The Triple Postmortem - Black Ice, 6180 The Moon, The More You Know (About the Devil)

[Music] Hello. Hello. Hi. All right. Good. Good. Good. Okay. Hi, guys. Uh, I am speaking first. I'm Christine Forbus. I'm the Oh, all right. Early claps. Go ahead. Bring it on. Yeah. Mhm. I deserve it. Keep it going. That's all right. Uh, I am the CEO and co-owner of the Super Duper Game Company. Uh, my husband, uh, Garrett and I work on a game called Black Ice. And I wasn't too comfortable using postmortem because we're still in early access. So, I made up midmortem and it it's not a real word and sorry, but it it'll have to do. So, I want to talk a little bit about our game, how development's gone so far, what I can pass on to you from what I've learned. So before I get into any of all that, I want to get into what Black Ice is. So this is Black Ice. It's a

cyberpunk hacking game. You're a hacker in cyerspace taking down servers of large corporations. So pretty cool. It's we kind of say it's like Borderlands meets Tron as far as visuals and game style goes. So we started development in uh 2013, got green lit in 2014 and uh moved back from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas, where we are now in 2015 and now it's 2016 and I'm speaking at GDC. So what can I teach you? Before I was in the game industry, I was a high school teacher. So I kind of instinctively frame everything I do as a teacher and I didn't want to come up here and say this is what I did and it sucked. This is what I did and it was great and then not put that in anything constructive for you if you want to get into the indie industry. So what can I teach you? First thing go to conventions.

You have to go to conventions because people need to see your game. Twitter's not enough. Telling your friends isn't enough. Your mom telling her friends isn't enough. You have to get out there. You have to say, "Hey, this is my game." So, you need to get eyes on your game. And don't get stuck into thinking that that means packs only or GDC only. Don't shy away from local conventions, conventions that are geared towards things that are outside of video games. Uh we our game's really like kind of cyberpunky kind of retro that you saw. So we looked at classic game conventions and looked at showing our game there. It's about cyberpunk stuff. So we looked at hacking conventions or places that communicate with hackers. You know, look at the style of your game, the the video, like the visual styles, the play styles. Find those really niche

conventions and reach out to them. Even board game conventions, I've heard you can do really cool things with. So, hello. Find the people who are looking for a game like yours. I don't care how weird your game is. I don't care how niche you think it is. There is a human being out there who wants it and wants to play it. But you cannot trust your audience to find you. You have to find them. So, get out there and say, "Oh, you like video games about rabbits picking up carrots. Guess what? I make that. And you're going to make somebody's day. And that person's going to go and say, "I have been looking for a game with rabbits and carrots for months. Somebody made it. Hooray." Be that person. Be that game developer that can give somebody what they want. But find them cuz they're not they don't know. They don't know to look for you. So do that. But with that comes this exception. Limit your storefront presence. This is something that we did wrong when we first started. And it

sounds counterintuitive. You think, well, the more places I sell my game, the more money I'm going to make and then I'm going to be a millionaire. And no, you're not. You're really, really not. It's It doesn't work that way. And so, when I say we had too many storefronts, I mean we had too many storefrs. These are all the places that you could get Black Ice when we first started, not including our own website. And just to kind of break that down before we got on Steam, this is how our sales looked. And you notice that's only four out of the many that I showed you. There's a reason people didn't buy them on that storefront. They're not going to go to all these different storefronts to buy your game. And what's more is once you make it onto Steam, that's what it looks like now when we sell Black Eyes. We replaced the Humble Widget with the Humble Store. The only reason that 8% is a big number like 8 is because we were

on their uh front page for a while. So once you're on Steam, step back a little bit. Reasons to limit your storefront presence is it's less work for you. When we first started out, we thought that the coolest thing we could do was push out a patch a week. So, it wasn't just one patch a week. It was one patch a week to eight different storefronts. And oh my god, did they make sure that was the hardest thing to do cuz every storefront works differently. Everyone gets patch notes differently. And so, you're pushing a patch to one place, pushing a patch to another place. Don't do that. Don't do it. It's not worth the trouble. Have one really good build on a couple sites instead of one kind of okay build on like 10 sites. And also, it's important to build and focus your brand. Think about what you want your game to be and who you want to play it. And that goes back to conventions. If your game

