Slime Rancher: A Preemptive Postmortem

[Music] everyone welcome to slime rancher a pre-emptive postmortem I'm Nick Popovich I'm the CEO of Minami park and before we begin I'm supposed to say please turn off your phones I will be in the wrap-up room after this if anyone has any questions and then also be uploading the presentation to the GDC vault and in PDF format as well so if you want access to these slides they will be available for you so this is a pre-emptive post-mortem for slime rancher we're not done with it yet we're still in early access and so we're being a little cheeky with the name here but let's get right into it I'm going to cover our how we made the game are sort of prototyping process and everything and our first year in early access and share all the tips and

everything that I have for that as well as a lot of information on YouTube and things like that so hopefully you get something out of it to start I am the co-founder and CEO of Minami Park I design slime rancher and spiral knights and there's me on Twitter and that's everything that you need to know about me right now let's hear about slime rancher so has everyone played it a slime rancher yeah yeah cool all right well I'm still going to introduce the game anyway so bear with me it's a first-person farming ranching game with slimes the the name is totally appropriate it's super heavy in the physics department and the world is completely open and nonlinear very Zelda like in that sense but let's see a trailer of slime rancher to kind of understand it if you've never [Music]

[Music] [Music] that's I'm rancher so let's look at the development data we worked on this for two years before it went into early access in a little apartment somewhere and after releasing it to became five we're super proud of that it uses unity and you FPS which is a unity asset package that allowed us basically to make a first-person shooter like overnight at this point it would probably be more efficient if we weren't

using it but it got us to to this point so we're gonna stick with it we also use sector to break up our world and let it kind of load on the fly it was totally bootstrapped no funding and we never crunched and that's super important because you don't need to in the retail it's PC Mac Linux and Xbox one twenty bucks and it's done super well for us this is probably why I'm giving this talk and yeah I mean it completely took us by surprise and so the sort of the purpose of this talk is to figure out why maybe that is the case so let's start by talking about creating slime rancher and the points we're gonna cover are the original idea which had nothing to do with slime rancher our approach to developments and constraints and that sounds boring but let's get right into the seed that grew into it and this isn't boring this is a lot of fun this is a house slime Rancher all started it

was with a bug in Oblivion there was a bug in oblivion that allowed you to put a mundane object into a bow and shoot infinite amounts of that into the environment and break it so you can do that with melons and I think that's like a worm cult priests trying to be very serious while melons are just like filling the environment I always thought that was really hilarious you could do lots of silly things with it like fill ins full of cabbages and cause everyone to fall over and then the town guards would would try and come after you and they're tripping on cabbages as well and that was super silly and so I thought you know ball pits are really really fun maybe we can make a game about a ball pit but that was long before slime rancher came to be when it was that was always sort of simmering in the back of my mind and then when it was time for us to create our own thing slime rancher was sort of the the marriage of this kernel of an idea and a couple other

things that made sense to us plus I just like slimes they were cheery and I wanted to do something that was happy but then we were faced with a development reality we were only two people we could not make a better version of any kind of known property out there it didn't matter if I had a great idea for a military shooter like a first person military shooter it wasn't going to happen I didn't think it was worth competing because they're always going to win so we took a different approach and it is to be better than anyone we decided we can make a better slime ranching game than anyone ever that was something that we could actually do and this might seem obvious but we really had to kind of stick with it and the way that you do that is you make your own Calvin ball I don't know if anyone has ever read Calvin and Hobbes I'm sure a lot of you have a running joke and it was Calvin ball which is where Calvin and Hobbes would take a game and invent stuff on the fly

and just kind of run with it and there was a couple of comics where they talked about how they were world champions in Calvin ball and that always kind of stuck with me so we made our own Calvin ball and by default we were the best at it and the other important thing to note about Calvin ball is it's using a lot of known elements from existing sports so you know how to interact with parts of Calvin ball but you don't necessarily know the whole rules yet but you can get comfortable because you can interact with pieces of it that you're very familiar with it and so what this amounts to is sort of on the weirdness spectrum you have something like call of duty which people are super familiar with and that is represents the thing the mousetrap that we couldn't build a better version of there was there was no chance for that but with something like call of duty if you have a great version of that people not only know how to play it already but they're gonna like the theme of it walking into it on the other

end you have Katamari in which at the time no one knew how to play it no one understood what the theme was the art style wasn't mainstream and you can do that you can make your you know start an indie company and try and make the next Katamari good luck to you because it's it's like you know a real shot in the dark and when you get that you're gonna go huge with it but the chance of you getting that is much slimmer and so we were looking to mitigate risk and so we went somewhere in the middle where slime rancher has a lot of familiar elements of existing games but then we kind of hold on dearly to this core of weirdness that isn't too off-putting because much like Calvinball people can be familiar with the soccer ball or you know a mallet or something like that and kind of ease themselves and do it it's a way of getting your player to kind of let their guard down and we use these constraints that we were faced with as two people

