The Hitman GO Design Postmortem

all right so good morning everybody and thank you very much for joining me on the talk about Hitman Go uh at this point I would like to remind you to turn your cell phones on salad mode and also please don't forget to fill out the speaker evaluation at the end uh to tell GDC how awesome or how bad this talk was I guess so uh this talk is going to be a postmortem and the hit game Hitman goal but at the same time I'm going to try and document the creative process a little bit that when into the making of this game uh a little bit of an introduction about myself uh I'm Daniel I'm a game director with sarex Montreal uh before that I used to work as a designer for both square and EA um and at the same time I'm kind of an independent developer on the side in my spare time uh I shipped these three uh games by myself they're IOS games if you want to check them out and so to tell the story about Hitman Go I think we have to look at three things we have to look at the circumstances uh that

allowed this project to happen we have to look at the idea that initially started off the project and we have to look at a process that refined this idea uh into the game that is now downloadable on the app store and to be honest with you the circumstances this is not really the story that I can tell uh this is uh the story of management I guess of Studio management that allowed this project to happen and I was not part of that at that point but I still want to give you a little bit of a uh introduction a little bit of an overview to get you a the necessary information and so the story starts here with scare enex in 2012 the summer at the winter of 2011 2012 uh sarix decided to start a new studio in Montreal and someone had this brilliant idea to turn up side down the E from sarix logo and make an M out of it I always thought that was pretty brilliant and so it was the winter of 2011 2012 um and there was a new studio to be started and for that three people from I interactive mes carsten and

Rasmus who used to work on Hitman games and who had also worked on Kanan Lynch they came they relocated to Montreal to start this new studio um and hire people uh and I was lucky enough to be one of the first hires and within a year or so I guess we had grown to around 40 people yeah you can see this is cold Montreal in the winter that's what it looks like and so our mandate was to make a AAA Hitman game for consoles uh this was in 2012 so this was still when current generation consoles weren't announced uh so this was a very exciting moment I was working on this as a designer um but as you know plans they don't always turn out as you expect them to and so after about a year of development of this game our project was cancelled uh and furthermore um SRX decided to turn our studio from a AAA development Studio into a mobile game development studio and as you might expect this is quite a drastic change and this kind of shakes up thing quite a bit but I'm pretty

happy to say that management did a very good job at kind of transitioning from triaa into the mobile space um there was a lot of changes as you might expect some people lost their jobs uh a lot of them actually just left because they didn't want to make mobile games but at the same time again I think this transition was as smooth as you can possibly make it with these circumstances and at the same time I think this was a pretty exciting moment for everybody because getting to start working on something new is always exciting and management realized that and they started what they called an incubation moment so they allowed everybody in the team everybody in the studio to come up with ideas for mobile games within the sarex uh Brands and we started off with Hitman and they called this the incubation and basically everybody could participate and make their own games um and so the Mandate was to come up with an idea for a mobile Hitman game really this was the top level kind of idea and there was not many constraints around it right so we were almost uh given cut block on this one we could

come up with our own ideas to whatever we thought was uh good uh to make this uh this this game as I said it before not many constraints other than it has to be mobile and it has to be a Hitman game and as you might expect in these kind of situations we're always kind of inclined to think outside the box and come up with crazy things um and be really creative um but at the same time I have to say that I think there was a sense of false optimism amongst us in that studio even though you're were very excited about making and tackling this new uh this new platform we believed that we were the the pros right we were around 40 people of AAA developers uh we thought we knew it all and that mobile was some sort of thumb down version of what we were be doing um and this could not be very hard and so we thought we're going to be shipping a game within 6 months uh of the initial pitch uh yeah and so incubation began and I guess my experience as an independent developer also brought me to this point uh I I really like to work

with strong constraints and projects I find it very hard to start off with a blank piece of paper and so I was looking for constraints and again I think independent games suit us very well they're very aware of the the kind of the limitations that they have uh be it uh resources or creative uh constraints and I think one great example for that uh is are the game jams where uh a lot of games are actually created out of one single theme or constraint by themselves but these straints can be very arbitrary right we would not want to make a Hitman game based on the color blue for example right this could be a game Jam thing but for Hitman you wouldn't make that much sense and so I guess I was looking for more meaningful uh constraints and constraints that were related to the Mandate and so in research for this talk and kind of trying to see if this is something is also applied outside of video games I came across a very interesting quote by Charles E uh who was uh as most of you know uh one of the very most important industrial designers of the 20th century together with his

wife uh Ry uh they were probably best known for a series of uh furniture that has become truly iconic today and so Charles E in 1972 when asked about I think it was a Q&A or an interview when asked about if there's uh constraints to the design process he says design depends largely on constraints and so this was in 1972 please note how I skillfully constrained Mr 's right eye in the letter P there that's pretty meta so he says design depends largely on constraints and furthermore here's one of the few effective keys to the design problem the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible his willingness and enthusiasm for working with these constraints the constraints of prize of size of strength balance of surface of time Etc and then he says each problem has its own peculiar list and I thought that was pretty great because even though I didn't know about this at the time as uh working on the Hitman mobile games I thought this was pretty close to the actual mindset that