is educational, then don't worry about all these other sites that focus on FPS's and war games. Find some cool education sites that focus on maybe selling to teachers or selling to classrooms. If your game is if you don't even want to sell it, if you just want to give it away, try looking at charities, nonprofits, things like that. So, make your game tailored to the people you want to give it to. And doing your homework with storefronts is the best way to do that. cuz there are a lot out out there and they're all going to come out of the woodwork once they see you're selling to one place. We got emails on emails, hey, I have this storefront. Would you like to give me 50% of your earnings and I'll put it on my store? No. No, I wouldn't. And it's tempting. It's tempting when you're not making any money from your game. 50% of the cut's going to sound really good, but don't do it. And I'm going to get to like value later cuz value is like super important. And that goes in with price perception control.

Out of all the storefronts we had, one of them they decided when and for how much our game would go on sale. And that was really tricky. And we got lucky that we could opt out, but we had to tell them, "Excuse, excuse me. Uh, I don't think I want my $5 game 75% off today." And then they would, "Okay, fine." And so you want to make sure that your game is selling for what it's worth. And again, going back to you're going to get stuck in this mindset of screw it. I want I need $10 now. I'll fine. It's a $30 game. Whatever. I'll take it. Don't take it. And controlling that price perception. There's a really nifty plugin that I'm sure all of you know that will tell you where a game is being sold the cheapest. So, it doesn't matter if your game is being sold for $10 on a 100 websites. If one site is selling it for $5, everybody's going to go there

and buy it for $5. So, you need to be in control of how much your game costs. And that goes into something else you should do, which is take yourself seriously with the indie scene. Nobody wants to be the boss guy. Nobody wants to be the suit or the you need to do this and you need to do that and I'm a professional. It's like, nah, man. I'm like, I'm just indie dev. I'm chill. Like, I'm cool. But people don't want to take you seriously if you're chill and cool. And then nobody's going to buy your game. Nobody's going to want to feature your game because then you look like somebody who doesn't know what you're doing. And so you need to set professional standards. One of the worst things we did when we were starting out is because we were new, we weren't comfortable telling contractors that they had a due date. So we ended up with assets. We've been developing this game for 3 years. Their assets I still haven't received from artists. I'm just never going to get them. There's a cool poster. Not going to have that. An animation. Nope.

All kinds of things. You need to do that even if it feels uncomfortable. You need to do that. You need to say, "No, I'm sorry. I need this by this time." And then once you get that, you'll get comfortable with it. And then it'll make everything so much easier for you. Cuz you need to treat your game like it has value because it does. I don't care how terrible your game is. is it could have the worst graphics and it could lag every half second, but you're putting your time into this game. You're putting your everything into this game. And if you don't treat it like it's worth something, nobody else is going to treat it like it's worth something either. So, you need to step back, look at what you're working on, and say, "Hell yeah, like this is worth it, and I'm going to let other people know that they need to treat it that way, too." So, get feedback. Don't shy away from that. Don't baby your game and coddle it and say, "No, it's not ready and go away and you can't

look at it." Like, don't do that. Get it out there. Put it out there early, often, and everywhere. And when I say everywhere, these are some amazing places to get feedback for your game. Reddit was one of the best places that we got awesome feedback from our game. Uh, not just like indie dev or gamedev subreddits. We were on the cyberpunk subreddit just posting early screenshots of like our demo of like our earliest build and saying like, "Hey guys, we make a cyberpunk game. Is this cool?" And they were like, "Yeah, this is cool." Find, again, I know I keep going back to it, like those really niche communities. Find a small community that fits with the themes of your game and ask them what they think. Also, listen to what people have to say. It's really easy to give people an opportunity to talk, but it's impossible sometimes to listen to what they have to say. I had maybe 50 people tell me in a row at a convention that the crosshair

in our game is hard to see. And I was like, "No, it's not. It's right there." And I know, but I just And they're And I'm watching these people who I'm wrong. They're taking time out of their day to play my game and they're trying to tell me this part of your game doesn't really work. And I'm like, "No, I can see the crosshair." So 50 people the whole day and then the second day of the convention. Uh just has anyone ever told you like your crosshair is kind of hard to to see? And they're squinting at my computer and I'm back there like no, nobody's ever said that to me. And I went home and we fixed the crosshair. And people loved it. Not a single complaint since. So, it's going to bruise your ego. It is. You're going to want to think that you're the best game developer in the world. You're going to want to think that you know exactly what you're doing because it's your baby. But

