The Vertical Slice Challenge

[Music] okay hello everyone people behaved themselves last night thanks for coming making it a ten that's pretty early even by game development standard so I appreciate that they've asked me to ask everyone to please silence your cellphone's and anything else that makes noise because they're recording this another than that we'll get going and hopefully we'll have some time left answer some questions if there are any so by way of a quick introduction my name is Greg Donovan I'm a senior producer at volition they've been putting up with me there for about a decade I've been in this crazy industry for 16 years now most recently I was the lead producer on Saints Row 2 and saints row the third but none of that stuff's really important the important stuff is what this talk is about it's about the challenge of delivering on a game's vertical slice and showing Volition's history of vertical slices through

examples from the saints row and Red Faction franchises and we'll review the successes and failures of this deliverable from these titles sneak peek we've had more failures and we've had successes but that's okay volition as the studio believes the vertical slice should be part of the development cycle because even with its challenges it can really help the team before entering production and this talk aims to illustrate that point and show why we're giving this talk to hopefully educate share and inform potentially help you and your teams to avoid the mistakes that we've made in the past because we believe that sharing each other's mistakes and learning from them means better games for everyone and that's something we all want but before this talk there are some caveats and you need to know them number one this is not a do this and you will have guaranteed success lecture we're not claiming to have the answer I've been to lectures like that and frankly I think they're horseshit excuse my French think about it we production our job is

to basically accurately and consistently schedule profitable fund a process that is currently iterated upon time and time again it's really really hard to do so if you're looking for a silver bullet there be really disappointed with me I apologize too this talk is where abolition is now based on our past learnings this is how we approach how we process a vertical slice today may change in the future and moreover this is based on what we do and what works for our studio volition has about 200 full-time employees and we make my most accounts large overworld games on the console and PC and what we do may not be right for you and your teams finally this talk isn't about me I didn't work on all the projects here this is about the studio and its learnings I'm just the mouthpiece I drew the short straw I guess I did do a lot of interviews with many principals on on the projects to ensure that to the accuracy here I want to spend a little bit of time answering this an apology so this is insulting I

know that most you probably have an idea but I want to make sure that we're using the same language as a common language you're getting into the talk first and foremost this concept can go by a lot of different names sometimes it's called a first playable sometimes it's called a proof of concept and if you're really cool from Silicon Valley you may call it a Minimum Viable Product and if you're really really busy call it an MVP because acronyms are really really cool but anyway they all mean the same thing for common understanding the vertical slice is a section level game play duration X number of missions whatever of the full game that successfully communicates the team's intended player experience by having major systems and features proved out in production working together the assets aren't typically final but they should be as close as possible representative of final quality yeah I made that lovely image because when you try and do an image of a vertical slice there aren't many out there really proud of that one generally speaking vertical slice is a

very large and complex milestone that occurs just before production they are challenging but we believe they're worth the effort because they can teach you a whole bunch not least of which is there we go click whether or not the team is ready to move into production as a team you can determine whether or not you're ready to move in production where production is usually defined as the team is what they're making in how to make it by attempting TV active objectively answer these questions is the game delivering on the player experience do you get a sense of what the game is do you have an acceptable level of tech debt a quick aside for tech debt no way is everything going to be done on the vertical slice some systems and features will be hacked in others are still going to be in development you'll probably have a few that haven't even been started yet the issue is the team's going to need to necessarily finish these systems otherwise you're gonna or

archetype them Architect them correctly later in production and the rub is trying to quantify and track how much work is left to bring these systems to a point where it's already far enough along to be submitted so succinctly it's like this vertical slice can keep the team objective and honest about progress of whether or not you're ready to move in production overall and importantly the issues you uncover in a vertical slice and you will uncover them are going to be their best discovered earlier on rather than later on in production so to find out where we are we're gonna take a trip down memory lane look at the lesions attempts at vertical slices based on what worked and what didn't on our projects first up is saints row came out in August of 2006 a little bit of history of this title I used a similar slide last year but affairs repeating Saints Row was really really hard for volition it was a new genre we had never made open-world games before completely new tech engine and tools was a new platform we didn't know