we were in at the time and so again he talks about price size strength surface balance time Etc and we can imagine uh him talking about furniture or industrial design and maybe even about this chair here uh uh dining chair uh that's uh beautiful beautiful Furniture but the question is is this really that far away uh is this really that different making a chair considering all these constraints from making a game or in our case uh making a a Hitman game on mobile platforms and obviously as indicated by Charles E A lot of these constraints depend really on the product that you make and I think in this case size strength balance and surface all these kind of material properties they don't really make sense when we talk about games but we can substitute them we can come up with other things and I think price in time I think we can keep them maybe like consumer facing things such as how much is the game going to cost how long is the game going to be playable like what's the play time of the game but then more importantly we can using this model we can add different

constraints we can add probably the most important constraint is the brand right we're working with a brand that is very established it has gone through many iterations um that have come out in different platforms before and in the genre that comes attached to it um a very important constraint obviously the platform that we're going to make a mobile game after all an audience that has expectations towards what we're building and production constraints very important we were a studio of AAA developers ready to ship a game within 6 months and obviously other things such as business model so I guess this list can be really gone and on but this is kind of just laying out the the key important things that you want to consider and so I guess to illustrate this idea a little bit better um we can take this chair and instead of having this beautiful DCW chair here we can come up and think about different chairs that don't really do that this well and so we can think about a chair that doesn't have a surface to sit on for example which seems silly but it might

be very pleasing to look at right if it's well done might be very beautiful and another good uh thing about this would be that it would probably be cheaper than building a regular chair because we would need less material but at the same time it would have very low usability right we could not sit on and maybe as a product of art this might be interesting if I was an artist I could build this chair but as a designer I don't think this would fit any of the needs that uh this product would have and so the same thing going back to Hitman we can come up with some very quick ideas for example we could make an Hitman endless Runner would probably work pretty well on the platform on mobile platforms but it would greatly conflict with uh brand identity and to be honest it would also be kind of aiming for the wrong audience and maybe another example could be if we made a port kind of thing where we used like a third person point of view with virtual joysticks uh on mobile this would probably come pretty close to the the original experience that people know from Hitman but have very low usability

and I guess also would be kind of the wrong platform because people that want to play these games I guess they play them on consoles and so kind of just laying out these constraints here um you know that I put four of them in black um I think depending on how you work or what you focus on you can really emphasize certain things and also depending on the product that you're building but for us I think the main important constraints really were platform brand audience in production uh I didn't put business model in black there because right from the beginning it was uh clear that we're going to make a premium product and so we didn't have to really work with that um during the development and so the question here is how can we use these constraints to come up with a great idea and a great product uh and unfortunately I don't think we can because what we're looking at is a pure top down model um this is a pure analytic and strategic and also very rational model I think this is pretty pretty interesting to look at it that way but uh this really doesn't lead to any ideas at least in in my case I don't think that led to any ideas and what

we're looking at is more like a set of tools uh that allow us to evaluate uh the creative developments and as you probably expect the very contrary approach to this would be a bottomup approach where we're looking at a more experimental and random and also maybe personal and intuitive kind of way of building things that has kind of the idea to become the raw material of what we're working with and so you've probably heard this before and you've probably seen GDC talks about or any other talks about this kind of top down bottom up approach which is very popular in many different fields not just game design but it's really this idea of top down evaluation and bottom up creation and there's many different ways of putting it top down converging thinking versus bottom up diverging uh and making but the way I like to call it is being smart and being stupid and so this doesn't mean like smart and stupid in a sense that you have to be dumb and smart but more smart and stupid in the sense that you have to have this high level approach approach where I have to consider as many things

as possible and being stupid and kind of Reckless sometimes to come up with ideas that seem impossible or seem out of out of the beaten path and I think diesel did a very cool um campaign at some point they had this uh kind of photographs of people doing weird things and they always had these taglines kind of building on that saying smart critiques stupid crates um or this one stupid might fail smart doesn't even try and so kind of B building on that we needed an idea for game and for that I decided to be completely stupid and bottom up and at the time I was uh talking to my friend and colleague and one who became the technical director of the game I told him this not I got this all figured out I know how mobile games are made there's only two types of mobile games that need to be made it's only two types very simple there's games that have a very short individual session so games like Temple Run that are uh in real time but failing at temp1 doesn't really matter

because you can just replay uh and it's really this overall this big level goal of grinding coins of the meta game that makes it important so you can play this in between two bus stops and even if you get interrupted it doesn't really matter so much because every session is kind of replaceable with another one and on the other hand there's turn-based games like Triple Town um turnbas games that obviously wait for the user to uh interact with it and so we can put them down pick them back up easily and we don't get interrupted for anything and since I didn't feel like making a kind of fast- based uh game and I think Hitman is more like a strategic and smart game in a sense I think turn-based was a great inspiration and so I said let's make a turn-based Hitman game and this mean uh this is probably looking pretty stupid uh there's no kind of rational thought behind this um and also looking at it today believing that there's only two types of mobile games is a pretty silly idea but I think at the point uh at the time we were building this this was enough of an inspiration kind of initial spark to get started on something so we said turn based simplified Hitman that was going

to look like The Sims top down uh 3D lots of characters lots of details fully animated because why not and so we had to be smart uh we were uh as I said we were working in this incubation moment we had to convince our colleagues and then later down the line the GL board uh about making this game uh and so we came up with the strategy of saying we want to make a game a Hitman game that's basically based on three things we want to base It Off making a highly accessible game so a game that you can pick up and play without knowing anything about the previous experiences the previous Hitman games but at the same time you want to make a deep game a game that has uh the full Hitman experience and that really starts off simple but gets more complicated and more interesting as you go and a game that has very high production value because we are Square Enix and people have expectations towards what we build and that would printy well uh people really liked the idea at the studio and then later we were allowed to go to green light with it and uh within a short amount of time actually we managed to go into

