Lessons Learned Making Gunpoint Quickly Without Going Mad

so yes this is talk is about efficiency the game designers it's going to draw a lot on what I learned making my first game gunpoint which looks like this I'll see how the villain is going thank you rev sound so it's getting where you're breaking into these my security buildings security measures and the way you do that is by using this crossing twice now will be later into the level of wired up so you can see which light switches connect to which lights and then you can also drag those connections around set a light switch to open the road or you can set a security camera to open trapdoor instead of saying how long 40 percent like switch to trigonal white we could do that that was

also you very well wake up when there's a lot and punch people in the face repeatedly those aren't the integral concepts behind the game but they did go a long way to making people like it and when I started it I I had done some programming in school but I've forgotten all of it and it was in Visual Basic so it was completely irrelevant to game making as far as I know I certainly couldn't remember a line of code I completely forgot all of it I didn't know what I was doing I'd ever made a game before and and I had I didn't have like a game budget I had my life savings I spent a chunk of that to come to DC one year but other than that there weren't any major expenses for the game it was like $30 to buy game maker and I only worked my weekends and that's kind of the important one because the title of this talk is lessons learned making gunpoint quickly and gunpoint took three years and gunpoint is only three hours long so that's not like a great rate in calendar years but I was only working weekends I was doing a full-time job

while I was making it so as a writer for PC gamer at the time and I'm a best guesses it's probably about a year a full-time development equivalent to UM and since I was also learning how to make games in that time I feel like that's relatively quick for what it is and in particular it's good because it succeeded on pretty much every level I cared about so it sold well enough for me to quit that job I was able to leave PC Gamer and become a full-time indie developer which I have been for last it's been nearly two years now since it came out and it went down really well on the press got really good reviews and I'm happy with it which is quite important we've been porting it to mac and linux for their like the dignity a year after launching it and during that process that was done externally but I was having to test obviously to check that the the build is coming along okay and it could still play through the game and this is after having spent three years making it which also rolled a lot testing and every time I needed to test new builders like oh god I can't face to

play again and then as soon as I started it up it'll be like yeah this is good good good like this and I think pretty much every time I played it through something has happened there's never happened before and it's made me laugh out loud so that's that's my personal metric for success in terms of me being happy with it and and the last one is it didn't destroy my life which is often a bonus in any game tolerant process despite the fact that I was doing on top of a full-time job so I think it would've been easy to completely burnout doing that right and that's why I only worked on weekends I didn't work in the evenings I was trying to kind of keep some kind of sane balance and keep my mental health so it was it went very well for the amount of time that I put in so that's that's me defending my credentials to give this talk because it's quite a kind of grandiose title I think I kind of regret that and so also that the other part the title is it's lessons learned making a gunpoint by me about my process and stuff and I'd like to just sort of make sure it's clear that's the tone of this and not sort of

trying to dictate how you should do everything it's just stuff that I found useful and it will involve a lot of stuff that that I learnt but then kept forgetting it's kind of like I mean being efficient we probably already know that's a good thing right but actually practicing that day in and day out is trickier and there's a lot of things that it's difficult to keep reminding yourself of how to do these things right and so that's going to be mostly what this is about so when I say efficiency I'm talking about this value for players / work for developer and also it's not an equation you'd ever plug numbers into but it's just kind of the definition of the word in this case and value is obvious incredibly vague if I was still a games journalist I would be unhappy with using that word because it's too vague but that's intentional because I could put fun in there but not everyone astronomy game that's fun that's not everyone's objective anymore and that's a really good thing and the kind of calculations you can do

the sort of tricks and the the ways of thinking about redesigning your game to be more efficient or to figure out a better process for making it aren't specific to making a game that's fun they're not specific to making a game that's kind of even enjoyable you could try and make the worst game in the world and all this efficiency stuff would probably still apply to your attempts to make it terrible that's what we in each case for me personally I define value as it's not really fun for me I'm kind of I always hope to make a game that's exciting some after like a very particular kind of I guess intense fun so it's kind of related to that but I feel like funs a bit sounds a bit narrower I always imagined like a really satisfying shooter when you say fun and for me I'm looking for that moment where when you're playing a game and you suddenly kind of your mind lights up when you kind of grasp what you can do in your eyes oh my god I can do that that's incredible so that's my definition value and it would be different for everyone here but hopefully all this applies regardless and work for developer you could find

that as for me it was just my time I did everything except the art and the music on gunpoint so programming and writing and design is all me but obvious if you're working a team then other people's time also factors into that and you know actual expenses which I didn't really have to deal with but yeah that's a hopefully pretty simple concept but it's worth just defining what we're talking about so the first thing I learned was to forget about looking for good ideas like before I started making games when I was a journalist object spent a long time analyzing them I spent about nine years analyzing video games and trying to articulate why they were good and why they're bad but the thing that was missing from all of that analysis was I didn't know how it was made or how difficult things were to make and so I could only judge whether something was just a good idea or a bad idea and so I thought well making like designing a good game is just trying to think of the best ideas and then you make those you make the best ones and what I quickly learned actually trying to make one is that that's it's

basically impossible to consider or it's stupid to consider the value of idea without considering how difficult enemy to make so just looking for the good ideas without considering how hard they're to make doesn't get you to the best game because you're going to have to make them it's going to be a real actual cost to it and that cost will determine how much you can make of your game how much you can work on it I think almost every game is released at a stage where it would have been nice to work on it a bit longer and there are things that you could have done to make it better and so efficiency is about maximizing ads about figuring out how to do the most good in the shortest amount of time and it's up to you kind of which one of those you want to optimize like if all these things could be used to take the same amount of time to make a better game or they could be used to make a game of the same quality in less time or some combination thereof so to illustrate we talked about heat signature a little bit this is what I'm working on now this is my next game it is a top-down space game you're flying

