 years um i'm possibly the least talented person in the world when it comes to graphics and and let me also just offer a confession i'm absolutely laughable when it comes to online gameplay yet over the past 20 years i've been pretty successful in the games industry and i can honestly say that that i have fun at work uh every day of my my career

my goal is to teach you what i have learned in the hope that it contributes to your success let me um let me start off with the next portion of the presentation by telling you i'm hoping you're asking uh who is this guy and why should we bother listening to him so my credentials um from 2001 to 2011 i was part of the team over at starduck um we shipped games including galactic civilizations one and two sins of solar empire demigod elemental um during that time we built up a steam competitor called impulse if you were involved in the gaming ecosystem at that time you may remember it in 2011 that was sold to gamestop and i joined gamestop as the business development manager um for their pc digital sales which was a great opportunity it got me to work with with every major game companies as i used to say i worked with everyone from from activision to zenimax

um in 2013 uh i joined night dive studios my my reason for that was in part uh because i wanted to get back to a studio that was creative that actually uh made things um my title is director of business development um we have over 100 titles published on steam gog xbox um switch uh soon playstation um including the system shock and turok games um last year working in cooperation with atari we did blood fresh supply and then most recently working with our friends over at bethesda we released uh doom 64. at the uh at the very bottom of this slide um i have my education um i have a bachelor science degree from new york university i have an mba from detroit mercy i was a mba scholar of the year when i graduated a member of the business honor society etc and so forth so

the reason that i put that in smaller font and at the bottom is truth to tell um i have never gotten a job in the game industry because of my education so if you're uh if you're concerned with either um getting a degree or uh of not getting a degree it is it is neither a guarantee of success if you get one nor a barrier of success if you don't have one in the game industry um with that said i am kind of proud of my education and uh and what it means and we'll talk a little bit more about that later um i uh always described this slide as uh as star of uh stage screen and uh and podcasts um one area that i've been pretty successful is uh in working with the media and if you follow night dive studios um particularly our our latest release of the demo uh the alpha demo of system shock um we get a lot of of media exposure um most of which is is pretty positive so

um so there we go so that's uh that's my role in the media um probably the uh the thing that i'm i'm most proud of is the work that i do outside of the company um stuff to where i i volunteer so i'm um i'm co-chair of the las vegas chapter of the igda international gamer uh game development association and um i work as a mentor um a regional coordinator for them and uh i have was was actually the first person that was acknowledged by the igda um for my volunteer efforts um supporting services like the red cross and uh the world health organization um not not so much a plug for my company but um with the virus being uh being on everybody's mind i just want to tell you that that since um since the beginning of this year night dive has helped raise a half a million dollars um through various efforts working with humble

bundle among others um for for kids in hospitals and uh for uh in 95 masks for for healthcare workers so that's uh that's pretty important to me um title of my presentation is uh is his business uh mindset as as a philosophy and and i want you to think about this um not just not just the pure business itself but as an approach to to problem solving as something that you can employ on an on an everyday basis uh to help you uh overcome problems uh that that you're facing uh that it's analytical it's data-driven which are things that are are often very appealing to people in uh development um it's a guide for making decisions ranging on everything from game design to hiring practices it is not just about profitability but profitability is an important aspect of

the business mindset and putting this into a practice we're going to go through an example something that i think every developer particularly um particularly new studios face which is answering the question of how long should i work on my game and and how long can i work on it and still be profitable so again it's a it's about a framework that will help you to make choices so why should you care about profitability well if you uh if you want game development to be a career not just a hobby if you want to be happy in the business uh the primary source of dissatisfaction cited on various game development forums is a lack of compensation specifically uh the disconnect between the amount of effort that it takes to make a game and the reward and how you get compensated for that game um what defeats this is very often a lack of a business focus at the outset

and uh what i'd like you to do when you start thinking about about your next title is to ask yourselves how do we expect our games to generate money how much money should we expect where will we sell them and what would we sell them for i tell people all the time when you start out to make a game deciding on the business model should be as important to you as as what platforms you're going to launch on or or what engine you're going to use um you should probably spend as much thought on that part of it as you do on any other aspect of your game design document i help out on on game development social sites the single most common complaint that i hear from developers is that the amount of money that they will make from selling their game does not justify the effort that they have to put in to create the game yet when i ask them um how did this align with their business plan did you did you meet expectations for your business plan did you expect something different what changed very

often they say that they didn't have a business plan it needs to go alongside all the other aspects of your development roadmap so um i actually pulled this cartoon from um from the game the indie game developers um facebook page where several thousand people um you know liked it uh saw it retweeted it so the the cartoon shows uh developer saying well making our game took over two years we barely paid ourselves seems reasonable to price the game at 15 and um and then when they they post it up uh when the game actually goes on sale they're they're accused of being greedy of uh not having enough gameplay etc and so forth and and the reason it it it's funny or the reason it resonates with game developers is because there's there's an element of truth to this the developer figured on pricing of the

game based on how long it took him to complete it not the other way around and not the content of the game if that sounds depressing let me lighten things up a little bit um i'm uh i'm guessing everybody is familiar with uh the underpants gnomes from south park um they come up with a three-phase plan for success phase one is they're going to collect everybody's underpants phase three is they're going to profit phase three is always profit and um all that they need is is phase two so um i don't know anybody in the games business that does not does not know this cartoon that this does not resonate with um the the point is about this is that your business model needs to be well thought out uh in advance and it needs to be realistic so there's a basic formula costs most especially development time equipment licenses marketing spend etc

must be less than revenues and revenues come from sales revenues ad revenues etc um net of of whatever platform fees steam nintendo um uh play apple um whatever those guys take out and any other deductions like taxes vat returns that kind of thing usually you see this the other way usually you see somebody saying well revenues must be must be greater than costs and the reason i kind of flip this on its head is because you have less control over revenues than you do over costs cost is the one thing that you have you have real control over and um and revenues is something that uh requires requires outside influences to to generate that so let's talk a little bit about that um how do you determine costs well developer time the amount of time that

you spend in uh in creating your game is going to be your single largest component but i urge you from the very beginning of a project to track everything all the time you spend coding all the time you spend creating art discussions meetings all of that stuff and you're going to need that this information not only for for your presentation in the current game but to talk about how you're going to work in the future um be aware that in a very very real sense time is money and we'll talk a little bit uh as we move on to how do you assign the the value to that um one of the one of the things that you're going to hear me repeat over and over again is is ask your fellow developers what's the going rate for game developers with similar experience similar skills it's the best way to get that information so talking about asking your developers um asking your fellow developers i'd like you to to really pay attention

to this slide if you get only one thing from today's presentation this should be it build your business network um you may not want to think of it as your business network you may want to think of it as as social as developmental but um it is a valuable and relevant source of information particularly information uh about wages and uh and values um you're you should be able to share resources you may find that you have a lot in common with other developers and are working towards common goals depending on your situation you might end up getting a job offer if that's something that you're looking for and and then it's probably the single best way to to to combat loneliness which is a a really serious issue in the in the world of game development so what i'm going to urge you to do is begin to find game developers start off looking for game developers in your area

and one of the reasons why i emphasize in your area as a starting point um particularly when you're looking at at the value of time that varies going wages vary depending on areas so if you're comparing for example how much a developer makes in warsaw poland you probably don't want to use what a developer is getting paid in san francisco as a comparable um the the guy in san francisco is going to make multiple times because the cost of living because of a number of other factors so you really want to start off building your network by looking at people in your area well how do you find other developers in your area there are a couple of great tools one of which is find out if there is a local igda chapter in your area participate in game jams there are all kinds of of events going on in areas that are a great place to network

a a very prosaic very simple lesson that i have for developers but that often needs to be repeated make up business cards with your contact information and keep them with you at all times just in case you run into somebody that is a fellow developer in your area um if you uh if you if you can't find anyone through a local igda branch and there aren't any game jams going on in your area well there are a couple of different ways that you can you can still find people out um you can do searches um i actually uh when people ask me about how i i got my job at night dive i actually a cold called night dive um after my time at gamestop and um i did a search uh based on uh based on companies in a specific area um ended up talking to the ceo of night dive and the rest as they say is history

so use use search engines you can use social media um linkedin is is actually my preferred path and i know a lot of developers don't use linkedin but you should one of the reasons why i favor linkedin is because you can do searches um based on multiple criteria people in game development in a certain area you're able to do that via via linkedin there are other ways of getting in contact with people in your area twitter always works uh i i tell people that if you're going to approach others on any kind of social media if you're going to do any kind of cold calling the primary thing that you want to bear in mind is be candid you might want to start off by saying i'm a game developer just starting out would you have a few minutes to answer some questions for me be frank about your experience or your lack thereof um and the nature of your quest if you're uh if you're like uh so many

developers and kind of an introvert this can kind of be hard but it is so worthwhile if you find uh people in your area that are also doing game development there are so many benefits aside from shared resources shared information it opens up social context i mean there are just so many positives so again if you're going to take one thing from this presentation it's to build a business focused network so the cost equation um it's value multiplied by hours so let's use an example you and two friends work on a game for two years you each devote as much time as possible uh but it's uneven so you want to track the numbers that you have and then you can do some conversions uh the the number of hours in the average work week it's no longer applicable but we still use these for calculations is 40 hours that's five days of eight hours of work time each that's that's kind of the basis

