Indie Polish: Making the Most of the Last 10%

[Music] hello hello wow people turned up that's cool for my Mountain Dew down there Nisan Indy um hello I'm Ike I'm in a game developer I made Thomas was alone people in the room know what Thomas was alone is the air hands up in England you'd get more of a groan at the self-promotion and applause but let's go with it those of you who want to hear about polish game development my friends you've walked into the wrong room this is this about polish something we don't talk about a great deal as indie game developments in the game development indie game developers I've got a suite because my throat is killed by telling Glitch Mob very loudly last night how much I enjoyed their music um screaming seems like a good idea at the time a lot of these already talked about um what polish is because it's not the

part of the conversation that we necessarily think is cool we do a lot of game jams and a lot of ideas and lot of cool inspirational stuff which is massively important and massively lovely however um I think there's other stuff that we can talk about this is a question I showed in these polish the ending is obviously we have a cool opportunity to do whatever we want to push aesthetics to do different weird cool whatever stuff um we usually associate polish with kind of triple-a stuff or more corporation kind of develop stuff and therefore when you mention polish in rooms full of indie game developers sometimes you can get either well at best a board look at worst anger um so polish the purpose of Polish is to make a game more approachable obviously and make it immediately pleasing on an aesthetic level or you know an interactive level it's it's the thing that makes games fun

which is a word with lots of plantations there are lots of reasons to make games fun is not the only reason or it's pretty good one so there's lots of arguments I think for doing in the Polish there's obviously there's the capitalist argument I need to pay my rent my staff my team members my colleagues my friends they also need to pay their rent to pay rent currently we need money um in order to make money we need to sell our game to enough people to cover all those bills therefore we need enough people to like the game play the game talk about the game show the game to their friends on YouTube enjoy trailers all these kinds of things there's a good very obvious argument for polishing a game if you want it to make money there's also the design argument um we've seen kind of play testing and polish in general go in and out of fashion generally depending on how much Valve are talking about it which is fine um but play testing is

awesome play testing is a great way of finding out where things go wrong where things don't go wrong and making sure that the experience you're creating is the one you want to create I don't think we should use play testing to find out what a game is it's useful sometimes if you're not sure what the focus should be to put it in front of players and and let them tell you but generally I'm more of the slightly arrogant ohter type that I have a vision and I have an objective with my games and play testing is really useful to find out how badly I'm achieving that it's good at pointing me in the right direction of achieving what my goals are as a creator arm usually I'm miles and miles off we've had this with volume I've been demoing that to press for a year and a half now and it's only just a point where people seem to be getting it and getting what I'm trying to do with it that's not their fault but we've solved it because we've had that feedback over a year and a half there's also of course the ego argument which we're not allowed to admit to but

obviously if you make accessible polished clean games people will think you're awesome and they will fist bump your events and things like that and we will pretend we don't care about that but it is quite nice there's lots of arguments for it of course you don't have to um obviously Indy has an enormous capacity to be Punk to be different to fight to not be the way that anyone wants it to be we can create stuff that is not designed to appeal to anyone by ourselves we can do that that's an absolutely objective that's fair it's cool it's fine and it's actually where a lot of the more interesting stuff in the indie space is being done the stuff that is genuinely pushing the medium forward is often the stuff that is riskiest and if those people had subscribed to polish to the degree that I do or to the degree that designers like me - maybe they would not have achieved the enormous ly impressive work that they did it's more prone to failure obviously because it is riskier um but when it succeeds you can create new

genres new ideas new everything however um and it seemed very important that as creators we never make the mistake of thinking the punk work is without intent the person who sits down and makes a game that breaks the rules that does something different if they're just doing it because they didn't bother to check what the rules were or to see how players reacted to what they were doing and just went for it anyway then they're not punks they're people who haven't invested the time method in their design Punk intentionally produced is fantastic Punk which is an excuse for not really thinking through what it is you're trying to do is less exciting and I'd also even argue the punk is in itself an aesthetic polish we are making a choice we're making a choice to do something we're testing the water be it through play testing through releasing screenshots through making videos whatever and we're seeing if it has the result for players but we want it doesn't matter if that's you know aiming