to this infinite galaxy you are encountering all these randomly generated ships and if you dock with one you go inside and then you see all the crew walking around you can hit them with a wrench as I just did there and I think I'm about to oh yeah so like I was gone then I smack them in the face of the wrench and you're trying to like either steal something or in this case I'm trying to assassinate that guy who circled in red and it's all about kind of like these random attention ships in their systems and want to shoot this guy my bullet hits the fuel barrel it blows up part of the ship we get sucked out into space from the vacuum and then I remote-control my pod to go and pick myself up so that I can go about on my next mission so it's a it's a big kind of randomly generated it's gonna be kind of a roguelike like thing and I think I'm just about to catch myself yeah so that's it I'm back to the silo and something people often often say in comments and videos this on YouTube and stuff is hey you should have planets you can land on this game and agree that's a

really good idea that's the thing that would add a lot to the game would be a major change in scope in context it would be a huge deal if there are planets that you could fly up to and land on that would really massively expand the scope of the game it is a good idea for heat signature but my best guess is it'll probably take about five weeks to make I mean it's really really hard to guess and I'll talk about later about how to deal with that uncertainty but I've done it some thought and I think it's such a huge thing that it would take that amount of time I think most of the first week would just be thinking how the hell do I do this at home it might involve compromising the the actual kind of some of the things I'm going for with the game which is kind of consistency like you saw when I boarded that ship we didn't change into a boarding mode or anything the camera stays where it is you just zoom in a little bit and it's all one game so landing our planet the planet would consume you know the entire game world you can never see it on one screen except by zooming out it would just be extremely difficult to integrate so it's a good idea but it's very very difficult and if I was going to spend five weeks on something which I

am I'm still working this game I would much rather do something like this bunch of stuff and this is a lot of ideas that where each individual one is not as good an idea as having planets that you can land on they're all just a bit more modest in their in s cope they're all less ambitious they just don't really amount as or each individual one doesn't make such a huge difference to the game and the first one here is in this time I could add space stations that you can dock with I do plan to do that and that actually fulfills a lot of the goals of adding planets like I think when someone that says they would like planets and heat signature' they're kind of probably responding to the fact that it seems like a big mishmash of random stuff floating around in infinite space which is completely accurate and having space stations that are like at fixed locations that you can dock where then you can go aboard and like go to a shop and you know restock your supplies buy new upgrades get a new mission from some kind of job listings board that actually I think checks a lot of those boxes I

think it may it will give the galaxy a kind of feeling of geography there we places that are important to you there'll be a home base of some kind and so it does a lot of things that planet would do but because it's a space station it's man-made and that means base stations basically look a bit like spaceships and I already generate spaceships so I can use all the same kind of ship generation algorithms to make a space station or some kind I have to tweet through a little bit so it'll take about a week but it's not a massive massive job and because it only takes a week and the other thing takes five weeks I've got time to all this other stuff so I can add randomly generated weapons I can do upgrades for your ship I can give interior doors for the ships that you can mess with so you get to a central computer and then you can like manipulate those doors to seal them and lock a guard in I can add a whole galaxy map so you can keep zooming out and see roller stations are and you'll get a sense for the kind of the geography and like the context for your missions and I could create factions that all these ships belong to and the factions would fight each other on-site and you'll be working for some factions and trying to undermine the others this is like a

large chunk of everything I have left to do on the game and it still doesn't add up to being as big a difficult thing as the planets thing so these are a bunch of small efficient ideas and they make the game better than the one big good idea even though there is better than each of these individual things and I think when I say they just said in abstract the reason I got into a lot of detail on this is that by just saying the abstract it's it's better to work on a lot of little efficient ideas than it is to work on one big one in a lot of cases a one big good idea then it sounds like I'm saying be less ambitious it sounds like I'm saying don't you know shoot for the moon don't try and make your game amazing just try and make quite a good game and that's not at all I'm saying I'm saying make a much better game make a really incredibly exciting complicated amazing thing by focusing on efficient ideas because they will make you they'll make your game more ambitious without actually increasing the amount of difficulty of creating so when you're trying to judge whether idea is valuable and however its value relates to how

difficult is going to be to make like I say value is very vague if we like if we take like fun for example then when you consider some idea you're thinking about making and you probably have an idea of how fun it will be to do once like when you experience this thing it'll be this much fun landing on the planet will be this exciting or going around these these space stations and thinking about adding this will be this good that's probably the intuitive thing I think that's the part where that's what we think of when we think about estimating the value of an idea but there are some other considerations like how many times one player get value out of it like if you're going to have if you're making like a sort of a scripted encounter where you're like the player character in some game is fighting a boss and they're gonna it's gonna be a shitty QuickTime event and you're going to press triangle to punch the boss in the face and you're working on like how satisfying that punching the guy in the face is then it's worth thinking about how many times is Blair actually going

to experience this probably just once if it's a actual plot moment but if that's part of a you know takedown that you do in that kind of game where every time you attack an enemy you're gonna be doing that punch then one player is going to experience it hundreds of times perhaps the next one is how many players will experience it and this one there's some kind of of its might be slightly controversial I can imagine my friend Jim Crawford who makes fractions giving a whole talk about the opposite of what I'm about to say but I think it's worth at least knowing always thinking about how many people are going to experience a thing so if that that punch moment that I was talking about was taking place on the critical path then like in the main thread of the game the thing that every player is going to encounter then that's all the players that's the most if it's something that only happens if you happen to open it's like a secret door and then a guy ambushes you and that's when the punch occurs then only a tiny potentially players are going to experience that and that doesn't mean it's not valuable it

