Making Great VR Games: A Postmortem on Skydance Interactive's The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

[Music] hello everyone i'm guy costantino uh this is chris bussey hello we're here to talk to you about the walking dead saints and centers and sort of like the journey from uh creation to market uh it's been a wild ride um so hopefully you'll have a great time ahead of marketing um so take everything i say with a grain of salt and uh chris is the head of production so he's gonna be telling you about a whole bunch of stuff you can't get done so we are skydance interactive uh members of the skydance family uh you may have seen some of our stuff uh we put out archangel archangel hellfire and things and sinners in the game side uh on the tv side we've done stuff like foundation that's uh coming up soon jack ryan altered carbon uh on the film side things like mission impossible the upcoming top gun and the old guard

on netflix uh and we also have a nascent animation division that recently announced that uh they're working on the title uh so we do a lot of things but the people that you're talking to now are the ones that are really focused on the game side of things uh we've been working on vr gaming and before that just sort of um the edge of what technology would allow games uh for quite some time uh so hopefully you'll find this interesting yep i'm gonna hand it off to the chris to talk about the game yeah so we're here to talk about saints and centers um and you know this is uh the third vr game that we uh ended up making um and really learned lessons from from each of them uh go ahead and give me the next slide uh we began knowing that we wanted to make a vr title uh and we knew that uh you know we had the walking dead and so we wanted to live in that world and one of the great things that vr does is really let you

inhabit not just the world but a character and we wanted to put you in that world in fact one of our early you know ideas about what the the you know tagline of the game might be is live the walking dead and so all of our choices were really centered around that wanting the player to feel like that what would they do if they were in this world right and so you know really wanted to focus in on kind of giving player a huge amount of choice in what they do at any time anytime you're talking to anybody you can you know mess with them and interact with them and and do various different things so we wanted those choices to to really be there and we wanted that world to be you know expansive and feel real we wanted to kind of go beyond that kind of entry-level um you know vr experience that you know we had been exploring as well as we got more used to kind of vr as a medium we wanted to really push the limits and bring that full kind of game experience to

that everybody's looking for you know with combat and exploration and you know letting your your weapons and stuff degrade and and that's you know where we kind of came at it from and ended up discovering these pillars right you know the visceral brutality and the the you know anxiety inducing and really that anxiety inducing is the secret sauce that we're going to talk about here next the tension engine this is this is the the engine that runs the whole thing um it creates this kind of vicious loop right so you have dwindling supplies and you have your weapons degrading and you're trying to kind of you know move through the world but as these things are you know degrading that forces you to go out and explore and find new supplies and upgrade your weapons and find new weapons uh and of course when you do that that puts you in contact with other people and and walkers and now all of a sudden you're gonna you know end up in combat and maybe

you'll get injured which forces you to go and you know find medicine and and bandage yourself which you know lets you lead you back to the crafting and so it becomes this kind of tightening cycle that we put you in pressure at at all times and so the world is just a little bit too big to casually explore and your time is a little bit too short or you know zombies come uh you know just as you're kind of hoping for a little respite and stuff like that and so we've got this just beautiful cycle where you know if you're playing really well uh things seem to be going fine but when uh you know you make those small mistakes we're there to just kind of put you into a bit of stress and a bit of tension and you know this is very much in line with the walking dead right you see a walker they're shuffling around a little slowly you think you got it right and then you turn a corner and all of a sudden the situation turned turned to [ __ ] and you don't know how to handle it the the attention engine is predicated

on the concept of fragility player fragility like you're constantly sort of trying to survive and you think just when you think that you have it under control things fall apart you drop a gun in an alley in the middle of a confrontation all of a sudden your firearm is gone you only have a melee weapon the melee weapon falls apart so it's again it's just kind of evidence low between feeling control and the loss of control that powers this yeah it's definitely not intended to be a hero's journey so let's talk a little bit about what that um daily the the average day of a survivor in post-apocalyptic new orleans which is the setting for the game um so you wake up you're going to be at a hub where you have your supplies a little bit of safety or perceived safety and you're going to have the ability to gear up to prepare yourself for whatever quest you're on or whatever objective you have maybe you need some medicine because you're sick and your health has been deteriorating or maybe you're actually

