The Kine Postmortem

all right hello my name is Gwen I'm an indie developer I've been in the industry for 12 years now these are some of my credits I I started out in online games working on Marvel heroes I worked in the BioShock Infinite franchise I founded an indie studio with several other people I did that about five years ago and a year and a half ago I I did the craziest thing I've ever done I quit all of that and I went solo I founded my own indie studio to make a one specific game line and that's what I'm gonna talk about today I'm gonna talk about kind this is a narrative puzzle game it's about six hours long it's got a wide variety of spatial puzzles there's different characters that have their own way of navigating the world and you have to kind of figure out how to move through the world with these characters and as the game progresses you have to complete different puzzles like Sokka Bond style stuff or sliding puzzles and so forth but what makes the game unique is that

the mechanics aren't introduced arbitrarily the mechanics exists to tell a story so when I have sliding puzzles in the game those puzzles exist so that two characters can go dancing together or go on a boat ride together all of the mechanics service the narrative of the game that's the point kind is a game that tells a story using puzzles I released this game on PC just last year actually at the end of the year I released on console as well and on Google stadia and I'm happy to say that this game was very successful I'm really proud of this game I loved making it but I have to admit when I started making this I didn't sit down and plan to make a six hour puzzle game that tells a story with puzzles that's crazy I'm I would never do that I'm not a designer I've never actually wanted to be a designer until I made this game in all my years in the industry my background has always been in animation tech

animation and sometimes in the business side of things so I I don't have a design desire to do this and and honestly in all of my years in the industry I've never worked on a puzzle game I never even considered making one in my time as a person running app is like helping to run an indie studio if you'd asked me before this game what you should make what's a good idea for something to make I would not have advised you to make a narrative single-player game without any replay value these are not the kinds of games that tend to be really successful in the marketplace for Indies this is not the kind of game you should invest a lot of time or money into right but I did is the problem I definitely did I spent two and a half years of my life on this game I spent four hundred and twenty thousand dollars on this game and that's a lot of time and a lot of money to put into something that probably I would have advised against early on I would have said that this wouldn't be a commercially viable product but I spent

that time and I spent that money and I have absolutely no regrets I'm really proud of this game and I love it and so that's what this talk is about today this is a sort of post-mortem but I'm gonna explain what I was thinking as I developed the game and how I came to the conclusion that I should invest this time in this money and I'm gonna go over some of the things I learned along the way and it's gonna be difficult to explain exactly what I was thinking when I came up with the idea for kind but I did used to record my desktop at all times so I can show you before I made kind this is what I was doing I had a full time job and I was messing around after work in blueprints blueprints scripting for fun and I was mostly trying to explore different animation ideas at this idea in particular of a character that like a humanoid character that would roll around in the world and kick off of walls to move around rather than using run cycles and so forth I prototype that character with a cube the head kind of like appendages that would extend you can see here this was the

beginning of that prototype and as I was coming up with this tech for this this thing that would be a humanoid character I didn't I honestly just really liked the cube I just like the way the cube moved I thought it was fun I so in the beginning I was just working on animation tech and I really liked the animation tech I was doing and I wanted to make a game to justify this tech demo so in the beginning I sat down with this demo and I thought can I make a game out of this can I justify a reason to keep working on it so I started working on a puzzle game and I call this face the brainstorming phase at this point I didn't even realize I was making a game yet I just had an idea I like the way this character moves and I want to come up with a something game-like that uses it and you'll see here different things I tried maybe the limit gets in your way and it blocks from moving around maybe there's sliding puzzles I tried things where you're like a Tetris shape that tries to roll through holes in the walls I just experimented a lot with different mechanics that were

