The Salt and Sanctuary Postmortem

[Music] all right hello I'm Michelle J Silva and and I'm James I'm my mic sound like to it you can stand on this too cool um yeah and we're Scott Studios and we made a game called salt and [Applause] Sanctuary thank you um that broke some tension that was good y uh so the really the best way like without just saying stuff like it's an action RPG blah blah blah it's really cool the best way to round it up is just saying it's 2D Dark Souls that's really like the best hook for like drawing people in to make it to like explore it better and really get into it so we're the whole studio is right here W two people two cats technically um it took about 2 and a half years to develop and this is our fourth major huge game get it yeah uh so so yeah in terms of like what to talk about it's you know it's one of those scenarios where you spend so much time in the forest and the

whole can't see the forest from the trees kind of things I you know I had no idea what would be interesting so I just said let's do the sexy thing that everyone does and crowdsource it and just ask Twitter um so that's what we did and we got a lot of questions um so that's pretty much you know it's like it's like a preemptive Q&A uh and that was you know we kind of organized it a bit but um just just starting right from the get-go um people love to see concept art and sketches and really unfortunately we don't really do that a lot and it's kind of sad cuz I love concept art I love the books and all the really great visuals um most of our stuff is just done directly into the computer and put right into the game um James does a little bit of stuff basically when we're stuck in a metal box in the sky and have to be somewhere on a plane and that's what happens there that's his SK little Sketchbook I brought that and then I do a little project I call monster of the day that every October I do a monster of the day every day and a lot of that gets drawn into the game's horrible

creatures um so the map the world map that doesn't actually exist in the game much sugar in um it's kind of it's right there it's got like a weird stain on it I don't know if you can see the cat on the cats would sit on it so I don't know what the nature of the stain is but that but um but like it so so I I I made that like on a plane and kind of followed it like like it was it was you know it was fact and that's how like so spoiler alert if you haven't played through the whole game that's that's the world map of the game and it it's I mean it's it's very hard to tell I guess but it you know it it matches up really it's pretty close yeah um little bit alings um so here's some more just to go through more like Concepts there wasn't a lot of variation here you can just see like it went straight from sketch to creature and this is some of my like concept have finished um as you can see my style is super different that was my style there's me look at that and there's Michelle like she's really uh

I'm very clean and concise and pretty um which doesn't really work for our game but I'm you know have to work backwards and make it work with our sketchy kind of gritty style and yeah there's there more of mine you know it's kind of a different style but it's you know it's a bunch of like armor set um Concepts right the setting of the background is um another like how did this happen where did it come from and we're just really in love with song W and fire and really especially with house gy joy and the themes behind that where it's really nautical and like gritty and and sea salt soaking and that's where we came up with the the word salt really is drawn from the ocean and the power of the ocean yeah I really I'm like kind of a geek for for like premodern science how you know the before the the you know Advent of the scientific method it was like how do we explain this well it's probably you know

a bit of fire and like some gods and that's where this you know it's just it was it was figuring out things including the supernal as well as the natural so the Creeds and their religious themes are just like really to set to set the world and give it more flavor and really like explore culture religion and culture um as a thing yeah yeah it was um it like the whole concept of like modern atheism was was non-existent in this in this kind of universe um and uh cuz I I I have this like this like bug bear about Dungeons and Dragons where you know someone wants to play like an atheist cleric and it's like that doesn't make sense this world I mean you can make little bit coming you know um but so that was that the now we're going to get to something interesting um again with our processes and methodology we don't really have one but we sort of do so that that that was concept and now like with the with the nuts and bolts it's you know everyone's like well how do you you know what's

what's like how do you start what do you start with um and and for me it's always like I just it's like you have an imagined slice and then you execute it um you know it's just it's content and then iteration becomes the becomes the execution uh for Content tools are a big like I love talking about tools um and then you know iteration is where you just keep working to make sure that your your content matches that that thing that you imagined um like for instance with uh the dishwasher which was kind of like the first game that I made that was not horrible um like the the the the scene I imagine was like okay what if it was like a Devil May Cry kind of thing and you could air combo someone and then like teleport up into the air and keep you know keep attacking them how would that how would that play out how would that feel uh and then so Charlie Murder was like I really like you know Punisher Alien versus Predator arcade like what if that was punk rock um salt and Sanctuary was like What if we had like a 2d fighter kind of kind of game that took all these Dark Souls mechanics and and how would that work how would it like could you could you have uh you know like custom armor sets different move sets different weapon sets how

