The 2016 Failure Workshop

All right, let's fire this up. More room for my notes. The notes. Hello. Hello everybody. We're going to get started now. So, those of you who are wandering in, wander quickly and sit quietly and everybody else, let's rock and roll. In the tradition of the failure workshop, we have had some failures in room scheduling and AV. So, we're all set already. And a failure in making a two obvious joke. Okay. Um so, failure workshop is a session that I really love and so I sort of we resurrected it last year after it had been gone for a couple of years. And um the the the brief is basically that in our industry and particularly at conferences where people are worried about uh appearing competent, uh we don't want to discuss our failures. But, I actually find that when you're discussing failures with people is when you really get to the good meaty delicious parts of what will actually inform your design practice and make you better at things. And we're weird, you

know, we don't want people to know that we have failed. We want to cover up these failures and uh collectively if we can all agree to sort of uh hold hands and and all fail together and we can think about those failures, I think we can agree that we're all going to be better developers for it and happier people if we don't have to be hiding our failures all the time. Um which really sucks. It's It's kind of how it is. Um was there anything else I wanted to say about It's the It's sort of a therapy workshop. Yeah, totally. Um Yeah, and so that's the impetus behind having this workshop. So, in fact, we had uh multiple cancellations this year. Uh and I think that speaks to how hard the our industry has gotten this year relative to years past. And I think that in particular this workshop is more important this year in than in years when things are going extremely well. And we have a a panel about the so-called indie apocalypse, which you know, whatever. We'll we'll talk

more about that later, but I do I do think that the fact that people were canceling out of the failure workshop not wanting to share their failures is a symptom of the fact that things have getting tougher and tighter and it makes this type of gathering of all you beautiful people getting together and thinking about these kinds of things all the more important. So, today we have three failure workshop speakers. We have Paul from Mode 7 Games who made a game called Frozen Cortex. He's going to talk about Jaime is going to talk about Earth Primer Primer. You're not going to talk about it. You just You don't know what I'm going to talk about. I don't know what I'm going to I It was a last-minute fill-in, so we're not really sure what Jaime's going to talk about. Hopefully, he doesn't fail too hard. Um And Joe is going to talk about the sophomore slump phenomenon relative to his successful I'm going to call it successful game Tower of Guns. I'm sorry. He's going to go first. Let's give it up for Joe. Um hello everybody. I'm Joe Mirabello and I made a game called Tower of Guns.

Uh quick background, Tower of Guns was a rogue-lite first-person shooter that I released about 2 years ago. I've been working as a tech artist for a large studio that went out of business before that. Um And instead of moving on to a new company when that company went out of business, instead of moving to another game dev, I decided I would go ahead and try and do my own thing. So, I took a couple of months and make this kind of as a learning project. I hoped that it would sell a couple thousand copies and it went on instead to sell a couple hundred thousand copies. Um it was not a runaway super blockbuster kind of hit, but it did pretty well for a small indie project. Um And I expected the project to be kind of a small sabbatical from AAA and I kind of expected to go back into the AAA industry afterwards and instead this became the beginning of of a new career path. Um Now, I had heard about post-release blues a lot. I understood it as a very common depression that happens after developers ship a project, but I never really gave it much thought. I'd shipped a couple of games before prior in my career back when I worked for larger companies, and I didn't think

that this post-release blues would really affect me. I was under the impression that post-release blues were for people who identified too much with their pet projects, and so that when they released them, they kind of felt this suddenly hollow feeling from releasing their project basically to a very cruel and critical world. That wasn't That was kind of how it, but that wasn't how post-release blues manifested itself for me at all. I had no problem getting Tower of Guns out the door. But then I was faced with this. When it came time to start on my second project, I felt a sudden vacuum of purposelessness, and I didn't know what to move on to. Here's the thing, I had no shortage of ideas. I had ideas coming out of my ears, too many ideas. My wife was making fun of me cuz she was like, "You're not going to know what to move on to next cuz you want to move on to too many things." Uh but then instead when I actually was faced with the like opportunity to move on to something new and exciting, all of those ideas felt like flat. They all kind of just didn't feel exciting anymore. Um so I did what a lot of developers do, I think, and I retreated back into

supporting my game. I put out a lot of patches, I put out updates, I helped out with ports, I focused on promoting the game. This led to the game having a lot more legs than I think it would otherwise have had. It made its way into a PS Plus deal, into a major Humble Bundle. That focus probably helped make the game stronger, but it was still me avoiding the hard problem, and that hard problem was project two. Um I knew I wanted to work on something that wasn't like Tower of Guns, and I knew that I also wanted to make something quick, and I knew that sometimes you just need to start something. So I did what a lot of indies do, and that's I made a little puzzle platformer. The concept was that the entire level is broken up into like slot machine style reels, and you could spin each section and come up with the best solution on how to progress. Um it created some interesting puzzles requiring the player to essentially mentally traverse a maze backwards, Um, then they had to remember how to go forward by realigning the pieces as they played. Um, after completing the prototype, I looked back and kind of realized the design wasn't all that solid. Uh, people solved the puzzles more out of trial and error.

Um, they couldn't really get a forward read on the puzzles. But I was okay with that realization because that's why you prototype. Uh, so you could get a sense of what works and what doesn't. Uh, and I never intended this to be anything other than like a little filler project while I was kind of thinking about what my real project two was going to be. Uh, in the meantime I developed a few more mental goals. Um, for example, I had a lot of new tech I wanted to catch up on. It had been years since I had, uh, really been on the cutting edge of game art and a lot had happened in the meantime. Back when I worked in triple A, I was an environment artist and tech artist and um, and while working on Tower of Guns, um, I really like that the art in Tower of Guns was really really really rushed and I feel like the entire game dev cycle of that was, uh, had more in common with game jams than with my work in triple A. And so I really wanted to make something that felt like it looked better than Tower of Guns. Um, however, being a former full-time artist, I knew that art could come later. I knew that I didn't need to focus on it yet. Um, I hit a couple of spots where I dove into art polish too soon on the subsequent prototypes that I'll