much about the 360 and we were developing for it we didn't know how to do much of what we were doing well at all I mean basically was shaping up to be a perfect storm but this project does mark the first time the volition consciously planned to deliver on a vertical slice before Saints for one volition of volition had team sizes over about 50 to 60 people we didn't do vertical slices in part because it wasn't part of our vernacular just we didn't wasn't concept and also impart it was just easier to turn around and see what people are doing and what the team of 50 to 60 it's relatively easier to see what people working on rather quickly and things just came together it was kind of cowboy development Wild West but for Saints Row 1 that approach wasn't going to work so this guy up here's the producer on Saints Row 1 is name is Jacques I have no real reason to put him up here except that I like to troll him and I know he probably doesn't like this picture anyway he and others in studio

management before working at volition worked at companies where vertical slices were a thing and they being smart fellows brought the concept of the team and said hey we should do this and volition being smart fellows said yeah that makes sense we're buying into this concept let's make a plan was a dumb idea so they came up with a vertical slice deliverable and that was make the deliverable phase based multiple milestones across multiple months it's going to be a ton of work because it's new everything that was going to take some time make the deliverable culminate in a demonstration of a player bullet playable experienced player experience and make it playable in a city section a small city section that is exhibiting core gameplay and overall show progress and sell the vision to both the publisher and the team internally we needed to know that we can make open-world games and the publisher which was THQ at the time we needed to show them that the game wasn't as controversial as some of them over there thought at the time so they had a plan I felt good about it and decided to plow

headlong into the storm so actually part of the result up here this is a map of Saints Row vertical slice the environment it was ultimately called phase 5 because it took 5 months to do it it's a one section of the city approximately four blocks in the next clip I'm going to show you some gameplay footage from phase 5 from Saints Row 1 full disclosure of the clip is actually one month after the latest documentation that could find on the Saints Row 1 vertical slice but everyone I spoke with on Saints Row 1 says that the footage is indeed from this deliverable [Music] [Music]

that rather brisk framerate has not been altered or sped up in any way I promise so looking back in hindsight about what worked and what didn't for the vertical slice in Saints Row it demonstrated the player experience we had gameplay there through core features working locomotion combat navigation via vehicles etc the fun was there the deliverable was in a

city section the team had a first pass of what it would take to make a city and it answered some good questions for the development team scope was coming into focus we knew it was going to be huge in fact this deliverable was a starting point for us to talk about whether or not we needed more time seriously knowing whether or not you have a scope or timing issue as early as possible is a good thing the vertical slice can help add data to another wise subjective concerns that typically come from you know production team members and finally I sold the experience it got the team excited I got THQ excited precisely because of paper vision was actually in the plan in the game and you could play it as for what didn't work scope was huge remember the date was in question at least internally we're talking about it but instead of looking for ways to work smarter like reducing scope we instead asked the team to work harder longer and more Saints rollin was a very bad crunch for most of the studio and in retrospect we could have done things a lot better secondly tech debt

wasn't understood or quantified at all this is our first attempt at making an open-world game we had no idea what we were getting into precisely because there were so many new things and although there were many unproven technical issues you know it's never ideal to do tech and game the same time as design but it happened Morgan I'm gonna focus on the streaming example streaming is the first time you're making is a really big matzo ball if you haven't done it it's a lot of fun so anyway to help provide some context streaming's rather critical for open-world games you can't have everything in the world loaded at once like you can for many other linear or level based games objects animations all the data has to streaming around the player and you do your best to hide it and if your streaming is an efficient then the game doesn't run this is a map of the Saints Row 1 it's divided into City chunks at the time we had a chunk based streaming system and it can only load in two chunks at once the problem was we didn't fully realize at the time there were a number of areas

that we called try point so it's basically were three chunks met like this so whenever a player came across these areas particularly when they were in a vehicle and driving very fast the whole world would crap out would be very poor experience I'm bringing up here a little bit higher there so again phase 5 was basically only two chunks with an incomplete streaming system and we had no idea at this try point problems made that big of an issue so basically what we let the development team go wide after phase 5 the vertical slice and the chunk sizes instead of being uniform and in a brick pattern were all arbitrarily sized the size of which was dictated by the world artist so they're on the fact we hadn't even touched level of details phase 5 didn't have any of those and things like shaders which are pretty commonplace terms now at the time we're only known by a few like really hardcore engine nerds we basically had this tech debt that assumed that was a monster and it bit the team very very hard as far as the lessons again using hindsight 20/20

