The Last Game I Make Before I Die: The Crashlands Postmortem

[Music] in the fall of 2013 I walked into my kitchen and saw a blood dragon burst out of my chest crash through the wall and fly off into the Horizon this was not a Daydream it was a full-on vivid hallucination my brother Seth and I had just published our second game and were working on an endless runner for mobile something we had designed to pay the bills and not really much else the blood dragon began to visit more often the further we moved into Dev first it would show up once a week or so a reality break I came to expect when moving between rooms and then it picked up the pace like clockwork every day the dragon would intrude on my daily routine it got so curious that I mentioned it to Seth my brother co-founder and Game Dev partner we chocked it up to postpartum depression from our previous game release and soldiered on my energy started to decline I began waking up later and later and requiring more and

more coffee to sustain my work the dragon came to visit more often still and the vision of its blood soaked Wings became a common thing that I eventually learned to Simply ignore I figured I was struck with a strange virus something I had picked up while hiking out east I decided to start going to the gym more and eating healthier to combat the growing sense of fatigue that was starting to overtake me my left PEC began to swell up as well as my left lat which I attributed just to my increasingly intense gym regiments the dragon started showing up nearly every time I walked into a room and then the fever came hot boiling temperatures consumed me beginning at 5:30 p.m. each day and put me to an exhausted sleep by 7 I'd wake up at 3:00 a.m. covered in a bucket of my own sweat I visited a doctor who sent me home with headache medicine my generally cheerful disposition hadn't been impacted Ed by being sick all the time

and it made the doctors think that I was doing just fine I was 23 after all I called to get a second opinion and was told that I would have to wait four weeks to get an appointment with the doctor and something about The Mention Of Time caused a sudden panic in me I told the nurse on the phone that I absolutely could not wait and that I needed to see someone even if it wasn't a doctor she lined me up with one of the doctor's assistants for the very next day and I drove in took my shirt off as directed and watched as fear flashed through her eyes and then was smothered by a professional demeanor she practically ran out of the room and came back with a doctor who I told wasn't going to be available for 4 weeks the doctor came in and squeezed the now sizable lump on the left side of my chest he felt my left Peck pushing hard under my clavicle all these places where I thought my extra gym time had just been doing a hell of a lot of good for me and then he stepped back from the table and

he told me I had cancer the next few weeks was a flurry of tests scans and biopsies when you get diagnosed with cancer the first step the doctors take is nailing down just which one you have because some I've been told are better than others each time a test came back for me though my results were worse first it was lymphoma then a rare form of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma which is more difficult to treat and then I was staged at 4B that's short hand for saying that the doctors genuinely did not know how it was that I was up and walking around St the stage Beyond four is supposed to be death they guessed that I would have died if I waited four weeks for that appointment and I learned just several months ago that my projected survival rate at the time clocked in at 7% it turns out that Dragon I've been seeing wasn't some weird mental slip it really was in me growing more dangerous with each day that passed my name is Sam Coster I'm

co-founder of butter scotch shananigans and today I'm going to talk to you about life death and game development I told myself in preparing this talk that I would leave nothing on the stage today so if I get a little choked up please bear with me once the tests were completed the doctors chose a regiment of chemotherapy for me and I was sent off to the clinic to get all sorts of poisons for those of you who have not had the uh good grace to go through chemotherapy let me try try to put it into easy words what it feels like how many of you have been hung over before how many of you been like really hung over before all right it basically feels like that just just worse and also it lasts a lot longer some of the other procedures that you get done are a little less easy to quantify like getting a bone marrow biopsy of which I've had the good grace to get seven it feels like someone punches a dime-sized hole in your backside and then pulls one your legs

out through it just for a second though the worst part of the whole thing though really is the underlying sense that maybe you're doomed that's really the hard part that sets diseases like cancer apart from most other illnesses it forces you in no uncertain terms to confront and walk with death but it turns out that recognizing that you're going to die has a couple benefits too the day after my first chemotherapy session Seth and I sat down at the Whiteboard for the first time in basically a month a whole lot had changed and yet here we were looking at the design and production plan of that silly endless Runner we've been building before I got diagnosed the whole day passed without the intrusion of the blood dragon and my energy was actually soaring despite the chemo largely due to an enormous dose of steroids and a whole lot of tumor death when Seth left for the day I cracked open Game Maker Studio our engine of choice and began prototyping I needed to make something to get my mind off the sense of Doom that was trying to break in so so naturally our prototyped

it was basically a Roomba picking up leaves once it picks up 10 leaves they turn into sandals it's incredible the thing is this was not compelling in the slightest and this is this we remade this recently basically what it looks like the next morning when Seth arrived eager to work on the plans we had laid down the day before I showed him my Roomba I told him about this crazy world we could build something that was it was huge it was going to have crafting and tons of stories and characters and items interact with it was going to be something ridiculous to get us through treatment something so ambitious that we keep ourselves alive just to do it he asked me why I wanted to build it and the words fell out of my mouth before I realized what I was saying no offense to those of you who make endless runners in here but this endless Runner is not the last game I want to make before I die I wanted to make something that mattered not just for money say signed up on the spot we were going to build this enormous game in enormous world and it was going to be a