I can't animate for a dam so we used limbless slimes as the central actors of our game by making an FPS there was no character model other than a hand to animate the FPS as I've said mainstream muscle memory it's it allowed people who maybe would have never played a first-person slime ranching game to play it because when they see a trailer of it as I just showed you its first person you're shooting stuff and so that you know works for a lot of people it's open world because scripting is hard making sequences and hoping they don't break and having to check that every time you do you know add more content to the game is super hard so we we did the easier thing which is open-world and I think that helped the the game's reception and then as I said farming is relatable the rest of it is weird so that gets people who are who could at least say oh I see they're growing vegetables in this game play games where you grow vegetables this seems like perhaps it's a game for

me so the takeaway here is that slime rancher is a weird concept played in a familiar way it's wrapped in a familiar theme so two of the three battles are already won and the last battle is a game of Calvinball which by default you win so you know doing the too familiar and then whatever it is you're trying to say or be is a is a pretty good cocktail so next we're gonna talk about kind of building guarantees into slime ranches design and this seemed super presumptuous but bear with me the points to cover are our approach to prototyping and how we evaluate it how we build fun loops and which sounds like breakfast cereal and how this all guarantees sort of a strong foundation for the final product so when we first began before we had any sort of working anything probably even before we opened up unity for the first time I made a kind of an

image of what I wanted slime rancher to be thank you tf2 assets for that but we knew it was going to be like kind of lower poly and paint early that all made sense so as you can see it's kind of close to to what we ultimately did but then you know this is what we started with this is sort of raw you FPS in action or as you know I like to think of it as meat handgun versus the devil spheres that was our initial prototype and it worked and it was what sold my partner Mike Thomas on the idea was that even in this very very crude state like there was something there like especially when you had all these spheres inside a Corral and they're bubbling over and it was almost like popcorn popping and you were trying to manage that with your you know marine hand with with a pistol it actually was kind of fun but we didn't go right from that into developing the full-on game

our approach to prototyping is a bit different instead we built a prototype that kind of looked ish like a final game and so this is where we were at including thank you again tf2 so we had slimes who were expressive and they chirped and did all of the kind of things that they do now in the game they were eating food and making ports there was even largos at this point and you see there's some Corral's back there and even the tar and the reason for this is our prototype focused entirely on the core game loop and not the vertical slice and our prototypes loop and final game loop was exactly the same so we got this thing propped up and we said let's just make sure that the the core action in the game is fun and then we'll move on from there and there's an additional reason why we kind of polished it up a little bit more than maybe we should have that I'll get into later so this approach is because almost every game

has what I like to think of as like a 90 percent loop it's the thing that you're doing 90 percent of the time over and over and over almost every game has this with very few exceptions some of them are just pretty much purely the 90 percent loop which is I guess a hundred percent loop but you you get my meaning so this um this loop is the machine that makes players want to play and replay your game and is that thing that players want to interact with if your game had a you know it's that it's like I just want to play that you know like and it's not thinking about achievements or long-term objectives or anything like that and it's not perceived as the experience as a whole but it is absolutely what is going to drive your experience and I'll give you a great example of how that can be so strong nothing else matters so here we have destiny I believe it came out in like 2014 and when it did you know it had some problems there was some

questionable performances by Peter Dinklage and you know lute didn't exactly feel great there was a bunch of things that you could chalk up to it's like oh I'm familiar with what they're trying to do here because I've played other games where they do this stuff they're not doing it quite right however the fun loop that 90% of you engaging with an enemy shooting them a bunch of times taking cover when your shields break throwing a grenade to disperse them and running in and doing melee you could do that 50,000 times and it felt just as good on the 50,000th time as it did the first time and that's why it was just completely arresting for me for like a year and why it totally dominated the news I think Kotaku I believe even did a story which was like we'll stop doing stories on destiny when everyone stops reading them because everyone just wanted to read about destiny and there was again no shortage of complaints but what they made was magic and it was the thing that was driving that experience the other thing to note is that is absolutely in

all forms of play if you're choosing teams in basketball and you happen to be holding a ball you're not just sitting there like this holding a ball deciding what you're gonna do you're gonna be dribbling it because that action is just so satisfying and even when you're playing a board game divorced from all strategy you want to roll that die not only is that a satisfying action but it means something's going to happen to me and I'm hooked on knowing what's next and it's all the parts of the game that just feel good so let's get back into our testing approach now which was we presented the prototype as a mostly finished game I think some of her friends were definitely looped in that there was much more to do but for other folks we said there you go what do you think of this game because that prototype that I showed you earlier had like a beginning middle and end it even had it you were supposed to last about 15 minutes see how long you can survive and then how many points you can get there was even an event at the end and

