How We Almost Wrecked Our Second Game, 'The Wreck'

[Music] let's start with this conference H we almost wrecked our second game aply named the wreck um if my keyboard works of course so I put the same t-shirt I had in 2018 so you can play the 25 million differences game you know between me then and me now uh my name is Flor Moran I'm from France I try to work on my accent but it's not working um I'm a former journalist uh I've created the pixel hunt or tiny video game studio in 2013 I think uh and in this studio I'm a writer game designer producer creative director and I wear way too many hats um we did a first game in 2017 that was called uh bury me my love and as every game we do it's a real inspired game a

game that tries to talk about real topics of the real life and today I'm here to tell you a little bit a little story uh this story starts I forgot to start my timer up this this story start oh and I I forgot to specify that I'm very bad at PowerPoint so I'm sorry for the quality of the slides that are coming yeah bear with me the introduction of the story is uh once upon a time a tiny video game studio in France made a a game called bur love so you may have not played it but by IND the standards it's been a huge success for us it sold over a 100,000 copies over five years and when it was out uh it got very very positive feedback both from the Press uh the players of course and also it got Awards actually we were nominated here at GDC in 2018 for best mobile game so yeah it was really humbling but it was also really great

for us because we got the feeling that we were living uh fairy tale basically and so that's the first chapter of the story The the fairy tale we had a very successful game uh we had um lots of desires to work on new games so the question that uh started uh appearing in our minds was no what well the answer for us at the time seemed very simple now let's use what we've learned to make another game only of course when you have a first game that's successful then you tend to grow Ambitions so let's do it bigger and better of course that's easy right we done it right the first time we will just do all the all the same things all over again and make it even better the second time but what had we learned in the process first we know how to make a game so I'm not saying that the path to releasing bur love was walk in the park of course there were

problems and of course because game development is game development there were issues but we shipped on time and we also shipped on budgets and we shipped bug free although that last point is debatable but um I would argue that most players were very satisfied with the game so we were very satisfied and uh my my belief at the time that that was that uh it's not that hard really to make video games sweet sweet summer child yeah and then just before releasing uh bur my love I got in a car accident it was a pretty bad crash but luckily enough we weren't hurt we never nobody had anything but it gave me uh an ID for a new game when you're a game designer I think everything gives you idas for new games but this was was this one was interesting at least to me I thought that making a game about being in car accident and seeing your life

flash before your eyes and remembering things from the past was actually an idea that was interesting actually it made me think of an old French movie called the things of life that does exactly that but in the form of a game I had never seen something like that so I thought it's a good fit for us because it's reality inspired it's not seen before and my idea was to tell an intimate story and something quite intense about a character whose life would be turned literally upside down but what by what was happening to them in this car accident and I was pretty convinced that it had to be a very good idea and a very easy one to implement as I said sweet summer child the cool thing about being a European and that might be a little bit odd for people living in North America and pretty much all the rest of the world is that we've got something pretty Co called Public Funding in Europe it's it's actually really cool in Europe you can apply to

for instance a European Creative Media Europe prototype found and you can get some money to start working on your game that's what we did with a first draft of of what the W so our next game is called The W uh would be and we got 50,000 to begin with the Only Rule when you got Public Funding if is that you have to match that amount with private funds so we found ourself with a budget of €100,000 to spend and I thought I was smart and I thought we just we could just make a vertical slice directly rather than work on a proof of concept prototype because €100,000 is a lot of money so I thought we we were just going to get ahead of ourselves and directly start working on something that would both work as a prototype to show what we wanted to do as a game and also basically be the first part of that game

we also knew how to build the team uh so that's exactly what I started doing for the second project uh we hired uh excellent writers Olivia wood and George loette from the UK they are very talented and so I asked them to join us in this adventure we hired an art director who is very experienced Alexandre grieta and he was because I knew that he was he would be able to develop a visual universe that would be striking and interesting and then I got a little carried away we hired Dev sound guys another Dev voiceover director Sarah elmal who did an absolutely Stellar job on the game and basically we uh were pretty quickly a full-fledged team and so I was thinking that the project was shaping up I was really happy with the the way things were turning and I was also very in love with every single member in my team very in o with all their talents so I led myself