would that all play out so those are the the kind of like imagined like just you know it's like a like a little slice where you're like that'd be cool I want to see that um and then like now you have this problem where you're like I imagined a thing I want to turn it into reality what do I do and then it's like well I guess I have to build all the tech um so for salt that was the 2D animation system the game World loot system um probably more than that um but that'll require requires tools and structures um tools just the the better like it it's took me forever to realize this but like the better tools you make the better content you can make because you're going to spend so much time in the tools making the content and games are are mostly content and then create and iterate is really what we do a lot of it's you make the thing put the thing in the game and then see how it looks and iterate iterate iterate that's how we do it Y and then and then so this is like an like an aside uh question that's just the answer is just going to be no um it's you know how much programy junk did you plan out do you use agile

Sprints all these words that I just kind of vaguely can understand um but no we don't it's just it's all self-taught um yeah so we do both have backgrounds I have a BFA and James has a MERS in computer science but you would you wouldn't know it you wouldn't know no I'm just kidding um but in terms of the game the game aspect of it that's all self-taught so like I learned how to use Photoshop and how to get things into the computer and yeah most of the the challenges were just um like adapting shaders to PS4 and you know but it was it was pretty doable um but game is mostly content so maps and characters and animations a lot of animations a lot of time was spent on that yeah yeah so it it all kind of comes down to like identifying a type of content that needs to be in the game and then um you know if you could you could sit down and hardcode it and you know more power to you but the the way to to to really be able to be flexible with content and and expressive and artistic is to make really good tools and then those tools become kind of you know it's like a like a paintbrush you know you

make a really good paintbrush and then you can make a better better painting and so on um and then and then an interesting thing is when you're making these tools a lot of the game logic that goes into the actual game is just created through the creation of the of the tool so what were those tools specifically and then let's start with the regular ones Visual Studio 2012 Photoshop garage band was for music audacity and then I used it's XNA is still the framework I'm going to I'm going to keep carrying that torch as XNA and then uh you know we used monog game for uh for PS4 um and uh but yeah for the custom stuff that you know I'm getting into uh those are it's it's tools that like I started working on in 2007 um like a lot of them have like most Co like most of the code is in common from what I made for for dishwasher dead Samurai um like the character editor that's that's I've carried that one forever um but stuff like like atlasing animation uh map monster loot definitions the skill tree was the new one uh destructibles was from proba murder dialogue editor and

then here they are they are this is our um Atlas Atlas editor editor yeah and so we I I was doing development streams and um people would like I'd be doing just spending a lot of time in our tools you know which kind of like that that goes with my point like that's where I spent most of the time was just in the tool that I made for the content um but so we'd have a I'd have a tool and I'd be using it and then the the the viewers would be like what's that called and I'd be like well it's the sheet editor they'd be like no it needs a better name so ended up calling this one we came up with kind of a crowdsourced names for all these things so this was the Cartographer um our animation tool is Skellington yeah that that's the one that's been like since dishwasher dead Samurai and it's been so improved so the tools also have been iterated and just worked on and worked on and they're so much better now yeah it's basically like like it's it's assembling um you know frames out of Parts it's all it's all skeletal there's there's um you know parent child hierarchy yeah this is our first game that has had SK sket hierarchy our previous games were just

like dragged the thing a little bit and it was Parts floating in space yeah it was challenging yep um there's a map editor we call that salmon Maps yeah so salmon Maps is supposed to be like Sam and Max but it's Maps so it's salmon Maps I guess delicious um it's a map editor and the whole you know the whole um the whole world is one giant map which we should have had a picture but it's one big world I guess you saw the map in the beginning that got it uh yeah so our monster editor and our loot editor is kind of the similar thing it's just it's just a place to organize all the all the metadata like you know the value of things like how how much damage does this do what that kind of thing um and then uh yeah the smashables editor needs a name if anyone wants to help us with that uh that one I created for Charlie Murder that's basically for for representing how like an object will destroy if it can be destroyed so it would be like you create an object and create a a bunch of Sprites of the

