Nuke Possum Springs: A Night in the Woods Design Postmortem

[Music] okay hi my name is Scott Benson thanks for coming out I worked on this game night in the woods I was the co-creator co-writer artist animator at some other stuff too it's an is an indie game everyone does everything at some point thanks everyone for coming I thought maybe five people we're gonna come out to this and there was there's at least six or seven which is fantastic this is good audience interaction is great because there's going to be some jokes so there's some people from the night in the woods team here you're kind of just getting my take on it but anyone who worked on night in the woods can you raise your hands okay thank you well now that that's over with so night in the woods the first game I ever worked on is my first time giving a talk

at GDC you may be shocked to find out and so I should say a friend that this talk would be different if someone else's giving the talk like with Alec you'd probably get more like a but the technical design aspect of it and kind of he's you know the coder and the composer on it the co-creator of it and so you kind of get his take on it wick with Bethany she's the co-writer on it you'd get would take more of the history and kind of where she's from and her experiences that make up a lot of kind of the bedrock of a lot of what ended up in the game with Adam and Becca our publishers at fin G right there you'd hear a lot of horror stories about trying to adjust deadlines and kind of trying to herd the cats across a cat field or whatever let's see you're John Manning is here you'd hear about like yarn spinner and somebody like the cool solutions with a yarn the dialogue system that we ended up using and creating I guess they're out this and em who's there to you hear about like her fantastic work on like the sound design but you are unfortunately stuck with me

for the next 45 minutes or so I'm gonna give a warning for anyone who's watching this talk later it's probably to be a little cursing because I'm gonna get excited and it's gonna it's gonna happen and I think there's one slide that has a swear word in it and I'm so I can said nightly which is the first game ever worked on I'm not a developer with like years and years of like strains the successes I was like some like dumb punk kid artists who like years later like got stumbled into making a video game and it just kind of went well so that's why you have to hear from me also um we have a lot to get through and I don't know if I can fit this into the time so let's get going to do wait I skip slides already hi that was supposed to go before and this is the name of the title of the thing of the talk alright part one so travel back with me if you will to twitter.com June 3rd 2013 Alec coloca

who commits co-created this game aquaria actually won Awards at the IGF here 25 years ago how long ago was it Alek 25 years ago and 25 years ago back when the IGF was you know all the ColecoVision and they made this amazing game and so he contacted me and said hey you're funny and the on Twitter and I like some of your animation work would you like to make a video game and I was an independent animator just doing like indie animation like contract work illustration kind of trying to get by I was self-taught didn't go to college just this is like the long end of a long line of like thus just trying to get by and I ended up kind of accidentally falling into doing animation and stuff right before this I'd helped co-found an international independent animation collective callate night work club guy named Jake Armstrong did that logo my logo for it just way worse so I put that

one up there you get a late-night work Club calm and check out our stuff it's all free and it's all good but so when alec asked if i want to make a videogame I was like I guess like the year before so I played a game called super brothers sword & Sworcery which is a brilliant amazing game and before then video games were kind of like you know I know for example like people make rockets and go to like the moon and stuff but I have no idea how to do that and video games were kind of like that like I'd wanted to since I was a kid I was interested in game design and just you know like I liked games a lot it kind of just as an art form and I also just for like fun and but I had never had any idea what to do with them or what I could do with them at all and but sword-and-sorcery which I loved it kind of pitched itself when its credits as like a collaboration between a dev team and an artist and musician and I was like oh wait I can do one of those I was like oh it's like a

mixed media collaboration or something like in like my path you would be like Oh someone does like a little comic zine and then like a band record like a 7-inch or something with it you put them together and it says mixed-media collaboration project and I was like ah I get that and sword-and-sorcery um at least for me gave me permission not in the sense it's like not in the authority figure sense where someone says okay now you can do this but in the sense of like when someone says demonstrates to you or out in that says hey you can do this you know there's something that you have to offer or another part to your life it's like you can be this you can think this you can feel this way sometimes you you just need someone to go oh yeah you can do that that's valid so Alex sent me an email this is an actual email and our ambitions at the front were really funny I'm gonna do and I'm gonna do a dramatic reading of this real quick Alec Aloka I don't have a plan or anything but I think it'd be cool to make like an atmospheric exploration chilled out moody type thing for iPad maybe a lot non-linear but some story

elements love your art style animation in the vine you just posted there's me Shh no plan ha ha yeah I'd love to I know next to nothing about how to create for the for this medium but I would love to do something been trying to edge in that direction and would love the experience and making cool stuff is cool thanks God also thanks the clip is part of the law Alec Oh Luca we should start up a Google Doc and brainstorm see what comes to mind and I said sounds good and that was basically how that started so we worked for a while like a few months on that summer kind of coming up with like this thing it was like this atmospheric kind of mystical like silent protagonist she had like a little cape that fluttered when you when you jumped there's probably gonna be some just like kind of like very nice mystical stuff some storybook II elements probably to be some like humming ancient obelisks all this stuff this is just what you did in indie games in 2013 so we so we're doing that but like we kind of weren't feeling it it was cool but like it wasn't like really grabbing us and then

