John Murphy, Kevin Zuhn and Adam Saltsman on 'Bugsnax'

[Music] hi everyone welcome to live chat with the um creators of bug snacks um one of the my favorite games that i've gotten a hold of recently um so i'm super excited to be able to do this um and we get to do q a from the audience later in this session i'm really excited about that as well um hi my name is adam saltzman i am the co-founder and director uh here at finji i'm in our offices which i'm the only one here because um we're all still in the middle of that thing uh we're developer and publisher we've worked on games like overland night in the woods and chicory and i've been on the gdc advisory board for about 10 years or something now so i'm just pumped to be here and talk to these gentlemen the first of which is kevin zune from young horses hi i'm kevin zune thanks for having me here uh as said i'm the creative director at young horses on octodad deadliest catch and bug snacks

uh my primary responsibilities day to day include level design quest design and writing and on rare lucky occasions some small art i work pretty closely with my colleague john who will introduce himself now uh hi i'm john murphy um i am one of the co-founders and the studio head at young horses we're a independent studio based in chicago and i'm here because for bug snacks i uh did a lot of the sort of like systems and is i think what i gamepl to talk about most for this game is how the gameplay and the story are connected because i think that's one of the things that um a lot of developers

struggle with either coming from a story background how do i do gameplay stuff if they're coming from a gameplay background oh no how do we you know get story in here and in bug snacks these things are married in a way that's really beautiful and often disturbing um so uh also yeah another reminder there's a questions tab down there and the swap card app in the chat section um you can ask questions and chat moderators can help get those things queued up and we're going to save time at the end of this to answer those questions which i'm looking forward to very much um so but i wanted to start with a question kind of about the early days and about the earliest stages of this project which is a project that you guys have been working on for a very pretty pretty long time in game making terms so bug snacks in many ways i think is a game about people who are trying to solve uncomfortable internal problems with comfortable external solutions and it started out like most games which is a clone of pokemon snap but you can eat all the pokemon um

so i was curious if you could share some of the erling turning like early turning points for the system design um and also some of the early kind of hooks for how story might be connected to those things um and whoever wants to start is totally fine with me uh zune why don't you start you have you've been uh looking back through the archive so you have a little bit of a better uh memory of the progression of these various early prototypes that's true i i made it my mission early on to just keep a record of every like kind of major phase of the project and i have builds on my computer of like old versions of bug snacks uh and you're right adam that the the very beginning it was uh a pokemon snap like it was on rails uh you threw your traps out into the world to catch bug snacks while being in no control of yourself uh and you would bring them back to the

town uh which would be later named snacksburg in order to feed them to these grumpuses uh and john you can speak more on the actual systems at play when that happens but uh even like from the earliest pitches of the game we knew bug snacks were parasites and that they were very bad for you and that you should not eat them and if i were gonna summarize kind of a lot of the development of the narrative and systems behind the game it would be knowing that bug snacks are bad for you and everyone wants them is kind of the driving force of all the themes in the game yeah so and uh we needed to figure out like kind of like what happened after you you fed grumpuses like early prototypes were kind of like you're in this food truck you go back to this town you feed bug snacks

and then why what happens so one early prototype that didn't really answer the why but was was fun was um just uh you feed a grumpus a bug snack and their nose turns into a pickle or something it's like okay that's that's so there's something fundamentally nice about that but we had not yet like tied that to any narrative stuff and then um separate from that there there was an early prototype uh where this town you're trying to get the town to sort of like the townsfolk to work together dentists or build up the town and so i'm kind of obsessed with um both like personality and human interactions and also with um

building simulations so we tried to do a an early an early idea of okay the different bug snacks will change different aspects of of the grumps's personalities and different personalities will get to get along differently so it's like oh going to feed this this person a bunch of uh bananas and this person a bunch of pickles and then they will collaborate better to be able to i don't know build the town hall john i would love to chime in on the specifics of the personality system oh yes please just to note that like at the time we had decided that it would be best if the personality traits had no bearing on the real world and so the personalities the grumpuses had that interacted were things like gormless flatulent ticklish um just like nonsense and it's like hey ticklish people get along really well with garmless people that's how it works

that sounds super fun to try to surface through ui in order to like engage the player that must have been a super smooth and uh whatever oh yeah everything was super transparent and and everyone understood everything that was happening in this in this rough prototype for anybody who's following along with the subtitles or other languages we're being profoundly sarcastic right now this is a nightmare scenario for a game developer one of the uh one of those early prototypes we were talking about had a uh an indicator where if you clicked on an individual grumpus like node because they were just sort of running around as little circles it would show you their connection to every other grumpus in town and whether they disliked or liked them so it just like opened a spider web of relationships that was impossible to read great great awesome um uh it so it sounds like like uh i think