we asked them to evaluate only what they see and then I asked if they would buy it and we were very happy to find out that lots of people were like yeah this is cool you should probably add a little of this or a little of that but otherwise you know it's cool so why this approach you can't hide behind cool features that aren't yet implemented I see this happening all the time you make a prototype and you say ignore this pretend this is there and just keep in mind this crafting system will make all of this stuff more meaningful later how on earth can anyone evaluate that especially because a lot of the times when you playing someone's prototype and they're talking about things that have nothing to do with that 90 percent loop there's no way of really evaluating that stuff you know in the vacuum that you currently exist so it's it's just additional noise that isn't necessary I also think that you can't really trust your friends feedback especially developers the reason for this is I do this all the time I'm playing someone's

prototype or demo and I see something that is like oh wow they should fix that but they're an experienced developer of course they'll fix that I don't need to mention that or it would seem silly if I said you're really gonna change the art right because is this temp is this not I don't want to insult them or anything you know so it I think you have to you have to kind of be as naked as you can and just give them something and say this is what it is you know it doesn't it there's nothing else that I'm kind of hiding behind and it because if you're successful with that more cool features on top of a solid foundation will just make it better assume you don't add features that somehow detract like it's a first-person shooter and you add a kart racing minigame or something to it but if it's a first-person shooter and it's rock solid like destiny was and then you add some sort of progression system that people like it's only going to be better but you have to be really true to yourself and say I evaluated that loop in the beginning and it was

solid and I'm not moving on until it is so the takeaway is to build a prototype that proves whatever the players doing 90% of the time is fun prove this by testing it for what it is not for what you hope it'll become and the fun loop should be fun on its own so again just put it out there don't pretend it's anything that it's not if you need it to be something that it's not wait and get it to that point but don't don't assume that you know your friends are going to give you honest feedback when lots of the the puzzle is missing so next a little bit of a diversion here a quick biology lesson so this is a great white shark everyone can see that's a great white shark here's some cool shark facts they have razor-sharp teeth which is rad they can

detect blood in an impossible amount of water they have had few evolutionary changes I think I heard once that they're like older than trees which is pretty wild and then even their dorsal fins are super scary like sharks are Totally Rad so the summary is every part of the Sharks design makes it better at being a shark look at thing so next this is a pug and here's some stupid pug facts they have trouble breathing they can't give birth without human intervention their eyes can literally pop out of their head I'm not making this up and they were known to wear dumb costumes even in the 16th century at that point like in the Victorian era they were actually further bred to look ridiculous and I apologize to POG Gunners I love dogs but it is a necessary example that in summary pugs are loaded with features that hinder its ability at being a successful dog sorry

guy so what I'm talking about here is lean game design every aspect of Slimer interests original design informed the core gameplay it created a very focused confident game right off the bat and it's cheaper to do that I cannot stress that enough if you are early on in development of your game and you were like us and you're not getting paid for years you shouldn't be working on a crafting system unless your game happens to be about crafting don't just work on the stuff that you think is fun work on the stuff that makes its strong so here's some pub features that we ditched early on in development the world was randomly generated at one point we ditched this because it wasn't creating spaces that made that sort of intimate interplay between slimes fun and and/or happen at all in a lot of cases but it seemed like an answer it seemed like free content and it totally wasn't even though there was procedurally generated vegetation based on ports sinking

to the ground and creating fruits and I could go on but it was like at the end of the day we just simple just will just place the fruit trees on our own though it was a very open world and a vehicle was required and I still I'm wondering why we thought that was a good idea it was like here was an interesting space and then you just have to drive for like five or ten minutes to get to the other interesting space I don't know so there was dozens of unique tar I still think this is a cool idea but it's proven completely unnecessary where when a tar would form it would actually have like elements of the previous tar so if if you're familiar with the game if it was like a phosphor rad tar creation and plus a third one it would be a flying irradiated tar that and at the end of the day we just realized like it's just gonna be noise like all the players gonna care about is like I'm getting killed but I thought it would be really cool to have the player like really have to live with their mistakes you know and

like this is what you made me you know but it was totally unnecessary and then there were even more enemies because why not because you start making creatures and it's fun to make creatures and then you say oh we could just repurpose it in this way and it was a lot of bad ideas so the takeaway here is to make your game of shark every feature informs the core experience and makes it a killing machine cut your crafting systems multiplayer whatever nice to have you you have until the game matures that does not mean that you just cut it completely or you add it as DLC or something we're still in early access and we're adding features that we would have never dreamed about adding or that we cut early on in development but we're we're stable now we can afford to do these things so you know it's it's a marathon not a sprint especially if you're doing early access and so just save that stuff for later so now we'll get into the release and our