going after one of the tasks that somebody in the world assigned to you uh and so you get ready you go out you take your skiff since new orleans is semi-flooded you kind of make your way out into the city uh and you find that the house that you're meant to go to is fortified there's humans which are the major enemies in the in the walking dead franchise um and they're there they're just kind of they don't want to let you in uh so you have a couple of approaches that you can take uh you may decide a full frontal assault is the way to go uh it doesn't look like you're going to be doing that hot though because you have you know a sixth shooter and a knife and they have ars uh so you can look around there's a crack under the foundation of the house maybe you can sneak in by going under the house maybe you can climb to get up from a higher level uh as you make your way in the house you search room to room trying to find the objective uh and you get ambushed by some walkers because they cracked into the house

there was some fire uh and all of a sudden your time is dwindling people are shooting everywhere you have to make your way out you lucked out this time around you were able to get your objective you kind of noticed it from the corner of your eye and just quickly grabbed it up and so you hear the bells the bells are sort of our alarm system that tells you that the tower the dominant faction is going to flood the area with walkers and so you just got to book it out of there if you don't want to have to survive through a hor a herd and so that's sort of a day in the life right this is kind of a session on gameplay sessions uh we wanted to make it sort of digestible in a short chunk and simultaneously you know giving you that hit of anxiety that the game is really known for absolutely and those layers of choices go throughout you know guy mentions you know you didn't necessarily have to crawl under the house you could have climbed a pipe or done a frontal assault but even a step back from that you didn't even have to necessarily pick this mission you've got a bunch of missions on your map that you could go to and so

we're really kind of leaning into that idea that uh you know these sandboxes allow for player expression on how they want to take things on and even the world itself allows you to you know go in in a bunch of different ways and whatever kind of suits the way that you like to play so yeah these gifts are are indicating you know kind of the melee brutality but really this is an extension of that whole vrness that we wanted to bring the presence that we wanted to have there right you know you're pulling your axe off of your back you're pulling your backpack out you're rifling through putting things into you know sorting through your backpack grabbing stuff out of your slots and and it's one of the real strengths of vr is is bringing that that just sense of presence the entire time and it we really wanted that to come into uh the combat itself as well and and you know whether you're you know swinging an axe or you know one of our you know handmade signs that you know turned into a knife or

using your firearms you know we want to feel the the reload of the gun the aiming the you know sinking the knife really into the walker's head and having to you know drive it all the way home to to you know deal with them but it you know it's all part of this kind of physicality and presence that we wanted to be there and this is why it became kind of one of our central pillars was just the the theirness that you felt as you played the game we knew it was really difficult in vr to sort of nail the concept of melee combat and we also simultaneously knew that vr was one of those places where melee can feel the best you've ever felt it uh and so the team put so much time into making every contact with the walkers various appendages uh feel realistic uh because it just levels up that anxiety that we were talking about earlier and this again leaning into uh our other

you know key pillar is just that and that whole tension engine is really looking for those opportunities for when and and creating them uh for the players to make mistakes right you know be in the left one there you're you're searching through the the house and you're trying to get into a new room with your axe chopping through some wood and of course right as you kind of are making that noise you turn and of course a walker's coming because they're attracted by the sound and suddenly you've got to deal with not getting into that room but dealing with this walker and then the other one you know you've got this guy he's obviously got himself into a spot of trouble with a whole herd coming after him and he's bandaging himself and pulling out his gun feeling all right i've totally got this but you know maybe he doesn't have totally have this right you know that's a as guy likes to point out that's a two shot shotgun that he's got going on there so you know he's feeling totally confident boom you know you see he gets first shot off and then he's just about to get the second shot off and then then what he's to have to fumble and reload or

grab another weapon out of his pack or out of his holster or something like that or hope that he's got you know his katana ready you know these are all opportunities to really find that area for putting the player under real stress and we really wanted you to feel that stress yourself right it's intentional yeah you will learn a lot about yourself trying to survive in this game now you'll learn about your preferences and weapons you'll learn that a two-handed weapon isn't always as cool as it looks so it's something that we feel pretty happy about [Music] and yeah as guy alluded to this is a huge part of the walking dead ip the the human angle of it you know the the great quote i love that maybe kirkman himself who said you know the walkers are the weather you deal with them uh as they come but the real issue what you're really dealing with is people both the people that you meet and interact with but also yourself how you

