Owlboy: The Evolving Art of a 10 Year Project

[Music] Hi everyone. Hello. Hey everyone. Welcome to the uh first of many Alboy talks at this GDC. Uh yeah, only good things. Uh I have the pleasure to introduce you to um two of the D-pad. There's more of you, right? Yeah. Yeah. Two of the D-pad guys, um Yormy and Simon, who are here to tell you about the art of Alboy. Let's hear it. So hello. Uh so I've been told to instruct everyone. So if you're all huddled on the the edges here, whenever you come into the the room, try to get more close to the middle. Just it's easier for everyone. So but if you're comfortable where you are, that's fine. So today is going to be kind of a low-key presentation, I would say. Um, we're going to be showing you everything that we've been doing for the past 9

years. Uh, the the small little changes that we've been going through, and we're going to be showing you some videos of how terrible things were and how not so terrible things are now. Yeah. So, but first, let's have a look at how the world has evolved these last 10 years that we've been working on the game. this guy was president and um this little thing appeared. Yeah, I think we started right before that thing was announced. Yeah. So, the rise of smartphones and Alboy actually lived through the entirety of console generation. We originally signed Alboy to be on Xbox. Yeah, it was uh we were one of the first um indie development projects that actually used XNA and we've outlived that programming [Music] language. So, and back in the day uh the first time we started traveling around

was when we got nominated for the IGF and after that we like we got a taste of you know showing the game around and just getting feedback on it. So every time we would come back from anything like an event or something, we would return with like books full of scribbles and notes and feedback that we wanted to work on. Yeah. And you you have to remember that we started as a Norwegian independent studio and back then India development didn't really exist. Um neither did all of the goods and great stuff like engines that you had uh back then. So we kind of had to start from scratch and there were not video game courses didn't really exist back then. So when we got the IGF nomination on one hand it was a big honor. We didn't win it that's fine. Um but it ended up opening the eyes of a lot of other people especially Norwegians. So the same year I think we also won game of the year for Alboy in 2010.

Um, that was the year we walked around on the streets of Tronheim with a giant check uh next to a bunch of drunk people. So, that was fun. And then we ended up showing the game everywhere. And at this point, you know, we're completely green. We've never made a big commercial project before. So, here we are. We were going to make this big game. So we uh ended up uh making a demo because uh we thought that we were reaching, you know, the end of the line. So we wanted people to actually look what the what the game looked like. And this was in 2011. So I'm just going to show you a little bit of uh what the game actually looked like back then, low key. [Music] So, this is our 2011 demo. Yeah. So, just a show of hands, how many people have played

Alboy? Yes. There's people here. Yeah. How many played the original demo? All right. Oh, then the rest of you in for a treat. Yeah. So, this is our boy as it appeared in 2011. So, you just fly a little around here. this guy appears out of nowhere. Yeah, there's no explanation why he does that. Um, we were very smart with our level design back then because right before we released it, we removed the tutorial. Um, so we had to teach people to do this somehow and we just added sign points everywhere which no one read and got very frustrated at us for. I can't actually remember how to play this. Let's see. So, one of the things that that you did back then was um you killed your partner. Uh you could only teleport your your friend in if you even figured out how to do that when you were on the ground, which is really frustrating. Yeah. Everything is kind of clunky and

you have sort of a set limit for how fast you can shoot bullets. So, one of the first things that we did after we we released the demo was actually add an entire new dungeon just to teach the player how to play the game. So, uh right now I'm going to just switch over to Alboy as it appears today. [Music] So, one of the first things that we did um Can we full screen that? Yeah, we can. Yep. Was um we had to uh reprogram the whole game because uh widescreen, believe it or not, was actually not very common back then. So we initially we started all the way out in a resolution of 800 *

600. So which as actually if you see it in widescreen the whole game since it's pixel art would make the character look extremely weird and yeah it so one of the things we had to do was go around in the game and resize rooms and do everything. Since it's a 2D game it's not that easy to you know just make it widescreen. And I should mention that um when we released the demo because we had never developed a project before when people came out and said that oh this looks nice this means it has X and X in it that meant that we had to put those things in it. Uh so uh we started developing like giant rooms big free roaming areas that sort of thing. Uh but one of the other things was it didn't live up to the quality that people were expecting. Not really. So, one of the first things we started to do was really, really polish things. Yeah. So, as you can see, when you look at it, it

