Selling Out: What a Year of F2P Taught an Art-House Indie

[Music] hello it's nice it's like a little friendly group of us you're gonna get to hang out right now how is um how is everybody doing it's the end of a long week it's good to hear thank you for being here and not either at the experimental gameplay workshop or facedown in a bucket of margaritas which is where I intend to be in you know sixty eight minutes or something [Music] selling my soul that's why we're here this is a slow it slightly different from any talk I've given before nice vocal TVC got in touch earlier in the year and said would you be interested in giving a talk about what it's been like going from kind of deep or at how Cindy to commercial free-to-play which is the change that I've made over the last couple of years as I found a great

interesting has been you know I've learned a lot in the course of doing that it'll be fun to share some of those conclusions with you guys but then I realized that really what that talk added up to you was something a little bit less palatable because there's no way of the certainly no way of talking truthfully about how I got from there to here and what that journeys been like without exposing the realities of some of the bumps along the way so um I'm Margaret and you're about to discover more about my career in my life than you were perhaps bargaining force so let's start out by kind of giving you your bearings a bit in terms of how that journey stacks up so I think one was in people's minds when they were asking me to do this talk was the time that I spent at hide-and-seek hide-and-seek was a experimental game studio founded in London we branched out and had a New York studio that I moved over in Moran and we were kind of best known for for

very hybrid games so often that meant digital worlds with the digital games with a real-world component or collaborations between digital game makers and artists or choreographers kind of all points in between so here's a super quick survey of some of our projects that people may have heard of board game remix kit was an early independent project that we did that we designed in the middle of having a depressing conversation about how much we were all dreading going home for Christmas because when you go home at Christmas somebody pulls out that mostly broken or full board game from the top of a cabinet and you will have to play Monopoly or trivial pursuits with the cards that are 25 years out of date so nobody knows any of the answers anymore so Burger roots kit was a physical card set and a smartphone app the kind of mashed up and remixed a bunch of games that you are likely to have not likely to receive Scrabble and gave you new

rule sets or a new kind of combined ways of playing them some super super nice stuff in there that was fun we made a knife and game called the show must go on which is the world's first opera platformer this was in collaboration with Royal Opera House cast you as a push up on stage manager he was trying to get the show up and running but was in the course of finding out that everything had gone wrong the the costumes had got my start the set hadn't been built the sheet music for the orchestra had blown away you would play a bunch of kind of one step above WarioWare a little puzzle games to solve those problems and then at the end of it you would watch the performance that happened as the result of your preparations if you played well then you've got a little nice animation of everything went great if you messed up then you've got a little dynamically generated animation where things went wrong depending on which games you had failed in so if you fan all the sheet music then you've got a gorgeous orchestral recording of the real world

upper house orchestra playing the score if you didn't you've got a terrible janky chips universe that we made the stunts go wrong the costumes change around cute fun nice thing this is new your games which was a citywide game that we ran on New Year's Eve in Edinburgh a few years ago New Year's Eve is a massive celebration in Edinburgh and they wanted to follow it up with another huge public event the next day and so we ran a series of distributed games across the whole city where you could play and collect tokens we put you in a team and you were trying to win the whichever team more on that team earned the right to set the they were blessing to the city for the rest that you gave a tone for the city for the rest of the year so that national poet of Scotland wrote two blessings one for each of the two teams and then depending on which one won that was going to say the term first year so you collect tokens and did things and dancing the streets and more ribbons and then the hub of the game was this huge central square underneath

edinburgh castle where he would play mass mass mass multiplayer real world games so that culminated in a in a 5,000 player game of basketball in which nobody was hospitalized so that's a game design claim to fame this tiny games where some people might just remember we kick-started a few years ago this was born out of a series of giant vinyl stickers that we stuck on a slide walks all over London that kind of gave you in a sentence a game that you could play using the surroundings immediately around you they were a surprisingly big hit on the street so we decided to make them digital and then this was just a very simple system where you you tell the game where you are what kind of mood you're in how many people are there if you've got a particular prop that might help and then the engine just serves you the perfect little game that you could play there and then most of these are no longer currently available which is a thing we can talk about later but even before and after that I was doing a bunch of crazy stuff I don't want to if anyone's interested in any of these I can tell you more after I don't wanna focus down too much

in these but before I was a hide seek I was on the team behind half of Sangre which was a iPhone 3d dungeon Explorer survival game except with no visuals so you had a completely black screen and everything about the world was presented via the normal 3d audio so you were navigating by sound alone she's a experiment that started out as a question about whether or not we could make a horror game that was as accessible to non-sighted players as sighted players and drunk dungeons the thing I made after I came to New York which is a game built out of drinks coasters designed for a whole party to play together you get put into a team when you arrive and then every time you get a drink you got a coaster with the drink and the coaster is a play piece that either helps you build out the dungeon that the game is happening in or elects you five battles or remove pieces around and you have to kind of find the right way to coordinate with every other drunk person in the bar to figure out how to

make that work so that I did that for a long time and I'm going to retro add a company called dots we're in New York there is about 50 of us one of those is me but you don't win a prize for figuring out which maybe you do it's harder than it looks you see X 8 we're on the internet with that improbably short URL we're also on the socials if you're a fan of the socials our Instagram is particularly pretty recommend my yarn store up to you and recalled dots because our first game was this game this game is called dots it was about connecting dots this kind of came out of a a kind of incubator skunkworks e thing at a tech startup in New York to everyone's surprise was a pretty close all hit got a lot of attention and a lot of players and so we followed it up with this game which was called two dots