mix of Diablo Terraria and Pokémon and it would be funny because that's what we needed but of course we had no idea how the [ __ ] to do that our previous games were making, 1500 bucks a month which was enough to keep me alive by Midwestern standards but Seth actually hadn't been paid yet we launched two games up to this point Each of which only took 48 work days to complete from inception to Market neither were known very well and nor were they known for their worlds their stories or for making Mone much money this was Reckless by every standard it was not a business decision it was an answer to the question that we living in a relatively safe and affluent society scarcely have to ask ourselves what would I do if I were going to be dead in a year what plans for the future might you have because you assume that you'll be around to enact them there's a good number of people in this room and what if I told you it's not statistically unlikely that someone's not coming back here next year

not cuz they didn't buy a ticket how would it change your plans and your behavior now when would you build whatever it is that you're building for myself and my family the question of what to do with life became clear we do the big things we really wanted to do because the worst thing that could happen already did and we didn't even think about that happening in the first place getting sick and being a given a rough expiration date suddenly make me suddenly made me ask a bunch of design questions about my life things I never considered before like do I really want to do this does this make me fulfilled is this worth my scarce time it made me approach my days as if I were actually a game designer trying to craft the best experience for myself why I had never done this before became a mystery to me because my sense of fulfillment soared despite being critically ill I remember giggling nervously when my mother who does health and wellness for corporations walked me through this four quadrant model there are things in life that are urgent non-urgent important and unimportant everything you

can do fits into this box of categories yeah there's a cat in a wood Cher be careful the problem for most people is that they neglect the important but non-urgent things until they slip into the Urgent category things like hanging out with your family spending time with your loved ones working on your game most people in fact don't run their lives but rather are run by their lives so it seemed a little crazy but managed to pair down nearly all of my activities to the things that were just important cancer gave me a whole lot of clarity we even developed a phrase for it which was pulling the C card when someone tried to pressure me into a situation that wasn't actually important according to my own distinction I could always fall back on the fact that I was dying and they would have to leave me alone my family and I got down the schedule of going to the hospital every 21 days for that routine poisoning and I always brought my laptop along now while I do all the for our studio I do not

consider myself an artist by trade I'm not the sort of person who's been scribbling on every surface available since they were three in fact I just started doing art four years ago when we started the studio because my brother Seth is better at programming than I am much to the horror of nearly every game artist I've met I use a mouse to do all of my art the one Fringe benefit of this is that it makes it incredibly easy to continue working from pretty much anywhere you could work from a bed you could work from a hospital chair you can work while getting poisoned it's fantastic and being able to work from all those positions makes it easier to endure treatment because I wasn't just a passenger along for some crazy roller coaster ride I was actually able to continue participating in my own life in much the same way that I was before at this early time the working title of our game was literally thuck cancer. GMX this only changed about 4 months into development when my prognosis improved due to the response my cancer had to chemotherapy and the was definitely

therapy therapy for us I know a lot of people say that making games is hard and I originally wanted to get up here and say yeah well making games while you're dying is really [ __ ] hard but the truth is that making games while going through treatment made treatment easier and weirdly going through cancer treatment made making games easier it allowed me to focus in a way that I hadn't thought I'd be able to before work also became therapy for my brother it was his way of helping in another helpless situation and it was my way of keeping that creeping Doom at Bay every day I'd wake up with a list of important things to do and Seth would be right there to assist he'd take time his in his evenings or when I was conked out from pain or drugs or both to add more things to the game to get me excited to get up again a great example of this happened when I was interned in the hospital for a particularly poisonous drug called methotraxate Seth asked if he should come by to visit and I told him no you get that PL planting logic done cuz I want to build

a [ __ ] Garden in my bed tonight he laughed and cranked on the project from home and a few hours later a new build arrived in Dropbox I was able to plant a garden from my hospital bed the name of the game eventually graduated to Four Corners and the reason was that Seth was having a hell of a time figuring out how to generate an infinite World that didn't take up so much memory that it crashed everything that it was put on keep in mind that all of our experience up to this point was on the mobile market and that's what we were aiming for so we needed low Ram overhead with cth best World building algorithm the game took 7 minutes to generate in four minutes to walk across I remember feeling really glum about this because it suddenly forces us to scale down the vision for the game and then Seth suddenly said [ __ ] this if Minecraft can do it so can we and he did a bunch of Googling and he found about found out about this thing called pearlin noise which for those of you I see a lot of heads nodding for those you who build procedurally

generated worlds that's the way to do it without taking up too much memory give it a Google you can figure it out with these limitations removed we suddenly had to abolish the name of the game four corners no longer existed we essentially had a bunch of different Infinities to work with we figured we'd be done with the game in about two months now this is back in February of 2014 about four months into treatment and Dev on the game we decided to call it crashlands GDC of 2014 rolled around a week after my fifth chemotherapy session with a severely damaged immune system and an intense dragging sense of fatigue I boarded a plane along with Seth to come here and see if we couldn't Wrangle up some press for our new title we' already worked twice as long on this thing as anything we' previously built and we were really excited to see what the critics thought and basically everyone we met with was completely unimpressed this is something to keep in mind I mean the Masters at Pixar talks talk about this with how every movie they make starts out as complete and