show, but usually, um, I was pretty good at keeping things to programmer art. And that's important. I'll get more into that a little bit later. Um, so my next prototype was this little game that I called Design My Kitchen. Uh, you had to plan out a kitchen layout, um, in order to maximize counter space, floor space, and storage space and you were kind of given point requirements for each room and you, uh, you had like a budget of of how much you could spend and uh, how much uh, each piece cost and how many pieces you could use. Um, and the idea was that you had to balance certain requirements for rules, certain kinds of, uh, multipliers against each other in order to meet the requirements. Uh, I was actually having my kitchen redone at this point and so it was inspiring. Like that gave me the idea. I was like, you know what? I'm like kind of planning out my own game. Maybe that would make a good game." I was feeling very inspired. Uh and it was kind of a cool idea for a prototype, I guess. I had a couple ideas on where to take it, but I realized that I was having more fun building the prototype than actually designing the puzzles. Um and that was a huge red flag for me. Um the puzzles weren't fun to design. If the puzzles weren't fun to design, then they wouldn't be fun to play. That was

at least my personal uh opinion about design. Um this prototype went on for a couple of weeks, and during that time my actual kitchen remodeling in real life went from new and exciting to holy cow, why can't this be finished? And suddenly it didn't seem so fun to be thinking about kitchens all the time. Uh by now a few months had gone on since Tower of Guns release, and fans were beginning to ask me about what I was working on next. Uh and I realized uh that people were watching me now, and I began to get nervous about whether or not I would have something they would like. I mean, would Tower of Guns fans like a game about building kitchens? Um would anybody like a game about building kitchens? Uh so I added a few more mental goals to my list. Uh starting to feel a lot of pressure to develop something, and I was having trouble getting my feet moving on anything. I was starting to have trouble sleeping at night at this point. Um this right here is a turn-based, grid-based, first-person shooter because for some reason I thought that would be a good idea. Uh this is a first-person game where you are blind and you can only see things

when you bump into them. Uh the less time we spend on that slide the better. Uh this is a landscaping RTS called Bunnyscaping where you had to save your flowers from being eaten by bunnies or else they would procreate. Um that was more fun when you lost. So by now months had passed since Tower of Guns release, and I began to panic. Uh I had nothing worth showing for my time. Uh I couldn't stick with any plan long enough to validate whether or not it was good or bad. I just kept ping-ponging between projects. Uh I was sleeping terribly, I was feeling sick often, and I was basically in a full-on sophomore slump at this point. Um this is a little first-person shooter prototype where I got caught up in playing with the art technique and kind of lost interest in it. Um, I don't even remember what this was. Uh, I don't remember what this one is either. Uh, like I was building I was building tons of these things, dozens of them. And I began questioning myself as a developer. Uh, I mean, as a former AAA dev and as an indie who had made a game that had been played by thousands of

people at this point, I was supposed to know what I was doing. Uh, and I knew that I had learned so much and I was still floundering anyway. Um, and then a new goal was added to my list. Uh, my wife was pregnant and I was going to be a father and for some reason that created this this firm line in my mind. I knew that things wouldn't be the same after that. Um, I couldn't afford to be stupid with my time after she was born. So, I sunk my teeth into the prototype that I happened to be working on at that time and said, "This is it. I'm building this, no turning back." And that prototype was called Fulfillment Center. Um, the basic idea is that I was inspired by reading about the automation of Amazon's warehouse fulfillment centers. There were these little Roomba Roomba uh, delivery bots that they had made uh, that it's pretty cool stuff, but in this prototype you basically played a more humanoid robot living in a not-so-distant future warehouse uh, running around fulfilling purchase orders for customers um, that you never see. And along the way you struggle to meet your weekly quotas, you customize the warehouse um, and your little like prison cell style room to your liking as you progress. You make

friends with the other robots around. Um, basically there was no action, there was no puzzles, there was just narrative. Um, but like I said, I needed to dig my teeth into something. Uh, I showed my wife and she told me to show the game to other devs and see what they thought. I told her I would have a prototype to uh, a prototype that would be ready to show within a week. Um, so I built a system to manage inventory, an auditing system, a stat tracker. I made this fun little PDA to tell you when you had uh, what missions you had um, and how much time you had to complete them. Uh, I made the warehouse expand over time or with game's length. Now, experienced developers will know where this is going. I told my wife I'd be ready to show this prototype off within a month. I built a working dialogue system with branching paths that were ready to be localized. I built a quest tracking system. I built a fully realized save state system with quest tokens and states and I was reading every single book I could find on Amazon and Walmart and and warehousing software and I was going to be ready to show this to people within two months.

I made a shop system where you could unlock items. I made it so those items affected gameplay. I made it so that your relationship with your co-workers were tracked and everything was going to be ready to show other people within three months for sure. So, to make a painful story short, I was getting caught up in the details. I was making things that didn't help support the core question and was hoping the details would save the project. And I knew all this stuff. This all stuff was like game dev 101. And while I was doing it, I knew I was doing it. I still did it even though I knew I was doing it. I mean, I'm a fairly young designer when it comes to the dying side of things, but I mean I've been in games for 10 years now working as an artist and I know that it's important to test core hooks and I know how important it is to not get caught up in the details and I know how crucial it is to show others the idea early on. And I knew this project had issues. But I still couldn't help myself. I couldn't look my wife in the eye or myself in the mirror and say that I need to scrap another project because it was indulgent or heavy-handed or boring or had bad gameplay or whatever excuse I

had in my mind that made this project unfinishable. Because that's the thing, that not all these ideas were terrible. Some of these ideas actually had some interesting things behind them. Some of them some of the prototypes actually did a great job of proving that there was something there I could explore. But my confidence was shattered at this point and whatever compelling elements some of these prototypes had, none of them were enough to keep me moving forward. So, back to Performance Center real quick. One week stretched into one month and then into two months, and then it's three, and the further that tailspin went, the harder it was for me to show people. When I finally did show a handful of friends, um the uh the the actual demo, it kind of confirmed my fears. Um I'm not someone who believes that every game needs to be fun, but I do think that every game needs to have something compelling, and this particular prototype didn't have anything compelling. Uh at least in its current manifestation. Uh looking at this screenshot, um the thing that I'm most proud of in this pro this particular prototype was that was what's not there. Um for all the time I spent on systems and tools, at least I didn't spend any time on the art. I was confident enough in my

art abilities, um that I didn't need to concern myself with that yet. Um now, why couldn't I do the same thing with the design or the code, um and catch myself earlier? And it's because I made Tower Guns, because this was not my first project. Uh this is project two, um and I didn't feel like I could show anyone anything that was any worse than what I'd already shown. Um there were expectations now from others, but mostly from myself, uh and um I wanted to show the world that I've improved as a developer, and that meant showing nothing until I was satisfied. Um this would be very difficult to talk about if it if I was still in the thick of it. Um I've been pretty candid because this is in the past now, uh but rebuilding my own confidence has been pretty slow. Um I put my daughter was born a few months back, and wouldn't you know it, the world didn't end. Uh I'm still able to make games, uh and now I have a little buddy to help me. Uh additionally, after this shortly after this prototyping train wreck, uh a second project finally did stick. Uh and