for a mainstream audience and like free-to-play farming games or if it's making something for ten people and you think a cool it's the same idea so I'd argue that actually the should we shouldn't we debate is a bit off the mark I don't think I think we're all talking about the same thing basically just we have different goals so it's UTC so obviously I have to give you a list of things you have to do so animating squares so this is why I'm known for I'm the rectangle guy um that's okay it's there's worse kinds of guy you can be mate but it's fine um so why why was some of those lone rectangles the very obvious answer which is guess why the average 14 year old on YouTube absolutely accurately if I can't draw I could I'm sure I'm not a massive believer in the night challenge I'm sure if I put in the energy and effort that every artist who's good has done I could probably reach some level of mediocrity but I've not invested that time I've not invested that energy so that's why I'm

not an artist though I am is I'm a reasonably half decent graphic designer who worked the years producing pitch documentation for Triple A games that means I'm very good at putting a gun on a page so it looks really nice next to a cool typeface I can't make the image of the gun but I can make sure the gun kind of fits well compositionally and I can make the colors work so that it looks more brutal and impressive and Triple A these are things I can do and those are the things I focus on with Thomas was alone they're squares because squares are what I can do now initially that might sound like I wasn't pushing myself but I was pushing myself I never made a game on my own before um I was definitely trying to do storytelling stuff I'd never done before I was trying to do various different things I was making a game in my own time around a full-time day job I was I was pushing myself plenty so I chose an area that made sense that actually I can be the rectangle game and it struck me as weird at the time that more people hadn't done it strikes me as even more weird now but

no one else has now this of this slide that she became out date about two days ago when there was a game now some green light which is some aesthetics of hilarity Thomas was alone which I'm not gonna talk about um um but yeah it was a way it was a way of game of thing done now this is where polish comes in if I just done again without rectangles I think people rightly have reacted to it kind of negatively they would have they were seen as lazy butts all I did was I decide to do you know good animation now the first page of any animation textbooks you can pick up is about squash and stretch it's about this idea that objects retain their mass but as they move around if they impact things they swish a bit usually when they move away from something there's a moment of elongation although it's not as strong as most animation textbooks show we just elongate it more to sell it today it look more impressive so I read the first two pages of every animation textbook I could find um just just because you know I'm an overachiever um

so I did squash and stretch those rectangles now what's cool about the second page of any animation textbook is it tells you that eyes are really easy to trick I've never been called up for this by anyone before I pointed it out but Thomas was alone doesn't actually have squash and stretch has stretch the characters when they impact when they land never actually see the impact squish the character the reason because from a gameplay point of view it messed up the kind of the footprint of the character and made it awful when you're jumping the footprint doesn't matter because you're moving vertically so it's fine so I'll go away with that and that's going to be a big theme of this is things we can get away with the human eye is very easy to trick and you can actually usually through a little sleight of hand achieve massive benefits from from smaller beginnings speaking of her big benefits this is my voice actor from Thomas was alone Daniel Wallace who is actually legally a king of a small country that he set up in the UK in his

flat as part of a hilarious TV show um and it's true he actually does well I think actually he moves out of that flat I'm not followed up with him what happened to that but that's fine he's a voice actor um he's a very good voice actually does a lot of TV in the UK he's very cool on it to Americans he's usually more known as well some people think he's Wheatley from Portal which isn't army really really isn't um but the these are Sean Hastings in the Assassin's Creed series so that's where a lot of people known from and they do a reasonably good approximation of his face in that game as well so people tend to recognize him from that now voice over was interesting voice over some things that came to me very late in the day we Thomas was alone and again it's something I'm very surprised more Indies don't take advantage of three years ago it wasn't being done by many games and to be honest it's still not being done we see a few those um there's a Wil Wheaton voiced tactical shooter that looks really cool there's a few things the voice-over isn't often used I think the reason for that is that people