utter garbage and uh I think a lot of games work the same way at least crashlands certainly fit the pattern we returned from GDC a little down but inspired we took time each week to jam out a new game in just eight hours we needed a break from crash lands like I needed a break from being poisoned and luckily at the end of March I finally got that break because my sixth and final treatment finished I rang the bell on the chemo award which signal the end of treatment celebrated for a and then we got back to work my scan had come back not totally clean but the doctor said it was probably just healing in the affected areas from all the chemotherapy they said it was probably nothing to worry about Seth and I settled into the grind work of Dev we were in that process of of the game development point where you know everything you need to make you just got to put in a ridiculous amount of time to get it done and then something funny happened once the clamor from GDC died down and the scan came back relatively okay okay we realized we

had a problem which is that I wasn't going to die turns out being alive means you have to a lot of work to do uh we had to turn this game we or this toy that we had really been making for the past six months into an actual full-fledged cable title our trip to D to GDC had really ripped the wool off our eyes regarding whether or not crashs was good uh it was more of a boring toy with a few tear of crafting equipment shoved in I still had a scan coming up in June but I was feeling great had no obvious lumps and the doctors were pretty confident that I was in the clear so we just decided to look forward and start building for the future June rolled around and I went in for my scan we waited patiently for the results and finally they came through the doctors found something the constellation of nodes under my left arm where all the mess started were glowing again the doc told me I had cancer and needed to prepare

for Salvage chemotherapy which is as bad as it sounds plus not one but two stem cell transplants these were designed to simultaneously nuke my cancer into orbit and then lock it out by giving me someone else's blood and immune system permanently my world exploded I really felt like I had mined the first cancer experience for all sorts of wisdom and I wasn't even mad about it I feel like I had gained so much from facing my own mortality but to have to do it again and have it somehow be worse she like what the [ __ ] was this my girlfriend and I left the hospital numb we went to a nearby park where I made her ring out of clover and we laid in the grass it talked about the future that we were not going to have my parents who both work in medicine clamored for a biopsy before we called the case closed and I was interned again the doctors gave us some push back but eventually yielded and

decided to take a huge needle stab it into my chest and bite out pieces of where they thought the tumors were we waited a tense few days for what were going to be the legitimate results to this whole thing during which time I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she became my fiance a day or so later the doctor called she told me I didn't have cancer great three of the five biopsy reports had come back from pathology and they said it was all fine we rejoiced and began carrying on with our lives Feeling sufficiently yo-yoed by the whole thing but before we could make it to lunch the doctor called back those remaining two biopsy reports had been given to a different team and they sent her a note about the abnormality they found in the cells she told me I had cancer again and I needed to pack my bags and head for Salvage chemotherapy the next day the next morning I woke up with my bags packed all the way out the door received another call from the doctor she had investig the genetics team's claims and found the cells

weren't cancerous they were just abnormal and again what looked like consistent patterns based of healing from chemotherapy turns out I didn't have cancer but I did get a fiance out of the deal so after taking a long and Furious nap uh we decided to fix our focus on just getting this goddamn game done so we could close the chapter on this whole cancerous Escapade and luckily help us on the way our third brother and final co-founder of the studio Adam had been trapped in Texas getting a PhD in molecular biology once I got sick he made the call to wrap up his PhD as quickly as physically possible and joined us in the studio Seth myself and the rest of our family flew down to Texas watched him give us a defense and not more than 20 minutes after being Minted as a card carrying PhD we gave him his butterscotch business cards and stole him away from Academia Adam's fresh eyes let us re-examine a lot of the system systems that we had built in crashlands we were trying to build toward a feeling rather

than from a mechanic and this is a method of Dev that we weren't familiar with up to this point the feelings we were trying to hit were simply exploration and joy anything that got in the way of those two things we ripped out or nullified as best as as best as we possibly could but one thing had been giving us a huge amount of trouble that was inventory crashlands was shaping up to be an enormous crafting game with over 400 components that built into 540 different recipes that naturally meant that players players had to spend a lot of time collecting resources and managing them and it also meant that players exploration hunts were always cut short by a lack of bag space Seth and I both hated this but the best we'd managed to do so far was to keep adding slots to the player's bag by the time Adam came around the player had 80 inventory slots Adam played the game and simply asked a question that neither Seth nor I had had the presence of mind to pose what if we just didn't have an inventory this really had Echoes of those same questions I asked about life

when I first got diagnosed something as basic to a crafting game as traditionally minded and glossed over as having an inventory was up for negotiation did we actually need this was this a tool that was helping and serving our players or was it merely something we were doing because that's what people do removing the inventory did seem mildly insane but on closer inspection we found a truth the only way to get rid of the friction between exploration and craft was to literally destroy the concept of a limited inventory we decided to make the inventory infinite and completely non-searchable meaning players couldn't open up a bag to see all the stuff they had instead the total number of items that a player had would show up when they needed to like when they're about to craft a recipe this ended up being a huge design win for crashlands it freed up tons of player attention for the game world and put the focus back on exploration rather than sack Management in other words it gave us and our players more clarity Adam brought some other Firepower to the