it's funny that you guys landed on the idea of like um the uh they have snacks they get physically transformed because i think even though the personalities and simulations components um didn't move forward for um possibly in retrospect obvious reasons kind of the the idea i think it's funny that like coming from an initial idea of these things are bad it was the funny but kind of horrifying idea of physical transformation that really stuck but then you had to compensate i guess you had to find other things to go and actually my original follow-up question was pretty specifically like um i think it's interesting that uh in a lot of ways the um the transformation of the bug snacks ended up being something that was used narratively a lot and actually isn't used in terms of giving people stats and i feel like that's the normal place you would go with the design and it sounds like that is also where you started like oh strawberries give you plus four

uh gormless or something um and so that's how their gameplay meaningful but in fact it's actually it's really meaningful that um they have a a pickle for a nose yeah uh that that is an interesting point that um we had started with a much more systematized understanding of bug snacks effect on the characters and one of the reasons that we moved away from it in addition to it being kind of a snarl of ui was also that um like it felt very distant and manipulative to um work on the characters in such a statistical way and uh in answering the question why you care about this like why do you care about these creatures and what's happening to their town um it gets harder to answer that question in a meaningful way when you see them as objects that can be just sort of changed to your liking uh and so

almost on accident because almost everything we do is an accident we find that it's more meaningful in this case uh for a narrative reason to accept that the bug snacks are not useful in a mechanical way if that makes sense but that they have meaning to them uh in terms of their desires and their personalities um and especially as it evolves in the story that uh bug snacks are not great for you the fact that they are also useless to you is important right right and how how early would you say that was so you've got you've gotten from okay um like are you still in a food truck are you still kind of pokemon snapping around collecting things at this point uh if you're talking about that version with the uh like town manipulation yeah or figuring out like so there's a point where you figured out like oh

um the player is a uh this godlike scientist who is single-handedly transforming all the people in the town in a cold and manipulative way and actually we're not into that i'm curious where systems were at at that point too [Music] um so it our idea back at the time uh was that it was kind of a uh there was a core loop where you would go out in your food truck to catch the bug snacks uh in the pokemon snap first person uh rails game and you would bring them back to the town to do your feeding uh and your attempt to get them to cooperate we had also uh and john feel free to chime in on this had a separate side system where you would uh peel bug snacks apart in order to make them more edible uh as like a physics toy that was deeply horrifying yeah so in addition to deciding that

having the systemic manipulation be directed at the grompuses and how that made it harder to see them as characters that you care about even though we're capturing and feeding even though the bug snacks are are parasites and you're feeding them to so these grumpuses the the the ripping them apart uh was was also too too far yes it did it definitely came off as sadistic and uh upsetting to do even if that's like how making food exists in this world it didn't come off right uh yeah it seems like a kind of a fine line or a balancing act almost uh because i feel like if you want to like uh i think i guess this is a tricky

thing that i'm probably going to be poking at throughout this but um i think it's a it's a game about um things that are kind of uncomfortable but you do want people to sit and play it and have fun so like how do you walk that tightrope i think is a tricky question i mean all the time and especially here so yeah like devouring bug snacks having your body transformed in horrible and surprising ways great uh but peeling apart the bug snacks oh that's that's over the line i think that's an interesting balance is that feedback was that just internal guidance was that i'm curious like uh how you guys navigated some of that balance um it was definitely uh internal at that point because uh to answer like the when of this like we spent about a good year the first year of the project building this particular version of bug snacks uh and it was about at that year mark that we kind of took stock of what it

was and what we were dissatisfied with uh and like started making major changes like i don't think we had necessarily shown it to very many people outside of ourselves at that point um not until it had become a lot more like the game it is today uh but like for sure uh like finding that line was a part of that development process and you know at the time discovered that swallowing them whole fine no one has a problem with this right right but uh there was a very interesting uh result from doing that also is that um we had not allowed the bug snacks to be cute at the time particularly they were actually very scary and upsetting looking as well because they were much more bug-like back then and in part that was um