can still be worth putting a bunch of effort into something that's very only a few people will find but if you're going to do that that value that so that value will have to be much greater you're going to work on something that only like 1% of players are going to see better be [ __ ] great they better talk about it to everybody they they meet and it will they'll be more excited about it if they know that they were in the 1% who experienced it but it's still gonna have to be memorable it can't just be punching a guy in the face so I guess it could be but that's probably not the best way to do it and then the last one is is it the type of value you care about creating so I talked earlier about what those types of value might be like for me it's excitement I really care about stuff that like I say opens your mind up to possibilities it makes you think oh wow didn't realize I could do that or suddenly kind of a lot of everyone like the mechanics that you've learned kind of flower in your mind and you can kind of grasp how how much freedom and creativity they give you but you haven't quite thought it through yet so it seems kind of magical because you don't understand it yet I love that so

that's the type of value I care most about creating but gunpoint was full of it was a story of gunpoint is a kind of noir tale about betrayal corporate espionage murder Affairs and then when you play it you're opening a door in someone's face to knock them out and it's basically slapstick and so it's got slapstick in it it's got it's got quite a serious plot and it's got a lots of different types of things that kind of tonally quite incongruous but there were all things I liked little things I cared about so I worked on those things and hopefully they kind of fit together so I've been talking quite in quite black-and-white terms about value and how long things are going to take and if you've actually worked on a game you know that these things are by no means certain you often have very little idea ahead of time how hards aren't going to be and sometimes you don't know how good something's going to be when you think about the future or something addition it's difficult to know how much

it will add sometimes it's difficult to know how hard it will be sometimes it's difficult to know either so obviously you have to deal with that the way this is written that's the most facile thing I've ever said but what I'm hopefully gonna explain is is how to deal with uncertainty how to factor it in so they have an idea that you are pretty sure it's going to be good you're going to add something it's going to be an exciting addition to the game but you're not sure whether it's going to be easy to do you're not sure what its gonna be quick then um what I kind of the conclusion I came to is that you just try it just give it a day or whatever period of time seems appropriate to explore it just see if it how hard it really is and then you'll have more data on on the size of the task like how complex is going to be you probably won't know everything about how long it's going to take you won't give you certainty about that but it will give you a lot more information to work with and you'll have a much better idea of whether it's worth it so my example for this is gum poincaré's break the

leveling just by punch I'm gonna meet back that's my voice and I knew gunpoint was gonna be short I knew I could only make about twenty levels in the time I had well I didn't have a strict deadline but I didn't want to spend years and years making hundreds of levels and so I knew the game was probably going to be about three hours long I knew people would complain about that and I wanted to shut them up so I thought about I knew it would be great if I could have a level deter I knew that would really kind of just make it harder to criticize gunpoint for being short like people still would I knew they still would but I wanted the line in the review that says gunpoint is too short to change to a gunpoint is too short but it has a level editor because then it ends on a positive easy home so I knew it be it would be massive if I could do it be really a huge win but I like I said as a novice coder I was barely keeping it together make your game so the idea making level editor is actually pretty daunting because now you're making application you're making a piece of software that essentially creates a kind of document and like and saves it in a new file format that I would have to invent and

it had to have an interface and and buttons and stuff and so it's daunting and very very uncertain and new it'd be good I was very uncertain about whether it be possible whether it be quick with every feasible whether I could do it an amount a time that would actually make sense and be possible for me to do so I just I did I took a day I it was a Sunday I decided to just try making a level editors jump straight into it I had a pretty I had this kind of idea for how those buttons would be laid out and stuff just a rough concept of what filmless level editor might take and this thing where you kind of drag and drop items from the from the interface into the world that's kind of stolen from portal 2 sorry yeah fortunately when they added a level editor that had this really lovely intuitive feeling of just picking stuff up from blocking it down and at the end of that day I had it working basically I had these buttons they had the sprites for the from the objects they represented I could click on them I could drag them into the world and it just worked it was by no means a finished level editor and I already had

about 5 things you could place but I could save them to disk like other kind of text file essentially the text files are just lists of all the objects in the level they just say where they go so it's incredibly primitive but it worked and so I knew then I still didn't know how long it would take but I had a pretty good sense that oh this is doable if I can make something that roughly works in a day I can make the whole thing in some kind of reason amount of time I'm gonna let this play out because I really like the solution to the level I made it which is to smash the window and then the guy hears the sound runs upstairs walks in the motion detector which you've why to the door and then you get in the level editor the question was did I make the level editor in game maker yes I did in fact I made the levels income point in game maker and then at the end I did the level editor because there was a lower priority thing and I made that in game maker as well and it was way better than game a cos limiters for gunpoint at least it's much

better to use and so like [ __ ] when I do this first then I could have made the levels in it so the other possibility is what if you're certain that the thing will be easy but you don't know how good it'll be so the value of it is the unknown but you're pretty sure you know how to do it you it's similar to sine you've done before an example for this would be gunpoint actually going to pause that sorry no no open pause it at all okay again let's play gunpoint has a load of gadgets that you can buy like upgrades for your gadgets that you buy between missions and and most of them are optional they're things that you can buy if you want and they will change your play style they will facilitate different ways of playing the game and setting up that shop was a challenge setting up the inventory system was kind of a challenge but then once I designed like a gadget I think that maybe one of the first ones he did was the hush cracker which lets you jump through a window silently so you still smash the window but it kind of muffles the noise once I've done that I kind of knew oh that's how long it gadget takes it takes

like maybe a day in total which is very quick and very easy and they add a lot to the game they let you kind of tailor your your play style and then I was watching a talk by Jonathan Blow and mark 10 Bosch and they were talking about their kind of design philosophy and kind of describing the way they approach making games and sort of taking out some principles that they think kind of generally a good idea and the one Jonathan Blow was talking about where is interconnectedness when you have a bunch of game mechanics in your game you should think about having them talk to each other in some way having linked to each other and I was thinking what are the elements of gun playing like guns and rewiring stuff how could i mesh those together well you could rewire guns and so I tried making a gadget that would do that and I couldn't it seemed exciting but I had no idea really like how would that work what would it be like what it really add to the game would it just totally break the game because if you'd wild like switch to somebody's gun and then just flick that to make them shoot their friend then that seems kind of disastrous so I just