bear for the studio Seth and I had been so focused first on the studio surviving and then on me surviving that we never had the bandwidth to step back and ask ask how we could better operate as an entity we were trapped in this vicious cycle of just making games without ever spending the time necessary to build the infrastructure to help ourselves so things like email lists marketing tools art pipelines command build line tools we just didn't have the time to investigate I mean I was dying in the Studio basically had no money Adam's arrival signaled a big shift though because since he wasn't trapped on the game side of things he started thinking about how we could improve our odds of success in the long term game over game through a bunch of discussions we realized that our biggest hangup and growing a studio and securing ourselves for the future was one of player retention between games because at this point that we had accumulated 3 million players between all of our other free titles we had no way to communicate with them that meant that that with every title we launched we had to

effectively start from zero again and beg borrow and steal to get on the front page of the App Store and simply recollect our fans that's an exhausting and non-optimal long-term strategy so our solution was to build our own proprietary login system called B Scotch ID with basically no knowledge in web programming Adam pulled a Tony Stark in a cave and somehow pounded the first version together in the span of a few weeks it was basically an email capture system with a bunch of other features Chief among them our own cloud saving system and this would allow people to move their saves between PC and mobile something we refer to as a save Bridge so you could play on something like steam pick up your device take it on the road with you and play your same save the Advent of B Scotch ID in my good health had his thinking really far down range because we were finally building for the future and it felt great we saw what crashin was shaping into and decided it was possible for us to launch not just on the mobile stor fronts but also on Steam and with with a safe bridge in place we could launch

simultaneously across all three and cause as much Ruckus as possible given that we had no money for marketing it was the end of 2014 by this time and the game was still very much in process despite all of our hopeful pushing otherwise it turns out that crash lands wasn't actually anywhere near done and it turns out that my cancer wasn't anywhere near done either in December of 2014 I was showering and felt a lump on the side of my chest Salvage came with theapy began a few weeks into 2015 I was placed in the hospital for 3 Days Every 21 days and given a more intense blast of chemo than before and all the while we kept plotting away on Crash LS adding more and more assets and expanding the game world I admit that this phase of the cancer is extremely difficult to talk about I was in a dark place my focus on process one of the gifts from the previous bout with cancer was about the only thing getting me through I simply focused on the very next asset for the game the next couple minutes I had with

my fiance or the next episode of Parks and Recreation my feeling of having a future was basically obliterated the chemotherapy was so harsh this time around that I would throw up every few hours in the hospital and be unable to walk up a flight of stairs without becoming exhausted for weeks once I left further the treatments were starting to affect other parts of my body which meant we started facing several delays due to complications Hope was in short supply and at the same time crash lands was also experiencing its own bout of Darkness while the game had shaped into a wonderful crafting RPG it Dawn on us said the game had no differentiation points whatsoever from other crafting games aside from the infinite inventory concept and that to us didn't sound like something we could sell the game would if left unchanged look like every other crafting game on the market it didn't have a unique hook despite the level of innovation we had brought to the design and this brought us to Discerning point that we now keep in mind as we build our games forward differentiation within a genre

is simply not nearly as good as separating yourself from existing genres pressent players are not interested in improvements they want whatever is new and crashlands for all of its Innovations was very much focused on the small stuff it was pretty far in the weeds of the crafting genre as far as where all the Innovations lied so we needed to get out of the weeds and move a mountain we needed to alter the landscape we were in so we could so we could pitch the game as effectively different from other titles like Terraria and don't starve otherwise we weren't going to be selling much of anything the future looked Bleak because the project meant to pull us through the destruction of cancer felt like it was going nowhere and the cancer wasn't going the [ __ ] away like it was supposed to so we started asking questions what can we do to make this game stand out from other crafting titles what could we do that would also add a sense of expiration to the world the answer fell out of one of our brainstorming sessions like an anvil we could use a story there weren't any

crafting games with long form hilarious narratives at least none we could think of most didn't have much to say Beyond throwing players into the woods and making them punch trees to survive Seth plugged a hard-coded quest into the game to see how it felt and it felt really good so Adam got to work building a back-end tool that would let us make these stories and we were suddenly back on to something and not a second too late because GDC 2015 was right around the corner it was just a few days after my second of three rounds of Salvage therapy the doctors warned me that I'd be attending the conference at the low point of my entire immune system they told me not to go in fact so I told them to find me a doctor buddy in San Francisco who could save me from a fatal neutropenic fever if that happened to happen I agreed to wear a mask on the plane and that was that we showed the game to our press contacts at Touch Arcade to a few of our contacts at the App Stores and a few other media sites and I tried desperately not to touch my hair because it started falling out our contacts were excited the game looked like a hilarious weird