think it's expensive people think the voice acting is expensive they look at you know actors movie stars and they you know you hear the how much so-and-so gets paid for a movie they don't really think about actually how much it costs to get a very talented person into a room for an afternoon to record some voiceover for you I'm not going to talk about actors rates onstage in front of a GDC audience but it's lower than you think and it's fair frankly it's fair for what they're bringing to the game if you compare it to the budget for animator or the budget for an artist or a coder it's an easy trade to make you can actually look at it and go you know what I am getting that amount of value from the actor it's also scalable um more so actually than artists animators is the is the difference in wages because obviously you have he's a jobbing voice actor like he's not famous we'll do X amount right up to you know if you want to get a Hollywood movie star in your game obviously the price goes up and it's

variable because actors are often used to taking roles they want and a lower pay so there's a few ways around it and a good voice actor who understands the medium can really elevate a game so Danny Wallace actually used to be a video game critic many years ago so he got the game he played the game a lot before he voiced it he usually he had the soundtrack playing to him in the booth so he could kind of judge where his voice would sit with it he took it very seriously and you know created about two winning performance as a result of that I just had to slip that in I apologize also add a major could joke about needed to inhale some air and I hoped you'd laugh and you did which helped me know so thank you I didn't inhale enough so I made another joke so anyway was fine um and then I know this good this to grow we're busy we've got stuff to do so it's possible is my point and it scales of the budget does so as you find yourself hopefully making subsequent games with maybe a little bit more cash you can scale up so Danny did Thomas was

alone he's back in volume but now we have Charlie McDonnell in it and Andy Serkis doing the villain and he's awesome I can't wait to share that stuff um it's possible to scale that up but you can start very cheap with voiceover and it immediately makes your game feel more polished color or color um yeah I don't feel good about this slide um it's an overlooked issue um color theory is old there's lots of color theory out there it's reasonably accessible you walk into any bookshop is give you five books targeted at a level students are college students um about it you can learn in an afternoon the very basics of you know secondary tertiary color palates and you know how to actually think about color and yet none of us do we look at the other work with the color palettes that come by default in the software we use we leave the shadows in unity to black while they should be blue if the scene is outdoors shadows are not black as my art director tells me on a daily basis we don't think about this

stuff but it's actually again very easy to do Thomas was alone I'm not going to claim a level of skill at this I had the guy who's now my art director on volume created a palette for that was cool and consistent and worked across the game and it made the game look great Thomas was alone has I believe 24 colors in it that's it that's all we use and Thomas was alone um it's a game everyone things we go through the whole palette but we have to use 24 colors what that does is that means every color in the game fits well with other real the color in the game really straightforward stuff that an indie budget we often don't think about doing volumes the same volume is again 24 of colors I think we're using the same palette or something very similar what's great about doing that is every screen shot looks good we're next to every other screen shot when you're on the scene shop or whatever everything ties together it looks consistent I believe I work for Nickelodeon at one point on the project I think every Nickelodeon cartoon is 16 colors total which means they can take any character from any Nickelodeon cartoon and put them next to any other character for any other Nickelodeon cartoon and it all

works this is stuff that was invented 50 to 100 years ago in it well as invented thousands of years ago that we wrote it down in pretentious textbooks about 50 years ago we should use that is my point it's useful and you can there's lots of cheats you don't have to have a best mate who's good at color theory you can use things like adobe cooler is a good shortcut I think that's actually where Thomas was alone as main characters were just me using a default how on cooler when we started real games and what that even means we're not doing that conversation don't worry we're not doing the whole what makes a game a real game thing we're not talking about that debate we're talking about the much more well simultaneously more interesting and less interesting debate which is the average player how they view a game when they open it up whether a game is real or not whether it's a professional game whether it's something that they can assume is a good game off the bat that first impression nothing to do with

photo realism it's nothing to do with walking simulators polish does this and there's lots of little bits of polish that we can do they take time they take a little bit of money but they create a much better first impression I made a list asking a few with a few youtuber friends and I got a usual you know field of view in game control rebinding in game settings for graphics effects windows fullscreen UI scaling on desktop mouse control on menus raw mouse input versus average input splash screens tutorial information credits stuff like that is really good at making things look right because you know as with this slightly creepy image I found on the Internet the second you remove one thing it just doesn't quite feel like a real game to the person playing and you kind of can lose them at the menu screen or at least you can put them in a bad position early on anyone who's released a game commercially knows this because you will have an inbox full of emails about the one thing you forgot to put in your game

