The GDC 2018 Micro Postmortems

[Music] hello everyone thanks for coming I'm curious by a show of hands who is who's here on a student path there's quite a few that's nice thanks for coming to the Career seminar this is the final talk of the day I plan this thing so if please rate all the talks so that we know what kinds of things you like and can bring back next year and this final talk is three post-mortems of three different types of games from three different people and we'll just get started because it'll be pretty self-explanatory with Alderman hi thinks I'm Audrey moon and so there's

definitely some contrast in our project types I'm going to be giving a post-mortem on I like very personal interactive art piece and since it's kind of a different project I'm going to go ahead and just play the quick thirty second trailer so you can get an idea of what I'll be talking about [Music] [Music] alright so the name of the project is into and so first let's start with a bit

about me so after me and I do development design and storytelling I'm kind of like a hybrid artist with a big background doing UI UX design and so coming into this project I was mostly doing it solo and experimenting with kind of like a lot of new design techniques too and also a lot of like kind of just weird coding tricks so I can just kind of quickly rehash a narrative experience then let's talk about let's see so when I started the project in two it actually came that was it was branched off from another project I had started working on that was kind of this science fiction story and it dealt a lot with about thinking about the separation of consciousness from bodies and I had

elements of body swapping and I was thinking oh is this really cool like contemplation on existence but so I thought I was having a good prototype going I took some time off of work to I was thought oh I'll spend like three to six months working on this project get a prototype together see what happens and after like two weeks of spending full-time work on this project I realized like a lot of internal troops I was like oh this story is all about how I am transgender and I'm having all these like hidden feelings inside of me that I was putting into this story that I hadn't yet dealt with so after I realized that you know kind of hit me pretty hard I wasn't ready to tackle that subject matter yet and I also had realized with the scope there were some technical things with dealing with animated characters inverse kinematics and some screen space effects that I just wanted to practice on before putting on to this giant larger project so yeah that's what brought me to this

project into or I turn my autobiography into a fictional second person surreal coming out of age dramedy and now my life is happier this was like I enjoyed in the name and it worked for me since it was just a little art project that I wasn't expecting to make money off of but it was kind of a terrible naming choice because for example its release on Itchy oh and the search engine I know just excludes the word into from searching so you cannot search it by typing in like the actual title only if you type in one of the words in the subtitle and yeah so since this project is dealing with some design and technical implementation choices on the project and it deals with a lot of like personal things I was dealing with while writing it I it's

going to be a post-mortem like a little bit on the project and a little bit of a post-mortem on this chapter of my life I'm not dead it's not like actually a post-mortem but I mean and so let's see when I was kind of forming the ideas I had ideas coming from all over the place and that I was thinking about different design and technical issues and eventually this kind of perfect storm came together of oh I need to make this project because it's kind of what I'm interested in working on now it's technically feasible for me and it's relevant to my life and one of the things that got me started with wanting to make an interactive narrative project in the form it is because I've been playing through Kentucky were zero and a couple of other things with some friends at the time and I was realizing like how awkward it is to go through dialog and click through dialogue boxes especially textual ones

with other people that like read at different speeds and then you and the same thing is kind of true with anything like Mass Effect or any other game with that let you pause for choices like they work well but really like if all you did was post the video of it and someone didn't know is from a video game and you had all these pauses and conversation options it would be kind of like why there's all these awkward pauses there's like a dramatic one when someone says something and the other character just stares blankly into their eyes while they're like thinking of four different sentences and so I was thinking about like how to design a project that isn't necessarily going to be full-time or like fully control the time like a film but in the design itself it actually accommodates it so no long no matter how long you wait it will feel like it was a natural lull in the conversation and so basically one of the solutions to that was I was like well what's what's a conversation like when