you got to listen. People are they're going to sit down and the first thing out of their mouth, you need to remember what it is. The first thing they say, good or bad, that's their instant immediate impression. You need to write it down if you're not going to remember. If it's I can't see your crosshair. The colors don't make sense. I don't get it. Take the time to talk to them. What don't you get? Ask that question. It's simple. People love to talk. People love to tell you what they don't like about stuff. So, take that opportunity. Be like, "Good. Tell me what you don't like about it and make it better." All of this goes into the most important thing. Keep your day job. And I am not going to be the first indie developer to tell you that. And I pray to God I'm not the last indie developer to tell you that. But you need to keep your day job. No matter how much fun it is to work on your game,

no matter how much time you think you can spend on it and kind of h like maybe I don't really need that game job. And I'm going to give you some real logistical adult reasons why, which is the first one is you subsidize your game costs. Your game's not going to make money right away, if it makes money at all. Let's be real. So, you need to pay for things out of your own pocket. our first couple conventions that was all us. Uh paying our contractors, paying our artists, that came from us. You have to have that available. And if you don't, if you think I'm just going to quit my job and I'm going to become an indie game developer, it's not free making a game. It's work and it's money. And quitting your g your day job eliminates any chance you have of subsidizing game costs. Also, you need a safety net. Your game might fail, and it hurts to think about that, and it hurts to admit

it to yourself and to keep that in your back pocket while you're developing a game. It could fail. And if it does, you need to have something that's going to prop you up. It cannot be your game. I hate to tell you that, and it sounds so negative, I guess, but you need to have something there because that's that's your livelihood. Like you can't play with that just cuz you want to make a cool platformer. Like that's not worth it. But you get to define success and failure when you keep your day job. If your game fails and you don't get to eat dinner that week, you have failed. You don't get to deny that. You don't get to say that that's not a failure because it is a failure. If you have income already, if you have something to carry you, you get to define what success and failure is. For us, success was having the game pay for itself. That's all we wanted. All we wanted was

a game that could eventually sustain itself. And we got there. And we got there because we kept our day jobs. And we got there because we were fortunate enough to have that foresight and put ourselves in the position where we could define what success is to us. And I want that for you. I want you to be able to pay your rent. I want you to be able to get your kids a new backpack for school. Don't tie those things to the success and failure of your game cuz it's not worth it. But it will be worth it when it succeeds if you don't have all that stress. So I've I just I wanted to end with that because I've heard so many horror stories from other devs losing houses, not struggling to get by. And that does not need to be you. I'm here telling you the industry does not need to be that difficult. If you have a day job, keep it. If you don't have a day job, find one, keep it, and then work on your game. So, that's all I have

to say. That's our game. That's me. That's Garrett. I would absolutely love for you guys to come and find me after this. Ask me questions, talk. You can talk to Garrett. He's lead developer, so he'll be able to answer more technical questions. But you guys can do this. You can do this. If I can freaking do this and I was a high school teacher, you can do this. Like, come on. It's just just do everything I said and you'll be totally fine. So, yeah. Awesome. Thanks, guys. [Applause] Hello.

This is my the longest talk in English ever. [Applause] [Music] Yeah. My name is Sun Park and I'm a creative director at Total Cream. Turkim is an independent game studio based in South Korea and in 2009 I founded our studio as a school assignment project and since 2011 we've turned out 30 our studio into professional game studio. We made three games and two commercial games so far. Today we will talk about our latest project 6180 the moment. Hm. Yeah. So in our team, we are just twoman team. So our programmer young men do code and I do everything but code

except music. Yeah. Including us, a total of five people worked on our game 6180 the moon. A different programmer made the original version of game make with game maker and two different music composer created the music. The game is available on Steam, Xbox One and Wii U so far and we will launch on iOS soon. Android, we don't have Android phone. Sorry, I actually didn't work on um Yeah, that's skip. Yeah, so maybe you don't know well about our game. So this is trailer. As you see, this is a really minimalistic game. We've connected the top and bottom of the screen so player can jump extremely high through the screen. Yeah, I like that sound.