into thinking that such a talented team could not fail of course and we also learned along the way with B malov we learned how to convince Partners so bu malov was actually a c production so we learned how to just like negotiate with people and convince them to invest in our projects and that's what where we when we met Alexi gavar who is the head of col nights colon kns for those who don't know them are an investment fund that they invest in projects not in companies so if they like your game they will give you some money to actually make the game and then they are pretty hands off but as you'll see they still are very keen on providing feedback Alexi liked uh the project I pitched to him and uh also he really loved B my love he had played it and really enjoyed it so he was really Keen to see what we were going to do next with our next

project so he gathered with his board and together they decided that they will found our game but as we didn't have a prototype yet they would only give us that much money so that we can actually make a prototype and then we would have a review after that pre-production phase so that they could evaluate the direction we were we were headed and that's when the fairy tale turned into something of a cautionary Tale because of course colon knites are very experienced and of course they had concerns first the the new project the wreck seemed quite far from bu my love bur my love is in 2D it's text based it's basically a glorified Choose Your Own Adventure book uh and the wreck was int Trey it implied lots of gameplay more more gameplay mechanics so it was really different from the first project so of course the they warned us they

told us that there were challenges to overcome with this new project and also they were slightly worried that that might be a little little harder to tell a compelling story that way because um what they loved about Burmy my love is the storytelling uh of the game and of course if you do a game that's more like a game a little bit little bit less like a story it may be more complicated to tell the story in a very comp in way but even though they had all those warnings they trusted us so they decided to to to give us a green lights and we started working so we worked for roughly 9 month uh almost a year actually and the result was a 30 minutes vertical slice so something that would look not like a prototype but like something that we could actually use in the final game and that's how it worked you had a central crack scene so you would begin the game

driving a car and very quickly you would get into an accident and then the time would slow down so the crash would happen very slowly and the the main character's bag would open up and objects would SL flat would start flying around as you can see in the last pictures down down right and you you would use those uh items to access some of the characters memories so uh you would point at the objects and it would just like spark new memories in the character's mind and then suddenly you would be teletransported to the the actual memories and we had three memories to explore in the in this uh version of the Prototype and each memory came with a custom puzzle miname so three different memories three different uh mini games to to to play with and to understand the rest of the story and we had anide that we thought was a very

good one at the Time spoiler not so much uh we decided to go with two very different visual Styles so what we wanted to have is to have a style in the car crash that was very realistic because it was in the present and we wanted it to feel like it's happening right now right before your eyes so we tend to we tried to go with something that would look really realistic but then when you would Access Memories the memories were VR painted because we thought that uh this the brush Strokes that you can actually see in VR painted models would convey this sense of weirdness and this dreamlike feeling that you have when you think about memories basically so we thought that it was a really good idea to have this difference between those two Styles and to be able to to alternate between one and the other basically everything is perfect or maybe it's not

and then that's when The Story begins to change and evolve into a horror story because we sent our prototype to colum nights and it was time for honest feedback first they thought that the game play was Cluny uh sometimes you didn't know what you were supposed to do and when you did you uh could uh have trouble doing it sometimes you would try to do what you were supposed to do and not not achieve that so it was clunky you can say no big deal that's what prototypes are for you can still try to polish it and make it make it better but that was not the only issue another issue was uh that the art style the very intelligent choic choice that we made was not working really well actually uh it's it was all over the place and another problem with that is it was very uh complicated to identify the wreck as a game because if you would put two screenshots of the same game next to each other would look nothing alike so