you're pausing in between every sentence you say well that may be like hard conversations or maybe awkward teenagers talking to each other and so like that was one reason why I felt like this was something there's tackle because I had this little like memory of my life that I was kind of incorporating into a fictitious story so it's semi autobiographical but basically it was like a young awkward version of me trying to have conversation with someone in fiction and I felt like well that's the perfect thing because I would might want to just sit there for like five minutes while thinking about what's say next and so with all that stuff going in my head it all started with a dream I had a dream one night where there were just these like two characters and in my head I knew who they were and I saw their bodies on each side of the screen like this and eventually they came together and merged in the middle and I

woke up in the middle of the night at like 3 or 4 a.m. and it was like I kind of figure out how to do this screen space effect because like it's exactly what I was like wanting to learn to put into my other project so I got up I fleshed this scene out and I haven't thought well this is like really cool and I ended up writing the whole and ended up being the climactic scene in the project and I wrote the rest of it to lead up to it so yeah I had to work with a multiple camera setup and death mask to get a lot of effects and the first thing I implemented was this is only part of the scene but it deals with when the characters start to reach into each other and then fade into each other and then once that was in place and I had this death mat shader going I just started putting the death mask everywhere I was like cool like I have this shader let's just see where I can put it so dialogue conversation prompts became masked out views into

just trying to get an idea of like what is on the character's mind and always kind of focusing the conversations into the characters heads and then another aspect of this was dealing with human bodies and making characters touch so I also started going through a lot of different experiments with inverse kinematics and this was one of my first attempts at hand coding the inverse kinematics obviously it kind of worked but the math was a little wrong and so then I that was from a mix of no character asset then I pulled in like the default unity kid and it was yeah it started off you've seen the top left like for some reason it kept going sideways reaching for the cylinder and also spinning and eventually I did touch was achieved and I was able to make

characters touch things and I could control their acting however it was like obviously a lot of struggle to get it to work as accomplished complexly as I wanted to you so I was looking I found this cool plugin this is one of the demos it was like hey you can make bodies interact with each other even and so I started working it's I think called fabric I K and it made it really easy to just do anything with having the characters interact with actual objects or each other and in the first scene it's actually characters in its art class together so I started putting together this whole system of like basically it initially started with a broader design where you could like dynamically have the characters draw different things in a still-life around the room and eventually it just turned - a thing worth are writing notes to each other but it was just need like I was just as soon as I figured out one way to do this i case system i was able to use it in every scene in the game and

yeah and so compiled together with the deathmatch the facts of the prompts you get this kind of situation where the clickable target is this fade-out thing when you hover over it it kind of like shrinks the thoughts together and then you get to see visuals that looks like they're actually kind of writing a note to each other but also this was my first project to do voice acting with which was fun and I wrote a screenplay which was interesting it and I got a Google Doc that had the format and it was kind of fun I don't know if a screenplay is necessary but this was a short project and it was easy to work with and it was easy to like hand the script to people is doing voice acting and like one of the important things was before making anything final I did all the voice acting just on my own on my little microphone that's on my earbud mic just because I was kind of rewriting and developing this in the script as I went

so it was important for me to not put any effort into anything that anything was final so eventually though I brought in the talented sound designer Jocelyn Reyes who did the music and the sound and also all the recording we recorded the voice acting in the closet under the stairs of the house I was living at the time Gabrielle Genevieve who's an artist here in the room was the other me so we were the both the two characters on the different halves of the scene and Lucy vataj Lulu is an artist that's currently working up in Montreal from France happened to be crashing on my couch at the time and it's her doubt you know she knew a lot about art we just I just had her ad lib what it sounds like to be an art teacher and it actually was this was a good example of like collaborating with someone bring up really unexpected twist because her outlet was like really humorous so I added a secret in the game where you could like instead of it just being muffled you could like listen to

this ridiculous rambling about like what life is and but it was kind of cool I definitely found out working with voice actors it was useful to not talk a lot about oh what is the character what happened to the character what are they thinking about because like you're recording things out of order and it doesn't necessarily matter it works a lot more to be very specific about like I want you to sound like this emotion or even like sample voice act for yourself to the actors so they get more of an idea that made a lot faster to work with and there's also kind of funny cuz with Gabriella and I we were like recording some breathing and we were in this little closet and so we got like really we're hyperventilated and it got really spaced out breathing together in this closet and but it worked out perfectly because the next thing were the two characters like lying the next thing we recorded were the two characters lying