Okay, skip it. The first prototype was made in a game jam. One day my previous freelance programmer Jerome and I visited my friend's game studio and then they were doing their internal game jam at that time. When we arrived there there was only 1 hour and 43 minutes left until the end of the jam. Jerome and I decided to join in the jam. We had less than 2 hours. Jerome said hey I prepared thing to make a platformer game. So you should make an awesome idea for it within 3 minutes. Okay, I agreed and started to work on my our game's main concept. So I'm always interested in make a weird fun games. So this time I wanted to make a weird platformer game. So how can we

make a weird platformer game? I have only three minutes. At first, I thought that the most essential thing in a platformer game is jump. So, I tried to make an idea for kind of weird jumping. Suddenly, I realized that all platformer games have a limit on the the jump hate. It's screen size as you see. So I wanted to make a jumping mechanic that exceeds that jump limit. Finally, we did it by connecting top and bottom of the screen. This is it. The first version is this video. And yeah, it have just four tiny levels. We really love this prototype. So we decided to make a full version. In this version, this white circle, yeah, it was

just circle in the first version have a skill which make it stop in the midair. Yeah, maybe you will see that soon. Yeah, as you see, it could stop infinitely, but in in the full version, we change it it as one one time for one jump if the player have the item. Yeah. So, we had a play test with our close friends. They also like our games. Of course, there were both of good and bad feedback, but we decided to concentrate only on good feedback. Why? Why good feedback only? First, we are not veteran developer. Though we've made games for several years, I think we we are still newbie developers. If we couldn't make a

perfect game, then we wanted to make a game which have its own color. So I also think maximizing good points goes toward minimizing bad points as well. So to keep improving our game's unique color, I made a game design checklist based in only good feedback. The important the most important purpose of this list is making every build fun. This is a part of the list. They are mostly for supporting our main mechanics extremely long jump through the screen. Let's take a look each guidelines. We thought our jump mechanic is super unique. But whenever I added new elements in our game, it I felt like the game is was becoming too normal. So I boldly quit expanding content. It

was uh just try to make a tiny sexy game. I wanted to end the game before people felt like our game mechanics wasn't fresh anymore. Actually, the average clear time is just around 6180 seconds like our game title. We didn't intend it to make it though. Yeah, lots of people said our game is too short, but I think this is totally enough gameplay length. If we make our game longer with same puzzle elements, yeah, it must be a lose a bit. Yeah, I think our main mechanics super long jump in connected space would be a little complicated to some players. Actually in the game the player should think before almost every jump. So the core mechanic is already complicated in

our case. To reduce the difficulty and make a game more simple, we used only common puzzle object like breaking thing, blinking thing and keep falling thing. Yet they are really common things in platformer genre. So they could support our jump mechanic without elevating the difficulty of our game. The most important thing while game designing is checking whether game objects block both of the top and bottom of the screen. As I've said again and again, long jump in open space is main feature of our game. But if we block the space, it would be become a normal platformer. So I always try to keep both of top and bottom of the screen open. And there is only one exception to this. It was breaking blocks because the space would

be open after breaking. I really like these breaking ones. Um in the early stage of development we set its sound effect like glass crashing but I wanted to make it a kind of music thing after we made background music. So we made five musical sounds which fit with each PGM and play them randomly when they are broken. Um yeah like making music through the game play. That's surely so yeah pretty. [Music] We also tried to make all sound effects in game as a music thing but as a result we just made only this breaking sound as musical sound. It was my opinion. I thought that would be uh I thought that would be more charming if we make only

several musical experience in whole game. We didn't want to make a hard game. Basically, I hope more people could see our games ending that allows us to show the whole thing we made to players. So, I designed all levels as fun experience, not as a kind of challenging thing. For this, placing save point in each levels is really important. Basically, I placed save points right before hard challenge, but I tried not to make it too often. It was just for reducing a kind of useless action before retry. Yeah, for the same reason, I tried a lot to place spikes in proper location while making games. If I try to make to play or die, they always die. So I tried to

make them to threaten player, not to kill players. In addition to make making our game's long jump more attractive, I placed the spikes st slightly down position on the normal jump path. It could yeah give a feeling like yeah kind of yeah slightly good jump to players that makes yeah the player excited without dying. We had such an interesting experience while we made the second page of the game. I made about 200 levels and selected 50 levels for the game. At first we'd set five words which have 10 levels and try to make a different gravity space in each word like braid did it well with variety mechanics with time but everything wasn't good as you know there are tons of gravity puzzle in the world so it was really hard to make

a kind of unique gravity based puzzle one day I just reversed gravity in some levels and the magic has started. it. Frankly, reverse gravity is one of the most popular gravity puzzles, so I didn't expect anything, but it changed all levels totally different. It because of our game's jump hate. In other platform games, the player's character cannot touch the bottom side of the platform. On the other hand, in our game, the moon can touch that bottom side of after jumping through the screen. So, in normal levels, some spikes aren't really threatening, but in the reverse gravity, they become critical obstacles in some cases. Um, yeah. So, this is normal level.