like a reaction to the fact that they were prepared like food uh that the cuter they are the worse that system becomes to interact with right you've got pressure there automatically kind of from uh i assume like from a player but also as someone who would have to sit and work on the game for a long time it's like oh we're this is where you do the horrible thing to the horrible creatures um we definitely can't make these creatures then cute um but i i i guess like so now if you don't have to peel them apart piece by piece and like masticate them in detail um now that's kind of maybe that's opened some doors design wise for like oh we can actually we can do some other stuff with these creatures now yeah and and because you know one of our goals is to make games that are you know both accessible and like charming having a banana with like realistic looking

grasshopper legs that you're pulling off is is uh it's not that that's fair um but john it was i think it was you who insisted that they all have googly eyes oh yeah that was that was definitely a uh yeah that was a thing that i uh felt strongly about that it was it was a there was a bit of a fight it was a bit of a fight but it's retroactively a great choice i of course agree um finding the little um dish out in one of the uh in the the little um laboratory on the beach that's just full of extra eyes um really ended up being for all the all the upsetting things that were removed from this game leaving that one in i found very very upsetting um yeah so i was curious too i think one of the things that um

uh one of the things that ends up being or was very memorable for me at least about the game is the um so i guess it was it was like this quest system of going out and finding all the people and bringing them together to make a village it's not a pre-existing place that you're just tweaking and so your year into the game there's been kind of a set plan about let's get it to a certain point and then we'll maybe we'll evaluate we'll see how's this extremely realistic um horrifying insect food peeling game where you manipulate the village let's check in and see how that's going um and then uh there's kind of like okay parts of this are really cool parts of this aren't working um quite like we hoped i is that the is that is that a point where you start thinking more about who specifically is in the village uh is that a point where you start thinking about okay um are we are we pulling the player off of rails or does that come later still um

that all yeah that was around that time when we when we found that uh the way it was wasn't really working uh we made just a series of very drastic changes to all the designs uh one of the biggest things that we tried to accomplish back then was that the there was a deep separation between the part where you're in town and the part where you're out hunting bug snacks and we wanted those to be more connected uh and so that kind of brought about like um also that we didn't like that the game was on rails so the feedback was like all right so take it off the rails let us wander these environments freely uh same premise throwing traps out in order to catch the bug snacks but uh that was actually surprisingly easy to do uh that change well yeah i mean that that opened up a lot of possibilities because it turns out if you're trying to like lay down traps or do like elaborate

uh interacting contraptions while you're moving away from them it doesn't that doesn't really work right like like pokemon snap works because you're kind of just doing one thing you're pointing and clicking uh so yeah that allowed us to but and we slowly like developed this this goal of having the pacing of of the game be like relatively slow and um i don't know how successful we were at this but there was always a push to have it be observational and planning oriented rather than sort of like reactive and actiony yeah i feel like it did land in a place where there's there's kind of a a kind of hunter gatherer kind of like stop and wait for this thing to happen

kind of vibe to it as opposed to like uh here's arcade shooter moments but i guess i'm curious where that impulse came from because i think for um for game designer that that feels like another risk to take on is like oh what if in parts of the game you don't do anything so i like did that come from um and obviously it's worked very well so i'm curious if did that come from a um like was that just a um an innate desire for kind of an interactive experience type of thing or was that sort of like a story thing like you know you're we want people to be in a mindset where they're stopping and looking around them and that's useful for x y and z i think uh that one was definitely something i pushed for as far as like uh the more contemplative pace um because i um like i at the time was pushing us in the direction toward mystery um

as far as like exploration and mystery as far as your kind of tone and expectation going into the game uh and i thought that contrary to the on the rails game which was very twitchy uh and reactive that if you're allowed to explore freely it would be good uh to be more deliberate about the things you do i one of the i i remember now one of my biggest desires back then and i had the same desire with the characters too was i wanted individual bug snacks to matter to you um that i didn't want it to be that you were just scooping them up in big handfuls and like didn't notice or care what was going in your bag like you were uh net fishing right um i wanted you to like have to look at and care about bug snacks because we're gonna put a lot of effort into these damn things so you better appreciate their designs

uh yeah and there was always kind of a uh i was always like not intentionally pushing but i was always like kind of pushing against that as i was designing and building the various like contraptions like there was an early version where you you like kind of attached the different tools and traps to each other so i i was like oh you got your your strabby and it's in its hamster ball that you can control and then you take like a cannon that shoots nets and you attach it to the top and you've got this like wobbly net cannon ball that you're rolling around and like shooting it at bug snacks and it's like oh this is fun but it it quickly makes all of the bug snacks kind of be the same and there's some of those tools and traps end up being uh imbalanced or too powerful so so it would kind of ruin some of that that uh chiller