interesting over the course of about four months and when I thought I was onto something I made a video of it so after four months of the brainstorming phase I made this video and I sent it to my friends and I asked them if they thought I should make this into a game and I completely ignored their advice because I didn't care at this point when I made this video I pretty much knew that I I wanted to make this game but I also keep in mind at this point I was working after work and I knew that this making a puzzle game probably wouldn't be a commercially viable project so this was gonna be a hobby project of mine and at work right when I made this video we were going down to working about 20 hours a week part time so I realized at this moment I wanted to make this hobby project and I had the time to do it and I came up with a plan and I call this plan the first scope of the game at this point I had decided that I would make a game I had spent four months brainstorming and playing around with different ideas and I knew I had 20

hours a week that I could spend myself for about three to four months until I had to go back to being full-time and I figured that was enough time to make about a one hour puzzle game if I scoped it tightly and I focused and I figured I would spend this time I would make a one hour puzzle game that just kind of refined what I had already built during that brainstorming phase so now I'm gonna go over some of the things I learned during scope one at this point as far as design goes I had never made a puzzle game before so a lot of those early puzzles were kind of pointless and boring I cut basically all of them and remade them and I've put a lot of my focus into making sequences of that I found interesting early on in particular I was really interested in the idea of having a preset order two puzzles I really like a crafted experience I thought it would be fun to introduce a mechanic and then introduce another mechanic and then have a puzzle to combine them I wanted to really control the experience of the player going through the game I like that I like the idea of having that kind of

crafted experience but you'll see that that's kind of controversial among puzzle designers a lot of designers would argue that you should put your you should have your puzzles in a nonlinear order you should be able to jump around from puzzle to puzzle so if a player gets stuck a player has a different thing that they can kind of jump to and a different thing that they can play and there's good reasons for this if you get stuck in a puzzle game it is very frustrating more frustrating than any other genre it's important that you're able to jump around and play something else because if I guess the best way to explain this is with other games if you're stuck in a game like Super Meat Boy every time you fail and Super Meat Boy you at least feel like you're getting better you feel like your skill is progressing when you fail on a puzzle game you don't ever feel like your skills progressing you either you've figured out the puzzle or you have not figured out the puzzle and if you're not if you haven't figured out the puzzle you don't feel like you're closer to figuring it out and you're just getting more and more frustrated a lot of the

time and so it's very important for a puzzle game to give the player the ability to to leave and go play something else as soon as possible when they're stuck and if you have a very difficult game it's important to give the player a lot of different puzzles that they could go play but in spite of this I really wanted that crafted experience and so I kind of came up with a hybrid solution at the time I decided to layout my puzzles in sequences but have multiple sequences that you could jump between so this you eye kind of shows off what I was going for there I I took the puzzles I clumped up by mechanics then I came up with the concept that they were each different characters there was three different characters in this game and that way I knew there'd be at anytime three different kinds of sets of puzzles that the player could go between and so that's something I figured out as far as design goes in the first scope of the game and we'll get back to that more later in the first scope of the game I also had make a lot of art decisions a lot of important art pillars were figured out specifically I decided that the game had to have a sketchy art style because this

is a game where you have to cross these gaps in the world and I needed the player to see where they would land when they crossed a gap so if I had a sketchy art style I could have a line that kind of overhangs the world and I could have the I could show the grid of the world in negative space so that the player could actually see the board that they were playing on another thing I locked down as far as the art goes was the character design which seems I guess obvious in hindsight but the characters had to be designed very intentionally the mechanics the game are a bit unusual and that you can stand up off of a lambo limb is is load-bearing from the side but you can stand up off of a limb but the limb will not bear any load if on the side so like if the body rolls off the world if the body of a character rolls off the world the limbs will not support weight or if another character rolls on to a character different characters limb that limb does not support weight so the limbs had to look flimsy they had to also somehow look

like they could maintain your weight if you were standing on them and also I needed a way to grown the characters in the world there need to be very clear color separations between the different grid units different grade tiles that the character was occupying at any time so you could kind of feel out where the character was in the world this is important to make the game playable really so that's a lot of stuff I figured out in the first scope of the game it took about four months and after four months I made this video and I brought this video to GDC this was a trailer of scope one I showed it at GDC 2018 and this is a trailer for a playable game this version of the game was two hours long I was aiming for one but I hit two and it wasn't completely done I did need some UI fixes I did need a lot of bug fixing the game would crash at times but it was feature complete and it was something that I could have polished up and shipped in my free time if I if I wanted to but I didn't want to

