Obsessive-Compulsive Development: Retro/Grade Postmortem

and I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder as well as depression now I don't know how many people identified as OCD sometimes people say oh I just got the Pokemon game and I gotta get all the pokemons or I'm not gonna be happy or something that that's not really OCD it's not just being anal retentive it's a dark and troubling illness and it's been a real struggle for me I have a clinical diagnosis for both I've seen a therapist and have been for over ten years and in all my therapy I've discovered I don't think there's a cure I'm never gonna be fixed but therapy helps with gaining tools to deal with my illness and I was dealing with it pretty

well before I started 24-karat games and not so much during the development of retrograde so a little bit about retrograde we released last August on PlayStation 3 we spent about four years on the PlayStation 3 version we just released a PC port on Steam last week and I did that basically by myself part-time for six months the team was roughly three I did the game design and gameplay programming Justin Wilder did the engine special facts and tools we worked with art contractors for the project but we had trouble finding a good match till about the latter half the project when we started working with Joe Grabowski and then we contracted him full-time for the remainder of the project on average I worked about 80 hours a week for the four years of the PlayStation 3 version the game has about

three quarters of a million lines of code let me just let that sink in three quarters of a million lines of code and there's two programmers that's insane according to the game developer magazine the post-mortem of LittleBigPlanet they said they had about half a million lines of code and 37 developers so lines of code is difficult to measure and it's hard to compare and it depends on the standards used we use codeine analyzer and the actual number is not really important I'm not trying to say I'm better than you I've so many lines of code in fact it's been a bit of a curse but yeah the thing that's significant about it is that we had a huge project why did we have so many lines of code I wish I knew but no we tried to create a reusable engine that would be modular and support different projects and all this adds complexity so 46 percent of

the code was the engine in quotation fingers because really it's just a game right what what is the engine it's not like we're selling it you know unreal retrograde whatever now 38 percent is the game specific code at least in our minds and 16 percent was the tools but they shared a lot of engine components we had a good amount of tools there are several different features that had quite a bit of lines of code when we are trying to do procedural art we have these animated signs for the menus the active board boss which we'll talk more about later and this procedural City background and each of those things had five thousand lines of code by themselves so when we first started 24-karat games we didn't plan I'm self-funding a project we just started working on a demo the idea was we were gonna pitch ourselves to publishers unfortunately for us the economy soon crashed right after we started 24-karat and game projects were getting cancelled

left and right so it seemed unlikely we could get a gig we decided to start self funding a small project targeting Xbox Live and PlayStation Network and we thought we could do it in six to twelve months seems like a reoccurring theme and the other ideas talks but we figured that our project might not be a big money winner but we can make our name for ourselves as a company as a quality developer so the concept of retrograde is that you're playing a game backwards to the beat of the music so it looks like a side-scrolling shooter but it's actually a rhythm game we were doing our own indie project so we wanted to do something interesting and fun that would stand down the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network space way back in 2008 was really not as competitive as it was now we thought that even with a simple design we're in good shape relative to other games on the market at that time we saw our main competition as boom boom rocket and I'm not sure if anyone even

remembers boom boom rocket but I think it was an enjoyable rhythm game but it was very small in scope so after about a month and a half of work on retrograde we submitted our demo to IGF in October and we were very fortunate to be nominated for excellence in design and excellence in audio we lost our artist co-founder at the beginning of 2009 since he couldn't afford to self fund the game at the IGF it was really nice to Sony camera around and they were interested in getting us on PlayStation Network which we're really excited about because we wanted to make a console game but at this point the bar for console indie games had really been raised by braid and Castle Crashers which came out after we started 24-karat we scrapped our schedule completely and wanted to try something more ambitious big mistake we originally designed the game's graphic so we could scale down to mobile but now we're on PlayStation 3 so we wanted to redo our art style to take advantage of its graphical horsepower so

by October of 2009 we finished the gameplay pattern for all ten levels the art wasn't really where we wanted it we were having trouble finding a good contractor we decided to do another pass completely on the music and make it better and design it the music in conjunction with the gameplay patterns and we were adding more complicated bosses a new player and enemy fire types so retrograde became like a spoiled child and I couldn't say no to it things changed in 2009 when I met my wife Joanne it was during a lull in the project so it was only working 60 hours a week unfortunately after a few months I felt the pressure on retrograde again and I resumed working 80 hours a week and spending less time with Joann in 2010 we spent a lot of time on procedural art generation since Justin and I the founders lacked artistic talent and we