did it because I knew gadgets are easy you can do them in like a day making this upgrade it's gonna be pretty simple and I don't know how good it's going to be and so I tried it and in this video just first every ride that guys gun to the light so you can shoot me if you were a gun to something it triggers that thing when the guy tries to fire if you Y something to a gun then when it's triggered the gun goes off so what I'm doing here is I'm going to wire that front guards got gun to the guy behind him when he tries to fire it won't fire it'll trigger what it's linked to what it's linked to is the gun pointing at the back of his head so he's going to shoot himself in the back of the head let me see if it actually happens ever I'm saying exactly why I just said on this video that's why I'm not doing it right away okay here we go and that's it okay thanks here is everything I just said in graph

form and so if you if you're certain something to be quick but you're not certain it'll be good then try it if you're certain would be good but you're not sure will be quick then give it a day I am you know see how how long how hard is going to be if you're certainly quick and you're certain to be good of course just make it and if you're not sure of either those things then just forget about it because you're a game designer so you could probably think do better than that right you can probably do better the idea that you don't know will be good and you don't know it would be easy I think also on the point about uncertain Bally uncertain time be sort of the outliers for that are going to be the things that take years right the things where it seems like oh yeah that should be doable and then when you actually try and do it it just goes on and on and on it never quite never quite works for uncertain value I think the outliers are the ideas that turn out to be amazing that long shot thing as you

can see it's pretty funny it also led to like maybe 70% of all of my favorite moments in gunpoint like all the best stories about crazy things that you can rewire crazy traps you can set up crazy like stunts to pull off it led to a huge amount of those it was a massive addition to the game it has really really made it loads better in my opinion and so that's why stuff that where you're uncertain about the value it's worth just just biting the bullet and making it and spending the time as long as it's not a huge amount so the third thing I learned was the art of not doing things this is a screenshot from gone home and if I show you three screenshots from gone home gone home is a story about a young girl coming of age kind of discovering her sexuality and kind of learning her place in the world and it's story about relationships it's very sweet and sometimes funny and touching story about people and their relationships to each other and there's

something missing in these shots there's no people in it they decided to not do people in the game that's entirely about people there were no people in it it's incredible how often we don't consider just leaving something out and it's really easy to assume that something has to be in there like it's just so integral to the whole thing that you're doing but of course you need people in a story about people but you don't come homes amazing and it's it tells that story really sensitively and brilliantly and for my own example something I should have considered not doing for gunpoint is the gun that was a thing that perhaps understandably I always assumed well that kind of needs to be in there the gun right it's good gunpoint when I first when I count at that name I was thinking it would be much more about holding people at gunpoint so in the game you can later on you can buy a gun and it costs a huge amount of money and you only get six bullets for it ever you can't buy any new ones and people love

that they're totally accepting and understanding of that its main use the whole point is you're supposed to point to their people and when you have your gun pointed at guard they won't shoot back because they're in that movie standoff situation where if I shoot him what if his gun goes off and kills me and you're supposed to be thinking the same thing in actual fact if you do shoot them you're fine but I really wanted that it would be a really tense moment you have to hold down the button to keep your your gun pointed so it's this like if your finger slipped off the button you would instantly be killed and it does have that tension to it you know I made it it's in there it's in the game but I didn't have a lot of luck designing puzzles around it it wasn't that great of a puzzle mechanic once you have someone at gunpoint there's a limited number of things you can do in that situation you can kind of shuffle back goods you can shuffle forwards you can pressure light switch that's about it anything else involves putting your gun away and I guess he shot so it wasn't a great puzzle mechanic and once I've made that sort of became clear it wasn't really the center of the game and calling a gun point was probably a bit silly but I stuck where they could have the word gun in it and people like that so

the problem with it is that you can fire the gun as well like my idea was to use it to point to people but I also let you fire it because if you can't fire it then that kind of tense situation of holding it holding someone at gunpoint loses its meaning like in order for pointing a gun to be meaningful you have to have the option of shooting them if you don't have that then you know you're bluffing and it kind of makes it a totally different situation so you can just shoot people and of course has to kill them everyone at gunpoint dies in one hit and including you and that means of course you can just shoot a guard to get past a problem you can solve the puzzle when is shooting the guard or you can shoot out a window to get through back and so I knew you'd be able to do that obviously and I thought of a great penalty for that which is that if you fire a gun the police hear it and they'll show up in like 30 seconds and when they show up they will put a sniper on the subway exit which is doing way out of every level and that sniper can see infinitely far has infinitely fast reactions and a perfect game and will kill you in one shot no matter what so the game is kind

of over at that point but I don't that's why you're screwed because there's my bridge exit and I didn't want to come down and say game over right because you're still alive you kind of failed the mission but I hate it in games when you fail your mission it just is well that's the end of your life then like when Sam Fisher fails in Splinter Cell and like you set off one too many alarms it just kind of fades to black and just this game over like what happened to him I want to see what happens to Sam Fisher so I don't want to do that but the phone with that is cross like the player is screwed they can't get out of the situation what I want to happen is they go to the exit they get shot and then they realize oh yeah I'm screwed I better go and just restart that level or go back like nineteen savegames because the game auto-saves constantly and the problem was that was a little bit weird having a sort of game over situation that doesn't tell you it's game over and caused some confusion people were kinda like how do I get out of the situation after tell you just can't just [ __ ] forever but

the bigger problem with the gun and gun point is that when you shoot someone it solves the puzzle such as in a sense of the word but the time limit that impose a time limit is a really big stressful penalty it's really it's a big deal and that's why I used it I wanted the player to feel kind of stressed and it's a it's a cost of doing something that you never need to do you never have to fire a gun so if you've done it you've done it because you've decided to and I'm happy to give you a very big penalty for that and make it scary and stressful and you might get frustrated or you might have an amazing closest scape and the problem is that the gun also lets you solve puzzles really quickly so if I give you a time limit for using the thing that lets you get past the puzzle quickly you can then just use it again to get out at the time limit because you could just shoot everybody and blow out all the windows and take what you want and then just leave so the penalty I was giving you is kind of undermined by the very thing you've just talked show me you're willing to do so it's kind of a mess

