Rewarding Exploration in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

[Music] hi oh okay and everybody Clemens so I'm going to be talking about how we reward at expiration in Deus Ex mankind divided proxied has actually I noticed yesterday that it wasn't written in the program that it was about pride so it is about program only talk only about prank I've been working on it for four and a half years at a toes so yes I will try to make it less than an hour so let's get started I'm going to talk about me very briefly because I would rather talk about the actual game I used to be a game journalist for various French magazines for about seven years and then I became a QA tester for a number of game including Rayman heavy rain and remember me oops remember me being made by a company named not not entertainment you might know them for life its trains as well and in the actual um the execs

project have been working first missing anything okay cool I've been working on this map which is also recorded in Prague it's a parasite Bank I've been a part of the solution team for about a year and what I was doing all these things I was also trying to nail how our expression could reward players what the navigation would be the challenges that you would encounter in prime so yeah lots of things in foreign harshest but today I will mostly talk about expressions how we designed in and first how we design meaningful expression content I'm going to talk about explorations that ups that's the cricket name with these things and this is what you encounter in the city hub as you play you cancel the setups that tell you stories that change you and to me I designed my slices of life designed to tie narrative exploration education in challenge

together and it will sorry I have a delay so explosion setups sorry about this so why do we need these expression setups so why did we make them it was our own task we didn't have an exploration team it just started with me and my colleague who is a senior designer he his name is Jeff there were two of us for the better part of two years on Prague so we were trying to learn what we were going to do and we decided to make this MIDI part of Prague so obviously we need to keep the player interested and busy in Prague and isolated but you come back here a lot to a mission you come back here three times it's not an open-world video it's as the name says a hub so it's not that big but it's quite dense and we need to keep people interested with challenges and routes and nice little storytelling and we also need to flesh out our universe if you don't know what I do sex game is

about it's a it's a game about transhumanism it's set in the near future it's a game where lots of people were prosthetics and it's talking about lots of modern-day issues like prosthetics actually maybe you've heard of the science advances that we're grieving right now when an interesting deep lore and as a level designer I found it very interesting to flesh this universe out in exploration throughout the game and to add Prag mostly so with that same the main story does that I guess you're going to tell me that it's the job of the main story to tell us more about our universe and I would say yes that's true the main story is the core that makes us understand the state of the world what it's about and the big topics the segregation as you may know our game is not a happy one there's lots of people have a cell they know they live in ghettos they are taken away from their home of mental people the ones who

quickly cut if you haven't played human Revolution the previous game at the end of the game millions of augmented people go crazy and start bidding everybody else to a pulp so they became know kind of outcasts and people hate them and yet the main story again it is depicting huge stakes they have multifaceted characters conspiracies what page comes back sorry there and side missions are another big part of what makes park interesting in the game in general they take the player deeper into that universe that world and yes I've been part of the team so quite I'm not objective but they are actually unique experiences both narratively and gameplay because among other things they offer complex scalable conversations lots of tracking consequences we have it's very scalable you can place a mission 10 times in has 10 different

results and they offer excitation like with these Borg bearded guys text control of your augmentation it's something the main tasks cannot always do and going back to the topic and why I'm saying all this the third layer of content we define it that it would be expression setups and they complement the existing content they meant to be discrete they meant to breathe life into the city and his people into many tiny details on allotment to to be in a competition with everything else they're just mental component and tell us about the world let the player connect the pieces your environment storytelling little bits of health stories and hopefully they also meant to make the world plan to navigate around so all this to say that we are freed about of complexity and through your boss to tell story and I will speak about the latest one the smaller one but hopefully the less not less interesting so that's a video if it plays of what an actual

expression setup is and there is no sound so I will speak over it so you it's a pretty small one it's something that they used to do a lot in human Revolution in Detroit and Hank sure this is what you encounter most a return when you explore little set up that tell you a contained story some narrative a little loot that that was pretty much it was very interesting that Foreman can divided envy and just we want to expand this disc that's and make it richer and we did it with two things connectivity and density and I will explain connectivity later basically we wanted to connect expression set up together locations together NPCs together so you would hopefully make a connection between locations but first the nice part of that prize is that as I said it's not a