which is exactly the same mechanic but kind of expanded a little bit bigger library of game mechanics got into it and much more configured to be a profitable free-to-play game and then last year we released this game which is called Dotson Koh because I wasn't I couldn't go three dots couldn't do it cuz even when do you go next you can't do four dots you got a you got a cool time on it somewhere so he called time on it and this is what we make and we're lucky that they're popular and that means we make enough money to have 50 people in New York making them but it's obviously pretty different from where are we spending my time before that so I thought I'd like to pick up on a couple of key areas and just poke at that question of what is what is different between doing that thing in an indie or house environment versus a highly commercialized environment so speaking of highly commercialized let's start with the

money and I do start with money this is the first thing I look at every day these are our this is our company-wide KPI email that comes out every day don't get excited I've deleted all of the interesting numbers not sharing anything that I should get me into trouble I shouldn't be sharing at EDC but it's true every day you get up and you look at where those numbers are sitting every single design choice that I make I'm getting feedback on in terms of the metrics the or analytics team feedback to me I'm very conscious of every every decision that I make kind of from a production perspective an artistic perspective a game design perspective has specific financial ramifications and that feels a lot like it comes with the territory with being not just in a commercial company of a commercial company where you're kind of you're getting minute-to-minute feedback on whether or not the the thing you're doing is hitting the fun out of targets that you hope that it will hit accept this is a

thing called the Cod I can't remember why it's called the cold no one can remember why it's called the cold but it was the thing we used at hide-and-seek to track all of our spending and all of our income this is it says I haven't haven't hidden any of the numbers here because there's no exciting numbers talent but you'll see at the top there's some nicely dynamically formatted cells that go pink in this case on the 18th of March and they go pink because that's or go bust date as some people would call it we tended to call it because that's really what it was we were we were a bootstrap company we had no resources we could only pay ourselves the next month if we got paid the previous month and especially for the for the people you know who were kind of mostly concerned with running a company if you always run it dominate is your waking era to an

extent that I could never really articulate at the time because you knew that you couldn't pay rent next month if this didn't happen but also that a bunch of people who you adored who you had lured away from possibly perfectly successful sensible person jobs to come and work with you wouldn't get paid and that pressure was super intense and so that pressure wasn't waking up at 2:00 in the morning intense pressure and not just a rolling out of bed and checking my kpi's the amount of time I spend thinking about money now that I work for a free-to-play company is much reduced and certainly the amount of kind of energy and friction that I'm dealing with in terms of money is radically reduced it's much nicer but you um you saw those screenshots at the beginning it seems like a fair question to ask whether or not that has come at the expense of abandoning interesting unpredictable work for I mean I don't want to say

boring but you can see how similar those three screenshots or to each other all right that's the same game three times and that's what I do and what I find is I think I wasn't expecting to find so these are don't worry they don't make sense these are early prototypes for the last new puzzle mechanic we introduced in two dots they're called paddles the kind of idea here is that if you clear a dots along so there are there are set of tiles that function together along one side is a hinge if you clear dots along the hinge then they flip and then whatever they land on they squish and then if you clear dots on the other side of the hinge then they flip back and while they're not flipping they act like gaps and dots can fall through them there's a relatively simple idea but dot says two dots is three years old nearly

we're coming up on our third anniversary in May and that means there's a huge amount of stuff in the game already this is level 1,000 which we just released and this has every mechanic in the game so far so you make those two connections that are in two connections you can make which then drops the cloud which sugars the cloud which lets the lotuses trigger which hits the gems that gems explode they hit the bombs that bomb goes off that hits the slime the train triggers that connects the magnets the magnets trigger and that explodes that the monster dot fell then the thing went and I've paddle he's gonna trigger and that was refreshed move in that level I mean I've never got to play with something so intricate in my life the interactions between all of these different mechanics are currently endlessly interesting the joy of like getting to drop a new one in to that every month or two and see what it changes and what it enables and how

it inflicts the flavor of the game is incredibly satisfying and so I you know a hesitation that I had when I took the decision to join the company was how am I gonna feel like it's literally spots before your eyes there's a point where can you really look at this all day every day for you know however long let me do it for two and a half years and I'm nowhere near done with enjoying looking at this particular set of things and that's partly because hide-and-seek this was this was this was our logo this was our tagline this is what we did we invented new kinds of play number of problems with that even as a claim um it's also just so dumb it's such a bad ProTour way of being a game designer you we would iterate well it's really even the word we were I da ting so many new

projects in so many crazy configurations where every single thing was on the table where I know we're gonna do this with motion sensors now we're not we're gonna do it with like super-weird targeted speakers that know where you are no we're not we're gonna do it with a partnership with Nike no we're not we're gonna do it with it everything was possible and you use very rapidly stop being a good or you risk stopping being a good game designer and and and just being a good game describer at that that becomes your job that you just show up in a room and you say a bunch of stuff that sounds good about a thing that doesn't exist and then maybe you get to make it good if you do get to make it you're going to spend three months making it and you're not gonna have time to get it right but it doesn't really matter because everybody's gonna be on to the next thing three weeks after that and it's invigorating and there are I think serious merits to going through that process but it certainly put me in a position where I'm now could not be happier to have this