development of the game and so we entered this kind of process and uh I guess even before that uh we did this kind of round of prototypes so there was four people and during two weeks we built this prototype actually iterating a lot building a lot of different prototypes but it's this one prototype that really uh LED everything and for that again taking a very bottom up and stupid approach coming up with game mechanics was what we tried to do and so having worked about uh about a year I guess um on big AAA Hitman game um we identified these five things that were essential to the Hitman uh gameplay experience and you might say this is pretty dumbed down and stupid again but again I think this is just to prove the point that something seemingly silly can spark an idea and interest into something that you later can refine and so uh what we kind of dissected what we distilled from The Hitman experience was that there's five things there's Agent 47 there's a Target I have to assassinate there's uh enemies that can try and stop me from getting to my

target there's an environment that I can be in or that my my enemies can be in and there's tools that I can use so this could be weapons this could be simple things like uh Patrol paths and so forth and because we had this kind of uh box full of uh these kind of board game pieces around at the office we thought it would be a great idea to kind of use that and to rapidly prototype ideas before we even went into coding anything and so inspired by The Sims we printed out these kind of architectural visit izations of Apartments these renderings and I remember drawing like little dots with lines on top of it um and then starting to move around these kind of wooden pieces around and hoping that we would come up or stumble upon a great idea for a game design and that didn't work uh and I think uh looking back I think that was mainly because of one reason and it was the reason for it was uh this very this very piece and if you look at it it might not be obvious but when you think about Stealth games one very important thing about Stealth games is the notion of being seen or being

hidden so in this case Hitman is hiding the hi the corner there and two characters can't see him but if you look at our Bard game piece this guy has no Direction so what we realized after a while is that we had to give these pieces a a facing Direction basically we didn't add googly eyes like it did on this one but I remember putting some uh some paper pieces on top of it to kind of start playing with that uh notion of Direction and that was a pretty simple learning but I think it greatly helped us to come up with a game design and because this is kind of standard stealth game um material we started off with using Vision cones right um I remember uh this honor came out around about the time when we shipped when we started working on this game and they had this really cool like 3D visualization of uh view cones and so obviously I guess this and many other games influenced us into starting to work with these things and we thought that was pretty great and that we had found a pretty good game design for for our project but obviously it wasn't the case um especially like uh

in a in in a scenario like this if we expect the blue uh character to turn to the right it becomes very hard for the player to to know uh which one of these kind of spots is going to be hidden and which one of these is going to be detected so um unless we get measuring tape out or we start to do some crazy calculations we can't really know and this is something we really didn't want uh we really wanted to not have in our game we wanted it to be like deterministic for people to really understand what's going on and to really look learn from uh the mechanics uh and I guess in this case a would not be seen and B would be kind of in between so again would be too complicated and so we simplified it and we came to this conclusion that just aligning the pawns on the grid so basically on the nodes and the lines that go outside of it would be a great idea and we were pretty happy with it and we thought we had found a great design for our game but obviously this is not the end of the story because as soon as we started playing around with more complicated and more interesting AI like this guy here that actually uh ended up being in the game as we shipped um a guy that walks

back and forth in a straight line um seems fairly straightforward especially in this case I guess we can imagine the blue guy going up and down on this axis there but what if there's a more complicated case like this one um do we expect the blue guy after moving forward to we expect him to move left and right left or right or maybe you go back um and I think even though we could have come up with some sort of rule and program that rule and mechanic kind of a hidden logic uh we want it to be visible for the user right we could have said like if there's a certain angle that has to be satisfied or if there has to be some sort of a a flow right we could always say character turns right if he can't go forward but we didn't want to do this we wanted to be as simple and straightforward as possible because again looking at it from a top uh kind of top down view considering platform and the audience we're looking at small screens and we're looking at uh people who have possibly never played complicated games before we uh went with this more simplified approach in said just straighten it out and then I guess

at the end um coming up with this very simple uh and distilled way of uh creating the Mechanics for the game and we thought that was pretty great and spoiler alert I guess if you've played the game this is pretty close to what uh the game design ended up being and even though you might say that this is uh very simple and almost a bit Bland I think U working on this uh so intensely and actually simplifying it and building it down so much helped us building this for that actually uh held up up until throughout the actually throughout the whole production of the game and so this was really the the most basic building block that we used to build it and from there we could extrapolate and we can come up with all these cool mechanics that existed in stealth games and in Hitman games and we could them fuel back we could fuel them back into our experience and so we added distractions we added civilians uh social stealth like hiding in a crowd trespassing disguises multiple player Pawns uh weapons hacking and so on but obviously

a lot of these didn't work out again throughout the iteration uh trial and error I guess prototyping many things we found out that a lot of these things actually didn't work uh from a brand perspective or were too complicated or just not feasible or just out of scope for the project that we had but we added new ones and we did cycle kind of a couple of times and I guess this is how the set of mechanics that you play today in Hitman Go came to happen and so again four guys working two weeks I guess this core was really built within 2 weeks on one prototype and then later we extrapolated from that there's only one elephant in the room which was the Sims uh we had promised to make a game that was beautifully animated and fully 3D and everything but we came to realize that uh we had to be smarter about it uh in terms of production if we had six months to build this game and we had already kind of a cool design we would never be able to make and ship this game within the time constraints that were established and so looking at the material that we were playing with to kind of prototype and come up with the