an open world it's a it's a hub and it's very dense and that's a nice moment to bring up a quote by someone you might know more inspector said that and I didn't know but this code before two weeks ago but I added it anyway and that's exactly what we try to do with pride serum is we try to make it as dense as possible so there is no wasted space anywhere everything that we put in Prague as a meaning it's supposed to complement the world make it richer liked it better and make the experience of the player really cool for those who are interested in this kind of thing so the image showed an example of a it's pretty early work it was four years ago we try to place our expression locations around the city so as you can see it's pretty dense and it's maybe four times denser now just give you a little idea of how we worked at placing accountants and we did it with very few modules at

first as I said we were for a team of four for two years in priming were two designers two artists and I was I was a junior so I was trying to do things and we did it with this these modules we were trying to nail what what could exploration look like where we put our content so we we had modules we define that shops apartments and storages with the O main ways to convey expression sets and we would place them around the city we'll put a thing that maybe the players want to go this way because they have to go to a mission they have to do a sign nation to play this little bricks everywhere and we would make challenges around them based on augmentation and player skills and navigation and that's that's how we started doing it pretty euros but it helped us define what exploration would be and as I said connectivity in addition to density we thought that we would connect location by using protein using

environments meaning that if two locations look the same maybe they share a connection and that's something I know it's ugly but it's actually something that we had in the game four years ago or something and I would put I had this idea of a setup of an alcoholic woman you could edit her apartment and then you could be it also a liquor store that we set up and pride and we just scaled up a huge bottle of wine and I put it in her apartment and in the store and we just put test this teller to see if it works and that's the ID like maybe there's a link because the prop thing looks the same but this is not something that we use the heart of the same because you don't want you don't want to rely on only prop seeing an environment because places that look the same our often boring you know one boring so we try to find various ways to diversify the look of our set up and show connections in a subtle way whether

it's narrative or visual and that's the very same setup four years later of this alcoholic woman who's the apartment is pretty hard to reach so that's another part of what we did with explosion we try to vary the challenges as with the Davis X game you need to have a lot you to support every player style so expression is always meant to challenge you there's nothing that is given and so in his apartment yes you still have lots of liquor bottle and you can spell on some emails and I'm spoiling but this email is from the liquor store which is called Hemingway's and maybe if you have a issue walk around the city Street and you stumble upon maybe this door which is going to appear very soon yes that's how you make the connection maybe if you paid attention to the emails you notice that maybe these are links and the

stories themselves of this alcoholic and the store owner they're not linked in the proper sense you discover a whole new set up in there and you can loot her whole the whole store if you want and drink lots of liquor but yes that's the way we we try to connect things in a subtle way that the careful Explorer will notice hopefully so from this from where I to show you we extracted key principles for exploration setups they they are supposed to offer a challenge like we saw you need to work to get there we're not limited by main story and critical path constraints we don't have to we don't have to give the players easy access to all things which is the actual core part and they have to grant rewards and reward can take many forms and I will talk about that later and we create subtle links between locations and they meant to tell compelling stories about the world as I

say make the universe look deeper and better and a lot of the concept about expression setups that has bits of struggle explaining it when we were designing it before - my hierarchy today there's a sense of progression they're not missions they're not rotated that you follow we were very insisted on it because usually people want to have a they want progression they want to the good from point A to point B and it was suggested at several point during the development that these applied tools they the idea came that we should have locators and the sense that in order to see an expression set up you had to go through a first part and then the second part and we don't really we didn't want that at all so there is no sense of progression you can explore connected location in it in whatever order you want and you're going to get something whether you make a connection or not and quickly what are the rewards obviously I'm going to talk

about it a lot doing this talk they can be functional loot lots of loot things to pick up narrative is its own reward I'm going to talk about navigation a lot but not too much and navigation so I'm also talking the another part of the talk how exploration helps making missions better with navigation but there is no sense of progression as I just said but we still have types of expression sellers and it's only for tracking purposes because some setups as I said it wasn't a team it wasn't we didn't we weren't an official exploration scene so every request that I had for this they were level design with price they were not tied to any budget so I had to be careful how to how was measuring my setup so we created 24 of them the ones I documented there's many more that just did and and 20 of them are standalone

that the very first one I showed you is a very simple they only have one locations such as the contain 70% so the majority are the medium one that connect at least two locations together the one we just saw with the alcoholic lady and 10% our large ones and large one are interesting and I'll show a video of that right now and I'll explain why they're kind of tricky to do so we'll have some so I'm going to explain it you enter this apartment and there's people talking about who is inside and people talking in our game it's very expensive so for an expression setup to ask people actually talking it's pretty cool I gets us excited and we can see these pictures of an unknown location that you were visit later I supposed to intrigue you and then stay in your memories and in these emails you find out that this guy this painter guy who has picture of again his his ex-wife is escaping from