this one night and I think it was like August of 2013 I was sitting there I'm just gonna like it was thunder storm announced I'd humid rain storm in Pittsburgh you know lightning crashing just so you can get the idea and the I was watching this really like great art movie called Return of the Living Dead and it's a fantastic movie it's a cinematic masterpiece and I was sitting there like no singing like this game is cool I want to make this game and now looks cool and like I don't know what to do like maybe all my ideas are bad and and then I was watching it and so Return of the Living Dead has this these great like these punks that only existed in 80s movies which are great they all have names like yeah like thrash I'm suicide I'm razor you know like they're being like man this isn't just a costume this is my way life and it's great and then they fight zombies and it's fantastic and I was like it reminded me of kind of like the punk kids that like I kind of came up with and like the punk adults

that Bethany and I kind of rolled around with and I was like man no one makes games about us and so I was like yeah we could do something with like that but I wasn't good at drawing people I was good at drawing animal people like kind of little cartoon people I was like a huge Richard Scarry fan when I was a kid and also like I'd like them in kind of like a subversive way I saw this flyer like 13 years ago and I was like it just like was like such a cool thing of taking these kind of like early like you know 20s 30s kind of like cartoon animal people and then like putting them in this context it was like a level of like kind of like playful subversiveness that I like and so I started drawing a little animal people too and I was like maybe have you kind of come up with some stuff or whatever and so I just sketched out these characters and they basically didn't change until we ship the game this is the first sketches of them and I sent this - well I didn't send this to Alec yet around about that that time - I just recently played a game called Kentucky route zero drink every time this game is mentioned in this talk and

what was cool about Kentucky route zero is you know Bethenny and I Bethenny's from central Pennsylvania I've lived in western Pennsylvania for half my life so it's just kind of part of like who we are and we conducted zero was one of the first games where I was like oh I know that place not Kentucky but he's kind of off the highway places that are kind of like in the general Appalachia region there was there was just so much there there's so much like truth to it and so much like okay so for example the only times I think I'd seen Pittsburgh in video games beforehand were so there's the Last of Us and that's and it's in a big room it's at a big post-apocalyptic ruin and you're fighting people and there's monsters and stuff it's a great game but it's not exactly the most positive depiction of western Pennsylvania the only other time I'd seen Pittsburgh in a game was the pit Fallout 3 which it's it's it's it's knock it's a slightly exaggerated version of Pittsburgh a lot of just wrought iron and people killing each other and being generally unhappy and so

like I hadn't seen a lot of representation of like our area and kind of just the people that live there and this guy lives next door to us and there so I was like I'll be cool and I was like similarly too with the characters I was like me I knew what makes games about war for him or something I was like hey why don't we do that like that would be cool so I had a wrote up this big kind of this like little pitch thing to Alec and I was like oh yeah here's like here's some sketches here's some ideas he was like kinda what the story would be and I send it and I was like this sucks is gonna end now because all my ideas are stupid and then now looks like no that's better let's do this and so so we we kind of embarked on this like really really quickly I'm scrolling my notes here check this out the game design vogue at that point I think was to make these kind of very minimal stripped-down experiences you know like silent protagonist the protagonist talks

it's in kind of like ruins it was like super cool and and also a lot of it was like honed down your mechanics to like one thing that's kind of minimalist almost like Apple product design of games and that's really cool like some of my favorite games are like that but we were like no actually let's make a game where no one shuts up ever lets a big busy town lots of people who gain this never never shut up lots of writing that in no way efficiently points the player to the next destination as quickly as possible and just this big kind of shaggy thing that you that kind of was just like there it was like kind of full of life and full of energy and we're gonna tack on all these things to it and we kind of just threw up these designs like really really quick and this was like these are the original two concept things I'm cycling between them this is very cool and so we kind of slap together this kind of the version of maze street that's May our main character that Steve Scribbins who's a jerk and and we were

like oh we want this town that you can walk around this huge world we want to make this big world that you can explore and we also knew that we wanted you to spend a lot of time in these places going back and forth that was like a part of the game that we wanted to do like it was part of a routine I think Alec use the term ritual early early on these kind of like building these rituals and building these routines like you kind of do in real life but we're like it's gonna be kind of drag just to walk back and forth so the game became a platformer like because jumping is fun basically it's like if you were play like fallout or like any of the Bethesda open-world RPGs like I never walk in those games I'm constantly just bounding along the ground I'm like the best Saviour of the universe just here he comes you know and so but like with that week we could we'll come back to this in a little bit but there wasn't it you could be expressive you could be like um like hopping down the street and bouncing off of cars and bouncing off of mailboxes and all that and that was pretty cool and we also wanted to build that also enabled us to build up so we can make tall buildings and hide things in the windows and do all that kind of stuff and so soon

Mei was bouncing along those power lines and that was how that kind of came to be at the same time we knew that there was gonna be a lot of talking for lack of better words and kind of coming out of animation and having friends that were in like independent comics and magazines making you stuff I wanted to do something that was more interesting than just like a kind of a text box out front because text boxes can be a little stale sometimes and they can also kind of distance you it's like here's the game down there and then here's you and then the text box is somewhere in here and there's like this distancing we didn't want to do that we wanted those word bubbles to feel like they were part of the environment so I kind of sketched out this like these bubbly little comic keyword bubbles and this little waggly font and Alec kind of mocked something up this was a great thing of like generating and doing various things with those which is really really cool and we knew at that point that there were certain themes that we wanted to tackle like all of us had dealt with you know