idea we thought that this would be a great idea to kind of you know simplify also in terms of uh scope and we used this board game uh aesthetic um to kind of uh yeah come up the better scope for the game and this was great because we didn't need animations we could work with static environments and there was no S effect effects needed um and at the same time this kind of uh just opened up a lot of new ideas again very bottom up uh we came up with this diarama and scale model uh Vision that just was very related to the uh to the board games and so we went into kind of figuring out what art Direction could be um again pretending to be very stupid and very bottom up uh looking at these scale models and I think uh yeah I think when looking at these it is very tempting to just go crazy and say uh we want to build these beautifully modeled and beautifully Lush environments uh with a lot of character characters and obviously the first thing you see if you

Google these kind of images is a lot of these kind of train sets uh that I guess grow men build in their apartments and then uh forbid their their kids to touch them and I think that was cool right it was a great inspiration but at the same time again being smart looking at from a brand perspective it didn't exactly work um even though there was some potential in it I think uh it still felt a little bit too nerdy and a bit too obscure for what we're trying to build and so working with uh Rasmus who was the old art director on the AAA game who had experience uh working at IO and then also with the people uh still at IO I think we managed to kind of get to know the brand much better and really distill down the essence of what Hitman means and what Hitman is and there's a couple of things that really struck with us so there's this kind of notion of globe trting Hitman traveling around the world uh to these kind of exotic locations and luxurious mansions that he has to go and take out this uh evil people that he has to assassinate um and then there's things like sterile environments like

even though these have these people have these huge manions some of them are pretty empty and it's kind of boring uh as you expect from from rich people's places and there's this very interesting uh notion of voyerism in stealth games in general so if you're navigating in an environment and you're uh not seen right that allows you to overhear and deep drop on conversations of people and NPCs that don't expect you to do so and I think if you played stealth games before again this is a very big thing I think especially in Hitman they use this to tell these kind of weird and funny stories every once in a while you overhear something um so there's the story and in Absolution there's this moment where you hear a guy on the phone talking about this doctor and getting a note that he is not ill or he's not sick uh and a minute later you throw him out of the window so there's this kind of weird uh funny uh not notation of warrior ISM um and also this kind of rational cold kind of atmosphere to uh to assassinating people I guess in general and on on top of that this uh really understated and Slick uh feel

that Hitman games have and we really thought that we need to capture this better instead of just building a train set or train model environment and really get to know what Hitman was and here's I guess the four Inspirations that we then used to uh really come uh closer to this brand identity and the first one was architectural models and so instead of just looking at scale models and these kind of little figurines uh we really like the aesthetic of architectural models because it's more about uh a global and a more approximate kind of way of building something and it's more about materials it's more about uh shapes uh much more than uh just details and little things and if you see an architectural model maybe once in a while there's a little detail there's a figurine but it's mostly there just to indicate scale and it's not there to tell a story um and then there's theistic nature of of of these kind of Steal games that I thought still could be portrayed pretty well with the with the scale models if you look at these kind of dioramas you always see these freeze frames Freeze Frame uh scenarios

of people talking of people arguing or people just enjoying themselves and so you could almost like see how you could uh interpret that as watching people doing things and kind of watching on them and then obviously the rational cold uh thing that we kind of learned from the from chess and and board games in general very calculated um just moving pawns on a checkboard like like you would in in Hitman is basically puppeteering and Engineering I guess situations around and then last but not least a luxurious and sterile uh that we borrowed from the blog Rich Kids of Instagram I don't know if you're familiar with that but it's a pretty great Tumblr it's basically a curating site uh my friend Eric who was a narrative designer in the old AAA days had got me onto this and uh it's it's truly brilliant you should check it out it's basically kids from very rich backgrounds taking pictures and this website curates them and shows their daily lives and it's pretty impressive

because even though it's very uh yeah it's it's it's it's luxurious lifestyle and it's everything you can possibly imagine but at the same time there's this kind of bland and sterile look to it U because these places are huge they show their huge houses but they're always kind of empty it's always the same kind of goods it's always the same cars it's always the same purses and so forth so it's really worth checking out and so having that uh we really felt like we had a really solid base but again making that happen was not just a matter of art Direction but it was actually uh matter of producing levels and producing level art and so uh again just to emphasize this kind of two-tiered approach of being bottom up and being top time at the same time uh we were greatly inspired by these two main references which were architectural models and uh scale scale models uh diamas and we kind of identified a couple of cool things the physicality of uh of things right how are things built is it made out of wood is it made out of cardboard and how could we portray these material properties uh in the game then

there's this idea of variety because everything is handmade we expect things to not be entirely perfect right especially if you look at uh Scale Models uh there's a lot of this variety going on because everything is basically put on by by a person and there is this kind of imperfection something really interesting artifacts if you think about diaramas um especially like things like uh paint being scratched off a little bit through the production of the of the diama itself or maybe a little bit of glue that sticks out underneath a grass surface and so forth uh and in general just adding a lot of detail we thought that would be the right way to go to really portray this uh this View and this vision of uh this kind of physical environment but again looking at it from a high level perspective and considering production this was still very much out of scope and so we proposed a very different system um and I guess this was one of the early sketches I did uh just small this quickly for a prototype but the idea was to build the entire game

