Micro Postmortems: 'Sky', 'Blaseball', and 'Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator'

[Music] hello everybody we got we gotta get started i know there was a card reader problem but um it turns out we still have to end at 5 20. so we got to get it moving along because we have three delightful micro postmortems uh hello i'm brandon sheffield i'm unrelated to this but i run the career seminar and so that's why i'm here talking to you right now i hope you enjoyed it this is the last talk of the show um so yeah woo indeed [Applause] we've almost made it so we got three post mourners for you we got gabe mcgill talking about uh blazeball we have yes we have vincent diamante who i realized i have known for 22 years

um talking about the audio for sky and then we have zalavir nelson jr who's going to talk about the uh warlord or i can never say the whole space warlord organ trading simulator yeah there you go there's there's so many words in that title okay let's get started with gabe hi everybody congratulations on surviving gdc i have a hundred and fifty slides so i'm gonna go quickly uh my name is gabe mcgill i'm a product designer at the game band uh i joined baseball right when it started so we're really going to do this we made a lot of slides joel is sitting in the front shout out we gave a talk the other day on baseball and it turns out that giving a talk with another person is incredibly difficult and uh never having met him before in my entire life it's very hard to do so so what is baseball well it's a baseball league that's really all you need to know except for the part where it's also

a horror game or the community is the one who's driving the story blazeball is really a game of choice this is probably the best encapsulation we've found and it's really really weird um instead of having a playthrough for every single player like in say a video game we all have one shared understanding of the universe blazeball is just one thing but it's kind of really hard to know what's going on if you're just on the website so our understanding actually takes place on reddit discord etc we also develop it on a highly compressed time schedule we have an election every week and we're basically running an entire sports season in that week so if we need to change something we find out wednesday and we have to make the change by sunday so we iterate rapidly and our iteration is primarily dictated by the outcome of an unpredictable system we're building the simulation the fans are setting up inputs we don't know what's going to happen and that's the thing that we use to drive direction and we get really really weird by what i

call boiling the frog we take incremental steps adding one simple system at a time and then the combination of those systems together gets us to very strange places chaos reigns the experience then becomes about those iterations your experience is grounded in a baseball that is until somebody gets incinerated on the field then your experience is grounded in baseball where somebody gets incinerated on the field awesome ultimately though uh the fan input i think is one of the things that makes it the most unique we aren't just uh going out of our way to tell a story we are actually allowing the fans to control what goes into it in the same way that maybe a tabletop gm would so we have this combination of factors the output of the simulation input from the fans and our direction of development all of those things coincide to make the thing that is placeball we can't do everything at once though

you can imagine if uh everyone in this room wanted to go to a different place to eat uh it'd be really hard to pick a place to go eat so we need to boil it down to one simple thing that's why we have one election each week in order to coalesce the entire community into one specific movement forward so like what am i talking about we're basically on the same side as the fans we are also watching this live thing play out saying oh my god can you believe that just happened and pro basically what we're trying to do is create the possibility space so we think in terms of systems primarily even though the experience we're trying to create is a narrative one we break it down into these three categories so beats are the things that we specifically do this is going to happen these are great moments to say introduce god have god show up and speak to you for blaspheming or succeeding

um and these beats often create prompts so prompts are a question to the player god just showed up and told you that you're doing a bad job what do you do we have a whole bunch of different kinds of questions we can ask and what you care about is a really cool one and ultimately the way that question is going to be answered is either by a narrative decision or filling in some sort of data we have this concept of what we call the ad lib where we know something is going to happen but then we allow the fans to say to whom so we have these two things that we try to conflate as often as possible system and narrative if something is important in terms of the story we should see it take place on the field of play it should happen during a baseball game if for example loot cookies shows up better impact what's actually going to happen in the sport and uh every time we make a prompt we are also making a promise when you tell us what you care about we