mental health issues in our lives had dealt with depression I was I had dealt with something called dissociation which I actually didn't know was a like a word until we start making this game and some was like oh that thing that you're talking about this dissociation I was like wow so and there was that also all of us had been involved with the church in the past and had since like lost our faith and all of us like had like we're on our early 30s at the time now we're very old and the and we had some distance on the time period of May's life you know she's around 20 and we felt like oh we could comment on that now we have some distance on it and there's some similarities between that time in life and the time that we are in in our lives - there's this is this transitional moment like May is like when you're 20 like you're not a teenager anymore but you're not quite an adult like people aren't like people expect you to have responsibilities aren't super taking you seriously enough to sell you alcohol at least in the US so we had these kind of themes and they would grow and change which we'll get into a little bit later

and but with that and the dialogue and the the moving around we kind of had the basic building blocks of this thing now it's funny because people consider night in the woods at times like a nostalgia piece we hadn't like none of us who were making the game had a lot of us nostalgia for this time period in our lives and actually a lot of the game somatically at about how nostalgia can kill and nostalgia can really be a very bad thing just even like on a societal level but it was definitely was just something that we felt like we could explore at that time and I'm kind of glad we did because we went to some interesting places with it so Bethany and I were like broken in debt at the time and Alec was like okay cool we're using unity we should all get like Unity license and I was like we don't have any money for and this is before unity was free for a while I actually don't know what it costs now but back then it costs $25,000 and we could not it didn't but we couldn't afford it at least and I couldn't afford to take any time off of trying to find work to do it and Alec is like hey let's do a Kickstarter and I was like that's not gonna work

and and he was like let's try it anyway and we're like okay so we in the process of doing that we had to mock-up a whole bunch of scenes which means that we had to do a lot of decision-making right up front about what this game was going to be so one of the good things and very bad things about Kickstarter is that you have to make a commitment of this is what our game is like you know up from but we mock these things up and Alec made this really great trailer track and they kind of started to take shape just these ideas there was a feeling that was kind of coming out of it that was a little different than we had like first like thought about there's moments in a project or any sort of idea where it starts becoming what it's going to be and that happens like a lot of you know it's not like we had this idea and then three years later we spit out the best version of it it's like it evolves it grows and changes and we were able to kind of talk about like you know it the the the vibe of it kind of started coming through of like the town and like where it was and what people were

dealing with and so I was like yeah like our trailer is cool and everything but like no one's gonna like gonna buy our weird like you know it was gonna be interest or weird animal people in the Rust Belt game this wasn't a huge sell this wasn't a huge selling Jean WA in 2013 but so we put up the Kickstarter and that we've hit our goal within twenty six hours and then we made four times our ask within that thirty day period now Garen mine our initial ask was for $50,000 you know for three of us to work full-time on it for years that's a very very low numbers what I'm saying but it was really exciting suddenly people were like interviewing us and we were like news you know this thing just kind of took off and had a life of its own and it was not the first time that I I definitely forecasted doom and things kind of worked out so around about that time was when Finn G came along Alec had

some previous a previous relationship with the saltzman's and had worked with them and the and so they came on as kind of our publisher just kind of like crossing T's and dotting eyes and like sending us up for you know talks like this and and and stuff for like a really long time and none of this would have been possible without them so after after a Kickstarter like Alec and I just like you wake up the next day and you realize you've married someone like we didn't know each other like at almost at all and we wanted to get something out but in part because there's like that thing like when you make a Kickstarter that everyone expects you to like fail or like rip people off so we wouldn't like make something really fast and also just to work together to get something out sometimes you Scott finish something and so the Kickstarter ended like at near the end of November and then like ten days in in December we made a little game called longest night there which is this kind of cool little thing and we stars would go around you

and you could kind of connect with the mouse the different stars make a little musical notes and then when you connect then like after you kind of revealed the constellation the characters down there what kind of expound and converse on it it was our first time like again like making something kind of feeling out our creative process for kind of being trying to be flexible with like mechanics and and stuff it was my first time trying to write these characters or draw them in like in in ways that weren't in the trailer you can see Greg kind of looks like a ventriloquist dummy down there just like you know it was a it was early days but it was it was this kind of foundational moment and he made it like we seriously released it like an hour before each of us went home for Christmas like Alec like finished it and we he went to the airport in Vancouver and flew back to Winnipeg and Bethany and I got in the car and we're just hurdling through the night to Central Pennsylvania and I remember like looking at my phone and seeing like oh this is weird what a weird year this has been as I'm

watching people like on Twitter going oh not in the woods they released a game that's weird is this what the whole game is gonna be like I don't like this if this is gonna be the whole thing but it's kind of a cool small thing and I was like wow people on Twitter are talking about our game this is so weird seven months ago I'd never even met Alec I wasn't think about doing video games at all but now we'd released a tiny little game and this was our full-time jobs so here's the thing I could keep doing this where I'm giving you the play-by-play of like every month but Alec and I did that talk last year and it took two and a half hours so from here I'm going to kind of switch to talking about some of the design lessons kind of giving you a design history of the rest of the game and just some kind of some some general things that we came up with there were rules for us and things that we discovered as we went through I was told that one of the purposes of these talks is to be helpful hopefully some of this is helpful so we