Adventure by this point so press started to roll in and built a little tiny hype fire around us we returned from GDC booed and feeling like we had done the right thing so we dug back into the work shortly after my eyebrows fell out we carried on slamming content into the game as fast as we physically could we had for some arbitrary reason decided the game needed three biomes worth of content each one ended up taking six enemies 20 resources about 80 components as well as six tiers of armor Each of which had a Helm gloves chest and pants and then there were all the weapons the gadgets the Trinkets and the furniture this is one big game so word of the wise crafting games require a shitload of content had I actually died that year the game would never have gotten done as we ran up to May of 2015 my first sem stells transplant loomed the doctors warned me that it would be incredibly painful the chemotherapy regiment a patient receives for this sort of transplant I was getting is

ominously enough called beam Adam and Seth were nervous had they be trapped away for me from the duration of my time in the hospital this was because I could have a minimum of visitors anytime someone came to came to see me it would risk me dying from picking up some plague Vector they were carrying while I had no immune system so they decided to stay out and they just kept building chunks of crash lands while my chemo dripped away and the chemo goes in slow for six hours a day and it has a lagged effect I was actually so nervous about how the treatment would go this time around that the only thing I could do was escape and Escape I did while the nausea rolled in I picked up Dragon Age Inquisition on the sixth and final day of chemotherapy I actually beat the game as a spoiler alert you kill a dragon in the end something about the symbolism perked up my spirits as I headed into that second week and it's a good [ __ ] thing it did because I don't think I

understood what sickness was until the second week of that transplant I got 103 degree fever that lasted for 4 days during that time I was vomiting every 45 minutes or so crapping out my insides and coughing away like a broken leaf blower at one point I had to stand for 60 seconds for a chest x-ray I nearly passed out and then vomited Adam and Seth continued working on the game but couldn't handle the extreme stress from the hospital stay they'd simply be getting drip-fed texts from my fiance or my mom which read fever at one4 and not breaking he's coughing so hard he's vomiting they dove into the work to escape but crashin was Now too sensitive it was our project and I was very much out of the picture they built a small puzzle game kind of like threes and and send it to my phone so I had something completely non- taxing to take my mind off

of I played that game while I was cramped over the hospital toilet for so long that my legs went numb I was running on fumes and transfusions at this point for more than two weeks I watched some movies during this time but I don't remember any of them I don't remember an entire week of this whole experience I truly feel that I was pushed through the veil of life to the other side when my doctor just held on to my pinky toe and then dragged me back across I did recover after a time but the depth of that suffering sat with me for a very long time I got out of the hospital a month after being intered and I was Restless vaguely traumatized and really ready to build some [ __ ] the three of his brothers sat down inspected out what we had left to finish the game Adam had completed the backend systems for story creation and most of the end-game content was ready so now we really just needed the story but we also needed to go about getting on Steam Greenlight we did a bunch of of research on green light's process and realized

that we need at least 6 weeks of lead time to make sure that we were in the clear after looking at the games available on there and seeing what their pitfalls and successes were we decided the majority of the focus should be on the trailer we banged out a script for a ridiculous voice over trailer inspired by battle block theater we finished the trailer and launched our green light campaign on June 19th of 2015 42 hours later bright and early on Monday morning we were through and we just had to finish the game work on the story began in Earnest great writers suggest that you write stories from what you know so keeping that in mind we decided we'd write the story of someone just trying to do their job while the whole world [ __ ] with them because we knew a whole lot about that by this point in time I dove back into the hospital in August of 2014 for another four-week stay this time to receive the donor immune system that would in theory keep my cancer at Bay for the rest of my life this one was was shockingly easy aside from one allergic response those four

weeks breeed by rather than disappear to work I flung myself again into a game Skyrim in adventuring across the world that Bethesda built I was reinvigorated to complete crash lands and I also killed a shitload of dragons this was our goal to create a place that people could Escape into full of joy and exploration and as was now about time to pay it all forward with my hospital stays completed we had nothing but open road in front of us we still didn't know if I had cancer or not but we knew that we had done literally everything medically known possible to help by this point we finished the story the content for the game and got the marketing engine spun up which largely consisted of a spreadsheet with lots and lots of email addresses in it for those of you marketing your own project there's a phenomenal 45-minute video from Total biscuit about how to approach press and YouTubers the big lesson is make it easy for them to participate in the way you want that's mutually beneficial official here's what our email depress ended up

looking like you'll notice that the Embargo date is very small at the bottom we'll come back to this error later on another tool I suggest since you should value your time as much as a dying person does is mail merge for Google Sheets it's cheap it's like 30 bucks and it lets you send 1,500 emails per day in a highly automated fashion plus it has great open tracking so you can actually AB test your own press emails so as our press engine got rolling we started talking about beta testing having nearly died a few times you can imagine that I was quite impatient to get this [ __ ] game out the door I was firmly in the camp of get it out by the end of 2015 and the main reason honestly is because I was terrified my first cancer scan since stem since receiving the stem cell treatments was scheduled for December 6th of 2015 that'd be the first one in the whole year of treatment in the relapse and I didn't want to have anything getting in the way of getting the game

out my brother Adam ever the scientist talked me down from the ledge he created a beta testing tool that let players report bugs from within the game each feedback item also uploaded the players save so if we were confused about what was happening we could simply pull it down walk through it on our own device and discover for ourselves we recruited 170 people who were in that b Scotch ID system we built and they tested the game for us now since I had played through it in its entirety while I was building the story I figured we'd find maybe a handful of bugs however the game had grown to over 40 hours of content by this point so imagine my surprise when our testers found over 2,000 bugs in one month and more than bulletproofing the game they came up against problems that challenged some of our original design pillars of exploration so we made several sweeping changes to the game's content and systems alongside crushing all the bugs but there was one that we left out players really wanted a Quest tracker and in crash lands we chosen to give all

