Open Production With Sunless Sea: Kickstarter, Early Access and After

[Music] right ladies and gentlemen I'm about to reveal a secret about GDC you may not be aware of and that is that every year at random they pick one speaker who has not received any evaluation forms they take them out of the airbag when ur and they shoot them in the back of the head so please for my children failing of any evaluation forms the second thing that we are required to say is that your mobile phones your the noise makers please turn them off I'm of a nervous disposition if I hear a sudden noise from the audience I'm a leap from the stage that will end badly welcome hello I'm Alexis Kennedy I run far better games which is a studio in London and we're an indie studio we're up from four people in 2014 to 16 people now so that puts us kind of firmly the mid-sized indie and what I'm

going to talk about today is going to be most useful to you if you are either a studio of about that size or looking to be a studio at that size I want to make this clear there has never been any successfully substantiated allegation of cannibalism against our studio these things are subjects and libel actions we may again call fall in London it's a web based narrative thing that's been around for years and the best-known at the moment for a game called sunless sea sunless sea made using a bundle of techniques that are very popular and success with indie Studios which I'm calling open production because unlike things that sound like buzz phrases Kickstarter early access paid beaters getting feedback for community early interacting directly with your community they're not for everybody I think they're great

I spoke to Justin Marfan subset games earlier today and he said he thought the idea was horrible and he couldn't imagine doing it I can't imagine doing it any other way so this really is about finding what fits your Studios way of working and money is always available from somewhere if the idea of working this way appeals to you then do it if it doesn't to be able to you look somewhere else divine funding so much really specific good and bad things about building games in front of your community with your communities collaboration before we made summer C we were in a terrible place we were four people we'd be doing bits of client work I just said in layoffs three of my friends and fallen in London our own game was not making enough money to pay the bills so sunless sea was a bit of a Hail Mary pass I don't play American football some have

used that completely wrongly it was a bit of a last desperate roll of the dice we were going to go bust by the end of the year we'd never made an actual video game all our work had been web-based stuff browser-based traditional web development we never built a Unity game we thought we probably could we thought we knew enough about game design and world building we thought we could make a go of it we built a prototype to make sure we could but it was very uncertain and it worked out so this is not a epoch-making headline success but it is a solid indie success for most studios of our size would be very pleased with we were and the key thing is this is a very technical success if you are working in a team two three or four if you are wondering whether it's impossible to

make a living making video games there's a bunch of stuff you can do there's a bunch of opportunities available to you that are allow you to do this this sort of thing a couple of points I want you to take away above everything else this is our loop we build stuff we listen to our community we build more stuff so first of all we've been around for four years we've started building sunless sea and we were as I said in a dire place we didn't have much money we didn't have many resources but we did have four years worth of the community if you've been working on your own even if it's only for six months let alone if it's for four years you have built up a backlog of people who know you and know your work when you issue the call to Kickstarter will come out and help you or the call to early access or any other kind of open production mechanism even if you feel like you're plugging away and getting nowhere you have been getting some we're having a community is

almost as good as having money in the bank you can't spend them but they will help you and they'll help you in terms of feedback they're Hopkin in terms of spreading the word which is hugely important they help you in terms of keeping him around hi in the dark times so if you've been struggling you haven't done nothing you just not got there yet and the other thing I want to talk about sustainability when we made a hundred grand out of Kickstarter we felt like we had felt like made all the money in the world our monthly studio burn team and rent is now about 60 grand so all the money in the world doesn't last very long it's been as much lower than obviously but if you're an indie team and you suddenly get a giant chunk of cash even has a giant chunk of cash after Kickstarter and the credit card companies are taking their cut it is just the beginning of your journey same thing with the game launch we sold 40,000 copies in the first week of early