really really precisely defined a puzzle box that I that I have this you know I feel I feel like a jeweler trying to perfect a gemstone rather than somebody trying to whatever it was we were trying to do that whole time but I thought for sure I was leaving art behind sorry I still feel a bit weird about this but I'm seat walls are fundamentally conceived of as an art studio as an arts institution we were arson residents at the South back Center in London which is one of if not the biggest arts centers in London we made work like this I gotta talk about this did you see a while ago so I won't take you through it because you can fault it if you care but this was a piece that we made as a counterpoint to a documentary film about the very distressing story of the

discovery in a London apartment of a the body of a 36 year old woman who had lain undiscovered for three years and my uncle Carol morally made a searing emotional amazing documentary about it and we got asked to make a partner piece so that people could kind of extend and explore the that the issues in the story that they film told online making it was hard and beautiful and weird and I've never seen anything like it and I don't know if we got it right but it was you know it it definitely we felt like being an artist even if I don't know if I wanted to call myself an artist and that was it was a huge amount of how we thought about ourselves and what we thought we did a year later this company came to us they're called Capgemini I don't know what they do but apparently it's consulting technology and outsourcing they wanted I think to make a mobile web

thing that would tell their clients or convince their clients that buying smart mobile devices for their clients employees would overall up company productivity more than the devices would cost and we said we've got just the thing and so we took the game that had been that beautiful documentary piece and we stuck a bunch of my stock photos in it this is I dreamt about this photo it's literally called adult people having a business lunch and then with governor's help we wrote a lot of choose-your-own-adventure business productivity dialogue I suggest you don't read all of this because it's too gruesome but there's some highlights that you might want to dwell on and that

was a project for us because it pushed that go bus date a couple months down the road it was a thing we could do it felt good to be building on the technology that we'd already developed but it's a really stark contrast to the stuff that we wanted to do and the stuff that we cared about doing and because I'm lucky enough to be at a game studio that's founded by a bunch of people who care about culture beyond the culture of games it hasn't necessarily meant leaving this behind so this is this is contemporary magic this is a side project that dots put out last year a collaboration with a woman called Stacey Eggman who had put together a collection of commissioned interpretations of tarot cards from artists around the world that she wanted to she had the cards but she wanted to make a digital versions of cards and she was looking for a good partner to see and for us we're at the scale that

that's not a scary decision to say well this is a this is a pretty simple little standalone thing that we can put together and so although I have in theory left all of this behind to my surprise it's amazing how much of it you can take with you if you're an environment with the right kind of people we also talked about more similar thing this has really surprised me and I feel a bit torn about it part of why I wanted to work with hide-and-seek where I wanted to stay ahead and seek was I can't really did I know what alright there alyx were holy here I don't think they made it there's other very good high deceit people here this week you find them you should talk to them because it'll be fun this was a thing I was super proud of well stay with me this was the Arg we made for the launch of the Green Lantern movie starring Ryan

Reynolds which none of you saw right it's terrible but they wanted an Arg and that's the kind of thing we did so we felt we could have some fun with it and part of how we had fun with it was with this project I knew some folks Cambridge University who were trying to run some citizen science digital tools to deal with a weird problem that now apparently exists in astronomy which is we have really good photographic reverses of space now this picture that you're looking at here is from the Spitzer Space Telescope so we have this huge amount of raw material of images of space but computers are still pretty bad at doing visual analysis or photographs they were certainly even worse whenever this was six or seven years ago that we were doing in so what actually ends up happening is that grad

students are just expected to invest hours of extra time in manually going through all of these photos to see if they can see anything that looks interesting and this project was specifically about trying to find photographic evidence of the birth of new stars and what happens when I'm like if anybody who actually understands I know this stuff is here and just do this for an hour cuz I'm on shaky ground here but for the sake of what happens when a star is born is a huge explosion all this stuff all this stuff not that there's much space stuff but there's some space stuff that was around the storm when it exposed gets pushed out and you end up with a globe of stuff which to a 2d camera looks like a ring and then it's hard to see because the colors don't the pictures of any color in them so you tint them the way this one is tinted to make it look Spacey and cool you get where you get is a green ring in space for the Green Lantern movie I was pretty pleased so we had

this cute thing that if you play the energy it would it would take you through weary skinned there citizen science tool to be within the game fiction then you do too much stuff you would maybe find a story that no one had ever found before and then you got a certificate from NASA at the end saying thank you for being a scientist and that seemed as like high on the job satisfaction score right that seems like a really nice thing to put together but the truth is it's it's it's utterly eclipsed by thing that I had a much smaller hand in which is that when the travel ban hit a few weeks ago led by former VR CEO but with just enough of support of a ton of people in the company who were on slack over the weekend we put an announcement in all our games because stating our opposition

to you anything that was limited free and fair aberration and directing people to the ACLU donation page and that push half a million visitors through from us to the ACLU can't then track that onward donation because the technology wasn't in place but it was there we got a bunch of unbelievably nice letters we got a bunch of mean letters and in the interests of balance I was going to also put those on the screen but the truth is they are so ugly and hate-filled and racist that I'm not willing to give them the oxygen so you're just gonna get a nice one he's the nice ones but it was a real you know we as a commercial company we had to stop and think about what we might be looking at in terms of the repercussions and we were able to do that and determine that that it was worth doing and there is a kind of numbers game reality that that hide-and-seek had had

