Partnership on Darkest Dungeon: The Double-Edged Sword

thanks everybody my name is Chris I'm Tyler we're we're pretty much Co everything on red hooks videos on darkest dungeon and just thanks very much for being here there's a panel on writing sex scenes at the same time as this talk to really appreciate you guys making them very poor choice to be here so we we're probably gonna use the full 30 minutes unless miraculously we run short because of some reason that hasn't happened yet and but we're happy to talk to people in the wrap-up room after where it's just just corner us and they'll shoot us out of here somewhere where we can talk and we'd love to to talk about the challenges and things you're facing in your Studios so quick preface this isn't like an instructional or prescriptive talk I find those really abrasive because I don't think there's any like true flight path through you know something as personal as a partnership so we thought we would just try to expose our working relationship

given that our company structure is 50/50 which is somewhat uncommon and we've had some troubles with that and also some some really good successes so this is really a subjective recounting of how we structure things and how we do it and hopefully there will be something in there for you guys to apply to your own situations yeah and the other thing is we don't talk a lot about it and the team in this talk so apologies to the team members were sitting here this is really a focus on sour time I'm not there time so a little bit of background Red Hook we were already I guess veterans in the industry of various places but Red Hook started with just Chris and I on an idea and the only money we had was savings from working at other studio jobs and so this partnership had seen and go from that to something that ended up being quite a bit more successful than we ever thought it would to be honest making a game not for everyone about the grim dark and so

we've seen different challenges we've seen the no money challenge and we've seen the money challenge and along the way there's been a lot of things that we've had to tackle as Chris mentioned we are co-presidents work owe everything we don't do the same things all the time but sometimes we do our Gill's very different or personalities are very different but we share all the decision-making and as you might expect that's sometimes cool and sometimes really messy and complicated as probably some of the team members don't mean to if you want to yeah venting having two bosses is not always as it's not streamlined really so we'll get into that a bit but the bottom line I guess of this whole thing and if there's any real context to put on it is that we truly believe that the game would not have been as successful without that mess messy in perfect structure so all the reasons why you would partner are pretty self-explanatory so we're gonna gloss over the good stuff just like a steam review we're gonna ignore most of the good stuff and take it for granted and then really focus on that just the trash it's not the first hundred hours

that matters it's that last ten minutes yeah it's a slap in the face Wow so obviously you can accomplish more together than apart sometimes having two people the key takeaway of this talk is two people can do more work than one person I know let it like sink in there's moral support you can really leverage different but compatible perspectives that's all great and pretty self-explanatory what sometimes gets overlooked especially early on when when you're talking about partnering up with someone is you can lose the the realism with all the enthusiasm all of these benefits of partnership have a very real price you can have competing egos you can you know be fighting each other for sort of the authorship of the thing there's a huge potential for conflict arguments and you know many many partnerships flame out like that I mean we're not the police but like the police Simon and Garfunkel obviously be workshop the Simon Garfunkel thing and I was like hit banned Simon & Garfunkel

so really the thesis here is partnership is a double-edged sword we're not going to hit this analogy the whole time but if you don't know how to use it you're gonna hurt yourself so I think this is pretty common usually when you decide you're gonna partner with someone hopefully you know them and you've done some things but sometimes it's just you're sharing ambitions you're like I want to make gave me want to make game let's do it in our case we had known each other for years we worked at we first met in another studio and had a chance to kind of work nearby each other and different proud and then work together on some projects so we started growing appreciation for the other person's skill and that planet definitely a seed that that took many years to germinate and over those years we ended up going other places working doing a million other things we became friends and are the probably the most common thing that we did is we'd get together once a month and play poker with a few other few other friends of mine Coover and that alternated between like really heavy poker at the beginning of that maybe like six years and then went into therapy sessions and then back to poker because it was taking like an hour to play a hand but during that time we got to know each other and not only