because I took this to GDC and everybody really liked it and everybody was supportive and I just didn't feel ready to be done yet I decided at this point because my GGC experience was so positive that I would continue working on the game and so I sat down I made a plan for that and that plan is scope - and what this was was I decided okay I've completed scope one I know exactly what that game would be if I shipped it I have but basically done but I'm not happy with it I want more mechanics I want more variety I didn't feel like I'd explored everything that this game could do yet and I talked to I talked to my co-workers and he said it's a part time for about six to ten more months to just help me figure out what I wanted to do to complete the game and wrap up the game and this scope - was probably the most fun this is what I think I did the work I like the most this is when I decided to both add mechanics to the game and also add a story because at the time in my head these characters had

personalities in my head these characters were talking to each other but no that was actually in the game in the original like puzzle game I had made and I wanted to actually put that in the game and so I added a narrative and the narrative drove the mechanics so for instance when Euler Andrew were in love I wanted to show that somehow so I thought what would happen if two characters were in love maybe they'd go dancing and I looked at choreography for figure skating and I tried to design puzzles that would make you dance and that's how I came up with the ideas of these kind of sliding puzzles it's actually based on watching a lot of figure skating um the other hand later on I I decided I wanted them to fight and so what would it look like if these two characters would fight actually didn't have to add any extremely tech there I just had to fit the characters on the same I just had to fit the characters and on a smaller board in order to kind of get that so I was designing puzzles what looked like they were fighting or here boy is injured and I wanted him to feel

like he was limping I wanted him to feel hurt so I designed puzzles where you would have to literally limp through the world I mean Euler's always constrained in his movements but here he feels particularly helpless this is the kind of stuff I did in a second scope of the game and and this is the kind of stuff that was honestly my favorite if I could go back again I would throw away a lot of the earlier puzzles I think what I found was as soon as I had a purpose or an intention for the puzzles the those puzzles were just much stronger they were fun or it was more fun to make it was easier to make and the puzzles tended to sit in the game and in a better way they had a purpose simply exploring a mechanic I didn't find that those puzzles were necessarily the strongest ones if I could go back again I would probably have caught a lot of the the main stage stuff not because it was bad but because it didn't those puzzles didn't really have a purpose that they didn't really they weren't crafted with any kind of intention they weren't as grounded in the game as the puzzles that were designed specifically

to tell a narrative and and that's something I learned in scope 2 that's the second scope of the game and I had a lot of fun with that but if you look at this kind of timeline here you'll see at this point I had spent what four months brainstorming for months in scope one and eight months in scope two so that was a full year that I had spent working part-time this year I at this point it's been a full year working two jobs and that was important because I needed the money but it was really killing me at the time I didn't feel like I was burnt out I didn't feel like I could keep going I felt like I wasn't putting my all into my job at my proper job I felt like I was putting way more energy into kind at home and so what I figured I would do at this point I worked it out with my co-workers and I decided I would quit I would found jump squad and the goal was I would found chopped squad at this point at the end of scope two I had a another game that was completed that

was longer it was about six hours long without final art the art you saw there was a final art but the art the actual art for the game was the the art you saw from from scope on so I had this this finished game and I figured I'd quit my job I would I would wrap it up I would ship it within like two months and then I would take a break and then would get another job again and the reason why I felt like I'd have to get another job again was because I really did not believe that the version of the game I had would do well in the marketplace I was proud of it I loved that I thought I was fun and I was excited to ship it and show it to the world but I knew it wouldn't be commercially successful for a lot of reasons the biggest being I I didn't have any kind of marketing plan I didn't think the art in the version that I had at that point would stand out in the market I I didn't I just looked bad it didn't look like something that would be successful in the marketplace and there's some ui/ux stuff I hoped I could