somewhere you already know and that's the paint store again we still link location via processing you discovered another piece of this story and it also extends to Gotham City this is a map that is outside of pride it's a critical path map that you have to go to and you pick up another part of this story right here so maybe you make the connection because the name is similar and if you do it's good and then for the game if you remember the first location there were photos of this very place this theater which only opens later in the game and you can basically find the same pictures that you found in a first location but you can also as I say in a sense of progression for ku you can just visit any location and make the link yourself or don't make the link and just take the loot in the code and that's fine by us you can do whatever you want but the thing that was hard

with this particular setup was that with anything that is big and spread out between various locations especially out of a natural map this one connects Alf Prag in next comprehension very difficult and memory work very difficult as well and that's written for the future actually I had to find a sweet spot between invisibility something you will never notice you will never connect and over exposition something kind of vulgar that takes you by the hand or the impact suffers and for this particular setup I think the rewards were not very balanced I was I was too involved in this story I liked it very much so every time you would stumble upon a piece of the story like in Garden City you would just have an email and nothing else and I was pretty cheap of me so in the future I had to try to vary what I give you and another interesting example of big setups and how we try to entice exploration in price this is your

headquarters please plane that's the video okay that's your headquarters is where the hero Adam Jensen works and this is a place that is interesting for two reasons first we check something from you in this area we remove your ability to shoot people because we don't want you to shoot your boss or your psychiatrist which is a shame but it's edster like that so we thought it was a good way to actually balance it the fact that we take something from you we would give you a lot of contents in terms of narrative and exploration and everybody isn't someone who is going to explore on their own so for people who take kind of new to the game that already know what the city has to offer we thought it was a good idea to place lots of little connections to the city how black what you just saw I picked up a code that was talking about a case from one of my colleague about a storage locker he wanted to investigate this very storage locker and maybe it's

going to incise player to explore prague more because you have to come back to this area it's critical to come back to the task force our Lots and to us it was a good way to incite excavation in price and maybe as I just did I messed up my colleagues investigation so to bad soil and other interesting things and it's again it's it's a lot of narratives Deus Ex is a very narrative driven game and as level designers it was our job to explain the universe and make interesting stories you know map and the main thing that we wanted to depict was now that society has fallen in our in our game with this as I said segregation and happy people ghettos it sucks so everybody who was invented who close to augmentation business we want to talk about what happened to them what are their issues now what you know the

artist the Augmented people who were forced to get augmented for their job fight by new mega Corp how did they survive and we do that by in this video you have two example that I think are interesting and exposing how the socioeconomic class was affected we had this woman who was a new Olympian programmer and now she's turned into a programmer of crappy house AI you actually hear this this house a is in some location in the city hub and she's not happy about it then she secretly developing I won't spoil you there which is she's developing some AI that is a direct reference to other AIS as we find in the universe and on the right this ballet dancer of course used to be very successful she used to have a nice class at the Opera and all she is just a bar owner with secrets because everybody has secrets in Prague but to us it was very important to talk about these people the little people the

simple people the citizens who are affected by this semi apocalyptic event and that sums it up the stories are the stories we create they meant to fit the universe key events and how they impacted people's life so topics like the odd incidents segregation police state and classes and we need to talk about all kind of people even the ones that we would hate in real life because it see people talk about people we would like but we have to talk about the assault as well so now that's just some pictures that we flew around that we thought were interesting in searching out the universe and that's something that I was struggling with a little bit a little at some point because I wanted everything to be very interesting and as I said I was a genius I wanted everything to be super top and best stories best characters and best

environments totaling and I had a discussion with the former lead submission designer if it's only once that my stories were impacting his technicians character because there were too complex and they were meant to be more invisible and listen it was kind of shutting casting a shadow over his own characters and I was just weird and that's what we call the small waterings I don't know if you ever heard this word is the feeling that everybody everybody is awesome and they live next door to each other and that's something we really wanted to avoid and as a practical example I had this guy that I the actual conflict or guy this was I want to put all that into him are all these ideas how to make him interesting so I would justify how to make his apartment interesting in an environmental way I want to put prop sing for him I wanted his apartment to

