The 2017 Failure Workshop

hi everyone uh my name is Michael moliner uh developer of a failed game called cityst stream an experimental live game launched in January 2016 lasting for a whopping 2 months before we shut it down while this is a talk about the ultimate failure of the game there were many interesting things that came out of it so I'd like to cover those as well to help paint a clearer picture of its history City stream was a strange combination of Idol games Twitch plays games and real-time dming it was created as a way to counter the experience of earlier Twitch plays games like Twitch Plays Pokémon or our previous game choice chamber the game was still played via the chat room of a live internet broadcast but this time the aim was to make each players's actions feel like they mattered no matter how many concurrent active players there were while the game's potential popularity was unknown before launch we still prepared the engine to be able to handle thousands of simultaneous players using staggered updates cycles and

accelerated variables to compensate our Peak player count was around 100 so things never quite took off as we had hoped in the previous game we made choice chamber we added a few viewer interactions that celebrated individuals while they were small successes we wanted to make a game that championed every action of every player making anyone's efforts feel worthwhile the most obvious design change was to almost completely remove timed polls and instead allow players to interact at their own pace performing tasks as they saw fit this ended up being realized as a collaborative city building game with elements of Tower Defense and RPGs each player had their own avatar responsibilities stats and inventory persistent across playay sessions and all saved locally on our host machine saving all data to a single file wasn't a very safe or smart method as crashes and bugs forced us to keep a daily backup should the world State need to be rolled back in one case some players exploited a glitch overnight for which they apologized the following morning

the save data needed to be checked against the previous days to roll back specific players as a punishment for abusing a broken feature while the idea of a job wasn't formally assigned most players took responsibility for what they did best forming a community that did in fact work together as a team there was even a player that was present at every stream every day for two straight months this isn't to say any given player did one thing while playing but enough time playing with the same group of people allowed them to become quite efficient since the game was played from the twitch chat there was no additional software to download no additional logins to create and no cost to play this low bar for entry excited us though we would soon realize such a feature was relatively lackluster when the game itself had troubles getting people excited most importantly it was only playable from one channel ours giving us full control over how and when people experien the game this was especially useful in monetizing the experience for those who wanted to help support development it's not uncommon for a twitch viewer to to want to continually

pay money directly to a broadcaster to not only show support but to make sure they can continue doing what they do players who made contributions were rewarded directly in the game in real time most perks were cosmetic as a way of literally showing support though there were some perks that acted as super attacks during battle in those instances the Super Attack would benefit all players not just the contributor helping to cement the idea of this being a team effort we didn't want a player to feel like they were inferior because they couldn't afford to spend as much money as someone else the Cosmetic perks were helpful in showing support in the game while advertising their benefits but weren't quite enough to entice a lot of players they were also permanent missing an opportunity to continue receiving income from players who wanted to help City stream went through constant iteration both before and after launching we were in a rush from twitch to launch in time for their Twitch Plays gaming category debuting with the smallest of core Loops after a mere 6 weeks of development we would go on to add new content to the game every day for 2 months including tweaks and bugs

fixes timed polls are a major element from almost every twitch BLS game including our own choice chamber but they turn a group of people into a single number making an individual's vote not seem to matter we noticed in other games that viewers would participate most often when their decision had the chance of make them feel special for this reason we wanted to do away with polls completely but a few remained for major group decisions accounting for less than 2% of all possible commands we eventually moved polls to the top of the screen to prevent City progress from halting for 1 minute at a time a feature request from players who had a schedule to keep in the city all their interaction in the game was done as an individual player where the sum of all players actions contributed to game progress to prevent the already flooded chat room from being more crowded we added a whisper bot to have a private chat with any player informing them of their status inventory and other events unique to them this also helped out with a video delay that could range from 15 to 60 seconds dictated by a viewers location and connection we actually needed to get whitelisted by twitch so we weren't marked as a mass whisper bot

which we were uh this worked fairly well aside from a few nights when the whisper servers were down forcing us to manually tell individual players their status much of the game's progress was gated by time to both add weight to players decisions and to make a rather simple game last far longer than it really should have every action took time to execute some taking seconds others hours we encouraged teamwork by allowing most actions to complete faster as more players helped out diminishing returns were added where each additional player contributed less than the one before to prevent a mob of players from going around completing every task immediately most buildings would perform their functions linearly as players entered such as offensive Tower shooting lasers equal to the combined powers of all players inside other buildings like the XP farming disco stopped operating if too many players were on the Dance Floor forcing them to manage work and play carefully these kinds of things led to emergence specialization which was pretty cool suddenly players would have to communicate outside of regular play to decide where each one's skills could be best utilized some even created chat