what their skills and values our bed ambitions that was really important but just like relationships and other things timing is everything so once you know we had talked about working together we actually tried a webcomic at one point it didn't make it very far it never got out there so don't go hunting you know we thought about making a really elaborate choose-your-own-adventure because we were figuring out ways to blend our skills so when the timing finally came up I'd like to say we both had disasters at our previous companies which ended up being really fortuitous but we're like okay we're doing this but we discussed a lot of the hard stuff up front and as you might expect like the first thing it's like okay well who's the boss as you know shortcut spoiler alert nobody's the boss but the biggest thing was the 50/50 talk there was a proposal for 5149 for really good symbolic reasons you know and then that really we had to confront those no-go lines and we ended up at 5050 and I guess the main message from this is like and that was just as symbolic as the

5149 it you want to have these discussions up front I guess we're not trying to be prescriptive but it's a bad idea to have that discussion after you've created something of value like even if it's just okay now we've we have a full design and it forced us to work through something hard at the beginning just to test test ourselves quite a scene in that Starbucks great reason to partner up you can leverage your compatible interests or skills you can carve out areas of expertise really feels like you've got someone who's got your back here you're able to make progress in multiple SKUs at once again glossing over the positives yeah the positives are kind of Boreham however as you might expect apologies to all the Tony Danza fans but who's the boss the reality is you know some areas require a lead you can't just hey we're gonna we're gonna just link arms and make every decision our skills are different our minds are different and that that's really difficult I think that's an area of can be heavy team

confusion it still happens Chris will give a piece direction I'll come in and contravene that accidentally or vice versa one thing that is I guess been really helpful but it's also challenging is there right now versus the future sometimes you take on a role to get it done or like this needs done or I'll do this or maybe you're just better positioned to make that decision right then but then the other person is thinking oh wait did I you know you you give feedback to the composer and then I'm thinking did I just you know am I no longer the music guy was I ever the music guy I don't know but these are easy to think about in the short term but they become really scary when you think about the totality of like am i handing over the keys to this part of the business yeah some partnerships I think are really effective because you might have two completely different skill sets so the business guy the creative guy and where we have a lot of overlapping interests and end skills and so like for me I spent years and years and years of my career going up through the art track concept artists art lead

art director studio art director back to concept artists and the whole time just fighting tooth and nail to get into that like secret room with the designers and the story guys like I felt like I had a lot of ideas I felt like they're like really good but no one was listening to me so but in those larger you know triple-a structures they're they're compartmentalize for good reason I guess but it was very very hard for me to actually get to the place where I felt like I was being able to express all of my creative potential so that's why we've started the game I want authorship on the design I want to be a part of it it's important to me but funnily enough that's a huge overlap with Tyler yeah I mean my background my business card has said game designer for a long time and you know originally and it's really simple SE and we look at each other and it's like okay you're an artist I'm a game designer let's despite what you're seeing here make so and so you know I that's a big that's what I'm

bringing to the partnership is that background and but it's not that simple you know like so there's a lot of the reality is like darkest dungeon was was created by all of us and a lot of the design decisions were made by Chris and I working together and it's definitely challenges the ego a little bit right to figure out like what's your role and what's my identity because sometimes you enter that with your own self-identity and that tension that tension is really hard but it's also definitely really key to making things better because like basically an outcome of that tension is that you make better decisions together despite our extremely similar dress code we're different people we think differently you know in that that means two sets of eyes but sometimes two sets of eyes just represents like you know okay someone might you're thinking the same you might catch mistake that they miss but when you fundamentally look at problems differently it's better than that it's it's a way to solve things from different angles and stress test all your decisions and it really does

apply to to everything you know not just design but business decision strategy staffing all that and I come are katinka land to like illustrate a little bit of our differences I guess using the poker analogy again you know Chris Chris can read people really well he can play the situation he can play the person he can no he could not a nice word you can take take the temperature of the situation really well and that's a real advantage to have that sort of like bird's-eye view in that intuitive gut feel conversely playing poker against Tyler you can be very confident that whatever move he made calculates the pot odds is is fundamentally correct maybe not right in the moment but absolutely mathematically the most common sense sound choice to make so a lot more methodical a lot more numbers oriented and communication wise I'm french-canadian so you know give me a glass of wine and we'll just hash that out like it's fine we'll just get right into it we'll make a decision we'll move forward