interact and deal with it we wanted to really kind of explore what you would do when there were no rules what how would you react what would you do when the consequences even within the game themselves are just how you feel about it right you know we we do some uh you know consequence building but it's mostly about exploring how you would deal with all this kind of stress and and possibilities and and wanting to kind of let people live that experience and the yeah the inventory and exploration this is you know more of that kind of vrness is really wanted to lean into that you know physicality of it there you know from the wrapping the bandages around yourself to you know the climbing and stuff like that uh you know and even the map experts you know physically picking up the map and stuff like that we wanted that presence to be there but there were also again opportunities for you to uh you know not play perfectly and and

you know allow that tension engine to come in you know you make a misstep uh while you're climbing and you might fall into the pack of zombies that are down there or you know you grab the wrong bandage or you run out of bandages you forget that you didn't have bandage in your pack and suddenly now when you really net health it's not there for you these are all just more aspects that lean into those kind of key pillars that we were driving towards i think the sentence i used to always use is now it's a problem you know because it's the problem that you haven't anticipated that sneaks up on you and all of a sudden you have to improvise and that's sort of what makes this part of it like i credit the game team enormously because even every small interaction in the game that took a lot of care in making sure that it could be manipulated there's this part in the game without spoiling it that you have to manipulate and the fact that you have to assemble it and manipulate it in order to progress the game just makes it for such a more compelling experience because all of a sudden you're not just clicking a button you're actually having to work the object

within the environment yep uh and you know this is kind of the post-mortem that's always you know a part of looking at uh back on in retrospective i call out the two big vr ones they're obviously ones i'll talk about beyond that but uh you know vr is a new medium uh and the instincts and experience that you've gained as a game developer might not apply quite as much as you would like and so a big win for us was bringing people in all of the time multiple times a week we would have you know one to four people in the office playing through you know whatever our latest section is or a section that we had reworked and we would learn you know sit there and watch the video or watch them live and and just understand like oh that didn't play out exactly as we wanted to or oh that was you know either more or less than intense than we than we wanted it to and so it was a real

uh key part of what we wanted to do was we didn't have that kind of gut to rely on and so we had to kind of go to you know real world testing to to find out exactly where we're at and to that that brings me to the second point which is that iteration you're gonna it's gonna be longer and more than what you may normally be used to and you should really make sure that you've allotted additional time for that it's important to really get to those those highest highs uh you know other traditional ones that we always have you know which are exacerbated again by the fact this is kind of a new medium is you know making sure that your team is the right size for the the the portion that you're in you know and you don't want to be too large and pre-pro nor too small as you're kind of you know entering into production and not really keeping a close track on where you are in your production cycle so that you're making sure that your team is the right size uh for the thing so you don't have overruns or that you're you know running late and stuff like that those are all you know key things that we had to kind

of tackle and you know had various successes on on each of them uh plus and minus for for that and the the team that worked on the walking dead saints and centers has shipped a lot of titles over the years uh and so when chris says take more time than usual uh in iterating around the schedule you really means it because um the the team has worked on a lot of sort of uh 2d games and the other a lot of lessons have been learned in the decades that 2d games have been around in vr you'll run into some stuff that you really need to kind of like build yourself from scratch and so it's important to account for that yep so we're gonna get into what i like to call our brief timeline the screenshots uh which shows you sort of like where we were in february 2019 this is a year out from launch as you can tell the models are not completely built

textures or temp there's not there aren't any textures in some of this um and so this is sort of like the beginning of the game working the systems being kind of proven out and getting ready to be fully built out um and you'll see that already we have some of the mechanics there but the walkers don't even have teeth so you know that they're not quite there yet yeah this is this is like a month into production here right you know we've got some of the buildings built out from our from our pre-pro you know we've started to kind of build the bus we've got you know really early examples of of what the walkers are going to look like but you'll see here on the next slide just a few months later the hub you know and bus area is looking very much uh like it's gonna be when its ships were already kind of you know really cruising along whereas you know the other areas are less built out and even the the walkers are you know fairly uh similar looking uh and even the ones in the lower right right you know we