first year and the points that I'm going to cover our pre-release strategy the early access planes and how they got thrown out and then how early access actually works yes I have the secret information so pre-release was version o two gave it to friends and family we knew it would leak because we gave it to some internet friends who we really don't know and they were strangers to us and then it was a small file size to the first one I'm probably get this wrong but I think it was like 38 Meg's it was tiny and it allowed people to share via email we found out which is really cool because that's super old-school and then suddenly it was on YouTube we were anticipating that hey maybe it would get on YouTube but then it kind of happened very quickly on us and we had to react quickly so we moved right into green light to utilize that momentum we probably came into green light earlier

than we would have expected like maybe a few weeks but we rushed into it knowing that our thinking anyway that well it's gonna be in green light for a while we have everything that we can show right now there's already people around playing the game this is smart and instead of making a trailer to be as efficient as it possible we actually took a trailer or a let's play from YouTube that I really liked and use that as our trailer on greenlight and I'll get more into this with YouTube later but this was kind of a perfect video for us it was made by a guy named metallics and he did lots of videos on slime rancher but this is really what you want to look for if you're looking to curate YouTube videos it's someone being entertaining and informative and kind of showing your game in a really good light so this is um you know the first 30 seconds or so of that video

hello dissenters same good morning to you welcome to the ranch this is slime rancher it's game due out in 2016 no set release date or price so far as I can tell but I have the opportunity to give you a sneak peek into an in development build of slime rancher and I am really happy to do so much like these pink slimes bouncing around these guys you're not supposed to be out here get back in the vac pack that's what just cut his fourth where it attached to my back like a backpack is the backpack and we gotta take these guys to a safe place because we're charged not just with protecting these little slimes but also ensuring their profitability so that that was our first big video and that's what kind of helped us take off a really important thing to note in this is you know he's just explaining a game and he's being entertaining it's I I know there's a temptation to have your video in front of someone who kind of like screams at a

game and is really funny and has tons of subscribers and will take that too but in a lot of ways that isn't even as useful to us as a video like this who at the time I think he had like hundred and twenty five thousand subscribers or something and the reason for that is I think when you're someone who screams at a game you're playing on YouTube your audience is largely coming to see you scream and see that personality with italics the way he does his videos I could definitely see people wanting to come to that to subscribe to him in order to learn about new games and get his take on it I think there's a huge difference there so our early access plans after we were greenlit were we outlined them and we said small updates big ones will announce and they'll be worth coming back to play and we expect people would walk away in fact we told them to walk away there was some great

advice by a guy from Bioware once that said with your MMO let people walk away - just don't let them quit but give them natural breaks in it because you're never going to have someone stay entertained for like the ten years that you hope running to run this game we said we were a small team updates would take time and this hinged on players understanding development which was our big mistake so then early access reality players complained if updates were too infrequent or too small youtubers who were actively making videos a slime rancher at the time needed a very clear signal as to when to come back and make videos no one is going to come back to your game and make a video about balance changes unless it's a guy who makes you know videos about competitive games and those would have a really huge impact on the game experience you have to give them something meaty we realized that we need a new strategy we actually turn to our MMO development experience both Mike and I worked at three rings say and Sega

on spiral knights and puzzle pirates and so we started looking at well how did we keep players engaged with something like that so the new approach was treating early access development like a running released live game it was no longer in development to us it had shipped the big updates became like content updates in an MMO and it had an effect on sales in YouTube when we promoted this it was a change of messaging and it resulted in changing like waiting for the developers to like get off their asses and release new content into hype for this new update all updates like the one we're coming out with next week are centered around a core piece of content that we can take pictures of and kind of wrap that as like this is the thing you should be excited about not a list of things that include balance changes everything people find out about that in the patch notes we don't care about that in terms of messaging which leads me to my somewhat provocative takeaway that

early access doesn't work or at least not as intended and so let me unpack that this is what you might expect that players are going to join the devs on a magical journey in game development and everything is ok because it's all in development and everyone understands that and they gets the memo that it's in development and things might change and that's normal but the cold reality oops is that players expect regular content updates yesterday and this is important the second point is that if your game is in development in early access to players they will think that anything is still possible so a big feature that they think would make your game great and gets you know talked about a lot on the forums and that that is still a possibility to them even if you tell them otherwise and the reason is it's still in development if you ship

a 1.0 version of your game to Steam doesn't have that early access tag players might say for example that you know multiplayer would make this game a lot better maybe they'll add that in DLC down the road but when it's in development there is a completely different kind of mindset and that is they are along for the journey to make their suggestions and they expect that some of these are going to make it in and also you'd be crazy not to add this in the final game and also it might not be worth the money you're asking for if you don't add this in the final game and that's something that you really have to be aware of so additionally if when you I love this if someone says I understand it's early access but they're about to say something where they don't understand that is there you know the development and everything but you'll see that a ton and then players actually dislike changes however small you've probably seen this in the number of early access games where a new a big new feature was added that kind of fundamentally changed either fundamentally changes the game or