be connected to another map I wanted to be really huge and that was quite too much and so I finally understood what the solution lead was like trying to tell me and so for the wrong we designed these people as ordinary with a twist because they need to have something interesting but very discrete and so and yes that's about finding the right balance between the dark secrets and the ordinary within other relatable person keeping them human it's not about making the story absolute crap and an interesting but you have to give clear interesting wind currents and let the players to the rest and final lesson about this I used to get very panicky when I saw empty space because again we were alone for long time in Frank and I would just start prodding at a place putting stuff in it and if he wasn't he was making me uncomfortable so I would over complexify

things that in me too and as our narrative directed said to me once he came to help me at the very end of the project making these stories a little less convoluted he used this a lot with me because yes I wanted everybody to be awesome and that's not a good thing you want an expression expression is supposed to be very very discrete and the player has to make up their own stories and left how about narrative then we'd be more talking about navigation we have a several very characterized areas in price there's the right part of this this this image is it's the or district it's where tourists lives middle class the blue areas business area so businessmen during the day and hobos during the night downtown LA was our main reference from what a creative director said and the yellow part is the

for district poor people or benefit people sad people and drug addicts but it doesn't mean that you have to be absolute about it we really try to to explore the universe and to find out ways to twist our stories and make them less absolute because it is not decorative in the poor district or in the sewers what actually the sewers another good example it's not because you live in the poor district that you are a lamented hobo when addiction issue or a purist who hides all arcs and would report them to the police and an example of that is that as weeding a document one day creative direction document and it was saying how in this particular poor district there are 70% of mental people who live there and 30% none of mental people so hundred percent human we call them I guess and I thought what interesting to give a twist to an expression set up in the area that I created about this group called ad astra

who was actually trying to help bridge the gap between augmented and boggling said it was a cute little story that was pretty optimistic and Deus Ex is not optimistic so I was actually trying to do something different and we warring with never narrative and XP point like this now I'm done with a narrative part of this talk was pretty important to talk about it in my paintings who help you understand how we try to design our world and flesh it out but exploration is not just about telling stories and environment storytelling it's also about rewarding every other part of the game and in our case we have to benefit using exploration in navigation every aspect that again and make our type of content shine from the most important like main missions and side missions to the best kept secret thing that people we usually never find so most expression setups are standalone and original some of them feature special reward that provide

unique advantages during mission - but I don't have the sound that you can follow that video that gives a five point example of how exploration components an existing mission that's my greatest puzzle you just saw there turn off the TV to sign this story item that is connected to the palisade bank and if you make the connection you go to this this area the bank and you meet this guy and you can tell in this use your item to make him like you he's not happy that you're an invented guy in he was taking real pleasure in telling you to school yourself but because you were New Mexico congratulations you find a sighting and you bypassed now a whole area of the

bank is open to you your clients you stole his identity shame on you but it's it allows you to to bypass something that would have been very hard otherwise because the bank is a very difficult mission full of people like this guy so that's one of the way we found to reward renditions using X question and it's not just about finding story item it's also a lot about pure navigation so pure level design and connecting exploration narratives and how it can connect via sometimes alternate paths like we like to use in Deus Ex so this I read interesting because it's it's it's in a PowerPoint of some artists you don't know what happened there there's blood it's a mess so it's a lecture story and soon and I I added yes it's an event I know people talk about events I'm sorry I really try to keep them very

small in price and this area is offers another another route towards main missions which is a coalition and yes I put a little storytelling piece in that event I think it's important to keep air vents interesting and it offers you a new a new path so it's also about connecting various areas using exploration setups and as you may know when you design platforming elements for a first-person game like ours it's very weird so we try to avoid having a 300-pound guy standing on flowerpots and we do that in different ways so that that's actually pure visual language we need to be very careful about how we entice or expression wealth how we make people want to explore something and how not to deceive them so we need to have clear and sizing integrated navigation platforms that's a lot harder to do than

it looks and identifiable navigation threads from all levels on that addition these are just quick example I could talk about navigation for hours but I don't have time right now we have to be able basically the rule while we have to be able to identify a route for an expression set up from anywhere from the ground we would see all of these platforms connecting together and we know that something is accessible because in a dual sex game you will never want to lead the player somewhere they can let go because we had the player explore everything we want the player to be able to access everything that he sees that's the dual sex experience so we need to remove the delete navigation clutter because they betrayed the players expectation that's called affordance actually and it's something that we were very careful about in fitments deleting balconies that led to fake windows we would do it a lot I think I deleted 100 balconies without the artist knowing but it's a good thing do it and another thing what

