The Design Direction of 'I Expect You To Die 2'

[Music] thank you hello all thank you all for coming to the talk I'm extremely excited to be here this is the design direction of I expect you to Die 2 and I'm Francisco and I'm a principal game designer at Shell Games I was a design director for IX picture.2 and I've been at Shell for a long time now about 12 years worked on a plethora of projects but we're here to talk about I expected to die um we are currently number three top rated quest game as of February 2022 obviously extremely happy with the game with how the game turned out uh and today I'm gonna cover uh specifically the design Direction uh from a project management perspective so a little bit about I expect you to die we are a VR puzzle game six levels total and the design team that I was running was at

its largest about six people close myself but you know on average I was in charge of a team of about four game designers plus plus me and like I said this is primarily a management track talk through the lens of the design director so I'm not going to be covering puzzle design I'm not covering uh gameplay I would happily cover that in a different talk I love nerding out about puzzles but today we're going to talk about creating the schedule for the game and mostly we're going to talk about process and planning challenges and how we solve those process and planning challenges again these are specifically the design director portion of those processes you will once in a while see a slide like this one these are my key takeaways and there's another slide at the end and just so you know I will be sharing all these slides in a PDF so there's going to be a link at the end as well as on the Vault so you know feel free to take pictures but there will be a uh PDF shared at the end so no pressure there

so you know this is my first takeaway just a very simple one this is there are things I value in my teammates civility tolerance and respect you'll notice that skill isn't ranked particularly high in this list um and you know this is this is just speaking about the the type of people I like to to make games with these are the non-negotiables you know in that note these are those type of people who are part of my team who I am extremely grateful to and without home we of course could not have been able to to make the game let's get right into it let's get right into into making this game and how that went so let's start with pre-production and what we knew going in we knew we wanted a game there was six levels long and we knew what I call the size of the Box this is you know the the schedule length and the resources we had at our disposal and we were trying to to plan the game to fit in this box of course we started with pre-production that's you know where this is happening it's a very quick note about pre-production is that

because we were a sequel we did not have to dedicate pre-production time do anything like you know exploring new core mechanics or anything like that it was mostly about new ways to tell the content that we wanted to to put in the game then we had this crazy theory that we were just going to make everything sequentially we're going to make three levels and then we're going to have a separate team a separate pod making three more levels and then you know we'll have a six level game what what can go wrong and in parallel we're going to have the What's called the Metapod which is just a teamwork and all the meta features for the game once all of this is in we're going to polish it all kind of QA it all ported and we have a game so we're armed with a schedule and this is the schedule that we walked into production with let's talk about making a specific level we would split our level making into three phases nothing you know groundbreaking gear is a pre-production

and Alpha and a beta for for each level and I do want to talk about this idea of buffer I am a huge fan of planning out my projects with buffer at the end buffer is not polish buffer is a a chunk of time that you would be totally okay if it just disappeared Into The Ether something happened and just took your buffer away you would be happy so you want to plan with buffer because things will happen for this specific game we did something a little different which is instead of putting the buffer at the end we sprinkled it throughout the different level of Milestones so one week of buffer at each Milestone the theory there being that teams could reclaim the buffer if they needed it or they could Bank it for a future level if they didn't need it so what are our design goals during pre-production yeah pretty simple just plan everything this is a lot of planning and a lot of figuring out what we're making

was one main problem though for me during pre-production uh which is that I did not work on the first game I was not part of that team in any way so imagine you're me you're walking into Shell Games it's 2019 so you're physically walking into the office first day of the project and you're tasked with making a sequel and you you really didn't you did not work on the first one so you have to figure out sort of what it is that you're making i i i liken it to like imagine you sit at a restaurant and you're served a pizza and you bite into the pizza and then you're told right now you have to make a pizza so what what did I do how did I go about making this pizza what I decided to do was talk to anyone that has opinions about pizza so capital O opinions people have opinions about I expect you to die people from the first team maybe people from the studio leadership people who just are fans of the game and I started to collect what to you makes and I expect you to Die Level

I collected all this information and I put it into into you know different categories and with those categories I build what I call the master design guide so the master design guide is a 60 item checklist of things that make a level feel like an I expect you to Die Level you know if if you check all one every single one of those theoretically you have something that kind of looks and feels like an unexpected at that level right we're going back to the pizza this is um you know you would have things like you know probably have some cheese in it maybe it has tomato sauce uh it has some amount of topping so you can hold it you can bind into it and not burn your mouth right so it's not a recipe for making the level it's a list of characteristics that each one of these levels will have this is a template that I used and the key thing here is that because this is a checklist we have to decide when where we're going to check that we have everything on the list so we

