The Art Direction of 'Psychonauts 2'

[Music] thank you how's everybody doing today good good um it's after two o'clock so I'm sure you guys are getting nice and sleepy so I'm hoping that I can keep you up and excited for the rest of this talk um but before we begin I have some housekeeping to cover and we'll get right into it uh similar to the game this talk also has a mental health advisory we will be covering serious topics of addiction PTSD panic attacks anxiety and delusions people may experience fear of Dentistry tight spaces or vomit and we approach these topics with lightheaded Manner and maybe stressing but we always try to approach these topics with empathy so let's begin

so welcome to the talk of the art direction of Psychonauts 2. today we'll start with some intros I'll tell you who I am and some ground rules and then we'll begin our psychedelic Journey this is not a technical talk it's about the creative Journey that our team and I went on in order to create the game that you have gotten to enjoy and this is also a dedication to the work the team and I did so feel free to ask questions at the end and we'll get into a little about a bit of that later so I'll introduce myself really quickly my name is liset to Drew Montgomery I have been an art director in the game industry for who have been doing this for 21 years I've been in leadership for over 10. um I've worked at Studios large and small large Studios like EA and Ubisoft and then small Studios like backbone and now double fine I've worked on 14 different engines across multiple genres here's some of the ship titles that I made Psychonauts 2 is also of course my

why you're all here but I've been making games for quite some time in addition to making games for the last 20 years I've also been an instructor at gamehead so I see a few of my students here thank you and so I'm very experienced at being in the classroom and so I have a few rules first rules no cell phones or phone discussions during the talk I will have the talking Turtle until QA please hold questions until the end um and there will be maybe a pop quiz and the third and most important rules that we're all here to learn and to have fun so I will start with one of the most common questions that we got during development [Music] so why did psychronous 2 take so long well there's a list of reasons and it kind of reads like a Christmas song

16 years after the first game 13 unique brain levels that all needed their own art Direction 10 years of planning seven years of development five and a half hours of cutscenes three missed deadlines to Publishers and a fake campaign so the real reason why however is that our initial production process is in our art Direction processes did not work for the gate we were actually making so just a quick recap of where the game was when I started the cafe campaign happened in 2015 and production pre-production start started shortly after and I joined double fine in August of 2017. so that meant that the game didn't really have a dedicated art director for the first two years the team had also just completed their first vertical slice or playable level and everyone felt like it was close but it wasn't quite as psychonautical as we wanted it to be

and I'll explain the term psychonautical it's a term that we use on the team to describe if whether the game itself was close and felt true to the first game and what we were trying to do in this game so something didn't feel quite right we would say it's not cyanotical or if something was really cool and trippy we would say that okay so the one of the biggest challenge I noticed at the time was that the leadership who was in place created a big Studio structure the lead designer had come from a really large studio and he was used to this Silo departments and sort of how content moved through those apartments in that way which is great for a large studio and that sort of structure works when you're having teams of three or four hundred people but not necessarily so well when you're dealing with a team of maybe 30 or 40 artists and 20 designers so there's just not they're just is it the kind of structure that works with a small team

so this is an example of uh what this structure was like when I began um essentially everyone is reporting to the lead designers below that are directors like myself where we are approving features and working with the lead designer on how things work below that are the art leads so they are the technical and craftsmanship mentors that work with our implementers and the people who actually do the work are all the way at the bottom so you can see that everyone at the bottom is just reacting to decisions but they're not necessarily participating in it and then decisions all have to be funded through the LD so that was just creating a lot of confusion attention once again this process works great when you're in a big Studio doesn't work so great when you're at a small Studio and this is an example of what the vertical slice look like when I began and it's a really great start when you look at it it feels close to being psychological but there's also a lot of visual challenges first thing is that the team is having a

really hard time figuring out how to make it easy for the player to understand where to go and how to navigate landmarks were hard to distinguish the shape language wasn't as clear and I think the worst culprit was the back wall if you literally notice the back wall and there's a static shot of that there's a lot of repeating repetitive shapes and that was just creating a wall of noise and was making it hard for the player to know what was important um and the culprit and the main couple for this was our level design process as I mentioned before we had big Studio processes so every you know content would go through design and white box then it would go to Art to update then it would go through the pipeline to VFX and foliage so that wasn't really necessarily working extremely well and you kind of see that here the kit process we were using in order to save on cost which is essentially reusing a lot of assets because we had such a small team was also leading to visual noise and lack of