pieces that that object will destroy into and then painstakingly arrange them like a puzzle so that you know they all spawn in the right places y um dialogue editor we have never had major dialogue before so this was a a big thing there's about 55,000 words in the game um so we needed a tool for that that that kind of got out of control um but yeah it's a you know it's a like for for dialog trees um you know you can you can have uh you know um Parts where they ask you a question and you can select an option and um like an amount of limited logic like you can have a flag be set after you answer something and then they can change their dialogue based on that flag um it's pretty limited but it's just you know enough functionality yeah so the skill tree again the skills thing was new um we had a kind a very rudimentary version of this in Charlie Murder but this is like major RPG we need a big skill tree and that's yeah that's that's what came of it that's what came of it and that

was like I was pretty proud of myself because that was making an Editor to make an edit one file only but you know without the editor it would have been a nightmare to place everything and do all the connections programmatically hardcoding it so you know that's just love editors they're a good thing all right so Jason Z he's an awesome dude who's been like a longtime follower um you know what were what was like the first thing that you made for this game and is there anything that didn't it in so we talked concept and then the tools the foundation and then the question is when do you go from Foundation to to content you know you build on this Foundation um so yeah the first the first enemy I missell that that zombie guy the Berserker on the it's an s on the right there r s I just I guess so um yeah he was the first guy and also the first Ai and a lot of monsters had that carried over with a little bit of adaptation to them yeah and yeah because the AI you

make it for that now you can use the AI for new monsters and like you can you can reuse parts of an AI to uh you know Define behaviors and then the behaviors you can plug into different different monsters and so much of of what feels like the behavior of a monster is defined through its animations which comes from that tool um it it really like you you you start doing a few things and it just a lot of stuff comes of that whether you like it or not um all right so how do you know um once you have a concept if it's worth pursuing because we always have ideas and like sometimes prototypes going on how do you decide like this is the thing you should be doing and really the biggest thing were our peers people like friends who would check out early prototypes and just being super excited and saying this is something you need to do so yeah biggest Catalyst appears um and you can tell that this is fun to play um and it's exciting to work on like you want to get up every day and immediately start working on it it's

definitely scary though like going from prototype to like this is the thing I'm going to be working on for 2 years of my life yeah for on on the uh the the technical level because you don't know if the foundation is like enough and then on the just greater existential level yeah like is this really going to be good is this really something we should try to make good if it's not good and are people still going to like the souls genre by the time we actually get this thing out and I feel like there must be people here who told us to go from prototype yeah we've got some friends maybe here that were like do this game you guys can say just keep it to yourself but I feel like there must be something cuz we you know we showed it around a bunch so what does the typical day look like what's it like working together with your spouse um I like to be sassy and say it's a lot like working with your cooworker except you're married um and it's a typical day is like it's really good to have some kind of routine like get up or drinking coffee I'm answering some emails and then Dive

Right into like whatever you're working on at the time um you know music audio animation art the maps uh lots and lots of animation and like you like to do yeah I like to I like to actually the five is probably too much I was going to change that I did it but um and I even said that when we rehearsed this too um but yeah no like at least like at least a day on a specific task cuz if you do too much task switching the the the overhead like the mental overhead to to just kind of you know gather your your bearings and figure out what you're doing is is too much so I'd have to if I was doing music I would stick on music for like you know two or three days at least and if it was if it was audio it was that if it was coding or working on the map working on a new monster um it you know it had to be like just stick to this one task and then and then the neat thing about that is switching tasks after that was exciting yeah it makes the next thing fun um yeah those Dev streams that we were doing really helped keep us on task and like working on things that we should be working on um you're sitting

around all day and part of that routine thing is getting exercise like just sitting in one place all day as we know is not great for you um as tempting as it is cuz you really just want to keep working on that thing that's giving you trouble um and you're excited about it but exercise has been really good for just clearing your head as well as idea generating like showers are sometimes good for Idea gener Idea generating um or long runs cuz we were marathon training last year um that helped a lot and again you'll hear this a thousand times communication is key really you just have to be able to communicate with each other um and and work out any troubles and one of the troubles that we had was before this game we didn't have Source control as you can imagine that is bad super bad it used to be just it used to be just James so that's fair um but I came on what like five years ago or something and this is the first game we had that had that Source control and

that really helped just I wasn't just for combining content right like I would make something and say James put it in please and then he'd say sure sure but he's busy doing his thing and it just sort of gets ignored for a long time and then angry wife but we worked it out uh with that Source control I can put it in the game myself and I don't ever have to be mad y all right this is a Lo question is Chris here um yeah so so this is you know kind of a kind of a cool question about how do we you know walk the line of being Souls omage without being a knockoff and and you know it was it was something we we obsessed about a bit um because like it's it's you know it's how you describe the game but it's it's still very unique it's still got its own identity but um at the same time it's like if you're into Dark Souls you'll love this game if not we're probably going to waste our time trying to convince you otherwise and that's just you know that that's just that's just reality um but yeah it was about you know inspiration and identity and I I I started looking at it