just looks like a screenshot, right? This is it's entirely static. Uh, except for Otis twiddling his thumbs. So, what we started to do was find ways for the game to feel more alive. So, we added um movement to clouds in the background because the entire game actually has these clouds in the background which instantly makes it, you know, come more alive. But, um we wanted to go one step further and if if you look deep into the background there, there's some clouds in the paradise layer as well. So we started moving those around and started to you know find stuff in the levels that we could give life to. And uh another thing is we wanted things to have this kind of floaty feel. So if I go up here you also have these parallax things that also can flow. So if I turn those off you see it becomes pretty

lifeless more or less immediately. Yeah. pretty much everything that we started adding, we wanted to feel like not only that you were there, but that you could interact with everything. Uh, one of the earlier design decisions that we came up with was that we were not going to use um portraits whenever people spoke. We needed all those animations to be within the characters themselves. Um, and one of those things that the benefits of doing that is now everything felt physical. Everything felt like whenever you touch something that was in the actual world. So you could um it made us focus a lot on where character placement was. So, the next step was um let's see uh we had to figure out a way because the game was actually when you scale up pixel art, it gets kind of jagged. If you look at the clouds and stuff in the background, they all like chip a little

bit away. But, uh Henrik, our tech programmer, he found a way to make it way more smoother. So if you compare it like this, it goes like choppy, but once you have the smoothing on, it actually kind of looks nice. And this is kind of a difficult technical achievement. A lot of people uh when they see pixel art, they say that it has to be exactly within the pixels. Uh which is what we did. We just changed the algorithm to make it appear smoother. That's it's a lot more complicated than it sounds. So the next step was to uh let's see whenever we display the demo to people and they would say that um the character art looks kind of clunky when he moves around. So this is how it works in the old demo. He just you know shifts direction immediately. But we added animations for him to, you know, make little turns. And, you know, when he flies in the air, he actually

goes from side to side, flipping. And this is what it looked like in the old one. [Music] So, suddenly he gained a little more weight. Yeah. It was a I think it was an old complaint that we had that someone said that his animation frames that he didn't have enough when he was flying. So, I took that as a challenge and I added like 200 life. So, and the final stage of, you know, um getting the game to look like there was actual life in there was to add wind. So, um we Yeah. So, yeah. Um essentially, um this is going to get a little technical, but most of you will understand this. In the old NES days, you could shift pallets on, uh background objects to make them appear like they move. is a really nice way to save memory. So we did something similar in the sense that every single object can have multiple textures and we can animate those. And

we took it one step further by doing it so that every single texture while it's being animated can be contextually interacted with. So that means that we can set the motion of the wind where it's coming from. You can hit bushes. Now if you have an object you can pick it up, throw it into it. it'll spawn more particles and react to it accordingly. Yeah. So, um and I think we went overboard a little bit maybe, but you know, we we had to keep up because uh the pixel art and the games were evolving as we were working on Alboy. So uh we in order to you know uh release Alway now to modern consoles and to PC we had to do that extra bit of work to make sure that the game was up to you know modern standards. And you have to remember I didn't say this at the beginning but the point of Alboy was to

find a way to bring pixel art back into the public consciousness and kind of elevate it to the level that people expected it to be. And when you've developed the game for 9 years, that expectation changes a little bit. Yeah. So, um, we ended up, uh, let's see here. Oops. Uh, we ended up maybe overimproving on the game. Uh, because of Alboy's, you know, lengthy development. Simon was actually getting better and better at doing pixel art. So, at some point he said, "Uh, let's try to, you know, depict Otis as I would have done him today." And he posted it on Twitter and the fans went, "No." Yeah. Because they didn't want me to redo the entire thing. And I don't blame them cuz there's like 800 custom animations for him. Yeah. Uh there were in fact a lot of things that we had to

sort of dumb down a little bit because I was working with 8-year-old sprites and 8-year-old animations. So I changed a few of them, but you can't change everything. So if you play the game, you'll notice that throughout the later areas and the very beginning, the quality is a little different than um sort of the middle parts. Yeah. So, uh, at some point we just had to say, "Okay, we we got to stop now. We have to find a deadline for a game and we have to, you know, figure out a way to cut down on our work because we had actually originally um a lot of ideas that would extend the game. like we had planned for this huge huge city called Advent which was going to have you know a bunch of different characters, a theater, side quests and even like Minecraft was getting really popular at the time. So we wanted to add crafting to the game