out out of these 4x4 meter cubes or blocks I guess with different heights and as you can see there's different pieces for pool there's pieces for uh roads for house for uh uh grass and so forth and this seemed pretty wacky at the beginning but it actually ended up being the exact uh pipeline that we did for the game um and so if you've played the game you might recognize some of these places so we build entire sets for tennis courts the greenhouse uh the pool uh the mansion and so forth and also if you've played the game you'll noticed that we had these different locations so we had different boxes of environments and for every of these boxes we build actually a set of pieces so it's pretty much like Lego breaks actually you could just snap them together and play around with them and then on top of that uh we had little pieces little detail pieces that we could then add to kind of break up the Rhythm and break up this kind of pattern uh like behav behavior of the modules and I thought that was pretty great um

because we could run level Art and Design in parallel right we were really fast with this because as I was building the levels in in unity with this editor that we had uh the level artist could basically model the blocks and then I could play around without having too much dependency on each other and it also greatly helped us creating this kind of unified look um that kind of I think is always very hard to achieve in games in general making something that looks like it's only made by one person or by one uh general idea that kind of brings everything together and that kind of obeying this very strict system helped us greatly to achieve that and even though it is kind of hard to work with I think also again constraint on a very low level it uh applied these very interesting constraints that I guess very very inspiring also for us to come up with different locations different sets different environments and so forth and so this is uh I guess a couple of screenshots to show you how this actually worked in an applied sense um so this is the screenshot from the editor Bare Bones I guess we had this

really cool tool that the programmers built where we could just place out these little circles and connect them with lines and then on top of that uh we will place the pawns I guess the spawners for the pawns and the spawners for the tools like the distraction you see here and then obviously the extraction point where Hitman has to go to and then the next step would be take all of these pieces and kind of play with it and arrange them a little bit and start coming up with a cool environment obviously doing a lot of iterations to this considering the different environments that were before in the levels before and after but really starting to play Lego with this and once we were happy with certain design uh we kind of put that closer together added uh a little bit more detail like this wooden frame that came became pretty iconic to the game uh and uh maybe a bit more detail like the grass Hedges there uh and then later on we would add more uh small detail like the trees um the little figurines that would tell kind of the story going on and so so forth and then the last step would be to just light the levels with light map um

classic uh light Maps I guess and so really this kind of initial model of focusing on physicality focusing on high variety and then artifacts and a lot of detail everywhere uh kind of uh was refined into a model that was more focusing on composition uh especially because of the modules the modular system you had the chance to be very iterative and to do a lot of different uh just trial and there are a lot of different variations on these levels and so we really got to work with this uh and at the same time capturing that uh that idea from the freeze frame live from scale models and really putting in these characters trying to tell a little bit of a story a little bit of an environment um working with cross-sections like you can see there the pool being cut in half I think is a very strong kind of image and makes people really uh think about this as a manufactured object or something that uh you would have in your on your coffee table or maybe in a in a showcase and so forth and instead of having detail all over the place we actually decided to be way

more selective about it uh and so even though uh one thing that's quite interesting even though a lot of people consider Hitman Go to be a very naturalistic looking game there's actually only one texture as far as I remembered that is truly naturalistic which is this wood uh piece everything else is either untextured or has textures that have nothing to do with the original material that we're trying to emulate for example the um the grass I think it's a sort of a carpet that just looked really good uh on the screen and on on what we're trying to do with it um and this helped us greatly with readability right again looking at it from the constraints about the platform we wanted this game to be able to be played on small screens and on on tablets and so having high readability was really important for us and I guess focusing on these things uh helped us manage to uh to create a game that was was very readable and so there's one last anecdote I guess before I uh I want to wrap things up and so very important thing I guess to making triaa games transition into mobile games which is

the story aspect and this is a pretty tough one because as you might expect triaa games focus a lot of story uh mobile games don't do so as much and so again uh being very bottom up uh in this uh in this field uh whoops sorry uh we looked at our inspiration again and again as I mentioned it before these kind of little figurines these stories like this uh car that broke down and the guy is trying to explain to a police officer and the boy is doing something in the background this is just a moment of life and we can totally come up with a story in our heads as we watch these and we were greatly inspired again uh by this and then at the same time I mentioned it we had these modular systems that were uh developing pretty quickly uh and we were really inspired to just you know play around bottom up be very stupid as I as I would call it and come up with cool ideas and so uh we created this set of uh of pieces of blocks that were based around uh Road networks and so you can see here this is like a Suburban kind of uh environment

with a lot of roads street signs and these trees growing in between the lanes and so forth and we thought that would be a really cool test bet for our ideas with stories so the additional idea was to have these kind of developing stories throughout multiple levels um and so on this one we did a test where we wanted to have like a car accident like this this guy that's trying to get away and you're following him on a highway and then he crashes and he tries to run away and at some point in some level you would actually then get to kill him uh and there's something that was really interesting is that no one really understood that we did a test with this and no one really got the coherence between different levels right no one understood there was like a continuous story going on in between levels uh I think it's it's it's it's hard to say why that's the case uh but I think it's also just because people are very focused on solving the puzzles much more than just observing the environment and also kind of breaking uh these kind of abstract pieces uh apart from each other and not having one continuous experience because you go through loading and level selection every time it's just it just