those weren't even models that we ended up shipping right so we're still kind of iterating a little bit on kind of the walker stuff as we're rolling in production here yeah you got the player has the measles you got a whole bunch of like naked old men coming at you pretty unsettling i credit our qa staff with a lot for putting up with us and then yeah here we are you know a few months later and just a few months before we end up shipping and you can see that a lot of stuff has really come online the hub and the crafting is there the journal and the ui are are really starting to approach final lighting uh and effects the details on all kind of the weapons and stuff are really coming together this is uh you know we're nearing the end of production at this point and starting to go into pre-pro for the final push and then these are our release you know screenshots uh you can see that you know the blood doesn't look like measles it looks you know final and excellent the details on all of the weapons is there the walkers look amazing and grotesque

you know signage and and all the kind of lighting and details and atmospheres is is in the web is in the world so it's you know it's feeling really good and this is where guy gets to talk that's right um so as he's that was sort of the production timeline uh when it came to marketing this game there's a lot of challenges because the market was just not quite there yet so there's a lot to figure out how do you find vr players uh where do you approach them i think that we spend a lot of time sort of doing uh preliminary research in the various ways in which we could reach players because again being in a in a vr ecosystem your budgets are restricted you got to be a little smarter with all your spend buckets uh so a lot of what we ended up doing is sort of approaching it from the get-go to come out with one core tag line that we could all rally around and as chris was talking about um you know the

idea that this was the first walking dead game where you weren't playing the character but you were playing as yourself uh it was really appealing so i came out with who are you which is sort of like our um call to action to say come find out i think you guys really nailed it with that one by the way i just loved it when we fell upon that one we we felt we had the opportunity finally to say you know what step through the screen and take matters into your own hands and so that's sort of what we did oh i know why you've come here i know what you're looking for but what i still have to ask tourists is who are you [Music] now that the dead lived forever

that every scrap counts that everybody's just in it for themselves do you hide in dark places do you kill from afar or do you prefer it up close it's a big world out there and there's no one left to tell us what to do so tell me tourists who are you if i didn't do it someone else would have there was no preventing her exhaust do it already finish the [ __ ] please just stop here not like that in him now [Music]

that thing still gives me chills man i love that thing i still get goosebumps jb is uh something else uh that was uh our gameplay announced trailer where we really sort of finally um opened up about like what the game was going to look like how it was going what it was going to play like uh an important step uh something that thankfully uh everybody seemed to like um and it was really sort of meant a lot to the team to finally see it all come together uh because you sort of get when you're really close to the product the changes are incremental but when you finally see a video that sort of like brings it all together and presents the parts of the game that are objectively the ones that are most interesting um it really kind of motivated the team for the final sprint

uh and as you may have seen if you have um uh looked us up on youtube uh we are we were watched way more than we were played like way more people uh enjoyed watching our content uh then people had vr headsets even uh and the the thing that we that we think it made this possible is really that sort of feeling of freedom that the game aligned with the forwards if you look at josh dubs top video uh it's the top video for of our game it's not even about our game it's just some crazy the ravings of a lunatic is the way i would summarize it i think you'd probably take that as a compliment but it's it's a fantastic example of how um the freedom of expression granted to you by the sandbox uh can be so powerful in getting the word out uh helped us a ton it helped us keep the momentum going throughout the length of the marketing campaign um and it was really important because uh one thing that we understood from the very beginning is go after the entire audience uh that we wanted to tackle is gonna

take time it's gonna be a marathon not a sprint uh and it started from the sort of walking dead fandom but we realized that a lot of uh walking dead fans didn't have vr headsets uh and even if they were survival power players only a subset of those were a vr player so we sort of looked at the vr market as sort of like our total addressable market we thought that if you could stomach um the violence then and you had a vr headset you were gonna play this game um and so we went and sort of went about it that way but again within that core uh we sought out people that had that loved uh sort of uh a deeper experience of gameplay in vr and it sort of had their vr legs already so to give you an idea uh this is what our sales timeline looks like um we start in january we're now in february if you notice this is sort of like um it sort of shows a trajectory of growth uh and the reason that it ended up working this way is because