I can't say it's a much better fit for me, but I can't really say too much about it. I'm actually contractually not allowed to talk about it any more than that. But, I can say that most importantly, I actually have partners now. Um for the first time in years, first time in four years, I have co-workers. Uh and that's already creating an ecosystem of shared confidence. Um and I think that's crucial for combating some of the problems that I was facing here. I mean, everyone goes through confidence ups and flows. Um and teammates by their simple presence uh basically offer daily validation for what you guys are building together. Um a few more positive things that I should uh end with. Um First, if this is going to happen, uh it's good to have it happen to a solo dev with an existing revenue stream. I mean, I had a really ridiculously low burn rate. My only real loss was a few months of my own time and my pride. Uh both of those are not the worst of casualties. Um I also came out of this process learning a few things. I think it's I've heard that it's bad business to chalk up any failure as a learning experience, but I don't believe that. I believe that there is value to improve technical expertise

uh and to increase tool comfort and to an improved instinct about what makes good prototypes. Uh and most importantly, I think uh I've learned to trust myself a little bit more. Um that's the hardest part about being a designer for me. Um I trusted myself as an artist. I knew that I could make something look decent later on once I found a road to commit to. Um why didn't I have the ability to trust my own design sense that same way? Why couldn't I avoid fussing over details? Why couldn't I listen to my instincts and redirect the project when I knew it wasn't going to go the way I wanted it to? I didn't trust myself early enough to show uh I didn't trust myself enough to show the work early to others, and I didn't trust myself to recover from failure when it happens. Um failure happens sooner or later to everybody uh multiple times it happens, and when it happens, I think that in the future I'm a little better to uh equipped to deal with it. Uh and that's because I'm starting to see failure as a road to improvement. Uh this goes back to something a friend uh a badass artist once told me. Uh he said that the difference between a master artist and a student is only about 10

ft. That's just a 10-ft tall stack of paper with a terrible drawing on each one. And I feel like in this last year I churned through a big chunk of that 10 ft. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Keep the root of the sacred HDMI. No whammies, no whammies. Yes. Well, hello everyone. Can you hear me okay? If I talk No. Okay. That's Do I have to Is this mic on? No. Give it 1 second. Yeah. Correct. I mean, I can shout like this if you prefer. Woo. Okay. I think we have We might have a little mic action now, too. I'm going to I'm going to project uh project failure

across the room. Uh my name's Paul Kilduff Taylor um from a company called Mode 7 Games. Some of you may have known me before when my name was Paul Taylor, but when I got married, I decided that what I needed was a name that nobody could either pronounce or spell. Um so, with that in mind, here are some of my favorite uh misspellings of my name. Uh this one, Paul Kill Dof, quite good, quite creative. Kill Boss, uh not even the correct letters in that one. Kid Off, I like this one. It sounds a little bit like someone bouncing a basketball off the head of a child. Kill Dof Taylor, uh a good one. The interesting thing about this one is that it's normally the first part of my name that people get wrong. Taylor's quite common name, so uh more points for creativity. And finally, my favorite one, this is quite a big conference. I don't know if you can see that. Paul Kill Dof Jones. Uh we don't really need to say anything about that. Oh, wow. Thank you. Oh, that's much more comfortable. Ah, lovely. Good.

It's great. Uh yeah, so my talk is about conceptual failure. Um and what I mean by that is uh the kind of the idea of a game concept is something that combines uh the kind of core fantasy of the game with the aesthetic, with the mechanics. And when that goes wrong, it can go very, very wrong indeed, because it's the kind of strange alchemy of those things that makes people enjoy games in the first place. So, it doesn't matter what you do on top of that. If you've had a conceptual failure, you're going to be fighting against that for your entire dev cycle, and you're certainly going to be fighting against it when it comes to PR and marketing. Um so, yeah, just a quick bit about us. We're Mode 7. We've been making indie games for 10 years. Um there's four of us. We're based in Oxford in the UK. And uh if you've heard of us before, it will be for this uh game called Frozen Synapse, which is a simultaneous turn-based tactical game. Uh you basically make a plan for the next 5 seconds of gameplay. Your opponent does exactly the same thing. And the plans play out together at the same time.

Um yeah, so this game did pretty well. Uh came out in 2011 and kind of made our name as a studio. And one of the great things about it was that it was kind of a very immediate game. Uh when you look at what it looks like, you can kind of imagine the sort of gameplay that you're going to be enjoying as you play the game. You're going to be making these plans in quite a detailed environment. Had procedurally generated levels as well. You can tell that because they're all squares and rectangles. Um and uh that was sort of a really interesting project to work on and something that we found that resonated really well with other people. So, when it came time to uh to make our next game, what we wanted to do was take the core of Frozen Synapse and then add something to it, change the aesthetic, um basically kind of frame it in a way that we thought would make it a bit more accessible. Um so, the idea for the game was uh Frozen Endzone, which was going to be uh based on a game that we really loved called Chaos League. Now, Chaos League was the first adaptation of the Blood

Bowl franchise originally, and then the developers, I believe, uh lost the license some way midway through the process, but they released their own game. So, this is a kind of fantastical sports game with with orcs and elves and all that kind of thing going on. It had a really good simultaneous turn-based mode. So, just as Laser Squad Nemesis had inspired Frozen Synapse, uh Chaos League kind of really underpinned what we wanted to do with Frozen Endzone. But, we didn't really like the kind of fantasy aesthetics, so we thought we'd go for an aesthetic that we hadn't seen for a while, which is this kind of future sports thing. This is a game called Hyperblade, which we always thought looked really good. Um and of course, the classic of the genre is Speedball 2, really popular game. And we felt that kind of bringing back this type of futuristic aesthetic, we always preferred sci-fi, and then coupling it with this sort of futuristic sports idea would be something that nobody really seen before, and certainly hadn't been done for a while. Um so, what I'm going to do now is uh I'm going to show you one of the uh one of the early trailers for uh for Frozen Endzone, if I can actually get to my