it would be complicated to just communicate on the game and to just show this is what the W looks like because it doesn't look like one thing that didn't work really well and the third problem is that the writing was good but not memor memorable actually the writing was really excellent Olivia and George did an awesome job writing the first draft of the Prototype but the problem was that because you were um troubled by the different art style and because you you had that game play that got in the way of really immersing yourself in the story uh you you wouldn't really get the full uh attention intention of the story and you would would not really feel engrossed by it so for a company that's supposed to make story heavy uh games with story that are really memorable that didn't really didn't work the fourth point that uh they they gave us as a point of feedback was that the the game felt experimental so at

least that good right it's it's amazing to be experimental some very cool uh igf nominated games are super experimental you can be proud of that but if you look at the full quote by Alexi gavar that's the rest of the quote so yeah it was experimental but not in a good way it felt like he told me afterwards because he he didn't want to be too cruel at first but he told me that it felt a little bit like a student project but not a very masterful one so you know yeah o uh so we got this feedback and I reacted in the only um reasonable way you can react when you get such feedback denial I decided that they must be wrong I was really like sure that they didn't understand they didn't get what we tried to achieve and and so on and so forth and then then I got back home and I

started uh to work a little bit on that and to think a little bit about what makes good feedback and I came to the conclusion that good feedback has to First be kind and trustful people who give you feedback should always do that because they trust you and they trust they have trust in your ability to actually use that feedback to make your game better and that was definitely the case with uh with the colon kns because they really love our first game and they really believed in our ability to make something great for our second title so yes the colon night's feedback ticked that first box it was kind and trustful it has to come from people who are experienced so that's not a golden rule of course uh when you do play tests with players they are not necessarily super experienced in game making but when you GA feedback from people such as Alexi who used to be the head of ID at Xbox

and who has probably tested thousands of games or um Lindsay rostar who is the head of Timberline games and who is part of the board at uh at colon part of the committee at colon and all those other very experienced games people you can just Overlook that feedback and you have to pay attention to it it has to be specific and actionable it has to not be uh too to personal like you can't give feedback such as I don't like it it's not my test I I don't know why but it's not working for me feedback has to be very specific and very precise in what it tells you about what's not working in your in your game and that's exactly what colite did for us they pointed out what didn't work specifically and they didn't tell us how to fix it but they told us it needed to be fixed and that was really informative for us and that's the other point right

feedback good feedback aims at bettering the game instead of redesigning it for you because when you ask feedback from game developers they tend to put themselves in your shoes I would have done things completely different I invest myself and my creative process in your game and I tell you how to completely redo redo it according to my views this is probably not the best feedback you can get the best feedback is probably the get the feedback that understands what you are trying to do and tries to give you the best advice to make it better especially as especially as you consider that failure is a step towards success and not uh something definitive that will never be overcome and that was their case they thought they told us you know what you failed with this prototype we still believe that you can do something that works so consider that as a a step towards success so yeah I had to step out of

denial sadly and I had to come up with a strategy to face that situation so I came up with a methodology that I'm going to explain to you now and I call it the cry method yeah really efficient so the cry method is three points first consider then refocus and then ultimately hopefully yield something better so consider what works so we had to have we had to do some for and six for our first prototype what worked in it well the story setting and the theme were interesting definitely like we had very good feedback on that point making a game about a car crash with a woman who has trouble in Al and tries to understand what's happening this is this was a setting that was not never seen before but really interesting and really

in the genre of bur my love so it was something that worked the fragmented narrative design was promising the idea that you should visit several memories as many puzzle pieces that you have to then put together to understand the full pictures that worked too the memory exploration in and of itself is a cool concept the idea that you can have a memory but not understand it perfectly and that and then move over it and work on it and finally get some kind of epiphany that something you didn't get before no you understand was a cool concept and something to keep the voiceover worked really well to Foster immersion even if in the first prototype Sarah worked with very talented artists so that worked well and that's definitely something we wanted to keep the art style the art styles I should have put a pro pro there were nice the problem was not the art side per se the problem was not Alexandre G's work the was that we should be more coherent and