uh we had to stagger lunches for our platforms and what we did would turn that we ideally wanted to simship in january however um you know game development being a creative endeavor uh we got to a point where we just wanted to go to each platform in the best way possible uh and so we took our time uh and then timing ended up favoring us and it also made sure that throughout the year we had positive reminders that this game was out there uh one thing that i credited the team enormously with um is that they really took their time creating the game experience on psvr on quest that was very specifically customized to the platform uh and i think players have told us that they really enjoyed that uh they definitely have shown it to us through sales um where you look at this timeline you're like all right this looks great but this is the way we look at this timeline it's like half or a third of our eventual timeline

uh and the reason for that is because vr is very different and sort of like your aaa even your indie space you have a lot more time uh some of the advantages of marketing of vr game is that there's just not as much competition um some of the disadvantages is that there's fewer people in the market uh so you have to kind of make the right decisions when it comes to spend when it comes to the message that you're going to put out there the windows that you have to get that message out there um quite a few lessons that we learned uh that i want to share with you uh one of the things that is obviously this is true of any business that like adapt to your circumstance i guess is the first lesson uh turn sort of the challenge into an advantage uh it required extra investment to do so uh but we approached it from a standpoint of we can have three launches in a year and if we do it the right way we can get a benefit from this sort of staggered release and that was really to to what guy was saying earlier you know we we recognized that the

vr market was a smaller market and so we really wanted to make sure we were capturing as much of that small market as we could and so we couldn't we wanted to lean into that psvr and the quest ports because we wanted to make sure that and even pimax right you know when we first launched and realized that we you know we weren't supporting that it was important that we you know whatever corner of the vr market a player might approach from we wanted to make sure that you know we were uh getting in giving them the best experience possible on that yeah you'll always get the person that's playing on shadow pc through a virtual desktop and also bought like an index and the real or it's using a vibe with the knuckles and that has to work right and so there's a bunch of combination uh we really like paid a lot of attention the the game team reacted very rapidly post each one of those launches with any issues that were creeping up uh and given the the really technical

nature of the game um they had to respond very rapidly so a lot of time was allocated for doing so uh we over indexed on communication across uh our social channels but funneled it all into discord because it was just an easier place to have a more casual conversation with our hyper-engaged fans um and then on top of that uh we partner very closely with platforms uh the one of the advantages of vr is the platforms are much friendlier with one another because they're not a this like dire competition that the more established market is in uh they're all just trying to like make cool experiences happen in vr so um the guys at sony were great guys oculus were great valve was awesome and they helped us really get the message out once the game was proven um and that's a lot of what you know once it's all these gates that you have to work through as marketer and we were fortunate enough to be able to kind of like power through each one of them uh and yeah last but not least a lot of people bought quests too so

you know keep that in mind so in other words uh we collected some heads that was pretty good we put them up in our bus and i've been looking at him ever since um and i think chris has some final vr lessons for us before we go yeah i mean i think the if you listen to zuckerberg five or six years ago when he you know acquired oculus that kind of got everybody excited like oh my god vr's here but at the time he said look this is going to be five to ten years out and here we are about five years later and realizing hey mark he's a pretty smart guy the good news is the market is growing both um you know the hardware is getting better there are more players out there but at the same time you know the we as game developers are starting to kind of understand what the verbs are more and more and so there's actually a really big opportunity there to make a non-small size investment and

get a good return on it so you know obviously you've got to be careful and and make sure that you're managing things well and that you're offering something that that you know excites players and brings them in with uh you know newness or you know uh uniqueness but it's uh it's there the opportunity is there and i would totally encourage people to to go and uh explore vr i think that uh the biggest problem we have is is getting people in headset um we're huge fans of vr and you know this the walking dead and vr we're not done with it you know we're we're going to continue to explore uh a future here it's it's it's too exciting not to yeah i think that there's a lot of things that you can do uh in this space that you that allow you for that experimentation um it's definitely when when you go down that rabbit hole i'd say figure out what the things that you made that are great

are and then sort of stick to a couple of them uh for the messaging around your title um but definitely you can experiment a lot more and to be fair like oh there's people experimenting on games on all platforms uh but i think that you'll find this platform really interesting so yeah that's uh the walking dead saints and centers we wanted to take a you know a quick opportunity to kind of walk you through some of the development and marketing aspects of the of the title thank you for coming take care see ya