in bed together and like having this kind of spaced out conversation so we were also like feeling kind of loopy at the time from lack of oxygen so it worked out perfectly and then it has a lot of like very careful framing of the scene and a key component in that because the camera view never showed like the full body of the characters is there's a lot of cheats that you can do the characters are always facing away from the camera and you never saw below their bust so it doesn't matter if they were like merged into each other which I guess is actually what happens in the end I just realized so that it's like foreshadowing if you go into developer view and look off screen and then um the the next up was there is a bit where the characters will turn over and you'll see their eyes look at each other but this is an example of when the character is faced away it didn't matter if it wasn't like realistic by the time the head has

turned the eyes look like they're in a natural position and this is like their default resting pose that happens all the time so if you play this project just know their eyes look like this all the time but you don't see them and so bringing all these elements together I had a lot of it was a lot of fun there's a lot of issues one was the fact that the pacing was so slow and mellow and it was just such a different project that it was all about the feel and the aesthetic and just pointing and clicking there's not like gameplay necessarily so I ended up having like design against games in a lot of ways at least in the beginning it was almost like a tutorial to open it up and there's a huge there's a long prolonged section of just music with colorful screens the show that's credits to kind of and then gradually over time opening up more and more control to the carrot to the to the player so that they'll realize more readily like oh I'm not this isn't like a first-person game where I'm like going

to be all over the place there's a very limited access constraint and so starting from a smaller place and gradually opening up to it made it like a very smooth transition and made it like I felt like people just got more out of it immediately and also in yeah I did a lot of like rewriting like I said I did all the voice acting myself to begin with like temporary poor recordings and it was interesting because as I was putting lines up into the project I was realizing it was a since it was so personal to I was realizing like oh that's kind of like a messed up way to think about myself I need to rewrite it and so I was doing this whole thing where I was like writing and designing this project but also kind of designing myself at the same time and then when bringing collaborators on it was like some of the first time to have these conversations about these things I had talked with anyone but I was like we were talking about the game we weren't talking about

me so it also like had this buffer where it was easy to have this conversation and that was like a really fortunate way to be able to design a thing and also work through these like tough feelings for myself I was able to be very carefully designed the project so it included all the words that I wanted and also releasing it was actually me publicly coming out so I was really fortunate not everyone that does come out and gets to control that message in the narrative and audience in that way and I guess I was just really scared so I had to have as much control as possible yeah so that's all Moni that's all I'll talk about for right now again I'm Audrey man and you can find me on Twitter animal phase or I'll be happy to talk to you after so after the panel

play but a play button all right thank you sorry they're like a bit of a caveman on this machine oh wow my name is Dan I'm like a contract producer designer type troubleshooter guy and this is about spider-man homecoming VR experience which we released some point last year I think it was in the summer everything's been kind of a blur since then okay so it's updating oh there we go all right am i second behind on this thing okay all right because at the time of the talk I will not be playing the full spider-man theme that's why you just got that little trumpet I hope you enjoyed it so this was as far as as far as we

profiled it well I like to call a do or die project so what I do with my project deliver on the dates or you you know proverbial proverbially die it's a thing that you know if you don't meet the conditions you're screwed there are no good things to happen stakeholders have to be appeased at all times so if you've got something you know usually on a high stakes project like this a film director has to be appeased and exec has to be appeased you know these guys have to be happy at all times otherwise you know it is just bad and it had to fit in a constrained budget so we couldn't ask for more money you know there was just the way it was so this is how it tends to feel when you do these kinds of projects so how do you survive these well you got set realistic goals so for us we had to scope very carefully not make promises we couldn't keep and