get to you but I wasn't sure I'd have time before I ran out of money so I figured I would ship this and then I would I would have to get another job but just in case since I'm quitting my job anyways I figured I would take one week and put together a pitch deck I would send it out to all the different publishers just in case somebody would bite and this was a long shot you have to keep in mind if you pitch a game to publishers I've done this many times generally from the moment you pitch until the moment you actually get revenue that's like at least six months six months after you pitch is the earliest you're gonna actually see money in your bank account and I knew I would probably have to launch the version I would have to launch client before then in my head I didn't think I'd make it that long so this is really more of a Hail Mary but as it turns out something really unexpected happened I quit and I found a chump squad and three weeks later at the Epic Games store launched and a matter of a couple weeks after that I had a

side exclusivity deal with Epic Games which is how I funded scope 3 and I'll get into scope 3 in a second but I should say that this was the biggest stroke of luck imaginable I had no idea this was coming but I was very lucky that I happened to have gotten an unreal death grant for kind already kind a pic already knew about kind when they launched their storefront they I already had their emails it was very easy for me to get in contact with them they knew who I was and so get it banging out that deal explaining the situation and banging out that deal really quickly was an unexpected huge advantage and it really that is the entire reason I was able to do scope 3 which brings me to scope 3 so at this point what I had was a game that I liked as far as the design goes I was really happy with it it was I had figured out and scoped to what I was doing I was making a game that told this story with puzzles and I had made those puzzles and I was proud

of it but I didn't think I'd be commercially successful and so at this point I had a set amount of money I couldn't spend more than that I had a designed game and the goal was to take that game I had and make it market viable specifically I wanted to polish the environment arts the UI and I wanted to port and localize the game excited enough funding to do that I figured I could work full-time and I could hire a couple of contractors and I needed to wrap up what I had in about 8 to 10 months um I still don't really have a marketing plan but I figured maybe I could buy like hire a PR company and maybe if I just came out on a lot of platforms part of why I came out in a lot of platforms was I had this idea in my head that if I could just be on every platform I would get marketing from each of them and they would reinforce each other and it would create some buzz anyway scope 3 is when I was funded so this is when I should probably talk

about the budget because the vast majority of the money was spent in this version of the game in total I spent four hundred and twenty thousand dollars on Kline that does not cover my salary but that covers absolutely everything else I mean that covers paying for the contractors that I hired in this phase also paying for the company when I initially set that up going to packs the flights to GDC this year that I didn't get to take because of the coronavirus so this is the amount of money I spent total for everything with kine and you'll see as you'll see here I spent $210,000 on art and pretty much all of that when it's the environment so let's talk about that first because that is the biggest part of my budget I did I worked with about four artists over about four months to revise the art style that's not perfect but I hired surface digital to help me with the art style and what we did was we we tried a couple of different things I had this abstract kind of painted or style initially and I knew I wanted to

keep that sketchiness for the reasons I talked about before I liked the idea of having lines that overhang the world but I wanted the objects to have some kind of just some basis in reality I wanted to come up with something a little higher fidelity more interesting for the environments or would-be artists to do this but we we rapidly found we couldn't have too much high frequency detail in the environments it would distract the eye and as soon as the player couldn't see the the puzzle board the player was completely lost we had a lot of other problems it was very necessary to never have anything not aligned with the grid there was a really long lines that don't alive aligned with the grid again the player would have difficulty seeing the puzzles and the puzzles are already hard it doesn't feel fair if you're failing on a puzzle because you can't see what's going on this is a huge problem in kind even if you're very careful to have all of the lines align with a grid you can still end up with optical illusions like here do you see this brown box in the

