Making Kitty Powers' Matchmaker - Adventures of a Videogame Drag Queen

[Music] I'm here I'm Richard I'm here from the UK I'm gonna talk about my game Kitty Powers matchmaker she may have seen let me start my slideshow oops shouldn't be there that's better so um I'm gonna try and come in a little bit early so people can ask questions at the end we'll try nothing awful too much so I've been making games since 1996 and all that time it's been my personal holy grail to make a game that was an expression of everything I love as possible just like every other game designer or know I came that I could direct and not have to answer to anybody else again my audience could play and

get a real clear insight into what I have to say is a designer and something unique that might add a new color to the rainbow or video games a couple of years ago I left I finally found myself with the chance to make that dream happen I left a well paid job in triple-a games after 10 years with enough cash to start something up and a friend and now ex colleague had recommended a graduate programmer to me who was very keen to get into the games industry I've seen success and failures so I was conservative in my approach to this new venture so I got a contract job a medium ala Kuehl working on the fabulous tearaway that contractually allowed me the freedom to work on my own projects without the fear of the dreaded conflict of interest clause working during the

day gave me enough income to pay a full time budgeting program and myself enough to save the contractors later on I the audio designers and artists and those kind of people and enough security to not have to worry about anything other than making a good game which is kind of what you want really so I changed myself to go against the grain of death destruction and zombies that you tend to find in most games I had after all spent decades making driving and shooting games about destroying people cars and buildings I wanted to see if I could create a game I love social interactions and relationships but with my own stupid sense of humor and there is no better way to represent to my stupid sense of humor than way alter-ego beauty powers you can see that I'd been doing drag in my spare time for

about five years and I watched an opportunity to take it to the next level so I decided to put her in the game but I wanted to make our presence meaningful what kind of game did I think kitty would fit well into what I needed was a brief no not that kind of brave kitty a kind of checklist of all the things I wanted it to be so I didn't want any violence or destruction but love and baby-making procedural systems because I loved them procedural characters with real humanity that you would that would feel like they've been designed rather than randomly generated people that even want to help and not shoot in the face I wanted a very English sense of humor because that's what I know best despite the pressure to Americanize it my argument against that being that the best British comedy such as Monty Python am 5 etcetera didn't need to be

Americanized for people to get in and I wanted it to be a premium product with knowing that purchases like the room which is also made in Guildford so after all that it seemed pretty clear to me we'd make a dating agency simulator with Kitty powers of your host it would be so easy we just make a game similar to guess who but without the demonic children but wear your matching procedural clients with potential dates and then seeing how it all panned out in excruciating detail and Kitty powers would be your boss on hand to be sarcastic and saucy every opportunity it would be easy and sell millions or so we thought so before we get some detail at his launch trailer of the game to you a taste of the flavor OMG put your hands together for Miss Kitty Hello Kitty I'm

Kitty Powell matchmaker extraordinaire as we all know the path to true love is long and hard which is why I prefer a new dating simulator Kitty Pao is matchmaker whenever I've got a little black book full of lonely heart it's your job to find them love helps them through delicate daily dilemmas did I get possibly the turbulence tunnel of love [Music] hello pizza powers dating agency you can even match make your main and setting their rotten date will end up in the penthouse of passion or the dustbin of broken dreams scary doesn't it but don't despair cookies because I Kitty powers will be there for you every step of the way

every client deserves their happy ending and it's your job to give them one coming soon kidney [Music] there she is so yeah happy with that actually being a game about relationships it was important to me to be inclusive accessible and respectful respectful to all types of people this of course sounds sweet and lovely but it brought with its own set of issues and challenges that we had to meet sensitively and thoughtfully we were here to bring our players laughs and fun not offend them or make them feel left out we really wanted to make a game about how people really are and how dating really is not a soft-focus romance first but you know the kind of gritty details about the way real people think and act when they're dating at the heart of this with the characters and the procedural system we use to generate and represent them so we wanted to

create characters with depth in humanity not just boring archetypes but real people with flaws and foibles we wanted to play to be able to think about themselves in the terms of the game and identify with these characters we started with personality the more scientific and psychological side of things we wanted to create a system simple enough to be easy to communicate but complex enough to represent everyone at least approximately so each character has five personality categories and each of them can be one extreme or its opposite which ones you think you would be in spite of not wanting to generalize we had to put people into boxes in order to create game mechanics so we were very conscious to make sure that no box was treated as the wrong or right box we loved all the boxes the same we created