settled on at the end of every milestone for every level so at the end of pre-pro end of alpha end of beta I'm sure one more time at the end of the project why not we're going to do a check against each single one of these items and everything that would weren't meeting was going to be tagged in yellow here's an example of some of the things that you could find in this document and it it spanned everything from puzzle design all the way through to accessibility considerations right so we're talking about you know things like our players invited to look around our desks getting players closer to the solution you know are people confused in any way by you know where the clues are or how we're leading them to cleverness but also accessibility considerations like can this be completely one-handed yeah Etc here's a little example there at the bottom uh of one of these questions that we weren't meeting in Alpha so we tag it yellow hopefully by the time we come in into beta and work on the on the level again um that specific item will be addressed

on the topic of accessibility this is another notable document that that we we used to plan in pre-production and the problem we're trying to solve with this one was that we historically like Shell Games have not been particularly good at accessibility especially up until 2019 when we started getting more serious about it so in an effort to combat that uh we we worked out a process with the product team at Shell that results in a list of all the accessibility considerations and design decisions and those go back to the master guide to that pizza document right this is this can be and is actually all other GDC talk so on Friday Alexis Miller and I are going to be covering um how how we use this document and how this document was created uh there's a quick peek at what the document you know part of the document looks like is this a giant list of of

about 30 35 different accessibility considerations and the goal is you want to look at these as early as possible so you can weave them into your project planning for us this meant putting it in the pizza document right putting in that in that design Master guide and again checking out every Milestone how we were doing and then everything that we weren't hitting we're tagging yellow make sure to come back later okay you all probably are familiar with game pillars there was no problem solved here we asked ourselves do we like the pillars from the first game and actually yeah no they're great we love them uh they're beautiful they have served us well and they continued to serve us well throughout development so we took the decision to not touch the pillars we're going to keep them so that was that was pre-production and armed with all this knowledge we set on to make our first two levels right the goals of this phase or just you know

let's make two levels and see where we're at see see if these levels we make kind of feel like unexpected eye level or not so we're starting we're excited and then March 2020 happens and we are not excited anymore we are all at home so I don't have to explain to any of you what happened in March 2020 we were you know in the alpha phase for both of our levels we had to go home and you know looking back in retrospect about how much time it took us to regain our footing it was about an extra four to six weeks that just disappeared Into The Ether so what does it mean it's important to the Easter well it means that all of that beautiful beautiful buffer time we had planned for the whole project we had to look forward and just chop it we we essentially were left without room for error now this put us in a way better situation than the majority of teams around the world right that were working from home at this time

they were trying to adjust because we had planned for that buffer and so this just meant that we used the buffer but we were still theoretically uh if nothing else went horribly wrong scheduled to ship at about the same time that that we were planning um something to keep in mind here is that at Shell Games we seriously as much as we can disincentivized crunch uh I don't crunch I try to get my team to Crunch the least amount to just just no crunch if you must work extra hours I would like to know so that we can find ways for you to recover those hours later and that meant that if anything else went wrong we had no room for error so the game was going to have to downsize or we were going to have to go to leadership and request more resources for the game so you know through this work from home yeah it was hard on a lot of us and you know looking back at that period I I

think that what was the most the the biggest need we had at that time was a need for stability of any kind there was so much out of our control in all of our lives that every single developer was just looking for something in this project to hold on to something they could predict and something they could control in many in many ways that reflected itself in changes to process to to try to help people regain some of that control some of that we got to write something that we got wrong and there's two big lessons to learn from that from that adjustment the first one in game development processes is that processes impact people's lives directly your developers lives so what I mean by this is you know if you imagine your game that you make your players are going to play your game using a game controller using a headset your developers when they make the game they

make it with a combination of tools and processes and these processes this is scrum this is daily meetings this is daily reviews or general reviews this is like the all the meetings all the ways in which your your team is interfacing with the game development and as a process holder if you're a director you you should be very careful about meddling with process because it has the potential to have direct impact in someone's lives or someone's emotional state to the point of like what time do they wake up how do they plan their day how do they expect their work to be reviewed and when the classic example here of getting this wrong for us is some of us when the pandemic started had a stark need for more social time and some of us had a stark need for no social time right and some of our

process changes were sort of optimizing for the team being together and supporting each other and spending more time with each other and that was just not what some of us needed the way to counter this that I would recommend is to default to involving the team in all of these decisions your dream state should be that if you're going to roll out a new process by the time you're rolling it out to the team every single person in that room that is affected by that process knows what's coming was consulted and had an opportunity to give feedback on that process so you're not really imparting any new information you are just Pretty much telling them something they already know so you know we added rattling and we part through it and eventually we ended up at what felt like two levels you know you can add to squint you kind of had to like blindfold yourself and take a bite of that pizza and be like

the cleavy pizza if I think about it really hard uh but it felt like a big success for us again these are the first levels many of us are making uh and we were calibrated to the rhythm of what we were making it really felt like the first stage of the project was completed and armed with that um with that confidence we we marched into the next stage of the project which is four more levels so let's make four more levels that's that's our goal and before we go and make these four more levels we're going to take a little bit of stock here this stage of the project the the four more levels stage is where we where we had the most impactful process adjustment I call it the great adjustment State uh or stage it is what the majority of the stock will cover and it is a period of learning from that