didn't allow people to understand these stories and I guess uh one great example for this is something that we only refer to as the gas station at SX Montreal which is kind of this weird thing that everybody fears um and so this was uh I guess our idea to make a an entire Mission this was supposed to become the first mission of the game entire Mission about a hit an assassination that you would have to do around the gas station um and you can see this was not just environment art we also did game design on it we had these kind of nodes and you can even see like uh yeah obviously looks a bit different now but there's it's pretty close already to the to the experience we have and so the idea here was that Hitman had to infiltrate this kind of uh gas station environment where it was this guy that you had to go and kill H and there's two things like for one Hitman was uh able to go through the sewers as you can see there that was pretty weird I don't know why we came up with this and then the other thing was in the top top right corner you see this kind of soda machine we thought that uh maybe coming up with a story where you

would have to follow a guy who would really like soda and he would drink these cans of soda and would leave the trail behind him to kind of explain people why you would follow a PE a person's kind of like breadcrumbs uh yeah I don't know why but this is what we tried to do and so we had to ask ourselves is this really Hitman um and especially I guess looking at the triaa counterparts this was not Hitman as uh as in infiltrating these luxurious and exotic places trying to kill like the the top evil people in the world but uh not doing that uh it was in our case it was Hitman on the beach uh trying to bypass a guy in blue there uh but can't do that because there's traffic hones on the road um yeah this was actually a level that we built and so again I think looking at it from a high level perspective even though I think that there's a lot of great development and a very creative kind of atmosphere around this but looking at it from a high level perspective it just didn't fit with the brand and so Rasmus again the art director in the triaa days he made the sketch for us that I think was very important at this point during the development and he uh kind of took this

idea of these little pieces of levels that we had already built and he designed a kind of a sketch uh around what he thought a mission or a hit should look like and so he did these kind of key moments uh in this kind of infiltrating and exfiltrating going through a hit going through an assassination so it's this kind of Hitman arriving at a gate uh there's probably security security there that he has to take out and going for some sort of a courtyard entering house there's a watchdog and then getting to an office um taking out the bad guy and then leaving again and this was really I guess a Cornerstone for us in the development and also looking at the game today uh I think it's cool to see how we actually used this and build the levels around it so this is the first chapter of the game a couple of the levels uh and then so in the first one you can see Hitman arriving uh to this kind of place to this mansion and then going through sort of through some sort of a gate um bypassing this pool area that we've seen in many screenshots now and then uh just

all these kind of classic locations that you've probably seen also in other Hit Man games the tennis court uh a little bit of a pool house there on the left uh going through a greenhouse with a lot of guards and then entering a mansion where finally we get to assassinate our Target so really building up this kind of story and this approach of Hitman that we also know from existing AAA Hitman games and so I guess these are kind of four anecdotes uh to explain a little bit this approach this creative strategy of not being afraid of doing seemingly stupid things but then again also don't back off from looking at it from a very rational and kind of high level angle and so the game mechanics the art Direction in the story and the level art I think they're all great examples of how we use this approach to make hit Mano uh and really uh as I said it in the beginning don't be afraid of uh being smart and forcing yourself to be stupid every once in a while to just kind of not be afraid uh of coming up with things that don't seem to be uh lodging and so on a day-to-day basis

I think this could be really described as keeping a balance between the two modes right um I think Hitman Go was recognized as a game that did something that was pretty un unorthodox a lot of people uh that saw the game initially they did not really get what we're trying to do with it um but at the same time I think really keeping this idea of like the impulsive and almost uh intuitive kind of way of making games but looking at it and evaluating it from a top level View making sure that this these ideas are not just crazy for their own sake but they actually Mak sense within the big picture of the brand the franchise the platform and so forth and I guess another example that if you're developing games you're probably very familiar with is uh switching between these two modes of Bott bottom up and top down um it's very easy to kind of fall into one of these extremes and just to kind of stay there uh so if we're top down too much I guess it's becomes very easy to shoot down ideas because they seem too weird or stupid uh from the Geto go and if we're purely bottom up I think it becomes very easy to get lost

and not see the big picture anymore and so I guess to wrap up and to kind of come back where I started with this presentation I think now it will be the time to see if I actually if this actually makes any sense so going back to this idea of this comparison between the the chair and and the game that we've been building um looking at Hitman Go On on mobile phones and looking at I guess our four core uh constraints that we've established in the beginning um and so looking at production um we didn't manage to ship Before Christmas 2013 within six months I think that was uh just a little bit too ambitious uh for everybody involved uh but we were pretty close uh we actually managed to finish the initial release in February 2014 and I think still today that this uh given the fact we were a tria development studio and we had very little experience making mobile games this was a great achievement uh we managed to stay a small team between four and 12 people through throughout the course of the development I think also for seeing this kind of dual kind of mode of being top