Yeah, it's a really tiny level. And when we reverse gravity, it's a it's a bit different, but yeah, it have yeah, a a bit different mechanics in in the same space. So, as a result, we've got 50 free levels for the second page. We should had to edit a bit several levels though. As I mentioned when I talked about puzzle objects, if the game mechanic is unique enough, the freshness remains when it mixed with familiar things. Let's talk about audio. Our game's graphic style is very minimal, so we wanted to fill the lack of visual with audio. Actually, we didn't have an artist when we made this game. So, I did the art as well, even though I don't

have any professional art skill. That's why our game has only circles, rectangles, and triangle in the game. When we made first prototype, yeah, this is one of our games PGM. When we made the first prototype, we used music from my favorite Japanese artist, Ray Harakami. He he died two years ago. Yeah. RIP. The music has a kind of space feeling and it was a great mix with our long jump mechanics. So, I requested that kind of space filling music to our composer, actually my wife. This game has a bit slower pace because the player should think before jumping. So I think our slow background music makes the player calm down properly and it also

make a great atmosphere when mixed with musical effects. Yeah, this is good. So now I'll talk about our porting process to different platforms for the last. Basically the Xbox One and iOS version are almost exactly the same as our original PC version, but the Wii U version is a special case. After launching the original GameMaker version, we showed our game at E3's Indicate Showcase 2013. Yeah, we met Nintendo repres representative there and decided to make a console version. At first, Nintendo proposed that we make a 3DS version. But we we heard that making a game for 3DS is too hard. So, we thought that if we port our game to Unity 3D, then we could support Wii U and also support many

other platforms easier. So we decided to port the game to Unity 3D first. The W game pad was really interesting. It was too big though. We talked a lot about how to use the game pad screen in our game. Basically, we are always interested in making something new and weird thing. So, we didn't want to use it as a typical second screen. We didn't want to make it uh mini map viewer or inventory like other games. Our game feature uh connected space as the main mechanic. So we try to connect both of screens. So the player can jump from Wii U gamepad to TV and vice versa. Yeah, super complicated. Of course, that means that all our existing levels didn't works in two

screen space. So, we had to make entirely new levels for the Wii U version. Frankly speaking, this is not a popular use of the Wii U gamepad. We already knew that Wii U players like its TV off feature, but we didn't want to quit our experiment as a developer. Even though we would fail to succeed with this, we wanted to finish this experiment. Well, like the original PC version, connected TV and gamepad would be frustrating to some people. So, I tried to reduce that confusion. So, Oh, what? Why? Why you don't move? Oh, sorry the timing. Let's get back.

Okay, so this is Yeah. gameplay footage of Wii U version. Complicated. Yeah. For example, I tried not to make levels that make player move super fast between TV and gamepad. So yeah, this is game play. Um, we released W version several weeks ago in US and Europe. Many reviewers said that this is the best version of 6180 the moon. I think we did well. As your research, we made a game which has both a likes and dislikes. Some people said our minimal graphic is really beautiful, but and others said it's like an Atari game. Also, some people said our game is really experimental and unique and others said

that's another copycat of we we or geometry dash. Anyway, yeah, if if one of you thought about it, try our game. It's totally different. Anyway, we really love our game. Why should I care about the taste of other people? I'm indie. I played hundreds of time while testing our game but I think this is really great fun game if I play this game again now. Yeah. So yeah we are indie and I love it. That's enough. So the most important lesson we learned is yeah love our own game. This is the most important thing while make games.

Every time we decided something we did something we did what we liked not what people liked and we are satisfied with it and and think I'm not special person you too we are not special so if we love our own game other would love your game right so love your own game thanks for listening [Applause] [Applause] Hold on. Wait. Let me [Applause] We're turning off tweet. Sorry. Wait, how does this How do you do this?