Bots to automate certain processes though they soon retracted them when they realized how much fun that removed from the experience one interesting thing we added was a building that buffed adjacent buildings but only if they were all the same color this led to players designating neighborhoods territories and even having gang wars as they fought for control of different districts where they were once arbitrarily deciding Building colors they were now arguing over the benefits of having a chocolate Lookout post versus a smoke research lab in a particular spot tying into the game's end goal of reaching the moon we had special events occur during real world moon phases to add to the narrative this made players change up their strategies even planning ahead based on the lunar calendar after the game had finished we had a one-day special Revival of citystream on April Fool's Day called citystream Extreme where all variables were cranked to 11 there were nine moons and a bunch of rainbows and explosions players accomplished as much that day as they did in the first one and a half months the first time uh though this can also be attributed to the game actually containing all of its content from the

beginning early on we felt it would become boring to stare at the same steady grid for hours even days at a time and decided to create a narrator beep who you see here connect uh to connect with players and give them a focal point for communicating with the game similar to how you see a green screened human player in the corner of any other twitch Channel beep was supposed to be driven by AI to have Dynamic conversations with players but we couldn't get something so complex working in the short time we had not wanting to have him have a predictable canned responses to everything we took shifts playing as beep to respond back to players directly acting as a man behind the curtain they loved him so much we continue dming as him each day making sure to keep players engaged through the mundanity of crafting a city one resource at a time unfortunately this meant we had to cut the broadcast to about 8 hours each day using the rest of the day to continue working on new content tweaks and Bug fixes we continued expanding beep's arsenal of mcing from a dozen animated emotions to wearing hats for various occasions such as a general's hat during battle and a night cap when it was time to end the day stream it was so important to us

that be maintained this relationship with players that we created a system to remotely control his responses by sending private Whispers to the game via the twitch mobile app this was especially attractive to us as it didn't require creating additional software it allowed us to go out to dinners and functions completely ignoring our friends our original idea was for this to be a 24-hour live channel that ran itself only needing to be taken down for servicing but with having to play as beep during the day and working on the game in the evenings our days turned into double Shi combined with poor revenue and retention overall this ultimately forced us to discontin the game after 2 months we could have continued making tweaks and adding ways to get players excited but working 14 plus hours a day at less than minimum wage made us consider the possibility that maybe we should cut our losses and apply what we learned in future projects uh that's the only picture I have of our battle station that's Chelsea playing as beep uh the players could actually tell when I was playing as beep and when she was playing as beep cuz she was a much better Storyteller than I was monetizing a game like this was tricky since it was unlike anything else

out there not surprisingly this is where our design fell apart the quickest we offered additional cosmetic and gameplay perks to players who subscribe to the twitch channel are donated via a third party system however almost all perks were permanent offering little reason to continue supporting this is a missed opportunity for Die Hard players to have a long-term contribution we noticed our most generous players go from throwing hundreds of dollars at us to tossing a few coins after just a couple of days mostly because the game wasn't compensating them accordingly but also because we never thought someone would want to donate so much at a time thereby never designing for it oops it actually says oops on my slide here to avoid constant grinding we added a wishing well where players could offer some or all of their inventory in exchange for a chance at winning big some players became addicted gambled away everything then grinded resources to do it all again we triy to break this habit by time gaining additional wishes after jackpots but that simply let them grind more resources at a casual Pace we also didn't monetize wishing for legal and moral reasons despite this there were

still ways to manipulate the system allowing some players to build entire districts on their own overnight it was a broken system even after continued tweaking battling was a huge component of the core Loop where players would stop building to defend the city from an army of creatures offensive buildings would fire from afar while Brave players would use melee attacks and weapons on the battlefield and if a creature made it to the city and destroyed a building it was permanently gone from the game the difficulty of those battles was intended to be automated by a system that accounted for the number of active players and their combined potential power curing the experience to be challenging yet possible this system also did not get finished in time so while we were playing as the narrator beep we were also deciding how and when every battle unfolded even with this human control many battles appeared either too easy or so unfair we had to roll back the save file because every building was destroyed we improvise these moments to players usually mentioning a time machine of some sort but they knew we screwed something up even the final battle had to be painstakingly fated to make sure it lasted more than a few

minutes but didn't erase 2 months of work unbeknownst to us some players had been stockpiling on explosives via the wishing well and decided to use all of them at the same time defeating the final boss fast and the we can give it another Health boost another problem that only got worse over time was onboarding new players as the city UI and commands grew more complex the game became ever more puzzling to a pair of fresh eyes this was largely because all information had to be on screen at the same time and a late game newcomer couldn't start at the beginning we tried to ease the introduction via a helper bot and an online manual but despite the efforts of these and chat room moderators helping out we got the same question up until the final moments how do I play we realized this was a problem as soon as we had trouble ourselves telling someone in person what things to do first in addition to our struggles with the game itself it was tough for twitch to promote a game that didn't present well At a Glance even with beep telling jokes in the corner other than a launch Day promotion on the front page it took one and a half months to create a