that's probably a better way to do it but I spent like implementing the gun itself wasn't a huge cost but just all those consequences all those little fiddly things and hang on whether sniper shows up how does the player know they're screwed or how does this lifer show up like that I never got the animation working for him to come up the steps and so he just kind of teleports in but then that's terrifying because if you tell what's in and shoots you in the same instance you don't even know why you died and I had all these like awkward little consequences and it was a difficult cause design problems caused technical problems it was a big messy thing and I wish at some point I just thought maybe I just shouldn't give you a gun wishes leave that out just not that big a deal it's a game about rewiring things and I I kind of knew that I made the whole game about the rewiring things but I just couldn't let go the gun for some reason probably because it's cool gunpoint so the full thing I learned was the best place to save time is in the concept along I spend too long on this one because it's kind of it is a really big deal you can save years of your life at this point but it's of limited relevance to

probably most of us because only some of us are in the situation where we actually get to be the guy who just saw that what the new project is going to be what the new game is going to be and decide everything about it that's pretty rare privilege and even for those people you only get to do it like once every one to two years right so but when it does come around it's worth the time you spend re-evaluating your concept and thinking again about what you want to make next what you'll get next game should be whether it you're thinking individually or whether you're discussing it as a team and brainstorming and stuff that time is going to pay off massively you know one more week thinking about what you're going to make is could save you a year of going down the wrong track or could just come up with a much better idea when I finished gun point I was going to do a I switch to unity for a while and I was going to make a kind of sidon heist game in unity that would be a little bit

like gunpoint but you'd have grappling hooks and you would in fact I think I downloaded video this so I can show it to you hopefully can I know I didn't home we were on oh god now lost what sliders on this is terrible I'm just going to tab through a bunch of these you might remember some of these scenes from earlier in the talk here we go I don't have a video of what I want to show you but there's no point in seeing anyways I kind of abandoned it it was a game much more in the vein of gunpoint but made in unity so much harder to make and I was really excited about it I didn't the game mechanics seemed really exciting to me but also I had this kind of had a story in mind which I won't tell you because I might make it one day but there were certain element to the story not so much that like the plot but just the setting and the characters and this world that I was thinking of that we're just like driving me crazy or six like so excited about it I kind of felt sick I would get excited

about it and just be excited about it for an entire day and I was so sure this is my next game and definitely gonna do this because it was so amazing and then I tried to make it and it took a very long time and I spent I think it was the time when I spent about a week trying to get a grappling hook to unwrap from around a lamppost suddenly realize like this is just too hard I just needed to something else actually I didn't give up on at that point I was just thinking it was around that time that I was talking to a friend of mine about an idea it had years and years ago one of those things that I don't know if you guys do this but sometimes you kind of think about the game you'd make if you had infinite money and a massive team and if you were you know the perfect overlord of a of infinite resources and my idea was like I love spelunky and I often talk about like what spelunky like in 3d this was kind of probably before minecraft existed at home and how would you do that kind of random and generation and make destructibility a really important thing in a 3d game and I thought I would love a game where like you're just in

the infinite galaxies and you're like you're in a spacesuit and you have a jetpack and it's super powerful and your spacesuit super tough and you're like a human missile you just slam yourself into the hulls of ships and just like breach in and kill everybody and steal everything and it would be like inside the ships it would be like a randomly generated first-person shooter and outside you'd be jetting around and stuff and I knew I was never going to make that I just wrote down some ideas for it for fun but then I was talking to my friend Graham and I think he mentioned it like he said I still think about idea you had once I was like hang on we just made that 2d I think I know how to do that and game make it right now and I think I could poached like that in like two days and so he did he was in the middle inside the game but I said you know this is gonna be quick to find out whether this is any good or not and so I just started in game maker and it very quickly became clear that it was eminently doable and it was really exciting and the second you go inside a spaceship that it's been flying on the galaxy it's just a really magical moment and when I started to show it off in public as well weirdly even before I

showed that you could go inside spaceships people were more excited about that than they were about the coop grappling-hook thing I'd spent the last five months on so and I kind of I started to agree I started to get more excited about it - like I was thinking it would be a quicker and easier maybe smaller project but the more I work on it the more heat signatures just like lighting my brain on fire and it's just so expansive and flexible and I can do anything with it and it's just so exciting to work on so that that was a situation where I had a concept I was very sure was going to be my next game I really I should have just spent more time thinking about what I wanted to do I didn't really consider anything else there was like a strategy game I thought about maybe but um I should have spent more time just reconsidering the concept because that's where I will probably save a year of my life by making this game it's dead and fifth thing I learned was how to stop being a perfectionist and it's probably something a lot of us suffer from maybe I might not be as afflicted do this as some people the other way of saying it is [ __ ] it that'll do I I do

have this problem and I've kind of learnt a range of ways of trying to snap myself how to perfection schism trying to just let it go just trying to move on and the main thing is every time I come back to work I just have to self is this thing I'm working on the most important thing left to do if I can only do one more thing before it just gets cast out into the world without any further input from me is this what I'd be working on and 90% of the time the answer is no there's something much much more important I should be working on and so I keep it like a to-do list that's in priority order as best I can I try and you know put the most important things next and I constantly reconsider it and I also have to use mental tricks to like get over the pain of having to cut features like when you put things in priority order then what you really need to be doing is when you're adding a big new idea to your game you should be cutting something out right you've only got a set amount of time and you've probably planned it reasonably well so that it's not going to take forever and