will respect that and how do we respect that well uh we like to reward with consequence the consequence is probably a system and it's probably a cursed system ultimately though uh the best situation are when the fans have a very clear idea of what's going on what they want to do what they can do and then we throw them a monkey wrench or monkey's paw if you're unfamiliar with the term it's basically uh an unintended consequence so you get the thing that you do want and you also get something that you very much do not you can think of it like a mixed success in a tabletop rpg you get what you want and you get what you want but this allows the fans to have like one very specific goal that they're trying to work towards and then the complication of the story comes out as we introduce some secondary effect

sometimes they just want to mess around and find out what happens uh but typically when it's more focused everybody has more fun it's a lot easier to tell one specific story even if uh ultimately that ends up in a labor strike so when we do a good job we give the fans the thing that they want and then also introduce a complication that moves the story forward um there's not really any point to all of this unless there are people playing it so we have this concept of the digital stage the key here is that we have a shared world that is changing when it changes it changes at the same time and it changes for all of us this is pretty different than how we would say experience in mmo i play a lot of final fantasy 14 and in that game i'm very much in control of my story i can go do the main story quest for 60 hours and that might be entirely different from your experience of rating but in baseball we're always doing the

same thing we would be watching the same story unfold for both of us well okay or maybe 24 because we have 24 teams or maybe like three to four hundred because that's how many players there are in the league but i think ultimately the more it can be boiled down the more successful it is narrative choice takes place on the collective stage everyone here participating gets to input into the choice then we all experience the consequence together here's an example for the forbidden book exists we open the forbidden book something bad happens but because it's happening in real time the experience can still be asynchronous um we love to tell stories we want to tell you about what happened just look at this talk so for the fans typically the experience of something like the forbidden book goes like this

and even if we're having an asynchronous experience where the way that we're digesting the story is second hand through our friends the change still happened in the moment it's the same thing for all of us even if our understanding of it is different the world we knew yesterday no longer exists and now the player has been transformed i'm just going to reiterate that we don't know what happens the simulation isn't deterministic we set things up with probabilities we have some idea that you know x could occur and then we roll dice we want specific things to happen though and then we find out at the same time as the fans to whom unfortunately this means that we have to be in a state of sort of constant vigilance if you don't know who your protagonist is it's really hard to plan the end of your story so whatever happens on the website is the truth this is something that we say

to ourselves all the time especially when it comes to leaning into bugs if there's a bug that affects the data well the only data we're manipulating is the production so that means that now we have a new universe reality is different and it's different because that bug actually did happen in the real world and we try not to unwind things or roll back things unless it's actually critical to do so is one example we have a promise to the fans where the community is going to be the one who's driving the story so if someone is able to say get infinite votes we would undo that because it's breaking the fundamental promise of what baseball is so let's run through an example as quickly as we can in terms of how we would design one of these things we have the idea of umpire that's the guy who stands behind the catcher if you're not familiar with baseball i'm sorry i can't really help you because they get the ball thrown at them really hard they need to be really big so that means that their two responsibilities in this stage play are

to loom and to pass judgment that's awesome if you're making a horror game that's fantastic so what do they do well thematically we've already established we have these two things so then we want to figure out how can we make the simplest possible system to achieve those two things most of the time we get inspiration from something else in this case stephen bell who unfortunately can't be here asked what if an umpire could shoot somebody like a naked gun obviously a great idea so because that's either horrific or hilarious depending on the framing we kind of roll with it you can interpret it in either way that makes a lot of questions though when you can kill somebody well you have to figure out where they can go what happens in the simulation can a dead player play baseball in this case no that's like specifically the thing it means you can't anymore so if an umpire incentive it's a player

they have to be removed from the team and replaced with someone else and that was the in the system as it was first introduced just those two rules the player goes away and a new player is there instead and then we keep adding to it so if someone dies where do they go and we introduce the answers to those questions is piecemeal so we find out that players get incinerated and leave the league and then we find out that they end up in the hall of flame and then we find out that the hall of fame actually its purpose is to create an all-star team to kill an antagonistic god so umpires always existed but we need some sort of inciting incident and we really want that inciting incident to be driven by the fans in this case uh it was the opening of the book it's a scripted moment that uh resulted from an election the player that it specifically chose to incinerate for the first time we didn't choose we just set up a simple rule pick the best player then we wrote a script to establish what would happen the umpire's eyes turn white mode the swallowed by a hellmouth