Oh, sorry. Here. Oh, there we go. What's happening? Can I just do to um Are you trying to do presentation? Can we Can we just do regular? Yeah. Um that's here. Let's do this. Oh, there we go. Can you see it? Yeah. Awesome. Hi, I'm [Music] my public. Um, can you hear me? Okay, great. Um, so my name is AVB and I wrote a game called We Know the Devil. And now you're going to know a whole lot more about the devil. Um, and so let's see. Um, I've been a games critic for an awful long time, about eight years, which is horrifying. Um, and I've been freelancing for a lot of different

places. Um, I'm currently running my own alt website called Zeal. Um, and last summer from June 2nd to September 12th, we conceived of and completed a short visual novel called We Know the Devil. Um, it's a visual novel about choosing which of the three teens trapped in a weird and unsettling Christian summer camp will hang out and maybe kiss and which one they'll leave out and then what happens when the devil shows up for them all in the end. You know, normal stuff. It's heavily steeped in the aesthetic of unbearable Midwestern summers 80 horrors movie and growing up gay and repressive religious communities. Um, it has a unique mechanic to it actually and I'm going to spend a lot of this talk talking about how the mechanic of the visual novel because visual novels do have game mechanics. Screw you. Um, they are games. Um, and how that created a structure um, when it came to outlining and designing this process cuz we made this game in 100 days actually um, which is an awfully short time. Like we didn't have we I pitched the idea on

June 2nd. We had an outline a week from then and then it was like a whirlwind process. So I'm going to mostly focus on uh what I did because I'm I'm the writer and designer. Um I wasn't the programmer or the artist. There's they have they're super wonderful talented people who can be here today. Um and they have their own perspectives. But I thought that it would most be most useful to frame this as a writer. How did I design this as a writer? How do you marry writing and game design together? Um, and I hope that it will become clear that there's a lot of the the the larger structural ways in which you frame long pieces of narrative writing that are not linear are actually very similar to game design. Um, if you want to write something longer than an essay, at least for me, I have to break it into smaller chunks. Um, and the the structure and the the mechanics of We Know the Devil helped us do that. Um,

so I'll go into those in a little bit. So this is my talk, how to finish a visual novel in less than a year if you also know how to do a bunch of other stuff. And here's that other stuff. Uh, I won't spend too long on this, but uh I I want you to know this was my first commercial game. Um, and it was also the the artist and co-creative director Mia Schwarz's first first video game. Um, but neither of us had shipped anything before then. Um, is it auto advancing or Okay, cool. I'm watching you. Um, but part of the reason uh why we were able to do that is because we were both experienced storytellers in our own mediums. We had this structure that allowed us to start applying it to games. Um, and we also knew uh an amazing team, the date night, who makes visual novels in HTML 5, and they had a programmer, a project manager, and gave us a whole bunch of startup capital. Um, so part of a subtext to this is is make

sure that you know people um make friends, create like make cool stuff on your own and you might be able to find some really great collaborative partners later on. If you prove yourself um in your own field, even if it has nothing to do with games, they'll be impressed enough by your your gumption. And all right. So, all right. So, this is we know the devil or at least this is what we know the devil looks like to me. Um, until a few weeks before we shipped. Um, I wrote this whole thing in Scrier, which is a very wonderful program that I'll talk more. I'll talk your face off about this. It's really useful because it is a nonlinear writing program. It lets you subdivide things. Um, if you look at the the left hand side of the screen, and I'm going to zoom in on it, I promise. Um, you can see how every branch of the game is subdivided into different little folders. So, whenever there was a choice, um, then I could

have I could nestle those choices together, and it helped for me visually and it also helped for the overall structure. Um, let's see. So, what I'm going to do is step by step go from the initial concept um to the day when I figured out how many words long this visual novel was going to be. Um cuz all of that stuff there at about 7 days into development, I was like this is going to be 15,000 words long. Um and I knew that because of the groundwork that I did in the first seven days. So, let's go through it. Here's the plan. Um, first there's the premise and the mechanics, like what defines this game. Um, second, because this is a character-driven game, um, and there are three characters in it, we needed to have a firm idea of who they were, what they looked like, um, what their personalities were. Because the entire mechanic of the game is putting these characters in a room with each other,