a huge amount of freedom but we just had this really tiny reach even when we were trying to surf you know we're trying to find cool ways so to hitch the ideas that we wanted to do up to a major movie release and now being at a studio that has hundreds of millions of installs when we want to have this kind of impact we have a capability to do it that we wouldn't otherwise have and some of that is just to do with this kind of weird simple bit of math I didn't do until Freddy recently there's lots of there's lots of things about working for a commercial free-to-play company that only really makes one kind of game that doesn't seem very exciting or enlivening but the what is true is I'm now in a place where all everyone in that room cares about all day every day is games and all the people who are our customers want from us all day every day is games I just I live in this delicious game bubble and my old job I got to do a

bunch of cool stuff but it was nearly always in collaboration with somebody else and those organizations were full of wonderful people and they were doing great interesting things but they mostly carried about chocolate or opera or a prescription prices and they didn't they didn't even not like games as much they didn't they just they didn't games didn't they didn't know about them they didn't believe in them they didn't know how to interface with them they didn't know how to write contracts for them they just they just it would you know there was just a real boundary there that was hard to cross and I spent so much more of my time defending and explaining and and lobbying for games than I ever spent actively making them whereas when I walk in now it's my office every morning I'm not there's no friction I'm just walking with a bunch of other people who want to do game stuff I should say in almost I'm I'm painfully aware that there are lots

of different ways to be a commercial free-to-play company lots of different ways to be an Indian and I know Indies you don't do anything like this so please don't think that I'm suggesting this is the only way around it is but this is this is the bit of it that I know about so I thought it made sense to store there its rainbow because here's the thing maybe this whole premise this whole question about the transition from Indy to commercial is just a big pile of rainbow poop maybe it's not really a meaningful transition at all because I think what I find and I spoke to a few people who've been through similar changes before coming in to this today they're kind of saying the same thing what doesn't change is the work is the work if you make games for a living what

you're up against in terms of all of the weird technical psychological artistic commercial challenges that you face of like starting with nothing and trying to get to a thing for weeks for months for years later that people will understand and know how to use and stick with and derive a sense of accomplishment from and doesn't fall over all the time whatever else might go wrong with it it just doesn't change this is the is an awesome collection of Richard Serra drawings from an exhibition called work comes out of work and I that phrase get stuck in my head a lot even though it's a bit hard to explain because it feels like what it means to me is that the you know you think of work in terms of an artwork the work is like this finished object that you see in a gallery but the way you get to that thing is is through that work is through the daily boring stupid tragedy work that you do and you can't get there

without here and in fact you can't directly make that you just need to do this stuff and you do enough of it for long enough and then the thing emerges at the end of it and that just feels the same I mean the truth is I probably burst into tears a little less often but working on a new mechanic for adults doesn't feel fundamentally different from working on a game bat death I still have a bunch of like logic clothes I can't resolve and I need a bigger piece of paper because I always need a bigger bigger piece of paper and then I sit there for three hours until I figure it out and then I figured it out and then I go and talk to an engineer and then next day we play it and hopefully it's better that's just the same it just hasn't changed so for all that it looks like I've been through this kind of massive like career you turn it in practice doesn't feel like it at all but I think there are some things that came out of being in that crazy in the environment that I brought into commercial-free to play that I wouldn't have come any other

way this is one of them this is a crying child my work used to involve a lot more crying children when you make real world games physical world games really often especially when you're you're developing them when they're they're still being designed your players in your playtesters or they're like they're in the room with you but they are so in the room with you you probably you there's no like mediated thing where you give them a screen and you get to sit back you're probably gonna say stuff you if you're me you're standing on a chair because you're 5 foot 2 and no one can see you you're going to tell a bunch people to do things and they are trusting you that it do is gonna be fun and they do them and it stinks because the game is still in development and then they come back and they yell at you and that is what making games is like and that's bad enough what's worse is when they're three years old we did a the tiny waste project I mentioned earlier we followed up with the collaboration with Sesame Street an

amazing delightful experience but we did a bunch of similar tiny games for sort of three and four-year-olds and their parents or caregivers and you have to play to us those things and and not wreak psychological catastrophe on the children her playtesting them in the concert in the in the course of doing that not always easy and turns out that one three-year-old who's better at cup stacking than her four-year-old sister and the four-year-old isn't okay with that and the whole thing happens and so I think the the the intimacy and the immediacy of the playtesting experience that I had in an experimental real world play focused studio told me things that I never would have learned working in a just in a digital studio and just in a casual digital studio the the I talked earlier about the downside of the inventing new kinds of play thing where you never get to the bottom of idea but there's a pretty big upside this I

couldn't show you this for half a second because there's proprietary stuff on it that gone that was is pulled out of a real email team email we did team email each week I had to think of all the things we were working on that just listed out all of our projects and that was one from a few months before we we took the decision to close this is kind of translation of what we were doing so on the left is the stuff that was live that was actively in production or release of a Sesame Street thing I just showed you the tiny games we talked about we were making prototypes with leap motion for in-house for in-house project we wanted to do we were installing seven-foot playable carrots at the Royal Botanic Gardens in London we were thing going with a government research unit that current watcher page those plastic those vinyl stickers were going down somewhere we were doing a movie marketing thing that wasn't Green Lantern Holly if she was here was running a twine game of a philosophy for the Open University that terrible Capgemini