a man month is the number of hours generally worked in a month there's some variation here the eu defines a man month is 140 hours the us definition is closer to 160 hours but again we we use that it's important for you to know the term man month and then there's annual time again there's some variation but generally and and this number is kind of rounded for convenience sake we look at at 2 000 hours uh 50 weeks at 40 hours per so this concept is very often far into developers i mean we think about working as long as it takes to do the job so why is this important well you're going to need this for your own growth and your professional development you need this for your other team members but there's another reason for this if you're going to be pitching your game to publishers publishers want to know how much you have invested in creating the game and the majority of that investment is going to come in the form

of time if you're going to pitch your game to a publisher the expectation is that you will not only be familiar with these concepts so that you can talk about about average work weeks about man months about annual times but that you will have this information at your fingertips uh my local igda branch we just hosted a presentation from um justin berenbaum of of xola um ixolo often provides funding for indie developers one of the first questions they ask is is how much have you invested in creating the game and if you say gee i don't know um that that kind of um is not the answer that people are looking for so some revenue terms um and again i want to make sure that i define some of the basic stuff for you gross revenue is the the sale price multiplied by the number of units sold so an example um you sell a thousand units of your game on steam at ten dollars each and your gross revenue on

the title would be ten thousand dollars the net revenue is the amount that you actually get paid it's gross revenues less allowable deductions which include store fees so steem charges 30 percent um as an example returns fraud etc in the case above so while your gross revenue would be 10 000 your net revenue would be 7 000 or less depending on how many other deductions beyond the steam 30 feet other allowable deductions that will come up taxes vat or standard if you sign with a publisher there's often a paragraph that defines these deductions i'm going to urge you to read that paragraph very carefully this can include things such as marketing in the old days of retail mdf or marketing development funds were a big deduction so again standard platform fees are 30 epic charges less mobile free to play

revenues are are harder to predict so let's just use a a pc game that would be sold on steam as an example if you're truly independent that's self-publishing you need to understand that your that your net revenue is going to be your gross revenue minus at least 30 percent the other part about this about your negotiations with publishers and about what's allowable uh you know again i'm going to urge you to to spend a lot of time on this um the the second time that i signed a game with a publisher it was back in my my time with starduck so in the early 2000s we agreed that marketing was an allowable deduction but i didn't really have a definition from my publisher of what marketing was so my company ended up paying the salary for their marketing manager who actually did very little of anything to help our sales so i learned an important lesson there

about be careful with with what's getting defined under that section okay so forecasting revenues um remember at the beginning i said that that your costs are much easier to predict you can track that and uh and revenues are are harder to forecast but you still want to get some idea of that um as you go into it so how do you project the number of of units you're going to sell well the easiest way is to find comparable titles same genre similar size developers there's a fair amount of data that's available online steam spy if you're making pc games is one example of a tool but you know what the best way to come up with realistic sales projections is through that network through your network of business contacts so in order to to forecast how many units your game is going to sell both for you to make a sound business decision and as a key part of any pitch that you're

going to send over to a publisher you need to gather that data easiest way to do it is to say well games in this category typically sell so much so how do you find that out well if you go out there and you start um looking for people who have done similar projects and you're able to develop a relationship with them where you can ask them you can create a spreadsheet and say well at the high end it's so many copies should sell at the low end so many copies should sell and this is an average for a game in this particular genre from a team our size um so the example that i will use and i'm trying to make this um very pertinent to people but the example that i use is a visual novel and uh and you're going to be pitching that visual novel to a publisher well the first thing you want to do is make sure you don't compare that game to something

completely in a different genre you don't want to say well my game will sell as many you know will generate as much revenue as fortnite did right so let's get get down to basics and talk about how how we uh developed a projection on this so okay i'm hired as a consultant for an indie company working on a visual novel um i really know very little about visual novels but i do know how i would attack the problem i'm going to head over to uh to itchy ichio and i'm going to look at titles uh that are similar to to what i'm looking to develop and i'll find the one that's that's closest to my clients so i click on that title and it gives me a link to the developer studio in some cases i actually get contact information maybe the developer's twitter address maybe you know i get a twitter handle on there and i reach out and i begin by asking them if they can spare some time and again what i had said earlier i'm completely candid um and and i make sure

that my request is clear my email might say hi i'm an indie developer working on a game similar to your title and i always mention the title of the game that there they've already done would you be able to spare a couple of minutes to help me by answering some questions so in that statement i've explained who i am i've explained what i'm going to be asking for and i've explained the reason that i'm asking for it my game is similar to yours i'm trying to gather some data i'm looking for your help let me talk to you a little bit about cold communication um always be clear what you're asking for always state if you're asking for help and then be clear that you won't take up too much of the other person's time time is always precious get to the point and and don't waste time um i'm not going to stop with one title i'm going to go through it i'm going to click on every title that i can find that's in a similar genre from a similar size studio

um i'm going to get as many of them as i can and and make the assumption that not everyone will will answer me if i get lucky and i establish contacts with all the developers i'll have a great network if i only get some of them i should still get get enough information to be able to make a forecast and you don't need to begin by browsing itch or steam um if there is a particular title this is almost always true for for developers if there's a particular title that influenced you that made you want to create the game that you're working on that's a great place to start reach out and explain how influential the developer was to you and see if they'll be willing to give you some help um flattery is always good if it's sincere so okay um we've now got the two points in our equation we've tracked all of the time and and effort that we spend in a game we've got all of the other um resources

uh laid out for us and so um we learned through our research and networking that the best best price for the game that we have that we thought was going to be a 10 game is is actually five dollars and we learned that because people said well gee um i didn't sell very many copies of my game at the full you know retail price we use the term retail even though it's no longer in a retail store but at the full price but boy when my game went on sale at 50 off that's when i really started moving units so we uh we find out that the low end of sales for a com for a title like ours is about 2 000 units and the high end is about 8 000 units so you know if you add that up you come to an average of about 5 000 units for our model and we further decide that the best place to sell our game is on steam so the equation becomes five thousand um uh and uh times five dollars times

seventy percent remember steam is taking thirty percent off so all you're getting the seventy percent or seventeen thousand five hundred dollars in projected net revenue so with this information in hand we can now answer the question how long should i actually spend developing the game and still be be profitable um let me emphasize again um i hope nobody's taking notes on this these are completely made up numbers and and i i made i used the five dollars and ten dollar price points just because it makes multiplying easier easy calculation but the point being on this is that you can now forecast what your expected revenue is going to be and as long as you're as long as you're investing less than that you're gonna you're gonna show profitability so the equation part two so now we have a budget of 17 500 to work with if our cost is less than that and our sales projections are accurate we'll be

profitable it turns out that all the tools that we need to create our game are free for use um we're fans of doki doki literature club and it turns out that the tool that the developers used on that was renpi um there's no cost and even support is is free via the forums um further it uh conveniently turns out that the going rate for developers with our level of expertise in our home location is 17 and 50 cents per hour so we want to create our game in 1 000 hours or less again i'm going to emphasize that these are numbers that i i just picked um for their for their convenience factor okay so you can now say that that if we make our game if it takes us less than a thousand hours or less um you're gonna you're gonna be able to show profitability and again this is a part where the business philosophy helps you make decisions about every aspect of the game including design we want to bring the game in at under a

thousand hours so you now examine your work habits it turns out that you average 20 hours a week working on your game as a one-person studio um that means that you want to complete the game in 50 weeks or less of working time right now that you have the start and the end points for your development schedule you can develop milestones to fit those goals milestones or goals that are tied to specific times are key to staying on track so the milestones will give you a couple of things 1000 hours is a concept a milestone in contrast is a goal with a time limit say you're going to spend 20 hours a week for four weeks to help learn the software and that some of the python that you'll use is something that you can keep track of having these milestones helps you stay on track and measure your progress they guide you to help you to help you stay focused uh again you're you're setting it up that way and saying okay here are the miles the six milestones the six

intermediary steps maybe you're going to spend four weeks in in learning the software and set up and that's your your initial milestone the end of four weeks if you're not done with that you've fallen behind and and you need to be more focused if you're ahead of schedule great you can you can use some of that unused time on your next milestone a couple of things on this not only do milestones help you in the development process not only are they are they beneficial to your own internal work but boy if you show this to a publisher and uh and you're coming out there saying well this is the first game that i'm working on and you have a schedule with milestones and key dates and what you're going to complete by that time you're going to look way ahead of many of your competition so some tools and resources to help you um twitter looking to build up your net your network probably twitter is the easiest way to reach your fellow developers unfortunately until you're you're better known in the community um your dms may

be ignored uh but once you you you gain that it it's great to build up a network of of people that that you work with and um where you can amplify each other's social signal so again some some true life stories um night dive has worked on more than one you know we specialize in restoring classic games um we are certainly not the only company in there so people that i i regularly talk with and and sometimes uh actually work with um guys over at 3d realms um who who have a long history of uh of restoring and publishing classic games and uh the guys over at new blood whose games are new but are in a classic style uh two things on there um number one um we're able to we're able to to help each other because we're kind of playing in the same space but secondarily i i actually really like those guys and um

and we chat about just a lot of stuff i mean it's it is certainly not all business there um uh last night we were talking about uh early days of punk rock music so um something that is that is near and dear to my heart um that that said you know twitter is is a useful tool linkedin many developers ignore linkedin because it has a business focus that is its very strength you can search by company you can search by name you can get the person's title and background before you reach out to them also and and do not ignore this this is really important once you've built up a network once you have some contacts on linkedin you can get referrals to new people so you might be looking for somebody at the xyz company and uh and you find the right person and they're a c-level executive at xyz and and you're a little bit afraid to cold call