if people were very passionate about certain idea that seemed a little too you know not realistic enough we would have to shave it down a little bit however you also have to stay flexible so it's very easy when you're running against the clock to just quickly say no to things and it feels safe and it feels like you're protecting the team and all that kind of stuff but sometimes you've got just center yourself and go alright there's this thing someone wants my first things think this to say know what is another solution instead so you're not saying no you're figuring out how to solve the problem creatively which is difficult to do when you know you've got a do-or-die project and yeah figuring out when to say no the things that are

most impactful usually features I mean that's easy you know you will know that so it's just really identifying you know when those things are so here was the brief it had to had to work for first-time vi users it had to be intuitive nothing crazy to learn nothing you know overly complicated you could give it to your grandma she could figure it out it had to be on vibe oculus and psvr same day it had to have realistic visuals or you know realistic in-game world so I guess high definition of visuals it had to live in a like an arcade cabinet equivalent in cinemas a month before the movie released so this one we learn kind of a week into agreeing to the project and then we had we sort of had to you know figure it out real quickly and for the live version we

had to have a three-minute kind of trimmed version because of the throughput because it was a marketing piece for the movie we had to consider that aspect very carefully and we couldn't have vomit-inducing motion so you're talking about spider-man the first thing you think is I'm going to be swinging through the city probably be you know our first idea was we're gonna do an infinite runner swinging through the city and BR and everything we saw about trying to accomplish that led to you're probably gonna vomit so yeah the the marketing team were not happy about that so we had to identify what were our targets so first time BR users must direct the user quickly we had a limit discovery-based progression and level design so you know none of that here you're in a room and

there's nothing else and oh what do I do with that thing we pretty much had to tell the user what to do B for B and this was again to satisfy the you know person's grandma who's a spider-man fan wants to play and just figure it out trying to get on all three of those platforms is a bit of a challenge so we just targeted the psvr because that's the lowest spec one but the realistic aspect was a bit of a challenge because at the time substance designer and unreal for shipping to psvr there was some compatibility issue where all our substance textures just didn't work it just crashed the bill so we had to go back got all the substances export to textures and then shoved those textures into unreal shader model and do it that way so that we lost time from that but yeah and for the arcade release or sorry tour deployment we had to shave

from five months development time to four which was a little scarier and we had to sort of let the QA cycle get hit which you know for a short experience actually isn't that scary but you know when planning things out we were concerned for reasons you will see shortly if the player took so for the arcade deployment for that three minute time frame we had to build in a mechanic to push the player forward so if they stood around too long doing enough we had to either move on to the next task or teleport them to the location that they had to be thankfully not many people dealt with the teleporting side of things you know because it felt very unnatural but that was the only solution we could come up with at the time that we could execute and yeah for the

vomiting no freeform swinging because we just didn't have a design solution that we knew would prevent people getting nauseous and we couldn't take the time to do the R&D for it and ya know swing in focus on web skills physics game playing no framedrops or 90 frames a second we were pretty scared so we just shrugged and tried to figure it out and got to work so what do we propose okay you'll have to forgive me this text is very tiny soup it's very small all right so the suit is one of the things in the movie that's really special right so Spidey he's really

known for his special powers and so on but in the movie the suit was like this big he's got a fancy suit it was all high-tech so we sold the idea of what if we sell the entire piece about hey you get to try Spidey's new high-tech suit that Iron Man built for him so that was how we you know packaged the piece but there was one snag the client wanted a mirror seen like in the Batman VR experience and a mirror seen means you have to build a full you know upper-body rig at least and that meant inverse kinematics and we really will be worried about that so that was that was a thing and then the next bit was because we're not having swinging were we well what can we do to make this feel like a spider-man experience so we went with web types playing around with this web shooter slinging things throwing

things shooting things with webs that kind of thing so then physics came into play and we weren't allowing we proposed that we wanted to do something kind of gamy with like a our targets that didn't fly so we then had to go with real world props on a rooftop in Queens in a realistic art style so all of this stuff was getting more and more scary we asked if we could set it in Manhattan because we could use big buildings to limit draw distance but that was shot down and we were asked to put it in Queens and queens if you've never been in New York is a bit flat so if you're high up you can see everything so that was another oh god how are we going to deliver this moment and because it's a marketing piece we had to feature a major character in the movie that wasn't just fighting initially we were