with me it was there was no Mouse control Dean Thomas was alone as menu on the desktop I still get an email every day I'm not fixing it though because I'm an artist so the next step really is know what not to polish this is I think if you take nothing else away from this talk this is this is the big one for me this is the really really important one the easiest way to polish something is not to make something unpolished it's something that we're always game developers prone to do feature creep is real it's the reason you're not playing volume in 2014 it's everywhere in the industry it's fine it's good it's where good stuff comes from but also with good planning we can avoid some of the pitfalls we can actually polish the game by doing less work which when you're putting the energy and effort that you should be putting into color palettes getting

animation working with the skills you have getting all the menu settings working right not having other jobs to do is a big help so I I do this all the time I work around the limitations of the team I tend to try and choose two or three skills or things I want to push forward for us on a project because otherwise I'm just making boring things for myself I mean not for the audience hopefully I'm never making war against the audience um but once I've chosen those things I'm not going to make risks in other areas so for example bullion is a game it's it's a passion project for me it's a stealth game kind of ode to the stuff I loved as a kid which is story and these have been telling journalists for a good 20 years now um it's that but it is that really it's that 15 year old game I've always wanted to make um I knew I wanted to do quite complex server stuff so we could have used register levels I knew I wanted to be bigger and you want it to be more

complex with a puzzle point of view and from a mechanic point of view I knew I wanted to be less linear than Thomas was alone was I had a laundry list of lots of things always do but I also knew some areas I could stop one one great thing that I'm incredibly happy with is we we realized very early on how much storytelling we wants to do in the game we wanted so Thomas learned it like a narration but we wanted to add dialogue as talking to each other in this space um the problem that presented was lip sync we got I don't know the exact number off the top my head but about two hours worth of spoken dialogue in the game to lip sync all of that up for each character we present both the technical challenge in terms of rigging up that stuff for the first time but also population challenge and also lip sync it's one of those things that you can't have do you know if you make it if it's just a flapping jaw it doesn't work if it's you know if it's GTA it costs a lot of money so it's a big scary thing when we were looking at the project at the start um we put a mask on the main

character and that worked and that really significantly improved the facial animation we found um and that worked and the ending other characters became disembodied voices because they were AIS we had yeah characters with masks we have one character in the games who gave his lip sync'd he's on screen for two minutes um that's quite a good reduction on the lip-sync costs and what it meant was our animators and our riggers and all these other kind of professions that would have been hit by that could go and do other things and polish up what we had better I mean in the end we enter through development we've been pulling the camera angle further and further back so really what we did we if we done lip-sync a good start we basically have about three pixels shimmering here for quite a lot of money likewise the environment of the game we knew we wanted to make something that looked a big visual jump up from Thomas was alone we wanted something that a more mainstream audience could look at

and go yes I get this this is not photo realistic but it looks like a modern game but also we knew the budget that would be associated with that kind of choice so we came up with a story about a character won one character who's a quote unquote real character in a big room a big warehouse simulating crimes over and over now what we did was we spend all of our money on the character and the cool environment but then the the kind of the rooms you're robbing the simulated environments all very low poly artwork we actually hired a ps1 environmental artist who's now a teacher in Wales um we were his hobby project on every Saturday he would he basically lock himself away in his office and he'd fiddle and make Playstation one art again because it was something he he always loved and he wanted to get back to it and it's great because we could we could basically pay for all his family's holidays for though for a couple of years and and we got a very efficient person who knew exactly what they were

doing because this is how it used to be done using skills with a lot of people having to relearn to get that kind of polygon aesthetic nowadays so that was cool my point is choices worked in this case choices allowed us to polish the game through a mission and also through what we chose to put our focus on so that's all of it really um the summary is is I think polish is important I think it's crucial to game development whether or not you're going for a punk aesthetic because I'm absolutely certain every successful punk in history has been intentional in their practice they have tries to do the thing they wanted to do and they had used every tool of their disposal to do it I think it's cool I'm going to ask you all if you want to ask any questions to go up to the microphones and we will get started I think that's how we do things so if you want to run up to the microphone please do about yeah and we get it started arm and thank you all for coming this my first GDC talk I hope it was useful