if you can I add something major you should be taking something away but emotionally I can't do that I'm too attached to everything it's already there and I don't want to like not write down the great new idea just had so instead I just try and put them in priority order and it's kind of a trick I learned from writing about games I would often be way over the word-count and I couldn't bring myself to just cut out whole paragraphs so I just go through it and I just like indent the paragraph that weren't quite as good as the other ones and once you do that and you realize you look at the word count and realize all those ones I indented equal the number of words I've gone over so if I cut them all right now then I'm done the whole thing is just fits in it's fine and suddenly it's much easier to make that call whereas if you're going through and actually committing to deleting it right then and there it's a nightmare so if you do a if you have your to-do list in priority order if you try and put everything all your ideas for the games in order of which is the most important thing not yet done then the great thing about that is that you don't ever have to cut anything you can just pretend you're

going to do it all it's all on the list I'm gonna get to it one day and then when you're like when you're halfway down that list and you've done the most important half of those things it's really easy to cut the rest because it's been three [ __ ] years which is like since the [ __ ] release this so that's what I did on point gunpoint you know there's those to-do lists for that is twice as long as the things I actually did I just got to the point where I'm like I just got to get it out there I don't care about this goddamn camera bug which is one going to show you this is the camera bugging gunpoint it might not even register as a bug but probably anyone who works on like game feel and kind of tweaking things is looking at this and kind of alright when you climb up a wall and get onto the roof the artist john roberts has done this brilliant beautiful smooth animation for clambering up i love it's kind of sprightly and cool and i've completely shatter all over his work by encode you don't smoothly climb up you teleport to the roof i teleport you there then i

play the animation of the climbing up happening and the camera is following your true location not the animation so it just snaps to being above and if the viewer is scrolling then you get this annoying little jerk and the fact that it's looping constant is i'm saying this is what you're really pissing some people off uh-huh and it's pissed me off pissed me off for like two years or like i've got to fix that at some point and it's it is an easy fix but it's maybe not 100% trivial because there's nothing in the game that does any kind of camera tweening or panning or anything like that i don't think i'd even heard the word tweening at this point and it was always on my to-do list and i knew i always felt like it was as essential this has to be done before I ship I can't release the game with this goddamn bug in it and I never fixed it this is from the currently released version of gunpoint still in there and impact it out because by the time I finished I was like my god that's the smallest concerning world compared to the other things that were wrong with gunpoint at the time that is nothing and which brings me to a quote expert this is a common a prism particularly

monks games journalist games Jonas loved to say this I used to be one because when your games journalist job is to analyze a game and say why it's good and why it's bad and if you notice like some subtle little thing in Legend of Zelda or or half-life 2 but you love then it's really easy to massively inflate its importance because a you it was something you noticed and you felt good for noticing it but also be you want to seem slightly more insightful than everyone else and like I you notice the subtle thing and I so [ __ ] important if you didn't notice that you don't appreciate the game as well as I do and for me it was like there's a moment in half-life 2 when Barney throws you your crowbar and this is you know the iconic weapon you're going to use it for the rest of that rest of the game but you're standing directly beneath aiming so is it to you you've got good aim and when it hits you it just goes into your mentor and you bring it up but I tried stepping back and letting crowbar clattered to the floor I went a clatters to the floor it does so with the perfect noise for a

crowbar cutter into a concrete surface which is not because who the hell would back off when Barney throws the crowbar like why is the sound for that so perfect why did they make it in such high fidelity I was like this is amazing this is what's so great about half-life 2 they put this such rich fidelity into it is the moment when you're back off on a crowbar clatters first of all that's what really matters no it [ __ ] isn't like the little things can be important I'm not saying that they're not they can be really special and really nice and I was really obsessed with this moment but this statement says they're more important than the big things they're not the big things are much more important that's why they're the big things the gravity gun is really [ __ ] important the story and how fighter is really important like loads of those set pieces are very important and the little things are important but they're less important so to summarize the thing I was saying earlier about trying about getting over that camera bug it is easy to stop polishing the silverware once you realize how much of the house is on fire and that is how I kind of snap out

of getting obsessed with those little details now I try to remind myself how much of a house is currently on fire and that means when you instead of like polishing the way that the characters down in this particular chair look at level three which doesn't exist yet although four which actually can't be completed anymore I was trying to do I was working on a rating system for gun points at the end of the level that gives you metrics of like you read this you know this quiet and this fast and this violent and for the speed one I needed a part time for each level and so I had to play through the game and find out what the what my time was for those levels and then use that as the as the standard to judge other people by I was just like I like to do in life and when I played the game through I couldn't play the game through my game didn't work it had broken in about nine different ways since I last played the whole game through and so this tiny thing I was working on is like the part time for the level should really be an accurate reflection of my own personal

abilities was actually not the biggest thing whatever you do fixing the biggest thing that needed fixing was the game and the sick thing I learned was how to feel good about yourself at the end of the day this is something I really sucked at first because I was new to programming and I was initially for the first year gunpoint I was working totally on my own and I was working the weekends and so during a week I'd be thinking all the time about the game what I was going to do on it and have the loads of ideas I wanted to put in and then when I got to the weekend I would have a specific idea of I want to get this feature in this weekend I want to get elevators working I want to do this and then sometimes I would do it sometimes I would fail to do it and sometimes I would just be not even close like not even ten percent of the way to getting that thing done and it would just be just soul-crushing I just feel terrible and I just felt like an idiot I just felt like this is like I was posed to get this done this weekend and I'm not going to get it done next weekend all the weekend after and that's even

more crushing when you to work in part-time because that's not that's not six days away that's three weeks away so I would get really pissed off of myself and feel stupid and feel frustrated and eventually I realized like this is kind of ridiculous because if I had if I employed a programmer to do this for me and I said okay a task for this weekend does get elevators working and they came back to me one day and said look it has actually a much bigger job than we realized I'm only 10 percent of the way through this it's going to be really difficult it might take another four weekends realistically and my reaction to that would not be you [ __ ] idiot what's wrong with you it would obviously be oh that's interesting thanks for looking into it that's valuable data we didn't have that information beforehand I didn't have it you didn't have it we didn't know how big this job was and you have done the valuable work of going out and finding out how big that job was by trying to do it and now we have more information we can make better decisions nothing has