overall phase 5 the vertical slice was deemed a helpful deliverable it was going to be a thing for us and part of our development schedule it helped identify issues the team would have otherwise missed it helps sell the vision it's great to have a playable demo before the communicates the vision before you go into production it doesn't identify all the issues certainly we didn't realize how much technical debt we had amassed phase based is a good way to approach it because it's a lot of work and you won't get it done in like in one month milestone and of course it solidified the opinion that making no for old games is hard for us so rounding out Saints Row one I like to do these fun facts to kind of like make it a little bit more interesting after the game launched there was a witty youtuber announced this musical entitled buggy Saints Row it's a musical it was very painful to watch at the time if we can mostly watch it in good faith now it's still up there I totally you know you guys can go watch it if you want but it's kind of weird to think back and we created a game that inspired someone

and a musical about performance issues so yes Saints Row one was running at 10 to 15 frames a second approximately three weeks before launch this is not an exaggeration I think failure failure to establish the tech and the budgets earlier in production were likely the largest contributor to this and when the Hail Mary was the system called PBS which potential visibility sets basically this giant rendering farm used to calculate performances set up by programmers on programming saved us on this project and this is the epitome of necessities of mother of invention and finally a 3d City max the 3d the sr1 city was modeled and edited in 3ds max it's a great authoring tool but it's not a world editor and kudos to the team for actually doing that all right moving on other titles next up is saints row 2 came out in October of 2008 the history of this was a pre-production in Saints Row 2 started before Saints Row 1 actually launched we were banking that was going to be a hit but we necessarily

had a different set of leads because he can't have leads finalizing the project in doing pre-production on the other the new leads on that team of which I was a part was confident from the outside looking in we were saying how hard could this be why there are so many problems on this new genre if we're in charge there won't be any problems it'll be chocolate milk in the drinking fountains everyone will be happy the Saints Row one team was overworked they were work they were really stressed they were finalizing the game they didn't have time to work with us and because of our attitude frankly they didn't want to so we did things our way and that way it was take the codebase and implement new features features that the Saints Row one team wanted to implement but didn't have time to features the publisher on it and most importantly features that we wanted to implement and our plan was to make a vertical slice that demonstrated these features and all of their glory going through the archives I couldn't find the actual SR to vertical slice build but we made one we found something down there at the bottom there's is a

lovely Visio chart that we made and oh this is like circa 2006 it's really weird going through all this stuff again but down there at the bottom there POC proof of concept was like this gate before going into product well we did find was this Saints Row 2 vision piece in talking to the principals again we agreed that we're going to show you this on the next slide the features that are contained in this video are all the features that we had done at the vertical slice before it went into production so without further ado here's the Saints Row 2 vision piece this one does have audio [Music] [Applause]

[Music] why you [Music] with me [Music] don't be afraid [Music] my [Music]

[Music] [Applause] so looking at Saints Row 2 in the context of the vertical slice what worked we got in a lot of cool new features frankly a lot of the features that players expected from an open-world game like boats motorcycles and then flat and flying we made a lot of improvements in Saints Row ones core gameplay such as improved character creation and customization so in this regard we were nailing the sequel formula you know taking the established core of the predecessor improving upon it and certainly by adding new and improved features on existing code bases

one way to make a sequel and has with Saints Row 1 this video helps solidify the vision and get both the team and the publisher very excited about it as for what didn't work we took a shotgun feature approach there was little to no focus on establishing a cohesive player experience Saints Row 1 did focus on a player experience even if it was thug life or an MTV rap video they did have one and this hurt us in production because we had a lot of people developing wide in the future regard instead of deep and Saints Row two tonally is really really strange and one scene you can be euthanizing one your homies and another scene you know you're streaking or you're spraying sewage on people it's all over the place the vision that tone was just it wasn't solidified and doing not having that that in the vertical slice hurt us and the tech debt thing hurt us again we had to fix the streaming issues on Saints Row 1 I'm making all the city chunks into a uniform size and make them smaller so we could have three loaded at once we made it in a brick pattern and we had to fix