down and bottom up uh is something that really works with small teams uh that I've experienced and I think we really capitalized on that uh and as I said before I was actually the only person who had made mobile games before so I think it was a great achievement for everybody to do this transition and to make a successful game afterwards and if we look at the brand uh many people actually recognized Hitman Go as a true Hitman game even though it seemed so weird at the first time at the first time we showed it and people looked at it and I think we can also say that it manage to open up maybe because of that managed to open up the franchise to new audiences and bring in people that maybe knew about Hitman but had never played a Hitman game and so on um as far as the platform is concerned uh we managed to ship on phone and tablets at the same time even though in the beginning we were actually just aiming for tablets uh this was the Mandate and then we kind of shifted during production uh and we were extremely lucky to get and very happy also to get editor's Choice from Apple and being very much featured by Apple and Google uh so there was a great recognition for us doing something

specific for the platform and really working on that and last but not least the audience as far as the audience is concerned you might expect uh triaa fans being a very tough crowd especially if you announced that the next installment of your franchise is going to be on mobile games and I guess we can look at it this way when we announced uh Hitman goal on February 13th in 2014 we just showed a screenshot and a little bit of text this is what Nega looks like uh on that day so iing what the is this uh term-based strategy Hitman just kill me now um is this uh a little too early for April fools uh is this a joke 47 deserves better that is I guess this is a classic but then uh about a month no sorry two months later when we actually shipped the game and people who got the hands on the game and even very like vocal people same Forum uh different thread but after the announcement after the release uh it looked completely different and I think it's kind of a a very nice thing to to look at today and to see how people actually got time to spend with the game

and actually Chang their opinion on it so we can say uh going back to the slide uh very positive partion uh reception by a very broad audience and we got great reviews and a lot of coverage from press uh uh and so forth and that's pretty much it thank you very much sorry about that so I guess there's uh a little bit of time sorry that's very unprofessional a little bit of time left for uh actually 15 minutes left if there's any questions there's microphones uh if you have questions about the development or maybe the idea of the creative strategy that we apply to it hey hey first of all good job on that game I really loved it um were there any did you set any constraints on the size of the grid that you were using um and and determine how much people were willing to scroll as far as you know looking at the level yeah actually this

was a uh a big part in developing the levels in the design in general um and I think it's it's it's two things it's basically the size of the level but also the camera as you mentioned um and we did a lot of iteration on the camera actually we started off with a very free form like you could pan around you could rotate and even zoom in and do a lot of controls um but we felt that it was kind of like not slick enough and it wasn't intuitive enough for people that maybe weren't experienced gamers and so also in the beginning we had a lot bigger levels right we wanted to tell more of an environment more of a story but I guess in kind of a compromise between the platform again the constraints of the platform we're looking at that we decided to make these kind of bite-sized and and more uh smaller levels and I think even though you might find a couple of odd ones like there's like probably levels still there that are bigger than the the average uh I think in general we ended up making these kind of like 4X five kind of that's probably the average of level that we build hi could you talk a little bit about uh

the design how you designed the puzzles like the actual just making them hard logical puzzles to solve sure um so we had this editor I think the the process was very important because we we didn't really know much about this there was not a game that we could base ourselves off there was not a design that we knew that we could just use and kind of reproduce uh and so I guess in the beginning with with these kind of board game figurines I think that was kind of the first moment moment where we saw that there was something cool there but then I think really the uh the the usability of the editors and the tools that we that we had helped us great in kind of just iterating and making a lot of these puzzles and I mean it's safe to say we produced a lot of puzzles that were never used in the game and we tested also with uh play tests um and so I'm not sure if there's uh like a strict logic to making these puzzles there was a lot of trial error and evaluating especially in the beginning right but as as as development goes on I think you start to identify these kind of patterns so there's if you play the game there's

these kind of recurring patterns of puzzles like there's this kind of uh idea of synchron of synchronizing uh characters and so this is one thing that we started that we kind of realized and we started using on uh on levels going forward and there's kind of a couple of other different patterns that we kind of emerged from the development that we then use but there's no like a black magic or a secret sauce to this unfortunately and then was uh next um I'm curious if there were any discussions about um the business model and uh which fitted best with the project or if it just came as a design constraint from the very beginning of or you had any discussions sure um uh obviously there were a lot of discussions about this uh even I think 2013 the summer when we started describe this the summer of Candy Crush um everybody was talking about premium at that point um and so we re right I think that's safe to say um I think there was a couple of things that really got into

the that made this decision at the end there was first of all there was kind of the brand value right we knew that people playing Hitman games they expect like a AAA product they P expect something that they pay for thought that might be a better transition to start off with a with a premium product but also I think the design that kind of uh was built for the game it really didn't lend itself for a free-to-play game right and when you look at freeto playay kind of puzzle games there's this compulsive nature to it uh to many of them and our game was purely deterministic so to speak so our game was purely reproducible every level if you played it once you can replay it over and over again it's always the same solution and so there's just this missing component of Randomness and and and luck that makes a lot of these free-to-play puzzle games work um and so at the end it was really this kind of evaluation between different business models that made us stick with I guess the original plan of making a a premium game thanks Daniel I love the endtoend journey you took us on there thank you thank you you made it sound effortless and and I was just wondering if you could share any of those moments where you're

already banging your head against the table and you just thought this isn't going to work no there was none of that um no obviously I think um looking at some of these scenarios especially the um the early days when I think the story might be the the biggest point we had very high expectations towards that and especially having a full uh Studio of AAA developers a lot of them were actually into this whole storytelling and and and make making that really visible in a game um and so we had probably too high expectations for that and I remember being very frustrated about realizing that a lot of people didn't really get this kind of continuity between levels and the story that we're trying to tell with these little figurines going from one point to another um and I think it was hard for us to kind of accept that but I think at the end of the day this is what uh and was what helped us to really ship the game and also make the experience that it became today oh hey so um right here