Tyler is a little bit more asynchronous so we've had to adapt our communication styles where you know I could be bigger and bombastic and then know that he needs to go away take it think about it parse it a little bit and just adjusting our workflow back and forth like that has been really really helpful devil's advocate is great fun especially for me I'm a huge fan of the devil and all of his advocacy it's it's more than that though it's necessary and I think you know human nature is when you hear someone argue passionately for a point of view of perspective you assume that this is something that they believe in and we really tried to break that down and argue passionately for things that we didn't believe in so that we could really stress test the correct answer and so we spent a lot of time trading positions on things even when you know let's say my gut was against it I would argue as hard as I could for the reasons why we should do something so anecdotally before we launched the early access of the game like we were we were broke like we're running out of money everybody on the team was running out of

money it was very very stressful and we had shopped around looking for publishers here at GDC and we met a lot of nice people and they all wanted 30% and then they wanted to recoup their ad buy and it was going to be just really hard to create a scenario in our minds where that made a lot of sense but finally at the 11th hour this group came forward and they said well we'll give you 500 grand as an advance as an advance and my gut was like no we should live and die by the decisions that we made we spent a long time worrying stressing and bleeding for this it's three months out from release let's just go for it we we earned the right to at least you know watch it unfold and the and I felt like the die had already been cast but I remember arguing very passionately for why we should take the money you know I got a mortgage I've got a family everybody was stressed we could pay people there was a million reasons why it made sense to take that cash yeah and that situation I think we looked at it from both angles like I mean our message here is not don't go with poachers it's just a more of reflection that we were pretty late in the game we had already kick-started we

had already created value and so we also looked at you know the numbers side and said like wait it's two months before we go early access you know does that risk profile does that does the amount of points make sense and we both arrived at the same conclusion it was really hard to turn it down to be honest but it felt good later so it's it's great to have all this amazing decision-making power at you know your fingertips really well at arm's length we're not it's not that close but really it that you can only leverage that when you're aligned emotionally when you're in the same headspace and you've got sort of the same mental landscape and you know what development cycle is I'm sure everybody here knows three five years a lot can change a lot can change I had a baby girl partway through darkest dungeon do not recommend having a child when you're trying to make an indie game a second child even worse I should have run the numbers on that position and you know more seriously you know Tyler experienced some some death and

his family and these things have real consequences especially on small teams and especially where there's you know there's very few decision makers and you can find yourself trying to make good decisions by putting your heads together but so if you're out of sync it doesn't work yeah and I think I think that it's very common that you're aligned on the on the game or your you know you got into it for a reason you have the same goal of I don't know walking up on the IG IGF stage and grabbing a trophy or selling wall or whatever it is but those externalities are not always aligned and that's the thing like you when you first get get in it you're like okay you're not really worried about the long term but you know if you have a good partnership you're gonna want to keep working so in my case yeah like Chris mentioned like six weeks after early access my father passed away and then just a year ago my one of my brothers passed away so two deaths within one game development cycle not recommended also it was it was hard and you know we had to lean on each other had to lean on the team it was tough in last basically last year I realized you know I okay we got crimson court out and it was like I I

need a break like I am not are we are not aligned right now on on just the life you know but not so much the game and so those were hard discussions they weren't easy discussions but we ultimately I did I went away and I took the better part of a couple months off and you know Chris that meant more more responsibility and Chris during that time so those are handled it beautifully so yeah so those were hard discussions but also are real things that you might have to face over the course of several years and I have a problem with this slide is so Chris Christmas dismiss the highwayman I'm renown in this in this why am I looking I'm not even aware what's happening because I've got your back yeah I know but he's just I'll handle this there's got to be sincere like one time I know it doesn't work it just looks like I'm completely oblivious to what's happening anyway this is an obvious benefit you don't have to do everything yourself but paradoxically