and we were just Yeah, there was literally a point where we considered breaking it apart and then constructing chains to pull it back together again with a little furnace. These assets are actually in the game. And I'm surprised no one's found them yet. Yeah. So, uh, what we ended up doing because this was at a point in our lives where, you know, we were getting kind of desperate and things kind of took a turning point because, uh, we were just, you know, trying to find our way. And at that point, we started discussing, so what can we do? Um, first off, I'm just going to show you because we actually ended up fully animating and, you know, adding Advent as a city. We just didn't Let's see. Here we [Music] go. So, this is sort of a look at what Advent would have looked like uh had we completed it and on track. So, this is

just the main hub area. You guys see this as a brief moment uh when you arrive in game, but you never saw this. This was supposed to be a full theater area where you could bring one of your companions and put on plays. Uh we actually prototyped this, but it's not finished enough to show off. No, this is the first time we show it off. This is a plant mechanic because we didn't settle on the vegetables and uh things that you could eat in the game right away. So, you were supposed to bring seeds, plant them, watch this thing grow, water it, and then eat them. We're very practical. Yeah. So, I I think we can end it there. We're going to we're going to post this video uh online. Like, even the music is unused in the game. Um so, we're going to reveal this later on. Yeah. And in fact, the a lot of the themes I think they make it into the soundtrack, but we never actually use them in the game.

Yeah. Yeah, very frustrating. So, at one point, uh this is Tender, by the way. Hello. Uh and uh at some point we decided to um cut down on all of the content in the game. And the the important thing here is that uh we did this deliberately, not to to cut content necessarily, but because it ended up being the best thing that we could do for the story. And in fact, we've cut tons of stuff that most of you will probably say, "I want to play that anyway, but would have destroyed any kind of context in the game." We'll show you some of that later, but this is one of them. So, this is what happened to Adam. [Music] [Applause]

That was a lot of parallax layers. So, at this point, um, we we knew that we would be able to finish Alboy. [Music] Um but um let's see here. Um but the tone of the game changed um because at that point like I said we were kind of distraught and a lot of personal things were kind of you know uh intervening. So we kind of felt that we had failed a lot of people. Yeah. the I I've never really put a um had any problem saying that. I've been struggling with depression for pretty much my entire life. And when

you're I think it was 7 years into the project at that point, that was probably the lowest I've ever felt in my life. And you were going through some very difficult things as well. Yeah. one of my best friends died um out of a heart attack um in his 30s. And uh one of the things that sparked the you know the the part where we destroy Advent was part of because I felt like my life had been destroyed right in front of my eyes. So that's kind of how this tone changed happened. Yeah. We we also realized I think I've said this other places but roughly I think it was either 3 or 2 years before we finished the game we finally found the red line that connects the entire uh Alboy story and that was a story of friendship and it sounds very hokey but it is what kept us together while we were developing it. So we had a lot of things we could relate to and we

ended up rewriting a lot of roles. In fact, uh this a little anecdote, but Getty, the the character you see next to you in the game, if you've played it, you know that he's your best friend. Uh he's this fantastic guy that sticks up for you no matter what. In the original game, he didn't know who you were. You introduce yourself at the start and he's just some random guy that ends up tagging along. This was a very late change. Aren't you? Yeah. Yeah, it it was kind it was kind of, you know, the red thread that we found that um brought all the story and the characters together. Um but we also uh had a lot of the things that had been haunting us, you know, the the part where we had been trying to get this game out since 2011 and again and again promised people and those we cared about that this game is coming out. So, we wrote an entire intro sequence just depicting this feeling that we were failing. And it it just so

happened, it wasn't just that we went in and changed it just because we had a change of heart. It just so happened that everything ended up coinciding. Uh we had we had this story of a mute owl that couldn't live up to his mentor's expectations already, but finally we felt like we could completely resonate with that kind of feeling. And we also had, you know, there were still things that we wanted to add even though we decided that no, now is enough. But Simon, of course, going the extra step. I think half of these characters are ready to go into the game with charact like animations done, but we ended up scratching a lot of them. Yeah, I can I can point to a few of them. This will probably end up on the Alboy Reddit at some point. Uh, so on the left here, you can see there's a guy with a little um he's got like dreads and little thing growing on top of his head. in the

school that you visit um Midame. This guy was supposed to give you information on all the different enemies that you meet. Didn't end up adding him because, you know, the town blew up. Um the guy that plays the bongos was supposed to have a family uh living elsewhere in the game, but uh you were supposed to interact with them by wearing little shoes that made sound that you bought in Advent and then dance in front of his door. That didn't happen because the city blew up. Um, Buccaneer, the shopkeep who has all the little uh, bogwin creatures, was supposed to have a sister with uh, assistants that look sort of like the Bogwins. Um, we've debated so many times whether or not we should were supposed to add her, but again, just ended up being cut. And we also have the army general standing next to Otis there uh who was supposed to lead the army bravely into u an attack. Of course,