first figure out what we're making and getting ready for the next stage of just making everything and this adjustment period uh we framed in terms of solving some very specific problems so here's that here's the takeaway and something that you will see reflected all the way cascading through this talk is alignment on the problem to solve so what I mean by alignment on the problem to solve is try to get your team and try to get yourself as much as possible out of solution space out of solution brain solution mind uh if you are or if you if you lead them to be more problem oriented and you can get everyone to agree on the problem and first you activate their solution brain in a much better way which is not just solving whatever problem affects them but solving the general problem

let's talk about some general problems so this is a big one and it is the one that that pretty much keeps me up at night this is the the design team is hungry for more guidance but as a design director my role is to provide that Guidance with a light touch and in a way that doesn't steal from their their creative freedom and their creative agency like I said if I'm gonna be sitting at night in bed thinking I'm an imposter what have I done how did I get this job it's going to be because I'm going to be thinking back to this this specific problem like 95 of the time so let's talk about some some lessons that I learned in in providing guidance and protein creative freedom to my team the first lesson is that every single one of your teammates is a different

human and needs something different what I mean by that is not Everyone likes to take Direction in the same way not Everyone likes to to provide creativity or to be creative in the same way so there is not one solution fits all you will have to learn about the humans in your team and treat them like humans and and engage in that conversation in a way that that fits them so get to know them the second one however is avoid having too light of a touch so this one's especially useful for me because I tend to be the type of person who is more likely to to lean back and let people be creative than to give too strong of a direction however whatever becomes or what I've started to realize is that that is doing a different type of disservice to your team there is a

reason if you're the design director that you are the design director it usually has to do with experience otherwear passion or with a gift or strength that you have and not only is your team expecting that direction but they will learn from you and it will grow to be better developers by watching you provide Direction so you're doing as a service to the team and to the game by depriving them of your expertise so don't do that a big takeaway for me was to expose your decision making process as much as possible what I mean by this is presumably presumably uh when you make a decision you don't just pull it out of thin air right you you go through some process in your mind and you arrive at a conclusion and that conclusion leads you to making that decision if you can capture the process and then speak it out loud to your team you're going to do them such a favor

why well first team members tend to be stressed if they can't predict more or less what you're going to say second are you exposing your thought process your solution finding process they will get to replicate it next time when when they're putting the next thing in the game so they're going to be able to say okay uh what why what did Francisco want here last time and how can I sort of preempt that to or adopt his decision making adopt his thought process to make sure that I am successful faster next time um and then it's just going to create alignment much faster here's a quick example of you know very quickly one thing I threw together one day is we were having this giant play test and we're getting lots of data in from players lots of data and the team was getting a little stressed because they were like what are we going to do with all this data and to them I

was just making decisions randomly I was saying uh we're going to listen to that feedback and that feedback and that feedback but they didn't see any rhyme operation for or to how I was making those decisions so I put together this really quick diagram and I said right here's here's what I'm doing um if we're getting lots of data pointing in one specific Direction and that direction is low scope I'm going to take that without telling anyone I'm not going to consult anyone I'm going to say let's do it let's just save some time easy to do low hanging fruit grab it if we are not getting a lot of data on something that also happens to be high scope I'm going to Archive it you will also not hear about it I'm just going to pretend it doesn't exist and then these other two categories are going to result in meetings conversations decision making we're going to talk through all of them and this is what you can expect going forward the next week and that was a great week people people knew what to expect and it lowered stress levels uh

about all this data that was coming they didn't know what it was going to result in my next piece of advice is to again be problem focused and not solution focused and when you're giving feedback trying to focus on the problems you're trying to solve you may describe what success looks like and you could you could request the implementation of a very specific solution if you feel super strongly about it but I would I would lean on the side of giving Solutions as examples of something that might work and telling the team you may take it if you want it's there but don't feel pressured to do it here's here's an example let's say that we're making an unexpected eye level and there's a rope in the level and there's also a knife in the level and the robe is there because we want the player to pull the rope and you know raise some sort of of device by pulling the Rope however what we're finding is that players find the knife and they go rope

can cut knife I'm going to cut that rope and that's just not working it's not supported we don't let people cut that rope with our knife so I could go to the team and I could say here's what we're noticing play testers are grabbing the knife they're trying to cut the rope let's just make the robot chain call it a day ship that game or I could say here's another notes let's walk in the player's shoes for a second I am the player I'm playing the game uh I opened the I open the um the drawer I find the knife I pick up a knife uh what do I expect the player to do once they pick up a knife well generally the player will find a new tool and they will look around the level and they will say where can I use this new tool and what they're doing is they're doing looking left they're looking right they're seeing a rope and because they already had the knife they're seeing a hat there's a keyhole for my key I'm