didn't start working on the game full-time until Valentine's Day the next year because like when you start a Kickstarter you don't just go hi I'm sorry a Kickstarter goodbye to jobs like you you know because you don't know if it's gonna if it's gonna work out so we had we had like stuff left over that we still had to finish like Alec had work I was making a cellphone commercial was animating it and and all that so we couldn't really start working but like right after that the GDC was coming up and we made this little demo for it so we wouldn't debut it at DDC so within like six weeks maybe we made this like really super early demo like I don't even think we have it anymore I kind of wish I did because it would just be hilarious to look at now and Alec brought it here and demoed it and people are like oh this is cool but also this part sucks and like all that and with that kind of you know feedback you get and so we took that we're like okay cool we can fix this part and do this and whatever this jump doesn't work what

were we thinking and then soon after afterwards it was announced you know we had been talking to Sony and they announced that we were going that you know we were gonna launch on there on ps4 and they said hey come to e3 this year and we were like okay we don't have a we can't go to e3 we don't know we're not taking no that's ridiculous but we spent the next couple months kind of polishing up and expanding on that GDC demo and we'd what one thing that we learned really quickly was kind of a general rule that I just put in towards yesterday this is a really nice way of saying that we decided early on that like this game was gonna be about characters and in a in a story in a place and that was going to lead we're gonna come up with like our one mechanic and then like do different permutations on it throughout the entire thing and build all of it around that build the themes build everything around that oh that's applause next door so we I was

like it's really raining out there so but we decided yeah these moments these like other things we're going to kind of drive what we were doing mechanically with the game we decided that really early on a really great example of this was we so we just played this game called gone home which you might have heard of this like era-defining the brilliant little game gone home and one of the things we liked about it was like a lot of gone home was like you're wandering around like a house band then just like oh it's a water bottle you know you could pick it up and spin it around and look at it we we jokingly we're calling it like first-person rummaging like you're like a raccoon you know like this is like this is how a raccoon experiences your trashcan you know so and we thought that was really cool and we're like it would be cool to like be able to like because you're and the game you're kind of in like a side-scrolling view and like we wanted to get you up close into the world you know Tuukka mess with the garbage again like a raccoon and so alec had this in

this moment of brilliance came up with the name for it pause mode it's a great little pun that I've been laughing at for like three years so there's a thing you know like in movies or TV shows or they'll have like a real animal sitting there and they'll have like a fake paw right and they'll be like driving like or something or playing ping pong or like stirring soup with a ladle and it's clear it's just like a stick with like dog fur on it and like a fake paw at the end for some reason Alec Bethany and I think this is the funniest thing in the world and so that's how we design maze paws that's why they're just like on sticks and one of the reasons like when I talk about design following the moment is because we're like oh we want to do this thing let's just make a mode where that works and you know in doing that we so we we were making this e3 demo and we built all these things we built this town out we built this little story line to go through we wrote so much stuff and

we at the end we're like we should there's a we could put the scene where you eat donuts at the end of this with your we could debut pause mode you know and we could explain to everyone see get it pause but it also you could pause in games anyway whatever and so like we uh we so we kind of put that in like last minute like the day before we had to ship it off to to e3 and so we went to e3 here's our game next to like under like under these giant jumbo Tron's of like the order 1886 and Metal Gear Solid 5 and then here's like our game where like you're like sitting on the counter talking to your mom and we were like no one's gonna play this no one's gonna like want to read this much on the GDC or on the e3 floor all these acronyms and we had like headphones and stuff so like people would like put on this like headphone and they'd headphones and they would just drift off like we thought that there's gonna be about 15 to 20 minutes to get through the demo people were spending like almost an hour in it just like every line of dialogue that may had a little journal you can get doodles in

that we ended up using the game and they and people would like every single thing and you know it was just really kind of like moment we're like there's one point a woman was playing and she turned around and she took off the headphones after spending like 45 minutes a day and she had like tears in her eyes and she came up she's like I've just never seen a game that was just made for like me before and she gave me this hug and I'm like this is an experience I'm having on the e3 for right now and I remember the another thing was like so you know again people getting their faces shotgun too off on these Jumbotrons behind us and this one guy finished it and turned around and said guys this game that you're making is really dark the other the other great one from that is a guy went up to Alec at like he played for a little bit and there's a part where you act like you're talking to your mom and stuff and he kind of like puts the thing aside he turns to Alec and goes when does the adventure begin it's just this whole range of of things here's Alec and I when we first met Alec has a beard then he doesn't have now so this is at this is evil Alec

this is his evil twin you can tell because of the beard and so people had these like really close experiences with this we won some awards of at e3 which wears like whoa I still have this in my house cuz the first time anyone was ever like you made a good thing but you know what people like the most the donuts I have all these other things everyone was like oh my god the donuts the donuts like it was so great but when we started off the game we were thinking like oh this mean maybe some Metroidvania ish stuff we're gonna hop around and and unlock these different things and like unlock these different areas and all that is gonna be progression some like big puzzles and like some more like kind of traditional narrative platform of things but by this point like all that was out the window we're like we're gonna make this weird game we're like reading your journal and drawing in it and you're like eating Donuts and you're hopping around on rooftops you're feeding rats with pretzels that you stole these are all things happen in the game and looking through telescopes and all these other things it changed and it got weirder and it's because we were open to like kind