holes in the world to accommodate flying but as with Saints Row 1 we did a poor job of actually quantifying this tech debt fixing these issues in the small section of the world when you're doing it a vertical slice doesn't do a good job of telling you how much work there is when you scale up in the full production as for the key lessons you need to work towards delivering a player experience just having a list of features in the vacuum doesn't cut it and if you follow the player experience then necessarily the core gameplay the systems and features that support that player experience are gonna follow again we did the whole shotgun approach and developed wide instead of deep and this methodology was basically throw things at the wall and see what sticks finally we needed to improve not finally sorry we needed to improve that extra extrapolating technical issues again you're not going to be feature complete a vertical slice but you need to determine which critical systems are really in their early States and how much work do they really really need and finally check the egos at the door work

with previous teams and not invented here philosophy is as detrimental it's not good for anyone competitiveness among teams is okay but not when it comes to at the expense of you know doubling up work and losing productivity fun facts about Saints Row two co-op as a feature was added while in production at the very least at the end of pre-production it was our attempt at a silver bullet feature it wasn't accommodated for at all in schedules and guess what if you had co-op to a game before you go into production it's gonna add some work to the team as was Saints Row one we used 3ds max to create and edit the world and this fun fact Saints Row two had 94 thousand reported bugs the average bug count for all their volition projects was 40,000 bugs which got me to thinking what's the answer here did we have a better QA team on Saints Row two or was it a bug year game depends we asked okay next up is Red

Faction guerrilla it came out in June of 2009 the history for this is that Red Faction guerrilla I'm gonna call it our FG or guerilla was another challenging project for the studio key hook in this game if you're not aware of the franchise is that it has destructible environments for our FG we went from destruction in a linear game like in Red Faction 1 to Red Faction 2 to destruction an open world which is a very hard problem to solve I mean think about it we've got real-time physics based arbitrary destruction that's complicated enough in a linear game but when he takes to the open world it's a whole level of scariness the studio was moving towards making an exclusively open-world game so we of course we wanted to bring this technology to that genre and it took a long time for the team to figure it out determine how to make it work the plan is starting out because the problem figuring out destruction no 4 was so difficult was quite intuitively you know to get the destruction working through a tech demo lots of tech demos I went through four of them be clear these tech demos weren't vertical slices they

were demos focus on getting the technology working in an open world environment the next slide I'll show you a clip from one of these demos and actually it's a one of the things that the design team made and you'll see that it's not really a playable game it's more of a vision piece of like what could design for this game how could it be like if the tech were actually solidified but at the time they made this it wasn't this one does not have any sound so there's no anything wrong when you don't hear anything it's kind of looking at this holistically of what worked and what didn't for the team in regards our vertical sliced the team got the time to do things right right which in this case

was like solving the very hard problem of open world real-time physics based destruction but they didn't make a true vertical slice at least not before production after the technology was deemed completed or solved the team went into production but there were still a ton of design issues to explore and frankly answer yet this right here is of one of the maps in the game it's called dust the team remade this at least four times in production because they hadn't figured out the design or the gameplay yet effectively the redoing of dust in production became the project's vertical slice even though the team was officially ostensibly in production also there wasn't a very good strong vision on this game was very blurry and some of the team had had a running joke it's like what does this game about well you destruction what are you do in this game well you destruction that kind of added to the confusion of them trying to nail a cohesive player experience looking

back at it from the lessons that we learned key takeaways for Red Faction guerrilla where it's like open-world games with destruction are really really hard they take a long time so long that sometimes you're gonna focus on a singular problem in this case the tech and forget about the player experience design and tech demos allowed the team to solve the problem but tech demos are not a vertical slice precisely because they focus only on one thing technology and why this can be an important piece of the pie it's only one piece basically you can't prove out game design while TechEd of this magnitude is still evolving and being figured out you can't say the team is in production if you're still trying to prove out core gameplay fun facts about Red Faction guerrilla we had two Santoro games come out before one Red Faction game came out it took him five years we like to tease the team about this they don't think it's nearly as funny as we do but we think we're in the right here Red Faction gorilla was originally a first-person game he may have noticed that in the clip the publisher asked to change it to third-person because at the time

third-person games were selling better than first-person on console the produced a very short-lived but vivid shitstorm at volition but in retrospect it was probably the right decision next up it's one of my favorites Red Faction Armageddon came out in June 2011 depending on who you ask some will say that Red Faction Armageddon I may call it RFA was a more difficult problem more difficult project than central one there was a lot of collaboration from the publisher on this game and unfortunately much of this collaboration came in the form of specific features or ideas taking a step back a lot of people don't know this but Red Faction Armageddon was originally planned to be Red Faction Crusade which is going to be a direct sequel from Red Faction guerrilla Red Faction Armageddon is kind of like the spiritual successor but narrative Lee doesn't have much to do with it the producer on this game was from a company who also did vertical slices so it was part of the development cycle and they had a very specific plan for what they were doing the vertical slice and Red