device thing was happening we were making a iPhone an iPad app forward and for young learners of the violin that would listen to them play and then tell them what to do to correct and this kind of music course that we were putting together for them and we had a large installation at Kensington Palace where you played a bunch of games as a very very very astonishing kind of medieval Museum in London we had games installed throughout the palace and you played things and you collected things that when you got to the end so a Christmas kind of aimed at kids and their families because at the end if you played well enough you became king or queen you got to choose your royal name you built a big placard for yourself had your name on it and then we had a smart throne you sat on the throne it could feel that you sat down and it read your board because your board was full of RF IDs and then it played a fanfare a dynamically generated fanfare that was just for you and your name so that your dad could

take a photo of you that was alive that week that was the stuff we were doing live that week and then the stuff that we were pitching on that week was a therapy ant with a major dimension of charity he was interested in whether or not occupational therapy could be extended to digital play therapy it was in the middle of like the gamification of money stuff so we had an investment management company who thought we could help them we had a pension company thought we could help them the thing was happening that I can't remember about some guys who a big slot machine company thought maybe that there should be an experiential real world game that sat around the slot machine experience they were trying to help me with that the UK government wanted a bunch of people to go to a tourist destination that every was going to you and they thought an Arg could help there was a lightly pornographic movie I'll leave it up to you to guess which one it was that wanted a text adventure I still think did some of my best game design for of it different question there was a stupendously enormous movie deal that I still can't talk about but

we're taking telling 18 decayed which was a long way away one of the companies that did the you know you go to museum you can like hire a digital guide that tells me a bunch of stuff about where you're the people who make those weren't even doing to any games for one of those a mall wanted a three story playable sculpture a thing that was kind of half a health through skelter and half and escape the room that we would charge people money to go into you there was another movie that wanted a thing it was not the government thing that wanted a thing and a major Hollywood visual effects studio was wondering if they should stop just making visual effects for movies and start making games of their own so we were in development with a major new project for that six people worked at the London office and every week was like that and you get really good at having ideas fast in that environment because we needed to chase all of those things because only every 30th would turn into a thing because most of them as you can see you're bonkers and should

never have happened and so the fluidity and the the the fastness of feet that you need to develop to kind of survive that stuff is really profound and you also need to get really really good at no I always get just like um social is another thing that you design for differently when you're in that environment if you live only in the digital social world I think you tend to have these kind a creepy kind of viral adji analogies for social spread and now we don't talk about k-factor anymore but there is this kind of like creepy sense that things spread without any kind of real autonomy that this isn't about any of the particular individuals it's just if you package it right and you incentivize it correctly then you can count on a certain percentage of people to press the button and a certain percentage of the people that button goes you to press the button if you're designing physical space social games you have a much much

clearer understanding that the the the unit of social interaction is he's one to one and one to one between two individuals with their own dynamic and preferences and priorities so this was probably a most successful social feature that I designed and one that I think I never would have designed if I hadn't come that feature this was a crazy text adventure we did for a Skyfall the Bond movie with a chat with a natural language sample so the hook was that you were you're going through your initial test to find out whether or not you could be a good mi6 agent so you got hooked up to the system that was the conceit I guess was kind of that mi6 agents have like codecs that they type into you when they're having a bad day they would fly and so you hook in and they're like oh this is all going wrong I don't know what to do I'm stuck and help me and you would type your way through it figure out how to solve their problem and if you want out you would

get an email psychological analysis that told you that the fake mi6 is assessment of how you played in what kind of person you were so in this one I played manipulatively but then we would tell you that we you were looking for a different kind of agent so a ruthless agent or an unpredictable agent or impetuous agent and so in this recruit friends box we would ask you to nominate somebody so it hook you through to your Facebook friends which you could only pick one and it was kind of fun like when you get a thing that says who is your most manipulative friend and you look through your list of Facebook friends you can't help but kind of go oh well not her but him and what we got was through the roof rates for both this share but then also the response rate from the people that we shared it to because they felt like they were getting something meaningful we also this was a collaboration with Ronan Kennedy and they had a super cute idea but if you tried to circumvent that and share it more widely it showed up on your

Facebook feed is redacted so you could you could share the URL but everything showed up with a text black tight look super cool so we just we just said no you don't you have to one person pick one person and yeah weird so well I know I never would have done it if I hadn't made a bunch of real world social games that operate kind of very differently so that still feels different and better that's that and then when I started out working in games and as a game designer I I kind of like are physicalist and a game designer and if you ask me to express myself I would write you an essay I would do a nice design document headings and that's what you would get and I went from that to being smashed into a room with people from from widening Kennedy or RDA or mother or whatever else or are people from Tate Modern or were opera house the expectation of your ability to communicate visually and the expectation for your bility to present your ideas come to the best of

their capabilities was a was a lot of pressure very fast and I I mean you guys are going to be the judge of it but I'm hoping that I'm a little bit better at presenting my ideas than I was when I started out with those endless Word documents so I'm a I'm contractually obliged to give you takeaways I think I might actually be contractually obliged to give you takeaways and joy doesn't work in America doesn't it we've got any Brits who can give me a takeaway laughs all right you're lucky you didn't get a picture of a Munchie box which you sounds like you shouldn't Google but you can google but then you're still kind of wish you hadn't googled so we try to think about can I can I give any advice that's actually real useful advice and advice that I can imagine myself having followed either at the indie studio when I was having on that or the the