sorry um so you you uh brought me into the Hitman Universe uh and because of that I'm not really familiar with the uh with the previous Hitman game sound design uh so I I wanted to know what were some of the decisions behind the sound design I know it's kind of minimalistic there's a I think one theme that you hear like the a Maria theme yes uh when you're about to assassinate your target and I wanted to know why uh you guys didn't have other themes throughout other levels what was the decision behind that so you're I guess you're talking specifically about music not just the okay well and and the sound effects as well um well I guess to talk about music um we we tried different things and I think it became very clear in the beginning that this is a very uh calculated and a very kind of Brainy type of game and and when you look at these kind of experience you don't want to have music that just distracts you too much and everything um um and so we were really sparse with it from the get-go um but we had commissioned music

actually there's this kind of soundtrack that placing the menus and that we also use uh throughout the levels as a buildup and that worked pretty well and then at some point we were really looking at uh different ways of bringing more of that hit M identity into our game and then having this kind of uh this kind of composition actually it always works like this um in a level in in a in a set of levels there's always two guys you have to assassinate and so two levels before that there's a little bit of a of a of a change in music pace and then the one before that it really picks up and then the last one where you actually get to assassinate there's this theme a Maria right that was used by uh shet that was used by U uh the io interactive uh when they worked on other Hitman games before so it really was for us was a way to connect with the audience again and I think a lot of people recognized and really appreciated that and maybe about sound design I think um there was this discussion right really early on how literal we wanted to be right we had this kind of uh board game idea Aesthetics and everything so so it was very obvious it could have been very obvious to just say oh let's make these sliding pieces uh moving back

and forth uh but I think James our sound designer had kind of great ideas about how to maybe break that a little bit and so I think it became this very interesting blend between uh putting sounds on something that you expect but also I think there's sounds in there that don't make any sense um quote unquote U for example like when you throw a distraction you actually hear a guy being making a sound like this so I think it is this kind of charming mix uh of different effect that uh that we ended up being really happy with thank you thanks for your talk um one of the really interesting player constraints in Hitman Go is the fact that you need to make a physical move each turn you need to move to another spot I was wondering if that's something that you locked in on really early or if you did experiments with a weight or something or anything like that this is a this is a good question because this came up during development all over and over and again um and so there was almost like these kind of two camps in our team so people that believ that there had to be this kind of I guess inspired by classic

Hitman games a feature where you had to wait you had to be able to wait and kind of just have the situation you know go on um and on the other hand we had the uh the the learning that if you make puzzles um you have to make them really tight you know um Antoine actually the technical director had this really good analogy it's like building a set of Ikea furniture and then at the end having a screw that's that's left or right it's very unsatisfying process right and I think I'm making these puzzles very tight so that you um feel constrained again I guess in that s um and don't have the option to kind of just make everything go back and forth was was kind of the obvious choice and I guess especially with the with the game design if you've played the game there's this as I said before this this kind of synchronous patterns right so if I'm on a odd uh node then all the enemies that are on even noes I can take them out and so forth and vice versa and this was pretty much the foundation of the game design and by having by allowing people to wait on a spot we basically just

would have thrown out this this design as a whole and so we decided to stick with it absolutely thank you hi I was just curious about the um if you have a comparison profit wise for a a mobile game which you're charging $5 for versus making console games where you're charging $50 sorry I'm not sure I understood the question you pret sorry the mic sounds a little weird uh I'm trying I'm curious maybe my phone uh I'm just curious about the profitability of when you're a mobile game versus a console game where you're charging $5 for a mobile game versus how much you would Char 50 for a console okay uh I'm not sure I can I'm really the person to talk about that to be honest and also I think uh this being a project of like a publicly traded company I'm not sure I can really disclose any information um again uh I'm I'm um I worked on this triaa product before but I wasn't really involved in any of the kind of financial background in it so I guess you would have to ask

the people being uh I guess in charge of that to to get would you say the production's a lot simpler for a mobile game um I think simple is maybe a way you can put it I think maybe thinking back about the slide I had in the beginning where we said that mobile games are easy to make because they're kind of like a dumb down version of triaa games um it I don't think it is that way but when you look at I guess production constraints and when you look at scope of projects we on on mobile you can get away quote unquote uh much easier with like smaller scope games right because that's what people kind of want also in in many cases bized uh experiences and so yeah I guess you can make cheaper mobile games in general than than console games Okay thank you Hi Well running out of time here so here's the last question uh during the presentation you talked about uh you come up conclusion that that for mobile there are only two kinds of game that worth making one is fast-paced short

section kind of game and one is a turnbas and I'm curious how did you guys come up with that conclusion um I don't know honestly that was just a random thought that I had and I think this is really the idea of of of this this underlying concept of being a bit stupid every once in a while and not being afraid of doing so um I was pretty sure this was an amazing idea and I was pretty sure this was the way you make mobile games make successful mobile games obviously today we know there's a lot of other mobile games that are not uh falling into either of that category but um I think again at that point all we needed was an initial spark something to actually start working and I can't tell you where it came from originally maybe some sort of an article that I read just a random thought I had but I guess that's how it started thank you very much