awesome I'm gonna try and get through as many as I can yes sir okay oh and so we also working on the game right now and like everyone else we want polish but we don't have so much time no it's wondering what your process is do you like make a first pass of everything and then go back and polish or do you like try to get a certain level on certain things and then just cut in the end or what is your process um I assume so my process is that I make something and I leave it until I get so sick of how awful it looks like fix it I'm not sure that's very good advice though because I believe that that leads to yes volume coming 2015 um so so I don't know what the answer is I think I think I'm a big believer that we need to take things to a certain point to know whether they're fun I mean I don't believe that you can prototype a game very quickly and know whether that's going to work because they're so it's an

audio visual medium things aren't as fun as they're going to be until they have you know Audio attached to them and the right animation the right feel so I like my approach of iterating so I throw something in I fiddle with it when I when I'm not happy with it I'm also throwing new things in and eventually stuff seems to kind of fall into place and you realize yeah I think this about 9 user gadgets in this game and there's about 20 into environmental interactions but yeah that feels about right well actually that was horrible get rid of that um but now we need something to do that so I'm a bit more messy I'm hoping that that will improve over time but I've been working in games for 8 years now and it hasn't so I might have to deal with that but there is no right answer it's basically the answer question I can only tell you my solution yeah clinks no worries yes sir hi I was just wondering how do you approach like creating a library of game sounds for your game because like what I've been working on games I find if I'm trying to source sounds from the Internet it's like incredibly hard to find the

one that fits the game just right no it is especially if you're looking at free libraries and things like that um so Thomas was alone I was there a budget game so I used um is it CF Exodus or amending the CFX are right the that's at that one sfx are like that you know I think it's EFX other one I use because on anyway doesn't matter okay it's bear bear they know I'm wrong um so so yes so I used that which just made some bleeps and bloops which was right for Thomas was alone it really annoys my musician when he or my composure when he gets complimented on those sound effects because he hates them so please if you ever see him just say I loved your sound work into US alone it was me in an afternoon Karla's on a Sunday sometime um with with volume I hi the sound sound engineer now what's good about that is if you're working the freelancer usually they will have licenses to massive library so they will abort kind of access to one of the big sound libraries

and they will have access immediately to 1,000 footsteps much better than any free resource you're going to find online or any kind of Google thing so if you have the budget for a sound engineer they're probably going to be cheaper to get them to use their access to a sound library and create the thing that's right for you but if you haven't got that budget I would this is where I would say this is one of the Kermit the Frog moments you go maybe in the left angle and you go well is there another way of doing sound design on this game that uses sound audio or abstract audio or something else there's not very good library access for us I would actually look though if you can at getting library access to those professional libraries we might again be cheaper than you'd imagine and we'll just give you everything you need almost instantly hope that's useful no that's great thank Cheers hello hi can you talk about polishing the writing the writing in the narration it's really crisp and beautiful and kind

of what your polished process was there and then anything you did with your composer that you would consider polish right I play the score and my car while I Drive like how do you get sure that that's very kind um so so I launched the music one first because that's that's easy my composers genius um that that's the answer I honestly the process I have with the composer is we stars projects I send him it's kind of Spotify playlists of hey here's ten tracks I think are about right for the game can you do something along those lines please key don't ignore that email [Laughter] he gets the bottom of what I don't know that I want but actually I want and then he produces over the course of the year or two the music I need for the game and very rarely I give feedback sometimes if something feels like it jars with gameplay I'll say something but on the whole yeah sorry it's a really bad advice because higher David J house divided be my tip but don't for a while she's got quite serious more to do on volume um the other part of writing um