given the go-ahead to pour Ironman in there which was kind of exciting you know because we're all Marvel nerds back at the office but a little bit of the ways into the project there was a publicized legal hurdle and we couldn't use Ironman anymore so we'd scoped for Ironman and we'd scoped for this final moment where you swing out alongside Ironman like best friends and you know title card and all that and we have a scrap it and the only other character in the movie that's a big enough character was vulture so then you've got the villain of the piece showing up you got Spidey you can't fly away with the villain like he's your best mate what do we do so we had to then scope this whole extra section there was a dramatic moment for the player and you know as fighting which you'll see in a bit and the swinging we

couldn't do it without one swing or two you know it just felt wrong so our compromise was instead of freeform swinging and having the latches of the safety for you know player comfort and all that we directed to specific swing moments and that seemed to work because in VR people will not tolerate extended nausea but one or two shots and that's it you can sort of get away with it's not advised but we didn't get any complaints thankfully and yet the arcade tour build thing because that sort of hit us a few weeks in on a very short project the compromise that we offered was hey why don't we make it beta level quality in hindsight as we started rolling through we realized we couldn't ship beta quality code to a marketing level piece on a worldwide tour to promote a massive

film so we sort of facepalm for a few moments and then realized we had to scope a couple of polish features out you know which is as you do so the high level physics massive draw distance okay in VR 90 frames a second with no drops realistic ish art style for months development cycle no additions to budget so yeah this was our Sinha studio trying to figure out how to do this here's a previous of what we put together so this was within like the first two weeks because feedback loops are really difficult in climb and you know like movie client based relationships we had

to come up with something that could get approved really quickly so we put together a previous which is something very useful for film people you know they use it regularly [Music] hello Peter this is your new suit please put on the mask welcome to your SM 3000 suit I'm here to explain your suits capabilities please review your appearance in the reflective surface to your left

initiating your new web shooter rapid-fire mode press and hold your trigger to shoot a steady stream of webbing based on your performance you are awarded a B please remember to train harder initiating web slang beginner mode press and hold your shooters to tether objects to the web initiating wet bomb mode please hold the trigger to charge a larger bomb a unique energy reading is coming from your location please get to a higher viewpoint [Applause]

[Music] you have no idea what you're getting yourself into structural integrity failing your webbing is strong enough to repair back off [Music] so yeah that was pretty much it and as you can tell some of those pictures were from other games and the voices were from people who work with us p.m. that we needed something that the film guys could resonate with quickly and previews is a it's a pitching technique that the

movie studios use that actually saved our asses because from that they were able to very quickly tell us even though that Manhattan you know setup looks kind of nice and Atmospheric we don't want it has to be Queen's blah blah blah but we were able to knuckle down and figure something out straight away so how did it all go we shipped it everything worked out got it on time all our targets landed nobody died thankfully and we all got drunk after the only things we really lost in development which was just part of the decision-making process really was we lost full body I K so originally we wanted Spidey to have a full body presence and one of the issues is that we found and I'm sorry I don't have a gif about this I wish I did you'd look down and we we just didn't have the R&D time in the pipeline to have someone

work out when Figo janky because for body I K you've got a sort of approximate where the feet are going to be and we had some ideas like if you mount that if you mount the controller pivot sort of to the head and if the head moves then the body sort of does this but it yeah we didn't have time to prototype that and in hindsight it felt like it might sort of be weird and tanky and yeah so screw it we just did upper body and if you look down and your body is pretty much just hands and the only other thing we lost was the sort of depth feature we had where you look at things and you'd get a little readout on the AR reader but they never happened so whatever so here's some screenshots of what it ended up looking like this was the suit in the case which didn't fly in in the end because it was Marvel felt that was off-brand so you just show up on roof and there's