ten boxes or types the characters could be each was designed to be an affectionate parody of a stereotypical section of society mostly with a British skew but keeping other countries in mind these types are used to drive the character style and the and interests and also the opinions of other people's Dollinger interests it took a lot of tweaking refining to design the system but we felt that it does a pretty good job of creating characters the player can look at and take a reasonable guess and what type each character is but also simulating the edge cases and unusual randomness of humanity which one are you hipster so let's take a look at an example his Terra who Kitty reliably informs us is a hippie type Tora is bisexual and we have two candidates for her Danny and Skye Danny's job as a festival organizer

should be properly with hippie Tahara although Skye's horoscope is an air sign like Terra's so if they both believe in horoscopes that could help as for what they're into Danny is probably also a hippie based on his outfit in his interests Skye is probably a glam type based on her interests which probably won't appeal to Terra maybe the fishnet stockings however Skye is rather partial to Terra's hair and eye color so that's definitely a bonus personality-wise you can see that all three of them are carefree so I have that in common but that's as far as it goes for Danny whereas guy is almost a perfect match for Terra in the personality Department and finally a few advanced matchmakers we've got guilty pleasures and bad habits these are the bit that I like the best because they make people the most human guilty pleasures are eight interests that go against the characters type because

everyone has their peculiar fables that they don't tell their friends about Terra's guilty pleasures smartphones will probably go down well with glam sky and disguise guilty pleasure paganism is likely to be popular with hippy Tahara where Danny's not likely to be a match in that department because his guilty pleasure is casual video games so it looks like Danny or Skye could be a match for Terra if you chose to talk about the right things on the date but remember not to ask about guilty pleasures or bad habits my first date because they're a bit personal they might upset them which brings us to the dating part of the game in addition to the characters being somewhat realistic the dates had feel authentic too we were keen to evoke the feelings and thoughts that people have been going on a date with someone new so we mined all the usual dilemmas that people have to face when they're on a date what should I wear what should I talk about can I tell a white lie can I

let a fart go can I remember their name and how forward should I be if I like them at the end of the date here's the gameplay trailer so you can see some of those dilemmas in action [Applause] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] despite a bug I think it's been fixed actually already so 20 Comedy in a replayable game also presented us with some unique challenges we had to create a significant amount of imagery to do Kitty justice so that she can have enough presence in the game we ended up doing two photo shoots and a video shoot in order to generate all of the assets we bought a green-screen backdrop from ebay and shot the first a lot of images in my brother's garage later we do reshoots because we decided kitties look needed upgrade which wasn't very happy when I told her and and we also needed to shoot the trailer so that

the two would be consistent both of these later shoes took place in media molecules kitchen because it was picking up we also had to be careful about our age rating most drag comedy could be considered adult so we sailed as close to the wind as we could for 12-plus rating some of the restaurant names were among our sauce here moments I think the Kings held me as my favourite repetition is the killer of comedy so wherever possible we used procedural systems to create variety one source of inspiration was those random name generators you see on Facebook we took a similar approach with our customer and town names remind the internet for lots of popular and unpopular first names for the surnames and town names we analyzed hundreds of typically British names and then chopped them into first and second halves which

could be mixed and matched randomly just doing the just sorry according to bloody Texas juice just doing this Grayson's amusing combinations some of them we actually had to change because they were filthy and borderline offensiveness be removed I don't tell you what they were we also wrote the entire conversation script five times to give the customers dialogue as much variety as possible so each customer is randomly assigned a voice type when they're created which the probability of which one they get is based on their type the scripts are all interchangeable so that each type can be used with every other type in conversation as you can see here this is just a little exchange when when one of the characters kills when you decide to kill the spider and it turns out that they like spoilers nickels spider your

orphans it left behind so kitty appears pretty regularly as well to make smartass remarks this helps to break up the conversation and add Kitty's saucy humor certain lines in the conversation scripts are tagged to pull specific Kitty quips each quip has six variants again to avoid repetitiveness for a total of over 900 quips in our game and that's just her appearing and making stupid comments into our game the entire game script has the same number of words as the novel Lord of the Flies our Japanese localizer wasn't very happy with us all of our systems dialogue and character generation would you invite Google sheets in Google Drive so we hooked up a special scene in unity to download the latest spreadsheets we'll just have to press a button and it would rewrite all the text files that drove the game which is really useful because we were working remotely if you don't have an office it worked wonderfully as

it meant we could both we could work elaborately collaboratively at the same time on the same documents another issue that we was that we couldn't record that much dialogue so we were struggling to find a way to evoke Kitty's uniquely sarcastic just using text and stupid noises then a friend of mine posted these amusing speech mark gaffes on Facebook and I had to be able to pity so we went back through Kitty's entire script and judiciously added speech marks which really helped to make her the sarcastic she is we also had one or two other unique challenges so managing two identities is actually harder than it sounds so during doing interviews is easier as me because I can kind of talk about serious stuff kitty swears a lot and nice to piss about but obviously the crowds love Kitty's fabulosity and it's not like I