pick one and and stick with it and there is a lot of Personality um the game was unlike most games and definitely tried to explore something that is not that explored in in the video game Space so all those things worked and we wanted to keep them but then we needed to refocus uh on the things we are good at as at the pixel end so definitely we're not really good puzzle games this designer especially compared to all the other very excellent puzzle game designers there are um in games I mean some of the most amazing games are puzzle games and what we tried to do was to find to give the player something to do in the memories because we didn't trust in the rest of the proposition enough and that didn't work so we DEC decided to get rid of it and we are not really good experimental game creators either as as much as I would like to I must acknowledge that we are better at at

telling grounded stories that that are um just good stories than trying to really experiment experiment with video games as a medium but we're good at telling those reality inspired Stories We proved that with ber my love also with other projects that we did before and that's something that really we decided to focus on with this with the second prototype we we're good at character focused narration like all of BU my love is only dialogues between a couple and it keeps you uh it keeps you on the edge of your seat for a few hours so that's definitely something we need to keep uh exploring in our next project and we also are good at making games my mother can play she only finished she only played actually two video games sure she's my mother but she's also very computer illiterate and that's one of the values that we wanted to to to carry

with the pixelence making games that would be easily approachable by basically anyone even people who would never Define themselves as gamer so yes those complicated puzzles not a good idea let's drop that so then was time to yield something better uh still not a prototype because the curse of narr one of the many curses of narrative games is that it's it's fairly complicated to prototype narrative game you can't graybox it and expect it to give the full experience but we would work on something shorter simpler and more focused it was important to just regroup on one or two main objectives that we wanted to reach with that new project I would strongly advise against the cry method because we had less money we we had spent a lot of money on the first prototype and colonizes were kind enough to give us some more more but not that much so we had to scale down uh

most of the most of the second prototype was made with only two person Alexandre gria and myself and with an All or Nothing approach basically we knew that it was our last chance to show that the project could actually exist and that led us to very questionable work ethic we had long days of work we probably neglected our families in the process and that's something I hopefully will never do again because it was really stupid and I don't regret it because it had to be done at that point but I really want to do everything possible to avoid that next time and all the more as uh to do that you need an aome partner very few Indies have a second CH chance actually very few Indies have a first chance so it's really great to have found a partner that really believed in us and that was able to give us extend the funds for us but yeah

it's really something that uh I feel extremely lucky to have had and that I I would advise you not to count on so basically the cry method it's trash you should never use it only if you really really really have to so the result was a 20 minute uh proof of concept prototype that was really really closer to what the final game actually is today it was a 3D visual novel with a straightforward flow uh the the the memory exploration mechanic was still there but it was not a puzzle game memory mechanic anymore it was just about moving around the memory and finding Clues so that you're able to understand what what's happened and uh we had a consistent art Direction which was one of the most important part of the feedback that we got so this time everything was perfect well nothing is ever perfect but everything was comfortable enough for us to jump into production and

that's what we got two years afterwards the third chapter of the story The Coming of Age story The the growth that we had so first let me show you what the end result is through a little trailer for The [Music] wck all right I'll take tell you this story your mom had a brain aneurysm do you know what that means is is she going to die we just found out that mom might die does that mean nothing to you everything that happened to us it at us there was a reason why the hell do I feel so alone do I really have to be so

angry do I really hate my mother memory is weird you suddenly remember these moments without knowing why Until you realize it's trying to teach you something crucial no one can live like this not really but we can change everyone can [Music] change I have to leave it all behind it's funny that I only realize know that the wreck is a game about being able to change and that's probably the best asset we had during production being able to change because what happened is what I call the second game syndrome it's really hard to be very keen to live up to a first success uh our success was not huge but by any means but it was already a a big thing for us and we wanted to prove that we

could do something else uh something even better we didn't want to make a second uh uh text based Adventure because we felt like maybe we upt for something even even better and we run it to to prove ourselves right but we were still relatively inexperience I would say very inexperience just because you've shipped a game or even in our case several small games before that doesn't mean you've got it all figured out I I I don't think anybody has it all figured out in video games anyway the risks with this second game syndrome are first being miserable because of course when you leave in delusion and then suddenly the brick of reality crushes the the strawberry pie of your Illusions uh you feel really bad and you also make the people you work with feel bad we had to scale down for the second prototype we had to just uh keep people