navigation is that sometimes it was you are reaching a peak a point where we didn't really know how to make it better it was too ranchy at many places it was still where you would grab a ledge and you would fall to your death and it wasn't that funny so we use this the curfew is actually it was really nightmare when didn't happen because pride was never designed this is something that happened I relate in development we had to make the city an actual mission because there would be cops everywhere you walked when you come back from a certain nation you cannot navigate the streets however we want because people cheat you police shoot you on sight and that wasn't that wasn't something we planned we always planned to be able to create chaos in Prague and let you deal with it but we never planned to to have a whole map that was for stealth and combat inside of fright but in the end

we end up using it to make everything else better because navigation had to be really tight for this side of the gaming had to be possible to escape the cops and with this example it's an area that sucked before we had this constraint it was very hard to navigate and because we really worked hard to make this possible for the player because we had to while took pretty hard this section but let's make it possible I didn't involve tweaking navigation or a lot so it would be able to do this kind of things and bypass cuts or just kill them and sometimes we would use like I shouldn't say that but we cheated if you have the occasion to do it without it showing we had reality collision boxes in some wedges so we wouldn't you wouldn't fall all the time and it wouldn't show because you don't see your feet and it's cool but yeah we

cheat a little bit but it made the experience a lot better in the end and that's an example of how a really tough constraint helped us make navigation better for the whole city hub because what we did for the curfew impacted all of the other visits of Prague where you don't have to start for one police and it's a good idea to think about it now as in any deus ex games we give a lot of freedom to play again we always have to offer multiple ways to enter a location so our navigation always supports every pillar that we have for stealth combat exploration kiddo profiles air accounts place apps we have to think about and so we put a lot of efforts into avoiding magic locks and that's something ours are not me in games when they do this kind of thing I don't like this kind of thing it's it's pulling prop thing in front of doors it's something that we don't it's forbidden in the user to do

that but sometimes the Rd the ID just just convene this was an idea that was brought up by someone a long time ago to prevent an access to one of the banks the palisade banks which is a not in Prague again prevent the access using this that sucks if you want if you want to block navigation and expression if you want an area to remain locked up locked out for now early reason for a critical path reasons we tend to do it very clearly this is a digital grid so it's not it doesn't look very I mean it's still a sort of blockage but it looks it's okay because this area is the red-light district this is where people go to see naked women and and do other things with augmented women and then and we it's so enticed when you play when you go to Prague and you walk around the street everybody explains to you that the red-light district is it only opened that night so during the day I don't

expect to be able to go through so it's so well integrated into the game that we we know why it's closed and if you have to close an area is navigation must be control and the decree so clear why it's tremendously important for us and maybe for you at some point and a good example of that that was the same path that when I show you the broomstick in front of the door this is what it was meant to to block this is the secret path to the palisade bank and again sorry for the spoilers it's supposed to be a hard one but this area was supposed to be blocked off because someone wants to block it off for fun narrative reason but I had to fight quite hard to not have it locked and we do not because as you can see when we reach this area this is the

this is the bank's vault shaft this is where you can go anytime you want because you're going to find key cards in Prague if you scroll there were very well-hidden so if you found some congratulations and you can you can go there at all time to loot these votes and interesting part of it is that this pit is supposed to be an exit to the bank map it's not supposed to be an entrance but if you really really are good explore you can actually enter this area and it's very rewarding in some way and it's something that it was worth the fight because it makes the city really more interesting and some missions quickly about them they have very different constraints than main path and when I went to came onto the team I was wondering how I could help them benefit from what we developed in Pride and the interesting thing is that a mission in human revolution they had to put their

things into an existing layout nothing was made specifically for the side missions in human Revolution so it was pretty hard for them and from the very start of Primus we delivered designers the provost we talked to the sanction team to help them integrate their missions into layouts that would be made specifically for them in it it's very important to know because when they needed some location they would come to me and they would tell me can you can you create something so that we could put out things and that's how the source came to write the sewers are great if you don't know them and their mentor them to help design nations thrive by having their own layouts and that's how every location that I made for the side missions they take expression into account and it helps making them really harmonized according to the will go to the rest of the rhythm of the game and another thing with the mission is that they have a very small team