desktop in the spirit of failure. Uh there we go. Right, let's have a have a quick look at this. I'm not going to show you all of this, but this was how we announced the game. So, people had known us for a kind of very pared-down aesthetic, so we opened up on this big shot of a of a stadium. We thought we'd people would go, "Well, what the hell's this? It's something completely different." Uh have to remind people who you are, which is another thing uh which is difficult if you've had a sort of singular indie game that's done quite well. People don't know you as a developer, they kind of just know your game. Um and then we started showing this. So, in this you can see we had randomly generated pitches. We had these players running around. And we had a system where it would take your plan and then interpret everything into these kind of quite elaborate animations with really nice art. We had some really great artists working on this game, really great animators as well. And here is the section of the trailer where we are showing you kind of what the gameplay is. And And this is very critical. I'm going to come back to this again later on. So, the idea of it being your decision and showing the planning here, and then we show that plan interpreted

into these cool animations. And we thought that was the fantasy of the game. We thought it was going to be something where if you looked at your plan being translated into these amazing animations, it would be kind of something that really excited people and really interested them. So, there we go. That's enough of that. However, the response to this was not ideal. Now, these are some of the more polite comments that we received. I'm going to read some of them. Is this Is this from the same people as Frozen Synapse? At least that is one soundtrack episode you sold for me. People always like, "Oh, soundtracks are irrespective of how terrible our games are." I'm not that sold about the game seeing as I'm not that big a football fan. It's mainly about tactics, sure, but it's still about hand egg. Now, this is This is the first time I learned the unfortunate term hand egg. It was a word that I was going to see a lot over the course of the four years that we spent working on this game. Now, this really indicated to me that the one thing we got critically wrong with the game was that people thought it was a sports game. Now, sports games are obviously, as you all know, generally

action recreations of existing sports. They thought it was an American football game or a football game if you're American. Um And that's not what we wanted. We wanted people to see it as a tactical game. This was just the fluff around the kind of nice gameplay. It was there to make the gameplay feel exciting. Suddenly, we were kind of caught in this world of people who hated sports. Generally, people who like very, very hardcore tactical games are not big fans of mainstream sports. And this was something that we learned. So, we tried a few things to get us out of this. We changed the name of the game to Frozen Cortex, which is a much better name and people couldn't make a funny um funny nickname out of it as they did with friend zone from the original title. I can't believe I said that word in public. Good. So, we also changed a few things. We changed how the ball looks. We changed how the goals looked to make them look less like football goals. We started doing promotional stuff like this, which shows the game much more as a kind of nerdy tactical game with lots

of lines and things and there's a character talking up there. Uh we also shifted to much more fantastical settings. We put out lots of screenshots like this with big particle effects and explosions and stuff trying to say like, "Yes, this is a sports aesthetic game, but there's a lot more going on than that." Um and yeah, sort of shots of our stadiums like this is kind of you know, you wouldn't look at this and necessarily think that's a that's a traditional football stadium. Um so yeah, this was the the kind of the core of the conceptual problem. Um now this is a box. It's a box for two games, Strike Commander and Wing Commander: Privateer. And it was the most exciting box I'd ever seen in my life uh when I was about 11. Um and the reason was that it was so conceptually exciting to me that I was a Wing Commander fan and then there were these other things that were like Wing Commander and that was so exciting. And on the back of the box, it really kind of goes into detail about the promise uh that you get from these games. And it has this phrase, "Be what you want to be." And thinking back to all the games

that I really really liked uh and what we'd done with Frozen End Zone, we had this problem where there wasn't a kind of core fantasy at the heart of it. Nobody really wanted to be sort of managing a futuristic sports team with tactical stuff. Nobody really wanted to do that. Whereas being a space pilot, doing all the other things you can do in other types of games, they're fantasies that people have. They're things that people like. Now I've got a slide of Rocket League here because this is a game that took the sports aesthetic, but it made it so fantastical and so ridiculous that as soon as you see it, you want to kind of play around with it. You go, "Why are there cars? Why is there a huge ball? Why is there this weird stadium?" It takes people out of "Oh, I hate sports." and it puts them in the mode of "Wow, what's that? I want to try that." And that's what we'd completely failed to do. Um so just to kind of wrap up a little bit uh on some of the most important things here. I think the concept of a game is really delivered by that core fantasy idea that I talked about. What are you doing in the game? What do

people want to do? What's exciting about the idea? If you get that wrong, it's very difficult to sell these other things. Immediacy is very important. Frozen Synapse is not a very immediate game. You have to learn how to do the tactics. You have to understand the rules. And that hampered us as well. When you have a a difficult core fantasy, if the game's not immediate enough, then people won't get over that problem and they won't start advocating it to other people. The aesthetic, obviously, the visuals, the way you translate that core fantasy, I think we all understand that's important. And finally, notability. When someone does something in your game, it has to be notable. If you look at the way journalists often review games, they will often tell stories about what they did in the game. If you can't tell an exciting story about the thing that you did that was tied into the core fantasy of the game, then no one's going to talk about your game. We hope that people would talk about their losses and victories and so on in Cortex. And that did eventually start happening when we built up a core of players, but it just wasn't enough to get people through those initial problems. Now, when I hear people talking about their failures,

I often wonder, you know, if the games that they're talking about were any good at all, cuz that does matter still, believe it or not, even in this day of Indiepocalypse. So, Cortex did it did okay, you know, we got These are some of the better reviews. That score from PC Gamer was quite nice. And Eurogamer and so on. But it really wasn't enough to elevate the game. If you If you're hampered by your concept, you it doesn't almost doesn't matter what kind of review scores you get. People won't even look at the reviews if they don't like the idea of the game. So, wrapping up on where this has taken us now, we've started work on Frozen Synapse 2, which we announced recently. And the idea behind Frozen Synapse 2 is to take what people liked conceptually about Frozen Synapse, but then to kind of blow that absolutely out of the water and just add more stuff to it that we think is core to the main fantasy of the game. So, very quickly again, I'm just going to show you a little bit of a trailer and you'll be able to see the contrast with what we did with that end zone trailer. So, here you can see after this little idea, we get straight into gameplay. One of the things that I found

working on that Cortex trailer that I showed you at the start is that people were dropping off very, very fast when watching the video if they didn't see gameplay straight away. And this is about telling people what your game is for, what are you doing in the game? What what's it going to feel like when I play it? If you get into that immediately, it helps. This trailer, by the way, has already started to get many more views than that Cortex announcement trailer. Here you can see we pulled back from the level to show this procedurally generated city. And the idea behind the game is that you can have this completely generative vast city, you can do missions in absolutely any building. And this is a core fantasy that people like. When they play Frozen Synapse, they want to expand on the experience. They want to take that gameplay to some different places. So, the idea behind that really is just to feed directly into that set of ideas, something that we failed to do previously. So, although Cortex was difficult, it didn't make as much money as Frozen Synapse by a long margin, but it managed to keep our studio going. We feel that we've learned some conceptual lessons about how you design and promote

a game in order to connect your audience with your key ideas. Thanks very much. That makes sense. You may have to sort of just like stand right here. This this may be your microphone right here. Oh. So, we had that here earlier. We changed cables. Yeah. There we go. That works. I think. Close enough. Aim that in your general direction. Yeah. Oh, yeah, you can hold that mic to your left. Yeah, that's got it. Yeah, I know that hand. Do I need to switch something here? Do we just plug that from