your case and there's the Spidey thing this is a reflection scene so at the player level you just got the wrists but the ikb body because we were having some runtime issues with it we just isolated to where you'd only see it in the reflection and this scene for the framerate was actually pretty stressed so that's why we opted to go with that as well the physics playground stuff kind of worked out it's a little weird up there cuz there's tires and why the hell are there tires on a roof we could sort of excuse the construction school and you know we had lots of balloons there to add color that was also excused because it's Peter celebrating him getting a fancy new suit that can do fancy gadget things this was the first controlled web sling so you can sort of rappel yourself up to the

crane at a certain point in the experience and a lot of people get a little bit weird with it this scene is when you're looking down from the crane and one of the things I enjoyed the most is that I'd have friends over who playa la games and at this scene they would take off the helmet gun now [ __ ] off oh yeah it was a lot of fun seeing that and funnily enough people who didn't play games love to out there they didn't give a [ __ ] but most people who play games where I put put in the headset for this just yeah they couldn't do it so how did we get it all done all right so the stakeholders you know thinking about our audience in terms of the client we knew I mean the the company who built this are born of a movie trailer house so they understood the movie culture very well my role there was to help understand how to make games so using

that knowledge we built previous that work great and yeah everybody was happy one of the things we had to do because our development was somewhat I wouldn't say hampered but could have been hampered by VFX assets that we needed to build everything so for example vulture and Spidey were built from built down from VFX rigs which are usually these multi-million poly beasts with many boned rigs and texture technology called you DIMMs which is basically multiple atlases within an atlas and it's absurd like you just can't put that in a game engine so we needed to set targets for the film people so that we could then deliver what we needed to do so we didn't get say the vulture asset in a certain time we'd have a muddler you know have to

build him from scratch on reference the only time that that I mean I wouldn't say it failed us because we got through it but the only time it didn't work out was with the the UI on Spidey's wrists because in the movie it's this crazy thing that if you imagine the weapon wheel from Ratchet and Clank where it's got like that eight little dudes on it the little icons this is like a 50 icon weapon wheel so yeah obviously we weren't going to have that and yeah we work close with the clients have balance things out so they kept asking for things because they wanted this thing to be the best thing that it could be and you know their world is asking for things all the time again and we would have a negotiation we would say okay you want this this is what it's gonna take from the project we have to we can give you this thing instead or we can give you this thing if we take this other thing away you know so it didn't become a no it just became

an exchange a constant discussion and it worked out when we really couldn't do anything we would tell him look we really can't do this and they were try and suppose as best I can but yeah the most important thing it really was the right people and I know that sounds like a tired cliché but never before have I felt it be true than on this project we made sure that we pick people who had the right mentality to deal with a constant deluge of change and stress and you know things that you would normally kind of look at in a list and go yeah I'm not gonna do that that's not gonna happen so everybody on the team had a problem-solver attitude and it went a really long way people who had reductive thinking tended to be more stressed out they seemed to be you know they couldn't

deliver anything beyond the thing on the piece of paper because their brains the you know the way I guess their outlook their philosophy on how to tackle these moments was holding them back and you know I feel bad for him and I've caught myself in that mentality so you know like I can be sympathetic to it yeah that mentality is just a killer like you really need to be in a problem-solver mentality to get through a project like this and do a good job you know if you get into that reductive place where it's like yeah I agree to this you know I'm not going to go beyond this line or any of that kind of stuff you're not going to get through it yeah so but we agreed to this all that stuff it's indicative of a mentality either isn't about solving a problem it's about protecting yourself and that's a very understandable place to come from but you gotta think about how do I solve the problem not how do I protect myself

necessarily I mean obviously there's a line there but when you're thinking about building something start with solving the problem and then figure out okay is am i doing this in a way that's constructive for everyone not just constructive for me and yeah that's that's what I ended up taking away from this the most you know and then that was it so there we go okay hello I'm Brad Sheffield from Microsoft games you can see me right there I got to go fast because we're running low on time so here we go right into it see Nomura was a video game that came out in 2012 it was originally planned for our Cades but it wound up getting released on Xbox 360 Windows ps3 and