having a partner who's very competent and focused on another area of the business off especially working as a distributor team you can create a real nice narrative around how you're doing more work than anyone else who's ever lived it's very very easy to fall into that trap and you can get backed into a corner if you're forced to do a couple of jobs maybe you didn't want to do like oh I got to do the UI and now I'm like I'm doing all the UI and it just it doesn't it's very easy to fall into that pitfall and feel like the grass is always green or you know the other guys got it easy and and start to feel like the partnership is becoming unbalanced which again when you have overlapping disciplines and you're 50/50 it can really spell trouble over time I think what I've struggled with in this area was the the art in the game sat I thank God I have Trudy working with us now but for the core game was all on me and I felt a really a lot of pressure to deliver high quality stuff the best I could but in early access specifically you know Tyler would be like okay we're getting ready for the patch how's the

art coming together like yeah it's going it looks really good but you know it's coming along and I'm like how's the design he's like oh you know what you know I've looked at Excel and you know it fired out they were see what the community says you know see what and you know paraphrase I'm its aerial racing I said I was french-canadian so I felt a disproportionate amount of pressure to do finished work where I felt like over on the other side it's like oh it's just a work in progress yeah yeah so like so that frames like your view of things and so the pressure I was feeling simultaneous with all that going on is some weird reason several years ago I went back and got an MBA because I was interested in entrepreneurship but so I started doing you know more of these business operations thing liaison with the accountants and lawyers I mean these things just happen they suck up time you know you use someone proposes a potential partnership you're excited and you're looking at all this and I felt like I was doing more and more things just to keep the wheels turning like when it was just a couple of us in a room there was not much of that but once

there's a community you know storefronts to manage all these things it just grows and grows we all know this right it's so much work and so I was feeling like oh I'm having to do these things that are not they're very thankless and they're they're kind of hidden you know it's like maintaining the car just so someone else can drive it all the time and so I think like it's easy to get buried in your own perspective another benefit is I guess it's related to the not having to do it all yourself but passion is infectious I'd like to think of the darkest dungeon parties you know someone feels their affliction check other other characters get stress because cowardice and fear is infectious so it so is heroism no and we even have that mechanic if someone goes virtuous then they can start stress healing other people in the party I mean that's exactly how it works on the team to this one is I think like the two bosses one is really probably like one of the hardest challenges we got into this

because we want to make games that we come up with not that people tell us to do and that does result in sharing and sharing authorship sharing credit I'm seeing things referred to you know in articles or other things that hey wait I actually did that but they attributed that to the other person and again we're not talking about the team here and I understand there's like a lot of angles at it but just each other like trying to maintain that tension of we made this together it's not always easy yeah and it's a it's a creeping death it's a slow thing it's not like one thing happens and you're like suddenly you feel boxed out of your own game but you know anecdotally valve emails Tyler hi Tyler we want to put the game on say like okay one where I email them and save and I'm cc'd which is cool and then you know I see him on slack and he's like okay Dana I need you to check out these numbers hey this looks good I'm gonna talk to power up about this other thing and then there's an article that comes out you know deep dive game director Tyler Sigmund and it's like over the course of a couple of weeks a few things happen and you can again

build that sort of sense of like wow am I getting lost in you know the swimming pool that I don't know why you get lost in swimming pool I should have Fitz it's not a good one it's a really big B where a lagoon perhaps yeah but we developed this way of kind of coping with this because we again we really try to talk candidly it's not easy to do but we sat down and we're like look we both want credit for this game that we both made and that's natural and normal and this isn't like we don't spend all the time talking about how great it is to have credit but we made sure that when we do a solo interview or something we credit the other person and shout them out and that helps takes the edge off and we try to share or all interviews or things that are really important to us like being right here we're sharing it would have been maybe who's to say if it would have been better if it was just me I don't know who is doesn't ever know you know it's it's not practical for that always to be equal and I mean we'd like to think we're above worrying about things like credit but it doesn't matter right that's like your reputation and also you know it's it's a discussion point so it's not always easy so yeah basically