identical identifiable landmarks in addition to that we just needed a new work a way to work together um a lot of the team was just frustrated the silos departments were not communicating well um people were not quite sure why decisions were made and where they were coming from and that's because they're all being funneled up through the top so over Christmas break I kind of really quickly realized we needed a new way to restructure the team if this was going to work if we were going to be able to shoot Psychonauts too and I really focused on the feedback that I got from the team over the months after I started and what they were mostly frustrated about and what they're mostly frustrated about was a lack of ownership they felt like they were just reacting to things coming from departments but they had no say in the work that they actually had to do so I rallied a team a small team of leads to sequester a small team to try out a new process and this is a reflection of that

process so what you're seeing is a core team that's driving ideas and these are the people who actually do the work here in the center and then you have directors over uh to the right lower left providing support and also support team members who are our technical experts who are additionally providing support So everybody's there to support the Strike Team and not vice versa the next thing I did to kind of get the team to work better together is start having more forms of structured meetings in play I won't get into the rules of Ido brainstorming but this is an excellent framework for putting a team together in order to um quickly ideate on ideas and I won't get into all the rules but the most important thing is yes and when you're in the middle of a brainstorm the SN rule is probably the most important it also stops the negative nancies from dominating the conversation and it focuses the team on the best ideas and having them expand on them together

I also learned a lot of other design thinking methodologies that I use in my team and I'll cover some of those later but a lot of that I learned from leading for creativity of course at Ido and with all the leadership challenges we have I think any resources we can find are great to share so what you're now looking at is the final result of changing that process this is what the Quarry looks like in the shipping game and this wouldn't have been possible without restructuring the team and trust me this is the last of the processy stuff but what you played in the game today would not be possible without this change and I think it's important for people who are art directors and leaders to understand you have to structure your team around how your team works and the culture of your studio and not necessarily what may have worked at a larger Studio or what worked at what you did before so and what's also extremely the most important is transferring ownership to your implementers and also making sure that you're there

for them and providing proper support um and it's also and the most vital is trying to change your team culture so that the people with the best ideas um aren't coming from the loudest people in the room and I think that was one of the challenge that we were also having so with this new process and a new way to work and some you know proven results we needed to start on rebooting the rest of the game and we started with labados a labyrinth so we knew we were probably getting closer to being able to make the game we want but we needed to actually finish an entire level and we also knew that E3 2019 was coming up fast and marketing and our partners wanted to have a playable demo on site so we had less than three months to make a demo we had a new process that we just kind of started figuring out and we needed to figure out how we were going to get to E3 while we were running out

of time so I'll do a quick update of what bottles level is like so you understand what you're watching because our game is a little weird um so Lovato's level is um starts in a mundane office building and the mission starts with Raz Lily Sasha Mia and coach on a mission to figure out who Dr lobato is Dr balo's bosses so they've created this construct of a mundane office in order to trick Dr lobato into signing a vacation form for winning an employee of the ear award but Dr lobato quickly realizes that there is a trick going on in his mind and begins to set traps and so this mundane office building turns into a disgusting Dental hell that you have to try to escape no spoilers there um so we quickly got to brainstorming

with our new process and one of the things that I would like to do with my teams when we're first starting on levels is coming up some brainstorms and doing some Target art and the target art are just pieces that kind of say this is the weird experience we can have but it's not tied to anything we're actually going to be doing this is just a vision setting piece so a really talented artist John uh Gigi I'll just use her real nickname um we created these really talented fully formed visions of what some of the weird things and spaces we could do with this weird concept of office building and dental hell so these images really kind of told us we were on a right journey and a path of what we could do with some of these spaces and we were able to verify that really quickly with some brainstorms and exercises in addition to working out the general theme of the level we started to dig into what you're actually doing so we knew that the lobato level and the E3 2019 demo were also going to be our

tutorial level and at this point because we had two years of development under our belt most of our powers were somewhat figured out but not refined so we knew what you were going to be doing at the beginning of the game and what power sent Raz was going to have so we needed to think about ways to use those powers in unique ways and to create some danger rooms for power learning and tutorials so because of the weird Concepts in our game we had to really think about how we can identify what is decayable what is powerable what can you use your powers on because every single level looks different in what is a a proper Hazard is going to be a completely different object in the next brain so we use these Concepts to illustrate how we can use raz's powers within spatial Concepts so you see some of these really great ideas that came through the final game particularly you know the TK puzzle which I'll get into a little bit later