sort of pacing uh another thing that was beneficial i think um of going this route is that we're coming from making octodad which because of the sort of like weird controls it was kind of a level playing field for people who like aren't familiar with with just like standard gamer controls so the fact that we were coming from that to making more of like a a real video game that's like a first person as somewhat standard video game controls having it be uh yeah more slower more forgiving in terms of timing and things like that hopefully made it more accessible to to people who would otherwise be intimidated by the that sort of that sort of game yeah that makes a lot of sense to me trying to keep the keep the floor low for um you know people who want a

mystery story experience and there's this other activity that you can do maybe that doesn't have to be exclusionary based on like how good you are at bayonetta or something like that right that makes a ton of sense to me i really i think it's it's um really marvelous that there's this um well i i guess like i'm curious um uh i've got a bunch more stuff i want to ask about but there's something in here about um taking like deliberate steps to have this um kind of marriage between the tone of the gameplay and the tone of the story where um you wanted um there's like an increasing interest in telling a story that has a mystery at its heart and um having game play that uh also is a little bit more contemplative and observational um and trying to deliberately have those things fit together and i'm curious if that was something that kind of came about step by step or if that was sort of like a uh

no it's mystery story mystery gameplay i don't want to be in a article about pluto narrative dissonance or something or is this or was this really just an intuitive like it's a game about looking for clues um and you know you're you're foraging why not look for clues there too um great question because like the the gameplay story connection is uh hard to get right sometimes but i think uh similar to uh my feelings about the the contemplation of the gameplay like my desire for the characters was i also wanted them to be small and specific where i wanted you to care deeply about individual characters and that was a problem i had with the more zoomed out uh like town management version of the game but and so in that sense like kind of as i continue to ask the question why do you care about this

uh like kind of uh answering it by getting deeper and deeper into the situation at hand um but so to answer uh about where story and gameplay meet i think that a lot of my process uh is to write about the game that you're playing um and so like uh because i i think that um so much of the way the quests are designed and the way the narrative is designed are ways to encourage you to go explore the island uh and to get you to look around the world by doing specific things and to go meet new characters and so typically uh the moment to moment of the game i am just kind of responding to what the player wants to be doing at the time um and like letting things unfold based on what you've just done recently

uh if that makes sense yeah is that where you is that where you start to get this idea of like everybody who lives in the village has um kind of like been in a big tantrum and they've gone and locked themselves in their rooms and you're trying to get everybody to come down and have dinner uh the player now suddenly is less than like a mad scientist role and a little bit more in like uh sort of a therapist role or something um is that when that started to come in uh it actually took a little bit longer for that uh like i think it was a couple years later john let me know if that's right that um we didn't figure out until then that the player was a journalist like for a long time there was an open-ended question as to who you were and why you were doing any of this no i think yeah i think that's right but the the the idea of i think as soon as you have like

here's this like strange world where these characters um have sort of discovered it or it's like unfamiliar and there is is um and there is this this mystery i think like it almost sort of like naturally follows that uh the sort of like or maybe it doesn't naturally follow and it's just because jurassic park is so formative and you know probably makes up like five percent of my brain uh the this like oh there's like this exploit if you're not the center and i i don't know why but i think this is more okay so if if you want to have it be a mystery you can't sort of be the central hero because and so this this idea of like oh there's this intrepid explorer who you're following and you're trying to figure out what happened in this in this place

um i think that that showed up pretty early and then i think sort of connected to this is also some of those earlier town management prototypes because one of the things that we looked at early on was uh viva pinata this sort of thing of like slowly building up a community and then like new characters sort of wander in as it becomes a a nicer uh place or more you know gradually you build it up and it's more active and you know by the end it's just like flourishing little community that was that was there um from the beginning even before there were like real characters but then of course having real characters who you care about makes that process of bringing a community together much uh much more compelling

yeah it's funny i've been thinking i i've been i feel like i experienced the game a lot as kind of like a a noir pokemon thing but in a lot of ways it's almost like if like it's like an animal crossing godzilla movie or something where like there's you know uh cause you always have a there's always a monster movie trope of like you need a there's needs to be a reason for somebody to be there and and they're trying to find out what's going on because the viewer wants to find out what's going on and so you often you so often have uh you know a junior scientist or a journalist or something in the picture but i feel like they very rarely end up stepping into the role of kind of like a therapist for a monster community that then like brings everybody together um and i'm sorry i'm curious like the um how at what point it sounds like pretty early there was a notion about like there's a goal of cooperation as opposed to like a goal of being like adversarial