Faction Crusade and that was a four month deliverable again it takes a long time to do these right 25% of the gameplay was going to be above ground one of the new features was to take take the destruction underground so 75% of it would be underground proving out underground mechanics underground destruction was something new for us they're also focusing other other like single-player features like repair in addition to destroying things you could actually build it up again and they were focusing also on making it look better than red faction guerrilla on the next slide you're going to see a quick clip of the footage from red faction Crusades vertical slice it's very quick but I just want to show it to you it's like how solid how far along is this this team was because vertical slices were by this time kind of a thing in our development schedule or getting better at it you'll notice that you know animations basic combat the way things look it's really shaping up

[Music] okay then the team received some notes from a newly hired creative director THQ these notes came during month two of the four-month vertical slice and one of the motifs of this of this these notes were get aliens at the game at the time the team was like okay thanks for the notes these are great that makes sense but certainly these can't be a mandate right were two months away from production we're in the middle of a vertical slice of the team kind of ignored these things and just went back to work and shortly thereafter THQ went through some management changes and that creative director became an executive vice president and even more shortly thereafter the team received some more

notes and the gist of those was did you think I was joking about the aliens and we had an epiphany I was like okay all right we get it let's put in these aliens it makes sense it's hot sci-fi game let's do this and there was also a really important footnote to the whole ad aliens things it was also and you need to bring in the game by six months so there was a new plan as you can imagine there were some scrambling and consternation and people trying to figure out how to what are we gonna do here so the team and studio management came up with a new plan and that was the solution out of necessity was make the game linear take it fully underground because linearity would be easier underground and get the aliens in game here's a way to contextualize what happened on the left to get read faster crusade on the right we have red faction Armageddon here's where the team red faction crusade was working on the vertical slice month 2 of 4 when the request for aliens came in and here's for various reasons the team needed to pull it in by six six months the street

date and here's where the team actually got their first aliens in game so looking back at red faction Armageddon in the context of what worked and what didn't as far as the good is the team got in aliens and they pulled in the ship date by multiple months they made the necessity but painful decision to go from open-world to linear in order to hit a date I mean seriously what the team did here was pretty incredible I personally never worked on a team that's a game of this size that was able to pull on the street day by six months and I they don't get enough credit and they like really worked hard to make that happen as far as uh oh there we go sorry as far as what didn't work there was no vertical slice this was the epitome of a team figuring things out as they went aliens were added in production they abandoned their plans to do a vertical slice and just kind of plowed ahead right or wrong that was the decision the team made and because of this it wasn't an easy production schedule and when you're figuring things out like what a aliens look like how do they move what are they your most certainly not in

production so the key lessons are sometimes despite best efforts and planning the [ __ ] can hit the fan and things can fall apart you can say your imprint you can say you're in production but if you're figuring things out as you go you're really not in production you're just fooling yourself and a team to be clear it was well within the publishers purview to mandate aliens and to be fair the publisher did not dictate their behavior how they looked or were than you know their whole history or motivation and aliens aren't exactly out of pocket when it comes to a science fiction game the issue was just the timelines with developers and publishers sometimes don't match and it was a very complicated feature to be added so late we don't have a lot of fun facts for Red Faction Armageddon but this is a clip from the movie bolt which quickly made the rounds around volition and THQ when the aliens request came in and it was kind of serendipity it was kind of fun I know you're busy going but if you've got a second we'd love to beat you an idea for your show Tom's better pitching I'll let them take it from here