them um but um what you find out is that you have a friend already at the abc company that's already connected to them all through linkedin you can ask your friend at abc for an introduction to xyz the last thing i'm going to call out here um is email and it might seem funny that uh that i'm i'm shouting out email as a tool um but writing a business email that gets a response is becoming very much of a lost art um that said uh know your audience do not write generic emails they are spam be focused get to the point use the person's name um nothing catches persons attention so much as seeing their name in the email use keywords help advice referral or attention grabbers and then the subject line is

your friend as an example i would pay attention to an email that was that that that was entitled larry new developer seeks your advice let me tell you a true story i was meeting two young developers that i i mentor in uh in this area for dinner um i received an email that had to be six paragraphs of closely written text no spaces between the paragraphs so that when i looked at this on my phone all i saw was this this single block of text um i'm going to tell you that if i was not waiting at the restaurant for my friends to arrive i probably would have just deleted the email i had no idea what the sender was asking me for i ended up replying saying i'm sure that you're asking me for something but i don't know what it is so it was actually from a kid um i'm i'm old so so everybody's a kid to

me i was actually from a streamer who had moved on to mixer and he was asking me for a key for one of my games now i'm going to tell you if the email had gone to the point and said hi i'm a streamer with an audience of x number of people and i'd like to ask you for a key i would have responded immediately to it and said sure um as it was we ended up getting into a discussion about why he felt he had to tell me everything about his background to justify himself he said well i'm really not known i said well i get that but all the things that you're telling me really aren't relevant if you told me that you're a new streamer and you don't have much of an audience but if i would give you a key you would be sure to promote my game because you don't get that many keys i would have responded to that um even if you had said hey you're only starting out and you just needed my help

i would have responded to that too okay some some websites and and tools um i mentioned the igda and this is not a commercial message for them but there are often more developers in an area um than than you might think of um so the las vegas igda um had had grown really quiet had kind of gone dark um i moved out here two years ago um from from michigan and uh i met a great group of people um here in las vegas that were really excited to to get started to get it back on track and were willing to give their their own time to make it happen and we began to reach out to um schools and universities in the area um university of uh las vegas um uh college of southern nevada um when there was still

a branch of the art institute here um and and we we put it out there that it was free for for our students well you know what students graduate and they become developers in some cases we began doing some sponsorship of game jams anyway long story short we have over 500 members if you're a member of my local igda and you're looking to gather the kind of business information that we're talking about being so important to your success you're going to find plenty of resources that will help you steamspy i mentioned that before steam stats uh it's a great way to to at least begin with some um comparables uh gamasutra.com so gamasutra is the site that is devoted to game business and to blogs related to game development business again if if this is going to be more than a hobby for you um i i urge you to to read gamasutra as a as part of your

morning um you know ritual um powellgroupconsulting.com online business matchmaking events um this connects indie game developers with publishers it has been a highly successful event um it was successful before the virus um when there were still gdcs and e3s um now that those kinds of in-person events are cancelled it's it's even more important and uh and that kind of concludes my uh my presentation i'll be around for uh questions all right larry why don't we just keep the slides open for your uh your all your information for for everyone to kind of see uh just in case they want to reach out to you sure thing i can do that as well um you

can actually also um catch me catch me here on on discord um i'm uh i'm online uh all too often so uh so this is a i i got a good reminder for anyone that wants to kind of pull in questions while we're on stream here i'll kick it off with my own questions so i'm still very new to the business world and at least thinking and approaching game development with a business mindset and uh uh and what i'm learning and a lot what you're talking about is is kind of building a relationship with with whoever you want to work with right which makes a lot of sense i i think as a game developer by default we don't think that way uh yeah outside of our system that's that's true yep so and and even within the discipline yeah but go ahead but i i think that you're kind of getting the hint of my question here it's just like can you kind of expand on that a bit what you've seen

um for for game developers that are uh initially hesitant to to kind of think that way or just simply do not know absolutely um the first thing is that um sending out making that first contact that that that initial contact uh brandon just just before i start answering is my is my uh slideshow uh showing yes so i'm not sure okay actually actually i'm i'm terrible um i uh as a as a business person um i i should be shot uh um uh because i did not include my contact information on here but um you can find you can find larry cooperman at night dive studios pretty easily um uh but let me answer your question on there um so it's it's really it's really challenging

um for for people to make that in initial initial reach out um you need to understand that uh the game development community is largely populated by what's the word that i'm looking for oh yeah game developers that as a as as shy and introverted as you may be the person at the other end is is likely to be just as shy and introverted that does not mean um that the relationship is going to be uncomfortable it means that you need to spend some time to to be sure to break the ice on there but once you make that contact um the people in our industry not only are are are they mostly really nice and and willing to help um but they're also like you and let me also say that in talking about building your business relationship um i suggested that you reach out to people a in your area

that's that's obvious because you can you can meet with them um again if there's an active igda branch over there if there are game jams or if there are those kinds of activities you can meet with them in person but a number of our igda communities a number of just development communities have regular meetings uh at bars at restaurants at at kind of social venues simply because it is really difficult for people in our business to find other people that are like us that are interested in the the same types of things that we're interested in that speak a common language with us however when you do find somebody um that that aligns with you on on many of those things it's really exciting and it's really it's really mutually beneficial um let's talk for example about people that write visual novels and i use that as an example um people that write visual novels are

going to face the same challenges um again you know somebody introverted somebody um who who is is not necessarily outgoing when they find out that you are working on a similar project and you ask them about what software they're using um challenges that they've faced how you get past developers block you will find very often that they will get really excited and really animated because how often do you get to talk to people that are interested in the same kinds of things that you are brand is that a fair question if fair answered your question okay

i'm on meat what a new mistake my bad so uh as we're waiting for questions to kind of pull in uh i do have i saw your i saw your lips moving and please go ahead and use some anticipation so uh my question was let me back back up one second look back at one second did i answer your earlier question fully about about making those initial contacts with other developers because that's really important okay then i'm ready for your next one yeah the networking is definitely an important side of it uh my next question is more for like a personal reason but a

lot of game developers out there are are spending their time or half their time well most of their time building the product right what resources do you recommend to get them started in this path of approaching their games with a business mindset and then on top of that uh how much time and resources let's say given a day uh should they dedicate just towards thinking like that uh besides making a product perfect question um the place that i start off the the thing that really helps me get focused uh i i really really like gama sutra um in particular on gamma sutra there there are the articles in gamma sutra and there's there's always something that's that's really interesting to me um but there are also some some great blog sites and the blog sites do two things a it allows the author to you know be a little bit more personal and to expand on their ideas but number two very often there's contact information so if i read

something that's that's just a jewel um i'll reach out to the author of it um i start off my mornings by um before so before i i get into the business stuff that i deal with um and and my life is is not necessarily as exciting as you might think um i spent a lot of time on spreadsheets and contracts um there's a line from from ian fleming james bond that um it reads better than it lives but i i always start off my morning by by getting caught up on on the news so you know i hit the usual sites um i usually start off with uh with pc gamer um i will hit katako although kotaku is less interesting to me since uh jason shearer has departed from there um i will look at ign but then i go over to gamasutra and gamasutra really helps me to get my my business face on [Music] yeah i i'm a

constant visitor to to that site myself and uh it definitely makes it uh an easier digestible approach than diving into the library or a bookstore and just going through that section and not knowing where to start and and the other thing is um do not hesitate um if you read an article particularly a blog article um that that is interesting to you something that it that seems innovative um do not hesitate to reach out to the author and and give him some props for what they wrote um and and you know certainly see about about making a contact with him yeah i i feel like what how how much of it and we kind of touched this a bit with networking how much of that should be part of your lifestyle to build the product to talk about your product but then meeting the not even about the right people because a lot of times i i feel um

opportunities just come out from outside your peripheral sometimes and it's a lot about just waiting or keeping those door open so um great story on that um uh i was staying in seattle for uh one of the events steam used to have steam dev days we were staying at a hotel right down the block from from where the meeting was being being hosted we're in the elevator there and i noticed uh the two gentlemen that were riding in the elevator with me um had had passes on for the show but i actually i actually could not see the either their names or their company um just because the angle that was that but i could see that they were wearing the passes you know and um the elevator stops and i see the guys kind of looking around i said are you are you looking for the show they said yes and uh i said well you know i'm i'm

heading up there um if you guys want to follow me it's only a couple of blocks away but i'll be happy to show you you know where you can get in and all that stuff and we head up there and you know just being friendly those two guys were the publisher that i had my first meeting with so yes it it should always it should always be a habit um it was really was pretty funny um as we're walking there um you know once we once we get inside we're both heading over to the same conference room um but it should just be be a habit for you um the the other thing that you will you will find is that like many things with repetition it gets easier um you you refine your elevator pitch uh what your company does uh you know you you you get all of those things they the first couple of times that you do them they're awkward and they are um they sound unpolished but through repetition you know it just gets easier

to say and and it becomes a habit so the other thing that i tell people all the time just the easiest thing that you can do to help build your network is once you have your business cards carry some with you everywhere you go stick a couple in your wallet just in case you run into somebody at the store at the you know wherever um and it turns out that uh they're wearing a hoodie from a game development studio that you love and you're able to pass your card off to them business cards are very effective i i think in this age of just exchanging information through the phone people tend to really forget that that step of putting some production value behind your business card and carrying them around yeah because especially at these conventions they're very handy because you're beating people so fast and you're passing by a lot of people uh

handing them out i at least on for me on the other end i just keep it in my pocket and after the event is over i kind of go through them and actually do and i feel like a lot of people uh do the same one of the things that i do i i have done it various times and it depends on your your personal preference um but uh my personal business card because i also uh less so now i'm i'm just too busy but i i there have been times when i've done some some outside consulting for people i have my photograph on there it's a small one and you know um as uh as as flattering as it can get and the reason that i do that is because particularly at a gdc or an e3 um you'll come out with a wallet full of business cards and you'll say wow which guy was this right um and just having that that picture will will help of course uh it's easier for you because you're young and handsome and i'm old and not handsome