or you know kind of victorious um and it was that just like a is that a personal interest is that something that came from previous games is that um because i think that's something that's kind of rare and a little bit non-obvious in terms of you know setting out to have a goal um usually the goal is you know have the most to be the best um vanquish your foes etc etc that's fair because certainly like in a creature collecting game especially um it is about having them all and like beating everyone but like you know this uh one of our primary desires as a studio is to um make games that are unique and are not kind of relying on the existing tropes too heavily as far as like combat and platforming we want to come up with our own particular ways of doing things which is a nightmare sometimes but also i think produces unique results and so

like i just like as a a company i think we trended away from anything that involved fighting uh and so like naturally bug snacks was never going to involve like a combat component with the snacks and i and i think maybe that's part of it then and because like this idea that bug snacks are parasites and bad and you know there's also the even though we we never really uh it took a little a while to to figure out the each grumpus has their own thing that their own special void that bug snacks are trying to to fill um the like consumption isn't bad racking up points capturing and feeding everything being like not

i feel like that's just like a there's some sort of intuitive understanding maybe just on our team in general that like oh yeah this like yeah i don't know i think it's it's like it's it's a common knowledge enough that there's something wrong with focusing on just mindless consumption that and that we're not gonna like do something that doesn't examine that i guess yeah i guess to me it's that we um like just for early on uh looking at the premise of our own story and thinking about the implications of it like even if we didn't set out necessarily with that theme in mind we looked at it and said that's the theme of that already like and we would you know it would be uh unwise of us not to explore that aspect of it the parts that are kind of dark and upsetting about

needing to catch them all yeah i think i think also the moving when the emphasis is one we can't we're not going to treat the grumpuses like uh like robots that we're manipulating and we don't want to make it all about i mean it's still there but the all about catching them all then that sort of leads us to okay i guess this is about the grumpus's um and their actual stories uh so i think i i think it's kind of almost like a process of elimination of removing some of these things that didn't work until we ended up on on the focus that did work yeah there's almost like a uh once you've ruled out everything that's impossible whatever's left no matter how improbable that's that's what you have to go with or something

that's a good process it does sound scary to me as a game developer also okay but i'm really glad that you guys stuck with it um uh one thing i wanted to touch on before um uh well a couple more things i guess and don't forget for anybody who's tuning in feel free to leave questions uh for us that we can hit up toward the end of this session but i was curious about also the because there are things i guess we've been talking a lot about like all the ways that bug snacks is like uh uh kind of breaking the mold or doing something unconventional within games but there's a lot of things that i think are are very conventional but are still um very effective like the idea that you get um you get upgrades and new equipment that help you explore the world but i think um those things ended up also being kind of connected to the story into the characters and to especially this kind of like um sort of uh uh tantrum-based diaspora the characters

across the island um but i think it's i think it kind of like ties it together and yeah i was curious if there were anything about this process of like oh we're gonna we're gonna sprinkle these people it's the people around the island you're gonna go find them and they're gonna be focal to how you explore these regions and then we're gonna connect then we can connect kind of like conventional markers of progress to those things um it was a an interesting process and i know john and i talked about this the other day that um kind of the way it all shook out was that we had developed 900 bug snacks in isolation the 13 characters eight biomes and like six or seven uh traps and tools uh all just kind of on their own and then that process was looking at the map and then just shuffling everything around like mad like we had a bunch of big meetings or like what bug snacks go on the beach what makes the most sense

is it fruit is it all fruit like what belongs in the mountain what belongs in the desert what character would most want to live here uh like what to what order do you want to get the tools in by difficulty and who makes the most sense to have it right and and it took us a long time of moving things around and having very large disagreements about the kinds of foods that exist um that uh we just kind of uh shook through this process of like all right what kind of if we move all these pieces together at the same time what puzzle fits uh and what will kind of give you the best like sort of pathway through the game yeah we definitely didn't have any sort of like uh genius game designer master plan right uh because we never we hadn't really built a systemic sort of

game like this before i think the only way that we could have managed to do any of this was to build all these little building blocks uh and i think yeah so the the two games that i was most inspired by in doing the the systems the the gameplay stuff were and it's funny that these are both like big triple a things that are impossible to to achieve anything nearly nearly like it but horizon and breath of the wild so with breath of the wild being like oh this is amazing that this thing where all these you can do all these amazing creative things with these like little things that were clearly like built kind of in in isolation um so it was it was like uh both necessary and like the the way that