the feature within the game players don't like that and I kind of get it they've already paid money for your game so they expect that it's it's what they paid for and it's not a development journey I'll give you a great example of changes that they don't like this was our this is our pink slime on the left there's something called a puddle slime in the game and we first shipped they were literally a huge shift on the pink slimes it was very obviously temp the new puddle slime much to the chagrin of a lot of players looked like a puddle and it was a new model it had fancy new graphics and everything they're adorable they even blush when there's too many slimes around because they're super shy they're one of my favorites but to this day there are like little petitions to bring back the original puddle slime and it's because at the time those folks paid money and got the the blue smiley slime and they wanted to keep it that way so the takeaway here is that releasing into early access is releasing your game period there is really no

exceptions to this an early access game should be treated like a live game with content updates that drive excitement this means this might mean changing your development style it did for us fortunately we were able to revert to a style that we're really familiar with had we not had that experience I don't know but excitement equals more YouTube videos and more sales we've seen this with every time we've done a major release it happens big spike good tail we're in good shape so speaking of players and their thoughts on the game let's do a quick review roundup because I feel like a lot of the points here are very relevant to early access the positive reviews for slime rancher typically mentioned these four things the slime animations and personality this is where you could really score with your game because the I feel like a lot of actors and video games like the entities that are in there lack personality and a lot of that

is not really a fault of the developer it's that the those actors are centered or usually around the players death so they're they're very focused in what they're doing slimes are totally unfocused in what they do and it allows them to kind of breathe in a space and exhibit behaviors that are really pleasing to look at so it's something to keep in mind I think going back to the wonderful folks at Bungie you know I think everyone remembers the the cast of villains from that game a lot more than other games because of their behaviors like when the grunts would freak out and decide to it was all over and pull out two grenades and you know run at Master Chief like that that was just not only fed into the to the play but it was unexpected it gave those characters and personality as opposed to the million soldiers that you're just shooting from behind cover exploration and discovery based there was a it's all

discovery based learning and players really respond to that and I think you know this is a trend that we're seeing happen in in the game industry in general probably starting with like Dark Souls with people becoming really aware of this where it's like hey you don't need to make you know golden breadcrumbs leading everywhere and it's happy and most games I'm sorry just aren't happy and then also that it's a chill or Zen game people say that a lot and the funny thing about that is we never set out to make that kind of game but I guess you know think about that it for your next game that you know when the pressure is kind of off and then you just have this opportunity to kind of relax in a game space and still be entertained rather than just stopping the killing to to check your inventory or something like that but in slime rancher you could stop and just observe and the slimes are

gonna kind of entertain you and I think that's important now the fun part with negative reviews this is something I'm a little sensitive about but that is a $20 price tag we frequently see folks saying that indie games should be no more than $15 that still exists and again I think games are being released that are kind of pushing that back a little bit but that's something that you're gonna have to kind of live with I don't know if we would have sold or made as much money at 15 versus 20 I think it you know for us it would stand by the $20 price tag because even though a lot of the negative reviews say lack of content the average playtime is 12 hours and for many many players is way above that so you know for me that's pretty good 20 bucks it can't run on their system you're gonna run in this problem all the time this is not really new but it's worth pointing out we get so many Chromebooks that are trying to play slime rancher

and you know it's with specifically with slime rancher it's that it has colorful graphics we will get support responses that say but it's cartoony I thought you don't need a good card to run a cartoony game ok so the last thing is that there's no multiplayer and pretty much every game in existence that doesn't have multiplayer probably gets this as a complaint and so you know we're thinking about it but we're not sure it's possible one more thing is your negative reviews are gonna stick around from early access so if you have an early access game and you're missing a giant feature that is core to the experience don't release your game yet because all those negative reviews that say all it is is crafting right now and they haven't added the exploration element of the game are gonna stick around and the ones that everyone agrees to are super helpful though that is going to sit there at the top of the heap forever so you have to live with that you have you should ship your early access game in a

state where it's gonna feel like the final product largely it doesn't mean it's content complete but it shouldn't be a racing game missing its wheels so to speak like you gotta make sure that the you know at least for me I want these reviews to be to reflect the kind of game that I think I made not the one that I'm promising to people so next we're gonna get into YouTube because that was a huge aspect of our success we're gonna talk about some ranchers used to success why it works on YouTube what else works on YouTube and as you know streaming in YouTube plus the Internet is free marketing probably everyone is saying that and you just have to be comfortable with people making really weird faces while they play your game it's the strangest sort of ambassador for this thing that you did that I've ever seen but you just got to get used to it slime rancher on YouTube it's a big hit on YouTube we get over a million views a week and when we do big releases we'll get a lot more than that