the quest to players in the form of actual written dialogue that they had to read their Quest log instead of having a list of tasks had a list of conversations array as though through text message that they could read for clues in the same breath of feedback players would applaud the story and their connection to the Wy characters that we had built and then request a punch list of tasks to complete not realizing that if we provided a punch list that they would that the narrative would have fallen to the Wayside so it turns out if you want players to read your content you could just make them do it we certainly did without the beta testers this game would have been absolute garbage now that Beta had wrapped we were looking at our calendar and sit notes to our platform contacts to see when a good launch window would be it turned out the third week of January 2016 was going to be calm so we began researching launch date launch dates for other titles to see what we could do while we pondered our timing I prepared for my scan and on December 6th 2015 I went to the hospital with my

heart in my chest I had never had a clean scan even when I'd been mistakenly declared cancer- free back in June of 2014 I called my grandfather he's an Iowan farmer with a brutal work ethic who months earlier had fallen off of a cattwalk and broken six ribs but decided to finish out six hours of hard manual labor before getting some ibuprofen I told him I was nervous for the scan and about what the result would be there was a pause on his end of the line and then he said no matter what happens it won't change anything I rolled back and forth in the pet scan machine and felt a calm Clarity building he was right I'd been thriving on the thumb of cancer for the past two years I'd arguably done my best work I'd been my best for my fiance and brothers if the cancer was still there I'd still be doing the same thing as if it wasn't just with a few more interruptions if I was going to be dead I wasn't going to be done we went upstairs and waited in the

doctor's office for what felt like an eternity for the oncologist to come by and she entered the room smiling but she's always smiling so you can never tell without much fuss she finally told us the news there was nothing nothing on the scan the cancer was gone the blood dragon the real one that had pled me for 2 years was dead we claimed January 21st as our launch date and suddenly had a fire under our asses to make sure that that everything was ready to go the leadup to launch felt very similar to getting that final scan because we had done everything we knew was possible under our own power and to the best of our ability over the past two years and now we were simply waiting in an eerily calm manner for the market to tell us if we had done things correctly no one guarante guaranteed us anything on launch day while we had strong confidence in several sites that would be covering the game on day one we had no direct confirmation from any one of the more than 1,000 pressent influencers we had

emailed further the storefronts themselves will never tell you if you're going to get a feature especially if you're an Indi while we kept in contact with our people at steam iTunes and Google Play We genuinely did not know if we'd be getting featuring treatment on day one and we desperately needed it because again we had no marketing dollars this is a straight PR campaign we were running so despite the insane level of uncertainty the three of us were comfortable we kind of learned to be so from the previous two years of nonsense we're confident we that we had done the best that we could and so we resigned ourselves to we resigned our Fring to the realm of uselessness and simply tried to relax instead that is until our press embargo was broken so here's the email from earlier again note that we put the Press embargo date at the bottom of the Box a big YouTuber decided to play the game and loved it so he made and scheduled some videos and didn't pay attention to the Embargo date his his videos went live a full 9 days before

launch the internet is a remarkably fickle place and we thought that if the gates opened and all of our YouTubers launched their videos a week early that by the time our actual launch rolled around we'd be long forgotten timing was critical for this whole operation to work and then angry emails started coming in other YouTubers who had read the Embargo date were upset that we gave this person in exclusive and they started threatening to pull coverage and you have to understand why which is at the first video that launches is almost guaranteed to lead in search results which naturally means that other YouTubers will be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to gaining views on a popular game so we began strategizing for how to contain the damage coming out of this the easiest way by far was simply to reach out to the YouTuber and ask him to pull the video down for a few days we sent him an email and we're met with an automated on vacation message he had scheduled three more videos over the next few days and hopped on an international flight we FR we frantically reached out to him

via Twitter and a couple other means but could not get a hold of him in a day pass in a second video popped up now other smaller YouTubers who had planed coverage of the game started telling us that they would have to pull out this was heartening in at least one way which was confirmation up until this point we had no guarantees that anyone gave a [ __ ] about what we were doing and now we suddenly had a crowd of people talking about their coverage for the game they were Furious of course but but they were talking we went back into strategy mode and examin our options we couldn't trust that the YouTuber in question would be responding to any of our Communications by the time his suite of videos came out and that meant there was a guaranteed flow of let's play videos coming from one person which meant that we were guaranteed to be generating ill will with the entire YouTuber Community if we didn't put a stop to it it seemed our only option was to lift the Embargo just for YouTubers and explain what had happened this was nonideal in every way as we wanted players to be able to purchase the game the moment they saw it but we were cornered since we'd want

to work with all these YouTubers in the future we emailed everyone and explained the situation and lifted the Embargo we have a saying in the studio there's no such thing as a good launch something or everything will go wrong and threaten to to derail all of your work luckily our training and keeping a calm head and researching our options from the previous two years made it easier to figure out what to do with the let's players Unleashed a small amount of hype around the game began to build several prominent YouTubers released videos with with view counts in the hundreds of thousands we watched each one with a mix of excitement and Terror then we found that these people were having a genuinely good time with the game relief kind of started to settle in we knew if nothing else happened we at least made something that was good launch day loomed we gathered whiskey wine and our spouses in my small apartment and prepared to launch the game on mobile on the evening of the 20th and then an email came in from Steam my heart sank in my chest thinking