um, and seeing the, let me describe the mechanic. You actually have there are three main characters. Um, and at every choice point you decide which two of them hang out and which one gets left out. Um, and the ending is different depending on which two were together the most and which person was left out the most. Um, so two people will find some sort of happiness with each other and then the one who's left off um will have an awesome time with the devil at the end. Um, so that's it. And then so from the beginning premise and mechanics, the character profile profiles um and then the chapter branch and editing structure um was was basically what would the nitty-gritty of this be and from that we got to go to the word count. So, let's start um with the premise um because we both wanted to actually complete this game in a month. Um because we originally did

this for the I Love You Game Jam, which is a visual novel dating sim uh game jam that takes the place over a month. Um Mia, my my artist was like, I want something that feels complete. I don't want like a proof of concept or a vertical slice or something like that. Let's like make a short story in visual novel form. Um, and I thought that was a really good idea because I I didn't want it to feel unsatisfying. I wanted to take this concept and explore it as much as I could. So that meant like the smallest possible implementation of the single mechanic. There was originally four characters and we know the devil. Um, and that's exponentially more interactions between those characters. So we cut it down to three. Um, just as a sort of like, yeah, three people. That's all you need to have three different combinations. three different people, three endings. Um, a very easy to to see branching structure. Um, and from that we started coming up with like premise and aesthetics that would

emphasize the mechanics but also be within our budget. So '8s horror movies, we decided to use uh realistic photograph backgrounds. We actually took them with a disposable camera in the woods. It was really, really scary. Um, I was sure I was going to get ax murdered. Um, but because of that, we were able to have something that was really thematically resonant, um, but also very easy to do because we didn't have the money for a background artist and we didn't, um, want to go through all of that effort. Um, let's see. Um, and it's also representative of other indie visual novels, um, which like like Sukiime and Umeo, which are, um, Japanese visual novels, actually do a kind of like cheaply filtered backgrounds. We thought if we unfiltered them it they would stand out more and seem like a really cool artistic choice instead of like we were just lazy and didn't have a lot of money. Um the small cast was also really important because uh we ran into memory constraints later on. Um so let's talk about character

development. Um so Mia and I had a really good working relationship where I would basically pitch I would write up this profile of the character. she would draw that character. Um, and then the two of us would just kind of like spitball and come up with scenarios for that um, for those characters interacting with each other because Mia is not just like a character designer and a visual artist. She's a cartoonist. Um, and she does she does storytelling in comics. Um, I think this is a I think comics are such an untapped medium for video games. It's like we want somebody we want to like hire the art person. It's like just draw this thing and I'm going to put it in my game. Um, my relationship with Mia though was more like we designed the characters together. We co-created each and every one of them. Um, which is why I'm the co-creative lead on this this this title. And even though I wrote every single word in this, um, the characters, the ideas for the characters, their personalities and stuff were shaped very much by Mia like emailing or sending me a message on Slack at like

two in the morning saying like, "This vine is totally like Venus." and and those sorts of like us kind of like finding the characters and their preferences and their likes and dislikes in the world helped us come up with scenarios for them. Um because the whole game was going to be like, okay, we're going to put these you can choose between these two characters drinking underage together or these two characters drinking underage together. What would it be like if they were in that situation? Um, part of the reason why that's so so important, um, oh, here's a, so this was the first thing that I sent Mia of the Scrier file and the final chapter list is on the other side. Um, we came up with this um, when Mia was like when I was like, I need some sort of structure. We were going for a horror movie thing. Mia said like let's just do it over the course of a single day and I cut it to 12 hours because it seemed like oh an evening um you know from

afternoon to early morning feels like an appropriate length of time and this is a totally arbitrary mechanism but it allowed us essentially what is like no different than like a worldle structure like you would see in Mario or like virtually any other like platformer or something like that. Um it's just it's based off of this idea, but it ensures that we have 12 slots. We have to fill each of those 12 slots with something. What will go into them? Um and how will the dramatic structure kind of like go from there? Um I decided that it would be let's see a character work. Throw them together and what happens? Um, so after after a while of just spitballing together, we decided that like there's going to be seven seven different events cuz that's going to create an uneven number of choices. And I decided to only have two possible pairings, even though