Tommy's got the spotlight wait for it aliens ho snap aliens audiences love alien holiday the huge fans you can't shut I don't know if you call that ironic or serendipity or a lot but it was great and again you know the aliens went in and they fit and the game was a success so well it's well that ends well I believe saints row the third came out in November of 2011 the history of that is like we largely had the same leads team on Saints for the third as we had on Saints Row two this was helpful in that we were able to more directly learn from our experiences and our mistakes of Saints Row 2 experience told us that we needed to make a more defined vertical slice especially focus on the aesthetics one of the game to look better than Saints Row one in Saints Row two not the prettiest looking games and we started planning for a multi-phase vertical

slice from the get-go on the plan this time was to deliver it in phases again but we're gonna do a two-pronged attack and that focus on art and gameplay vertical slices separately the thinking was like let's let artists focus on making things look good and let's let design focus on the fun factor let's minimize interruptions do our respective things and then married the two at the end for one great vertical slice on the next slide I'm going to show you an example of one of the art vertical slices this is an earlier one way early in pre-production it was designed to show off improvements to visual acuity most notably in the world in the environments I think everything in here had its own collision it looks a lot better than Santro - for sure but I don't know if

like so in geometry and collision-free chose individual assets was the right thing and we'll certainly talk about that a little bit more so that slide will come into play a little bit later the next slide is one of the designed vertical slices on saints row the third we tried to focus more in the game loop you know what the player is doing over and over again why they're playing the game we focus on that more at least compared to previous saints row games example you're gonna see was when we were working on transitions in the game the player needs to go somewhere and when they get to their destination there's a cinematic at that destination how would that feel what would the transitions look like I mean this clip is one of the many design vertical sizes we made but it was a good one to show

listen Julius you've made some bad choices but you're a good man let me help you out what do you want I want this okay so looking at what worked and what did in the context of vertical slice it definitely showed improvement some visual quality at least compared to Saints Row one and to the separate art and gameplay vertical slice approach was very beneficial and that each discipline didn't have to worry about the others it was helpful for a time and it marked the first time that we focused again on the game loop and at least when it comes to Saints Row third the game lip was customizing your character going to an objective watching a cinematic killing things and then getting stuff because of

this focus we ended up focusing a little bit more in a holistic player experience it's kind of a subtle thing but even transitions like shown in that clip do contribute to the overall player experience of what players are experiencing by playing the game as for what didn't work we didn't spend enough time nailing down budgets not monetary budgets but performance budgets I mean again those interiors look great at the end of the day it was a mistake because they weren't realistic we shouldn't have cared about individual assets it should have been dead focused on the overall scene and how that played out instead of making those bananas look super awesome we should have spent more time upfront focusing on things like level of detail draw distance ambient peds and vehicles in order to have a more realistic scene in a cage where a performance was so I mean basically at least for the art side instead of having a creative vertical slice we had an aspirational visual bar the visual bar is not the same thing it's not a bad thing but it's a very different thing we

had smoke and mirrors and that the vertical slice wasn't representative of a final quality precisely because it wasn't a realistic depiction of what we could show in the final game and we didn't spend enough time figuring out what we could show looking back in the hindsight again for central to the third very specific category and retrospect was making sure we remain analyzing the performance budgets we didn't do a good job of establishing realistic targets many in the team as with Saints Row 1 it's been a large amount of time optimizing things in production granted it wasn't as hard this time around but it was nonetheless work that could have been mitigated had we been more focused on it earlier in pre-production related establishing the visual bar which is effectively what we did on the art side is not the same thing as a vertical slice and your bar may not be possible or frankly realistic and finally working on the game loop was very very helpful in addition to doing necessary in addition to necessarily requiring the implementation of key features to compete to complete the game

loop but also focus to think them things overlooked like navigation duration how long does it take to get here or so play are going to be engaged why I'm driving what does the transition from gameplay to cinematics feel like all those things contribute to the overall holistic player experience fun facts about saints row the third spoiler alert Burt Reynolds is in saints row the third as a character contractually his character couldn't use firearms he could use his fists he could kill people it's his fist can only punch and he couldn't catch on fire he could die but he needed to be impervious to fire alright last but not least we have saints row 4 came out in August of 2000 2013 this title got the best most impressive vertical slice volition has ever made and I think the most impressive vertical slice ever made in the history of the universe and everything well really how'd that happen I'm glad you asked because if you didn't I'd have this weird segue and would be good again I talked about this last year