foreground it's hard to see where that is in Z height it's hard to see if that's the same level as the the white boxes or not you have to kind of turn the camera just to see it this is an optical illusion that you have inclining there's a lot of other optical illusions for they're very similar to this that had to be troubleshooted basically and I'll tell you the way I solved this particular one was I added a scribble shader to Klein so any time you can't land on land on a grid tile from where you are you see kind of a scribble and that's consistent throughout the game so the player is their eyes trained to see where they can land and where they can't land and that becomes more important later on when you can change the height for different reasons or when you can switch between characters this is one trick I did going more into the art in scope 3 I would say I made some kind of questionable production decisions and scope 3 as far as the art goes I was working with a very small amount of time I was trying to work as efficiently as possible with a bunch of outsourcers so

I took each puzzle and I took all the static meshes from them and I merged them into one static mesh and I would outsource that and I would bring it back in and I would put back in the editor and that's how I apprised the the different puzzle pieces as quickly as possible but this also meant that I couldn't edit a puzzle right as soon as I emerged all these meshes together and exported them as an FBX now at this point I I can't change any puzzle unless I go into Maya and actually change the final art for the puzzle which means at this point no I couldn't change the puzzles if I wanted to and I would say that's a it's something I could get away with because I knew I was locking down the design at the beginning of scope 3 but it's something I would definitely recommend against I I hate that I like that there are certain areas that are still tile based like the boat area this is done entirely through through tiles and and using shader tricks to to make the tiles look differently I vastly prefer working this way I think it's really important to be able to iterate on the design throughout the entirety of production so

that's what I learned in in scope 3 as far as the art goes and like I said I spent about telogen $10,000 and 4 months on just that like working four months of my time as well full-time working on that to overhaul the environments in the UI art and that was the correct call I'm really happy with how the art turned out and kinda I think it really did help position the game well in the marketplace but if you look at here at the chart you'll see there's a sizeable part of the budget that's spent on porting and I that wasn't just the budget that was also my time I spent three to four months on kind full-time on localization importing this game and that was a bad decision I regret that I do not recommend doing that I think trying to do a multi-platform launch almost killed me it was just a lot of work for me personally I underestimated how much of my effort would have to go into that no matter what just learning

five different backends and setting up five different storefronts with each language so getting all the translations set up on each storefront each storefront has their own requirements not just for images but for everything I had to manage five different builds if I found a bug I had to fix that bug in five different places and this is on top of the language specific problems in the platform specific problems so like certain things to do just for a search on one platform or another or just in a certain language on certain platforms and others it just became a comment like no one thing was awful but all of these things in aggregate were just way too much for not only one person but for even spending a lot of money I just couldn't keep up with the amount of work required to launch on all these platforms at the same time if I could do it again I would have released first on PC and then on stay dr switch and then on the other platforms one at a time is needed and I tell you the the one platform that I didn't seem ship with with stadia cuz

stadia didn't launch until November and I came out in October so I had another month to work with stadia and that was a much more pleasant launch for me I got to work with the marketing team there I got to make sure our messaging aligned I got to get my marketing materials together fast or I had time to learn the backend by the time I was submitting the final cert for stadia I had already fixed all the bugs for the main game so I knew any bugs that showed up on stadia were stadia specific problems which was something that I didn't have for the other platforms there was times when I'd get a bug in on the Xbox I wasn't sure if it was on every platform or just only on the Xbox so again I would if I could do it again I would have focused only on one storefront and I can tell you specifically for kind a ps4 in the Xbox port were the ones that were not worth it I mean I can't legally say how many units I sold on each platform but if you combine the Xbox one and the ps4 sales there less than 5% of my total sales and

this makes sense largely this is because I didn't reach out to Microsoft or Sony I didn't participate in any marketing with them I thought I thought if I marketed the game in general it would have some kind of splash effect on every platform I I was a bit naive I didn't think to reach out to Microsoft and Sony and I didn't have the time because I was shipping on everything to reach out specifically to Microsoft and Sony and try to leverage whatever their marketing channels would have been also just in general I find people don't people who play puzzle games my users gamers who play puzzle games they tend to play on the go on the switch or on the phone some people who want the more hardcore games will play on their PC puzzle gamers generally don't sit at their couch to play puzzle games maybe for a game like Grist or a more of a game you sink into perhaps but games that are difficult

