Owlboy: The Motivational Power of Inspiration

[Music] okay so let's actually start off the thing and I'll have to try and speak a little bit faster because I don't have the time that I usually have okay so uh who here has played Al booy before okay so we have a good few of you then I don't have to talk too much about that excellent so my name is Simon Anderson I am a uh self-trained well mostly self-trained artist um I'm mostly known for my pixel art I think but I've done quite a few things uh I've done uh advertisement was one of my first projects that I did uh I think that was 2009 I also worked on children's cartoon shows that I don't think anyone here has ever watched they're very popular at home I promise um I've also done a good bit of freelance illustration so these are some of the covers that I've done uh some of you might know those and I have also of course worked on video games uh some of these our previous projects some

of them are out now one of them is planet toid Pioneers I did a very nice intro they're very thankful um but I guess um the the thing I'm most known for is a little project called alboy um now roughly 5 years ago I funded a studio called dpad studio and well I work as an art director and I basically do all the art for that studio practically everything if you ever been to the website I unfortunately had to do that didn't code it but I did that stuff um Dad studi has done a number number of projects uh the only one I think you'll recognize from this list would be Savant asent we also have that game in the mid right which is Project rap CID which we did before we formed the studio officially which I think was in 2005 which shows how old we are but again what I'm most known for is

this thing which most of you appear to have played uh now alboy was an idea that I got when I was still in school and this was kind of before the industry had really taken off and it was before the Norwegian game industry had really shown much uh we had fun come back then and India development was pretty much non-existent and more so if you were going to make a living off of doing indie games um that wasn't really an option at all um so I got together with some friends and I started to work with kind of hobby projects and stuff that I wanted to do on my spare time I pitched alboy we made the Glorious decision of being one of the first people to use XNA for our game we have now outlived that programming language um and uh the idea was that we were GNA

fund the studio really quick finish alboy and then go on to make all sorts of other things and the end result was that uh we ended up working on alboy for quite some time I think this was in yeah that's in 2011 they're talking about Fez not being released yet and we actually managed to uh get alboy done last year in November which brings the total number count to 8 years plus 11 months so pretty much N9 years now a lot of people ask why did we actually finish this project I mean consider just how long of a time that is um and there's a number of reasons for that but I think the main reason is that we felt really inspired to do this thing uh we knew what the game was going to be knew how we had to do it and we knew

that we could present it in a way that people would find engaging we just needed the amount of time for it so what's this panel about then well uh there's kind of plenty of panels here that tell you about very intricate design decisions and how to do 3D meshes and texture work and that sort of thing I thought I'd mix it up a little bit and talk about whoop not that one talk about how you can get inspired how to keep that inspiration to push through all the things you don't want to do and then well finish and I'm going to be using examples from alboy all through the thing so you see how I did it and then maybe you can put some of that in your toolbox if you want so how do we start well I'm going to give you some quick tips on how to be inspired most of you already know these things but I'm going to reiterate and use examples so here's how would improve this thing

now most of you do this already uh have you ever seen a movie that wasn't quite that good or game that was kind of eh or presentation with a long-haired guy that went on for too long uh you can kind of use that as a jumping board to get further along with your ideas and uh iterate on that uh my personal favorite is to play Old Game Boy Color games I do this on purpose uh that era of games the the system was so difficult to develop for and you had so many inexperienced developers that you got a lot of very unfinished ideas and it's a gold mine to go through if you want to find things to bounce off of and find ways to iterate things on your own now I should stipulate if any of the Developers for these games are in the audience I'm not picking on you specifically I just pulled something off of Google so uh let's see so in aloy's

case um I had two goals one was to show pixel art as a medium so back then pixel art wasn't viewed very well U publicly the whole Indie development thing hasn't really started up and most people saw it as more of a not as good as 3D kind of thing and the second um was that I was playing a lot of kiters and Super Mario 3 so the these are the two games I would say that inspired alboy more than anything else uh Mario had this sort of half Glide kind of thing uh it wasn't quite a flying mechanic and you could quite fly along with it and kidikas had a well it's basically Cupid but he couldn't fly which felt a little limiting uh it also had very open dungeons but you couldn't really explore anything so I wanted to to change that up and and uh kind of uh I I wanted to

find a way to to bring that into my own game that's one of the reasons why you fly an alboy is because I looked at Kris and I thought what if you could fly higher what if you could find flying Islands uh one of the reasons Otis is mute in the game is because I figured if islands are so far away maybe they have their own language and that developed to the idea of him being mute it wasn't some sort of weird reference to Gordon Freeman so let's see here what's the next one uh here's also an example of things that came from kikus um kikus was very vertical it worked more or less like Pac-Man if it could could scroll you could jump off the screen and pop out on the other end but it still felt very limiting because the world felt like it had some depth to it these are some of the design sketches we had for massively open worlds because back then we thought if you're making a big game it massive