you'd be surprised people throw it in disgust and and out of jealousy let's see yeah and steve see what what what i make up for with and and their things i actually have a whole closet behind me full of suits um this is not my first career i had a very exciting career in healthcare um finance if you're ever having a hard time falling asleep i'll be happy to tell you about that um because it will put you to sleep in seconds um but i i wore suits and ties for for for decades of my life um now i'm um i'm notorious um for for wearing my t-shirts um the one that i'm wearing today says uh no you're right let's do it the dumbest way possible because it's easier for you um i i wore one yesterday that says i can explain it to you but i can't understand it for you um i probably wouldn't want to wear that to uh to a business meeting but um one of the one of one of the few advantages about getting old

um and i'm not going to say old about by getting old is that um i've gone from um rebellious to eccentric it's great qualities to have throughout your career so this is a question from uh nightwolf and the question is uh this is back to the business card portion yep so how would the business cards work now that we're pretty much all virtual uh since we're all online now so um first first of all um there are while we are still online um the the the version of that that uh that becomes part of of your um of your arsenal of weapons is the signature part of your email so my signature on my email brandon you you've got my emails my signature uh uh on my email has my name my title it has my email address which is kind of dumb

because you just got it in an email it is my my cell phone number um it has my skype uh handle which i use less and less but some people do use skype and it has discord which is probably the easiest way to get a hold of me um so that becomes that the answer to the question is the signature on your emails which you should set up every time um becomes becomes the the uh the online version of your business card so that's that's one part of it um the other part of it particularly if you're a one-man studio and uh the speaker from zachtronics just before was talking about this if you're a one-man studio and you have uh uh whether you're one man or a small studio um and you have a web page uh for your game for your studio there should certainly be a means of contacting you directly from there so you want to have a contact section

and those would become the electronic equivalent of your business cards yep definitely um so this is a question uh the uh is there any advice on creating great relationships during networking events that makes a person stand out from the others yes be honest very first thing be honest about who you are um one of the things that that uh that comes up every once in a while is uh somebody will will embellish a story about how long they've been in the business or will not get to what they need and those things become memorable and can really tarnish a relationship so if you're a young developer starting out at some point in every one of your conversations you want to say i'm a young developer starting out and i'm really looking for somebody to help me i'm looking for somebody to to be my mentor

um so honesty and candor on there the second thing that um that becomes really really important about networking is get to the point if there's something that you're asking for and this this goes into into how you introduce yourself if you're looking if you're looking to to find help for your game if you're looking to get business analysis if you're looking to get analytics get to the point of what you're looking for [Music] and coming from like a business side of things you were talking about how most of your day is being drowned out um and in contracts and i i feel like if anything especially in your small development team you have the whole side of just making the game but on the business side of things i feel a lot of it is just having a team of great lawyers finance

everybody uh it's gonna help you on that side um what is the minimum that you recommend to kind of get a small group together that you totally say these this is where you should put your money at if you're gonna spend so to make sure so a good lawyer is great but you know what um there is uh no substitute for being willing to read it yourself anytime you get a proposal anytime you get before it goes to the lawyer uh you sit down with your you know whatever tools you use whether you use a pen or a pencil use a yellow highlighter whatever um whatever tools uh are easiest for you to use and force yourself to read through that contract um circle the parts that you don't understand those are the ones that you're going to ask your lawyer about i pretty much guarantee you that on the

first contract that you read when you get up to the section on indemnification your eyes are going to glass over it's something that you get you get past the first time but be willing to do the work and to read it yourself you're every bit as smart as the lawyer you may not be as expert in the same things but but you're you're um you're that smart then again and i'm going to answer a lot of the questions the same way if you've developed even even um even the beginnings of of a network a local network you now have resources if you're if you know one person the area that's that's done the game um successfully that that feels good about it ask them who they used as a lawyer get that referral if um if if they say well they've done it all themselves then ask them whether they'd be willing to help you or give you some advice and you don't have to show them the whole

contract but you can ask them what you know what what does indemnification mean um but again you know approach approach a contract approach all of that business stuff the same way you would a coding problem um go to google look at you know ask look up definitions um look up templates for stuff uh when um when when night dive started out um we were using you know pretty standard uh templates that were freely available that we then took and we we uh made them specific to to what we were doing but it but it gave us a starting ground yeah i think a lot of that is um the referral thing is definitely a huge thing i think if you find someone within your network that you trust that is working with you for a long time uh what has helped me at least

is just asking them you know if there's a certain certain part of the business that you need filling uh that has worked out really well because chances are they're they're connected with great people um as well uh in these other departments well you know we we optimistically we hope that they're going to say oh i'm working with a great lawyer but at the very least they can say i worked with this one guy and he was terrible don't go to him it's great to learn from your own mistakes it's even better to learn from other peoples exactly um another question that i have and maybe we don't have to go into too much of the details but if you don't mind kind of like sharing not a complete horror story when a business goes bad but like um maybe just the more like the steps of why went bad like why why things didn't work out the the

way it was intended because of these common mistakes uh that could have been easily avoided so i'll tell you two stories and first of all um first of all uh the common mistakes that could have been easily avoided if they're common mistakes there's a reason that people make them over and over again uh the one that that i um i start off with and and i i referenced this article this was an interview um with a whole team of us but but i was the first person that spoke um for the escapist and was talking about our misadventures in the development of system shock which i'm going to begin by saying is very very happily on track if you haven't played the demo you certainly should it's on steam and gog and there are plenty of of walkthroughs and gameplay trailers commercial message in there but um so we we began by doing um a demo of of what we thought was going to be the the game direction um built up in unity um we uh we we launched it at gdc we put it

online gtc we had an announcement in pc gamer and we had something like a quarter of a million views um the first week of the trailer we knew we had something very exciting and we announced that we were doing a kickstarter um to raise raise funds for the development of the game well the kickstarter was was really successful we raised quite a bit of money and we were flush with our own success um the interview that i'm referencing began with the words the longest journey often seen in game development often starts with the words you know what else would be cool and um we we feature creeped no no we said it to ourselves you know what else would be cool and that's how we start off on the longest journey we feature creeped our game to the point that it was no longer recognizable from the original concept so first thing that i would tell you is uh when you have a plan stick to the plan

um avoid those you know what else would be cool kind of things um that's that's number one um be be leery of your your own success um we we thought we were better than than than we were and that's not a knock on us it's just it's just that we became you know we we had some real good initial success we ended up um going off the track that we want to go on it was a painful process we got back on track and now we've returned to the original the original um vision but it was it was a costly um it was a costly series of mistakes that we learned from the second thing um that we that i would tell you is uh is don't put all your eggs in one basket so a horror story for from um from my early days in game development first game that i um that i sold or that i did a licensing deal on um we're really lucky we worked with take two it was a great relationship it was very

successful and uh things things went quite well and we got paid and we were quite flush with the money and we thought that was great the the second game that we sold we had um almost the opposite experience our game did very very well but the publisher that we were working with went into bankruptcy bankruptcy is an amazing thing it basically says well we sold your game and we made a lot of money and we're not giving you any of it because we had other debts and that that really happened to us um we had sold by a conservative estimate um 60 000 copies of a game at retail and we we basically got got zero in terms of payments on that um and there there was a whole lot of horror stories on that but um that that really hurt but the one thing that was a saving grace was and this was at the very beginning of of of the 2000s we were

selling our game digitally that is what saved stardock from going into bankruptcy in the early days that that is a that's one of the scariest things the game developer would would hear that it did well but you're not getting any of it and uh it seems like it's one of those because i'm sure you guys at least uh seeked out legal ramifications but i feel like oh absolutely is there when someone files not much um and it's it uh you you end up going to a court and and fighting over over the crumbs right and then that's that itself that's it probably yeah drive you more into debt than anything right um yeah you probably in most cases you're spending more than you're actually going to get yeah yeah well larry uh we are at the end of the

hour and i want to thank you for for coming on and and sharing important topic that i i i constantly want to learn more about because business and the business side of games is is something i'm quite new to and a lot of game developers who are watching and we'll be listening to this later it's the same story we just have no idea how to approach it i uh i i'll give you one um one one parting thought on this um you can't possibly know everything so one of the things that you can do is is to try to find experts on a particular topic um develop relationships with them and um and ask them questions and never be afraid to ask questions all right guys um brandon thank you so much for hosting this this was absolutely great and i'm glad that i got an opportunity to reach out to your audience and um we'll stay in touch all right thank you larry have a good

one cheers bye-bye okay i would like to remind you guys at this time that we do have an active discord channel where you can meet larry and talk to him past the presentation of course uh you can find the link on the website uh at gdux.me feel free to drop in to conversate with the other viewers who and inter even interact like people like larry and other presenters themselves throughout the conference so in addition if you would like to talk and compensate and stay connected you can go to gdux.me to to help with that and make a donation to help with the next production of g-ducks so give me a second here while i get this set up

all right every time i do those camera cuts i gotta fix something another way to help spread the love and stay engaged is to tweet at g ducks me or gdu xme or at blue champs i spent my whole kids college education on buying these name plates so make and please justify by tweeting at me i will read them it's what i live for your tweets and as part of the fun i want to mention the good folks at masterpiece vr they are the 3d application software centered around using vr technologies to make game development easier and faster they happen to be our sponsor for this year gdex event for the next three days or the next two days we'll be giving away 10 free one year in the license for masterpiece vr all you have to do is go to gdux.me to sign up to the mailing list and then tweet at and at masterpiecevr and how you are enjoying the show the instructions are pretty simple however feel free to go to the gtx.me and give it a read and to