spotlight feature to continue help spreading the word this isn't necessarily a failure on our part unless you consider our designing a game that doesn't catch one's eye but it does help paint a picture as to why we had trouble getting new players regularly City stream was a fun experiment that certainly taught us a lot about dealing with emergent multiplayer ecosystems but a time pressure combined with too many design and ux flaws prevented it from taking off as we had hoped we still believe to this day that all major issues with the game are solvable especially after having experienced them fall apart over the course of a couple months however when the final building on the final spot was upgraded to its final level we called at the end of season 1 and sent players where they had always intended to go to the Moon our final stream was a 2hour long Rocket Ride Through Outer Space featuring a dynamic rolling credits of every player who ever stepped into the game's world as players rode their rocket Tower through space and collided with passing Stars they gained the ability to shoot fireworks into the Galaxy giving back light to a fastly dimming world with that beep put on his

night cap for the last time wishing everyone a good night thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] everybody I believe uh Adrian is going to be next I think so yes so Adrian's going to be next right you yeah [Music] sure hello everyone um I'm Adrian young I'm a game

designer programmer business marketing person you know Indie I guess uh I just released hidden folks um yay and uh but today I want to thank you wow um so today now I want to reflect on the closure of game oven the studio I co-founded um in case in case you didn't know game oven uh it was founded by programmer buan androvski uh and game designer Adrian that would be me and we were later joined by marketeer Elina muris um we we had an office in the Dutch game Garden in utre the Netherlands and uh we made fingle Planet challenge uh bam Fu friend strap bounden and jelly Reef six games we were best known for fingle which is a sort of like twister like finger rubbing game um and we uh and some people know us for bounden which is a mobile dancing

game for two people uh and it actually has choreography by the Dutch national ballet uh I showed this at the experimental gameplay workshop two years ago so my talk to you today will have two parts one of being what it's like being a company and sort of our perspective on the closing closing the company and being a team and all the Dynamics that happened within our team all right part one being a company so um game ofen was founded by Bo and I um because at some point I had this prototype of fingle and it was sort of weird and fun and it was just awkward and we boy and I both saw oh maybe we need to make a actual game out of this and put it on the App Store but to do that we needed a legal entity so we were like H maybe we should just dive into it and make a company and game oven was born uh our business plan became to make enough games to collectively bring in enough money to cover the costs of the company and hope for a hit somewhere

along the way and we wanted um to run the studio sort of on the longtail of games so longtails usually look like this uh but the thing is if you zoom in uh this is what you see right so there's various games and the the money they bring in every day Stacks up and that's what covers the the cost of the the company every day so game of an employed one designer a developer a marketing person and uh we usually had an art or a developer intern um the biggest challenge to this structure was balancing prototyping games and um and marketing and doing business we hired Elina to with the promise to overcome that challenge but when it got real hot in the oven we still found ourselves helping out with marketing um and looking back at this it seems like prototyping and actual game development are much easier roles to mix for one person than making and selling a game but like this is my gut feeling I don't

have any like scientific data on this um so aside from our inhouse roles and skills we always required at least a number of contractors with every project so we always needed one or two full-time artists a music composer sound designer filmmaker to make our trailers localization company um sometimes an extra developer and uh for bound we needed a choreographer so that was weird um but let's talk about costs because the minimum w age uh of one person in the Netherlands costs the company about $1,800 per month that is about $1900 and this includes taxes and administration fees um with three employees rent software Administration and all sorts of little things game often costs about € 65,000 per month we think it's not really cool to share how much our collaborators asked of us but this chart can give you a little bit of a sense of what all these project costs uh so yeah one side there's the

collaborators how many of them we needed to make the game and on the other side is the studio time and months so bound and jel re were definitely one of our bigger projects so counting the months on this chart and knowing that game oven existed for 3 and 1/2 years all the studio time listed here doesn't add up to three and A2 years because in between these projects we prototyped we maintained the engine and our previous games and we did some Contracting work here and there but more importantly this in between creative downtime or project downtime was still studio uptime and it cost the studio as much as working on a project so you can imagine what kind of pressure this put in our creativity how can you have peace of mind when you know you're burning money every day and you don't find that next big thing and this is one of the reasons we decided to close game ofen because being responsible for the up up of this of a studio and being creative is damn

difficult and yeah we couldn't find a way because well let's talk about game oven's income so in total more than 2 and a half million people uh more than two and a half million apps have been downloaded with grossing about 155,000 uh EUR which is about $165,000 compared to other apps on mobile stores these numbers are not amazing but they're definitely not bad either uh speculating over what drove our game sales we think it's we think we made unique games and potentially appealing to non-gamers and using Phone features in unique ways but we were always constrained by the designs of our games to mobile platforms which already has a lot of competition and we wer really in the mood for a free-to-play business model from 2012 to 2015 piracy in piracy in our games was is crazy so most of our Chinese Russian and Turkish players

pired our premium games both on the iOS and App Store um and yeah especially with bound release we were baffled by how much how much percentage it was so in the end what we made off our sales wasn't strictly speaking enough to cover the costs of the studio and pay our collaborators and so we hunted for additional source of income lots of you know subsidies government grants Contracting work Humble Bundle app campus which is was is is or was a program by Windows to get more games to their to their platform and we won various Awards so with all these additional sources of income about a total of 144,000 we were actually easily able to cover the cost of the studio and in the end we probably even had enough funds to do another project um so again like game ofen income wasn't the main reason we closest studio but rather the pressure