we somehow missed something we're going to get delayed I quickly skimmed it and found out that the opposite had happened due to the hype surrounding the game and the preview coverage we'd gotten steam was Taking a Chance on us they were going to give us a pop-up feature spot for the weekend we could hardly believe it we hit the button at 11:00 p.m. on January 20th and Crashlings went live on mobile and the next morning Adam and Seth arrived at 7:00 a.m. and we launched on Steam and then we wait crash lands received an incredible amount of featuring support from the storefronts on Steam that weekend popup kept our sales numbers high for four days and on iTunes we received the editor's choice award for iPad which is a full week of featuring Google Play gave us a little front page nod all of these were due to us building relationships with the platform holders over the previous year simply an email here and there showing press coverage showing that we were still working on the game and keeping them excited we sold1 13 1,000 units in 10 days between

all three platforms we made back 10 times our meager Dev cost more importantly players loved the game especially on mobile we even stood as the highest rated mobile game of all time for a few weeks and we remained toward the top to this day our reviews were glowing across the board and though we didn't strike at the heart of the PC crowd as much as we'd like to we still secured a solid review from PC Gamer which is our first PC review and then came the notes from player people who knew nothing of the origins of this game wrote To Us telling us about how it was helping them get through life one man suffering from PTSD found relief for the first time in months for 60 hours another dealing with the death of a loved one found comfort in the ridiculous stories weed read and yet another who just started chemotherapy and picked the game up on a whim found his treatments forgotten crash lands the game we made to escape

our own reality was now casting a spell on hundreds of thousands of players and it worked and it mattered to date crashlands has sold 374,000 157 units across all three platforms it's swollen the ranks of our bcot ID system to more than 350,000 people meaning our next game launch is likely to be even more powerful than this one we were nominated for best mobile game of the year at dice just last week we got a nod from Time Magazine it's one of the top 10 games of 2016 and we won the much coveted Touch Arcade Game of the Year award for mobile with revenue from crashlands we've even managed to expand our studio so it's no longer just a three of us Brothers struggling to get by with the addition of our four hires Andy Tifa Sher and Monique we beg an expedition into creating meeting in a whole other way through creating a studio and a vibrant War culture when my brother brothers and I spoke about crash lands before launch we all agreed on what it meant to us this

game the story and the work on it all represent the biggest Monument of Hope and retaliation that we could craft it's the single biggest [ __ ] you to cancer that we could deliver making games and meaning out of life is hard if you take a designer's eye to the work you do and the way you live you'll come to find that the unimportant falsely urgent activities that take up much of your time will be Begin to Fall away if you focus on your processes rather than your goals if you stay grounded in the world around you and control what you can if you rely on those around you and if you approach work as the daily Act of making meaning in your life the way you live and the games you produce will naturally get better most importantly you'll get to create the experiences that give other people meaning when their world doesn't seem to have any so when the Press ignore your emails when your launch fails or your family forgets your

birthday or when your doctor tells you you might not be around for another year and when you experience a setback after setback as you try to make something meaningful out of your work just keep in mind this basic fact of life and Gabe Dev if you're not dead you're not done thank you [Applause] [Applause] thanks sit sit down you Rascals sit down ah good

God anybody got any questions I'm going to open book yeah of course hope it's worthwhile if you got any questions feel free to snag the mic if you got personal stuff you don't want to talk about you can just shoot me an email it's always good too my voice is cracking all over the place and if you have any specific questions about you know mobile and crossplatform Game Dev stuff we know a lot of technical things too besides all of our story nonsense so hello hello hello uh luuka 88 games I got a question about launching on mobile and steam at nearly the same time M uh of kind of my experience that mobile games if you're coming from steam that's a good thing if you're going from mobile oh yeah to steam you sort of maybe

looked down on a bit correct uh how is your experience doing it at the same time and uh any Lessons Learned there yes so I think uh so we this is honestly one of the things we did not I think control very well with our marketing message regarding the game um our goal is as Studios to build cross-platform games that essentially don't exist they don't exist on any platform they they Flex to play really well on any and so they're not just like a shitty port and the problem is if you're going from mobile to PC as you said there's just this general idea that if you're on mobile then the game is terrible and we did have that happen actually um it was noted in our in our PC Gamer review that the the controls seem simple the game seemed kind of simple and the interesting thing about it is we we actually employed a uh control scheme changes we added controller support a few months later our reviewer came by at PS and played the game with a controller and he said wow this seems way more complex we said yeah we split one interaction into 14 different buttons like it was

all there before you know um so there's there's a lot of that messaging I think is hard honestly very hard to control there is a there is a natural bias there um I honestly think for us it's going to be going to be a matter of sort of controlling that up front crash RS was originally talked about first as a mobile game and then we added PC on later so I think like we were kind of we kind of shot ourselves in the foot in a couple ways with that um because our marketing messaging was never really controlled because we didn't know what we were doing so I think approaching that from the angle of saying this is a cross-platform title as opposed to saying a mobile title or PC title should help a lot with alleviating some of that stuff in the future thank you mhm hello hello um so I was incredibly impressed with your the butterscotch ID um with kind of trying to create a sustained player base or or Communications system between multiple games um I was just curious if you could