YouTube is our de-facto marketing we generally we don't go to shows we don't have a PR person or anything like that we completely leverage YouTube we do have some twitch presence but it's very bursty YouTube works way better for us because we can get video series and things like that and we don't buy YouTube coverage I know you could do that and I've had people ask me about that I don't know really a lot about that III guess if someone else is paying for it you should do it like if you have a publisher who wants to buy YouTube coverage go for it but I think it you know if you're on your own and especially money is tight like it was with us like just you know have it naturally go up the chain like I'll explain in a minute here this is why I think slime Rancher works on YouTube signs have charisma they're fun to watch the action happens towards the camera this is super important that when someone is watching the game the game is kind of watching them back and and I

think that contributes to it being fun it's discovery based learning the audience observations feel rewarding so much is happening on the screen a lot of times the audience might see something that the player didn't or the host of the let's play didn't and there's lots of unpredictable events that keep it fresh and customization features that make videos unique that's really important because it will make someone seek out other videos of your game versus happen to watch other subscribers that they are subscribed to that happened to be playing your game so if if I follow these two youtubers and they're both doing a series on slime rancher I'll probably watch both because I like both of them and I want to see how they interpret the game but if there's customization and I get a clue from watching the video or anything that makes another video possibly unique I might find another youtuber that is showing off slime Rancher want to find out how they did their thing so how this

could apply to your game is what else works on YouTube I think games that allow you to start projects are super valuable because that creates a video series many videos are better than one especially because at some point the viewer gets invested they want to finish it so if your game has something where the youtuber is saying so this is day three of us building our lava fortress and as you can see we're blah blah blah blah blah you know that that really works because that's going to take time and it's gonna be slow and it's gonna get you a lot of coverage games that leave the audience with a question to answer you know detective stories are like the greatest stories ever because there's always that question so survival and exploring the unknown it's no surprise that survival games are big because there's this open question of will this guy survive it seems super basic but it's true versus anything that kind of has a foregone conclusion to it anything that prompts interaction with the audience if you ever here let me know in the comments what I should do next that's awesome

because they're going to be checking what players are saying about the game and generally speaking they're always positive on it because they like this person to begin with and so they're happy that they're playing this new game they're saying oh my goodness go farm phosphorus lines or something like that so it gets them prompted to do another video and then games that leave the audience with something to try on their own so this is where like uncharted doesn't really work if it's just a linear experience there's really no reason for me to you know go out and buy the game on my own you want there to be a reason for me to run out and try it myself so some additional YouTube thoughts I wouldn't consider developing a game that isn't YouTube friendly period make it easy for people to request keys using key mailer promoter app distribute those are all really great the best thing about those is they confirm identity you're gonna get a lot of people trying to scam you out of your game and really don't sweat that early on give it away for free early on steam keys are free so just you

know give it give it out until you can get some momentum and then be more selective we basically just have a subscriber limit at any given time which would guarantee that person a key or not and then games will move up the YouTube food chain we totally see this so the people at the very top of the heap on YouTube are are subscribed to the people that are just below them and so on and so on and so on so as long as you can kind of get a snowball effect started it's going to naturally move up the chain assuming your game is good and fun to watch and it's you know getting getting lots of views so you don't have to worry about like oh my goodness I got to get PewDiePie like on day one or something like that we we got our biggest feat like when we had markiplier and jacksepticeye and all those people doing videos we never talked to him we just assumed that it you know a trickle DUP and then I went and dug through all the videos and indeed it was like the the tear before the tear before separated by like a week

you know everyone's catching up on each other's content they go they find the video they make their their videos on their own and also videos get about 10% views to subs in about three days time so use that as basically your impression value for when you're determining whether or not it's worth it to give your twenty dollar game away to someone you know it's about 10% so the takeaway is YouTube and streaming is the best way to market your game being YouTube friendly will give your game a much higher chance of success this seems super obvious but as I just detailed there is kind of a little bit smarter way of approaching this and your game has to be kind of a good fit for it anyway if it is a you know a puzzle game that takes place just on a single screen you have a much harder battle than someone who has something that is you know scaring the the youtuber or something and hopefully none of this seems too crass it's just the reality right now it is you know if this were 15

years ago maybe I'd be talking about best way to get a commercial deal through your publisher or something but this is way easier and way cheaper so should do that anyway in summary be better than anyone don't be limited by your constraints embrace them pep talk kind of stuff don't compete with established games and genres especially as an indie I feel like that's suicide and then invent your own Calvin ball and Calvin ball does not have to be Katamari Calvin ball can be rocket League which is just replace the people with cars I mean like that's perfect because we know how to drive we know you know soccer it just works so that's a great example of that prototype for success Simon sure focused entirely on that 90% loop early on we tested it as a complete game and it allows us to be very confident early on in our design that is super important going back again to two years of sitting in an apartment no one's paying you to be as confident as we were that we really had something is