access far outstripping your most optimistic projections because our optimistic projections are pretty conservative but again it was just the beginning of our journey that the money we made from that wouldn't have lasted long and if you are running an open production process for a game you're making games for an audience you want to bring the audience with you into the future you want the studio that will survive the next two three four games and you want to have an audience that will help you and trust you as you build those two three four games here are six things these are all challenges or problems or techniques we found to deal with some of the specific issues of open production and this is I think probably the most important of those marketing I bet a lot of you in this room think of like

flossing a lot of you don't honor your being on this mill but marketing is a thing you do at the end of your game production cycle in order to make you other people actually buy it it's not it's not the window of opportunity when an indie game could just get on Steam and sell through sheer luck is over the chances that your game be so brilliant it will get picked up become world headlines and spread through shareholder mouth it is possible but it's a very low chance this yellow text is a very pungent quote for my direction of communications and I I would say something slightly different I would say you would not put out a game without debugging it that would be crippled and stupid you shouldn't put out a game without marketing it either and when I say the indie check box what I mean is that a lot of folk and I've been guilty of this in the past God knows read all the genuinely valuable advice on the

Gamasutra five things you absolutely must do if your indie game company posts do those five things sell 300 copies the game disappears in the dark without a screen and then you see one of those heartbreaking posts and gamasutra that says we sunk a year of our life in this game and nobody heard of it nobody for anything so it's not enough to send out some press release at the end they feel like you've done your job you need to be thinking about how to explain your game in a sentence or two from the get-go what makes a what the sensual creative core of the game is and how to express it to other people and you were iterating on your game all the way through one of the things that open production allows you to do is iterate on marketing as well you tell your community what you're going to make and they go and then you fix that when we first talk to our community about summer C we talk to a very small of core fans and we'd said it was going to be 2d

elite with steamships and nobody under the age of 40 or out outside the UK at that time at her dibbley now you have Brasilia dangerous but now it's completely novel so we took elite out of the pitch and one of the advances of doing open productions you expose your proposition your hook to gradually large numbers of people in our case it was port fans then larger core fans we tested our Kickstarter message on then Kickstarter backers in early access people in every stage we had the opportunity to learn and change our message before we went full launch and before we were stuck with whatever week we dealt with and the tagline of Thunder season lose your mind eat your crew that came quite late in development just before early access I think we didn't get to there without getting a lot of feedback from our community and working out what appealed to them about the game and lose your mind eat your crew we've

hear again and again people saying you know as soon as I heard there you had me support the game the community this is a point that RAF and Europe made in his talk last year about long dark another very successful if that much more successful early access game your community can give you feedback on your game on your messaging on your design on your game experience and that feedback is absolutely essential it's as essential as the funding they can give you but they will also try to tell you how to fix it they know when something is wrong if your community tells you something is wrong and you don't listen you prob blind but if the community tells you they know what's wrong they might or might not be right if you community tells you how to fix it then they'll almost always be wrong it's your job as

developers to work out how to fix it it's their job to tell them they don't like it so never confuse the two they're not and advice counsel they're a canary they tell you when things are broken they don't tell you how to fix it this I mentioned earlier that we exposed our game to ever larger numbers of players of community so we started out with about 30 we went to about 100 then we hit kicks that grew the community then the Kickstarter took off that going the community again but at the very beginning we told our early community our core community and we told them the Kickstarter was coming so first of all if you are thinking of running a Kickstarter and nobody should be in 2016 I think you're doing this if you're betting Kickstarter and not telling anybody about it until the day bang your head against a wall until the desire to do that goes away I don't think anybody is still doing this but statistically

somebody is we did it with our first Kickstarter and it's preposterous as soon as you run a Kickstarter started Kickstarter the clock is running got 30 days to make all that money what a shame to fail and ran from the finish post so tell your community that you're going to be running a Kickstarter tell any friendly press contacts you have they're going to be running a Kickstarter I know it's very hard to get pressed to listen to anything about Kickstarter's do you have contacts use them tell them when it's going to start and make sure that on the day like seven minutes past the point when you hit the button you have pledges on there because nothing succeeds like the indication of a huge success if people are pledging on a double pledge and what you want specifically what you want is to have people posting this image on their forum of choice on the Internet this particular one once you see this you know you have a valuable proposition so build your chosen kettle tell people up front gathered their