had difficulty finding good contractors we had a pseudo realistic art style which really makes procedural generation difficult it's a lot harder than something abstract we had an obsessive attention to detail which really hurt us at this point we were already in perpetual crunch we wanted to get the game out as soon as possible since we were burning through our savings but we never looked for ways to simplify the game or shortened development time which obviously would have been a good idea so this is a video of our procedural cityscape which I talked about before the buildings have little lights on the windows and they go on and off based on time of day so during night there's less there's more windows on and see now although most of the windows are off and then we have the lens flare and the sunrise oops so in 2010 I knew I wanted to marry Joann when she was visiting her family in the

Philippines I made a co-op video game to propose to her I basically placed the wedding ring in a battery pack of the controller and then I sort of tricked her into playing it because I'm like oh I'm playing this IDF game and it's coops I really need your help playing it and then at the end of the game I put in a fake message saying like hey you know player 2 out of batteries luckily she didn't know what the Xbox battery icon looked like so I just had something in there anyway I got down on one knee to fiddle with the USB cable and I told her to look at the batteries and so she popped it out and found the ring so fortunately she said yes although I did program in a response for no it's pretty cool there's actually I invented a pixel particle system so there's just like tears streaming down but it's all pixels aligned to the grid so I I recorded her reaction to with the

webcam and I put it up on YouTube and you can find it and it's I think it's pretty cool I don't know and I think I put up the losing crying as well but the the bad part is because of my final financial investment in retrograde I couldn't afford a nice wedding Joanne was very understanding and we decided to just get married right away without a ceremony and delay our church wedding until I finished retrograde or at least that was the plan so in 2011 my motto was release or die trying' I spent a lot of time on detailed animations from the bosses and complicated attacks and behavior so this is the active board boss I mentioned earlier that's 5,000 lines of code he has all sorts of procedural attacks and animations and complications we also redesigned our entire pipeline at this point so the artist could animate the backgrounds as a Maya scene and then we export all the keyframes for the objects

and so this video is also a good example of that you can see all the crazy animated stuff as your progressed I felt like we could finish by the end of the year but we'd be in the holiday season which is a bad time to release and for an indie game so we might as well spend extra time on it of course this is after three years over three years of development I was really terrified to release the game for fear of failure I felt like the more I worked on it the better the game was which would increase our chances for success however the longer development meant it was a bigger risk which made me even more terrified to release in the back of our minds I think we really knew the game would never be profitable for the amount of time we put into it but we never changed the way we developed despite that so Joanne wanted our church wedding in fall of 2011 and even earlier

in the year I was beginning to think that I might not finish retrograde before then which of course makes things very difficult I managed to pick up some work on the side to help make ends meet and pay for our church wedding but I didn't put retrograde on hold so I doubled my workload which of course meant even less time with my wife for our wedding celebration I only took off Friday Saturday and Sunday and I think I actually worked a half-day on that Friday I made so many personal sacrifices from retrograde I felt like I had to make the game amazing to justify those which really compelled me to keep working hard on it even if it was my swan song so at the beginning of 2012 I was really depressed it didn't feel like the end would ever be in sight I felt like I'd be working on it forever and I wanted to quit game development completely the only reason I kept working on retrograde was because I felt

an obligation to the fans who played the game at PAX IGF and indicate and who were really looking forward to its release even still we refused to make compromises to get the game out of the door earlier for example we ran out of memory and instead of down sampling textures are having loading screens we redesigned the engine to support streaming we also had unnecessary polish we created the challenge mode map at the which you saw at the beginning of the video which is like Super Mario World and has secret passages we added alternate ships with characters from other indie games like active Dan Super Meat Boy and we have a DJ deck based music player which on PlayStation 3 is actually controllable with the DJ Hero controllers and then we have unlockable concept art sheets and more than I can even list so for my wife's 2012 spring break she wanted to go on a trip with me