of our monthly burn rate um on the creativity for that next project okay so that's part one being a company let's talk about being a team because as Founders boen and I had you could say some struggles during our three and a half years of working together and I might present these struggles here as if they were really straightforward but we went through months of reflection and uh to to try to understand what happened and why we were occasionally so frustrated with each other my deep motivation to make games has always been very different from Bo's motivation to make games I've always had this thing for truly social games whatever that means while buan didn't necessarily and as an example buan really really did not like friend strap while I consider it one of my best working Concepts ever and buan became father after bounden um

money and being sustainable became even more important motivators to him so before jelly Reef the the last game game ofen made buen had not been able to motivate or convince me to work in any of his game ideas uh mainly because I looked for a social component in bu's ideas that he never focused on to me it felt like boel never understood what he wanted to accomplish with his games uh or that his games didn't have a bigger vision and for buan it felt like I never took his idea seriously and this kind of frustration was actually very difficult to deal with for both of us okay the other struggle I was uh primarily the face of game oven I was maybe a bit more extrovert and better connected internationally but unfortunately many interviews with journalists presented me as the sole creator of G game offens games even though they were made as a

team effort there was one particular uh interview uh on bounden that hurt boan most writing about me as the genius inventor of bounden while never mentioning it was made you know by a whole team and this struggle actually came back quite often too often as as what should be necessary um everyone wants to be credited for their hard work and so simply making this very explicit to journalist keeps everyone happy on the team so if you're a journalist please take this seriously like I know I actually know for a fact we are not the only ones who have struggled with this okay the biggest struggle however that we faced uh resulting from resulted from never strictly defining our roles so Buon didn't want to narrowly Define our roles as he wanted to have a say in business and marketing and design as well as being the technical lead having

a say in all aspects of running a game studio for a small Studio like that was why he wanted to be a Founder in the first place and I think that's very reasonable but unfortunately it resulted in a pretty bad a few pretty bad scenarios and I wanted to give you guys three of these scenarios because yeah I mean I want you to understand how important this this was uh for our decision to close the to close game upen so after the quite underwhelming launch of bam Fu our second title I decided after maybe three or four months of prototyping that game oven's next production was going to be friend trrap and this quirky little game with no beef other than being really awkward and weird uh bu just didn't feel anything for making it to me feeling that you know Studio uptime pressure it was one of the prototypes with the most potential we had at that time but to both it felt like he had no saying

whether friendship should be made or not and but he did feel as responsible for it as much as I did but I you know I took the best decision I could and I don't think I I still think we didn't have any better better Alternatives back then so the lesson here is defining roles comes down to trust and letting go of the things you too feel responsible [Music] for one long argument boen and I had was about a a timer in bounden so at some point during the project bounden took on the challenge of making a timer one that you know should convey where you are within the dance uh but while he was making it I came to realize and I saw in play test that the timer was actually not as relevant to the broader picture of the game and so I sort of you know had to discard the idea within the whole uh design and replace it with a much simpler solution but at this point it felt to buan as if I only wanted to

include my own designs um while you know I was only trying to Model A coherent player experience for bounden so the lesson here is I was often not able to communicate my bigger vision of the game fully to Boon which made it very difficult for Boon to understand why his contributions could sometimes should not should sometimes not be included and what complicated matters was that the vision and execution of that Vision changed constantly sometimes even radically so another difficult scenario was um jelly Reef in its entirety so from the start with all our previous issues in mind and all our struggles in mind I wanted Boon to be the creative owner of jelly reef and uh he filled that role well but somewhere along the way jelly Reef turned into a procedurally generated game which meant that my role for jelly Reef became

unclear uh I wasn't able to help Buon code it I was just not a good programmer uh like that and so not only did I had to leave most of the design up to boam I also had to work on a game that didn't align with my deep motivation to make games in the first place and uh it was at this time that I got us together and you know said those four painful words I want to quit buan and Elina understood that I was a fundamental member of game oven so we decided together to finish jelly Reeve and close game muen afterwards but finishing jelly Reef with a disbanding team was a a [Music] nightmare um buan worked his ass off to make the game happen regardlessly but it was he was increasingly frustrated with the lack of effort by his team members everyone had their Minds on the future and in hindsight I think we should have

just disbanded right there and then and uh even even though that felt maybe too disruptive to our lives at that point okay so those were three struggles that we had um but I do want to end on a positive note because only talking about our struggles makes us look like we should have never worked together in the first place but we obious obviously had super fun times too going to the office every morning was like a little adventure and we make something new quickly that day together figuring out how the hell to do it and even with all the struggles that we had bo and I didn't close the studio hating or disliking each other we've we've had times where we you know we where we could punch each other in the face but not when we close the studio and in a way our struggles are still marginal compared to our achievements I think 17 Awards and nominations for fingle and bound major features in the App Store stories of