enthusiasm but you ready set unleash hell when you hit the Kickstarter button and you get an app this how many of you went to the darkest dungeon talk yesterday ok enough people that are I'll skip over this some more the darkest dungeon guys made an amazing game with kick-ass design and they found a problem of the design halfway through development and they fixed it and the fix was necessary and it's very painful to their community and their community when absolutely Batchelor they they held their nerve and they they kept going they didn't listen too hard to their veterans that was the right thing to go do and that's why darkest dungeon has grown to sell nearly a million copies and has undergone tremendous critical acclaim summer see we didn't do quite as well on that one of the problems is

thunder see is that if you die yes start over that's ok that's fine it's a little bit of a red light with perma death but the experience of starting over means going through the same content over over again there's not much render us at the beginning big design flaw I own that it made the game much less than it could have been and the reason we didn't realize how big a problem it was is that we were listening to the veterans too much people are talking about the endgame experience people are talking about how what it's like when you play through master content we forgot to focus on the early game experience your veterans will be the most vocal people in your forums and in your feedback they will really care about the game that supported you from very early on you should listen to them you should not listen to them too much you should bear in mind they're not going to be new customers ever again they're not going to give you unbiased feedback and you think you know this we thought we knew this we thought we'd adjust it think

think harder assume it's always going to be easier to overrate them you can really dead listen to them too hard ok Stata itself so here are the obvious benefits I Cho Quebecers a chunk of money a third of our backers came through Kickstarter I'm not sure what the figures would be these days now it's a couple of years old but Kickstarter is the marketing platform itself so you can if you get a staff pic and if you've got a good pitch you'll probably get a staff pic get a good chance to getting we new backers once we crossed about 50 grand I didn't want a number would be these days what's cost about 50 grand we still after getting press coverage without needing to chase people so once your Kickstarter is a success if you actually start raising up people who pay attention then the press stop ignoring you as one of another million Kickstarter projects you can get that far it makes a big difference and of course we got lots and lots of early feedback on design which is vital but the less obvious but less obvious benefits of Kickstarter we got

as I mentioned earlier early feedback on the message so we didn't just go with our first past marketing message and putting out there and we listened to what people said worked we changed it we were forced to explain what our vision for the game was very early on and then forced to stick to it now this is a double-edged sword I've heard a lot of people in the last couple of days say they would hate that and for some studio spirited process it doesn't work at all but us it did for us it kept us honest because I am scatty and proud to run after you showing your ideas and it was very beneficial to have that but if you go on Kickstarter and commit to a vision you are stuck with a vision of the foreseeable future the other thing that's an unalloyed benefit it's not a noble - thought at all and I can't overstate it enough if you have been laboring in the dark for months and no money suddenly 4,000 people want to give you money that is wonderful feedback and design very quickly that

was there are changing the in the combat system that were these tumors are equivalent to darkest dungeons difficult balance change we went from this combat system on the left the combat system on the right very late in development cost a couple a couple of months very difficult very painful absolutely worthwhile lifted the game from people going to combat awful to people going the combats okay bit a bit in there you know I'll take that two things about that first of all again tonight it's come up a lot in the last few talks is the difficulty of making major feature changes in early access so I think of it like this you have goodwill that you spend like currency from your community if you treat them well if you treat them honestly then you accrue more of that goodwill and you can spend it on major feature changes but you can't do it wildly doesn't mean you shouldn't do it at all just make sure you have the good win the bank am you ready to cushion them when you go through stretch goals I hate stretch goals I think it's very