she works through the LA school system so she likes to do something fun we she's off and so her original plan was a night at a bed-and-breakfast of course one evening at a bed-and-breakfast doesn't seem like a big deal but it was right before PAX East and we were nearing release at least in my mind so I was really non-committal she ended up settling for an entire day out and eating out and going to museums and these are just things we always wanted to do but never got a chance to because of my work schedule at the end of the day she was so happy and she thanked me for such an amazing day at that point I realized what have I become I was not the person I wanted to be I never imagined that I'd be the type of husband who would ignore his wife to work all the time it's definitely not how I pictured my married life so we finally felt like we did everything we could to make the game

successful and submitted it at the end of June the reviews were good we had an average of 80% on gamerankings calm the main complaint in the reviews were that there's only 10 songs which honestly is one of the better complaints you can have I want more but given the obsessive level of detail we had there was no way we could afford to do any more content in a reasonable timeframe nor could we afford to keep funding development so this is the final feature list of retrograde we did 1080p 60 frames a second with an e alias and someone at Sony thought that was a PlayStation 3 first we had dynamic lighting and shadows potential visibility set generator for object culling background streaming for all data blah blah and so on and so on and so on and so on

now with all that applause you'd think that that was actually an accomplishment but it none of that actually helped sales I think actually we may have sold less copies of the game than there are people in this room here I'm kidding but not by much so the game went on sale August 21st and as I said the sales fell dramatically short of our relatively modest expectations I'm honestly too embarrassed to show the y-axis on the graph but trust me that even those Peaks are low so the initial sales trade off quickly and we did two sales this is just a PlayStation Network data we launched last week on Steam so I don't have fancy graphs for that but I mean the sales were at a larger discount and they moved more units than launch but didn't make as much money but why didn't the game sell I wish I knew any business endeavor is a risk and of course they

don't all pay off I mean certainly the Kickstarter 30% only 30% keep their funding I mean for retrograde we didn't get a huge amount of press I'm surprised you people are here no one's even heard of the game but anyway given our awards and showing off the game at PAX year-after-year I thought we would do much better so what did I learn it's really tough to come up with things because it still hurts to think about when I do think about it I have obsessive thoughts about how I'm a failure and a bad game developer and everything is my fault and honestly those thoughts really ring true which makes them very difficult to black out however there are several lessons that are fairly apparent don't compete where you can't we spent a huge amount of time on our 3d rendering tech and all those bullet points and graphical polish but

we can't compete with Triple A games and big studios on 3d graphics quality so it was really a bad idea to try we spent so much time on graphics both from the content side and the tech side will this feature increase sales when creating something out of love it's a bad question to ask it doesn't feel right however if you have to make money off a project to maintain the life you want to live it's something you should think about I'm not recommending that you compromise your vision based on what you think will sell I think that's a terrible idea but I think asking yourself that question gives you an important perspective at the very least you can ask for feature X what is the net impact on the players experience these questions are good sanity check for how you should be spending your development time we lost sight of this earlier in development because we wanted to make the game we never got a chance to at other studios because we always

have these really tight deadlines so this is our in game concept art viewer which has fancy pixel shader transition effects and streaming JPEG decompression probably a poor use of our time focusing our efforts on creating a gameplay content instead of the visuals would have allowed us to release sooner and been a better game overall although I did the game design and gameplay programming I spent much more time on graphics and procedural animation and effects so this is an image from our sky dome system and so how it works is it projects frustums on the sky sphere and then generates clip geometry the idea is then the clip geometry is rendered with decals tied into the environment map and then it's composited in the shape pixel shader with multi texturing because we wanted to reduce fill rate because then

we basically only have to draw the sky sphere once and we don't have to draw separate geometry for the cards I spent about a month on it really we should have just gotten an artist to make more cube maps or been content with less details I mean I don't know if you notice the sky domes in the previous videos but I'm betting that I really should have been making more content more songs for the actual game making the game live the life you want to live even if retrograde were successful I'm not sure all the sacrifices I made would have been worth it the development of the game was quite frankly miserable and it put a huge strain on my marriage right as it was the beginning I'm now trying to work 40 hours a week and I quite honestly feel like I'm getting to know my wife for the first time which is pathetic and sad I