multidisciplinary team that works very well I have a writer designers hitters but sometimes they really wild so they might not always respect table success pillars for example when I channel to the team you would get ambushed in this very location the axon guys will just jump you some pikas mercs and they will just start a fight with you in the middle of the street and that's something that might sound cool but in this kind of game you always have to let the play you have a choice to fight or not fight so I remove that and the cool thing about it is that I move this set up of people attacking you in your own house because it was already plan for expressions it is a multipass Marty actions already you can escape the other windows and I think that's that's something that is important to do when you have a team that is working on the site and you don't have a lot of contact with them it's it was in your in our case it works in Magnum it made the mission better it made the competition that you have with a key character better it's supported gameplay better

you can talk your way out now you can fight these guys you can just hide and it wasn't the case before and it's very very important to know what these guys are doing because as I'm saying here when a place perfectly fits within the world world it shows and potentially was very important to keep an eye on it and that's another thing that I tended to do a lot in addition to over complexified my stories and I want to connect everything because I wasn't always realizing that other people were doing for stuff because we were alone I'm going to repeat that a lot we were another big team we were experimenting we're doing a lot of things but sometimes I just wanted to yes I was over designing and it's not sexy it's not succeed because the word design isn't it and yeah too many connection I want to connect side missions through expression sellers I want to connect main stories with whatever I was trying to connect the world and it was just again small words meaning we want to

avoid that and many connection next to world stage and convenient so it's resisting the urge to do that and now strategy on that blocking stuff is actually another thing that I had to fight about um we both had to say about it me and Jeff the level designer who work with me we wanted to keep excavation content there are all timely we didn't want to block anything from the failure and then some of our guys in our team they wanted to make expression in steps in some way they wanted some content to be locked during a visit and then you would come back to dragons would be magically unlocked and as I said with magic locks they suck so we had to fight for it because simple reasons in Deus Ex you don't have key objectives Elda or scale objects are augmentation and you can get a moment Asians or not you can get whatever condition you want and we have no way of tracking what

you're going to be equipped with and yeah not about none of our augmentation are given through the main story so we offer Prag offers in the whole game of our skill based expression and not progression based one and that's what we explain to to our little directors to you know not let them block accesses because when you see something when you see an apartment and a balcony you have to be able to get there and we took specific care into making your little augmentation challenges so someone who gets augmented they can have a party in Prague and be very happy about expression and that's good for us and is the thing is if people explore the heddle of prions i've seen people do it i've read about people who were spending 10 hours in prague during their first visit there and they were spoiling everything and some people were not happy about it because what if we don't have content later to offer them and me I was very excited about it I was very excited about people finding everything during the first digit it was was cool

but it's a matter of respecting against against peeler and but there are exceptions of course we cannot just open everything all the time if a setup is tied to a missions timeline we need to lock the out of context content but if you have to lock something you must make sure that the explore area remains interesting and useful until the player into coming back and that's something that is very hard to do I think is how do you convey to the player that he comes back through allocation later it's going to be different there's a there's no really a magic thing to do there but what we do think with this exception this example is that at some point you're going to reach this apartment and you're going to see these pictures of you and Vega which is another key character in your game so you see these pictures and hopefully it teases you into coming back later because you know you know it's it's it's personal picture

of you so it involves you directly and I think it makes it easier to convey the message that if you come back something might have been maybe different and when you come back it's actually different there's a pragmatism guy apparently is talking you and you know who the hell it is he is he's waiting for you in an area and another thing that is interesting with that setup is that I couldn't have this guy being here before a certain critical class mission because it wouldn't have made sense at all it's something we discussed with Mary thermal which is our executive narrowly director she said that it'd make sense to have this guide this train station cop who suffers from PTSD after the explosion that you witnessed at the beginning of the game so I do something that usually never do I spawn him after you read an email and for expression something that we never do but in exceptional case like this guy it's a it's essential because else actually before he would encounter

this guy again in a back alley and he would just jump you and force you to fight him and yeah that couldn't stand again he had to remain consistent another thing had as I said visiting the same place twice most people don't do it because it doesn't make sense they won't they have no way of knowing it is going to be different and in our case in our game interrogation is going to change it should be the results of the players action most of the time we have this is at the example I don't know if you remember but the very first example I gave of an expression setup is this guy this crazy Augmented dude who's apparently stealing things on the street and putting them on his little archway I made three different versions of the depressing for this area with it one with the two of Prague and with the threes are going to be different it's going to offer you some rewards some narrative little pocket secretaries with codes in there and you're going to cover what this guy is about what he's doing