gonna try to cut that so we need to intercept them at that moment and prevent that realization from happening I don't care how you do it we just need to prevent that realization from happening so what does success look like the player never makes a connection knife plus rope how will you address that I don't care up to you however however here's a possible solution you could consider making that rope a chain see what happens that might solve it if you don't want to take it don't take it that's fine maybe the team comes back and says you know what we're going to do we're gonna let the player Cut the Rope and I'd be like that's awesome let's do that or they might say we're gonna get rid of the knife and I would say even better if you're fewer stuff to support that's great right so so the tool that I like to use to surface these problems is this walking in the player's shoes so taking the team in a journey and asking in every step of the way you know

what is the player thinking what does a player want to do what might they do next with the knowledge they have accrued and what I've noticed is that by running reviews that way developers start also thinking that way when they're making the game and so we start having fewer and fewer issues like like this one the key all of this I think that the one takeaway that encapsulates this whole slide is this last one there are many paths to Victory this is the true Zen moment for me as a design director is when I can truly sit down and believe this what do I mean by many paths to Victory what I mean is my job as a design director is to make a great game is to find to find in the universe of possible great games that we could make they're infinite great games I just need to find one of them so what do I do I tell my team team

this is what a great game looks like we're trying to find a game that is defined by these parameters these are the boundaries that we cannot Escape you know these are some some non-negotiables you cannot cross and then it's up to you to take me to that great game however you want if you can truly truly believe that and let your team take you there you are going to be so delightfully surprised so my takeaway here is there are many paths to victory that you cannot see and if you Empower your team and take you to victory if you define the boundaries if you describe Victory and then you just guide them in that process then they're going to take you there and everyone's going to be happy maybe it's maybe it's too wishful thinking but uh but this is the Holy Grail for me of game development

world trailblazing together all right uh the next problem we had to solve was that even though I preached problem solving I have a solution oriented brain I'm just firing on all cylinders all the time Solutions Solutions Solutions Solutions so I need a way to capture those Solutions when they're when they come to me is put them somewhere so they can stop bothering me so living agenda documents uh maybe I don't know maybe everyone uses these I don't know we came up with them I feel like we would never use these before maybe maybe we're just like in in ancient times of game development here but they're just documents where anyone can drop anything at any time to be discussed at the next meeting so uh they look like this and we have a ton of recurring meetings in our in our team right we have one-on-ones every couple weeks we have design team meetings we

have director meetings every every day and the idea is that if you have a thought that is relevant to a specific person or a specific meeting you can have that thought capture that thought find the agenda put it in the agenda and forget about it if I don't do this I go insane because my brain will not stop this is a different format for the same type of document this is what we use for for director meetings and it's a little more formal it's sortable so you can you know add items with a priority and then every day when directors meet we sort by priority sort by date and just boom boom boom boom boom start talking through these topics one by one put the outcome on the notes so if anyone missed it that day they can come back in and see what they missed and then tag it as discussed and rinse and repeat so we're adding stuff to this document daily and talking about it daily the next piece of

feedback we got our next problem we wanted to solve was that we had a horrible horrible feedback process it was it was the worst let's talk about why it was the worst this is like painful to think about even so we had stakeholders I'm talking BPS like c-level Executives like the people like who will eventually sign the game and say yes this is shippable uh their feedback was coming too late in a Cadence that was unpredictable and in a format that was hard for us to parse and that was not their fault that's mostly our fault and then they weren't getting follow up on what they want and follow up on because we didn't really know what they wanted to follow up on and so we we had some really really rough meetings where where you know uh stakeholders would come to us and say hey I didn't know this was the plan I'm not on board with this plan and it was just way too late for us to do much about it and and that just felt

horrible so we had to do something about that and then we also had no Avenue for the team to give feedback or people to give feedback you know as it came up whenever they wanted and all of this is making people stressed out everyone was stressed it was they were stressed because feedback was coming late feedback givers were stressed because they were like what kind of game are these guys making it was it was just not not a great situation so so the first thing we decided to do was to say we're going to choose one person one lucky lucky person and we're going to make them the owner of the feedback this person will be in charge of solving and owning our feedback problem and so we said all right uh if that sounds like you raise your hand and everyone took a step back and I said me give it to me I want it I want this problem give it to me so so I became the

owner of the feedback and my life became this for many many months all I was doing is saying this person thinks this game is too boring all right put in this box uh this person thinks this thing's too yellow okay give it to the art director this person sayings that rinse and repeat reason repeat and I redesign our feedback processes and split them into stakeholders and everybody else so stakeholders we made a special document for them which I am super proud of and we told them please play the game every two weeks and you're going to put all your feedback everything you want please everything you want as long as you're playing every two weeks just put it on this spreadsheet just tell us your build number tell us who you are what level you're playing and write your feedback just just trouble it in there drop a law drop it all and I just ask one thing of you you can go to this high priority column the one with a little yellow star and