Commerce's view that I'm helping Renee and I decided that in both cases it's it's it's all about the three FS I think the I'm lucky to be in the studio that I'm at now and a big part of what's enabled that is just the people that we have we have a weird mix of people and we are very unprejudiced all about what people's backgrounds are we don't care about experience and we don't care about industry background what we do care about we're certainly what I care about when I'm looking to hire gay news owners is is that kind of fundamental fluency are you fast or are you used to having to undergo a bunch of playtesting or are you good at taking that kind of feedback are you good at communicating your idea effectively and visually to routine I do not care how you've come by that experience I don't care whether you've got a degree I don't care whether you've been ok if you do have experience and you're bringing it to me out of a free to play studio I don't care if it's a

bunch of game jams that you've done I don't care if it's some skills that you can transfer across from having been working in advertising or whatever else I don't care if I feel like you can do it that's my number one concern I do care a bit about your degree of familiarity with the space that I mean free-to-play has a bunch of weird habits and you know kind of best practices that it's very useful to know but I don't care whether you know them as a player or a designer if you have some degree of fluency with what that takes or how that works in outfits together then that's all you need to make it on my list and then the third F is experience because it helps you know I think that thing that I talked about earlier in terms of knowing what it takes to take something over the line doesn't matter knowing you know the reason and a mane of grit and a kind of breadth of focus that you need

as you come to the end of a project to make sure that it debuts fulfilling all of the hopes that you had for it but again I don't necessarily care about whether that that not strictly speaking in games and I think the the value for doing that is there's a there's a there's a different talk I could have been giving to say if I was at a different studio I wouldn't have been able to say so many of the nice things that I said about oh hey we did this a cou thing or hey we got to do this artists collaboration I know that not everybody who's working in free-to-play is in that sphere but in a successful business there just is the scope I know that from being in a absolutely to the you know down to the bones impoverished indie studio we never had the scope to do those kind of things and in a bigger studio you can if there is the institutional world on the institutional will is built out of the people who make up the studio and so the more you bring in people who are going to help you stay connected to a wider cultural sphere and

a more a set of attitudes and beliefs the more it becomes credible that you can start to kind of incubate those kind of projects in activities within that commercial environment frooties is also the three FS actually or three after this time um last year I made a sequel I made Doc Simcoe it's a sequel to two dots it was unbelievably hard so hard kind of hated it learnt so much super proud of it I never did that as an indie you never make a sequel as an indie are you crazy you're lucky if you survive releasing anything once ever and then even if you make it that far you probably have to do something different the next time and so the the the design education I got out of really really tearing down an existing successful game it was such a horrid challenge because it often when you make a sequel you made a game and you released it and it did or didn't do okay and then time passed and now you're going to make another version of it and that's cool in the modern games the services age that's not how it works two dots isn't going anywhere

it's what I only successful its iterating incredibly fast month or month or month it gets better and cooler and and grander coming in on top of that to say well how do I make her sister game that sits next to that meaningfully men I had to go through a process of kind of like deconstructing all of the stuff about how to dance works but also where it's going but also where this could go there's different it was just like no design challenge I've ever had so I exhort anybody out there who's working in an indie or a high space to see if they can find a way to make it follow up Mac I know that's not necessarily simple I know enough about being an indie to know you don't always get an awful lot of choice about what you do next if you got make a follow up for real and just pretend just do a thought experiment just sit down with a thing that you made six months ago it's a very different process than doing a post-mortem go back to a thing that was finished and imagined that you were going to real you were going to do a sequel to it you're going to release a new version of it three months six months a year from now

and see what it teaches you because yeah because because you may not realize that there's a whole kind of design thinking that you're you're never confronting if you're working in a way that's more kind of free form an independent and then this is is maybe one of the toughest takeaways for me I you know I loved working independently I loved the crazy things that I got to do but I'm seeing now what being at a more focus to do is enabling me to do and I'm you know reveling in that opportunity Alex Pete what who isn't here my business partner in hide and seek in the time we shadowed hide and seek three years ago I think maybe three in a bit the time since then he's caught his breath and then come back with a project that was inspired by a very very very embryonic project we did at hide and seek maybe six or seven years ago and he's spent tune of eight years and is now focusing energy of five or six

people and one thing and one thing only which is this is a piece of balance his new game he um he's been he's shredded at the last two DTC's he's just told me earlier today was the first time the this news he was the first time where he came to show the game he's having to bring it in a suitcase when he got to San Francisco he just went to the store and he bought a copy of it in the store and then brought it a thing and it's a great in Pride moment and I look at that and it it looks to me like two things it looks to me like a thing a thing and we could have made a home seat it was it's so much you should check it out the super cool and crazy in road it's so much the kind of thing we love to make there it's like one part game one part poem one part educational app one part sculpture it's exactly the kind of thing that we love to do and it's also exactly the kind of thing that we would never have accomplished because the way you do this is you do nothing else for two years and I think when if I had it all