of like I said letting the design kind of follow the moment and it kind of started evolving one of the things we started doing a lot was improvising we would just be like oh there's a knife fight part in the scene let's just make a knife fight see how that goes and we mock it up and a lot of times it would be like that okay that works and then we'd flesh it out and work on it a bit but a lot of these kind of different things kind of came from just oh yeah let's do that that's cool and so like for example then that led to all these like little like small things we called exceptions they were exceptions to your normal rules of game play and so like the knife fighting was an exception the game is not about you know bass playing for example but the game is about being in maze position and one of the cool things about improvising and doing these little things is after a while you just stop really caring if these things can carry a game on its own there's like there's like a attention that you want to make us you're every mini game could be its own game right it's the most polished balanced thing but the imbalance can actually be fun fun if it like doesn't last very long or

it can like reveal character you we don't prep you at all for this base playing game when it comes and a lot of times when we watch people streaming they're like oh oh why am i playing the bass now I don't know how to do any of this but in the game they doesn't know what she's doing either she hasn't played bass in here she doesn't know the songs at all so her panic is your panic at that point you failing and not being able to play this mini game is like you know if that's what happens to you fits perfectly well with the plot of what's happening and that was like a lot of fun and that was just like that kind of like like a lit our path and going we can just try a bunch of different stuff and if it fits with the game like let's just do it okay cool my favorite example of like a weird improvisation thing was so there's a we're made kind of dyes for a little bit well after she gets electrocuted it's a long story and the and how sitting at the coffee shop in her neighborhood we're like we were like half the game and I was like you know it'd be funny if

the little bonzi buddy desktop friend that may has a shark hold a shark on her laptop it'd be funny if he appeared to her and like the afterlife that would be funny and so I was like haha this is hilarious and so I wrote and I wrote it out and I send it to Alec and I was like does this sound good and he's like oh yeah I know that's really funny and so by 7:00 p.m. that entire scene was in just art music everything you know and that's it and it didn't change I don't think from there til release and it's one my favorite kind of moments of the game and a lot of these little moments that we're trying to like design ended up being like some of our favorite and a lot of people who played the games favorite moments in the game and this leads us to another thing go simple so that you can be generous we talked a lot about generosity when we were making the game a good example of a really generous game like that kind of rewards poking around just kind of keeps giving you stuff you just cram so much interesting things in there is Symphony

of the Night which is this castlevania game you guys notice Symphony of the Night is and so I think this might have been like they thought that they weren't gonna be able to make another one maybe this team or something they just crammed all these ideas and do it like boots that you can get to make you one pixel higher and like little jokes everywhere like when you beat the you can beat the castle so that it flips upside down and you beat it again and it's all different there's like all those different things and you're like fighting and hacking and slashing all over the place but there's this one room it's kind of spoken up and these kind of like hallowed tones like among some people who are into the game so you're in this Cathedral in Dracula's castle because Dracula's apparently a churchgoer and off to the side there's this room and the music is really somber it's really calm and all that's in there is this confessional booth and you can sit down on either side of it and eventually a little ghost will appear and either kind of confess to you or kind of take your confession and sometimes they stab you but you can't do anything else that's it it's just a room

to have this weird moment tap and and so the idea of having these kind of calm moments these little like off to the side places that you can just sit there's a lot of places on our game where you just sit and sometimes you'll end up talking to someone sometimes you'd it's just there for sitting and that's it about us being able to be generous and like try to like put all these like little moments in the game that if you poke at you'll be rewarded from we could do that because we kind of went simple so another thing is just going low-res on stuff another game we talked about a whole bunch when we were making it is Final Fantasy 6 there's a part where you're you know opera low-res and they got so much performance out of their little @ cast of little sprite characters like flopping all over the place and like crying and like living and dying in all this stuff and you buy it when you're watching it it's like little puppets or something that lack of expressiveness that low fidelity sells it and gives them like so much range that if you were doing like full-on like

capture and high fidelity everything would take you hundreds of millions of dollars zillions of dollars and take you forever to do but you can do it with so little and we didn't have access to a whole lot at the time we were running our dialogue out of twine and but that that wasn't giving us everything we needed and was like I think creating a lot of more work for alloc to kind of get from there to it being in the game and so out of that was born a yarn which is a name that I came up with based on twine and that was my big contribution to the project and it it allowed us to do a bunch of different things John down there John Manning and his team expanded on it with yarn spinner and eventually we had all this functionality in it and it was such that even I could like hop in there and like do like you know these like long dialogue sequences and stuff and one of the things we ended up doing speaking of lo-fi was we we started making it so that well to trigger

animations of like different expressions and common things we would use emoticons so end up with all the mace has a line smiley face and she'd smile at the end of it or she'd go like this or wave her arms Greg's hold this an emoji an emoticon like and that was kind of again like you know there were a lot went into it but it's a pretty simple solution of doing that doing that just mixing and matching these kind of like lo-fi things speaking of lo-fi um we had to make the characters kind of based around this these simple characters that just walked and talked and didn't do much I didn't have a lot of help when it came to the art for most of it my friend Charles hudner came on it helped out he designed Bruce who is one of my favorite characters the game I think it's the best design characters he designed this guy he didn't make it into the game but I think one of the things is that like this kind of like you can you can you can have an opera with 16 pixel high characters and sell it you know like all people remember that Final Fantasy opera scene er like I cried you know and you