from that conversation we evolved this it's one of our big like kind of takeaways is don't let anything Fester especially when you have this sort of odd arrangement of overlapping skills and 50/50 ownership on something we have a zero-tolerance policy for anything that gums up the gears and and what that looks like practically is somebody says something that the other person doesn't doesn't sit well with them and if that feeling however ephemeral or vague it is lasts for longer than a day the the victim in this case has an obligation to raise it and discuss it with the other person and that's very tricky because a feeling bad is not something that's easy to solve and and the causes the root causes might not be something that are immediately apparent and it requires the other person to be extremely patient and to put down whatever they were doing at the time that the you know the wounded party sort of says hey man we got a talk and sometimes you know it's inopportune

but making that time means that our machinery is at least free from this sort of sticky goop that can kind of accumulate over time you know death by a thousand cuts are like just feeling wounded every day for for three months kind of builds up and we just refused to allow that stuff to accumulate but there's a time cost to it there's a maintenance cost yeah and I think one of the one of the huge benefits of talking sooner rather than later if any of you have you know been to relationship counseling you probably knows - not that I have ever all my relations there's Norfolk but is you diffuse assumptions fast right it's easy to sort of construct especially or if you're a little more introverted it's easy to construct sort of a tolkien-esque like simmer iliyan backstory of of why this person did this thing that hurt your feelings and create motivations and start constructing a snare oh is this the beginning of a change in dynamic but when you just go right to the heart of it and talk then often you find out that oh no maybe they just did it blow viously they weren't trying you know it was not even a thought and those

diffusing assumptions is really powerful so another thing that we found really useful and it's taken quite a while - totally like formalize this even just how we refer to it is veto power we don't have to agree on everything that happens but nothing happens unless we each approve it generally speaking you know especially I'm talking big decisions here and things and so the concept of veto power that if something is truly something we don't want to live with or we think it's bad for the company or the game we can we can veto and that that gives that paves the way for differing levels of enthusiasm or even being able to give power to the other person based on their expertise like hey you know I trust you with this call I don't hate it so much that I feel like we should stop it I don't necessarily love it but I trust you and so pardon the reference to current geopolitical climate but it's a little bit like the nuclear keys you you each need one each need to turn it to to

start the business just a secure lock yeah we each need to turn the key - oh no I have a large thing - you know I hate that so I'm sorry the other benefit of structuring this sort of like veto power and I maybe some of you are thinking yeah but how do you even get everything done but it really helps relax the pace where I can see things that maybe I am worried about or that I think in advance I might not like I don't need to jump on them right at that moment because I can rest assured that you know when when it comes time to make a call I've got a green light and the same thing with Tyler so it really helps take some of the the pressure and tension down and you don't feel like someone else is sort of like you know driving the car off off the road or in a direction that you're unsure of so another aspect of working on a multi-year project is just nothing static and recognizing this as it really is really helpful you know as we've gone into just how situations can change but

the truth is like your partnership is going to - for all those reasons and other ones that that we haven't mentioned and a real good concept that we use is like or think about as solvable versus manageable it's really wrong to think that every issue in your partnership is solvable there's a lot that you just have to keep it from becoming a conflagration out of control you have to manage it you have to address it it will grow again you prune it you eat it and and that's that's something we do constantly actually so really it's not a sword it's a marriage I had this epiphany like a year and a half ago I was lying in bed with my wife and I was like you know whoa whoa team I like it's it's funny you know it's like I'm married to Tyler she's like yeah no okay so maybe she should be giving this talk when I got married to my actual wife my dad took me aside and he's kind of old-school and he's like here's the deal son it's only a good marriage if you feel like you're doing 65% of the