like you're just we're drawing from a landscape of of Concepts and you know these are these are com steps that that come from everywhere and I've used them um this this bullet point of uh of abbreviations on the bottom is uh Ninja giden plus Devil May Cry is what became the dishwasher which was my first game that didn't suck like I was saying uh and then the dishwasher and Dark Souls became Salton Sanctuary um you know obviously much more heavily influenced by Dark Souls but so many concepts of dishwasher like that Broly combat was what went into into salt uh and then and then since this like we've been playing a lot of Neo and that's just so like affirming and awes I love that game but it's it's like it's also like kind of neat to see how this landscape of Concepts is making more content and you know it it's uh it makes me feel good yeah so balancing difficulty of the game when we wrong well that will lead into the next thing but balancing the game again it just comes down to iteration there's not acience to it we are artist heart and we learn science to

help us make the art um so it's really just a lot of iteration multiple builds yeah yeah yeah well there so much there's so much emphasis on like different builds affect the play style that's what I really liked about Dark Souls was how it's it's an action game but you can be like I want to try you know a mage build a priest build like let's try pole arms let's try heavy weapons and I really wanted to have that feel work where it's like we're an action game you know these boss fights are going to be just intense and testing and if you try them with all these different builds it'll feel good and like yeah that's just you know what what Michelle said like the only way to do that was just to sit down and play the game over and over and over and over um so while a lot of people like it I'm kind of sick of it um uh but yeah and also the so the critical path uh was unfinished for most of the development time so you know you you get a little farther and then have to kind of start over again uh so I'm particularly sick of the early parts of the game uh and then also you know an interesting thing with dark souls is so much of the of the fun the excitement comes from not knowing what's around every corner and

when you're the developer you know what's around every corner there's no there's no there's no excitement in Discovery there's no excitement and fear um so doing that it's kind of difficult to to like you know you eventually kind of convince yourself like this might not be good will it be you know and it's hard to tell um so what went wrong yeah okay so what went wrong was um so moname like I said you know we're going to carry that torch um but mono game did have some some trouble with PS4 at first um it was there were some stability issues but like we wouldn't have been able to put it on PS4 if not for mono game uh but we did get yelled at a lot for the stability things and it hurt our feelings uh so that's that was no fun and the biggest thing that went wrong uh was localization we did a major faux and released the game with basically Google translate of localization oops don't do that yeah a lot of you know it was it was kind of like let's lay the groundwork to support localization oops we need content okay let's use autogenerated content and then oops here's a deadline maybe everyone won't

mind oops they did and then so so it's been uh you know we're still fixing a so we definitely learned uh if you don't have the languages localized yet just launch in your native language don't fake it people notice yep so what did go correctly when you do localization right we worked with a porting or a publishing company or publishing partner Kakashi games uh with our Japanese launch and that was so smooth successful and nice uh you can see this is just Japan numbers on Steam so you can see launch a little bump and then Japanese low you can see like oh yeah when people can understand your game they play it more weird we don't know what that spike is we don't know what that last Little Giant spike is um we're guessing an influencer like a streamer or something picked it up like it didn't line up to anything it didn't line up to anything so I don't know but you you just don't know I thought it was cool to put there though cuz it's like without the L without the original thing maybe that Spike never would have happened you know so it's it's just a weird you know yeah

so we're actually still gradually getting localization implemented in correctly um patching that in so um yeah and then here's a so in the what went wrong theme um well what did you spend too much time on that in hindsight probably wasn't worth it and this is you know something I kind of wonder about um a lot of things I felt weren't super fleshed out like I I wanted there to be these these really you know different differentiated Creeds with with you know different weapons and different you know like a lot of different magic and and playing a different Creed would have a really significantly different playthrough experience and I I don't think I I really got the the picture I wanted to get um same thing with like doing Sanctuary takeovers uh and working for leaders they just they felt kind of filler um but then it's like one of those things where I'm like it's I don't I don't mind filler it's it's I don't know that's that's probably you know that's the most honest answer I could give about that all right so this was the most common question question and it's really interesting and strange but