meaningful one because it actually gives you the energy to just keep going day and in and day out and two because it felt like you know we were actually building towards something as opposed to like we're just living in the unknown every day that would be terrifying so avoid doing that as much as you can next to make your game of shark shark features inform the core design bug features are nice to have but not essential and bloat your game nothing against pugs add pug features later it's fine just don't do that in the beginning shark design is more focused and cheaper to develop because you're only adding these sort of lean mean things that feed directly into your core design ensuring that the player is going to be experiencing it regularly and you're going to get great feedback on that don't add stuff that like they're going to be doing ten percent of the time so next is early access as a live game players expect regular content updates

build updates around exciting stuff and generate hype I know sometimes we want to be quiet especially when you're developing a game but you've you're selling a game like don't fool yourself you've sold a game it's up to you now to effectively market it and your marketing your development so make a big deal out of all the hard work that you're putting in you know build up to a monthly release and then go for broke with it you know just keep trumpeting your achievements this may require restructuring how you would otherwise develop your game YouTube and twitch there are qualities and game designs that are YouTube friendly there are some that are not and for those folks you just have a harder battle because you know a lot of attention is driven by YouTube these days audiences want to feel engaged not just a spectator and make it easy to request keys but just give them a way to start can't stress this enough see a lot of developers on Twitter that are complaining about their game that not a lot of people know about how they fooled another scammer like

what are you doing that scammer has a friendslist give him a steam key there's a viral mechanism in steam and on Xbox and that's what it's there for the only way that that isn't gonna happen is if they sold it and it got lost or something or I don't know what but either way it's a steam key it gets activated on Steam and unless it's getting activated on a dummy account to be sold later or something you're fine they have friends who will see that they're playing that they're gonna look at the store page and you're probably gonna get a sale out of it once you're established don't just give it away because then there's like you know the word gets out and no one's gonna want to buy your game because the developers just give it away for free but absolutely do not be skittish about giving that game away and if it's a head of steam if you're not on Steam yet make it small enough and just available for download somewhere give it away even sometimes like we did we had this little bit of a kind of error of secrecy around because we hadn't really announced it yet and that really I think helped generate hype between the people that were trading it they were like what the hell is this game what is this game is a

very potent question so use that to your advantage when you're unknown that's it thank you very much I'll do some Q&A now it seems I have a little extra time too so because I finished a little early I'm gonna show a trailer for our next update that's coming out next week so just brace yourself [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

[Music] thank you very much um so if anyone has any questions just go ahead and line up you know hi hey so you had some really good sort of warning critique on early access knowing kind of what you know now would you do early access again is there some positives to it or would you just go straight to like a full launch so would we do early access again right now in the position that we're in I would probably say no only because we can but at the time early access was absolutely the thing that allowed us to do what we did you know we're on year three and change of Slimer entry development so two years

into it when we first released it we really needed to do that getting those initial sales absolutely helped so I I'm not trying to demonize early access in any way but if we could and just come out with something and say this is us this is our new thing I would probably do that that said I'm used to developing games over a long period of time so if we didn't do early access we would probably still ship something that is smaller than it would be in two years perhaps considerably smaller than it would be in two years and that really is just the reality of game development these days I mean name name a single game that isn't you know maybe a really small indie game or something that doesn't have content later on it's just that that's that's I think just what players expect these days you know Oh season pass it's miserable but why doesn't this game have a season pass what is a dead-on-arrival like you know it's they wanted both ways so yeah hi I wanted to ask so with

putting out like large chunks instead of like small bits and breadcrumbs along the way is there a fear ever of the risk behind like this could not work or how is that may be handled preemptively well going back to to what I was saying earlier like we just know the game is fun at this point so you know our reviews tend to say that so were when we add new stuff as long as it's in that sort of same wheelhouse as what we've already done were much more confident about that our slime science update which was completely unlike anything that we had done up to that point we were super nervous about that we were like this you know there there people are gonna see this and go this isn't the game that I bought like what would there's like crafting now and everything you know it's not for me that wasn't the case but we very deliberately hid that you know depending on on your

play time several hours into the experience we at this point kind of don't touch our first hour of the game there might be a few additional things down the road but we feel like the first hour works and so we're just backing away quietly and all other things are going to come later so we but we do rigorously test it and as I said in my emergent storytelling talk we just kind of dial everything back from broken so we know at the very least like whatever we're releasing is kind of firing on all cylinders and you know people seem to like that so this one in particular the quantum slimes are like generating other realities of themselves at all times and if they get agitated enough they will decide that that reality is more favorable than their current reality and dismiss the other realities and join with I mean it's a nightmare and it might it might be the end of us but it's gonna be a lot of fun to find that out and so far in testing it's it's it's okay but it's really close to that so