look at it and it's just like these little guys going you know you don't need a lot you really don't need a lot like no matter how many facial polygons you have you're never going to suddenly like happen upon emotion or human drama as like a hardware feature you know no matter how much how the good to your facial capture is how many polygons are in your face like that's not going to create emotion you have to do that with the actual characters and the story and all these things that aren't as sexy to talk about expressive this was a thing we talked about a lot we made another supplemental game the year after longest night called Lost constellation we made it about five or six weeks at the end of 2014 and that was that that's a we were kind of sprinting through it that becomes a problem later on in this talk and expressiveness was I think a thing that Alec talked about a lot and it was just like giving the character of the player the ability to kind of mess around in

that world and express themselves we in the game you're kind of talking it's framed as like a fairy tale that Mays grandfather is telling her and when she was when she's young wandering through these woods and you make these snowmen and you can put these little found items in them and the people who owned those items like inhabit the snowmen like like regular snowmen and the and we're like oh cool well how about why don't we make a way for you to take these various items and you can make the snowmen face as yourself and so these are just a couple I pull off the internet of things that people did you know same same items but people just made so many of them and they and they love them and we we actually put in a little camera button you can see down there in the lower right they would export I like a ping or a JPEG or something to your desktop and people were like posting them and it was really neat little moment I like this guy and that that expressiveness like paid off and people loved it and we we were trying to and we we brought that back

into the main game in a lot of different ways lost consolation was also a proof of concept for a lot of things we want to try in the game particularly came to exploration um a thing about exploration is I I think the exploration is one of the highest things the best things you can do in a game like both has like a developer and like as a player like exploring finding things finding secrets like seeing the whole like layout of something and like is one of the think that the best things you can do in a game and that doesn't just come with like exploring like a landmass it's exploring a story it's exploring dialogue it's exploring characters all those are different ways of exploration and but exploration doesn't mean a lot if you can't miss things like it becomes this precious thing this interesting thing if you can miss it like there's a thing when you're when you're a developer where you want to make sure everyone sees all your beautiful work right like we can't let anyone miss anything at all but we wanted you to be

able to miss things if you didn't think to go and poke or whatever not to like punish you but to allow there to be kind of the unknown out there that people could have different experiences lost constellation we we had a whole storyline in our tiny little game that we made in five weeks that you don't see if you don't think to go and do certain things and people responded to it there's to end this little design section the the there was a part in in the lajas constellation this little throwaway bit that involved all the things I just talked about designing for the moment improvising trying to be generous low-res solutions and expression and exploration there's a cliff in in lost constellation and we like okay well what do you do with this cliff I mean the player could just jump off and we can have a death state we wouldn't want to do that we just reset it were like No so we're like but what if if you jump off the cliff that's little may since the framing devices this is a story being told to young to little may what if she's just jumping in and going and then she jumped off a cliff and the

grandfather like no she didn't and just shut up I'm gonna keep telling the story and were like hahaha they're like what if you jump off the cliff again and really in May it's like she jumped off the cliff again the grandma it's like okay alright we're just gonna keep going and you could do that 15 or 17 times and we just kept adding this little story you could just keep doing it eventually he starts reading her a kids book that she hates called charity birdie which is this little like very like cloying like it's all in rhyme everyone learns a lesson he starts reading the book to you if you keep jumping off the cliff and eventually he's like okay fine I'm not I'm gonna stop telling this story if you don't shut up and that's when we put up the invisible wall that was a moment at one of the tiniest moments in our games but just one that I'm one of the I think the most proud of because it was all those things and it was just a moment of us let's just try this and it worked and like almost no one finds it at all I've watched a whole bunch of you play this game like five people found it you know but it's it's a great great thing I think and it's something that I'm really

really proud of so those were all like design things this is like the design talk but there's a lot of things that go into design that aren't just like mechanics right the game has a lot of ideas and it has a lot of context in it and a lot of the things that we did we wanted to we had some things to say and we had some some ideas and they came out through it unsolvable puzzles and unbend unprofessional if I found out as an actual word yesterday may isn't a character that is good at things really other than hopping on things like she's not smarter than you she does not make better life decisions than you she is not tougher she is not more clever like so many games are about people who can do amazing things but that's a really constrained kind of story that you could tell like the story of the person who is really good at some is so many games and that's like a really specific thing or like the story of for example the space captain who can

sleep with up to half of the people in their ship you know depending on how they play their cards that super attractive extremely charming boss is a very very specific kind of character and you have to tell the specific kind of story but that just like such a constrained kind of story that you can tell by giving me kind of by not giving her that level of proficiency by not giving her puzzles that she can solve may is not going to bring back like the mining industry to her town may is not going to suddenly cure all of her mental health problems you know in the game but a lot of the game is her coming to terms with both of those things those things don't have a really quick solution to them you can't power up and get rid of all that and meet immediately though all those things are difficult with mental health you can get help and that's a thing that may kind of like you know learns I think throughout the game but a lot of these other things like these are struggles you don't necessarily have access to all the time and that leads us

to a thing kind of a pun and the piggybacking on that idea is Alec early on was really gracious and let Bethany and I kind of go where we wanted with the story and he like you know obviously collaborative but he trusted us a lot at the beginning which is really cool I had early on play the game called cart life and cart life was I think the first time I saw some of my own experiences with being broke and being desperate and being afraid in a video game and to the point where I I couldn't finish it I was having panic attacks by the end of it we as we went on it came clear that we couldn't write about these people and these places that we knew without going into the actual politics of it and like that's scary sometimes in games but we kind of couldn't avoid it it would be the themes that we had of like mental health of like capitalism of