open worlds uh we have since cut these areas or at least drastically reduced them because we realize that there's better ways of designing games but the open world aspect on that came from iterating upon ideas that we didn't feel like were complete okay next Point what if so this one is another one that most people do but it keep it requires a little bit of extra effort so uh it's BAS basically any idea that you have and then you add a random random element to it uh how does that make the idea fun can you add something just really bizarre to something to uh give it that extra spice so just an example how about you have a giant City filled with very Dandy dinosaurs that talk um that's exactly what I did in alboy so we had the city Advent uh we had a a small settlement at the start of the game and the idea was

that you were going to come out to the later parts of the game and you were going to say like now I get to explore the big city now I get to go into all the shops there was a theater in there there was a school you could buy items all that good stuff that you get in in your usual RPGs um and to spice it up a little bit I added dinosaurs keep in mind these are 10 years old so not so good now um but again um when we continue working on the game we figured that on one hand it was a Monumental undertaken to make a giant sprawling City to explore and all that but it turned out that in context of the story it was much more impactful to lose that city that you got a brief glimpse of it and then the entire thing got destroyed so we ended up doing that in the game instead but I still kept the old designs um one of them was a sort of wonky looking velociraptor uh I'm not sure why I said he was a

velociraptor but that's kind of what I based him on not sure you can even see that I mean he has horns uh but this guy stuck around for quite some time and at some point we needed a way to teach the player how to do a Dodge roll and I kind of just dug him out of my old archives and looked at uh ways of incorporating him we ended up kind of liking him uh and because of this because he end ended up having kind of a big part of the game they became the bogwin which are kind of a staple of alboy at this point um now I mentioned that they were based on Velociraptors but the team kept saying that they looked sort of like a mix between a penguin and a cow so we gave their name by mixing Bine with penguin so that's where their name bogwin just in case you're curious and I want to address this now um back when I designed these guys I had no idea what a pry was so the

uh the comparison is unfortunate I should have picked a different color for them so another thing to get you guys inspired that looks cool now this is basically just finding games that you like and then dissecting what you like about them either it comes from a mechanical standpoint or if it comes from just the feeling that you get and I I realized that saying feeling sounds like a very you know mushy kind of thing to do but sometimes just getting the feeling of what you enjoy about something is a very difficult task so uh just as an example from alboy uh one of the things that inspired us a lot for doing our tutorial levels were Mega Man X and the Legend of Zelda linked to the past now both these games did tutorials very well uh Mega Man X for example throws you in a pit very early so that you're forced to to learn the jumping mechanic to get out of the pit

um they also put enemies in certain placements so you'll have to learn how to do certain Moves In order to get around them uh now when it comes to alboy um there were a lot of people saying that well the start of the game had kind of a a slow tutorial and that was kind of on purpose we had a lot of focus testing and it turns out that most people just didn't understand our throw mechanic so we had to really hammer in how that worked but that was literally the only place that we did that the rest of the game we permeated with the same kind of design decisions that we got from megon X for example reusing are you going to jump there you go uh reusing uh hints for certain mechanics right before you're about to use them um in this case you have a stone that looks exactly like the boss and the only way to destroy it is to spin on it which is exactly how you defeat the boss you have to spin on to get the shield off so yep I lost my notes there we are okay

okay next one new experiences now this one is going to be something that you're not going to feel the effects of right away and a lot of you are going to argue that I don't have the money or I don't don't have the time for this but I would really recommend it um it's basically just taking yourself to a new environment that you're not familiar with and simply by doing that you're going to absorb a lot of new things that you weren't aware of previously uh during alboy development I had to Brink a lot of comfort zones I started dating for the first time in the US I'm Norwegian so that was a big thing and I wasn't used to dealing with someone that had different interests than mine so I had to go along and you know join into fabric shops and that sort of thing and it turns out when you put in those environments you get a lot of very neat ideas I think I scribbled an entire notebook of new ideas just by going in looking at

plushies um here's a very simple example if I'm babbling too much um this is uh mandolin house from the start of the game for most of you it should be obvious that I had just visited Japan right before this but this wasn't intentional I think this was drawn maybe five years afterwards but it was something I had internalized she has there are there were no means to incorporate anything Japanese into the style but because I had that I knew certain architectural elements so just because I've been placed in that environment I internalized some things and I could use them for projects later so next one be bored uh I like to describe being bored as letting your mind wander and figure out what it actually wants to do uh not everyone has the luxury of doing this on of course most of us are very busy but