and then the side blast room that long walk up the executive table came directly from this really quick you know thumbnail and so you're starting to see how the integration of design and art really started to shape the gameplay spaces that we were creating another great way we helped support design was to do quick mock-ups of what puzzle spaces could look like I think one of the most challenging things about spatial design in puzzle with puzzles is figuring out what the solution is and not just that figuring out the various things a player may not or do wrong in order to find that solution so we use a lot of really quick sketches in order to visual problem solve that didn't require us to constantly change our environment art to react to those changes [Music] an example of us helping problem solve the final result of coaches TK puzzle finally great job following orders private you go on ahead I'll take up the rear guy

so what we ended up having with these new processes and then this new way to work was a really strong final result lobato was our first level that we rebooted and the E3 demo just had an amazing result we got a lot of awards and a lot of press and so we knew that what we were doing was right and we had to now go back and redo a good chunk of the game but all of this work is worth it there were some downsides the art was a bit more bespoke costs a little bit more time um but it paid off in overall improvements and team morale finally started to increase so now let's fast forward to one of the last levels we worked on which is Bob's bottles I think it's one of the last ones we worked on because it was the hardest subject matter we had to cover and the subject matter was alcohol

addiction um our main subject Bob zanato we find him in a very sad State and we had to explain why and this is not the type of thing you want to actually experience sometimes when you're playing a game is usually escapism but this story was so Central to what happened to the Psychonauts in this game that we had to explore it it also is Central to why Bob's mental words were so sad so there was really no way around it so for quick synopsis of what happens in Bob's bottles um you essentially uh start um finding Bob inside of a greenhouse and he's essentially drinking himself and feeding his plants and when he answers he doesn't want you there but the plants quickly realize that you're there to help him and they help you enter his brain and once you're inside of his mind you find him on a tiny Island kind of isolated by himself and he knows that there's these memories out

in the world that he needs to collect that he's cast off in order to help himself so you and Bob go on a mission in order to find these memory seeds and to help heal Bob's pain so our first bottle we had the taco was Tia's bottle and tia is Bob's mom and so we needed a way to tell Bob's story about his mother because it's sort of the origin story of where his addiction came from so our first Explorations were really focused on the theme of alcohol so there's a lot of bottles and tropical drinks and you know champagne fountains and some of this stuff actually worked and landed and then some of it felt a little I don't know too celebratory so we really started to explore what this world could look like but trying to figure out our way so this is an example of one of our first prototypes

um this is a environment level by Jeremy French she's one of our talented environment artists and you're also seeing the first expressions of what Bob's bottles looks like you see the water bubble which is one of the main mechanics that we use to kind of move Raz and keep him dry In This Very alcohol soaked space you're also seeing these floating bottles like the alcohol elements are really obvious you know The Primitives are alcohol themed the platforms are floating orange slices so you get that there's there's a there there but it just doesn't really reflecting what is happening to Bob um in addition it just felt like the kit process here again was just not working um and then on top of that uh it just didn't feel like we were being reverent to what was happening to Bob this is a serious topic and it just felt like we were kind of brushing over it um before I get into that um so we struggled with Bob for a little

bit and then I had kind of an epiphany moment while it was out dancing it's a thing that I do to kind of Disconnect and reconnect in my soul and the lyrics to this song hit me and that was when I kind of knew what we needed to do so I'll let the lyrics play and we won't listen to the whole song [Music] this is the explicit version [Music] sit down [Music] some people living their life expectations [Music]

[Music] so the thing about this song that really struck me was that it sounds like a Club Banger you think you're having a good time in your partying but when you really listen to the lyrics it's a person's story of alcoholism and drinking to fit in and that was actually what was happening to Bob and that was what we were trying to do we were trying to create this fun experience but tell a sad story so I started really thinking how we were using the themes of alcoholism in the level and so we started really exploring how we can use environmental storytelling to say and experience what happened to Bob and his memories and also to find a way to move the player through 3D space

so in one of our initial brainstorms for Boss bottles we came up with this really great idea since we knew you had to visit his mother and similar to Bob he would spend his time she would spend her time in the greenhouse drinking so we needed some way for you to kind of have these moments of interacting with her even though she's not necessarily present in your memories and also how we can tell the story of how her condition deteriorated so we came up with the idea of this recursive kitchen um there we have this really great relative gravity mechanic and so we wanted to use that mechanic in this space and also find some way to tell Bob's story without necessarily having to see her suffer so when you're in the kitchen you start to see as you progress through the level you start to begin to see this vegetation take over the kitchen and the vegetation represents the greenhouse where she would drink and also were Bob drinks so it's sort of oily subtle way of saying her mental state is starting