that's just iteration and writing is very iterative did he do it right um Thomas was alone script was about 30 read drafts that's quite light actually on a normal volume we went through I don't want to think about how many redraw volume had and actually I brought in a story consultant Mattie Bryce as my second name drop of her on stage she's brilliant hire her she came in for a few days and Craig well maybe this bits not working or maybe you should done to that um that kind of thing so it's really just iteration it's just you saw you just right though awful hack version of the script and then you go through and go yeah it makes why is he doing that you know when you watch a movie and you're like I don't understand why that character's behavior has changed you do that to your own work for about 40 times and you'll introduce problems you'll fix it's honestly like bug fixing only you get slightly more praise for it the bug fix thing which is nice so yes and that's it basically which is I've been doing this whole talk I've just realized this isn't my mic this is my hand I

could be over here yes yes you mentioned on the voiceover as being a big part of the Polish and I agree and for our project we plan to do things of that nature we were wondering about localization and being an indie game you might not have to think about translating your voice over to many languages but I was wondering if it affected the reach of your product or if you had to do anything after the fact to make sure that your game was still understandable to other audiences the speak different languages that's incredibly I'm really liking the movement that's incredibly that's actually actually feels weird now important identity that's incredibly true actually conversations we're having now with volume and whether we're going to do voiceover localization which almost was alone I was a bit of a Deven also really I basically went no it's Danny Wallace or it's not at all and Danny Wallace doesn't speak all those languages so we went well then we're not doing voiceover localization and we did you know the stand of the figs sorry English French Italian Spanish German everywhere but you know we get weird was

only text with volume we're taking a couple approaches we're thinking about voiceover and we're currently looking at some of the pricing on that it's quite expensive we're not going to do it launched though I would suggest voiceover something you can actually do as updates later and from a PR point of view that's probably a good argument for launching the game making a lot of noise and then as you do each of the own kind of update you can then target the press in each of those countries ago and now it's in whatever you know until your name of the language there that would you suggest really see if your native language is going to be English for the game should we ship the game with no voice over at all and then no I wish if it with English also because actually and it's embarrassing as an English speaker other countries are far better at putting up with our crap than we would be um they are fine with with English voiceover to an extended actually I find embarrassing that I know soaked a river you know with subtitles in games and when winter spoke in a

different language but they are um the other thing with different volume is use a register bilang Guajira be so on console that's different but on PC players will be able to literally open up the text file for the subtitles and make their own fansub sighs Anna that's amazing which is going to be great for the people who take it seriously but they cling versions would be awesome I'm going with gesture I don't know what it means does that mean to stop or does that mean one more question one more question you're the lucky guy awesome um so just voiceover did you do pick up spoiler Thomas was alone and what was your process for doing essentially retakes of pickups and really cowboy um so Thomas was alone we had no budget like we literally do the crowd funds and we got enough money to basically because we owe studio if you do it right cost by their money as well and I would recommend that people do you can tell when something's record even if it's that nice mic that's in all of the podcasting videos even though you can tell the difference between that and a professional studio so we basically have

enough money for a professional studio and four hours no three hours of Danny's time so we have no pickups on my game at all um that was just simply not an option luckily Danny's really good and did a good job but even then like those you know things I listened back to Thomas was alone just a couple of reads that I would tweak and change with volume um we decided not to do pickup so I did instead was I did rehearsals so we got Danny and Charlie we rented out a Drama Studio like a I say drama like we owned our small office in London um for the day and then we had kind of these two kind of going through repeating over and over again going through having big conversations about what the arcs of the characters were getting their performances right between us and Daniel was awesome because Charlie hadn't acted in a game before so he was kind of nervous and Danny had helped him kind of work things out which was amazing of him and way beyond kind of what we were paying him for frankly which is great um Andy Serkis is Andy Serkis um so he just

kind of came in with three hours slot recorded all those lines in two hours it was amazing and any left so I was an easier process um but some yeah so we don't do pickups now I think actually honestly that's a gap in our process and that's something I'd like to address with future games because I think I think it's something that again for the cost of actually doing it it would be worth it so don't take my advice do pickups don't like I'm not telling that's all we have time for thank you so much it amazingly and I still think this is the mic [Applause]