if you want follow-up you're gonna say yes please give me follow-up and I promise we will close the loop the other side of that coin is if you don't want follow-up you need to be okay never ever hearing about this ever again so for example you can say hmm I don't like the position of this dial on this machine I think it's not gonna work out do I need follow-up no that's fine you guys figure out what to do about it and you truly need to be okay knowing you're not gonna get followed and this work wonders for us because all of a sudden we had a clear Cadence we had a place to collect the feedback and we had assurance that someone was reading this feedback all the time very similar we created a Trello board for the whole team to drop feedback in so it looks something like this and the deal with this Trello board is that any person in the team

anyone at any time whenever they want three in the morning they woke up and they said I have the best idea in the world they can drop it in the Trello again trying to get people's brains clear people's brains when they have ideas they have a place for those ideas to live and my my promise to you if you're part of this team is that I will read every single card that goes in this Trello board so if you're not familiar with Trello boards yeah there's these columns you can make cards in the columns and then you can move the cards around the different columns so the first two columns are for anyone to put feedback whenever they want there's one columns for very important feedback someone calling for everything else then a couple times a week I will go through the board and I would grab everything in that column and again put in the in the little box right I'm going to go and I'm going to think what does this feedback want to be so

let's look at this one right here there are not enough things to eat in the elevator level we should add more bananas hmm fascinating what do I want to do about this so let's say I say yeah now this person is absolutely right more bananas so I grab it and I put it into the term into a task column and a producer later goes that and turns it into a task or let's say I think Hmm you know I um I need to talk to the level the level people about this there might be something to this but I'm not sure I'm not sure what to do here I'm going to put in a design review and we'll talk about it later uh or I might say I'm not able to do this this is not my problem right let's say this pretend this card says bananas are too yellow I think bananas should be green uh I would grab that and I would put it in the art review column and say our director this is your problem bye bye do whatever you want with this

uh the magic of this board is that it empowers anyone to give feedback at any time and by knowing that I will look at it they feel heard and they feel like they have they have a way to impact the game the best way is they're just doing my job for me they're just they're just telling me what do we need to fix so the tasks just make themselves it's great so from from engaging with feedback for so long I learned two big things the first thing may not surprise you is about problems and solutions is that people love to give feedback in solution form so you might get feedback that says something like move the key from the drawer to under the seat that's a way better place for the key and you might be tempted to look at that and say nah that's dumb and throw it away right what I what I encourage you to do is ask yourself what problem is this person trying to solve with this solution they're giving me a solution which I don't like I'm not going to do this but I do want to know

why do they want to move the key so are they telling me that the key is too easy to find right now are they telling me that the key is too hard to find right now already telling me there's too many things in the drawer or that we should put something under the chair because it's a great hiding place so if possible I'll go talk to that person and I dig a Little Deeper and if not possible and I try to try to as much as as I can reverse engineer that feedback to see where it might be coming from so think Solutions sorry don't think Solutions think problems uh the other piece of feedback is about digging deeper instead of pulling back we all receive feedback in our lives in our careers at home whatever we all receive feedback or find ourselves in situations that make us uncomfortable and not unsafe uncomfortable and tend to pull back and say oh I don't

want to engage with that because it makes me uncomfortable I would say that I have learned the most about myself by not pulling back in those situations but instead asking why does this make me uncomfortable and if I can be truly honest with myself and answer that question then I find that it leads to growth every single time one example here is we tend to get obviously a lot of puzzle feedback because you know our game has many many puzzles and I am often tempted to say no this person just doesn't understand puzzles or they don't understand this puzzle this puzzle is great this person doesn't know what they're talking about and every time I find myself thinking that I say stop pretend they do know what they're talking about or what is it about this apostle that is making me have this this reaction right and more often than not I find that it's maybe

maybe they're telling me to simplify the puzzle and I'm reticent because I want the vessel to be hard and maybe it doesn't need to be hard or maybe they're really telling me that it's not a good fit for the game and it's possible that I'm fond of but if I think about it really hard I'm like okay you know maybe actually maybe it's not a great fit for the game or maybe it is but just having that conversation with myself uh it always leads to a lot of value one more problem here um we were insane when we made the schedule this makes no sense here's what I mean we're here this is Alphas for the second set of levels and we're sitting there being like we don't even know how this game ends and we're supposed to make two full levels four full levels because we already have two we're already gonna have to go back to those two because we already changed a bunch of stuff that just just we're gonna have to change again so like this this is just unsustainable what are we going to do make these levels and finish them and then like

like call a voice actor and retrofit The Voice like this is we we we just messed up with the schedule let's go back to the drawing word uh and let's pause here and instead of going into level two and five betas let's go to the other two levels and let's just get everything to Alpha and then we can just play the whole game and just understand what we're making truly like let's make a blob and then shape it into something beautiful instead of trying to make like a beautiful arm and then be like oh no let's make a beautiful head and be like oh actually we're making a dog oh that kind of sucks I guess this dog has an arm now so uh we did that and and we reworked our whole schedule and decided to make all the alphas first just like you know a one minute part of the stock this was like the biggest decision of this all of this whole game uh and then the last one is that beta