to deteriorate we also wanted to show ways of what happened to her without necessarily having to show you know something violent and unsettling because this is really about Bob's memories of his mom not the tragic exactly what happened moment so we wanted something very tasteful and it waited to sort of what happened to her as a result of her addiction so this is a quick really first pass play through one of our kitchens this is Kitchen number two and the first one is pristine but this one really shows you the various details that we were starting to play around with as you progress through the kitchens the dishes pile up higher the greenhouse takes over the space becomes a little bit more relative gravity so what we're really trying to do in addition to telling Bob's story through audio cues you know he's running through the kitchen calling out for his mother and noticing things about something being wrong um that we were able to kind of tell this really sad story in a subtle way without

necessarily having to point to all of the alcohol bottles and the obvious problems and this is a final result for so long this is when Greenhouse has taken over this is our environment artist Nick Maxim doing so voiceover so you can see the greenhouse is fully taken over toward the end you see these red bottles kind of pointing to her fate and then you find her uh you find out her fate once you enter the drain and find her memory seed so we were able to find a way to tell that story but we had another challenging story to tell and this one was the helmet bottle and helmet is a character who's also one of the Psychonauts who is sort of a central figure in this story for Psychonauts too um helmet passed away in the battle against miligula and that fissure really broke the Psychonauts um so helmet was a very important story

and he was also Bob's love of his life and so his loss of helmet was a pivotal moment and why he is the way he is foreign so when we started working on Bob's bottles the design team had a really strong idea which is that there was going to be this landmark in the distance that you had to ascend to and we like that idea because so much of Psychonauts ended up being very flat or you were kind of going down and around but there wasn't a lot of going up so we like the idea of ascending but we didn't know what we were actually ascending to we know that most of the levels start in a swamp and then they change but we were quite sure where we were going but because we knew this was about helmet and it was a love of his life we quickly settled on the idea of the level being a wedding cake a collapsed wedding cake so I came up with some Concepts and mood Boards of water collapse wedding cake could look like in addition to some feedback from our artists to see if how

this surfacing could work for the level how we could theme the cake so it isn't all you know sweet cotton candy and cherries I mean this is a really sad story and we needed to figure out what was going to be at the top of this cake you know we weren't quite sure what was going to be there at that time we just knew you wanted to get to something and there were various ideas like a sword or a Viking helmet because that's what helped you know helmet wore but it didn't really feel relevant to what Bob was missing and Desiring so I really looked at who home it was and what he looked like and in the game he's this really bright and colorful character in his level um but it didn't feel like that's how Bob would remember him that's his Bob is his long-lost lover um and um because you know helmet always wore this Viking hat I imagine he had this very idealized vision of what helmet looked like and so I dig through some old Concepts that Scott Campbell did and I found these really great this really

great sketch over here to the left of you know shirtless Viking Bob in and I thought that that would be the ideal version of Bob to create at the top of this cake foreign we have this really great cake and then you ascend as you realize that this is the moment that Bob you know always wanted he wanted to ask him to marry him until you reach the top and then things get very sad so we know where we're going we finally figured out what the topper was we knew we were making a cake but wow how are you gonna get to the top so we started doing sketches on what the various tears of the cake could look like and we started theming those around what you do at a wedding so uh we were thinking of like you know there's a candy table there's uh you know the dollar dance and the you know bride and the you know groom's dance but

we weren't quite sure what we were gonna do with the space and then we talked with our combat designer Lauren Scott and I quickly realized we needed a place for a fight and I couldn't think of a better place for a fight at a wedding than the reception so this is the reception area that we created um and you can see the continued Ascent up to the Bob topper but we were able to create a fun space where you could throw chairs and and knock over dishes and beat up the DJ so it wasn't a really fun way to express a wedding in addition to creating and understanding space is there a lot of mechanical things we have to figure out when we had wall jumps and we were trying to figure out how do you all jump against a cake so this is a really quick concept we did on how you could possibly use cake as a wall jump object and we also had to figure out how you were going to get to from the bottom of