the first incineration shocking but it's also tipping our hand at the system we introduce solar eclipse at the same time as incineration that is all you basically need to know for the system the interpretation though would be something like this uh an umpire just killed somebody what does that mean and that second piece really if you think about it is what playing baseball is so you ask yourself questions like can players just die now but only in specific circumstances this is the part where we can sort of tell the story it's not just a random die roll it also allows us to introduce more complications so we have a modification of unstable a player becomes unstable they're more likely to be incinerated and then debt players can cause each other to become unstable in this way each of these very simple pieces one after the other is getting us to a place where we have a very rich story blazeball is all about kissing keep introducing simple systems

let's talk about how this works on a typical week it's monday well except it's actually sunday um because that's when the election happens so it's really important to know what the new fan input is going to be we pay a lot of attention on sundays are there new story lines are there new introductions of systems are there things we didn't anticipate does some player now have multiple modifications that will work together in some unexpected way how did our life get complicated then we have an idea of where we want to go and maybe we have a very clear specific idea of where we want to go just going to give a little bit more context for the forbidden book this is the actual text in the early days joel was prototyping the game and really allowing the development to be sort of completely driven because all the fans were the internal developers so we needed to introduce this choice when we finally got to it being live how are we going to introduce this system we chose to do it by a mystery box and we assumed well that's a pretty juicy mystery box so the fans chose to open the forbidden book we had a very clear

idea of the outcome the sim incinerated the players and all together we told the story of baseball that's great when we're doing a good job we have a big stack of simple systems that's driving the narrative forward in collaboration with the fans everything makes sense on its own and the part that's really fun is imagining how this is going to play out when they're all stacked together we go into it with this sense of being incredibly flexible and embracing the wild ideas that we or the fans have but uh i don't know that was really quick right uh can you remember everything i just said i probably can't um sometimes it's too much and we really want the moment to moment and big takeaways to feel cohesive it's why i structured the talk in this way to try and overwhelm you with information so that you would understand better what it's like to play blazeball eventually the stacking systems get too complicated and we need to cut some away but uh if any of you are narrative designers or storytellers taking away player mechanics is probably the least popular

thing you can do so you really need to adjust it from a narrative perspective another mistake i would say we made is leaning into team stories if all 24 teams are trying to achieve a specific goal well we have 24 threads going at once and that's too many so we want to try and simplify things get back to the place where we are running one main story that's easy to communicate to your friends ultimately it's about building tools that allow the cool stories that come out of baseball to be communicated to each other all right hi there my name is vincent diamante and uh where's the thing here here we go

all right hi yeah my name is vince diamante i do not want to do camtasia i think i did that right cool this is the sky children of light music micro post mortem uh quick intro sky children of the light is a multiplayer social online game where players engage in acts of friendship and compassion and kindness uh while exploring a beautiful and mysterious world uh we've been working on this game for a while now and by a while i mean really really freaking long it started out in 2012 you might have seen that we announced uh that it was going to be in beta in 2017 and we beta tested for a long time two years before we eventually got to a global release in july 2019 and i've been with that game company for that entire time since 2012 i was the audio director all the way up to 2019 and then once we globally launched i'm like okay maybe i can relax a bit i'll just be the music composer

for a while and uh that's what i'm doing right now is that a good a good idea well we'll see [Music] anyways skye really is sort of a story of a couple of different games and different workflows that went into it because 2012 was really weird when it came to the mobile space you know some people think wow mobile games it's like this monolithic thing it's actually changed a whole hell of a lot back then we were thinking oh wow journey came out and it was pretty good and let's do something with that in in mobile we can sell a game for 99 cents 299 whatever on the app store that wasn't working after a couple of years so we had to change that we had to change what we were selling we had to change the structure of that which ultimately meant ultimately meant we were changing what the game was and i was actually really struggling to deal with that because for the most part i was being a very artistic audio director i was just