make sure you don't mess that one up lastly i am truly a one-man army so what you see is built by my blood sweat and tears if you can't tell ddux is not controlled or backed by any major corporation i'm in a motel room for god's sake so any donations greatly appreciated to put into organizing the next g-dux event so go to gdu xme and hit the mark make it rain button and any point of the live stream and literally make your cord hard earn cash fall from the sky into my motel room seriously one dollar goes a long way two dollar goes a bit further and then so on and so forth alright if you don't want to make a game all by yourself oh my god keep cutting away if you want to make a game all by yourself and are having a difficult time finding the right people to be as committed as you are maybe you should follow in richard q's footsteps and work with this family

to deliver their studios first game cuckoo games first game mage hunter richard comes from a background of the decade of working at prestigious studios like blizzard riot games war gaming gaming and tencent i sat down with him a couple months ago earlier in the year to learn more about his jump into indie dev with family this is a pre-recorded unchained report so don't be confused but we will be following up with the next presenter shortly afterwards so please enjoy so so it it's weird because i would never consider myself an industry expert but then like i realized that i

uh turned 39 like more than four months ago so i guess i'm by default an industry i don't know it feels weird um i think like that's one quality about trying to make games that's really important is always to like to sort of stay humble and sort of like always look to like learn how to do stuff um i like really enjoy learning how to make things and how to create stuff that's fun and innovative and like interesting so that's sort of like you know in trying to bring my wife and my brother to build this game like it's it was pretty easy to say hey guys like what are some games that we want to make that are uh that we've always wanted to like make or stuff that we grew up playing that really inspired us that you know when you're working for like a large uh company that's trying to like make a mass appeal game like you have to think of um uh you have a huge uh xx million dollar budget you've got to think of this target audience you've got to plan out

your development for x years and you know a lot of things are done very top-down for lack of a better word uh whereas when you're trying to come up with something with a small group of people it doesn't matter if it's your friends or family or if your wife or or partner or husband it's like you gotta think a little bit like you gotta percolate the ideas from the bottom up too um because you have that freedom to sort of think about it that way and that sort of turns into top down because it's like all right so what do we want to actually accomplish in the core game play and then we can actually plan out like the bigger picture which actually is um one of the ways that we did stuff for several of the projects i worked on but those were like within well-established like um like uh uh frameworks and stuff so like oh it's a sequel to starcraft 2 or trying to make like a competitive rts moba or or whatever like the stuff that you and i worked on brand new which i'm not sure we're allowed to say yet but um

the uh the main thing that is uh important to because because like you know for for my wife and brother and i like um i have the most experience so i i am like the de facto leader so there's a lot of things that go into making a business that you just sort of want to protect from the team because it's really important that like when you're working on the day-to-day especially the creatives that you sort of like protect them from like thinking about stuff that doesn't really matter for the stuff that they want to do because you have to still treat it like a normal game development uh team where it's like hey guys so let's like come together and talk about what we're going to do for the week as opposed to every day and there's advantages to that but also disadvantages to it but then it's like you know in the background i have to think about well my lawyers contacted me about uh having to register trademarks for this

and um you know we need to get the website up or um i'm going to be talking to some guy on the podcast about like the like game development with family so uh what should i say not say about like the trials and tribulations of making games and stuff with family um but uh yeah that doesn't really cover it brandon can you throw me a question so i can latch onto something no i mean you're starting to get into like the the meet up topic here um you're talking about working with family and and kind of playing well i mean it's always going to be a blurry line of like uh of a team and then uh how you talk which i feel is part of the conversation that's interesting where you know how do you separate that um well let's talk about physical space or remotely right do you guys work remotely mostly when you do these stand-up meetings or do you guys hang out in the living room and talk like how do so i'll repeat that picture

how does it work oh yeah yeah so like a kind of like a like a day-to-day sort of thing uh yeah so as uh i guess like to kind of tie it back to your original question as the uh most experienced uh person like there are there's importance to like the daily rituals like um in our case it's more weekly rituals because we can get a lot of stuff done when we are together uh and so we figure out what we're trying to do for the week and uh every month like we plan for like you know the next couple months or uh figure out what the high level goals are and stuff um sorry to be a bit rambly because i think like one of the things about working as a family is that you don't have to do a lot of retros and stuff like it kind of just happens organically um so like to answer your question about like the the day-to-day like it's um we already know what we're going to do uh my wife like my wife and i split duties with like taking care of the kids in the morning um

so it's not like we'll go down into the living room and sit down and work uh my in-laws uh my brother sorry my my brother-in-law actually lives in anaheim and we live in long beach so we can actually go and visit him like pretty often uh like after uh after this podcast i'm gonna go grab some food and just go drop by and sort of see how he's doing with like some of the stuff that we've already planned um so i think like part of i guess like a lot of experience that i have is just like in making sure that you stay connected like i've uh so it's not really remote at all like if i if i need to ask them questions i'll ping them on discord or uh facebook or text or whatever um there's like different response times i found out like if i use like discord versus facebook you know um so you gotta like sort of measure that as well um and like i'm with my wife pretty much like all the time so you have to like always uh you have to again treat it like work-life balance like that's

really important to not like um talk about work after like um some time like uh past like 10 p.m or 11 p.m but even then that like that's still sometimes like we have something important that we need to talk about that we couldn't talk about because during the day we're like taking care of the kids or like running around doing errands and stuff i think the big secret about this is that uh our our parent my um my in-laws actually actually can take care of the kids uh on fridays friday evenings and all of saturdays so that actually gives um annie and i time to like uh you know go out on a little date for just the two of us so we can catch up with each other but then also like work all day on saturday and someday some of the time on sundays so that we can actually get a lot of heads down work my brother since he doesn't have any kids uh yet i don't know um he can actually work on the project like pretty much full head of steam like uh almost

every day but he even balances it out so that he only works from like around 9 or 10 a.m in the morning to about 4 p.m in the afternoon and then he just sort of like chills for the rest of the day and like um plays music plays games hangs out and stuff like that and that's where we usually can catch up with him like after the kids are done school in the afternoon we'll go like we're over um anne's parents house and we're like talking to him and talking to like uh like sort of just catching up on the project but um if you think about it in a normal work setting like you have all of these like um and sorry like i'm usually better at structuring all this i just haven't thought about it in a long time so i guess it's interesting um you'll have like daily standups you'll have like you know a set lunch time you'll have like you know weekly scrum meetings and stuff you'll have like monthly um company meetings and and whatever right um in this case as a family like

you're just sort of like figuring out ways to balance doing work with your normal life as it is and you're sort of like you know the way our family works like we're always like with each other like very often so it's not really a question of um how to do it in a way that works for day to day for me i realized that it's better to plan week to week and sort of just let you know annie and vic figure out like how they want to do stuff because i don't want to micromanage them like that's actually generally what you don't want to do anyway which is something you learned in like in nowadays people are very empowered to just do their work by x date and um it works really well with family because like um we don't have to spend time like you know talking to each other trying to resolve issues or anything like that we're a family and you know we're all like we're all in this together so you know we're not worried about whether someone's like committed or not or whether someone's passionate about a

thing and we know each other's like you know strengths and weaknesses like inside and out because like we live with each other and we can talk about things and you know like my brother and i used to work together at wargaming andy and i have worked together on a lot of creative projects before so um it works out pretty well like that

i wish to hear oh my god i was on mute the whole time oh my god that's my fault that's my fault oh my god all right give me a second let me reintroduce you guys i i wrote like a whole awesome introduction let me redo that real quick i'm going to put you guys back on mute all right you got to listen to it all right for one sec one second

all right let's just erase what the last five seconds look like my next presenter is with hugo and niels from the bedtime digital games company they will be demoing figment creed valley and we'll be taking breaks in between certain areas to unravel the thought process behind concepts as figment creed valley is an emotional touching on mental health and the human experience we'd love to share and well they love to share how we came about with the project concepts that would explain what areas of figment that creed valley are based off of and what the bosses symbolize in the creation of their theme songs all right now i can hear you how you doing good good good way better instruction without the deliberating

i know right man of course uh i at this time am uh and playing the music of course from figment creek valley seems to be piping in just fine i'm just double checking with the team here to make sure that it's not too loud but it seems like everything is good to go guys um so let's just start with the like i did a a minor introduction of you guys which of course doesn't do it complete justice uh why don't i just throw it to uh each of you to kind of talk about yourselves a bit uh before we start the demo uh let's start with hugo yes [Laughter] so i'm currently the art director on the project uh which i joined what was it a year ago now i guess so these guys really were already like went into pre-prediction a few concepts

have already been done even and i've can't taken over the whole visual aspect of the game and uh and i'm trying to well wrap it up now with the with the team you're doing great though oh thanks i wasn't fishing for compliment here and uh yeah that's that's uh that's my implication like with figment and i joined the company four years ago ago now for a little bit of context and it's basically it's actually my first my first time uh working on project like like this as uh in that position as a leader i just yeah well i'm in charge i get closer shots so if it's only it's my bad yeah i'm i'm mils i'm the billford yeah sure i'm the game director and the music composer on the game and yeah that's it