we'll learn but that's that's why we're in early access so awesome man thank you thank you great talk and you mentioned the performing toward the camera towards so as you watch and what could you tell me a little bit about how you did it that so that when the player watch and played and play the game they actually really perform it or the camera right yeah so explain more about how we developed this hole towards the camera kind of gameplay it was a backpack as a vacuum so to begin with things are gonna be coming at the camera but there was a key moment early on in development where initially when slimes and other things would back towards the the camera they just did in the state that they happen to be in at the time and we made one little change which said when you start vacuum a slime in you know a frame or two they snap and face the camera and go whoa you know when they do like I wasn't expecting that and that made the thing

that a player is doing you know fifty times every couple of minutes like way more intimate and it it showed that the slimes like weren't really afraid of you they were surprised but it I think eyes towards the screen especially in a first-person game is is really key and in most games you just don't get that because you're you know you're taking someone out from a distance or you know you're engaged in combat and so you're not necessarily looking at that and they have no real reason to interact with you on that level but we you know the tabby slimes Boop the the the nose of the player we just thought that was silly but it also informs like the game design and that it's potentially a hazard if the tabby happens to be spiky because it merged with a rock slime so it's all of those things that are just saying like the plot this is the players eyes and we want to do as much stuff as possible in

order to make that fun and also things that are happening without the player you know acting on something like the Boop I you know that kind of takes people by surprise and it's because they weren't seeking it out but it's a harmless interaction so the more stuff like that that you can do I think the better thank you mhm okay so I was wondering um slime rancher is actually one of the few games on Steam I've played that was kid-friendly and I know a few companies have been like kind of battling the YouTube content because it was like had a lot of swearing and a lot of mature content do you think that hurts slime renters image at all those I I don't think so because I I mean I think it's up to parents to make sure that they're not watching so I'm sorry the question was do do we think like youtubers who are swearing through a slime rancher Let's Plays it hurts our image you really have no control over that so I think it's up to parents to make sure that they're not

watching a youtuber that is known for that but you know I still think that half of the reason someone shows up for YouTube to watch a let's play is tends to be for that person at the it's probably more than half so we're kind of fine to let them swear through it I mean there's times I swear at slime ranchers so I think that's acceptable but you know guys like italics who keep it clean and stay informative I think maybe that's more more for kids but we don't think it's hurt the image because I don't think a lot of times those demographics cross over too much anyway so kids that are watching kid-friendly content on YouTube probably you know aren't aren't even being exposed to that and at the end of the day it's there's there's a talking head it's not usually coming from nowhere so it's not like they would think that the developers have added this to the game they're seeing someone's head screaming you know at this game and I'm sure there's no shortage of YouTube videos where someone's you know just wearing it like

a Disney movie or something as they watch it you know something like that so it's not a problem thank you awesome talk pretty simple question why not Kickstarter Oh honestly I kind of felt like it was on the way out and we were we were confident enough in our game that we thought you know if we can get this thing on greenlight and start selling it we're good but we did think about Kickstarter and I I think what we and we learned that early access is almost no difference but I really didn't want to be beholden to a group of backers who were going to be expecting things for them like I know everyone does it differently but like backer updates and everything where you're speaking to only these people that really that I've backed you like I mean I want a much much bigger you know megaphone to speak from so it made sense to just like get the thing on

Steam and let's see what happens and also to be totally honest we just didn't need the money you know we we weren't eating ramen or anything we really wanted to get paid because it had been a couple of years but but it wasn't it wasn't dire straits and so it was fine yeah awesome thanks mhm hi if early access is released now then what is released where's that line for you now released it's basically just 1.0 and we always think of it I'm sure everyone does it differently but we always think of it as 1.0 is the 1.0 version of slime rancher that is in a box on the shelf at Target that someone buys in a vacuum and never connects to the internet or reads anything about the game that they have $20 well spent that's that's it's a complete experience doesn't mean that we're not going to add a ton of stuff later we most definitely will you know there's a lot of stuff that we want to do with it pending continued interest but 1.0 for

us is just if this were in a box does someone feel good about you know having purchased it so yeah hey a question related to the same topic is you mentioned the reviews for your early versions there negative there were some issues it's not the same game you're gonna end up releasing and it is hurting you is there a way to remove those reviews and when it goes to GA or or is that not allowed because that way it's an it's almost like a new game when it's right right so is there a way to remove bad early access reviews and I'm my understanding is there is not other than they will be flagged as early access and I don't know how people feel about steams recent review versus you know total average review I don't know how they perceive that but I'm sure if one of those is mixed then the game is mixed so an early access review that is bad that happens to a review that is bad that happens to say early access I think anyone is just going to read that as a

bad review because it's it's blood in the water right it's like at one point this game was bad even if it isn't now so you know I get skittish already right like well what did they do that all of a sudden made it better you know so it's not fair but I would perceive it Thanks yeah all right well looks like that's my time if anyone has any additional questions I'll be around thank you very much I really appreciate it [Applause]