are you how do you stay motivated and focused and committed and it's interesting how many people like how many people ask this question very telling really so motivation part of it is just being experienced this is our fourth major game um seven8 years now I think of development um it's a passion but at the same time our last game Charlie Murder super underperformed it was scary uh we had just closed on a house and we were moving from New York to Seattle very scary very scary times so part of that fear was a good motivator to have like a good game that would sell and so he wouldn't have to get real jobs uh but the thing is most Indie devs struggle like a lot of IND devs struggle with this uh with motivation self-doubt it's a thing if you have that you're absolutely not alone what helps a lot um for me is surrounding yourselves with other creatives other developers GDC for example uh PX it's really great to just

listen and talk to other developers who are making things and making awesome stuff it's really great I always come back from these things like super recharged and wanting to make things and play other games so when all the new Souls games are coming out and bloodborne and whatnot we kind of took a break and just played those the heck out of those games and as long as the game isn't a time Vampire Diablo um yeah so and then my quick tip switch it up because I um whenever I switch from one mode to another or if I try to add a new feature or something it's it's funny because it's like going back to that thing how I said I added features that were kind of sucky and and now I'm saying but if you lose your motivation add a new feature switch it up it's a little bit conflicting but y it still works so I think this is our last question multi-part question thanks Annie uh what was it like working with Sony versus Microsoft um we talked about the tools and how those translated a

little bit difficult and steam pc is a new thing for us which is strange because it's usually the other way around people like Indies do PC first and then console we're a little bit weird managing those multiple platforms we haven't done that before either it's totally new Okay so we've got 5 minutes here um yeah and then marketing like what did we do for marketing so first of all Sony Pub fund awesome yeah yeah it was it's awesome like I wish I could say more about it but we're not supposed to but cuz it was it was it's really awesome um you know we had this so much uncertainty um you know like right we came off of like this generation switch from you know Xbox x 360 the new console Generation Um XA didn't exist anymore and that was just so crushing cuz that's what we lived on and that's how we made our living so like what do we do what do we do and PS4 says hi we love Indies so that was just a really really nice um

incentive and motivation right like having having them backing us and then you know it kind of took away all the fear of failure which which really just I mean it was it it was it was affecting you know it's it gets to anyone um but yeah there were you know a lot of big changes we used to do first-party publishing through Microsoft um for you know like six years uh it was all it was all just first- part of publishings through Microsoft and that was really really the only thing I knew uh and then going from that to Sony self-publishing was you know it was it was it was scary and and it was new and different uh it's probably why I thought we were supposed to do localization you know even if because that's what we did because Xbox had done did the localization in QA and everything for us and it was new to us that whole brand new world and steam as a new platform oh yeah that's a thing that's a really big thing actually and after 7 years of console exclusivity this is seems so cool you you can see all your data on there it's really easy to push and update uh the only thing is

it's a little bit tricky now that we have to actually think about all these different platforms it's a little tricky but you set reminders and remind yourself to do it yeah yeah we're doing it's cuz it's Sony America Sony Europe um Steam and then va va is coming out it's coming so yeah uh we're really bad at self-promotion I hate to say that but we think about it last minute so much because we're so focused on getting the game done and focused on the development of it luckily we are super lucky with this there's this huge community of streamers and YouTubers that are into these kind of games and they found us it was uh I start all started with FTI Vidia and he really sparked that Powder Keg it was amazing um Sony again also was super awesome we got on the launch party promotion and that helped a good deal yeah and their PR was great so the postmortem is postmortem cherish motivation when you have it seek it uh

surround yourself with your peers and listen to their advice so many times we just are left wondering what do we do I'm so lost go talk to your developer friends make developer friends uh ask them advice and listen to it or not but talk to people um don't release unfinished Lo don't it's bad that was a big takeway it such a big takeaway like that shocked us cuz we weren't used to it um and it also just huge huge thanks to all those um content creators that really helped spread Word of Mouth fans Gamers uh Sony of course and our friends and family yeah yeah yeah I feel like without without Sony us just really having a lot of faith in this project it wouldn't have uh you know I mean it it really like pushed it and catalyzed it it really helped a lot so yeah that was awesome thank you for listening to our talk and I don't know if we have any time for questions but we're going to head over to the wrap up room on the other side um do we have time for

questions it says 419 I guess no I think I think we're good I think we're good yeah thank [Applause] you