Yeah, we We're up. You're up. You're up. Oh, no. Oh, no. Take it. Okay. Down again. Hey, hey, thanks. Hey. No, no, you're down again. No, no, it's No, I'm up. It's just black. Okay. The time is now. I needed to jump into the water an hour or never. Maybe it was an hour later. I didn't have the patience to find out. It was time to jump ship. The year was 2007 and I'd been working on Spore for 4 and 1/2 years. I had started as an intern in 2002 when the project could have fit comfortably in a very, very small lifeboat. Now, years later the creature creator, or editor as we called it, and all the editors, they were done. It was years of research and development and I was proud and happy with my design work and the work of all the people who had made the editors so amazing. While I'd worked on many parts of the project, the editors, they were my baby and they were done. Thus the project, things were looking so sunny and I wasn't excited to be completely involved with them again.

We were paying the interest on bad loans that had been made years in the past and it was slow and painful. Meanwhile, exciting things were happening outside of the walls of EA, outside of the bounds of AAA games. I was 27 years old and definitely on my way to becoming an old man. It was time to move on, to trade in my vanishing youth for adventure. To do the things you do when you're a young, visit exotic places, create ambitious projects, and make bad decisions. It was time to become an indie developer. Clearly that's where the action was, the creativity, the autonomy. Brain and World of Goo were about to come out and make boatloads of money. The boundaries of the medium were being pushed out there. Out there you had creative autonomy and boatloads of money. Who wouldn't want that? No large development teams to waste your time. No one else to negotiate with. Just you and the open road. No more producers and their annoying schedules. Who needs schedules? People who don't know how to make how to move fast, be creative and nimble, and can keep fast. I had money saved up in the bank. I could find another job if I needed to. It was time for me to do what I could do

best. Make cool stuff and prototype it. The rest would be easy. Mistake number one, scope. I made a directory for my project. It was called Eden. It was a simulation game. There would be a world simulator, and there would be a lot more. The actual title was Pocket Kingdom. Um I got off to a good start and then immediately started making a playable game. Two months in, I had a network server and a basic multiplayer RTS game working. It kind of worked. I could play against someone. Um the game would have a single-player mode, a multiplayer versus mode, world-building tools, an intricate economy, a people simulator like The Sims, a sophisticated 3D user interface for making things. There was a lot of stuff. At this point, I should probably tell you how big the dev team was. It was me. It was this guy, this genius right here. I figured my game wasn't too ambitious. I mean, it wasn't like we were trying to simulate the whole universe or anything. And I could get halfway done with it in no time and then find some collaborators to help me finish it. It'd be easy. Looking back, it was as if I'd forgotten

that I was no longer on Spore. I was no longer at a big game company. Um I where I would have just built prototypes and then have engineers and artists to collaborate with and back me up and keep me in check. So, this is the situation. I was the brave general leading the charge, and there was no cavalry behind me. I didn't even know there was no cavalry. If I did know, I don't think it would have bothered me. Everything was going great. Turned out that was a big mistake. So, onward I plunged deep in the wilderness. Um I'm not going to show a lot of screenshots from the thing. I was going to but like here's a few to give you a sense. Um so, mistake number two, trust me, I'm an expert. My secret weapon was prototyping. I was an expert at failing fast, at starting over, at throwing stuff against the walls. I'd done it for years on Spore. That was one of my superpowers. One of the reasons the editors had come together so nicely. I'd given talks at GDC about prototyping. I'd written articles about it. I knew what I was doing. I would prototype something playable. So, there was good news and bad news to

this. The good news is that I had some amazing ideas to prototype. The bad news was I completely forgot how to do it. I kept working on this playable prototype, this network multiplayer game. And meanwhile, development started getting very slow. What was the economic game? The world simulation, the ambitious 3D user interface, the people sim. In part, I was feeling the thrill of being an engineer, of building a multiplayer network system, of writing a not very good 3D graphics engine. The wind was in my face and it felt great. I was learning about 3D graphics, network simulation code, and all kinds of things, but I got bogged down. Five months in, I was distributing a playable 3D game to some friends that had some combat and world simulation, but it didn't really fit together. My ideas were still all over the place and the stuff that I had implemented wasn't really jiving. Finally, it dawned on me that I was doing it wrong. I wasn't prototyping. I was building the actual game. Um here's just another screenshot. Uh I had no idea what game I was making and here I was making all the stuff in 3D, a big network simulation game. Uh it was going very slowly. It was going too slowly and uh and it was a mistake. It cost me five months. This is a

screenshot from the game join select screen and you see there's like cute little stars in the background that are twinkling and animating and like it's just it's just too much. It's all wrong. All right, so mistake number three is scope. Here and here's actually this is a screenshot of like all the builds that I made like in the first year with all the dates. I was kind of looking through this last night to kind of get a sense of where I went. Um so you see like you can kind of least progress over time. So, okay. So, the the my big success at this point was realizing I was prototyping wrong. I realized I needed to actually start prototyping. So, I started making my own from 3D to 2D, and then things got really fast. So, I started making world editing tools in 2D and then 3D. They were really really cool. I started building multiple fun playable economic simulations that people really liked. I made cool simulations of pandemonium here, stuff being built, and then stuff being destroyed. Um this was made in like a week, 2 weeks. Uh this inspired an iPhone game I later made. I made a fun interactive weather

simulation. I made a Sim style people simulator that was tons of fun in like a week or two. I made an awesome RTS game with a rhythm and rules I've never seen before, which results which came out of months of careful research. I made a world generator. Uh I made a cool SimCity tower defense hybrid game. I made a lot of great little game prototypes. Finally, 6 months in, I was actually prototyping the game, but the problem was I still had no idea how it all fit together. I was discovering all these amazing things. It was if my ship had run aground on a coral reef, and I was too busy marveling at all the amazing fish to actually notice that the ship was sinking. Um there are things there that I want to go back one day and salvage in this amazing reef, but that's that'll come later. So, the thing that I was missing is the project had no center. Nothing was holding it together. There was nothing I wasn't going deep in any one of these things. Uh you know, I either needed to go deep in one of these directions, become a design genius overnight, or somehow find a team of 100 to help me actually make this thing. And the team of 100 wasn't forthcoming, nor was a design genius.