hanging out and being like hey level designer what are you doing uh let me make something really cool for this level or if someone had like a cool mechanic i would say yeah let me make the sound of flying or maybe make the cool music and the rhythm of flying and all that it was a really cool exploration process for me for those uh first four or five years of stuff and all throughout that time i was very aware of what that game company was before that flow flower and journey yes journey did have that multiplayer component but was a very limited component and really the other thing that was there was that very important very solid narrative arc that brought you through that experience and how do you define that well it's a series of moments series of set pieces that we've got there oh yeah you finally have that vertical sequence through that underground temple and journey yeah set pieces moments let's score those

things so for me as a music composer i was definitely thinking about hitting those moments in a really solid way making things that were beautiful along this particular trajectory so yeah making sure that there was an awesome soundtrack for that single player story campaign experience but in addition to that we really wanted to make a robust online multiplayer experience not just oh someone might drop in into your game and then you could go to the end there's going to be more multiplayer four people eight people maybe even more than that that you join in and these um more along the lines of an mmo instance experience and these guys would come into the world and do different things and for me as a music composer i was thinking how do i actually rectify what the music is that's going to be playing at any given time someone wants their emotional story experience they're interacting with this really cool npc and then they get smashed into an instance with a couple of people that

are just goofing around and doing silly tricks some of you who've played journey might know about people who are into out of bounding just doing really cool things with the weird level geometry this also happens in this game too hey they just wanna have fun they wanna play around with this how does that actually jive with what's going on with these players that are playing the story and we didn't really have a good answer to that except maybe let's just make some tech in order to try to deal with that that is not the thing that i was looking for that's the wrong slide uh okay so there's a missing music texture music tech one of the cool things that we did was we have all these music callbacks that are in the game so i did all the music in uh cakewalk sonar until we got into reaper and i kept on using reaper cool thing with reaper is that you can do these things called rescripts and script actions where you run a script

i'm reading midi note data and then it can export these markers into the project which i then exported into fmod music events which would give me some cool things uh i could know at any point in the music what chord is being played uh what the melody was what the dynamic level was and that was really useful because then i can jive the sound effects that are playing with the harmony and key center of the music that's going on and we made a pretty good decision early on to actually make this happen for all the music so i was doing things in cakewalk sonar then i eventually did things with reaper running rescripts it was great there was a missing slide in here which is actually really important i'll try to describe it um there were two other pieces of tech that we did specifically for rectifying the different types of music in the game one of them is sync so we can actually sync up

what clients are actually playing and say hey there's music one that's playing on iphone one okay let's make sure that music one is actually playing on all three four eight iphones at the same time at the exact same point and it will sound really cool and awesome okay but what if i don't want to do that then we introduce this idea of not just music background but also music foreground so if someone is doing something elsewhere in the level like they go into a little nook and they say okay i'm going to do this little side quest that's not related to the main story that you actually experience in that level then you can experience music foreground maybe the music foreground is a stinger maybe the music foreground is actually a looping piece of music that accompanies this particular quest but they will have music foreground and they can have their music not synced with the other people that are experiencing stuff in the single-player campaign and that's what we thought we needed because there

was this clear divide between these different types of music the music of the core narrative where you would have cut scenes for experiencing the cool things that the elders of the world were actually showing you but then there were all the other things that came along the line uh once we realized that we weren't just being a free to play um a premium game we were being a social game and this idea of seasons and events then maybe that music is going to be stuff that consistently is foregrounded so stuff like new year's music valentine's music things like that where even specific multiplayer situations and quests so we're going to introduce a new space in the game that's specifically a flying arena all right maybe that music is foregrounded but it's also synced between all the players that actually want to play in that particular space so hopefully i described that okay [Music] ratios of music so at global launch there was about 100 megabytes of music and 100 megabytes is