we're inspired to build things that it's like okay uh let's just build this this uh this particular bug snack and then figure out where it goes like oh it's fun to have something that picks stuff up and brings it to its nest or it's it's like oh this is kind of nice to have a bug snack that burrows and you got to figure out how to get it out or about tank that's really fast and you need some way to stop it and then back and forth between uh going back and forth and sort of shaping the tools and the bug stacks and against each other and then that felt like a little bit separate from the character and the level design yeah i think because that's i guess that because xenon was responsible for the story and quests and the levels and i was responsible more for the bug snacks and and the tools there's like a little bit more separation between those

two things but then within those they were sort of cycling and influencing influencing each other yeah and i can speak uh even a little bit more specifically on character placement and how that kind of works dynamically that like oftentimes the quests were designed around the the bug interactions that were going on inside the level like i created quest to be like hey john made a really cool thing i want to make a quest where you have to do it i'll do it afterwards look at it uh but like uh but also um when we place the characters in the world uh based on where we think they would go uh so much then of the story was written around where they had ended up where um like there are a lot of details that could have gone very differently if we had made a different decision about where they went so an example like a big example is like the fact that lambis and tiffany were put in different levels

despite being married like because wambus made most sense in the garden grove because he's got his farm there and i i thought it would be good to introduce him early uh because he can teach you about sauce and that's like we like you need to know about sauce as soon as possible it's extremely integral to the way the game is played so wampus goes there to teach you about sauce uh befika was there to teach you about the journal so they both needed to be in that level and we only ever wanted there to be two grumpuses introduced in a level at most so it's like well he can't be with his wife but also tiffany cares most about bones and skeletons she should be in the desert where the ruins are uh and then the story about the fact that they went to different areas because of their career differences is then written about that right like the fact that we put them somewhere else uh yeah so that's interesting so there's um a little bit of like it sounds like the there's a part of the process that i've

heard described as um occasionally it's like scatter and gather where it's like okay we're gonna go off do a bunch of cool stuff and we're gonna bring it together and see what sticks see what doesn't but also it sounds like maybe there was um a certain amount of uh uh i guess i think it's interesting because i think there's a lot of there's a lot of conventional wisdom about um really digging into your story early and seriously to make sure that your story and your gameplay fit together but i think you ended up it sounds to me almost like you ended up in a scenario where you had like um characters and story were almost like a pressure relief valve for the way that you needed to spread out your gameplay elements in a way um you're able to have some like wiggle room like oh we've got you know um we we've left space there's connections between the characters and those things are maybe malleable in a way that you know the systemic interactions might not be yeah i i agree with that because

it's my feeling right now in this moment that like oh i'm confident enough in the way the characters were written that they could have been any you could have been introduced to them in any order and an interesting story would have happened uh and and maybe it's my experience as like a role-playing game uh master that i am used to improving a story based on what the players do right right but where i feel like oh i think the scenario and the setup are strong and the details of it can go any given way uh we cause like early on we had the outline of the story about the big beats about what would happen to the town over time like we know they're going to come together and have a shitty party uh because philba is not good at this we know they're going to get together and like they're going to they're going to see the monster but how that actually played out could have been very different if we had made different choices and i don't think i would have been dissatisfied with that

that's really interesting all right so i'm going to ask you guys to do a different gdc talk later about this kind of dungeon master mindset to like making making these kind of um modulars very much the wrong word i think but these flexible elements that can be sequenced and sequenced in different ways and kind of um remain kind of potent and interesting because that actually happens structurally in this game also like i think there's a deliberate kind of opening up toward the end of the game where you do where you start to be able to branch out and experience the stories kind of in different orders a little bit too yeah it's basically like once we're done teaching you new tools is when the player's allowed to just go wherever because you're you're like oh you've got everything you need you should be okay to explore now yeah yeah um so uh before i turn over and start scooping up some questions from uh the uh audience here which we got a

bunch my last question i think is kind of like um oh how do you put this exactly it's not exactly why bother um but it's it's sort of a little bit that right like on some level like um you know an arcade game where you um you know shoot critters and then feed them to people and there's like a town simulation like um that still totally sounds like a game to me but it also sounds like there was like a kind of like an intuitive dissatisfaction with that as kind of like a creative undertaking for a group of people um and i was curious if y'all had any final thoughts on um that piece of the project because to me it from the outside at least that seems like something that's fundamental to you digging into something that has these ambitions um with a team the size that you have uh