that are difficult to puzzle games people tend to prefer those on other platforms so that was my biggest mistake in scope 3 it was simchah ping on so many platforms I wish I had been more focused specifically in my case probably on stadion PC and switch mmm any case that's the story and some of the things I learned along the way of how I spend it how I spent two and a half years and four hundred twenty thousand dollars in a puzzle game and I'm gonna leave you with a couple of closing thoughts just what went right and wrong over the entire project the way I made this game was iterative I made a scope of the game and then when I had the resources and I knew the game deserved to be a bigger scope that was when I increased the scope I did not sit down and plan to make a massive game and then a game that I couldn't fund myself right I find that that's the worst situation to be in if you come up with a massive game where

you can't personally fund it and you're going around pitching your your small prototype hoping you get funding you're in a very bad spot you it's difficult to stay confident a you're just not in a good negotiating position with whoever needs to give you money you're just assuming a lot more risk there personally I the way I work and the way I would recommend working is to design iteratively and scope up as you know that the game deserves to be a bigger scope and as you can't acquire funding to make that bigger scope I there's a great deal of confidence that comes with knowing that you have enough money in the bank account to ship what you're currently working on I find that that's really important there's been times in my career but I haven't had that and that's maddening I would highly recommend against it as far as the rest other things from the game I'm really happy with how the art worked out I don't think the way it was cuz I wouldn't recommend the way I constructed it but I I'm really happy with how it ended up in the end as far takeaways for Kline I'm oh let's see here yes

I think launching at Stadio was smart I'm glad I did that there was twenty two titles in stadia when it launched and kind was one of them and that because there was so few that gave me a lot of press I am really proud that I got to work with stadia like that was pretty cool that I pulled off but on the other hand I wish I didn't launch on all the other platforms well I'm doing so many platforms at the same time just ended up being a lot of work that I don't think was worth it and as far as design goes I didn't put enough thought into the player experience when the player is stuck on a puzzle so this is a point that I don't think really fits into any specific scope but I really wanted to touch on because it's something important that I missed the user experience when a player is stuck in kind is very bad and a large part of this is how the puzzles were structured it's the core pointed game right like kyon is a game that tells us story using

puzzles and the part of the way I tell that narrative is as soon as you beat a puzzle you jump to the next one immediately in a sequence and you see a little bit of dialogue and then you beat the next puzzle and you jump to the next one and you see a bit of dialogue so a player is encouraged to continuously play the game a player almost never sees the level select screen compare this to an experience like Bob as you in this game you complete a puzzle and you're immediately kicked out to the little select screen every time you beat a puzzle you're kicked back out to it and you have a lot of different puzzles to choose from it doesn't feel like there's any set order in this game if you're stuck and you back out to the level select screen that doesn't feel quite as much like failure because you see the level select screen all the time in kind when you back out to the level select screen it feels like failure it's not something you do unless you're stuck oh and because of that there's a lot more player friction players generally don't want to do that it's just a more negative experience and I think in general what I needed to do is spend

more time looking at players that were struggling look players that were not did not rock the game immediately did not get it as easily I think if I was more focused on making sure that those players were still having fun or I would have caught this earlier on so those are some of my takeaways and that's the story of how kind was made I'm sorry we couldn't do this talk at GDC but I'm glad you guys get to see it either way my name is Gwen kinase out now I hope you check it out you can reach me on twitch I'm I'm sorry this way died your goldfish on twitch if this is streamed then hopefully I'll be in the chat I'm also Darren goldfish on Twitter and I am on YouTube because we couldn't do this at GDC because of the corona virus I hope you're all staying healthy please reach out to me with any questions you have hit me up on Twitter and all I'll reply as best I can thank you