well the audience and viewers out there are definitely listening some very uh smooth and calm music as we are watching the intro so uh so figment of course uh has been out but this is a new uh uh introduction to the game right to a lot of viewers out there uh do you guys kind of mind talking about uh figment creed valley uh just a bit yeah sure uh so creed valley is uh like we call it an encore to to figment and figma was released some time ago and now we're kind of doing a follow-up that try to explore some some other themes um first of all like the original figment takes place inside the head of a person and kind of explores different things in here among other depression and other things that we try to get around in like a light-hearted manner

and in green valley we kind of take this this concept and try to expand upon it and try to explore other things in inside this mind and some of the the struggles that this guy were inside of is dealing with beautiful so let's get started yeah yeah yeah i think a little easier to talk about once we get [Music] like that so we've i've had the a pleasure years ago and uh but like as a reminder can you kind of like as we're going through this um maybe hugo you can talk more about you know the the the size of the team and how long it took to kind of uh follow up figment with figment creed valley well actually nietzsche was the one who took over first

so i think he might be the best i want yeah yeah go for it niels all right sure so uh press the wrong button yeah so uh creed valley is uh we sat down a lot for this uh sequel like on the on the on the original figment at the end of the production we're around 12 people but for the most part for this game we've only been three or four people working on it so uh yeah it's it's uh hugo and myself and another designer and uh a programmer basically and then i had a few other people like join in from time to time to help out with some more technical stuff and some uh some animations and stuff like that but uh yeah basically a very very small team where we communicate from day to day and uh yeah that's the the team thing and the the thing has been going like hugo

said for about i think about two years so um yeah let's not talk on top of this so lisa my side i sorry no i'll let the audio uh go through before i talk over because they are talking yeah so so here we see uh the little green guy that hugo is controlling around is dusty he's like a representation of of the the courage of the mind the the whole idea with this world is that it's like a visual representation of the different concepts inside inside your head like if you could walk around inside the mind and actually see how it looked if you could go around and explore it right so this guy that you're following around is dusty and he's the courage of the mind and his usual role in the mind is when

when for example a fear it interests the mind like a nightmare creature of some sort that uh maybe the guy that you're inside of is a friend of the dark for some reason so the fear of the dark enters of mind as a physical enemy that you have to fight so dusty he's this guy that he's like this god that that runs around in the mind and keeps all the fears and and traumas and at bay basically and then in this installment uh dusty has entered crete valley just here and it sets out to explore it creed valley is the part of the mind that kind of handles the um all your ideas and uh and your your morals like your moral compass like the moral compass is an actual place that you can visit in in in this world um so all these ideals and like the creed basically your own creeds they they're meant they're managed in this world but something has gone wrong here like usually the mind the creed valley part of the mind can can switch between open and closed-minded by itself close-minded

is the state win right now but something has gone wrong so suddenly the mind can't switch so dusty is sent out to to try to figure out what's going on here and and see if he can do anything about it was he is rolling the mind sorry i'm sorry so like all right exploring the mine and and and and the game being based around mental health or is a very unique stance coupled with where i feel bedtime digital game has always been just by a glance of a screenshot we're able to tell that it's from you guys because you have a very uh artistic vision behind every product that you guys put out um so thanks when it comes to ideas and and creating a game i mean what drives the vision first is it the design or is it the art i'll i guess i'll talk to the art director hugo

on how you want to comment on your process and approaches uh when designing something i mean who talks first who comes up with the idea first i think what came first was was the what was the story like because because figment is not like so the idea of of of being in somebody's mind uh stems from the first project that bedtime made before even i and and nils came and and so so the setting steps from there and then from from that point on it's about like getting the story and what we wanted to tell first and then i would say that that gameplay and art kind of cannot evolve at the same time it's it's really like a back and forth it kind of thing and that's why like you know working in such a small team is is really great it's because uh i i get

some like the designers tell me kind of what they have in mind like like how that area should play out and then i come up with some ideas of how it should look and i get feedback from that maybe it triggers some some new ideas for for the designers and they do and they take over they develop on on on the on the initial concepts with the first draft of visuals and then get it back and so on and so forth and and basically the iterations like don't stop and it's really like a cooperation and since i'm kind of like the the only concept artist in the team uh like i can draw but as far as ideas uh like i i like the other guys in the team are just as predictive i'd say and and yeah that that's what like that's basically the process like like team effort even though i'm the one like painting the the last uh brush strokes

what's this nils yes yeah these are this guy is an opinion so like i i told you before the the whole manifestation of of everything you you imagine inside the mind is here or the things we at least imagine being in there so opinions are actual characters that you read throughout the game and talk to uh yeah this guy is the opinion on music and he's currently in the closed minded state like where the mind is closed closed-minded and so he has a pretty close-minded idea of music and he doesn't like his new neighbors who are playing loud music so you have to do something about that all right then you guys have such a as i'm watching and listening to this have such a whimsical style to to not just the art but like the sound and design it reminds me a lot of like alice in the wonderland-esque

um approach especially with dealing with uh the mental health aspect of it it makes a lot of sense yeah we try like we try to pick up on heavy things like in this game we focus maybe a little less on like stuff like depression and these things and try to move the like the focus on onto other things um but yeah we definitely want to keep like the serious topics but at the same time try to kind of deal with them in a in a more light-hearted way or also also let people have have fun while doing this but but still have have these more serious topics as a foundation of everything and visually i think it also draws a lot of information for from traditional illustrations so like like ever since the moment i joined the the team and even on the first pigment

what like the the the idea was that it should always look sort of like a painting like a traditional painting and my background is actually also primarily in in illustration and comic books and i think that we can't try to hold on to that that um yeah illustrate luke and like like all like books and and that kind of stuff and and not say that that's maybe why it like evokes some some other mediums than than a video game i do want to comment on something uh while we're kind of going through this because i noticed that you guys are sitting right next to each other and not doing six feet of social distancing and i'm not kind of hating on that but i am jealous because when hans kind of helped me kind of get set up with you guys last week i was like well are you guys like going to be from your homes or how

does this gonna work and i was very surprised to hear that you guys are already at the studio it really set up and and from what i read denmark is in a much better position than the rest of the world can you kind of talk a little bit about background because people are are very very jelly right now seeing that you guys are hanging out on a couch playing games again wait is this some clever vfx yeah yeah oh yeah i think denmark is definitely in a in a in a pretty good place at the moment like we're we're starting to to open up a little bit and be we're we're not com our office is not completely open yet but we can go in smaller groups and uh and be here like so we're more people at the office than than the people working on this team so we kind of try to split it up but we're able to be here i think the limit right now is 10 people at the same time so uh and we we never more than say five or six at the same time in the office and yeah just for like the reader of

context i guess denmark's like like uh got into this this lockdown situation one what was it three months ago so it was one of the first countries in in the europe in europe yeah yeah yeah pretty fast compared to other other countries which are more responsible i don't think you gave us any credit apparently but thank you as a in denmark i agree [Laughter] what did i do yeah so you put in the wrong battery so the idea with these battery targets is that if you put different colors in the behavior of the different objects will change so just need to put it so this demo right here how long did you guys um as we're playing through it how long

is it how long did it take the team to kind of put this together from beginning to end just to give a idea to the viewers out there uh some context of what it takes um we started we started basically just um doing the game and this was the first level that kind of came into fruition what do you call it and and uh like i don't know we pro we worked on the on the game for one and a half year before for this was ready to play as it is now but i think a lot of that work has been as huge had been put into concept art and and so on and so on so it's a little hard to say exactly how long it took since we're kind of doing everything at the same time if i had to put a number i would say like a few months of actual prediction on that one but of course there's a lot of pre-prediction that that came into work before that yeah

i'm a zoom zoom if you want to reach the end before so i think usually people a development team such as yours at bedtime when creating for figment which was uh the the first game that coming up with concept coming up with idea execution people assume that that would be the toughest part of making the first uh in the franchise but the second one in my experience and on talking to others a follow-up can be just as daunting can you guys talk more about what made it more difficult or maybe in your experience easier than the first one uh taking on creed valley yeah sure uh yeah i i i think one one thing that

makes it way harder is that you actually know what you're what you're what you're going into it's a buggy yeah i think i think one of the as i was saying one of the harder things is that you you know like you know all the aspects of what what you need for this game to be completed like if you wanted to be at the sa at the same level as as it was before as the first one for example you you know we need all these things done so as soon as you start making a plan and coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas you kind of just uh yeah it's just gonna whatever um so i i lost my train of thought yeah so yeah so it becomes way more uh overwhelming uh to to know all the tests that you that you need to do uh compared to when you're first starting out where's is basically just i have this cool idea let's just go for it you make one level and then oh let's do put in this feature let's put it this thing and just basically keep on

on going until the game is done but you never really have the same sort of what you call it like a idea of uh of of how long everything is going to take like the third the first uh figment took us around three years to create and uh i think that was that's way way more than than than we initially expected we just kind of started out and and and saw where it took us but this time around we have a way better understanding of of i mean what it takes and at the same time we also in in the first production you spend a lot of time just pointing and sorry just for context uh there was a little little like

um i think we're back i mean you guys should make me part of your dlc i'll make the challenges uh the game playing through the level even harder by just asking 10 000 questions why are you trying to get through the puzzles oh we'll make this part of the fun but i on the other like what i was just saying is on the flip side of that we we have a lot of things already laid out for us this time around say since we know which kind of game it is and we know like the base mechanics and we know the art style and so on so there's also a lot of things that are given to us but at the same time we also want to up our game for that of course so um so so at the same time we challenge challenge ourselves and try to rethink what we can do with these mechanics this time around so so to keep it interesting for ourselves we kind of try to put in a lot of new ways to use the game and different kinds of gameplays to put on top of what we already had on top of the foundation