and since it's very easy to do this prop thing is it's a very accessible area it's worth it to do it if it's pretty cheap changing the environment for no reason else dent I found it cool but still it's an exception and you should do it pretty often and that's a video and without the sound it's going to be pretty boring but it's a cat lady it's a sine missione apartment and it's it's the thing I was saying about if you have to lock contents the diarrhea most women remain interesting sorry so this apartment is a solution character it's not active yet you don't have the mission yet but you can find all of these cool cat pictures and does a cat shrine and we made sure that was intriguing and interesting and you didn't hear it that when you enter this apartment there's a that's a cat sound well every time you enter and this is my greatest accomplishment thanks for the audio guys for doing this and thus make this apartment tremendously important

and interesting so of a little conclusion with the twist about design because I'm not really done yet everything I just said so I can sum it up with these phrases know where two people on your team do and how your own work can help and that's my work with the submission same allowed me to really really take that into into practice and they want to explore your wall if you need to block an area justify the hell of it no crates before doors please and that is the topic of your game and you want to explore this this concept every constraint I can have benefits think about how a constraint can enrich the experience the example of the curfew how it helped us make navigation better as a good example of that and don't change things for the sake of it if you want player to notice find strong way to company to convey the message and that's what I did by putting pictures of you on

the wall of this guy so you would remember that and Aldi's we are keepers of the experience but it doesn't mean you have to be rigid about it find ways smart ways to twist the experience and it's something that's either and also by my contact resolution team who are like wildcards and they do all kinds of extra expression it's very interesting but as I said I'm not done yet with this part I'm going to talk about in a more personal way because as I said this was a four and a half years project and we were a very small team in Prague for a long time and it there were some personal struggles that we've had to face and me as a junior I was not always you know very detached from what I was doing and if I'm just stepping back a little bit I'm gonna explain the growing up process I guess with examples

I had expression setups in our game that became main missions and I'm going to explain to you why I had issues with that I don't know if you should play the game there's two missions one is called allicin complex and the other is called autocracy know the two main missions that used to be only explorations so I was making them in my little corner and I was happy doing my things and some at some point they became big missions and I had problems personal problems with it I was afraid that because it was going to be part of the main story it was going to be streamlined and less interesting in terms of designs that all of the cool stuff the hidden stuff that I would put in there would be would disappear and that was just because I was actually giving too much attention to the 1% of hardcore explorers and I wasn't seeing the big picture enough and that's why I do things personally as well so if I have this example of the casino it was a simple exploration setups it looks ugly

but I had the help of an artist we were doing it kind of under the radar and it was a lot better looking than this we did it in secrecy we I gave it to the submission team because they needed a location to pull one on the set of things and some day our gameplay director Patrick he just stumbled upon it somehow by exploring the many waves of the stores he decided to make it a main mission area so now you have this debate with this mafia guys and it's a really really cool location but to me was it was a loose or loose situation I would I would have trouble getting out of my my comfort zone actually I was afraid I was going to stop that a lot of people were going to work on it I were taking basically the math from me and I was angry about it and then I wasn't talking to anybody so I had to get out of my seat and had to

actually grab the people who were working on this area after after I became a main story mission they were like ten people now working on it and before that I was just me as a single nerd working on it and yes I had to fight to keep the interesting content in and it's not because it became part of a mission that is not interesting anymore and another example of it of it that was pretty close to me if this character says he had this very nice apartment with lots of Kindle and an obvious reference to her period for this we know it and it was a really nice apartment and one day map named Alison complex came to life and my set up and this map had the same topic it was about people trying to reach the Machine God and trying to connect to some mechanical dating so I was thinking what is going to where doesn't happen to my guide and at this point I was actually afraid again because we were very isolated for

a long time in our team I was kind of afraid to to again lose some cool expression things and but again I had to think how to make this set a part of the main story without ruining all of its intentions and actually I was I was kind of forced because I was afraid to talk to I would like to talk to her executive narrative director Mary she's very nice but I was kind of impressed by her so I wasn't act you know I was shy and one of my colleagues forced me to go talk to her and explain to her what my intentions were with this setup so I set up in meeting and I was surprised that she was so open to you know I wasn't expecting him and what I believe that people usually try for good compromise and you option but four years ago I did not necessarily know that another that is happy again is still dead but he has the national custom