after things were crunched down into the fmod music banks and the core narrative music was about 75 some megabytes and then everything else was the rest uh seasons quests and sheets those basically correspond to the new stuff that would come along the line there's stuff in there because we were beta testing this idea of seasons from 2017 to 2019 and it seemed pretty cool we kept on going with that and so now we're on 14 seasons and the core narrative music is still there still 70 some with a few more here and there uh but now the music bank size is huge it's 250 megabytes compressed uh and it's actually really crappy quality but that's okay you know it's an iphone uh ratios of music another way of looking at it is there's so far been three albums released volume one which is about a cd worth is that core narrative music volume two is events and situations and

volume three is seasonal i mean that's there's a lot of music in this game uh but i put a whole lot of work into that core narrative stuff forty percent of the core narrative music is live orchestral and just uh throw some numbers out there uh we booked an orchestra it's the famous orchestra in macedonia 47 piece orchestra uh we recorded for six hours 30 minutes of music recorded with that 8 000 euros that's uh this was definitely on the low end and actually kind of affordable if any of you are interested in doing that stuff whether you're a musician or not 8 000 euros it's still pretty accurate even those these are 2018 2019 numbers the rest of the music was synth or synth and live solo just like a single soloist like a single flute or whatnot and as we continue to do the seasonal music that's what we did um and we had to keep on going with that so we're on 14 seasons right now it's been between five and 30 minutes of

new music for each season so we're doing new areas new side stories and often really new mechanics so we're going to expand the flighting flying mechanics we're going to go crazy and let you swim underwater and stuff like that and these things are happening at a regular clip new seasons are basically dropping every two to three months and there's time pressures there so 30 minutes of music and it's one thing to be like okay i can do 30 minutes of music for this new flight season and then oh wait there's 30 minutes of music for these new mechanics in 30 minutes okay it can be really tough to just keep that up so we're definitely not going with live orchestra for all that now the thing that kind of frustrated me on reflection with that is that one cares about the core narrative music anymore and we put so much effort into that you know you got the orchestra and i spent besides that cost there there's also the other stuff okay the time that i need in order to actually create all the scores for people to read

and prepare that and deal with the the music orchestra coordinator and whatnot it's really tough sort of that feeling there players love the new music that wasn't actually polished the same way but honestly it's all right i should have realized because of the the differences between the music that i was making as well as the needs of the music and i think this thing's not playing because it's a powerpoint whatever we got these two game soundtracks and they're sort of fulfilling different functions uh there's the music that we worked on and we polished and actually was really important from a marketing perspective and part of communicating to people not just potential players but to everyone else in the world hey we care about this game we are polishing this game there's that marketing and promotional value sometimes it's really important to just have that bullet point there and that's great to a certain extent

and then the game comes out and it's really so much more about the player connection connecting with the mechanics even if i'm not polishing the music the same way because we're we don't have the time or the money to actually deal with an orchestra it's so connected to those game mechanics i'm not thinking oh i want to make this cutscene awesome i should have really thought about that question before who cares about this cutscene you know 45 seconds in a single player campaign it just sort of came to mind it's like oh yeah of course that's what i do i know about the cut scene so i'll polish them instead it's oh right people care about what is going to be this new sound of swimming underwater i need to make sure that i create a musical experience that properly correlates with that and players responded to that they don't care if there's no orchestra there they don't care if we're not polishing that but that connection and making sure that what i'm doing as a music composer is properly motivated by the things that

players actually care about that's really what's important there so yeah if you have any questions feel free to email me i'm also on twitter and thanks i think yours is over here so i'm solving nelson jr i do a lot of stuff uh and i've eaten at denny's four times in the last three days so if i'm not entirely lucid blame the denny's corporation i've worked on over 60 games in the past six years uh i was a journalist once upon a time including running a column for pc gamer magazine for two years i've worked in rpgs and print i've written comics i used to go around the world wearing jeff goldblum masks for non-criminal purposes uh this is a post-mortem of one of my latest games space warlord organ trading simulator