relationships crushed and babies made because of fingle working together with the Dutch national ballet coverage in the New York Times the guardian BBC The Verge mesh bable more than 145 million play sessions that's a crazy ride so I want to conclude game oven with you in in contrast to what most people initially think game oven did make enough money to sustain itself so strictly speaking our game sales weren't enough to keep us running but only looking at One S one of our sources of income uh would be a narrow point of view what was difficult for us to maintain was the rigid structure of a studio as opposed to the flexible structure of hopping on and off uh individual projects our problem was Studio uptime during project downtime and we worked really hard to close the gap between our projects but leaving responsibility scattered throughout the team keeping our roles fague magnify the pressure between us and cause many struggles between us and

eventually those personal struggles made us decide to close the studio and ultimately that is the more nuanced conclusion to game ofen so I hope you draw lessons from game oven our failure and if you have any questions please do come talk to me afterwards thank you [Applause] [Music] Tim you're up [Music] next hello oh I that

hey oh I'm going to play Hello everybody uh oh hello everyone uh my name is Tim Rogers I am the founder and director of interactive electronic object research design development and uh uh a consultation Studio action button entertainment I am the game designer and director of video ball video ball is a digital sporting good product which is available now as if this makes a difference uh for personal computers and uh for PlayStation 4 or Xbox one video game conso Hardwares somebody commented on the YouTube video of my talk last year that it sounded like I had to go to the bathroom uh I really did and I really do right now uh so I I need to stop doing this U all right okay so

uh video ball is a four player sport in which two teams of two players each project triangles at circular balls to push them push a ball into your opponent's goal to score a point uh the longer you hold the button the bigger your eventual triangle bigger triangles push harder triangles also stun players and eliminate one another uh regulation video ball is played with three balls on the screen at all times and here's a little video of some some experts playing the game um so video ball represents uh an attempt to make a serious electronic sport uh so through what I can un hopefully unpretentiously describe as a scientific game design process we started with simple core rules and eventually arrived at what I call quote unquote a compact expression of all sports mechanics video ball launched on 12 July 2016 and my life has been a garage sale ever since um uh one of my Earnest goals with video

ball was uh was this being perfectly honest now for the first time one of the earnest goals of video ball was to make the berbery scarf of video games up here on stage last year I said the Muji coffee cup of video games that was me being modest uh I I wanted to make the Burberry scarf of video games a luxury video game um so you can buy a scarf for a dollar and it will keep your neck warm or you can pay roughly $400 for a berbery scarf so why pay the extra I never meant to charge $400 for video ball um so but why pay the extra $399 well um a berbery scarf represents a perfect intersection of history science and art um so I personally don't really have any history or art but I know a little bit about science so I thought that I could you know fudge the other two um so uh uh bbery the company has existed for over a century the founder Thomas berbery uh invented gabardine a waterproof fabric which is still appreciated today and their

trademark check pattern uh P their trademark check pattern is a monolith of graphic design so I would Define a berbery scarf as a fine thing and this would be what I would want in my video game that is the berbery scarf of video games so to run through the list a fine thing is not too hot not too cold lovely to touch beautiful to look at and wonderful to think about so um I am not however a ridiculous enough person to vocalize this mission statement while promoting video ball before it's released but uh the game's been out for8 months and I'm wondering now if maybe I should have been that ridiculous uh I'm always you know checking my Ridiculousness um so uh instead we promoted videoall as a digital sporting good product uh video ball will empower the players the players are the characters the game is a thing and uh uh I'm working on another game right now it's tell you about it later um and uh

my my mission statement just in my head that my Mantra is video games can be things and hopefully that will be my GDC talk in uh 2018 that'll be the title video games can be things look forward to it uh or you know you don't have to if you don't want to um uh okay so I got a lot of weird copywriting out of the video ball mission statement and my favorite thing is something I said here last year which is video ball has the best graphics of any game ever because video ball is a perfect one to one simulation of itself um and this this uh in addition to being a funny joke is also uh that was something I sincerely believed uh uh I I thought why not make a game like that wouldn't it be cool if there was something like that so here's how we advertised that mission statement in the trailer um and uh if you want this guy to do the your a voice in your trailer there's his email address think of video ball as a pool table think of video ball as a pingpong tape think of your television as a dinner tape and video

ball is what's for dinner video ball doesn't need fairies elves Space Marines tanks or even helicopters video ball has the best game characters ever real human beings that's right when you were born you were already a video ball character want a new costume for your video Ball Hero put a hat on buddy I mean put a real hat on your real head boom you just made DLC so I I I you know hey you know I I thought that was pretty good um it got a lot of views on YouTube uh uh most of them saying that the announcer sounded like he had a stuffed nose so body functions keep getting into uh my my PR um so uh basically in keeping with you put a hat on buddy message we made hundreds of shirts many of them unique most of them

unique uh I promoted these shirts on the web and I even sold some of them up here at the podium last year at GDC um uh if anybody remembers that uh I would say Make Some Noise if you're wearing a shirt though I have surveyed the audience with my eyes and determined that that would be too much noise um so uh I actually have the last video ball shirt it is a mediumsized American Apparel you can't that's not going I'm sorry uh you're you're a robust gentleman you're you're you're tough you're stronger than me so um keep in mind that I I I I I have diabetes and I can't afford medicine so if somebody wants to pay me for this um all right so um one one of the video ball shirts was printed on a 1950s vintage french girls terry cloth uh t-shirt and I was very scared to print on this I have a collection of vintage uh European uh sweatshirts I mean cuz lots of people do um so and this this shirt ended up being the object of a bidding war and highest bid and this is a call back uh it was