Vita it was a collaboration between the Hungarian developer digital reality and the Japanese developer grasshopper manufacturer who you may know from killer7 No More Heroes and stuff all the code and design and story and most of the art was done in Hungary and a little bit of the art like concept stuff and all the music and sound stuff was done in Japan so five years later see Nomura e.x an upgraded version was released on Windows ps4 Xbox one and switch and I'm basically going to talk about how we got from the first one to the second one and what we did along alright so it's a it's a side-scrolling shooter it looks really nice it's got really good music by Akira Yamaoka just imagine all that stuff on the original game I naturalized all of the text and natural is naturalizing means basically I took the original stuff that was written in Hungarian and I rewrote

all of it so that it would appear to have been written in English the first time the story was pretty challenging because it was very complicated and convoluted and high-concept sci-fi stuff and it was constantly calling back to itself and you know referring to things that happened earlier or doing things out of order and in a shooter like a scrolling shooter where you're supposed to be doing twitchy action it's a tough sell and there's about 10,000 words for this shooting game maybe the most in any shooting game that I can think of so it was an interesting project and I had to translate an ancient poem that's what you see in the middle there it was part of the poem in the sieve of time this game has a part of its core mechanic it has a time rewind system because it's the protagonists are a group of humanoids who can control time

basically and they're being hunted to extinction by regular human beings so it was very important to them that they get this poem in there but this poem is a hundred years old and has never been translated it's by this guy whose name I can't pronounce it because it's Hungarian which is Endre ady or something like that yeah but that's him on the left not on the right that's not him so in order to do this I asked for the original Hungarian the directors own translation a list of things each individual word could mean and combined that with a Google Translate to kind of put all these elements together to come up with Oh also I read some of his other poems in English to kind of try to get an idea of his style and really a PhD should have done this but I did it instead so sorry but it was kind of cool to be able to be like yeah in this game we I translated a

poem from Hungary's most famous poet for the first time ever so then Cena Mori X was announced and I found out about this by watching Nintendo Direct and I was like wait a second I should probably get in on this so basically there was a lot of stuff that I thought we should fix with the original game that bugged me and so I basically tried to bother everyone that I could until I got to someone at THQ Nordic who was publishing the new version of the game and I was like you have to let me fix things and eventually they said okay but there are only two months left in the project so I'm pretty much framing this as a way to look at an existing game perhaps your game and see what's wrong with it what can be fixed and giving up on things that you can't fix so I'm gonna go down some of the things that we did tried to fix cuz there was a bunch of

stuff that we could have fixed I originally made a presentation highlighting all of these problems and showed them to the folks and then we had some back and forth and fix some stuff and one of the biggest issues was hitboxes on backgrounds so in this game it's hard to tell kind of what's in the foreground and we'll kill you if you run into it and what's in the background and you can just fly right by so if you look at the left screenshot here I've circled this thing it's kind of hard to tell what it is but there's a turret there that you're shooting so you can shoot that which should mean that it's solid but if you fly through it it won't hurt you because it's actually in the background somehow but it's hit its hitbox is in the foreground now on the right there's a there's this train boss that you fight and you can shoot all the way through this part of its body no problem but if you touch it you're dead and that's very confusing and I found that this is part of a bigger issue because some of these things had their

Hicks hitboxes extrude extruded many in-game kilometers into the foreground because some of them were too big or too small like in the case of parts of a certain boss they'd be too big so they would like shrink it down pull it further or pull it further away or sometimes they just weren't on the same 2d plane as the ship basically fixing this would have meant going through every level and looking at every hitbox and everything and it was not gonna happen in two months this is also part of why to some of the life bars on bosses appear in weird places and start to like float away and stuff it's because of that distance problem so like how could we fix this at all given there were two months so the solution that I came up with more of a band-aid than anything was okay we can't change the background well what can we change we can change the ship the ship is one