animation code that I could never have gotten if if I was if I remained alone with my little setup like again honor and this is what he set up looks like now and the cool thing about it is that by actually moving my butt to talk to the people who were responsible for the experience to marry two Gs to a credit director it actually made the whole experience better now this location has a lot more content not that it was in the Raider of our direction it gets lots of resources according to it we asked custom drawings we have even conversations the absolute you know the absolute most expensive ingredient that we have in Deus Ex and if the Kroll is still a is still a subtle little environment set up that you can stumble into it very interesting yeah this guy is a looks weird but he's yeah that's an additional conversation that is linking this set up to the Allison complex missions of the two of

them they work separately and they can work together as well and that's the lesson from it so from two optional salads done in secrecy with no money we get to polish critical mission supporting all of our pillars and some cool exploration areas with their own storytelling rewarding secrets and whatever in from this is the optional content is great but it doesn't have to die if it becomes part of the greater plan and if more resources are invested in a set up then gains more chances to which to quality in content you originally wanted for it and that's something I didn't know before I thought I'm going to do things on my own and everything's gonna be fine but really not and the last thing I'm going to say and then I'm going to be done is why is community great and wide of here why did people from our direction stumbled upon locations that I did why didn't they know everything it's the tricky part because the things

don't always go perfectly we have trouble communicating sometimes and in our case we were feeling frustrated the two of us jessamine the two designers on preg because everybody else was working on a very concise and we were we spent a long time along with ourselves and it taught us a bit crazy and yes we were we lost perspective on what we were doing and we thought we had to do everything on our own and talked to no one and it's partly offered this partly in nobody's fault but there's also another lesson deliverin it's about the process of communicating things to people I was using the document don't try to read it it's it's awful it's actually it's a working document that I made to detail every set of that I had and I made them naive mistake of sending this to everybody asking them to read everything and come back to me with answers and I

was I was doing the document because I was feeling the need to justify myself all the time because a lot of designer creating stories doing things and trying to make things validated by people it was making me very and acquiring my stuff and I was over designing these things or resigning again sucks and now I learned from this that sending documents to people and expecting expecting them to read them and understand exactly what's in your head it doesn't work and it took me a while to realize it so now this detail document I keep for myself and I use more of this some diversion that I made up a long time later I use these documents I was thumbing up free what I what my intentions were for exploration content and I knew that it was a night with Mary and Jeff or creative director because they would they're interested in keeping our universe interesting and yes short sentences and that's actually what

what my point is is that I was criticizing control freaks oops yeah but I became a control freak every time someone would because the cavalry came in progress later in the project three years later lots and lots of people came working on Ragan we were overwhelmed me and Jessie were like what are these people doing to us that was scary but in the end I was overprotective but I learned more and more to detach myself from my work because it was just making me very sad and it was not serving the project properly and Yahoo peer what it doesn't matter in the end and I had to care about the work and not how I felt that's the important lesson and if I forgive some humans parents takeaways about Maya for know how she's doing fight that yeah there's nothing magic and the reasons

are designed for the 1% as I did a lot it's okay as long as it doesn't side current percent of your time and it happened to me I was thinking about it too much get back perspectives and that means letting go again hue it's a lot of ego I wasn't realizing that it was an ego thing but it actually was and I had to take a step back and think about what my edges could bring to the project and that my ideas were not my own the beautiful thing that happened the video games and any creative media is that ideas are cool on their own but they only get interesting when they travel into other people's brain and that's actually the last point your ideas need to get dirty driving into other people's mind and you stop being too protective about them and yeah ask a petition to squeal all is an interesting one because there wasn't a lot of times to just say okay screw you all I'm just going to nut and I'm just going to give my minimum but because I

saw some of my colleagues shouldn't say that that some people I knew they just gave up trying and it was really depressing to see it was like they were broken and I was trying really hard not to be broken and it's possible to be broken phew yeah you should put your mind into it and in the end that's what I did I kept nagging people about everything to make the game better because the game is not about what I feel it's about making the coolest experience could ever have and in the end they said get good I had the help of a nice British guy who came to help me at the very end now a continuing collaboration had came late but hopefully gonna last for a long time so thank you that's all I wanted to say and thank you for Elam as my team mates for listening to this over and over again I will pay you many beers [Applause]