time is short we don't have that much time for beta and as you might remember we don't have buffer anymore so we're starting to like a little sweat and be like how are we actually going to finish these levels and that was another great great problem for me to jump on because my my dirty dirty secret is that I love Solutions I I have to work really hard to think in problems being a design director means if you're just exposing the problems you're explaining why things are problems and empowering your people to solve those problems but when you get to sink your teeth on a problem it's like yes I want it I will destroy this problem so I took these levels the levels that were once they hit Alpha I would technically be like I'll be right back and I would take them to what I call my design cave I don't commune with them in silence and be like you need to be fixed level let's understand why I would come out of the my design cave which is not a literal place and I would tell the team I bring

you problems I think these are the problems and actually I thought about Solutions let's talk and so we would have a conversation about these solutions that would bring some solutions as as starting points and then we would come out of that with with a lot of tasks and this was my favorite part of the project I will admit it maybe my team is hearing me say this for the first time but uh being able to set up the team for Betas with a clear list of tasks was just awesome and you'll see why very shortly so my takeaway from that process though this is just a fancy way of saying play to your strengths you know you know your team you know the people on your team you know how much time you have you hopefully understand the problem really well so you know design solutions that fit the people that you have set yourself up for success in a way that you may be able to the way I the way

like my measure for did I do this right is when we solve the problem can we look at it and say huh how did we do that we should not have been able to do that with the time we have and if you feel like yes and also no one crunched then you can say I have used my resources in the best possible way all right so in retrospect these like past 30 minutes of this talk which only represent a little bit of the schedule where were we like had the toughest process problems to solve I call it the feedback Avalanche stage because we're just receiving receiving receiving receiving and like you know changing our processes to like shape what we were making as we were going and to set up for the next stage that is bring all the levels to Beta so you know we're emerging from alpha so we have a scheme that is fully playable uh

at Alpha level we have a task in hand which is to bring everything to fully playable state or technically shippable state and we have those documents right the documents that Define our work super well so I like I wake up one day and I make this realization oh our team is just flying our team is just extremely proficient at making these levels right now not only that our team has a well-defined task list that will take us to success and I look at the directors and I go we're about to be in trouble these these developers are going to leave us in the dust we're not going to be able to unblock them fast enough they're just working way way too fast they're getting too much done like we are if we don't step up and find a way

to support them we're going to start just becoming inefficient and so we come up with a solution which is I love the solution uh no more scrums so no more daily meetings in the morning where we all get in a room and with a virtual room and we say I did these three things and then I say I did these other three things no we're gonna have scrums we're gonna have scrums in game so I put my headset on in the morning I wake up where I make my coffee I have to drink it all and if I don't drink it yeah whatever I don't drink I put in the desk it's 10 in the morning and I maybe it's like 9 30 and I put on my headset and I share my screen and it's first team walks into the into the um review Channel and everyone says what they did that's in game right now maybe someone yeah maybe someone didn't have any in-game work that's fine uh but people who did we talk about it we review it right there so whatever you did yesterday gets reviewed in the morning the next day you get action items based on that off you go you're unblocked next part

same thing next pod same thing if anything requires a larger conversation we tag it we put in that document the VP sorry the um director living agenda the spreadsheet that we can prioritize drop it there uh and then it's 11 30. I take off my headset I'm like the sun is out I look at my coffee and it's like I still have like a half a mug of cold coffee because like I forgot I had it there because I was in VR the whole time and then we pull out that spreadsheet and we make some decisions turn some things into meetings schedule some discussions with the Developers for the afternoon and then we just keep going and the game just boom boom boom boom boom it's getting built it's taking shape it's like we are just firing on all cylinders so daily builds with daily reviews the takeaway from this is and moving that fast did take creative power away from the team in the majority of cases people were

already like they were valuing that speed over agency over creative agency but we did need to check and in some cases we did have to pull back because the cost of moving fast is you have to make fast decisions and if you want to make fast decisions so you're going to be happy with as a director you are very likely to start demanding Solutions saying you know what that's going to make this a conversation I know what this is going to make me happy just turn the Rope into a chain ship it right and those things start to add up and people start to feel like the game is sort of being taken away from them so you have to do this carefully and you have to make sure the team has you know buying in this process notable documents can anyone think from all your experience what was the document that you would say the game is moving so fast so we're making everything so quickly what's the document that will serve you the best there is none

no document exists that can hold velocity it's it's maybe we're making like one-offs here and there but it's just everything isn't going in the game there's no document that's that's worth like implementation time at this point uh we get through this we emerge on the other side we're like all right we did a thing we have a game I guess uh if you play the whole thing it's technically technically shippable um and we did end up going back to the first two to um levels and doing a little extra work there and it feels like you know we we got it done and now we're gonna make it shine so let's polish this Beast uh the goal of Polish is uh even though we could technically ship that game after beta we are not going to we wouldn't ship it uh it's not a at the Quality bar that we want to hit at Shell Games so we're going to make it consistent and we're going to make it shine and how are