to do again I think as an indie we got banked so much in it into trying to do everything because we never wanted to turn anything again and we never had the confidence to just try and pick one thing and I do now really wonder what you know there were some of those ideas that show that beginning we're acute ideas that board every week it was a cute idea a tiny games was a cute idea but we put this much focus into it and then had to transfer it to something else and I think I think if I've learned anything moving into you the commercial world actually it's not about it's not about following the money and it's not about worrying about the margins but it's about what a commercial the focus that a commercial can a commercial structure can enable that you struggle to get elsewhere because that's really the thing this I opened with this this is uncle death any uncle death fans I can't see you but there you go so this is uncle death he's

he's your I don't know what he's he's your mentor he's your bully he's your of something or they're in let it die which is suda51 's weird free to play console brawler and that's interesting because I mean I picked him just because he was my favorite Grim Reaper I could find in games I tried to find good Devils in games and it's a weird space once you decide you don't want to die a blow thing you don't know what else you're gonna do his his sights a golf club but yes so repeat him cuz he's cool but also I mean there is a there is somebody who has you know whose career has taken him from making things that are very much on the margins and very much kind of creatively Otero style defined and delivered through to a point where you know I make free to play games and he

pays he makes free to play games and they're pretty different and you know we have nothing to each other but it seems like an interesting mmm but so he's a cute choice of Grim Reaper but he's not really appropriate because this is more about rebirth I think the we work in a super volatile industry I don't there's there's probably nobody here or functionally nobody here who's been cozy and happy in the same company for the last 25 years making the same kind of games that's not how it works for us there's there's too many winds of change blowing around games it's part of what we love about games the technology changes or the business model changes or the audience changes or we uncover some kind of new control mechanism or new paradigm we're all dodging Olivia or self out there right now it's never gonna let us rest easy and so for me the biggest thing I've learned in this transition is those fundamentals that kind of the work is the work core practice stuff comes with you but even

if everything else falls apart and we hide and seek had an elegant and we never hit that go bust eight despite the fad it was Detroit its best and we were able to like find the right moment to say this isn't gonna work anymore and finish our projects close things down elegantly treat everybody who worked there I hope well we believe it we did that well it still felt god-awful it felt absolutely excruciating ly miserable and I know that I'm not necessarily safe from that again in the future right now I'm at a happy successful company that all our expectations or I will continue to be happy and successful but I've done this long enough to know that a you know there are there are fates that await game companies they get bought by less friendly game companies that were their forth see cruel doesn't do as well or they back the wrong horse in terms of a technology platform or an input mechanism or whatever it is so I probably won't be here forever either

but now I I like I've got a clearer sense of how translatable the skills that I have are not necessarily two different industries but just two different places within the same industry and I think we'll do better if we recognize that in each other that rather than just ending up with a with a much more kind of closed circle where Indies know how to talk to Indies but or skeptical about people who come from free-to-play background or vice-versa we recognize that there are fundamental capabilities that transcend those categories that is ROI I have fee we're hiring was it your dog Jeezy's over [Applause] your questions are welcome okay so the

topic that was most interesting to me about the transition I love what you're describing to me feels like going from like a consulting environment in some ways because you're also doing projects for these corporate clients going to free-to-play mmm the the thing that has struck me like coming to GDC over the last five years was there was a lot of discussion about free-to-play where you know it's Wales and it's about paywalls and ads and offers and Skinner boxes frankly where it felt very skeevy to me so for me like when I'm thinking about free-to-play that's the part that creeps me out to be perfectly asked is is that obviously you know dots has a model right how much does that influence your design work how you feel about what you do when you look at free-to-play and what you associate with okay that sort of a broad question I got into it

so I was jaws is a very classic free-to-play approach and a thing that makes my life very easy is that we don't we don't do anything we would be uncomfortable before our players knew about that's kind of our litmus is would we would we feel okay about if someone who loved our game came in and said how does this work and we went oh well it was like this would they would they feel like we'd been tricking them as if there's a couple things that were not super public about just because they're complicated but we'd very happily talk anyone through them at length it's just hard to put it in a tweet in a way that won't miss construed there's like a bunch of like super-dense spawning rules around objects to make sure that the game stay fun even when players do weird things and so it's those are hard to explain but they're not they're designed only to make sure people continue to have happy game experiences they're not

they're not revenue focused it's weird I've made games that are just supposed to be about Joey I've made games that are in a consulting or educational environment where you're taking people to a point where there's some kind of threshold you have to cross where they have to learn a thing or do a thing sometimes that thing is they have to click on a link to go to the Green Lantern trailer and sometimes it's have to have to prove that they've learned a Greek verb or sometimes whatever they there are an arrow in this place where I we have a sumptuous expensive game that we give away for free and then we get two people to a point where we say if you want to keep going right now you need to put your hand in your pocket and those things just feel super identical to me like it's definitely not hard or weirder to get somebody to give me a dollar than it is to get them to watch the Green Lantern trailer and it's