gone wrong really like what has happened is the new information is a shame it's bad news for us but it's nobody's fault it's not a problem someone's created it's the thing we've just learnt about the task that were undertaking and now it's my job as a designer to or as a producer depending on how you want to classify it to decide do we still want to do that is that feature still worth doing do we have to do it if we do have to do it is there an easier way to do it can we rethink and if the answer to all those questions is no and we do have to do it then I just have to figure out how we fit that all into the schedule and how where what else we're going to cut how we figure out how to do that and so it took me you're embarrassing a long time to apply that logic to myself and realize that when I fail to complete something by a massive degree I should be nicer to myself about it I should say okay you put in the hours you you tried it we've got more information this is useful stuff I've done my job so if you are your own boss be a good one and obviously I realized that this is a

luxury in my case you know it's been great to be my own boss and to be in control of my own how I am treated and stuff and obviously I'm also I'm going to talk a bit about how many hours you work and that kind of stuff but I want to be very clear that I appreciate it's a luxury for me to be able to decide how many hours on a work I work like eight hours in a day or something and I know that some of you probably work for in an environment where you don't get to decide how much you work and probably many of you are sometimes asked to crunch and probably many of you don't want to crunch and probably many of you I just miss situation where that is inescapable and that's okay but if anyone is trying to make you feel personally bad for not getting the thing done then I was trying to make you feel like it's your fault that this job turns out to be a bigger job than you thought then [ __ ] that person and if it's you [ __ ] yourself so the end of the day I just asked myself

two questions I asked did I work eight hours and did I work efficiently and the number of hours plug your own number in there some people work a lot more than that and will work less probably most people were more at home and that's not necessarily like unhealthy some people just like to work you know 12 14 hours in a day I actually I do do that if I'm really from just on a particular problem that's obsessing me and that I'm really kind of engrossed in and I want to spend that time but it's worth kind of setting a standard for yourself just deciding for yourself what is a good workday what should I be doing every day and that that applies even if you are working an office job where it's 9:00 to 5:00 in your house imposed by someone else there's still a difference between showing up for eight hours and actually working for eight hours right and if you didn't work those eight hours and the reason was you're on Twitter then you can feel bad about that and if you didn't work eight hours for some like you know family reason or you were ill or something then obviously you don't

feel bad about that that's just something that you just need to ask the question find out if you didn't work eight hours why was it and then decide do I need to do something about that if you didn't work eight hours because you got distracted you do need to do something about that you need to change your working process you should change your access to distractions you need to change something and the same for the efficiency question did I work efficiently because it's okay if you didn't get the job done but if the reason you didn't get the job done is because you worked in some stupid way you just bashed your head against one tiny problem without looking at the bigger picture then you need to ask yourself is there something I can do to avoid that future that needs something to change where it's in the example earlier with the the elevators I think I said if that thing is taking you know ten times longer than you thought then that's not the answer to either these questions you don't care you worked eight hours you worked efficiently that's all you have to ask yourself you should feel good about it so to recap first wake was choose ideas based on value / work I choose efficient ideas those are more important than good ideas a second one was the quick ideas of worth making good ideas worth trying

if you're uncertain about how good they'll be just make them if you're uncertain about how long they'll take try making them just to give it a go for a certain limited period of time do a kind of feasibility study and then decide whether to carry on with it number three is not doing things is instant and free and it always works so it's always worth considering not doing something number four overcome perfectionism by knowing how much is broken stop polishing the silverware by realizing how much of the house is on fire and on the five is if you put in the hours never feel bad about yourself so I think this stuff is important because your life is precious I think it's okay to waste it making video games but it's a shame to spend a lot of it on things that go unappreciated so that's it thank you

and we have time questions so if you want to go to a microphone if you have one and but if you don't that's fine too hello I have a question about burnout specifically from the perspective of working a full-time job and also working on the game on the side you talked about how you you committed to working only on the weekends and working eight hours and feeling good about that I'm wondering one whether you had a time period before that where you were working too hard and experiencing burnout and two after you develop that process whether you still encountered burnout and and if you did how you dealt with that yeah it's a good question and so it was if I started working too hard and then came up with that that schedule to counteract that and whether I ever did experience burnout it was kind of the opposite I started much much more relaxed than that so when I started it was at like one weekend a month maybe because gunpoint was just a hobby project I was just curious about whether I could design a game actually I kind of wanted a job at valve and I knew that they don't care

about your qualifications you just have to make something and show them what you can do so I thought well I should make something and show then what I can do there's always going to be a free thing it was just like a trial project it's going to be like half an hour long and I'm going to make it like six months maybe and so I was only working one weekend a month on average and it was much more like oh god like do this weekend I think I'll try game maker again and just dabble with it which I know I have a lot of friends were kind of at that stage now where they have a I'll be project like that and so it actually it ramped up as it became a bigger deal as people started being more excited about it when I showed it and I start to realize I might be on to something and eventually people start telling me I should charge money for it which is a weird situation I am I asked them I said like people get telling me you had to give this way for free you're an idiot so I did a new trailer and said look am I an idiot should I give this away for free or a charge for it and I got a thousand comments in that blog post and 99% of them said I should charge for it so I did so it became a professional thing as it went along and I was probably working

more and more intensely as it went along and to your burnout question I towards the end it did start to get I did start to read a really critical point where I've been working on it for nearly 3 I was still doing a full time job full-time job wasn't getting any less stressful or less difficult it was a relatively an easy job compared to game development but it was taking its toll I just what connects so long and I just working every day of every week all the time no time off couldn't go to GGC or anything like that because that would be a huge expense in time and at that point I took a sabbatical from my job where I because I've been there for many many years I was able to take three months off unpaid leave and at the end of it I was guaranteed my job back if I wanted it and as soon as I stopped doing the day job and was able to just work on gunpoint like six days a week and