$400 um and the bidder was a person I actively dislike so I did not sell however pleased with its having obtained a $400 bid uh I felt comfortable selling it for $50 to a wonderful couple from Belgium um because I like Belgium and uh also because they' promised me that they would do something good with it so months later they sent me a couple of photographs um so upon seeing this photo I realized that in fact my first daily mistake my entire life had always been not knowing that a statue of jeanclaude vanam as he appears in the 1988 film Blood Sport literally stands in a park somewhere in Belgium uh but despite Jean claude's best efforts it was already too late video ball had cost me all of my money and uh when the game shipped I was broke I could not afford to spend even a daily hour promoting it so by now you may be

thinking how can a game with a $400 t-shirt on a jeanclaude vanam statue in a park in Belgium be considered a failure well I'm glad you asked because strictly speaking it's not because that rules uh video ball is not a failure because it is my favorite game uh however on the other hand I have literally five broken teeth in my mouth uh and I I dared to have a dental checkup last month and the dentist's words were and I quote you've got a lot going on in here that's not even a joke uh so put put put bluntly video ball is a failure because we spent too much time and our message was weak okay so and uh let's let's get into what I mean by too much time uh and uh week so Thanksgiving weekend 2013 we

played video ball for more or less 20 consecutive hours so video ball was Perfect 2 years before we released it and I can't prove this uh to you because I don't have two hours to talk but uh so I did give a two-hour lecture about why video ball is there's a couple people who were at that lecture um uh so black Sunday 2013 so two years before we released video ball uh some friends and I gathered in my house in Oakland California for what we called the first annual Little Caesars High hot and ready Bowl uh because we're idiots and because I may be wanted to die we bought four Little Caesars hot and ready cheese pizzas this was back when they were only $5 now they're $6 this economy huh uh so uh uh we had among us we had over 2,000 hours of video ball experience in the room we played a long tournaments on a grand scale so this is a very prototype looking video ball that we were playing with this was during the game design process that aforementioned scientific process um so we played a long

tournament on a grand scale so here's a clip of the final round um you're going to hear a cacophony of voices uh shouting bizarre phrases um I realized today that any game able to provoke this reaction in my friends despite its flaws should have been released as immediately as possible instead of us taking extra years to polish it instead we perpetrated a cataclysmic waste of time baby so here's the I mean the game looks like nonsense but listen to these people screaming there's a part uh RSE that no yeah yeah Ryan there's like 12 people in this room somehow there was still two slices of pizza left at this point oh what oh what no yes we're back in this we are back in there we go you're back sort of out [Music] now oh no oh God God yes oh god

oh yes eat it yeah eat it I will kill everyone get it out I'll trible this one taking this down F field Sal get these kids out of my neighborhood help T down bam boom go finish it finish I can't you help boom yeah no I got it yeah keep him dizzy try and go baby come on yeah get it in get in die you no go Jim come on man no God oh God it hurts this a little longer than no M

go no M you stupid piece of trash y oh my God okay uh so [Applause] so I I look at that and it's like compared to if if the sound were off I would be like man yeah this game sucks like uh and that's you know what I thought then I'm like oh there's a whole lot of stuff I want to do with this game and you I would just forget about that the next day immediately after resuming work on the game I would forget for some reason what's wrong with me I would completely forget that those people had that much fun playing that game uh so we should have released it pretty much right away so that's what I want to talk about real quick here uh we should have released the game simp simp and differently so let's talk about simpler

and differently so here's why we didn't release it simple and different um so the terrifying screams the video ball prototyped cause were so voluminous as to attract a publisher so I signed with the publisher because they offered money and uh I like that uh uh the money would be enough for myself Brent Porter and Michael Kerwin my uh my my partners uh to concentrate on finishing the game uh it didn't seem impossible it was a game we wanted to make anyway uh I hated the contract work that I'd been doing on the side to support the development and uh I liked the guy who was the publisher um but uh so what happened we agreed to the Publishers expectations which was simultaneous launch on PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 steam PlayStation 4 and Xbox one which is a lot of work for three people to do in 6 months uh they also expected cross-platform online multiplayer which uh quite hilariously did not happen um so um so we were now being paid to work on what we've been doing for fun so we subconsciously