so uh yeah um i don't know if that answers your question however at least i got to rain for a couple minutes yeah totally answers it i mean uh yeah i mean it's completely true there's uh in my experience um when when creating the sequel or a follow-up it can be very intimidating because you're you're trying to up yourself uh and make it um worthwhile for the fans out there it's like why why are we making a sequel what are we doing how do we come from a different angle that reintroduces the idea but making something innovative right um i mean to me that that feels a lot more challenging than coming up with something uh originally i am because like on the other hand like once you're done with the first um the the the first game which is basically the first of its name is like beginning of a new ip

um there's always some things that that you left unfinished for for because you had to you had to release the game right and and uh getting back to it basically gives you a second chance to fix everything you you to basically finally do everything you couldn't do in the first one so at least in the beginning i feel like it's it's it's very exciting and not not that frightening because you know what you you what you're going because at the end of the first one you already have a list of all the you have a wishlist basically oh i wish we we we had time to do that i wish we could have done this and that and you can and that's the first thing you do is like you address that list and and and you get to work on all those cool things that's true at least that's how i felt when i came in yeah but i i think that like it's like that consciousness that you have from the in

the first one we had to think a lot about the mind of this whole concept so i think it's true that you get a lot of things that you can take for granted because it's already established but at the same time like you say it's working with those things and making it interesting for yourself one more time is definitely also a big challenge at least that's how i feel and i feel we maybe even discussed like how can we visualize these metaphors even better this time around and so on and on way more actually this time maybe we had way longer discussions about what those things mean how should things look and all these things to represent the things that we're actually trying to communicate and make sure we have this like additional narrative that layer that kind of lies on on top of like this the story of dusty and and how he walks around and beats up nightmares but at the same time we want this extra narrative that lies on top that tells the story about the guy that we're inside of i think that layer has been discussed way more this time around and yeah so but what i feel like is that we we get

to those discussions because of the first case yeah definitely yeah so what i'm saying i guess that we have just time for as many problems when we get into prediction like just as many dilemmas are just as hard but i personally feel like the the question we ask ourselves are like you know on kind of next level because we already soaked the the the basic ones and like that's what personally keeps me going is that i know and i want i want to believe that we're already like that we're improving ourselves just because we're continuing the we're taking the good things from the first one and we put them into the second one and then we create new problems for ourselves i also think there's a like we also get got a lot of feedback from the first one which we couldn't obviously we couldn't get it in this amount since before the game was out so people have a lot of pin opinions and we take the game into a different place than the

people play it and hear people's opinion on it and we we're also able now to kind of take those things and put it put it into the game uh like take take the for example yeah i don't know some of the things we weren't too happy about in the first one we were able to take those and try to improve upon those two yeah so yeah there's a lot of things way more things to take into consideration for for the second time around both in terms of production but also in terms of the whole creative process but i guess that if the first game had gotten like 10 out of 10 perfect game you know on every on on every platform on every you know if everybody was an animal best game ever then yeah making a second one would be very hard you know to live up to that hype but uh fortunately wasn't the case it's been broken if that thing is broken it's uh

underlying theme of mental health is a huge heavy topic to kind of take on especially expressing it within the game at least in the states it's still quite a a little bit taboo i think we're starting to open up to kind of recognize and and and and embrace it a bit um but it feels like is it any different on that side where you guys felt like um uh it was a subject worth worth making a game around and of course it is but like what's the atmosphere in mental health over there in denmark or even in europe uh that's a good good good question um i i definitely think it's a it's a subject that you can you should you should should not be afraid to touch the reason i'm getting a little uh frustrated here's uh some weird bug uh yeah it's definitely a a topic that that should be discussed even though i

mean that's mental health is something you can you can never get too too too clever about i guess so i i definitely think it's worth discussing and and and trying to get get get to know yourself and and know others i guess on the through through art and i think that's a lot of both games i played and other kinds of media that i consumed like deal with like when when it deals with these kind of things i it helps me understand myself better too so i think it's definitely something that's that's worth talking about in in different manners yeah yeah i think the games that you guys can it's very important i i completely agree because even with me um i'm in at least an unfortunate position that it i never really have to deal with it firsthand but i know a lot of people around me that that struggle with it almost on a daily basis and it's very hard to talk to because a lot of people don't

understand um that perspective and a lot of it's like well are you eating right or are you doing all these different things i mean that's how an ignorant person like myself would ask it but a lot of it's just like this is something they're born with and um it's very difficult for them to function um without really really diving too too detailed yeah definitely yeah yeah for sure and i i mean having having art that that that kind of shed light and these kind of things is extremely important and and definitely i think helps helps have that conversation and also not as you talk about it make it such a taboo as it it can sometimes be to talk about these kind of issues knowing that other people made art that kind of reflect upon this and have opinions about these things and and so on it's definitely something that that

helped ease this this conversation that that we definitely need to have and when it comes to how to approach that dialogue i feel like i mean the way i think about it is that if we like sincere enough and like and and we cannot trust like like our um that we were enough intention then then then i hope that it comes across as something that is sensitive and sensible and not you know we're not trying to shove our opinion on on anybody's face no and also that's also one of the things we got from the original figment it was like we have a lot of people come to us and tell us that they've been like deeply touched by our game and uh and some of the issues that we we talk about i don't know exactly what my theory is because we actually take that slightly more light-hearted and like you

say whimsical approach to to these topics that maybe it gets under people's skin a little more sometimes when you yeah when you allow yourself to be fun about it and and human about it also in some ways like it's it's when it doesn't get too heavy it's it's maybe a little easier to to take in and talk about it and uh at least that's that's what many people told us that like we've seen streamers that cried through the ending of the game and things like that and it's just like it's extremely rewarding as a as a developer to see the that your the things you spend so much time on can really touch people that way and hopefully also like you say maybe help help make a change in people and how we talk about these things yeah i'm sure the feedback from your fans and anybody that comes across this it opens up a lot of conversations openly uh to talk to friends and family and

actually relate to each other if anything um i think it's a great undertaking that you guys kind of put out with figment creed valley to kind of make a statement that this is what everybody's kind of going through it's not a very unique thing it's it's very common actually across across the world and uh yeah exactly and if anything as developers i think it's it's actually really good that you guys are expressing yourself and and still it's a very unique subject we're just talking about the subject of not just entertainment but in games it's not a lot of games kind of take over and talk about this uh in a way that is approachable and whimsical and approach well i mean relatable to everybody that plays through it and if anything it's an educational device for people to kind of yeah but you should still be enjoyable right that's not like the whole point where you're saying i guess it's like it's

like it's still light-hearted like if i think it touches people when it comes at like a sudden certain time in their lives maybe but some other people and i think it's it's it's also a lot of players they're just here for the for the for the jokes and the in the universe so that's also what we kind of hope to achieve is to is to create different layers again like like uh on which you can appreciate hopefully the the the story and and the and the visuals yeah i mean there's definitely a lot of substance here as we're playing through the demo it takes a lot of time and effort for sure to talk about it there's more [Laughter]

bugs so sorry if i missed this earlier so how big is the team over at bedtime digital uh especially for this game i mean for this game like i said we're like three four sometimes five people working on it full time and then uh like the whole company how many people are we the four let's say 14 yeah yeah and they work on other things um yeah among others like parting the original figment and but also other projects and we can kind of we can kind of use each other in that regard oh it works now thank god look at that amazing puddle yeah you guys probably can tell what's different but for me i'm watching it

over and over again it's uh to me it seems to be working just fine so but let's see how we can get through now but now we can get through it and actually get to the fun part of the of the level this was uh but the introduction did i this made that puzzle so you guys mentioned myself for you i'll i'll try not to mess up you got it why are you going through this i'm smart i'm actually arguably the worst player in the office don't be so hard on yourself you're right uh we played through this a lot of times okay so the initial uh idea usually comes from

inspiration from a person or a couple of people but we kind of talked about how you know the the the education with mental health issues can be quite new to to some people that aren't aware of it or know people about it were there some parts of the team that had to kind of catch up to speed to to understand the subject to help with the development of the game i i think the story can come from you nils in the first place i mean we we kind of we like like you already mentioned them the yeah so i think the story like you already mentioned is like a bounce between uh the different experiences that the people on the team had so we had a lot of talks about how we could like make this this story work out and kind of like represent all of us so it's it's not uh it's not like

one one specific person's experience on the team it's more like these uh like a combination of everyone's experience that we kind of try to merge into to to this uh through the problems that are kind of represented in the game um i think you should just we should just talk one second about this stuff here you can just go there it's fine so i talked earlier about open and closed-minded so now we actually get to switch between two that's what hugo is doing here in the open-minded state the red reddish colored thing and the yellow thing is the the close minded state so the idea is that the mind can can switch it between open and closed minded like automatically it does it usually just do it all the time automatically but in this case something is wrong so it can't switch between those two and the idea is that closed minded it's when you act upon your ideals and open mind is when you

take in stuff so you need both those two and that's kind of how we see the mind functioning so in the first part here we basically just use it to to create fun little puzzles here where you can see some things are open and open-minded and some things are closed in close mind and so on and and you have to kind of use this mechanic that represents a mechanic we also see existing in the mind to solve these kind of different puzzles the idea is basically that you need to be open-minded sometimes to let in new ideas and challenge you your opinions but sometimes you need to be close minded to to get things done and and and actually yeah get moving as i said worst player in the office possibly in the whole of denmark now we need the the antagonists