that is his only pose in the entire game. Uh I guess he'll just be disgruntled forever. And then you have the quite large person next to him was the u very happy um ferry driver which was supposed to be like a uh quick travel option between all the different areas. But it turns out uh when you cut the game down to be easily maneuverable, you don't need an entire section to drive around in a boat. So he went along well and all the systems for it and everything was in and it was functioning but we we just ended up you know not using him. So, and we also had a shop called the Bogwin Shop, which was supposed to be, you know, littered around the world. And yeah, so we ended up cutting a lot, but uh let's see here. Um we even ended up cutting um giant

boss fights. Um one of those boss fights was with Molstrom. Now, a lot of the people that have been like digging into the game have found a trigger to get this boss fight to work and have constantly asked us, "Why didn't you keep this in?" And it's essentially that it makes Malstrom look very dumb because he's supposed to be this this absolutely indestructible force of uh of nature. He's supposed to be literally a tank that can walk and punch people. And if you could beat him, then he seems really weak. But the boss fight was cool. So, we're going to show you that. Let's have a look at it. [Music] That's Joe, by the way. It's

temporary. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Yeah. So that's the Mstrom fight. And even though it was kind of functional and working, we decided that the way we want to depict Mstrom is, you know, indestructible. So we had to remove it.

But we also had an entire freaking dungeon. Yeah. So, uh, for those of you that have finished the game, you know about the last area. Um, what you didn't know is that the floor you walk into when you enter the big hallway was supposed to crack and you were supposed to fall down into what was essentially like a massive dump shoot of winding cogs and uh like things that were just going to grind you up into meat paste. Yeah. Um, and at the end of this thing, you were supposed to meet the third guardian. Let's have a look at [Music] him.

Heat up here. [Music] So, we scrapped him together with I think about seven enemies that were fully functional. Yeah. the entire dungeon and the entire story to go with it. So that was I think one and a half year wasted at least. And the uh I

should also mention uh in addition to that uh we also cut a fourth gunner that you're supposed to have. And the the reason we had to cut her was two reasons. One she was being used for that boss fight. Uh so we had no use for her there. And the second was that she turned out to be extremely boring to play. Yeah, we made her way too overpowered. Yeah. Um, for those that that know the character, it was supposed to be Cornell. You meet her at the end of the game. She builds a giant rocket because she's awesome. Yeah. Um, she had a rocket launcher for a weapon, which I think Buccaneer ended up using at the final game. Yeah. So, but what we were pretty happy with in the end, because we scratched a lot of other stuff, too. We had something we call the extra dungeons which even like up to the final two weeks we started um redoing. Yeah, it was uh the this evolves over the the

course of the entire project. We started out with something called the mega dungeon, which was essentially you find a door inside a dungeon and it brings you to a big connecting web that links you to all of the other ones. Uh we found out that that is insane and we ended up cutting that. So we just decided okay our level designer Adrien Bower uh ended up making a ton of extra stuff for us throughout the entirety of development. So let's put the rest of the story that we can't tell in those areas and then put all those bosses and things that we've shown you now in those areas. Sound like a perfect plan. Turns out that's also a lot of work, especially when you're on the last year of your development. So, how do we rectify that? How do we tell the most important key story of the entire game? And we actually came up with this uh standing outside about to go home. I think it was like a month before we released. Yeah. Two weeks actually.

Oh, yeah. So, what we ended up doing was that we took one of the more empty areas that we had that felt very interesting, but we weren't sure what to put in there and just put all of that in there. And it turns out that was way more interesting than what we had planned for. Yeah. So, finally we felt like we had the game that we would have been happy with. So, we ended up shipping the game and finally being, you know, content with it. I wouldn't say 100% content, but, you know, that's just how the way we work. The um I I want to tell the story about this real quick. The uh on the day that we were launching the game, uh I mean, we were nervous, no doubt. Uh it didn't really feel real. So, we were standing around uh looking at the download bar of this thing and

then we thought we had everything ready. We had tested over and over and over again and then we hit launch on Steam, but we couldn't tell if it was actually launched. So, how do we do that? Well, we go over to the only computer we have in the office that doesn't have it downloaded, and we downloaded it, but it didn't work. So we tried for about half an hour to get this thing down and watched for roughly 15 minutes whether or not this thing was going to download and finally the second it did and we could confirm that yes it was version 1.1 that's when that happened. Yeah. So um thank you See?