the cake which is the swap to the next tier which takes you from the swing to the reception area and one of the challenge we had was we didn't want to make this a large level this is one of the last levels we had to make and we still had bosses to finish like we can't spend six months on this so we need to figure out some quick way to get you to the top of the cake so one of the great things about our new process was that one of the ways we kind of worked out ideation quickly was that we would do quick prototypes with design so they would do quick prototypes on mechanics and we would try to figure out what art would do to support that and sometimes those prototypes ended up in the game a lot of them did not one of the prototypes that I really enjoyed was in the it was supposed to be a large tree inside of the QA and early on those the inside of that tree got cut and so the prototype for that got cut as well so it was just kind of laying around for years and not being used and our lead designer Seth Marinello

undug it and he came up with an Innovative way to get us to the top of the cake [Music] before so we he created a mechanical space where there's essentially a euclidean design you can get you know this memory seed prompts you to enter But essentially it's a an unending recurring tunnel and it was a very interesting way to one get you through the layers of the cake and to get you to transport you anywhere that we needed you to go so if it turned out to be a really great way to visualize the inside of our cake [Music] and this is the final look so you're seeing the cake layers I will use the icing as a marker to make sure you knew what direction you were going wait no I want that and of course the emergency is still driving you through there's some string lights to kind of drive you wait a

minute and you also notice that the cake layers I don't know foreign so the cake layers really helped sort of Orient the player so if you know if you're going too far forward or too far back because the cake layers would change so it was a really great Shader that our VFX team made in order to really sell that you were inside of this large collapsing crumpled cake and so this really great results came together for Bob even though it was one of our hardest levels to tell the story of um and I think it's also one of our best levels um we have a Wilder and wackier things but from a vision and look standpoint we have some of the like widest range of looks one of my favorite is I love the look of the kitchen um and it just really tells the story What's Happening Here really well and I also just love the underground underwater areas like I would just sit in those spaces

um with the engine game engine on and just enjoy being there so I think boss bottles really came together we found a way to tell a story about helmet that was very human and focused on the challenges of addiction but not necessarily disrespectful to the topics and it turned out to be I think one of our stronger levels thematically so now that we've gone through all the brains that we needed to do the last hurdle we had to get through was boss fights and bossaway fights were on the chopping block for getting cut for quite some time because we were just constantly trying to deal with funding and time because that's what happens when you make games so boss art jams were a quick way that we put our ideas together in order to execute on five bosses and maybe six to eight months which is insane usually when boss takes five months but we needed to form multiple strike teams so we could hit our ship

date so one of the ways that I did that was doing a art jam session with the artists so our jams is something that double fine had done previously it's just sort of a casual way for them to hang out they would meet we would meet at lunch you would come up with a theme and the artist would just draw something for fun it was just a regular thing they did occasionally they would do that when they're kicking off a game but it wasn't just something we did constantly so people are having so much fun in that meeting and you know at this point everyone was kind of burnt out after two years of levels um and the bosses were kind of the last hurl so I wanted to come up with a fun way for the team to interact with one another again so we leveraged all the talent and focus of the artists in the studio on a big game Jam or not game Jam but boss jam session that we call the Boss Blitz and we would tackle one boss at a time and so that format really helped us sort of come up with these really strong ideas for what our boss encounters could look like

one of the best and the first art jams we did was for hollis's level hollis's hot streak um so there are some things we knew about the boss but we just had a really hard time nailing what she looked like throughout the development so we knew that she had to be an octopus um because the hotel you go to in the first mission is octopus shaped and we also established that for Hollis her addiction takes the form of an octopus um so we knew that that language needed to be there but what the octopus did and what attacks she had kept changing over time and what you're seeing here is this random collection of all the weird things we thought we could do with the boss and a lot of this fluctuation happened because we were constantly changing the power it was probably one of the last Powers they nailed the mechanics on so it just sort of led to some challenging results for our designs um you're seeing the loctopus hotel here on the left one of the you know fun

weird designs we had were very early on based on the mental connection mechanic at that time was that she would be a computerized Beast um and that was because at the time mental connection operated like mental Taffy but you could also use it to string electrical charges together it just it was a it was a unique experience of using mental connection but it was confusing because you could do something positive with the same power and then have it be punitive so it just didn't really land so he abandoned that and then we started you know let the power kind of settle and as the story changed so did Lucky's look so these are all the various ways we tried to express lucky but they just weren't really hitting but now with the power Saddles we felt it was a good time to revisit it so we kicked off a new jam and I'll just give you some quick updates of what you should do to prepare for in our gym and these are really effective sessions especially if you can bring people from