and it's going to run a little bit different than a formal porsche modem for some reasons we're about to go into first what space world organ trading simulator is is a sci-fi body horror market tycoon you know because that's you know a breakout genre that everybody needs it's really hot right now on steam uh it's revolves around the one thing everyone has wants and needs in a strange and evolving universe organs and this has been the cause of an existential crisis because when you're making games that are idiosyncratic people treat you as a monolith like you are making these games alone instead of actively enabled by a team to create singular visions and bring them to life in an ambitious and expansive way and it's frankly so uh i want to talk about how our studio works if only because people all week have been saying how do you do what you

do and why did you do that to your body at denny's strange scaffold uses something i call the constellation model essentially my work and purpose not just as a creative director but as a person is to find ways to make games better faster cheaper and healthier for the people who build them i create a singular vision uh i act as a prism and filter for bringing that vision to life but my job from there is to enable and empower the people around me to do the best work possible in a healthy environment and see themselves inside the game they create i assemble a team uh and from each person collect the specific things we need to bring that vision to life and from that point when their work is done they're done we might work with them and connect the dots in a different configuration for another project if there's a specific need that arises on a different project they can come and address it they might voltron off and do their own thing but essentially creating this wider cloud and constellation of collaborators

ensures that we can have really personal games that still exist on a micro budget scale and that emphasize the human health of the people who build the games more so than the projects themselves because i would really rather build a bad game well than make a great game in a way that destroys a single human life uh this is guided by a few key phrases behind our studio uh but one of them is just frankly we want to provide fair compensation for the most flexible interesting work you can do at a given time one of the jokes we have inside of the studio is that we rehabilitate seniors because when you've been working on the same game for five years under shall we say not charitable circumstances being told hey do you want to make a game about organs and be treated fairly and join a team where even if something arises in your life there will be other people who can support you in specific and individual ways it feels like a

breath of fresh air uh and we can talk about uh how the game did but we were next to halo for like game pass it did well okay uh it got it got very flattering uh uh frankly surprising critical and commercial attention and earned back its development costs even putting aside the game pass deal very quickly it did not sell mega hits but it is profitable and sustainable and the people who made the game have gone on to both continue to work with the studio and make their own things in a way that preserved their creativity and humanity which is our purpose for existing but through all of this people are acting like this was my game and i am not going to downplay my own capabilities as a creator or my role in maintaining that vision but i don't make games alone and i don't think i would enjoy it so how we're going to structure

this talk is i'm going to basically take you through our credits list and con gdc into giving me a several thousand dollar pass so i can do an ad for all of the incredible people i worked with and how inside of this vision that is mine you can see the individual people who worked on it and their perspective in bringing that game to life first i want to talk about uh sam chant he is our programmer he's the reason why this game works on a connect in 2022 [Music] [Applause] as you can see here sam has a deep distrust of the unity engine and so he scaled our actual screen space to be the size of several football fields so we could just drop in sprites and not tell unity uh his perspective on again making games better faster cheaper and healthier and creating collaborative tools means we can make anything

any major piece of content in the game within two to five minutes and it's created in a workflow that is itself joyful because the process of making games should be as much of a joy if not more so joy than playing them we have ben chandler who when i was uh originating the concept i said hey what what how does this even look i have this idea in my head is that pixel art is this what is this uh and then he dropped something that he should have fairly put a content warning in my inbox and said does it look like this and i said yeah yeah ben it does ben chandler has a way of seeing worlds and of rapidly iterating on visual concepts that meant he fused 2d pixel art that's very strong in its identity with ray traced 3d engine graphics and stuck them into a single thing that looks like

a cohesive whole ben was our audio director julia minamata our second artist on the team uh created the pixel portraits that defined its world and looking at the portraits of the game and how this has come together you might see it as again a singular collaboration but actually two artists with very complementary but also divergent skill sets worked together to make something that looks like nothing else out there rj lake our sound composer created a dynamic soundtrack that nearly melted to computers uh every single tab in the game has a different mix of a central theme that's being made that also has an escalating mix once your trading day begins so we ended up making like four different mixes for eight different screens for every portion of the game and in our roughly 20 gigabyte repo for the title 19 gigabytes are sound files rj lake is a madman and also someone