and exploring the subject matter that it explores um i can answer first if you want john yeah go for it uh my uh my feelings are that i think it could have worked as a game and that we just weren't able to make it at the time like it maybe it was too high scope for us maybe there were too many unanswered questions at the time or it wasn't exactly going in the direction we thought but i do agree that it uh it could be a viable idea so maybe it was too because it's funny because i feel like where where the game ended up is something that strikes me as very ambitious but maybe the what it was shaping up to be initially was even more ambitious in some ways that is accurate yeah right because we were tr um you know they've been these ideas floating around of like trying to make storytelling

more dynamic and uh improvisational right with like oh here's characters that maybe their personalities aren't changed by what by what food bugs they eat but where like a character's attitude towards or your interactions with other characters influence how they're gonna react to a you or a situation having you know basically having interactions between you and other characters that feel dynamic and and alive it's like a thing that people i feel like have been talking about trying to do for a while but uh maybe haven't totally achieved yet so like that that like uh systemic sandboxy sort of sort of thing like could someday by someone be accomplished in a way where those characters feel real and and um

and compelling but uh we we couldn't do it this time uh well i think i think to me it's such a funny way to describe it because i think you did end up with a game that it has these really strong interesting systemic elements and you have these characters that are really believable and relatable and that's done really specifically through thoughtful combination of like traditional storytelling techniques and kind of traditional scatter and gather prototyping techniques and i just think it worked uh i think it worked really well well thank you i'm glad you guys stuck with it even though it sounds kind of scary to me um i guess that's how i always feel about games and i'm not going to draw any tenuous metaphors between like uh not knowing the player's role in the game why they were there or why they were doing what they were doing for a long time and us as developers often sitting with our projects also not knowing who we are or what we're doing

for a long time i mean there were long periods where it definitely i mean you know middle of development is just sort of it's easy to just kind of be stuck meandering around not knowing like i definitely was lost in for about a year in there trying like i'm fiddling with all these toys and trying to massage them against each other but i don't know what i'm doing at all and i think they did you're like figuring out who the player is and like really solidifying like the the ending of the game and what it was about uh directly at some point it kind of like shifted from the gameplay and system stuff shaping and influencing the the the story and characters and just slowly i guess as we got to know and and care about the characters and like the themes and story that we like had no idea

like it wasn't there at the beginning and then as we got closer to the end of development and things started to focus in it it shifted over to to that and that made it clearer yeah it's interesting because that's something that i feel like we see a lot um on our side as as developers also is this um uh thinking like because like uh you can talk about this game like oh yeah we know up front bug snacks they're bugs they're snacks secretly they're bad and it's all about you know how the characters deal with that um but like and that feels like knowing all the important things in a way and it's like i feel like a lot of development often is figuring out oh that wasn't any we didn't that's nowhere near enough that's like that's not enough to hang a thing off of that's not enough to make decisions about um and like digging into it um which i think you you and the whole studio just did uh such a wonderful job of doing um so

we're under 10 minutes left we're actually technically under nine minutes left i want to get to some of the questions that came in from the audience is this a good time to do that sure right so um top loaded question is um specifically about the snacks what was the design philosophy behind the snacks um did you have rules for what could or couldn't be a snacks we talked about this a little tiny bit at the start about how um one thing the snacks can't be is viscerally horrifying and then um something that you physically um uh tear apart with your hands as a player but were there other guidelines that settled into place over the course of development well i know at one point we had a spreadsheet or we were like trying to get we wanted a large variety of foods uh we also wanted to like represent a lot of different bug you know

very loose definition of bugs so in sentencing other you know other arthropods basically um and sometimes just invertebrates right um and i feel like there's one other dimension that we are trying to balance other than food and and snack i mean on top of that there is like oh we need sometimes like oh we just need a carrot uh we need a bug that flies in this level and we don't know what we know the biome and we know the behavior like what what food what bug uh i'll also add one of our guidelines uh for but for what doesn't count as a snack because we have many things that shouldn't be snacks but are but the real and true limit was it cannot just be an animal carcass oh sure like well because there were a couple times they're like oh like a baked salmon i was like no don't just make it a fish

right like like because if it's already a different animal and you can see that it's an animal how is it also a bug that was kind of the question yeah i feel like like anytime it comes close like i i i have fond memories of some of the sometimes the in-game script sort of like engaging with that like ribble pede i think has a little bit of special dialogue about like oh these bones aren't crunchy like bones at all and um which again deeply disturbing observation to me soft all the way through yeah that's horrible i love to sprinkle the underlying horror of the world into just random dialogue yeah we you know as as like fun and accessible as we want the game to be we gotta maintain that a little bit of that horror edge i think it ends up being it's i think it ends up being one of the things that makes the the basic moment-to-moment gameplay feel a little bit tense