actually not that different and that may be quite a lot easier than while I'm designing a street game for Edinburgh where what I'm trying to construct is a is a set of gaming incentives where you will go and hold the hand of a stranger and frankly if you if you give me the design challenge to to make you give me a dollar versus the one where you have to hold on to the stranger I'll take the dollar right that's it that's easier so I think that the the the design challenge doesn't feel any different it's it's it's about motivating your player and then restricting the resources that they have to reach the thing that you've motivated them to reach and then giving them interesting options to resolve that restriction and then spending is one of them but you're always going to want to offer your player of that choice anyway and so it's just what you swap in and out of those categories that doesn't it just feels exactly the same where it would feel different is if there was stuff that I thought was explosive or underhanded or dis line too designed to mislead or trick people we

just don't have any of that so it seems easy is that at all helpful yeah I think if I was going to try to like replay it the real core is as long as you're transparent with the users and you're and you feel ethical about what you're producing it's okay so and that might be part of that design process too about like where do you put in your loop and how do you construct them are these things feeling ethical or not if you feel good about then well you could sleep at night I mean yeah kind of what I think I'm hearing I think that doesn't feel at all controversial again and I think some of it definitely comes from designing face to face with players the the the the model that I always have in my head is that a human is gonna an individual human is gonna want to sit down and ask me questions about any design choice that I make and yeah it kind just makes it trivially easy it's like do I know how to answer that person's questions cool that I'm doing

the right thing if I'm uncomfortable then we do something else yeah that's helpful because that also will allow me to one things I'm struggling sorry yeah question is um how do I test out my monetization strategy and so if I can sit with somebody and face-to-face and know that they're gonna say okay well no that's caviar that's good that also gives me design I do my pen and paper to test all my monetization stuff well I pen in money test all my monetization stuff I have a cup of dollar bills on my desk and and tokens and everything gets tested like that so there was another talk today there's a researcher who's surveying game designers to get their definition of success so what's your definition of success and did it change when you moved from from one studio to the other you

didn't have to answer um yeah I've I have so far been a hundred percent unsuccessful I would say I'm not like I'm like I feel like I maybe be successful if I made a thing that I felt was good and that I was proud of I don't really feel like that everything is everything is full of compromises and missed opportunities the games that I love have a essentialism about them that you know that you couldn't you can't change a single rule of that game because it's just right it's just perfect and I'm fascinated by those game and in all of them and I know I've not come close to making anything that good so there's like I guess yeah I guess I'd to definition success there's that one which I haven't hit and maybe I'll never hit keep trying and the other one is oh my god I'm a make games for a living any year where I can pull that together is a success and you know I've done it for ten and maybe I'll get to do it for

more and you know I think kind of as long as I'm within that ethical territory I'm not that fussy about what it is because it's a it's this weird wonderful absorbing task that I'm nowhere near tardar of yet I just want to say really love to talk and the really personal wander II style you used I think it's fantastic and very honest and I appreciate that now my question you've talked a little about or hinted at your design process and it seems to be you know pretty rigorous and rational but also I think a lot of people in free-to-play especially in mobile feel that there's an element of luck to a game becoming a smash hit and I would like your thoughts on that do you believe for example dots was mostly genius with a bit of luck do you feel like it was a lot of luck with a bit of genius or you know hard work or good process or you know comes coming

from a good design thing yeah that's my ill-formed question for you I mean the the the the cheat answer to that is it's always about the work and you the work needs to be perfect and then luck is the is the thing on top of that but I don't think you believe that and I no I don't believe that um I mean I'll tell you this the last game I launched walls Dotson Co and we launched it two weeks after I think I was it Pokemon go was that that game yes so that just that just changes the fundamental dynamics of the of the apps were charts in a way that you have no control over and that was very different from when we launched or a previous game where would the App Store winds blew in a direction not against us and so that kind of thing it that's like a really identify will quantify what

kind of luck like that's not something weird you know touchy-feely don't know here's I guess maybe my slightly more sophisticated cheat answer her is we are really bad clearly differentiating between luck and capital one of the reasons that nothing we did at hide-and-seek ever got off the ground was it was partly because we we had too many things going on and in some cases I'm sure it was partly cuz we were about our jobs but we could never afford more than one roll of the dice we put this thing out there and if it didn't work we were gonna eat that month so we had to run and do something else instead big companies get lucky because they can try over and over and if and that doesn't even necessarily look like launching a thing that doesn't work and then launching a new thing and then launching a new thing to das has been alive for

three years over the course of that three years we've been able to make all kinds of additions and amends and alterations to it we've been able to bring it out on extra platforms we've been able to do all of these things you know that's it that's a game that's been commercially successful all the way through but if we hadn't been a studio with income if we hadn't been a studio with investments had we hit more bumps in the road they would have killed us dead and we wouldn't have been able to do anything about it so I'm not saying lot still isn't a factor but when you when you when you look at a specific thing and think all those specific people got lucky it's worth broadening your examination of the odds to say well how many rolls of the dice that they get and how many rolls the dice am I going to get and how do i how do I sustain myself through those those things and then you just try and get smart about the other stuff that the we couldn't you know we couldn't quite a navigated around Pokemon go but we were navigating a bit around a bunch of other stuff in the App Store that we did know about that we had reserved that we had kept our ears open for you

can certainly mitigate that kind of risk and similarly with you know with how you're handling more car testing of visual assets or you know or you you know you love them but is anyone else going to love them you know there's a you can you can amortize a bunch of that stuff but never all of it it's like slightly less GT answer absolutely I think that's a really great model for for thinking about it thank you thank you we're done it's all over margarita time thank you everyone you