easy to get focused on that number that's like a school that the funding total at the end of the kickstarter at the expense of making the game and to make promises about expansions or platform for other things you might want to do you get plenty more ground funding that will disappear in a month and in six months you have most of all team there are 200 stretch goals that I'm in favor of one is things you are secretly going to do anyway the other is things that cost almost no money and a cool run - at attention like this so I know one of our backers paid three and a half grand in order to get this ink on my leg and that cost me 60 pounds and that's a bargain see if you can find stretch goals that are interesting and low-cost then do

them otherwise think very carefully before committing to promises in the future the ending first the common wisdom is that narrative in early access doesn't work for us it did we did well in early access we do better in full launch and I think the reason that this worked better for us is that we did the ending first this is a good rule for writing generally if you're doing content but it's particularly important to early access the moment we launch the game people could finish it unless they found a bug but in theory they could finish it they could actually achieve a victory condition so you could get to the end and then over the next year we blocked in all the content in the middle Sevilla could play the game through to the end you didn't come back and find more content and also they could trust us it didn't look like we had just started writing a story we're going to make it up as you went along and work out what to do when you got to that point if you're going to do a content based narrative based Kickstarter always make sure you have an ending that you understand you can always change the

ending if you a better idea here or you can change it but it's better to have an ending than no ending community management is whole other talks on this obviously the particular two points I want to make protect your team your team will go nuts obsessing on every item of feedback if they can and chase them out of the forums give them like 20 minutes to read the feedback and then say no come on look at it tomorrow SAP the rest you see them looking make a joke of it put them in the naughty corner but protect them because people get really hung off and really down on it if you have a community manager communications director anybody like that to help filter stuff that's obviously much preferred and educate your community to answer so if but people must people come to the game and say I don't sound sincere to all I'd die constantly it's really hard our community would say yes it's the base to be hard and then teach them how to go through it and that would save our time responding to people so put the effort into educating your community so they can do your job for you in that respect

and don't tell people more than they need to know if you've got your Kickstarter running if you're putting out a new update every month or two people seeing there's there's recent activity people can see what you're doing they do not need to know every detail the road map we taught people a lot and they didn't remember most of it it took a lot of effort so make sure you can share it's a live project but don't go nuts trying to keep them up-to-date we did we had a completion chart we had like a bar graph of ten things with 70% complete exactly complete a tiny minority of our players ever read it valve is also funny about this kind of thing in early access these days anyway so I wouldn't recommend doing that always when you are releasing on a new platform especially as indie devs you might have done this before do some sort of soft launch or some sort of limited beta beforehand we did our backers beta on humblebundle it was good experience but there were problems with

the process that we found and fixed winner still rottenest you we did early access esteem my god I'm glad we did only access and steam before the full launch because the backend of steam I can't say too much because obviously valves ninjas will drag me off the stage but it's a bit like going inside the monolith in 2001 a Space Odyssey it's very confusing make sure you practice things upfront and this if you do well if you do well if you're a delicate creative soul and many of the people in this room are I certainly a.m. make sure that you are ready to be supported by your friends and your team when you suddenly look around and see that you've succeeded in the project been working on for the last six months 12 months a year told once the autobahns two years has finished and you don't want to deal with your life make sure that somebody's there to catch within your fall it sounds like a nice problem to have you're successful you get to press but even a fairly minor success you get the

post project lose quick follow through at the end so we learned a lot from open production and we thought very hard about how to make that work in our production process both in the future for other open production projects and more generally I'll skim through these action at a time vision is the most important thing again there been a several really good talks about it this year are particularly recommend the Red Hood guys darkest dungeon creative direction talking finding the vault if you have a consistent creative vision it means that your team understands you you're not sitting there on your throne waiting people to bring you concepts off and say oh that's what it needs to have more shoosh and your community understand it your community can tell you what they liked it or not and you have a ready-made message for marketing so double down there this is what we said we wanted in sunless sea from day one every single creative