A very smart designer friend of mine told me that I needed to focus, which was a big like realization. It's like, "Oh, yeah." Um but he wanted me to finish my project while I was still young. And he was right. Part four, finishing is hard. Thanks to experimentalgameplayproject.com, I spent a couple of days making an iPhone game called Min me. It taught me that even finishing something so simple was a lot of work. So, I took another I took another break, a detour, and and decided to dabble and experiment with the iPhone user interface and made this game called Earth Dragon. Here's some Here's that. Uh it was inspired by one of the prototypes I showed earlier. It was tiny and it took a few months to make, but it again it taught me how much work it was to actually finish something. Um For better or worse, these little successes both humbled me and inspired me to carry on even further. So, I tried once again to make something simple and finish it, but floundered again. I started getting lost in a 3D world in weather simulator. Finishing any product is really hard. It's important to have focus. But, how do you finish a project whose scope is 10 times as big as you are? My scope was

still crazy. I was still the general without the army, the captain of a shipwrecked vessel dashed on a lovely ship, the juggler of too many metaphors and too many prototypes. It's hard to finish a project even when it's working. You have to decide you want to stop. You have to set deadlines and hit them. You have to fix bugs. You have to make lists. You have to check off things on those lists. And it's a lot of work. Trade-offs have to be made. If you've shipped software, you know what I'm talking about. It's exciting and it's exhausting. But, how do you finish a project that isn't happening? A project without lists, a project with no bugs? Because in some sense, the entire project is one huge bug. A huge bug that I loved was hooked up to a life support system. The machine is beeping out its unsteady pulse and its breathing is unsteady. I loved it dearly and I put my heart and soul into it, but clearly it's not going to make it. It's breath is raspy and slow. It's everything I ever wanted and nothing I could ever have. And somehow, from within deep inside of me, I had to find the the the energy to pull the plug. And that was really painful. I decided to pull the plug and try something else in my life for a while. So, wrapping up. I haven't heard a lot of failure talk, so I'm not sure if I'm breaking the rules by doing this, but I

want to talk about the silver linings of all of this failure. Um and uh because the silver lining is how I find my way in the world. It's how I keep it together. So, I like to limp away from the wreckage of any problem in my life, whether it's professional or otherwise, on my good foot. I like to look down at my good foot and feel really lucky about that foot. I like I like to look up at the glowing mushroom cloud behind me and marvel how beautiful it is. How I'm lucky to have gotten to see it. And maybe if I'm really lucky, I'll get a cool mutation. I learned so much. I have a new found jealous appreciation of people like Jason Rohrer who seem to have uncanny ability to pick just the right projects, to pick up super interesting and big and hard problem. And yet when they're like small enough to like hold in their hand and get it done by themselves. I think that's absolutely an amazing skill. I think I learned things about focusing and about simplicity and about finding the center in a design. There's just no other way to do it. I exercised and refined this new ability, this new mutation in my new project. I managed to pick up coming back another year or two later, and pick

up part of that weather simulation and world generator that I made and and I made this. Um which I which I don't think is a failure. Thanks. Sorry, the road that you've used to get to EarthPrimer doesn't really But I think it's interesting though that like you're like, "Well, what are you going to talk about?" Because I you're like, "I haven't seen the projects that you're going to talk about in this failure because I don't actually share the failed projects, right?" That's the That's the whole point of this of this session. Right? Is that we just They're like they're buried in the graveyard behind our houses. Like a shallow grave. Um Here's a shovel. Yeah, here's a shovel. Thanks. Yeah, exactly. Um so anyhow, so yeah, so one day so anyhow, so I'm really happy with the how things turned out again, but it's not to say that but that was like years of work and this is you know, that this is sort of the the tail end of. Um so anyhow, so one day I plan to go back go back to that coral reef and salvage more of the of the treasure that I found there. And next time I dive in, I hope that I'll be a little bit more modest, a little wiser, more focused, and more humble. Thanks.

All right. So, we have a little bit of time for questions. Um I have some questions here that occurred to me while I was listening to what you guys were saying. It We We did This happened last year, too. We ended up with sort of a theme, and the theme was kind of chasing the the correct concept of the correct scope, and and you guys both went through a zillion prototypes Yeah, a zillion Yeah, there's definitely some like I'm also sitting alone. I'm going Yeah, yeah. Why don't you move over to that side and join the group? All by myself over there. Um So, I had a question for Paul. Um and and this is This question actually works really well for you guys, too, so you can answer it also. But, how do you feel uh in hindsight about having sort of changed your design midstream based on external feedback? Because I think that

a lot of people I think the sort of accepted wisdom is that you're the genius designer, and you have this idea for what it's going to be, and if you change that midstream, then you're compromising your vision. So, how do you kind of reconcile that with the practical reality of of like, "Okay, this is garbage. Like, what am I doing here?" Well, there's a There's a couple of things that One is that our lead designer, Ian Hardingam, is quite a mechanics-focused guy. So, he just wants to find the best way of showing off the mechanics. So, in terms of kind of pitching the changes as an idea, I mean, he he kind of was instrumental in that himself. But, yeah, I mean, I With Cortex, it really seemed to work. We definitely seemed to get people to start understanding more about, you know, what the game really was as we went through those changes. So, even though it it it kind of can feel like switching horses in midstream to some extent, you can do some things to mitigate those problems. Um I'm I'm glad that we made the changes. What did you What was your strategy for sort of mitigating the problem of changing the so quickly midstream like that, or once you're so far along? We just used it as a PR point. Yeah.

Um so, it it's kind of heard you. Right. It It's kind of interesting if if a game changes its name, and it's interesting if its developer is kind of reacting to feedback and stuff. So, we just talked about that in public and went, "Hey, you know, this wasn't coming across the right way." Uh so, we got PR focused on, you know, the stuff we wanted it to be focused on. Yeah. Do either of you guys want to comment on that at all or I I'll say that I I think there's like that there's like a kind of balance between the kind of there's like the intellectual producer part of your brain, like the rational planner, and then there's like this dreamer part of you that's responsible for thinking up crazy ideas, and then just not thinking about boundaries, and somehow you have to reconcile those things. And I think it's easier to do it if you have it if you're collaborating with other people than if you're doing trying to do it all by yourself. One thing that I noticed that that struck home to me was when you were talking about how you had this idea of the the sort of grand infinite fields of brilliant genius that you're going to go join, and you had your own idea internal to you about what you wanted to create. Um but then you sort of got out there, and you were like running, and you're like, "Wait, like what where am I?