feel immensely guilty for putting her through the development of retrograde and while she was very supportive and patient that wasn't something she should have had to put up with so this is more of the möbius proposal and I did all the art programming music and everything and that worked pretty well it's not the best looking game as you can tell but I managed to come up with an art style that I could deliver on with my limited 3d modeling skills unfortunately in retrograde we didn't get the people we needed or designed for the people we had we lost our artists early on and had little success finding a contractor that could create the content we wanted we should have switched the art style to be more abstract and then committed to procedural graphics we ended up building the tech to do completely artist driven content but it was after we already wasted a lot of time trying to do these pseudo realistic graphics procedurally well duh I'm sure you're all saying

these mistakes seem obvious why is that guy even up here he doesn't know what he's talking about well the real question is why did we fall down this path and I have a few ideas I don't think triple a development methodologies adapt well on the small scale I worked on a number of projects and suppose in triple-a studios you know doing the big-budget titles and I thought oh man I'm gonna kick asses in Indy cuz I have all this experience but like I don't think it the mindset was right so this is a directory map of our insane codebase we built out all these systems and modules to create this engine it was supposed to be used for future games but honestly we probably won't use the engine again because the game was unsuccessful and really I'm trying to focus now on creating games that are easier to make content for so all of this effort was a waste we really should have focused on

the minimum effort to get this project done if we succeeded then we should have started worrying about the next one it sounds silly to say don't plan for the long term but if you don't know if there is a long term it makes a lot of sense so polish matters I think most successful games deliver a really polished experience and we recognize the importance of Polish but we went way overboard so this is a video of the final boss the iris on his eye is hinged like a proper mechanical iris but of course you can't tell because it's like 10 pixels even at 1080p he makes a number of expressions throughout the boss battle I thought they gave the boss some personality but no one has ever mentioned these animations in any review or fan tweets I'm really betting no one ever noticed why did we go so overboard

I think partially because it was our baby partially because we completely lost sight of the business aspect and we really felt like making a great game was the key to success but that isn't enough anymore we never rien when we started going down an avenue that was how we saw the game we never took a step back to try and figure out what we could achieve the same gameplay in an easier way in hindsight I wish we would have made the in 2d I think it would have looked better and finished way earlier we began building 3d tech because we felt like we had a lot of computer graphics skills and we could differentiate ourselves from other amis but once we decide on retrograde we never stopped and said hey the games in 2d why don't we make it in 2d instead we decided to do 1080p 60 frames a second with anti-aliasing instead of 720p like everyone else it

required a ton of optimization and engine work to pull off it contributed to our enormous code base which of course makes porting more daunting we get a lot of requests for a Vita port but like bringing the game to any new platform is very difficult because of the immense codebase and its complexity so what's next Justin Wilder the other remaining founder of 24-karat games laughed and got a full-time gig I'm still trying to find balance in my life I don't want to neglect my responsibilities to my family I want to work reasonable hours and spend time with my wife and realistically I'd need to start getting paid for work I'm hoping to do another indie game and apply the lessons I've learned but I'm not sure I can afford to retrograde has not been profitable and perhaps there's hope on PC but I've kind

of lost my confidence and you know certainly getting money for a project at the beginning is tricky and I took lots of notes at the Kickstarter presentation but hopefully I'll be able to continue living my dream of being an indie developer but I it may not be possible to balance my life and have the career I want which is unfortunate but that just may be in the cards for me so hopefully that's not fingers crossed so thank you for listening I really appreciate your time I hope you found this helpful does anyone have any questions I am fine [Music] so what I'm sorry to interrupt but I have an announcement to make it will be short so when you started the conference

most people didn't leave the room so if you could please Adela scan your badges on your way out so you can receive the survey and fill it up it's important to us and to the speaker too so please there were three exits and you would be asked to have your badges scan so that's it now you can go back to the questions so we can do questions or no okay cool decisions go for it first off thank you so much that was really raw and intense and I don't know about everybody else but that was I really appreciate you being that honest and frank about that I my my Steam login doesn't work for some reason I was just about to buy the game right now but I'm sure you and I get home I'll be buying the game on Steam because there's no question I played it at all the different taxes and things I really appreciated when you guys did the shirt promo I still have mine but I guess why I wouldn't say I just interviewed Andy Schatz who's been working on Monaco now for three and a half years and he had a lot of similar