work and getting 20% of the recognition and I'm like okay that's kind of old-school and he also says the only voice a man has is the invoice so you got to take it with a grain of salt but I think that's important to feel like you're you're always in a state of over-performing but you have to take time out to praise and recognize the efforts and the work that your partner is doing and restore restore some intimacy you know we go on dates we'll go and get a steak and have a couple glasses of red wine and really just try to get out of our heads and you know away from the game a little bit and it's it's kind of funny to dress it up this way but really it's a powerful tool to sort of really ease things out and help us both like it just relax a little bit and and just again maintaining is really important we did we have shared a kiss during during early access he threatened to do it if early access did you know well enough that we could survive it

happened it was a good moment but now the bottom line here is that is that it does challenge like our egos it does challenge you know a lot of pieces of us but but the bottom line is is we need each other and we look each other and we know that we could not have made something like this without each other and so that forms a basis for working through the kinks and that's awesome wait for it wait for it yeah we have we have time for one or two questions if you've got a question for Tyler Chris please come to one of the mics in the aisles we'll probably leave this slide up this is it just as a Belen law particularly yeah no no go one more I think there's some more content I think it's done I think that's the end of the slides so you talked about doing that figuring out the 50/50 thing early

on did you also discuss what would happen if one of you decided to leave the company later on because that actually haven't Amin with a partnership mmm but I was in before and it was it was tricky no no no we had an interim agreement when we started that we would the ownership would shift back because I had a sketch book that I had written darkest dungeon in and had like a bunch of drawings in some notes and that was the 5149 argument so we had an agreement that if we couldn't get to make anything if it you know things imploded too quickly then I'd be able to walk away with my sketchbook but then once once we started to build something of value and and you know really create a game together we just broaden that to be sort of a standard like shareholder and corporation shotgun Clause thing and just went from there but there was a there's a bit of time where it's kind of I guess in hindsight maybe we shouldn't

be giving any advice you go alright hello hello so talk about having a lot of overlapping interests as well as skills and both also having veto powers so I guess my question is what would you do when like say Tyler you have a lot of opinions about art but they conflict with something that like a pre-existing idea or another direction how would you resolve that kind of conflict sure especially if like you were really really opposed as to a certain direction yeah I'm gonna slightly shift your because I art is the one area that actually isn't that hard because he's a amazing artist and I cannot dress so that one's pretty easy but UI ohmygod UI we battle so hard we have in jokes we tease each other it gets ant

we get angry but like not really fun teasing yeah there there there are moments of momentum where you know it's just somebody's gotta we remember one of the slides said like is this a dying on the hill thing so there's a lot of momentum sometimes where somebody you know has already taken it a certain far in so a lot of times it's a practical decision because we're like look this is almost finished or we have it figured out and I know you don't love it but now we got to go back to the wall and figure out we have a deadline so sometimes you know then that's when you can do that say well okay I don't love it but if it doesn't work like I'm we're gonna have a chat and we've done some of those like do your thing I'm gonna be back to visit if it if it doesn't work out and so there's no one answer to that but there's a lot of class just not so much on the actual arc I generally say oh that looks cool okay this was a bit of trust that like something about it will work but if it's really a failure then you can revisit it yeah we showed off their crimson court promo art and I was like super amped about it cuz I'm like mosquito vampires it's gonna change the world and we put it out and then I go

hey man I'm not really wild about these bugs people really is like they're all drawn so it's like okay but it took a little bit of trust because I'm like it's gonna be great here's why it all works I think the thematics are super strong so it's just something you have to talk about and we trade victories that's the last thing I'll say alright that's got to be the last question if you have more questions for tyler chris please come on up and ask them and make sure you fill out your email surveys to give them feedback on what you thought about their talk and before you go let's give them one final round of applause okay thanks guys