it is uh if you read most authors books they will tell you that their big Epiphany was when they were on a bus or they were on a train or somewhere where they were just mundanely staring at something without thinking this is really important stuff and if you don't get a moment to yourself you're not going to be able to internalize and think about all those things that you've thought about previously don't overdo it though that's how you become a hermit so I've talked a lot of nonsense about uh ways to get inspired so let's put that inspiration to use um next part is also going to seem like I'm talking down to you but I'm really not make stuff most of us are terrible at this we are not good at just starting a thing and then iterating on it usually we start making design documents we think about the mechanics before before we' even started looking

at the program a lot of these things are pretty much a barrier to continuing your work um I'll I'll give you two examples for this just to hammer the the point across um before we finished completing alboy we made another project called Savant Ascent now a lot of people kind of felt like this project came out of nowhere and like where on Earth did you come up with this idea well the truth is this was actually an old project uh Joe Remy who's sitting there filming me right now uh made a little prototype thing that looked like this and it was basically just sitting there uh flailing your arms and making something random the idea here was that enemies were coming in in waves in little circle patterns and you can change out your gun now later we ended up reiterating that and turning that into a collaboration with the music artist

salant and as you can see it's the same basic concept but we iterated it a bit further you could have new powerups you could jump between two points um it was vertically scrolling to give you that feeling of speed at the same time so a lot of a lot of that simply came from this doofy doodle that that Joe did on my end um I was looking through my old sketch books because I didn't actually remember this and I found this gu this was just some random doodle that I made maybe I I'm not even sure how many years ago it was now maybe eight uh the idea was just that I have an owl that's based on a barn owl let's just make a snowy owl see how that turns out no basic ideas about that and it turns out from this I made one of the most important characters in alboy Solus uh which became the main focal point of pretty much the entire story so

again this was not pre-planned we had no design documents doing this it was just a bunch of Doodles that you started to interpret all right so next up is what do you actually do in this game so a lot of you will probably ask me what is alboy and I'll give you the standard pitch that I give to everyone and I'm going to have to read this ad verbatim because it's going to be hard for me so it's usually going to be uh that it's a game about flying exploring and conquering dungeons sounds pretty straightforward but that's not actually what the game is about more accurately let's say I describe the combat it is in combat the game is about careful positioning in a space with preset location encounters using twin stick shooting mechanics while managing several weapon types and different

effects while disarming abilities that's what the game is actually about and it doesn't sound quite as pleasing these are the small things that you have to figure out while you're developing the game and often times it helps you to figure those out early sometimes you're just doing development boxes someone has shown you a sketch don't base it on the sketch just make some really strange small iterative things it's the difference between thinking I have a really cool game where you you punch people in the face like that but if you expand that thought and instead say I want jumping standing and ducking attacks to count as different hit areas on the body that's what leads to this very different thought processes let's see here and these are some of my my own development sketches uh had nothing to do with designing pretty things it's just going through small interactive

little dillies that you're going to do while playing the game these things are vital all right another good technique interpret the mess you've made so let's say that your project is kind of a JBL mess of sketches and programming language and that sort of thing but the foundation is you kind of have a rough idea of what you want um one of the things you can do is just simply to interpret what those jarble things are not to go by your preset design documents just look at the image and try to figure out what does that look like I gave an example a little while ago saying if you have two boxes uh that you now have moving towards each other try to figure out what they're thinking as this is happening um I'll bring do a brief examp example here is uh the first sketch I

did of a dungeon in alboy um this was I think the second thing that I did for the game now it looks a lot different than the finished version and that's because all those interpretations that I did was based on the small symbolisms and trying to figure out where all these things went in this one image now for example I drew this symbol a lot I had no idea what that was I drew this symbol a lot no idea what that was and it turns out that that became the Cornerstone of what this entire project was meant to be uh if you look at one of the final images that you get in the game this explains the entire story uh these images are now a prominent part of the design structure uh these are now incorporated into the story they're incorporated into the way you play all of this was interpreting just old

sketches let's see here so how to get the most out of your work um this is not really a necessary part of all this but I'm going to go through it in case we have students here that want some brief brush UPS on how to do basic design work so I'm going to run through some ways on interpreting defining traits um so when I started designing the game Otis wasn't an owl he was a lot of different things I just knew that I had something that was going to fly and probably pick things up and that he was going to land on Islands so I started out with this it was some sort of insect guy with wings um most of the base mechanics were not established and I think I spent about a month going through this entire design tree um at first I was going to settle

on the flying dog then Okami was released yes that's how old it was so I decided to scrap that moving further down I moved uh I went away from the dog thing and looked more at seagulls maybe it was like a fox that had a little Cape that he flew with that sort of thing uh and I kept iterating on Concepts where you had some sort of cloak device and some sort of birdlike feature this was a very long and argu process especially back then when I had no experience but what I finally ended up with was this guy now this is not a good design uh you can see the base elements of the final character here but he has eyebrow tfts he has some sort of neck thing that I haven't quite figured out what is has some sort of checkerboard pattern he has just normal