with a priority on team health and on finding reasonable ways to bring things to life that even with the madness finds method to enable his collaborators and focus on the singular vision for the title hunter bond uh created this gif he is an uh artist uh he used to be a carpenter he is now a marketing expert and his insistence on supporting the team overall and to thinking and talking about how we can even turn down opportunities to ensure that the team had useful uh time to preserve themselves as human beings and focus on larger press beats as part of the way this game came to be marketing is a point as a part of the development team and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or ignorant [Applause] judith mccrory earlier in the development process we said hey we made

a game that looks like this how do we turn it into key art and judith taking her skills from cartoon network among other places found a way to translate this into key art that defined the branding for the title astrologer games our qa team uh also a independent developer in their own right who understands the needs of independent development qa is a part of the development team came in and [Applause] introduced us to the glory that is notion and organized uh the issues and points of feedback that could be brought into our title in a way that revolutionized several parts of the game even right up to the point before release to make sure that we brought the best experience of players possible uh and finally we have our producers not finally we a lot of people worked on this game in multiple small ways that no matter what their size was allowed this thing to be what it is uh kawa uh tayano and meredith hall are

producers that came in near the end of the project uh and part of the reason they did is because this is a game called which strandings we made it in the middle of making space warlord organ trading simulator because we're a little bit crazy and uh because of the way in which we work that game isn't completely finished yet it's 95 finished and we was just waiting for the final pieces of content to go in and i kind of forgot to tell sam to finish space warlord for three months uh having other people in the room to advocate for the development team and to see where the wheels are turning and who can be unblocked and uh supported is essential to not just the game but the studio as a whole becoming a better place tom venita uh created a tutorial for an airport for aliens currently run by dogs that was contr like uh completed by over 90 of our players and i said

i've never made anything with a spreadsheet before and i'm scared he came in uh near the end of the development cycle and provided a template for how to consider a game from a spreadsheet uh perspective that allowed us to create the content that led to the final version of space world organ trading simulator and something that looks reasonably balanced even though this game much like capitalism is deeply broken and finally uh not finally lots of people maxie molina uh made our steam graphics we were tired after finishing the game even with an emphasis on team health and i said please someone make our steam graphics and maximilian took the various pieces of art from the game including making some new pieces to allow us to create among other things a real money simulacrum using the steam trading card market of an organ trading uh market it turns out the human soul uh went like

plummeted in value very quickly which might be a commentary on steam itself uh and maxie molina enabled all of that uh during a time when we were too exhausted to pull together such assets ourselves and finally alex rose uh a prolific uh indie game developer of his own right worked on super red brood bear resurrection we were coming hot into our release zone uh dealing with some final things with xbox cert and i said alex please save us and he did he'd parachuted into the team and with a few points of expertise allowed us to not just uh meet our date but exceed it and have the game ready early there is a narrative in games that as much as we attempt to dethrone the auteur establishment continues to valorize people who single-handedly build projects

and it's a lie and we're partially responsible for it on a cultural level we say we want games that emphasize and support the teams that build them and then take singular figureheads and make them into gods this game and my career is proof that so-called auteur games with a singular vision are made better when they visibly display the contributions identities and priorities of their collaborators and if you take anything else away from this talk it's that time and time again the people who contributed to this thing and solved problems that allowed us to release this game emerged from pre-existing relationships if i had this game as my first game and attempted to go into the breach i might have smashed myself against the wall of reality in the process your first game is not your worst game but your best game is your next game and i didn't