loss of loss of the belief in God the removal of kind of a central organizing force in your life which a lot of these things kind of have that feeling to them you kind of can't just you know take those aesthetics and slap them on so we talked about it really directly the one character reads this poem where how far is Silicon Valley from here I'm in it okay cool we talked about burning it to the ground in this game we're kind of kidding but like but we want to talk about that because you know from where we were sitting there's this massive level of inequality and power and wealth and all these different things and we don't have access to that everyone we know is like desperate and just trying to get by that's where we were honestly before this Kickstarter and so we were just trying to be honest about it and there's a lot of things where games like games are celebrated for their mature politics often we'll just take the aesthetics of a struggle and then look look at it solemnly and go yes this

is we've made a serious game we're very grown-up as video games now you know you could you know you have like these kind of famous devs who were like yeah we're gonna use all this really charged imagery say from like you know Jim Crow or something and we're gonna put that in a game and then like let's say the character goes to an alternate dimension where suddenly all the black people have the guns and they're just like killing white children everywhere and then the takeaway is extremism is bad like the it's it's tourism it's a kind of tourism you you take these struggles you take these real live issues in these real life places and you just say yeah that's a thing we're grown-up and that's and then we will make some kind of just general what both sides are bad or you know conflict is bad we should just really check it out type of thing you know where everything is just kind of this equivocating thing and it's celebrated in games and it drove us it nuts because everybody hates a tourist to quote pulp

the Sun coughing people so we were just like no we're gonna speak honestly about the things not to like preach at people because we weren't trying to make a game that was that was trying to blow people's minds like did you know that there's poor people and a place called the Rust Belt that are like you know getting screwed over by capitalism and it's this really whatever we're doing that we're trying to myths for ourselves we're trying to talk about these things that we cared about people like politics and games if we can look at it kind of from like I not in my backyard way like it's over there we went away and we saw a political struggle so if you talk about like labor if you talk about thank you I just got the I'm gonna have to wrap it up soon thing if you talk about you know labor if you talk about labor in the games industry if you talk about the need for workers to kind of organize in that space people certainly suddenly start getting whatever if you can talk if you talk about that happening on like a space colony somewhere people are like alright well in the future they'll have to deal with that but if you talk about it now people suddenly start like it's in my backyard now people are like oh

it's this is this might affect me this is really really uncomfortable you know if you talk about like GDC you talked about the unpaid labor and underpaid labor that goes on here and the profits made by the company here all these different things people start getting really whatever I think that being able to be us be honest they make kind of mythologies of our own about the people we knew and the things that we struggle with and just kind of not about it that was kind of like a really kind of big thing Bethenny did so much like research and so much like looking into kind of her own past and the place where she's from and it was like and the kind of issues there and that and makes up so much of the bedrock and of the dirt underneath this game that you know and like for every time that you all talk about anything I just talked about and it makes you a kind of like someone uncomfortable there's ten people who are like thank God someone said something right a thing that art can do is tell people that they're not alone that is one of the best things that can do being able to speak honestly about these type topics and just be upfront about it and

not be and not kind of try to just have this kind of these aesthetics of it means that you can kind of connect with people in a way that you can otherwise one of the last things is just do what you can with what you have you know Bethenny and Alec and I all brought the things that we were OK at to begin with we learned a whole bunch of new things but we were just like let's see where this goes let's see where you know what we can like pull out of this well we can kind of make and kind of collaborate together this is one of the first times I think all of us were in a room together back in 20:16 and here's us like a year later much more tired some of the hard lessons that we learned from this was crunch we crunched ourselves nearly to death me literally I almost died by the end of it according to my doctor I think that that was a hard lesson we sprinted and sprinted for like three and a half years and it took like a lot of like I'm still

dealing with health issues from it from our launch like a year ago imagine if you're in a place where like we're doing that to ourselves imagine if you're in a place that a a your employment is in danger if that if that isn't done these things these projects can just chew you up and spit you out what we released we released the game people liked it just really shocking to us I'm sorry shocking to me the theme of this is I never think anything is gonna work out and then and then Alec goes I think it'll be okay and then it works out okay we got lucky we got really really lucky people would say I think because we tried to be honest you know people would say hey playing this game like saved my life that's not us like when you make art or we make whatever whatever you put out there is only part of it like other people meet you there you know people would we're coming in kind of meeting us there and having

these experiences and these kind of deep experiences and we were having these kind of deep conversations with people and it we were just lucky we were just really really really fortunate from the Kickstarter you know our Finn G was able to get us funding to kind of sustain us through the back half of it we you know I was you know no never before was a game designer Bethany never worked in games Alec had never worked with us all these were chances that just happened to work out this is not like the key to success we got lucky loads and loads of like amazing people do super great work and it just doesn't kind of work out in the same way but one of the great things about making art in conclusion is that we kind of committed to something that can only kind of come from us we threw out like a lot of rules and we committed to the moment we put stories and characters and themes first and when where that lead Bethenny and I were novices and we had like no experience in games and Alec brought us on and trusted us and we end up pouring just ourselves in our lives into it in