sometimes but i think it also ended up being great building blocks for the ending of the game which um we could do a whole separate one-hour session about probably but i want to move on to next question this question is also from megan tankersley which is was the size of the island driven by scope you have a lot of the kind of like basic biomes there were there um and also were there environments that you really wanted to include but but weren't able to you talked a little bit about this being kind of a scatter and gather like go off and make some environments and we'll we'll staple them together later kind of approach um but yeah if you wanted to get into that a little bit more that would be great um yeah i feel like we just didn't we just sort of pick eight as the number of levels like two levels per biome was our thought yeah and one thing that comes to mind is that we

we uh tried to do like or thought about doing twists on the sort of standard biomes it's like oh we're going to do like a a black sand beach instead of a regular beach but tried tried a few different versions of that and it's like this just it doesn't look right it just looks like dirt yeah so we eventually you know we're doing enough weird stuff that this is one of the things we're like we're gonna lean into the conventional like we purposefully for a lot of the stuff that is very conventional we're like let's not try to reinvent the wheel with this that goes for like ui and a bunch of other things too but but um for the the level the biomes are like let's just stick with the classics we could do lava level we can do ice level it's fine all right yeah that's interesting i think the um i know uh i i'm just remembering several several discussions that we've had um on our design teams

about like where how how fun is it for because you can make something different for the sake of being different you can make something different because you want to because you've already seen it a lot of times in games but like is it actually fun for it to be different is it actually fun for it to be stink like is that part of the fun of going to the area is whoa i've never seen this kind of beach before um and is that done through the color of the sand or is that done through this beach is populated by terrifying food parasites with very cute eyes and and the part of the question about the size of the of the island um i think that kind of comes from the thing that zuma was talking about earlier about wanting to care about the bug snacks and not just have it be your scooping up a ton of bug snacks like my mmo poisoned brain always wanted everything to be bigger uh and there's way more bug snacks but like there's like a cozy sort of small

manageable like you can get familiar with this this kind of comfortable in some ways sized place that that i i think ended up fitting the the tone of the game better as well as supporting that that feeling of like oh there's only a couple of this bug snack in this world at any given time and they feel a little bit more special and then the size of the space just well yeah and and part of that related to that kind of the sizes that i tended to go with were built around the fact that bug snakes are very small like a a big horizon zero dawn giant open world makes sense when your monsters are the size that they are but for us because buck snacks is a little and you need to be able to like watch and catch them like if the environment is turbo huge like they get lost in it and we don't have the optimization to put a hundred of them in a jungle and be okay but

yeah yeah associations so small and dense i think was the guiding line on that i feel like it works one of the reasons i think it works so well too is you have this you you want to all for all the reasons you were talking about before wanting to put the players in scenarios where they can wait and watch and grab something um kind of implies in a lot probably not um for me it wouldn't have been obvious but i feel like in retrospect it sort of implies like oh you need to be able to know where to go do that you need to feel confident that you can like go up here up the ramp across the thing um past this like very what appears to me to be like a really carefully placed landmark uh over to this area because i know this is where they're gonna be and i can hang out here and i can wait and watch and i can do you know the main thing that i do um we've got just one minute left um so this is a bit of a uh that is not enough time to address this very good question but um did you have a

favorite villager um in terms of getting to make them and find out who they were uh yeah that's uh well and also i guess um uh just in general how did you feel about how players reacted to the the characters that live in the in the village um the answer is uh yes i do have a favorite well i guess there's a difference between favorite to write and favorite to like understand and explore because my favorite character to write is chandler because i could just chandler is my favorite character just because i i identify with him maybe he borrowed some of john's personality traits but uh to explore i feel like um i had a really interesting time uh i don't know i've had an interesting time exploring all of them that's what i that's what i liked about that process so i can't really pick one of them for the exploration but

uh wait what was the second half of that question uh how did you feel about players reactions but we're also out of time so if you have a one word answer that'll be great thumbs up thumbs down surprised mostly huh awesome uh anything john no i'm good cool um thank you both so much uh i think we're gonna wrap it up here we went only a tiny bit over time which for me is a effing miracle um thanks y'all for tuning in and um listening to us um chatter about this game if you haven't gotten to spend time with it yet somehow apologies for spoilers and i strongly encourage you to go check it out it's beautiful and i think i'm going to wrap it up right there thank you thanks thank you [Music]