your team or who are not on your team to them to help kind of shake the team up in some of their ideas so the first thing you do with our Jam you do need a little bit of preparation and that is to remind people of the mission that they're on and you give information about where they're going here's an example of one of the decks we use to get people prepared to enter Hollis is mine and what they're going to experience there's also information about where you're going to have this battle this is a concept from Peter Chan he very early on he did this concept and we like the idea of this kind of room that was made of playing cards that would kind of fall apart if you had a fight or a battle or would react to what's happening so we kind of knew what space we wanted but not exactly how we're going to use it um we also wanted to update people on who else is in the fight um the interns are in this fight and so we wanted people to think of ways to find the interns and use them in this hide and outside of the battle

um with uh with our boss and with Raz and if less is not fine um not a last but not least you also want to remind them of the mechanics um a lot of the bosses behaviors and look are going to be changed by their tax so we wanted to also let the player know like these are the this is the main power you want you to use you can use others but we want your attacks to focus on this one so these are the results for some of those jams and if you look closely you can see how some of these ideas ended up in the final game this is a quick concept sketches done by Nathan Bagel Stapley and these are quick ideations on what the form of the octopus could take but most importantly how she could work within play space and I thought this was a really great little sketch over here on the bottom right because that became a very clear way to help us solve a different problem we were having with the octopus

one of the biggest challenge we also have luck to put was her scale um we know we wanted her to be gigantic she has this big symbolism of addiction so our gambling addiction so we know she had to have a large scale and she was a boss so she needed to be foreboding but the challenge is that lucky had eight limbs she's an octopus and that is a nightmare for an animator to have to animate a character a creature with eight unique tentacles so our team got together and really started thinking about how can we use Lucky's form in a unique way and also create some cool and unique attacks so once we started brainstorming about what we could do with tentacles a very fun idea started to emerge so we knew that we wanted the room that you started the boss battle into break apart but we didn't know quite how and we also knew we didn't want to animate a unique tentacles so we needed to come up with a unique way for the boss to present himself and attack

and so Chris Clem did these really great concepts of how the lucky could work in the space and what Ras could do and you start to see that the tentacles are taking the form of a room on the left and then on the right now we're seeing some ideas of the tentacles are actually just independent elements as well and sort of take on the form of the room that is breaking apart and thankfully having the artists and the animators involved particularly the animator helped us brainstorm attacks that worked for animation and didn't create too much of a scope creep so what you're seeing here is the final example of some of the sketches that actually ended up in the game particularly card pass over there in the upper left and the defibrillator on the upper right both of those attacks are in the final game and that came from these really quick art jams it just sort of invigorated the team and we quickly threw prototypes together based on these sketches so now that we knew what lucky needed to

do and what attacks she was going to have the final thing was to finally go back and finish her design so we went back to Scott Campbell and we wanted to revisit one of their first ideas for lucky and we really liked the idea of her being made of a neon sign that was like one of the first things we thought and Levi sketched out and so we wanted to revisit that but in a new form design also thought it would be a really great idea to use her body as a way to give feedback so her light States changed based on and she's taking damage or attacks or if she's upset and then you see the design for you know the push design of the tentacles and what they could work and look like my favorite little detail is the little cuffly cuff at the ends you know because she's a little poker player so those little details all finally came together and we knew who our boss was going to be in addition to finalizing the look of the design we started doing prototypes and this is a quick example of a prototype that Chris clam did to prove

that we could get the technical to work as an attack element um and that was sort of like the the final um confirmation we needed that we just needed to move forward in and finalize this boss fight I made some bad connections in your mind and this is the final moment yeah the reveal moment that's in the action and now [Music] [Music] thank you foreign who are you calling a bad idea [Music] I am the sweetest of dreams the spirit of unbeatable optimism I am the ultimate victory of Hope over mathematics