we going to do that well first we're going to prioritize the Polish work and this is a game of Min maxing this is finding the things that are not acceptable I'm bringing them to acceptable and then we had this top 10 moments document where we pulled play testers we pulled the whole team and we we um we found what are the 10 moments that we think are going to be the most memorable when you take off your headset you finish the game you're going to be like oh man I really enjoyed that thing in the in the jet level where whatever happens right and that's what we're going to spend our polish our polish money we're going to again min max min max polish uh bring things that are not acceptable up to acceptable and then take the best and make it even better to create memorable moments and then the other thing I wanted to

solve was that like I mean again I I use the the metaphor of like I wake up in the middle of the night saying oh crap we're in trouble it's not a metaphor it's like legit like what happens it's that's just my brain uh I I just came into work when they convinced us like will you change so much remember we've been moving so fast right so I'm like we've changed so much we've changed so much in the past two months that surely we messed up somewhere surely there's something we didn't have time to play test so I put together this list here's a template this is like this is more like a you know 15 item list of like every change we made in this last three months that I feel like this could be risky then I would say okay how risky I'm high risky medium risky low risky right trying to try to gauge risk there a little bit um and then we unleashed all of our play tester team

on it right we got a bunch of play tester videos and then we reviewed like everyone was in those videos trying to find answers to these specific questions and we were able to get confirmation in some cases confirmation that actually we did mess up and in some other cases confirmation that in most cases that everything was okay now just for last minute peace of mind to make sure we weren't shipping something out there that like everyone's gonna get stuck on on some small thing we tweaked uh and then the last problem we had to solve was that we had what I call infinite Clarity on how to improve the game and and we we made the you know we had a realization that two more weeks two more weeks would give us like A month's worth of work not because we're gonna work those many hours but because our developers were just at this point experts right we're all Pizza chefs now

we all have we've all opened our own restaurants of uh you know Farm to Table handcrafted I don't know specialty pizza and we're just boom boom boom boom boom bumping out like delicious pizza left and right and so we did get a two-week extension and generated immense value but I will tell you those two weeks in terms of exhaustion just felt felt like like I don't know like at least a month worth of exhaustion not because we're working those extra hours but because we had to make the nine shift of oh we thought we were done but we're not um the game is essentially done at this time right this is what I call the make it great phase and all that's left after that is porting the game and a little more QA and I was mostly the one in charge of boarding I don't have a lot of lessons to impart on you on porting other than

you know find someone who is who is uh super into ux and unleash them on all the different VR controllers because they're all different beasts and and you will like Bang Your Head being like how do I like fit my control scheme to work with Vive and Oculus Quest and Playstation VR like in a game with so many inputs it's it's it's complex uh so find someone who enjoys that work and says oh complex but rewarding that's the person you want on your team all right so wrapping it up wrapping it up that was a whirlwind all right um on the bottom is original plan and then the top is our actual schedule and you'll notice that the one on the top is slightly longer not to scale and that we had that Readjustment where we did all the alphas first and then all the beta work

um I did my best to condense all the document notable documentation uh into one slide so here it is for you and I also did my best to gather all the design Direction takeaways into a different slide and um feel free to share or or you know print these and put them on your office and that's it that's that's all I got I did leave some room for questions there at the end so if you have anyone lined up for questions awesome uh and like I said you guys um can access all these slides at the URL that that's there so you know feel free to prove that at your own at your own leisure and I hope you enjoy the talk [Applause] thank you

hi um uh you mentioned getting your team to think about problems instead of solutions um did you have any challenges in getting them to kind of think in that way and open up with you I feel like sometimes it can be kind of intimidating to get a team to give you feedback in that way yeah no absolutely um something that I that I would recommend is uh I mean I don't want to use the word like enemy but like trying to find a common enemy or a common like like it's not it's not the team opening up to me about the problems is if we can align on on the goal um something that was extremely useful for me were the pillars so you know back in at the start I I shared the three pillars from the first game one of those pillars is lead them to cleverness and that is a peel a pillar that

over and over and over we're using to uncover those problems so a big part of the review when we're doing reviews was um a level reviews I'll go on the headset and I would pretend to be a player and I would say all right uh I'm going to let this level lead me to cleverness right and I would speak out loud from the player's voice and you know not being facetious or anything just like truly trying to uncover where might a player get tripped up and the questions like to ask there as are as a player what do I know right now and what am I going to do with that knowledge and do I feel like I'm being led to cleverness and if I if we feel like that's not really working then I call it out and I said right that's a problem we need to solve let's keep going let's keep reviewing so we we collect problems to solve that way um and then we can talk about what might um what might lead to some um some solutions that are okay so at that point is when I would when I would start