decision we made every technical history made every marketing decision we made made reference to that points of light in the darkness the possibility of imminent death the sense of being something tiny and alone rocking chief of a boat a giant dark hungry ocean the sense of coming home again all that stuff finally creative direction stick to it like a face hugger culture what I wanted to do was say something about studio culture without any of this stuff I've never had anybody say we're not passionate about games we hate communication excellence is really bad so some really specific stuff that might not work fair would it work for us this is our guiding principle safety first then firm then profit when I said at the beginning it's important to think about sustainability that's what I had in mind most every decision we make about what gains to building what do next we think about the long-term financial viability of the studio then we think about how much fun it would be to do and

after that we think about how much profit it will make because I never want to look for my friends in the eyes and tell three of my friends in the eyes and tell them they've lost their jobs ever again so if you're an indie studio if you're not a funded startup if you're an indie studio that is trying to make a bad day and die out you are often going to have to make decisions that are temperate or the expense of decisions that might potentially pay off big we have a very clear studio identity that second paragraph I mean that's really specific but our audience know what we like and they come back to and respond to it so I this doesn't work for everybody but I recommend having a system studio identity and making all your games fit that mold some people are wildly creative and want to do a different thing with every project I salute you we can do it this really work for us and we are visible to

our community I protect my team and my communications director protects our team for the community but they know who we are they know our names often narrowly worked on individual bits and this humanizes us and it means that we can pass back attaboys from our community slack who's using slack yeah be honest terrifies everywhere it's really good it's just it's awesome it's if you're not using it it's a chat application that's very good at integrating on the streams this is what we use for tracking support our Zendesk tickets our Twitter responses form responses reddit posts in the summer sea subreddit all this goes in one channel everybody can see it which takes people out of it if they are there obsessing about it people can comment on it snarkily in real time without users seeing it but it gives us one place allows to track through unity directions generally so that's that's a really

revelatory tool other stuff very quickly production things where we ended up after sundar sea was two-week Sprint's month-long Sprint's for to do sloppy week-long Sprint's for two crazy we'd only spent retrospectives because we find that after two weeks people don't really have enough new things to say at the end every month we do a review of what we've achieved to know Tech and content were a very content driven studio in a full-time writing team so we have writing tasks and tech tasks they use very similar processes but not entirely similar tech we really focus on a Google sheets ready with estimates content we use something much more like a Kanban board we originally had a Kanban board and a tech spread II sorry a Content Kanban board and a spreadsheet for both we found that the

two together off they're a bit surplus so trim down your production tools to the ones you're actually using this right I want to leave you with this this is what I posted on slack just before we launch some let's see some people have no choice but to crunch if you have any choice about crunching crunch is I've only been a game dev for seven years but I've been in tech for 20 years and the data are in it's really clear you can work overtime for a week two weeks and you see a boost in productivity you work overtime for four weeks eight weeks six months your productivity drops you end up getting less out than you would maybe you are prodigy and you can work as an indie in voluntary crunch for six months at a time 10 hours a day 12 hours a day and gets good value out of it statistically speaking you can statistically speaking your ability to evaluate your own royal work and spot the defective button your

work drops as you work overtime SOTA statistically speaking working overtime for extended periods of time is usually it limits your ability to find other answers if you get the end of a Kickstarter or towards into the Kickstarter and you find you running out of money you can't do enough do not work overtime for more than a handful of weeks and compensate your people with time off if you do find things to cut your understanding gained much better at the end of the process you did at the beginning so you know what you can get away with cutting find other ways to do it look for other funding processors anything like this if you just think I'm going to work 16 hours today two more next week you will burn yourself out and you're making worse than because of it Contras one more thing open production goes both ways we wanted to build a community that will feed back to us we're also trying to build a modest ecology of indeed Aires would be indie

devs who work with us to make games and to teach them what we've learned and to learn from then in turn we've got two people in our occupation scheme at the moment we've funded one of them we've just announced fun better the end of the second line they're a very small funding initiative for narrative driven games we're talking up to 20 grand but it's enough to get an interesting small narrative project off the ground Google our studio name and that word if you want to find out more about it and that's me [Applause]