What's going on?" Like so, I don't know. I feel like there's this thing that happens retrospectively when you look at really good games where you say, "Okay, well, this was really good, and clearly they had that clear that core idea the whole time." But like very often as a designer, you just kind of like, "All right, that's the thing that I want." And you just like run toward it, and then you get get there, and you're like, "Okay, well, this is not working, but I don't know where to go next." And and like how how are you guys uh advancing in your ways of dealing with that? I feel like it's kind of like what this has become about. Uh well, I mean, we are we are giving a talk at how we failed at that in in a lot of ways. I mean, we like aim that people can take their own lessons away from it, I suppose. Right. I mean, I think a lot of it comes to to the feedback loop, and I think the smaller you are and indies are very small in terms of the size of the studio. The the the easier it is for that feedback loop to get into oscillating into something where you are way off target from where you originally thought that there was something interesting. Um whereas I mean, whereas I think a larger studio, you're constantly being checked against whether or not something would actually

make money, and which is you know, another way of saying whether or not people would be interested in it just from AAA speak. But, like as an indie, I mean you charge you you target something very specific, and you're like, that's what I want to build. And you may be the only one in the world interested in making that or interested in playing that. And I mean, that's okay if you're if you're a solo dev, and you've only got yourself to support. But like, the larger you get, the more you've got mortgages on the line, and the more you've got to concern yourself with whether or not people are going to feed their families, and I mean, I think that it seems like what you experienced was like like when you showed the game to like the world at large, that's when you had your reality check. Yeah. And I feel like that reality check can come through it at any time for for any of us, and it's like I don't know. I have a lot of respect for the for the solo devs out there who were able to make their own game, and somehow they get to something that people want at the end. And like that Undertale guy, like that's that's that's amazing. But even then, I mean he wasn't working in a vacuum because he did have the Kickstarter. And so, he was getting validation

immediately uh about everything that he was doing. Uh right, at least to the point where he was like, okay, people are kind of interested in this, at least enough to support my Kickstarter. Uh and I feel like like showing the world at least stuff early on, I mean that's the something that I feel like I That was my major failure, was not showing what I was doing. Does anybody in the audience, if you want to ask a question, feel free to hop up to one of those mics. Can can you do the mic? Yeah, awesome. Thank you. All right. I want to just say that I just I think like the people say necessity is the mother of invention, but I think desperation is the mother of invention. And the question is just how desperate you are. But if you if you're too desperate, you're screwed. But if you're just desperate enough, you're going to accomplish some really brilliant solutions to problems. I have a a talk desperation-based game design that's It's in here. It'll come out someday, I'm sure. Um my question is um in my experience, a lot of times when I failed, I have learned a lot from that experience. But I've still had to face the consequences of failure, you

know? And like my question is, you know, how do you mitigate that or how do you get past how do you process the consequences of those failure, you know, like spending so much time learning rigging and then not learning any or learning a lot, but not actually getting anywhere to a portfolio and then have and then because you're spending so much time on that you're having a lame portfolio as example, so. I can talk about that, I guess. Um well, there there's there's two different kinds of failure that you can be experiencing. There's failure of your ideas and a failure of your your your project in a large and then there's failures that are localized about tech failures. Everybody in this industry hits tech failures. The industry changes so fast that there is no way that you can ever keep up with everything and everybody in this room feels like they're behind. So, like that's nothing new. Like if you're if you're saying like specifically talking about the rigging example, um if you feel like you're failing at rigging, but your game

uh is something where you're really excited about something that has nothing to do with rigging, you're kind of getting caught on a tangent there and it's inconsequential to the like there are reasons that people go and just become animators and that's all they do. And Oh, I just lost the mic. I think. Oh, there we go. Um there are reasons that people like just focus on being an animator and that's their entire career. I mean, I feel like like one of the quickest ways to failure is distributing yourself across too many disciplines. And I'm saying that as somebody who has distributed themselves across way too many disciplines. Um that's I suppose you could give a whole another talk about how you should focus yourself, how you should start to to minimize your risks. Like for Tower Guns, I didn't animate those things even though they were animated and I didn't hire an animator. I just had things spin around in place or I had things that were like bone rotations to aim or I did the animations in the vertex shader causing things to like shake like they were an engine. I mean I cheated the animation and I let that limit define the game and I feel like as an indie you can get away with that a little bit better than you could as a

triple A. I mean I don't know. It's a hard It's a hard road. Yeah, so when you were talking about being in this spiral Joe, you mentioned that it was a hard thing to talk about while it was happening, but in retrospect you you feel confident that you can talk about it. Um my question's kind of uh based around the assumption that it's most useful to actually be able to talk about these things while they're happening, right? Um what did you say to people who were asking you, "Oh hey, how's it going?" Because that's a a thing that happens a lot when you release a game, right? The other developers will be walking up to you and saying, "How's it going? You know, what are you doing? What's what's happening?" And then what what did you actually say to them and how did you actually feel? It's like that the Facebook meme that went around. It's like that kid who's like, "Oh, it's the first day of school. How's it going?" "It's great." "Really?" Hey, you you're working on a game, right? Yeah, how's it going? "Great." "Really?" Uh I mean for me I would I would say that I was still prototyping. I would also say I was

still supporting Tower Guns, which was true cuz I was doing both. I was juggling the support post-release support of that with new prototypes, but uh the further and further along I got cuz you're talking about like a 13-month span here for me, uh the more that didn't fly. Like people were like they wanted to see something. Yeah, if nothing else my friends and family wanted to see something, you know, let alone the the the the internet at large. So uh it just became harder and harder and harder and that was when I began to realize that this tailspin was going along. And I like when I was in the middle of this, I knew it was going on and I can't say that I was in denial because I knew it was there. I just couldn't avoid it. It's like once you start getting into that habit of of not showing something that is a a it's a cycle. I don't know if you guys want to add in on that. I want to say something about that in the last question, which is I think that the story you tell yourself is really important and that's and it's becomes hard to answer that question about who you are and what you're doing when people ask you when things aren't going