and that was actually like very interesting challenging t like from a like design standpoint like visual design standpoint because we tried to to design every object to kind of reflect those two mind states uh so every object is kind of designed twice so we like different symbols like the eyes and the ears for open state because you you take in new information and when it's like in enclosed states i think it's more like is more protective and close stuff but also moving forward so you can see mechanism uh mechanisms uh smoke coming out of a chimney that sort of things and and basically as much as we could we tried to

put that kind of thought into into every every object of the game basically and that was really like that really the the best part but working on on that game as an artist so part of the uh then there's a question to you eagle expressing these ideas visually um sounds like it can be challenging because these are like hypothetical hypothetical ideas right that you have to materialize into expressing to fit within the game's theme and in visuals uh what kind of exploration and inspiration did you draw from to kind of help with putting putting things on paper essentially it basically comes down to breaking down its idea to like it's it's

simply simply and like like because there's only so many things that like that can clearly represent either space and and what we want them to mean so if if you like an open mind then things have to be a receiver basically and and in in close mind objects are more like either protective or they produce something and and if you take and and that that makes already for a pretty pretty good start it's it's it's a frame basically and then if you add on top of that the the function that we need in get gameplay-wise because the designers need needs those objects for for some specific things then there's you you basically have actually a very limited

transition over to you there's only so many objects that that that meet all of these requirements so it's actually more a matter of listing all of those requirements and then finding the very few things that that fit and that's basically how i go about about like finding ideas and deciding what what should go where is it's like it's like a matrix you have all your parameters you combine all that together and hopefully most of the time at the end you you you get like your object like it has to be a palm tree that turns into a a pass and well of course because rules are kind of made to be broken sometimes you just have a good idea and you don't know how or where from but it

just works and then you roll with it you should probably also add that the the game is a musical yeah oh yes yeah that's one of the parameters basically of the world you have you have as much as we uh as we can we like things to to make interesting sounds so if if this or that object can be a a musical instrument then all the better then you've got i'd say the the gameplay function and then it has to tie into the the the overall theme uh open in a closed mind so yeah so niels i think you know you know all of my sorry sorry to cut you off um so niels are you the man for the game yeah i am like yeah i basically did all

the music oh my god it's a lot of work it's impressive man i guess it's been one of the parts of the creating this game that i enjoyed the most like we spent a lot of time trying to make everything uh everything as musical as possible like that's the the obvious things as as these fights where where you actually have characters that that sing to you while you fight but then also throughout the entire world we have all these more background element element kind of things that are dancing and singing along as you as you pass by them like you've already mentioned have have small things that blink on the on the beat and and so on so the the entire soundtrack is already always evolving as you as you play through the game and we have all these things that are placed out all around where that will kind of play along and yeah and just add their own track to the soundtrack

i can try to demonstrate down here [Music] were there ideas um because this is so whimsical so out there where you guys explored and it was too out there that you guys had to take a step back any stories of like that creatively uh in any of the disciplines uh what probably some friday and ideas that i think what we have to restrain ourselves the most is is um yeah in in pre-prediction when it comes to adding adding safety to what we have already like when it comes to adding more content like hopefully we have more ideas than we need and we have to cut some of those out but when it comes to uh

designing the the in-game assets i would argue that actually the weirder the better like i don't recall a time where where we we did something like it it's a callback to what i was saying earlier i don't recall a time where we did something that that ticked all the boxes fit everything right but what's too crazy like it's it's never been like in theory if if it if it fits everything like then it's not going to be too too much like it basically writes itself not really but like you know at this point in time we we're very familiar with the universe and and the game so i think we we have boundaries but we're not that conscious of them i think that's true so so i just want to add here to what i said just before as you can hear here you have the music background music playing but then as you get closer to

this eye thing you can hear like every time his eye blinks you can hear that he's actually playing a little melody for you when you play press pass by him and all these layers are kind of added to the soundtrack as you explore and i think there's someone beats light bulbs as well yeah so like as much as we could we tried to put in all these small ideas of little extra pieces of all layers in the soundtrack that you that would be kind of unlocked as you explore around the world i guess it's a pretty fun way to break the the music loop in a you know dynamic way yeah definitely so because like every every game does that in in to some extent i guess but it's cool to have it badly the partition the the the music cheat is is the world and it's cool as a well for me as a

non-musician to actually see like that music that's actually pretty cool guys to put it i don't thought about that all right i hear it says the art director [Laughter] well actually it's more like the other way around like i drew i draw something like oh i've got this idea and then nils comes comes to me as like yeah so could it could could it do some music or something yeah like how could it sound like i think that that's actually that that's a very good like illustration of that ping pong thing that that we talked about earlier with where we kind of someone has an idea let's have a flower with an eye inside it to represent that it's open like an open eye it's taking in stuff and then how can you make that make a sound and i come up with a blinky blinky sound or whatever you can call this and hugo

kinda adds eyelets to to the eyes so it it it looks like it also says that it would give that sound when it when it's actually blinking so that back and forth thing is is is kind of how how the ideas evolve usually yeah the sense of collaboration is is definitely admirable i mean just by simply watching you guys play the demo i can tell even without the commentary how much fun you guys had uh working on the game it just really shows and speaks for itself thank you try we try and try barely trying but yeah that that's also something that we try to get across in like the dialogue and like in the whole whimsical thing is that that it should also be fun like that that out there concept of exploring the mind is is something that just calls for slightly wacky metaphors and all these

kind of things so definitely and it also fits our i guess our personalities too i think it would be a bit harder for us to make something that was just like extremely serious yeah and also like from a very practical standpoint you got to play you can play your cards right so like we know that on a technical level there's no way you can compete with big names triple a's and even like big indies and like so using our voice and our weird sensibilities i guess is also a way to organically stand out yeah definitely at least that's what we that's the business plan throw it out there to the the viewers out there this is a perfect time to kind of throw in your questions wherever you're watching this from so i can ask these guys directly

uh and in the meantime i'll talk to you guys and then try to kick this off um so niels you were mentioning about the the audio aspect of it and you know i i come from the art background i'm an environment artist by trade so when it comes to audio i have no idea how it gets implemented um so you guys talked about the the the collaboration uh where it's like a ping pong effect of of talking back and forth and coming out with the final result and what state do you usually get a bunch of artwork let's say from hugo where you're in the process of like composing something are you midway through like a like a demo such as what we've shown or what part of the process do you get involved where you're like expressing yourself and then when you put it out there for the team can you kind of talk about a little bit of that process because the figment seems like yeah so it's definitely harder through so since i i'm both

i'm both like the game director and the composer i'm kind of like the music is always in my head from basically from the beginning and i think for for at this point we had some concept art for and we knew we wanted to open a closed minded they can change between which kind of sets up some some boundaries and some pillars of inspiration for for the music but i think we probably had the music before we had that much artwork actually for this thing so i'd say come really early here in in the process i would say earlier the better and like they kind of both influence each other exactly so like for the further into the game there's that cave at some points at some point that i was like kind of setting up the mood and the question was whether i can't make it like like what you know most environment with with drops and stuff and to kind of like make that decision i went to nice and ask him what kind of mood he had in mind like like the the

soundscape of that cave and that gave direction to to the the visuals too so once again oh yeah yeah in short like as early as possible yeah so that everything kind of like clicks together in the final product and also especially for for the songs that we have for our boss fights where everything is kind of linked up to the music like we have to find the beat really early on we have to find out how fast the song is going to be for like we have some usually some very early gray boxed mechanics like just boxes that move around and does this feel good and then we find a beat and then basically that's the time we started thinking about music how should the music feel how should should it be double tempo should it be slow i want you to be and then try to find the tempo and then from there on maybe it's just like a a drum track or whatever and then and then we start to link up the gameplay to to that so yeah in in almost every aspect of the game we we're pretty early on with music

and uh yeah getting that at least some sort of rough idea of how the music should feel and then later on like with everything else it gets polished and fleshed out and maybe vocals are added on top of it and so on so huge so it's definitely something that we keep from there right so here you can you can uh maybe detail some some uh a story during development where uh i know you guys draw inspiration from each other all the time but an example that you can think of where neil's maybe wrote something that you listen to you're like oh wow this is really helping me visualize this part of the world a little bit better just by listening and getting inspired from from something he wrote peer pressure [Laughter]

the first example that comes to mind would be yeah that cave that we haven't seen today but uh like i had i had in mind a few a few sounds that that nic had previously made for another project of us and we kind of like did the same thing was like you know drops uh coming from the ceiling that sort of things that created a soundscape and i had that in mind when i started sketching up the the cave and and yeah that was definitely inspiration like like it was one of the main arguments for me to to to make uh something that that was kind of like damp with with the with the fog with with the drops that that sort of things and that was my initial my initial inspiration came came from that soundscape from that cave soundscape that he had already done

well later on i went to him and asked him about that and we decided to do something slightly different but uh but yeah that that'd be one instance for it i i yeah well i had a sample of of what it could sound like and that inspired me to to like set up a first draft of the mood of the visual mode this time i know you guys right and uh oh yeah oh go ahead yeah oh yeah i had another idea it's like those little drums that that you see in the here on the floor i was that's also a pretty good example because i think everything's kind of tight together but the idea is like being you know like in when in in close state everything kind of has to to move on everything is like working so so this idea of a ma like

a marching band and then percussions was kind of brought up and that's what like triggered this this drum plant idea so that's like another instance where uh percussions felt good in the in the in the music and that's why we have drums like plant drums like on the ground as little little flowers so the immediate team that works on figment you guys talk about how bedtime digital has multiple teams work on different projects so you guys are pretty much knee-deep throughout the development of the game were there times where other team members from other projects uh checked in with you guys were gave valuable input where you felt like oh wow that outside perspective definitely helps with this this one aspect uh any stories like that that you