divided the work into stuff we had to do such as getting it running on all the consoles and the unnecessary stuff we wanted to do such as graphical polish new options new modes new Arenas um so we' somehow decided that we were being paid just for the boring stuff which is a a really bad trap that we fell into and so we kept doing the fun work for fun and eventually we were working 16-hour days on this game uh and I I crunched some numbers and it turns out we averaged about 4 Hour $4.50 an hour for the work we were doing which is uh uh that's pretty bad uh so uh and then eventually we took so long making our game that our publisher went out of business and we we had no choice at this point we needed another publisher uh I could get into that but that's scary uh but so our friends at iron Galaxy rescued us and so we ended up releasing the game A year later um now one of the bigger problems here with the game was that our firsttime user

experience was too difficult in the wrong environment I accidentally said user and it says game right there uh I sorry about that um so uh we had we had cultivated an abstract colorcoded visual style because we found this the coldest most legible way to inform players and Spectators of the events of the game uh legibility was our primary concern which meant the game ended up with a look that I have descried described as preschool industrial uh which is uh this look here um so the first time players of video ball presumed that the game was as stupid as it looked uh and the disgusted glares I suffered from Evo attendees uh left a layer of frostbite on my brain which likely remains today that's an actual quote from a review it's basically pong made for the Millennials and I can't get enough of it I don't know Millennials are cool whatever um okay so uh we had designed our game under a strict law that it that

it was all it would be all skill no luck the players's first experience is not as important as their 1,000th and we knew that this was not a billion dollar mainstream idea we had decided with conviction that our game would not possess the immediately understandable metaphor and simplicity of a game such as Rocket League uh meanwhile the Press had decided that soccer was in fact rocket League without cars uh so we could have released our game before rocket League uh we ended up releasing after and eventually players at packs were shouting to their buddies hey look someone made 2D rocket League uh and our games I mean rocket league rules but I mean it's I mean that was people's first uh I don't know I cried uh so so it was that first timers pressed one button over and over firing dinky little triangles barely pushing balls or they' Ram into the I actually was was uh I was going to show you a video on YouTube but it's all messed up

um so uh or they'd Ram into the ball repeatedly and drop the controller and anger when nothing happened and uh some people didn't even realize the circles were balls and uh those who did would recommend hey maybe the ball should move when you touch it you know like in rocket League um and uh you know again I was like I've done science here man uh so video ball requires four players to optimally enjoy and so at game conventions people don't tend to be walking around with three friends and they also I mean that's not not a dis or anything I mean that's just what I noticed and they also are surprisingly not always in the mood to get into screaming fits with three total strangers uh and if just one player understands the rules of this game uh and plays well the other three players feel terrible uh and I noticed this a lot so video ball requires cooperation and observation and uh if there's just one player of the four who's good uh most players are not willing to observe and learn from the behaviors of total strangers in the presence of an expert

uh so no matter how hard a guy wearing a Notre Dame football jacket uh uh over a uh a dress screams at them this is me that was me at aack 2014 that was Christine Love's uh dress that she loaned me um so uh number seven we put too much stuff into the game uh uh so in our two years of polishing we filled the game with a bounty of rules score variations music tracks voice announcements backgrounds line variations ball markers and 35 uh drastically different Arenas we put in in arcade mode for one or two players we put in one-on-one and three on threee local multiplayer we put in AI Bots we did all this even though we knew for certain the best experience was two on two um so when we released the game streamers and let's players were playing almost exclusively one-on-one furthermore they never touched the customization options uh our game ended up looking dinky and plain uh we knew it was actually ferocious and flamboyant when we played the game we saw the 1995 NBA Finals when let's players played the

game we saw a lone untouched field hockey ball sitting in a tray of fresh kitty litter um I swear to God we could have remade this menu if we'd had one more week and it would have been perfect to Dave Lang uh I'm not going to talk about that menu uh uh that God darn menu it there's there's like there's a very simple solution um uh so we spent much much much less than $1 million promoting video ball we spent 0 promoting video ball uh uh had we spent a million dollars uh I promise you I would not be here today I would be at the success Workshop next door and uh uh I the profits would have likely been large enough for me to buy a 1999 uh Honda Civic SI uh uh which is vastly preferable to uh the car I have now and for reference this is the car I have now uh I don't think it's safe it's a Halloween costume with wheels it's like it's like what if dra were a cop uh if you ever see this car driving up out of a lake I pushed it in there and it's

coming back for me um so I I had uh five five conversations with Venture capitalists uh which I drove this car to all those meetings uh who said they wanted to invest in video ball and none of them invested in video ball maybe I didn't give them a pitch that was any good at all um my plan hadn't been good enough and hindsight being what it is I now kind of do have a plan which you know it's a little late but uh so here's the lessons we learned real quick the most important lesson is that our game is great we can make great games uh and I I love this God darn game man uh so it is amazingly easy to lose confidence in yourself when you're tooling around alone in the dark with the minutia of a game which is meant for four live Human players uh despite my many experiences with a living room full of friends screaming in ecstasy ecstasy I could not help feeling and inadequacy which drove me to implement too many modes and too much stuff uh we didn't need all that stuff because video ball is great uh the other thing I learned uh game conventions are loud and stupid we

should not have taken video ball to Pax uh Pax is great for many many games but probably not ours uh I reside in the San Francisco Bay Area I could have taken the game directly to journalists streamers cool people uh colleges schools uh instead of preparing for yet another laryngitis um so uh showing video ballet packs required a lot of explanation and man that place is loud uh on day two somebody always came back bringing their friends so I could take a break while they played with their friends and then they told their friends how to play uh and this it it occurs to me now that we already had a perfect place to show the game which was the Oakland video ball Sunday club uh which I invited people to come over to my house every Sunday for about eight months while we were polishing the game and it was open to the public one week a kid uh a college student from Berkeley came uh and then the next week he brought six friends uh that's like six people you're getting on a bus to come play a game at a guy's house uh I should have taken that as a sign but you know here's a photo of some people playing video ball uh at the GDC