thing the background is millions of things so you know we made it so that the ship takes less damage if it hits something and so that way it was less frustrating but also less work because we only had to change one thing instead of a whole heck bunch talking about the story it was hard to follow that was a common thing among reviewers there were some people who really put in the time that loved it but generally it's just look at all those words there's a bunch of him and that you know and there's an aide to continue button down there there's a lot more I would have liked to do a rewrite but that would have been involved a lot more people because the original director was not on the remake and since I was really only the naturalisation person on this project though I've you know I've written my own scripts for games before it would have been a lot more approvals and more complicated so instead THQ

decided to record English voices originally it was in Hungarian no matter what language you played it in Hungarian was the the language and I thought that was really cool and I was kind of against this idea but when they did it I have to admit that it makes the story story easier to follow and I think it was because this decision was made by the executive producer Reinhard police who is not a native English speaker he's from Austria and he mentioned that reading English subtitles is a lot harder and takes a lot more concentration than listening to people talk and that makes a lot of sense especially when you're like swooping through these environments and there's all this stuff going on and like if you look on the on the right you want to look at that big like Mithra style environment thingy you don't want to look at those subs on the bottom so it was a sensible decision coop is and

multiplayer stuff is something that I had nothing to do with this was Reinhard again but it was a pretty natural addition to the game but there were some problems because this is a single-player narrative so how do you have two players in that context because usually you're just one plane flying through and there will be other people talking to you but if there are more planes there that have other personalities than the game it's get completely plate breaks narrative flow so they decided on a drone character that would make a lot of sense because it's just a robot doesn't affect the narrative and you don't even have to introduce it really because so there's such a long history of you know shooting games having like a drone ship or something that you didn't even need to talk about it and they they made a control differently more like a twin-stick shooter to try to kind of make it more interesting and reinhard

who was in charge of this feature for him the most important thing was making sure that you could switch between both player types regardless of which player you were at any time so that everyone could try out the new mechanics also there is only one health bar which is basically the time and so we had to deal with that with two players as well and we just basically made both players take damage effect the main health bar thing but they could also both like collect power-ups and usually in the single-player game you can't collect all of them so it kind of balances that out quite nicely and then many games were added as a kind of thing to solidify multiplayer as a solid addition to this game um I'll share my time doing okay I got five six minutes so there were a lot of tiny details like power-ups would spawn on death and they spawned forward and away from you so if you see on the

left there it those power-ups when you died spawned far away from you and are now behind a boss and you can never get them again so now they spawn a lot closer bullets are hard to see especially enemy missiles I've circled them over here on the right but they're still hard to see this is still true unfortunately glow surrounding bullets was bumped up a fair bit but there was no time to do more and there's way more stuff that we could have done then results so Metacritic scores were really interesting the press scores went down for the new version in on average the things that the press said were much nicer than before but the scores went down Metacritic is weird and the producer and I were talking about how maybe we should do it talk about how Metacritic is [ __ ] but but uh the fan scores the user scores went up universally across all platforms and if I went through and read these reviews because I was really curious about this and I found that fans and reviewers both

liked the changes that we made without realizing it there were a lot of things that people complained about before that just weren't getting complained about or not complained about as much and the like you could tell that the the feeling in general was improved which was exactly what we wanted to happen and frankly the users score going up is enough also it sold well so that's fine so what did I learned from this I learned to fix what you can fixing things intelligently is incredibly important especially with complex projects like we don't with my own company this was you know a contract for me but with my own company we are constantly doing this we've released one of our games called gun house I think seven times on seven different platforms and every time we do it we improve stuff which fix the tutorial up more we fix the menus and every time the game is getting better and the general impression of the game improves every time and for us it's been really

important so I think that your existing games are ripe for remaking if you want to revisit them see Nomura obviously had a bit of a leg up because it's a relatively known game like middle tier and it had some good developers on it but yeah it's worked for us as well and we're gonna keep doing it and I I recommend it if you have the time and opportunity to do so so subtle changes can really matter but don't get bogged up in the details and that's it for me I think we could take like a question [Applause] [Applause] is that no questions then you're free [Music] [Applause]