there's three there's three possible pairings for each interaction. I decided to to narrow it down to two um because it would force characters to pick pairings that they didn't necessarily want because they wouldn't always have their favorite pairing available to them. Um and also because it would be less work. Um and that was the really important thing. Um again, it's the smallest implementation of a really potentially huge idea. Um and in order for us to explore and see that it worked, we really didn't need to go any more ambitious. Um, and the less ambitious we were, the more able we were to actually do this. Like I said, this is about making a plan to write something in one month so that you can actually write it in three and a half months. Um, if we had the more that we overcoped, the more we would have overshot this completely. Um, all right. So, word count goals. So, I I decided on this. Um, we had the we had the setting, we had the chapter structure. We knew that there would be

several different choices. There would be an intro chapter. There would be an extended ending sequence. Um, so I knew exactly how many of those little slots that I made in the Scriber file would exist practically within a few days of coming up with this concept. Um, then I decided, okay, what can I actually do as a writer? Um, I can write about a thousand words a day. Um, I could and potentially I can write more than that. Um, but if you've ever had the exper I know anyone who has ever written has had the experience of looking at a blank sheet of paper and having no idea what to put there for like hours and hours. Um, no matter how good of a writer you are, if you don't know what you're writing about, you can't do it, which is a very logical thing. Um, so by coming up with this plan though, I knew what I had to write. I had a series of writing assignments for myself. Every one of those little empty files in the Scriber thing represented a thing that I knew

that I needed to write. I need to write these two characters playing truth or dare under this circumstance. I need to write these other two characters playing truth or dare under this circumstance. I need to write them with this scene. There's this ending. This person freaks out in this ending. What would this other character freaking out in this ending look like? because of all of this v visual novels because of their choice structure give you all of this beautiful parallel structure um that's really easy to kind of like see the connections between but also continuously um inform each other so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time that you open up a file. Um otherwise I would have been like staring at blank pages every single day trying to decide what happened. Um instead I basically assigned myself homework. Um, I'm really glad that I did this even though like you'd think, oh, she can probably write 30,000 words in a month

then. Um, but that's what if you miss a day, what if you go on vacation? What if something comes up? I have a full-time job. So, there were a lot of reasons why I couldn't meet this goal. Um, as we'll see. So, we had that plan. Um, and it didn't quite work out, but it didn't quite work out enough that we had a structure for the rest for the rest of this to follow. Um, I didn't hit all of my word counts. Um, I had a lot of metaphors that I hadn't decided what they meant yet. Um, my actual my my approach to world building is that you write the characters interactions and you decide while that happened later. Um, because you don't need like a big wiki beforehand. you you get to invent the backstory. So you invent the backstory that makes most sense for the for the premise. Um more so let's go into these um thing by thing. Um so it's impossible

to not overreach is the first lesson. There's no idea that's not more work than you think it's going to be. Um, like when I nearly died in the woods for those visible photographs, I went like, you know, so the thing about film is that it needs a lot of light to work. Um, and this wasn't a thing that I was uh thinking about too hard. So I took 20 photographs. There were four usable ones. Um, I had to send the send the camera to to New York because I live in this tiny town in Washington um to get the film developed and we had to do a whole bunch of last minute scrambling to get the rest of our art assets. Um, you think something's going to be easy and low cost and it turns out to be very different. Um, however, because we had scoped at this particular or at this particularly low level, filling in those gaps was much much easier. Um, character breakdown. Yeah. Um, so a lot of stuff didn't end up the same. Um, the

characters, if you read the character descriptions now, they don't feel very much like the actual characters that are in the final game, but that was fine. Um, it was useful for two reasons. One, so that we had an we had a starting place. And secondly, so that when the characters started moving away from the things that made them interesting, we had this ability to go back to basics. Oh, I'm going way over time. Is that okay? Somebody give me a sign. I'm going to assume it is because you all are still here. All right. Thank you. Okay. Um, so one of the things structure, so I'm gonna I'm talking about this as a writer. Um, so what do you do after you hit the word count goal? Um, well, one of the things you can do is you can write more words. And I did in fact write I I found that some that the goals that I set myself made the visual novel too short. Um, the

final product uh was 25,000 words instead of 15,000. Um, it's like around that. So we added about 10,000 words which was a pretty big addition. Um but more so than that I spent the second the second month of this. So we tried to write it this month. We didn't. We pitched it to date night. We got all of their we got startup capital. We got zero minutes. Oh, are you kicking me off now? Okay. All right. Well, bye. [Applause] See here. Um, I would say control what you can control. Um, and give yourself enough room to up. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]