hands and I don't see any loopable patterns or uh repeatable shapes then I scaled them down this is another way to quickly iterate some of your designs uh if you're designing your characters full size sometimes you end up being stuck on details uh I decided to try and Sprite him first because things are small and you have to point out the things that you want to see so in this case you can see that he's developed more of those weird eyebrows he has uh his um what do you call those sideburns that's the one uh he also has more of a neck fluff thing and his cape now covers more of his body but this still isn't the finished version then I took that and I scaled it up this is the final design now some of the things here I should mention uh if you're looking for shape

language is more satisfying when you have shapes that repeat throughout the character if you look at the hair the eyebrows The Sideburns the tips of his cloak and his feet they all share the same points also his neck fluff thing and the tips of his the top of his boot are the same shape more satisfying let's see here um you can also remove traits to see if it looks weird um if if you take something away and you feel like it makes the character lack something then you can put them back and in centu it more I also want to jump back into this for a split second this is more for the more hardcore fans because I know they'll appreciate it if you look over here you'll see it was kind of a weird design Otis ended up being it at last um I also realized that this is what ended up being twig in the game uh uh which is one of the uh starting antagonists so

technically Otis and Twig are the same person it's a little strange um another thing I want to point out really quick defining colors um it's usually more satisfying to have a color that repeats at least once within a design here's Otis here are his color blocks you can see that his hair his cloak and his feet all share the same color as do his uh eyebrows and his uh sweater thing and I purposely made his pants and his face to look the same uh because it makes it stand out lless the main part that's uh popping out are his gloves those are the unique color and the reason I did that is because most of the game you'll be flying around and you'll be holding things and you need to see those gloves when you do but I also made sure that when he runs he has two little relics on his side that are colored in Gray so it doesn't feel too jarring when

you do that let see here another thing here is consistency now all of these areas seem very different I'm sure uh you have the the Blue Water Area and you have the tropical green area and the lava and all of that but in actuality all of these share the same pallet now I didn't have to do that I didn't have to uh limit myself to using a certain amount of colors but adds to consistency all of this is based on the first image that I made for the game now I'm going to be talking a little bit about sticking to your vision um now this is going to be diff different for everyone uh and I'm not going to claim that you'll need to uh that you need to finish uh what you start most of you probably have ideas that really passionate about but might actually not work out um but I know that

actually feeling that drive is one of the biggest problems usually we sit around for months if not years developing a project and eventually you'll lose hope in what you're doing or you'll hit financial trouble and I feel like the biggest motivator is feeling that passion for what you're doing and finding that one thing that you really want to complete there's a lot of things that you're going to get yourself into sometimes a project is detrimental to your income uh you simply can't continue likely if you work too long your spare time will vanish you'll have less time to hang out with your friends might actually be the case that your project is not very good might turn out that the particular Market you're aiming for doesn't exist or is no longer interested in your

project uh things might change halfway through development and continued work is not possible and it might be that you need a second job to keep things afloat we've gone through all of this during our development however I want to say that I still find it worth it first of all creativity is a process no one's going to make something on the first go and you're going to face multiple failures before you achieve great things the main tool I found to overcome this is the passion and the passion from the rest of my team to complete these um these hurdles I taught myself how to make pixel art I taught myself how to use Photoshop I did not go to school for those things and all of that was for the main reason of completing a project that I believed about a

lot I want to finish with a little anecdote um because there was a I feel like there was a moment where I realized how important this aspect of development was to me and the rest of the team so about two years ago we were interviewed uh for a short documentary on our development um this thing is not online unfortunately it was a school project but they asked how we felt about the project at that time and I've made no secret that I've been struggling with depression for pretty much my entire life and at that point I think I was at the lowest point where I was in my entire life and my answer was to apologize to my team and I remember after we saw the finished cut of the um they had asked the question of why I

apologized to the rest of the team and they told me I was stupid um that they loved what they were doing and they believed in this project so much they didn't care and about I don't even know how long later that was but on November 1st we put the thing up on Steam and hit the launch button didn't actually work out we couldn't see if it was actually uploaded so we had to go to the only computer in the entire office that didn't have the game installed and download it and after about 30 minutes of waiting we could confirm that it was the latest version this was the reaction to that that was 9 years of builtup Anguish

and frustration in one moment and I know it's it's not a very flattering photo it isn't um but I would say despite all of that because people keep asking me so I'll just do this on stage right now um it was completely worth it I would actually do it again and it was the inspiration that I felt and the motivation for Mar to the team that made us get to that point so if I have to leave you with anything listen to your own head and go do what you're going to do thank you for your [Applause] time but