intend this section to have so much rhyming but here we are you survive in video games by surviving by shipping what you have and moving on to the next title and saying that no matter what is in your hands the people around you are more important than the subjective value of the product the more we nurture our relationships and our medium with the collaborators we're surrounded by the better our games will become and i think that is particularly evident in the growth of the medium is seeing right now i don't make games alone but the games that i make feel like me because of dozens of collaborators seen it unseen who make my work possible and who believe in a better medium and if you are here today and believe in a better medium i encourage you look for the ways that you cannot just

treat your collaborators well but uplift their voices in your process because your vision will become stronger as a result thank you okay we have six minutes for questions if anybody's got any questions uh but we there's also a wrap-up zone that we can go to after this but if anyone does have questions for any of the panelists you can go to one of these two mics and ask it they're from and if we don't we can all go home and sleep forever please let us escape gdc uh i will not let you escape

what kind of difficulties did you face getting the kinect up and running on a modern game one of them is that we ended up out racing uh the end of life for xbox's connect i think it got revealed a little bit ago that it's about to be all of its drivers are about to be sunset which is great when you've made the connect a critical piece of your marketing for over a year over there so i was curious uh to your point where you're talking about how um you need to uplift and identify and celebrate your collaborators uh just how do you what's the best way to find those collaborators in the first place like especially if you're just starting out and you don't really know who you need or what you need for your game uh just uh how do you know who to look for um look for people who share your perspective and who can communicate and believe in the health of their

collaborators first and foremost you can teach and cultivate skills you can go into a different area of development entirely but what you can't teach is a human being to care about another human being or at the very least teaching that might be a much more involved process than is possible over a single development cycle so look for the people around you who have a rad perspective and are actively seeking to not just improve themselves but to create better conditions for their collaborators i hire a lot of people these days and no matter what the skill set of the collaborator i haven't failed with that methodology yet thank you by the way you all can answer too yeah one thing to add to that which is you should work with the people who make you the most excited when you see um yourself being reflected back to you in the creative output of someone else that's the best situation you can be in and those are the people that you want to you know hold close to your heart and pay yeah i've got a quick addition to that as well which is basically piggybacking

off of that where like i've had multiple times where i'm like i wish i could do something that looks like x or i wish i could work with a composer that sounded like y and then i might the gears click in another couple times and i was like wait why don't i just ask them and that has worked so many times so uh okay i have two questions one is uh as a fledgling designer how do i practice the dark sorcery called spreadsheets oh man yeah like uh there are a lot of tutorials online like genuinely um the the key i think is knowing uh the specific problem like that's always the part that helps the most with spreadsheets because ultimately it's just uh a dumb way to do programming um the only way i know how to do programming as well so i'm not knocking at them you know but if you know if you

can like very clearly define the problem that you want then you can you know get to the end of your expertise and figure out what question do i need to go ask the you know infinite sized pool of knowledge that exists around spreadsheets to to improve on um sort of general knowledge isn't that helpful but if you can find oh man uh vlookup solves my problem you've really improved yourself as someone who is using tradition and who is uh who's going to denny's tonight i'm not nobody the cycle has to be completed [Laughter] i really want another pinocchio [Laughter] okay over here oh yeah so hello uh after watching these microtalks i have two main questions in my mind the first of which is what the hell is blazeball i need to see this uh i hadn't heard about it before and now i'm very interested um and uh my second of which uh is for uh the denny's guy

um so um so uh my question is she's talked about this constellation model and um my impression of it based on what you said um was having this cloud of collaborators have a whole bunch of different you know important uh uh all these collaborators in your group you also said this like thing about backup support so is there like redundancies built into this model or is there like could you talk more about this uh let's talk about something that isn't denny's first and talk about the glory that's baseball yeah if you go to blazeball.com you can sign up uh because it simulates um the experience of watching like the nba or the mlb we're currently in an off season so we're not running right now but if you go and sign up uh you'll get added to our newsletter and you will find out when we are coming back and i promise uh you will know when we are coming back all right that's very ominous uh as far as this constellation of collaboration we actually we just ran

out of time okay sorry you'll never learn i'm keeping the knowledge it's mine we'll go to the wrap-up [Music] you