actually have a day off in a week that's I got it finished in less than two months I released it and it was out before my sabbatical was up and it's all well enough in that period that I could create my job right away and I gave my notice such that I think I had to give two weeks notice and after the first two weeks already knew it's all well enough me to quit my job so I gave my notice then and I think technically I was supposed to go back for one day and he never did so I still owe future publishing one day thank you I'm wondering if you can describe at all your process of imposing constraints on yourself because it seems that in some ways viewer that you had the luxury of few constraints and that you had the source of income from a day job I imagined there wasn't an external force sort of holding you to a release date but working efficiently is all about working effectively within constraints so how did you impose kind of whatever constraints you needed to work effectively um so you're asking him did I impose constraints on myself yeah my well my biggest constraint was my own

boredom like I was worried about getting sick of the project and working on it after um I was sick of it I knew it'd be less fun and it was I didn't get sick of it so there were that was my time limit that was my deadline I also stupidly did announce release dates for it I was like it's going to be done I first I was like it's gonna be done by May and then it wasn't done by May and it wasn't done by the end of the year and then I started thinking like I know I'll release I'll give release date that's actually an earliest possible date so I would say it won't be done sooner than May thinking like everyone will understand that and of course when May comes along they're like where the [ __ ] is it I thought you said it would be out by now so then I just stopped giving release dates completely but I still have you know my own internal sense of like this hope this doesn't take more than you know six more months or jump point that point where I was getting stressed that emerges now and it was because I looked at my to-do list and it looked like I had a year left and this was three years in like I can't do another year to get this damn

thing out so that was my only self-imposed constraint I think I mean other than that just I guess like getting bored of it is one thing and also patience is another thing and have a lot of patience I was very antsy to work on it like all day at work I'm thinking daydreaming about what I'm going to do in it and I only get those two days a week to actually work on it so that was felt like a huge constraint as like one of you working all the time but I couldn't so yeah I think that's the best I can do for that Thanks hi I was wondering can you talk about how you efficiently use your time to find and then work with your artists and sound designer oh yeah um I did that by because it was a hobby project I I was thinking I would lease it for free once I started considering charging money for it I still don't know for sure if I would and and so I couldn't promise anyone any money for it so I was in a very like difficult position so I would never get any help at all with it but in the spirit of like just let's make a free thing together I put out trailer with my terrible programmer art and I

asked in the trailer itself in the boys over for it as I was recording it and explaining the game we said obviously you can see I need our help pretty badly if anyone wants to help me then just like send me a sample of what you might do for this and I think at that point I was pretty sure it was going to be free so I don't think I actually mentioned even the possibility of money and so I said I can't pay you it's all free I'm doing it for free you're doing it for free and 30 artists applied to that which is awesome and that's how I found John Roberts who did his sample actually was like this is now I'm just suddenly realizing is very emblematic of working relationship I'm still working with him on heat signature and his sample for it was like a cyborg on a trench coat with like a robot face and a silenced thing which is totally inappropriate for coming quick there are no cyborgs in it it's like it is in the near future but it's all humans and right now John and I having a disagreement about whether heat signature to have aliens it and he thinks it should have aliens and robots and I want to be all humans and all

realistic but he had he worked at frontier developments at the time on Mike I think Kinect Disneyland adventures and some other like Kinect games that David Braben was doing and he was a 3d artist he'd never done pixel art before he did heat up for gunpoint which blows my mind and then once his art was in there the game looked way better and I did a new trailer explaining the game again and saying you know some people said I should have music should I have music and if you want to do music send me a sample and I think we got company actually maybe like 40 composers applied for that which is amazing and that time I did say I don't know if we'll sell it but if we do sell it we'll do like a revenue share thing we'll figure out a fair split and obviously we did decide to sell it and so at the moment I decided to do that I sent around an email saying here's what I think would be a fair revenue share for all of us and everyone agreed to that and then it came out and it did really well and so

they have benefited enormously from that arrangement for sure thank you I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about finding that balance when you have a day job and this is the side project of like trying to work efficiently around the other thing with her impacting your work in the other job yes the question is about working around at a job and management time efficiently my great advantage in that and was very lucky was that my day job as a games writer was I'd have consciously avoided responsibilities like never gone for promotions and stuff I just wanted to be a writer just like a workhorse just churn outwards and do nothing else didn't to be responsible for anything and so that was just good I liked writing but it had the added benefit of my job was pretty much it could be 9:00 to 5:00 if I wanted it to be so at the time I started it I was doing overtime and I was you know if I was working a review I'd usually spend some of the weekend making it better and you know maybe playing the game more

thoroughly and that kind of stuff but a it was a job where if I wanted to I could just say I'm just doing 95 now and that's it and no one ever pressured me about that no one ever complained or was disappointed that I did that kids I worked with just lovely just really nice people and also as a job right in that video game so it's not the hardest apologies to suppose you do hope but it's it's not it's a lot of game where you just play games and write about them all day there's a lot of like organizational stuff and management and stress and stuff but in the just workhorse right to position the worst thing that can happen is that you have to write a lot of words very quickly and you know that's something I enjoy doing anyway and yeah just wasn't a very kind of high stress position and I got to play video games I remember when Bear sex Human Revolution came out was massively excited about that game and I was down to review it and I was working on gunpoint as well and I was it was at the point where gunpoint was getting to be really technical just difficult hard work okay we're gonna wrap this up out

of this um and I was getting so stressed like working on that at the weekend that was like god I can't wait for dream on day and I can just play des axiom revolution Alder Hey so we have to stop for questions there but we can go to the wrap-up room on in 3000 if anyone wants to ask me anything else thank you very much you