I am the lady lucktopus but you can call me lucky so lucky really came together well through this process so art jams are really great tool you can use with your team it gives the artist something fun to do especially if they're not on your team and they just want to get away from their projects they can solve somebody else's problems it's also a really great way to give the team themselves just a wealth of ideas to pull from if they get stuck um and it just turned out to be a fun process that I'm definitely going to be using moving forward so that is the end of the talk I like to share with you this real um of all the beautiful places that we've made in Psychonauts and then it's just been an honor and achievement to work on a game of the scale and quality with such a small team there are only 73 people on this in the

studio at Double fine large Studios have three 400 people so it's just really an achievement that we were able to create such a fun and unique experience well this is a varied and just breadth of beautiful style I mean this was a unique project to work on to have 13 brain levels that all need to be art directed differently was an insane challenge but I think that it paid off to just a beautiful player experience that you're seeing here so I just want to say a great thank you to the team at Double fine and we can move on to q a [Applause] foreign have any questions

um quick note just like the game uh there is a mental health advisory so we are discussing sensitive topics so um please handle them with care and empathy hi so this is of a comment for admiration so I just want to thank you very much for being in this space um you actually gave me so much agency to be in this career and grow in this career so thank you so so much I don't have any questions for you just just a big big thank you for appreciation thank you um so I want to start out by saying that you did such an excellent job of making lobato's level really gross like um I hate teeth I I can't do teeth but I wanted to play this game so bad that I

literally some parts of labata's little I literally had to close my eyes so yeah that's it was awful thank you um but my question my question was um the figments are such a a big part of Psychonauts and especially even more so than the first game these figments are so unique to each level and do are such a part of that storytelling um that really helps tell the story of what's going on there but also um the fundraising campaign I know one level of rewards was backers were able to design their own figments and put those in the game and that was a reward so I really wanted to know how you compromise the figments as a storytelling element that were unique and important to the level with the backers ideas and their that system yeah we had um well the figments have always been a really special thing as you mentioned to the game um and it was extremely

important to Tim that we make them as unique and built into the space as possible so for the backers what we ended up doing was getting requests from them or what they wanted their figment to be and we tried to find spaces that made sense visually for them I mean some of them are like cat butts so I don't know what you're gonna do with the cat but but the rest of them maybe were a little bit more physical so we tried to find thematic places where they worked just a follow-up were there any that you were absolutely just couldn't find a place for um no I don't think so I mean our worlds are so wacky and varied we found a place for everything thank you so much hello hi Elizabeth uh I'm yusa and I work at EA and I had a pleasure of working with you all many many years ago and I'm still there after you left yeah you had really colorful career and the last two places are this one as an art

director and the one before was uh um art manager at Ubisoft um how would you describe the differences between art manager and art director and what made you come back to Art Direction yes um I think that depends from Studio to Studio but if I was going to give you like a high level difference um art management focuses on scheduling and the staff for art direction is more focused on the visual design and what you're making but as Studio like double fine it's really two jobs so I was doing a little bit of both um at a studio like um Ubisoft I was also doing a little bit of both so it's one of those like twofer jobs you're going to be honest um or you do end up doing a little bit of both but some Studios have just dedicated art directors and that's all of it do um so ideally if you're working on a bike project or a big Studio the two jobs are separated where the art manager works with the art director I have one more question

um double fine has people who's been there forever so I know that a lot of people are very close to each other they know each other how was it to come to that kind of environment when um you are coming from outside well I think you do what you should do when you're in a space that is not yours and that is you learn and you listen and you get to know people and so that's the first thing I did I didn't come in trying to control I just kind of came in to understand what was happening and how I could help and I think that that was why I had a warm recession at Double fine great thank you next question hi um I was just quickly asking um if there was any problems you had in making this game feel like a continuation of the last uh yes at times I think at the beginning of the project we were struggling to find our way I think the concepts were really wild but they didn't feel like they had a context to the characters for

example like there was an idea of making a macaroni level at the beginning um where you know you're just kind of going through a block of mac and cheese but we didn't know where that would fit with the story um Bob's bottles for example was actually like a inside of a Bonsai topiary at first because he was in his Greenhouse but there was just a lot of challenges with the space so for us it really has to be the marriage of story and environments that I think where we know we're kind of hitting something that was going to work thank you next question hi you talked a lot about trying to keep the tone of the game with the themes that you're going for and trying to balance that in a sensitive way how did you find coming to that was there a sort of core value that you kept trying to stick to or was it a sort of as it as the problem sort of came up like you said with the bottles