24 Sunday uh 2014 Sunday Club Dan tabar took that photo I love that photo um yeah so it's it's so clear to me now we should have shown the game at University sponsored events we could have taken it to events I showed it at a high school and it was way better than showing it at packs should have done more of that uh I could have uh sent us kids were asking me I call them kids cuz I don't know they're in college and I'm I'm almost 40 years old um and so I the kids were asking hey uh can I have a build of the game to play with my friends and I was like man no I I should have done it I should have sent a strip down build and let them evangelize the game for me uh I don't know I don't know man and then we went on to not even let uh online players organize so this is like the worst thing that we did our online was divided into ranked and exhibition uh and then further divided into one-onone two on two and three on three uh this was an utter waste of time and a flagrant display of idiotic hubris uh you can't just make an e Sport and ort has to happen we should have left it at two on two one Arena and made all

matches ranked by including a aaa's worth of options in our online multiplayer for our game we could not afford to advertise all we did was dilute matchmaking into Oblivion so that was a huge disaster so here's a comment from a a review this is an actual line I can't recommend video ball on the basis of its online multiplayer however because there don't seem to be too many players playing it online at this point so uh you know if you would recommend it uh there would be people uh this was like an 8.8 out of 10 like what is 8.8 I don't know so uh finally it's very clear to me that we could have made a dumber game and I use the word dumb very very affectionately uh uh I love dumb games I love the abstract nature of video ball I love its Devotion to its concept it's my favorite game that's the kind of person I am uh however maybe it should have been the professional addition of a much loopier floppier cartooner game full of vehicles

characters special weapons anime girls loadouts modes Graphics costumes hats and a robust Rog likee single player mode that's video ball X right there thanks to Dan dult for that fan art um so uh a wonderful man named Wasim Salman referenced Frank Lloyd Wright in a beautiful essay about video ball and I blushed uh however a student who had attended a two-hour lecture I gave at depal University about the scientific process of balancing video ball speeds and timings such that the average match was 3 minutes in length later sent me an email celebrating my process as one Bertrand Russell would approve of I almost passed out I know and appreciate Bertrand Russell as an expert of many occupations yet I take it this specific students comparison saw video ball as the electronic game equivalent of the fact that Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead in their book principia Mathematica famously wrote 362 Pages proving that 1 plus more equals 2 that's that's a I don't know

anybody who's ever read that book and I haven't either cuz why would you I already know that you know so uh uh basically that's a rule of thumb unless you already possess Financial Security consider any comparison between your video game and the work of Bertrand Russell to be the darkest possible Omen so can I save video ball uh well video Ball's primary concern is timelessness it runs at 300 frames per second and 8K resolution uh I mean it does uh that sounds like I promise I'm not joking uh so if our game is meant to survive intact is good design for at least a thousand years calling it a failure and giving up after 8 months is quite frankly a little bit ridiculous uh so we can we can simplify the product uh we can remove most of the menes no more Arena select leave in only the basic Arena that's video that's where video ball was born it's pong for the Millennials uh no more rules options every match is two on two three balls first of 10 no time limit we gut the matchmaking every online match is two on two three balls first to 10 no time limit every match is ranked there's a pattern here no more customization all

the visuals are all random all the time uh we make the game free uh we support it with tasteful ads uh uh we tasteful ads we always intended for video ball to be a digital sporting good product you know like a printable blank t-shirt uh so here's a version of video Ball video ball white label as we call it we've done for various clients and organizations who want their uh their own branded video ball we did this for PS uh 2016 we were the final round of the omegathon in PAX East so yeah then we can take on sponsors build an audience I don't know that if I were giving my pitch to uh those Venture capitalists a a year ago this is what I would have told them I wanted to do for the promotion uh and if Esports happens it happens and if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen so uh if you're a venture capitalist with no common sense uh and you'd like to talk to me my Twitter DMS are always open and that phone number number right there it's not fake uh so photograph this if

you must but please do not tweet my phone number uh so in closing video ball is a failure because I need insulin uh in closing video ball is not a failure because it is my favorite game and if you'd like to play it at my house on Friday night or uh Saturday afternoon or Sunday evening or if you're around next week uh my Twitter DMS are always open and that phone number right there is not fake uh please do not tweet my phone number thank [Applause] you oh and uh and uh one more one more thing uh one more thing truck heck truck [Applause] [Music] heck okay bye