talk about that a little bit more like what the inspiration was for that and it's with how you came from it from free mobile games leading into crash land yeah so so the question is basically uh you know the exception of B Scotch ID as our backend proprietary login system and uh what what we're trying to hope to do with it I think in the future so what we saw from our we launched four games uh two of them right before we started working on crashlands and two we actually launched during two of those 8 hour games that we made um we spun out into slightly larger projects the first of which had basically our first experiment with B Scotch ID in it and uh what we found is that we used we wanted to use it to roll it's like everyone's played Katamari demachi right like roll the ball forward make it bigger and bigger this is basically the problem we had is we were looking at our Game Dev stuff and we're like all right we have 3 million players but we can't we can't just roll them forward into our next title and so the idea was that if we could just get an email and then provide a suite of uh other services to players that sort of sweeten the pot to keep them active in there so there's actually friends there's a friend system um

there's a perk system so if you if you achieve something in uh crash lands like you beat a specific boss it'll actually unlock content in one of our other games if you're logged in so it starts doing the sort of cross promotion of the games themselves and then we we use this uh we sort of watch players activity and we can send them specific messages regarding certain games that they're that they're likely to play based on what we've seen from other user statistics in the past so we actually we don't use flurry we don't use any on those things we found them generally analytics to generally be overwhelming and not useful data um almost across the board and with this sort of stuff we've slowly started piecing this thing together so that our whole portfolio is back and forth supported so when we launch the next game we'll send an email to 350,000 people which we've estimated is going to be about 50,000 people on launch day who will open the email and see it we don't know about the buying rate is yet but we'll be able to talk about that hopefully in like six months um and then from there you know if they get into the game if new person getting into the game we're going to put perks in the next title that we launch that

retroactively go into crash lands that go into our previous four titles so you'll basically fall into our portfolio and a big inspiration for it was actually blizzard with Battle.net um a lot of the cross game stuff that they do and all the other they're sort of fully independent and our goal is to be a fully independent studio and sort of reverse a lot of the needs that we have for being completely reliant on the platforms like we love all three of our platforms of course but it's really terrifying given how many many games are coming out nowadays to know that with very few marketing dollars that if you don't get a feature spot with a premium game that you're kind of doomed so we wanted to kind of take some control back into our realm for that so there's a quick followup question to that if you don't mind um is the plan then to as you go on releasing new titles to continue doing even just small updates to pre like your existing Library yeah yeah yeah so the thing is like adding you know adding a few new achievements and that sort of thing doesn't take very long for us um we actually built in there's a bunch of hidden ones that people have already unlocked that point

to the other games that just don't do anything right now so we'll just go back in and update them and people will get new ships in like a previous game based on some of their activity there um so yeah we'll we'll keep on updating stuff and then eventually at some point if it's like you know five years down the road and we got 12 games or something crazy going on that we won't worry about some of the older titles but yeah cool anybody else hey uh you mentioned using storytelling to differentiate uh from other crafting games and I was just curious how you and your brothers collaborated on the writing you know if one person was kind of in charge or if you you kind of shared that responsibility yeah yeah so um so everything we do is so we have just an extremely collaborative work environment I guess and so um it was basically the case we all we all huddled for like three days and came up with the major beats of the story so I like a lot of the really good advice I've seen is if you have a beginning and an end then you can just fill it in so we kind of figure out what exactly that was and figure out what the theme was which is

essentially this in the case of crash lands it's a delivery driver who's just trying to essentially ship their [ __ ] packages and like they get stolen from you in the beginning your ship crashes and then you have to go through and you essentially uh solve a world domination plot that an alien has unrelated you're just trying to ship your goddamn packages and so and so we thought this was a hilarious thing like we wanted to subvert the usual sort of you're the only one like no you're like a UPS driver it's fine um so we we actually started we basically started out with that front and back side of it and then Adam finished building this backend tool so is it's almost like story programming uh it's called The Creator it's a little thing we built in the back end and so you can go in there and you can trigger you trigger events you can trigger changes in the world based on players completing Quest objectives and so uh I basically went in and just laid down I know I think it took about 3 months to write the whole thing uh it's about 50,000 words basically book um 56,000 words and I would lay down sort of the broad Strokes just go through and power through the whole thing and then Adam

would come back in and clean up stuff and add funny jokes and things I think one of my favorite things actually like the Creator lets you do all sorts of crazy [ __ ] but my favorite one is there's this one story uh involving a tend drum which is like a furry goat person and they have they're trying to hide from the villain in the game and when you walk up to them you find out that like they're hiding in a plant and then they like as the as the quest trigger Shi shs then they appear so it look it looks like they're transforming from a plant into a creature when in reality we're just swapping these assets out and so like having a few different people tackled this thing actually showed like I didn't realize we could do that with the engine essentially so having a bunch of these sort of collaboration points was fantastic for getting all the work done so essentially we do we sometimes refer to in farming terminology is plow seed uh water so one person comes in does like 90% of the work next person comes in finishes and polishes stuff up and then someone comes in look at it's like a tweaking some stuff here and there thank

you cool well that I'll be all I think you guys are free to go thanks so much [Applause]