can just spin around like Lynda Carter in the bogs and transform magically there are logistics and duct tape to take into consideration a customer emailed us and asked us if we could add a switch to turn off the gaze we chose to ignore that one we also got a little bit of flack for how pink the game was a vocal minority accuses of gender stereotyping targeting women and girls I thought they were the one doing the stereotyping then really but we weren't doing them the game is for everyone and pinkish Kitty's favorite color that's why we did it there were some lovely surprises too so every egx was a great opportunity to see how people took to kitty she made quite an impression everybody loved her she judged the cosplay competition which was fun I also

went Game Informer published an article about me and Kitty it was lovely to receive messages from other drag queens who loved video games I'm telling me how great it was to see one of their drag sisters flying the flag in the games industry so in conclusion you may not make a lot of money you probably won't but being an independent developer is unique and unparalleled opportunity to express yourself creatively in a deeply personal and rewarding way you can bring a kind of joy to diverse audiences that perhaps never expected to get that from a video game and of course broaden the scope of gaming to exciting the horizons and just up as a bizarre freak if I say Kate Hicks this is I've got time for some questions I think maybe have a go type of questions anybody yes good if we run out

time we can go to the breakout room I think he's from 3000 in this building if you want to ask me something afterwards as well and please don't forget to fill out the feedback thing afterwards so there's no avoiding questions go on don't be shy because there you go so you made a fantastic game you created your own IP it's this wonderfully branded product brand is all you it's absolutely fantastic and went over my conservative Southern Baptist mother she loves it it's great yeah and you know this is actually one of the talks that I've been most excited to come to hed see um so my question is what's next are you guys working on anything else we were doing a steam version of the game which should be in the summer and we've actually interestingly done the Japanese version which is free-to-play and

actually the characters artwork has been redone by cutter MOA who created hatoful boyfriend the pigeon dating game so if that goes well we may well bring that back over so I don't know where we have two versions of the game or something one of them is kind of anime characters because they are cool it's where it was really just a sigelei cow just having different faces I don't know about what we're gonna work on next I think we'll probably try and make something more quickly and less expensively this time just to prove that we can do it because this was I mean I love kitty purr house Matchmaker but it wasn't it was very self-indulgent and I allowed myself loads of time to make it but it's not really very practical from a business sense so we're gonna try and make something smaller but equally amusing what was the development time took about

two years to make oh thanks anybody else go on you know you want to okay well we should wrap oh there we go Joe come on make me feel popular um you mentioned the Japanese version I'm interested in culturally hell you think it's gonna go down and what differences apart from the artwork you had to do to make what changes you had to make to the game to appeal to that market we the Japanese publisher chorus who are publishing it they've organized the translation they they were the ones who said it would be better to make the characters of it walk how I as they call it sort of cute an anime style just to make it more appealing to that audience but I think dating sims are popular in Japan anyway so simple logical to take it over there

I don't know if I mean for example there's a game there's a brother dating dilemmas in the game is you have to tip the way to we have to figure out what the percentages but in Japan you don't tip it's very rude so I mean my my thought one that is the game is saying England so and that's why they all have this sort of English isms so I guess we can get away with that kind of thing because I was keen not to change it too much and luckily what I did was when I was designing the game I I wanted to make the decision about free-to-play quite late because I really know what the game was gonna be what form it was final form is gonna take when I started it we built like three versions of it before it was any good so it was quite easy to do free to play just to switch over because the mechanics were kind of built to be able to do either kind of

thing it's alright everybody else that's like you know usually when you make the game like other games you can kind of draw from other games in the genre and I noticed with this like it doesn't look like you know a lot of other dating sims that sort of thing like were there any like well what did you draw from when you go this far out in kind of a new territory we yeah we I really want you to design the game around the situation rather than I didn't you know to create I mean we drew this is a tough one that one actually because we really did design the game from scratch without really any reference at all because we really wanted the mechanics to support the

feeling you that we wanted to kind of conjure up in the player kind of thing but I think we actually drew from things like game shows and a little bit of casino a style stuff because we wanted it to be exciting but we didn't want to put any timers in it as well because I don't I think sticking a timer on game play is kind of annoying most people don't like it and also when you're playing a game quite a casual game like this you want to be able to play it with one eye and sort of while you're doing something else almost kind of thing like if you're on the bus or something and you want to be able to just put it down and go and make a cup of tea come back again and not find that you've games bug it up because you've run out of time or something there is a pause button you know I mean we want to make it super accessible so yeah I hope that answered your question properly I think we've got to wrap up now but I'm gonna go down to

room 3000 if you want to ask me something there thank you very much for listening [Applause] [Applause]