insecure although they were very talented and they worked really well and that's really something I'm not proud of and that's why I'm sharing it with you today just so you can uh avoid those kind of experiences uh and just so you can avoid tanking your game because B my love is a game that really could have not existed at all so I'm really happy that it it does so what would be the solutions to that second game syndrome the first would be not to romanticize success not to look uh navel gaze too much and not to consider that you've got it all figured out because something worked for you but you have to remember what you enjoyed and what your players enjoyed in your first game because that's how you grow uh and that's how you grow as a person as a designer as a creative director sure but that's also how you grow as a studio as a company and it's really important to

have a have a long-term view about how you are going to develop so how do you respect your Studio's DNA how do you come with a second project that yes is not the same as the first one but yes also is in the same uh the same um style and the same uh things that worked for you the first time you you should you should preciously try to work on them and take a fresh look at them and see how you can re new without changing necessarily changing everything another point that is very important of course is to leave your ego behind I think I'm very guilty of that and uh my ego and my inexperience were the things that put the project at risk at some point and so yes you have to forget about that and you have to just think that you have to address it like it's your first game and like you all everything is to do all over again so that you don't fall in the pit the same pitfalls that I fell into and the last

and most important advice would be to be ready to get some kicks in the butt because I think it's the most important part being aware that you can have flows in your process and in your project and being knowing that you know people that can actually help you and give you feedback that is sometimes harsh to hear but also life saving is something you have to be ready for and that's the that would be the best advice I have to give to you today thanks a lot for coming I hope you'll like the wreck and because in the end that's probably our F favorite game so far so yeah I hope you like it thank you if you have question we still have a little bit of time I think because there's no session afterwards so you can ask them then again it's Friday so yeah I

hello yeah that was a great talk hi thank you hi um uh since the wreck was so challenging did you find um not sure if you started on your third game how do you you know uh be energized to do it again are you a little traumatized like oh no we're going to do it again yes I am but I'm also very happy with all the things that we've learned and I also know things that I will never do the same again so I'll be probably hopefully way more careful with the next game so I feel I feel actually confident and I also know where to set the boundaries and where to set the limits and what to be very uh careful of which doesn't mean by any means that we won't make any mistake probably we will again but hopefully not the same mistakes so we can learn and I can give another talk in 5 years in the next GDC great thank you thank you hi so first things your introduction

really reminded me of my own position in my company like being a writer designer manager director creative director so it's it's good to see someone else doing so many things too many hats so um it's tiring though right sorry it's tiring though oh yeah it's tiring and you can do one thing just as well as you want to yeah um so I joined a company that was making their second game and we're at the cry face I mean I'm going to come back and I'm going to say okay we have this method I saw on this talk because we we we just got the the really harsh feedback or not harsh feedback but good but um hard to hear feedback just this week from another colleague right and is there any any further advice having feedback that requires you to fundamentally change your game and basically how do do I go and apply the crime method yes I I think feedback that

requires you to fundamentally change your game is not what I would call good feedback because you can't ask that from Game Dev you know they have an ID they have a vision and they want to make a specific kind of game so coming to them and telling them you have to do something completely different is is as as good a feedback as saying you have to to stop it completely and and start again a new project which can be a good idea sometimes but it has to come from devs who draw their own conclusions so that's why I would say that you you should probably not listen to that feedback too much but you should try to find if there is feedback that can actually keep the core ID of your game and make it way better than it currently is so never disregard feedback but if you want to keep your core ID if you still believe in it if you still believe it's going to work that's not the feedback you're looking for you're more for looking for feedback that can

specifically apply to points in your game that you should change I would say I see we do agree with the feedback though so it's a long story it's complicated thank you so much for the talk maybe we can change cards later yeah sure okay thanks a lot and uh have a good rest of [Applause] [Music] JC