healthy and unhealthy ways in a list of this game where we could just be honest and people were really gracious and responding art can tell people that they're not alone art can challenge and motivate and agitate art can change people's minds and our can just be a place to go you know even if it isn't easy or unpleasant we get people who are like I just have to go back to this game every now and again because of the music and just being there talking to the mom there every morning is this like safe cool space for me we also have people who are like this change changed my outlook on a bunch of things has changed my politics has changed my relationships with others has changed my relationship with myself this put a name on a disorder that I have this put a name on how I feel at work because we were just honest we didn't really know how to do anything else art can show you kind of an image good or bad where you kind of recognize your reflection in it like may here you know people would talk about the scene where may kind of tries to hype her self up for a party but it ends up kind of just

talking about how she's gross and unattractive and weird and someone's like I thought that was the only person that said I felt like that I'm like I'm 36 and I did that before coming here you know so games can forge those connections with people you know the art that we make can forge those connections they can tell each other that we're not alone we can affect each other and people said that that's kind of what this game did too good for them and I don't know what more you could ask for as a creator right is to have people come to you and say this thing that made this connection between us and all this like worked out and we had just this moment together and I didn't feel alone so that's my time everybody [Applause]

do we have any time left for questions we have time for questions okay those are the mics if anyone wants to ask a question if I somehow didn't address one iota of this game please say please ask hi hi oh you have to introduce yourself and say I'm blah from blah okay hi I'm Lisa from New Zealand so I wanted to ask because I haven't read anywhere why did you decide to have random little kind of like creatures and animals like squirrels and and cats running around when it's a town that was God's original plan for the world yeah no I mean the animal people in the game are just how I drew cartoon animal people there's just regular animals why are there humans and yet there are apes checkmate no there's no reason at all

people had puzzled about that that is actually the number one question we get is there's a kappa there's also cats so yeah that's a sufficient answer other mic hi I'm Sienna from Los Angeles hey hey and I have kind of a process question like a writing process question so one of the things that you guys did really well in night in the woods I felt was the fact that you really had this town that felt like the people's lives and it were progressing separate from you and you were just kind of eavesdropping on them like for example the the two dudes at the bar right every day had their relationship evolved a little and I was wondering if when you were how do you go about writing those scenes did you choose to be like I think there's certain people here and then you figured out the whole thing or as you were going day by day did you kind of feel like you needed more okay yeah early on I think

we just had some general ideas we wanted the world to feel alive without you like Alec made these great like what we call it squirrel tech we're like the squirrels were like run around we made this great random car generator like you'll never see the same car in the game twice and stuff so we wanted the world to feel alive and the like the world didn't you basically if May was not walking down the street those two dudes outside of the outside of like the football bar we're still gonna be talking and still going having their ups and downs in life and so that was it like I think early on it was just a funny idea and then as we went on it became more and more complex that there would be whole storylines and whole sagas but if you weren't around for you'd miss it like that like I was saying within the exploration part but if you paid attention it would be something that would would give back to you and you can learn more about it I think one of the reasons why some folks have like really short play times and some people have spent like 20 hours in the game it's because some folks are really attuned to that and they'll go and seek it out and there's a whole lot of places all around that so after a while you just get and I a feeling for

writing these little arcs and these little mini dramas they're like some of the most interesting stories in the game I think of these tiny little things and understanding that and sometimes we had it so that they would only start when you triggered them the first time and but a lot of times it was just gone going and you know you just kind of pop in and pop out kind of like you do in real life because I made the world feel fuller and it made um exploration mean something so yeah after a while we it just became kind of second nature to do thank you oh there Mike hey I'm Jasper from Australia and I yes sort of following on from that I was wondering about and there's a lot of different moments in the game as you talked about that that's had some relation on the overall game and some that I just self-contained and to me that was really nice because it kind of represented like how life is sorry excuse me and I remember you tweeted a while ago at the heart maybe you were frustrated

that people kind of felt that these were all linked and that there was some sort of overarching overarching thing that happened that linked every single thing in the game together and I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and yeah the football fans that we just mentioned they're behind the whole thing okay no there's there's a thing in a lot of kind of like it's been going on for a while but like right now I think it's a big thing it's like everything has been meta everything has to be like plot a like gear a of the plot here this to turn a gear over here or else this is just what are you even doing and having this here if you have a missing character they have to show up later as that mysterious person you know if there's like a villainy you don't know who it is it has to be your dad you know it has to be like this little like Christopher Nolan desk puzzle box type things and those things are cool but it's not like how you can do like you know that's not the way to do stories I'm getting the rapid up thing here but um and I think that's kind of a frustration and we wanted to avoid that we wanted to have these episodic moments

because we just liked episodic things in stories but and we wanted to have these little closed off sections they say you can find you can stumble into like the confessional room you know the story version of that all these little things that flesh out the world and maybe got across ideas and expressed character and themes and all these things so many things exists in the world just for that the two guys outside of the smelters bar you know they don't exist to you know you know be main plot points they're there in the world and you can follow their little story and their little life and you can kind of get like involved that way and it's for me that's over and for us I think in the game that's really a lot of the beauty of the world is right it's not just this thing that your character goes through and drives all of it it exists without you and you other characters having their own agency there's nothing to do with you makes them more human and it makes the story in the world more human and I think we wanted to just have a lot of humanity in the game so suicide okay

I think that's all the questions I can take what we're going over to the wrap-up room which is apparently right around the corner yeah it's it's around the actually don't know where it is it's right around the corner over there