um level so I think there's like some tenants that we all kind of followed pillars were designed um I think one of the things we kind of always look for was whether something was psychonautical we talked about that a little earlier for me artistically I was always looking for what I consider the signatures of psychonaut style the first thing is wonk where nothing is exactly the same size things are always askewed nothing is you know perfect angles and that's a you know style that came from the first game and we needed to make sure that was present in this game because it's kind of central to why the environments and levels feel very dreamlike it's just everything is kind of all killed off kilter so things didn't kind of have that off kilters you know psychedelic kind of feel to them we immediately knew they were a little bit off in addition to that tons of great storytellers so if we had a strong story we kind of had more meat to work with rather than some of the concepts that

were a little bit more challenging and third I think we had some really great Concepts artists on the team that helped us find that Vision quickly one of the key members of the first game was Peter Chan and Peter Chan did a lot of the environment on Psychonauts one and while he wasn't a full-time or you know barely a member on the team he did come in at times in the beginning to help us do these really high level art pieces if you've ever seen Peter Chancellor it's insane and he only works in pencil I've never seen anybody like him um so he'll take these really odd things that Tim would give him and he you would just come up with these like pencil drawing sketches and so those really early high high level just conceptual drawings I think really told us whether we were hitting something or not and when they felt cool we just kind of kept pursuing so that yes and the thing we were talking about earlier I have a another question about figments uh more so about the process in how they

ended up where they end up in the game a lot of it feels that an artist was in there drawing that directly into that spot in the scene however uh there seems to be a lot of placement where it feels like a designer is you know this is a breadcrumb approach or this is a find the missing thing uh for example one figment was a missing uh slot machine in this spot so they remove it from the environment so I guess my question is what is that process like is it going back and forth between design or do we just have sometimes an artist that goes in delete a slot machine and put a figment there I'm very curious how that works I think it's a bit more collaborative as you mentioned um we would come up with some really rough designs of what figments could look like in a space but it wasn't until we were in them that we knew what was going to work for example we have some large doorways where there are figments inside of them and we kind of use that as a way for you to know where to go forward as you mentioned the breadcrumbing so

they're also used for visual storytelling and then a mix of of kind of moving the player through or letting them know that there's something over here please go there so you are correct it was a little bit of both okay um if I may press uh which one of the question did you have a formalized process as you were going through it or was it more of a as you were reviewing it pointing at a spot and saying let's talk about figments here um I think it was a bit more of a pass that we would do toward at the end of the level like once everything was kind of in place um there was some thickness that were present just because we knew we needed them to be there for design needs and then we would do a final pass so to make sure if there's anything with storytelling that we would go through so it's a multi-phase process it was what it was necessary for design and then that second pass what was necessary for Aesthetics all right thank you next question kind of related to the previous question I'm really curious about uh how and how your concept artists collaborated with your level designers to create something as fun and

unique as this with as many iterations as it went through were there any specific points of friction that you found were kind of solved by a specific process um I would say that process was probably the thing I leaned into the most um especially with the concept team and the level teams so we always tried to make sure that the concept team was embedded with each level team so they were developing Concepts in time with those you know same Partners so we don't may not necessarily do a concept of a white bot space immediately but we will react to that and then conversely somebody will say I don't know what I'm doing here I can't even do a drawing and so we would do a drawing and try to come up with some concepts of what could happen in the space so it was really symbiotic it wasn't like a a very solid process more of a art created in reaction to necessity um I would say once I started

took a few months maybe almost a year to figure out what we needed to do for the reboot and because we were under time pressure we had to just kind of get E3 done so once we knew we were we had a good way to work and we finished the lobato level I would say that team had a really strong understanding of how to move forward and then the rest of the team had to fold in and I think that transition probably took a little bit longer to go from one Strike Team to five strike teams or four strike teams five minutes one more question uh I know that you guys are double fine interact with the um kind of with education on an individual level does double fine as a studio provide anything for educators um educate people who are Educators outside yeah like at the Collegiate level like you know do you guys have like here's here's stuff that you can use like here's some are anything like that or is that more individual based on you guys I think it's more individual I

don't think I've heard of a a formal initiative to support Educators but I do think that's something that we may be interested in um we do have all of our work archived so sharing that may actually be beneficial so you may want to reach out to uh PR which is our person um called James bafford to see thank you so much yeah all right I think that's the end of questions once again thank you for coming to the Psychonauts to talk um if you'd like to follow me or keep in contact you can use my QR code here and add me on LinkedIn thanks for coming it was really great to see friends new and old and have all of you guys Brave covid uh to come out and experience game developers conference so thank you for coming everybody [Applause] [Music] thank you