uh defining what is like a solution that is okay right so defining success so again if we're going back to that rope example right success for me could be that um that I never I never noticed that I may make the realization that I could cut the rope with a knife um but the true success in our game again back to that killer tends to be that I have some uh it's a moment of clever realization and if I can build toward that club that clever realization uh then I'm happy as a design director so so I tend to frame the solution that we're looking for into a solution that again taking it back to the pillars satisfy the the game pillars that we have um there we have defined um I see from what I hear there's

there's no no one in line at the moment for questions I'm gonna ask myself a question oh yeah yeah go ahead yes so um and the team feedback tracker when you have some feedback from the team and you decide to not move forward with the feedback what do you do with the ticket do you just delete it or do you come back to the team member and tell them what decision was taken or how do you handle it yeah most most often what I do is uh so we're talking we're in Trello so people add their own name to the card so I know it's coming from and Trello by default subscribes you to that card so I write um in the comments of the card what I'm going to do about it right so I might say we're not going to do anything about this because you know reasons and then I archive it so they'll get an email notification saying but you know what what my response was and they can always just come talk to me if if they feel like that that wasn't the fair not fair decision

hi um first of all I want to say thank you for the talk uh by experience most of the talks that don't fit in the first time slot that they had are great talks so in this metric it was a good one um I have a small small question that is maybe very long to answer um how do you deal with the fact that maybe the when you highlight the problem you want the team to try to solve they might come back with a solution that you know you might not deem as as efficient as another one but for them it totally is what they want to do and how do you deal with this kind of a diplomatic approach of that's not really 100 solving it even if it's about you know deleting the knife maybe you're like yeah but the knife we need it we can't keep going with these items that are you know it's always the same for example so how do you have this kind of a difference of opinion that sometimes are not resting on you know game design principles which are very solid or

now absolutely happens all the time really good question so that is likely is to happen at the start of the project when we're still trying to figure out what we're making right the the hope is that that starts to happen less and less and less if you can be eloquent about why a solution may or may not be good very often you have to say huh interesting solution let's put it in the game if it's a if it's a cheap thing to implement let's put it in the game yeah let's you want to get rid of the knife let's get rid of the knife let's play test it uh and perhaps you can even go as far as to say here's what I think is going to happen um I think blood tester is going to get tripped up for you know this specific reason and you know you you you're on a play test we run playlist every Friday so it's not super costly for us to do this and then you see what comes back there's a chance that I was wrong so there's a chance that play testers go through it and it's fine it's actually a better

thing for the game and that's great I learned something and there's also a chance that uh yep no it actually was not a good solution so what I try to do is I try to gauge can I invest in that process right now because it's a great learning process for everyone that's involved do I have the time to spend can the games bear you know if we're talking about the third fourth iteration it's time to do an in-depth review and say let's very clearly Define all these problems and before you put anything in the game you know let's bring the solution back and like poke at it really well and and trying to use a tool of walking through it in the player's shoes uh but I do I do have to consider of course every time the fact that I could be wrong so so play tests tend to be the ultimate um sort of test is that play test you do with internally with your own team members or it's like play test you you contract the third party to do

so we run all of our play tests ourselves but we do a combination of calling people into the office which we can do now because the mask mandates uh have been lifted but also a lot of our I'm still fully remote so we use usertesting.com is a platform that we use where we can do live play tests with people who own quests uh and we do them every Friday live and we run them remote okay thank you for the information yeah thank you for an excellent presentation um my question is mostly around resources and moving folks onto the project or off the project and how you navigated that I know shell has multiple projects running at the same time thank you precisely yeah this is a super complex question uh the the answer is what you just said right shell has multiple projects running at the same time and so some resources some people become available or unavailable and once

in a while you know leadership will come to us and say we have someone who's not in our project right now uh can you use their time or we'll go with a request as well of saying um hey if this person becomes available or someone with this skill set then we can take that so it's a very shell game specific solution to a problem which is like because we know how Staffing works and we're able to sort of um navigate the Staffing requests we are able to to see those down the pipe and you know let leadership know what what could be useful and they can they can help us out where they can when they can but again it's it's I'm not sure how much Lessons Learned there could be there perhaps if there's a students just like shell just because we do have you know six to ten products at any given time so there's just a lot of a lot of flux in our in our developers

sorry I have another related question to that like uh when ramping people on uh the project seemed to have a culture that was its own what were some of the challenges you ran into when moving new people onto the project and having to onboard them yeah my and this has to be the last question so just to wrap up my personal challenge for for the design director perspective tended to be around unramping with the um the vocabulary for puzzle making in virtual reality so there was a steep learning curve for not just how to make puzzles but how to make puzzles in VR for our you know our game is a little bit of a physics sandbox so that that tended to be it was less um you know most of us know each other at shells so you can sort of jump into

price and you you have a good chance of knowing unless you're new to the company of knowing a lot of people on the team so you can be adopted very quickly so it was more around the language tools the gameplay the puzzle making that that we had to have a very steep learning curve all right thank you everyone [Applause] [Music]