well. Um and then the question about how do you when you have wasted a lot of time, what do you do with that? I think the answer is to lie to yourself and just basically like retroactively tell yourself a really good story about how things are going. Like, "Oh, yeah, like if that mushroom cloud is really beautiful, let's check that out. You know, like maybe I'm going to get a cool mutation." Um and I think that I'm being I'm being silly, but I think it's true. Like I think that that's I think that's how you sort of have to like ramp up into the future and is to keep a positive outlook. Um and so like now the middle of the story tells you, "Yeah, I screwed around for a while. I made Earth Primer. Let's not talk about everything that happened there. I learned a bunch of stuff, but like whatever. Like the story is now this, you know?" But this workshop is about telling a different story. Yeah, this this workshop is sort of meant to be a dredge for all that really good work that you did that you hate yourself because of it. To remind you that it was good work at the time and it was valuable work and it's not just pouring down a hole of infinite blackness, right? It's valuable. Bring it to the workshop. Share it with

people. Share it with your friends. Just share it, you know, if you you don't want to get up on stage and talk about it. Share it with the developer next door that you know that you're friends with, like. And the other thing is it's a lot easier to talk about it and learn from it if you can keep going. Like if you've set up your studio or your own situation so that a a failure of one project doesn't mean, you know, that you go bankrupt and you have to leave the industry and like, you know, if if if you you actually have some safety margin, then it's a lot easier to say to people, "Hey, it's not going great." rather than, "Hey, everything is now in a pit of disaster." Uh this is in reference to Tower of Guns. Um I kind of want to know the rest of the story. You got to the point I you did a great job of explaining about your family and about going through all the prototyping and being afraid to show things and all. And then you mentioned that now you're working with someone else. Was there what caused that? I mean, what what what was it that you realized, "Well, maybe I just can't do this alone. I need someone else." Or was it something else completely? Well, okay, I

have to be a little bit vague here because of of contracts and and and legal reasons. But um I had had, let's say, an opportunity that was like a year out while I was working on all these prototypes. And I kind of knew it was there in the background. So it was almost like a safety net, this this next project. And I kind of kept on working on my prototypes being like, "Well, maybe I'll I still want to do my own thing." But this other opportunity was always there. Um and it was kind of a a a a fellow dev reaching out and being like, "We liked working with you. Let's keep working together." And so uh that kind of situation um I was a little wary of because I had come The studio I was working at before I went indie was 38 Studios, which had a very catastrophic like like bankruptcy. It was in the press. It still is in the press in New England. If you're from New England, then you see it show up in the news every so often cuz there was like FBI investigations and stuff. And a million-dollar or $70 million loan from Rhode Island. It was really crazy. I was just an artist on that team. I had nothing to do with any of that. I was just like like you know, like, "Whoa, what's all Why are there 30 news

crews at the office today?" Um it was pretty amazing, but it was also um I was like kind of wary of being like, "Okay, let's go back and work with a large team again." I kind of was enjoying the idea of working in my pajamas from home, seeing my my wife a lot more than I would when I was crunching at at a game dev at a AAA game dev. Um And I was kind of wary about the idea of picking on teammates, taking on teammates because um in my mind you couldn't do something that was crazy. I wanted to do something really batshit crazy. Uh and um I didn't feel like there would be I felt like in my mind the more teammates you acquired, the more you had a responsibility to them to make sure they could feed their family. Um I didn't realize that there could be other developers who were totally on board with making something crazy. And so the the partners that I'm working with now uh I've worked with before and I know I work with them well and uh we're building something that's crazy. So, yeah. Cool. Hey, so one of the things that I

do is I work with I'm a program assistant at a two-year program that's really project-based and quick-paced for our students. And there's really no safer place to fail than in your educational institution. But I talk to so many students who are scared to share their ideas, they're scared to dive into their dream project because they're scared they're going to fail. Do you have any tips for students or any of us who are hesitant to jump into a project because of the fear of failure? Uh it's it's endemic to our society. We systematically educate people out out of creativity by saying that the worst possible thing you can be is wrong. So, that may be too large for the scope of a a question and answer session, but I I don't know. I think you kind of have to like actively fight against this instinct to be afraid of the failure and it's the it's the blank page, right? Yeah. Well, I feel like I'm hogging the mic. Um so, uh the the best thing that has come out of

game culture in the last 10 years has been game jams. Game jams, there's no obligation to make something good. Nobody's expecting anything good. The deadline for them comes and goes within days or hours. Um I feel like if you're in an educational environment if you're in an education environment, you should really be pushing your students to enter every game jam there is out there because that's how you fail quickly and you can put stuff behind you as fast as possible. And I feel like that the game jam culture is amazing and it's making some really really strong designers just because they're getting through that pile of paper of of bad designs really quick. Um I think also for uh certainly for us as a kind of group of game developers around where we're based and we talk a lot. I'm sure a lot of people here have that. So I guess with students one of the things that could happen is to create that environment where they're happy to share with each other everything that they're doing. And then if you see someone else who's you know not having a good time, you don't feel so bad yourself. I think trying to kind of get that idea into students sort of

early on that it's community where it is acceptable to talk through some of the ideas that aren't working. Uh it is really good because that's something that professionally absolutely everyone needs that. Uh so one of the things I did when I stopped working on the Pocket Kingdom project was I went back to school and started doing a PhD and I taught an undergraduate studio class. One of the things I did in that class was every week the students had to do a whole new prototype and include and every week they also had to do a whole one-page design document as well. And it was all about just make a bunch of stuff and it's okay to if it's not good. And part of the point of doing it on like a one-week cycle is that you just it's like you're filling up that stack of paper, you know, and you're like learning. You're calibrating your own sense of scope and focus. Um but it was still a tension because students still want to get good grades in classes, you know, like as if you tell them like it's okay to like I want you to take a risk. I would encourage them to take a risk but they still are worried about sort of class or that

structure of the class that I mean I didn't It's still like there's still that paradox there but I think you can push in that direction. I think also improv has a bunch of good If you look there you'll find good stuff. You know, there's like a lot of like you you fail in improv and you take a bow, you know, like it's all about you celebrate your failures and it's a lot about just cultivating a sense of acceptance so that just all kinds of crazy stuff can has a place to kind of come up and be there and then you can move on and do another scene. However you feel about Jim Carrey, there's a great story about him uh as he was trying to learn how to do stand-up before he became famous at all, and just some nights he would be bombing so hard, and on those nights what he would do is just lie on the ground, roll off the stage, and then just pretend to be a cockroach and try and wedge himself as far as possible under the stage, and he would do that for like 3 minutes. He said he would do it until he got a laugh and then he would stop. Even like a pity laugh. Cool. Yeah, excellent. I think that's going to wrap it up for the failure workshop unless anybody had any like really burning closing comments. Yeah, I'm sorry. We we have to wrap up because

we're at time now, so room, too? Yes, there is, yeah. Yeah, huge round of applause for these guys. Um, thank you, gentlemen, for having courage to share your failures with everybody.