things a lot of this should have been simpler i but he wanted it a lot of ownership and I think what you're talking about is not isolated I think a lot of developers in the indie space want to own the code want to have had triple-a experience and moved on so I guess I just appreciate your specific insight and just want to let you know at the very least someone else I talked to had a very similar raw experience of dealing with the new marriage while making a game and all that sort of stuff you're not alone out there keep it up I hope that the next project you have is the perfect balance of your creativity and getting paid thanks again thanks a third time so that gigantic codebase that you're probably never going to use is that headed to the graveyard or would you consider sharing honestly I don't think I would wish it on anyone because like it's I mean we did some really unique technical stuff

that's very applicable to retrograde so if you want to make a game exactly like retrograde then well it's still incredibly complicated but it'll do retrograde really well but like anything else I mean like I I don't think it's really helpful to anyone unfortunately hey the the game looked it looked really great I've played before and this is really awesome I know you took it to packs and you got feedback Donna I was just wondering at any point did you consider bringing an producer on like you know maintaining you know control everything yourself but I know you got playtesting you would have gotten feedback from that as to what people wanted I was wondering if you'd ever consider if you consider in the future bringing and you know bringing an external producer on or someone you knew or some friend to just sanity check the sort of stuff that I just know I felt fine a really handy my stuff to get other people to to come and tell me that I really shouldn't be spending ages on

this feature that no one's gonna see like well I mean it's tough because we wanted to make the game for ourselves we wanted to do everything the way we wanted because at studio's I don't know how many people is anyone worked it like a triple a studio or worked for someone else show hands how many people worked there had a bad decision force down their throats and there was nothing they could do about it so I would have expected a few more hands but you guys are lucky but I mean it's it's a lot of times you know people say this is the way we're doing it and their reasoning may not make sense to you it may not make sense at all but you just have to deal with it and so with retrograde we're like yes we're free of the bonds we're free of the shackles but then wasted our freedom obsessing on all these details so no it never entered into our heads that we should bring anyone else on that we should consult people it was just like this is our baby

this is what we have to do we need to finish it and we need to finish it our way which is stupid if you didn't catch the gist of the talk hi I wanted to say thanks for sharing and for to provide some context I also suffer from severe OCD and I have that regular struggle when I'm making a game that all I'll know I'm spending way too much time on a feature that no one else is going to care about or even notice and so it's it's great to just know that someone else is out there who who struggles with that same thing and as far as question goes I wonder moving forward since it is a continuing struggle how you feel you are going to learn from that experience and approach finding that balance in a new way now that you have that behind you well I mean certainly I mean it's

tough it's a struggle I think everything in life is a struggle right it's not just me with obsessive-compulsive disorder it's not just certain people with problems everyone struggles with development game development is hard and certainly if you listen to any talks today I think you would get that message but I think with all your experience and every time you do it you know you take something from it and certainly I've taken a lot from it like you know I have to be hyper vigilant that I'm not wasting time and you know it's really tough because polish matters you know sometimes those details really make the difference between you know a 90 and 80 and I can't say I have a formula but certainly I at least have some perspective that doing things that no one will ever notice probably not a good usage of time so I hope that answers your question I

wish I had better answers than that Thanks okay last question but I'll be out in the hall if anyone wants to ask more quick question what happened to your hat well so the story behind that is one of the things with 24 carat games as I tried to do branding so I tried to dress crazy I had a like a gold miners hat with a light on it and then you know I would do all these events in this gold miner persona but like part of the problem is 24 carat games is sort of dead because it's just me so like I mean even moving forward I don't know if I can create games as 24 carat games because I don't have 100% ownership in the in the company so I may have to retire the poor miner but also I mean besides getting the right color shirt for the video recording which they're very specific

about I wanted to give this talk as myself if that makes any sense I don't know I mean certainly when I did the miner thing I tried to have this very positive you know buy our game it's great I'm a Salesman which takes a lot of energy I don't know maybe it's just me but like oh my gosh like packs and doing that salesman thing it's killer oh I'm just so drained like every day like oh my gosh so this is me the regular me hopefully hopefully I can still put on a good show thank you so much for your time they didn't even answer [Applause]