but it's so wonderfully amazing that bears repeating saints row the third team was working on the standalone expansion packed after saints row the third ship it was called enter the dominatrix entered the dominatrix was going to be in the same city as saints row the third but limited to new features intact the standout features were superpowers and aliens and the core that game was basically the Saints and the matrix with aliens the superpowers were fun the title was shaping up and then for business reasons THQ decided to take what was best about intro the dominatrix and then add it to saint for but Santeria for was originally doing its own thing it was a separate and larger team going in a direction without superpowers so effectively the original central 14 got word they needed to take some in quotes of what we had in entered the dominatrix dominatrix and added to their game but they didn't get extra time to do that basically they had one year from time that decision was made to combine the two games that's not

a lot of time to be like adding something like superpowers and aliens in your game but on a positive note entered the dominatrix was really far along and it could be a rather wonderfully marvelously fleshed out vertical slides for the central 14 I mean think about at least from a vertical slice point of view we imagine your vertical slices well over a hundred man months of focus worked experienced by people who understood what they were working on so and this one the central for team got a fully playable critical path which was about seven hours of gameplay more than functional new features the superpowers were working and they were fun boss battles in art-directed city and a preliminary quantification of performance budgets it was the greatest vertical slice ever so what worked and what didn't the good was the greatest vertical slice ever in the history of the gaming industry in my opinion the Santoro for team had nearly everything from a vertical slice point of view handed to them what didn't work that kind of vertical slice doesn't work unless you have near limitless time and money and unless you work in a studio

maybe whose name rhymes with mouth you probably don't have near limitless time or money I mean think about it like well over a hundred man months of enter the dominatrix dist is in time it cost money and depending on your Studios burn rate that could be a lot of money so basically this was financially an untenable at least for most of us and we couldn't expect this model to be something we would count on in the future so the key lessons the biggest takeaway is that this was the ideal model and a properly constructed vertical slice is something that can be very very helpful again we had player experience demonstrated through a fully playable critical path core gameplay was proven it was iterated with even some polished seven hours of gameplay that demonstrated pacing variety lots of little things that challenged to get in a typical vertical slice but it was nutty and again couldn't expect to have this vertical sliced model for us in the future fun facts Saints Row 4 before the addition of superpowers the original design

called for warring tribes that were headed up by historical figures these figures were brought to life through cloning through Ultor one of the main bad guy corporations there and it included the likes of Genghis Khan Hitler and Cleopatra alas they never made it in the final game that could have been an interesting interesting mechanic there okay so bringing this all home Volition's kind of what we're currently a one project shop in these days we have a larger collection of experiences and that we've made a lot more games we've got in one goal of volition one thing that they're good as like let's learn better from the past apply it to what we do in the future and the vertical slice is no exception from that rule we ask ourselves what were the key lessons that we learned and what are we doing to the vertical slice you know milestone today based on our past mistakes trials and tribulations and again this is what works for us your mileage may vary these are kind of the core pillars in order to succinctly bring it together I'll go over those a little bit more and the subsequent slides I tried making a grid

that showed like you know what worked and what didn't for each of the titles but frankly was a convoluted mess because what worked and what didn't and the lessons were kind of all over the place and this is where we've arrived at like their core pillars when it comes to a vertical slice you know apologies to a certain shoe company but I mean it's an important milestone make it a thing planned for it make sure the team's schedule is make sure the team's scheduling for it and they're aware of it we believe and we have found there's too many benefits to not do it if you think about it a vertical slice did a little deliverable is going to happen anyways it may be right before you submit but if you plan for it and attempt to do it before production you'll likely have saved the team for some pain down the road when they're figuring things out in production we've never never ever done it well on paper but not trying would have been a lot worse just axe ask some team members on Red Faction Armageddon and even with our issues and failures we still uncovered issues and problems with otherwise would have uncovered later in production and that's never a good thing try to do it right and that means use it

as a gate going into production the vertical slice doesn't help your team understand what they're making how to make it and whether or not you have an acceptable level of tech debt then you're probably not ready for production to reiterate it's like focus on the player experience don't focus on a list of features if you define the player experience first then the features the core gameplay in tech and systems needed to support and make that player experience come to fruition is necessarily going to follow try and quantify your technical debt doing this well is really new and hard for us it's kind of a new thing for us and again no way does the vertical slice mean your feature complete the content complete there's going to be systems and features and tools work going on in production but you should work with the team to determine how you plan to quantify how much tech debt you will need to observe absorb and production sums just frankly inevitable I need to need to figure out what the team what your threshold is this deliverable is going to take longer

than you think make it over the course of multiple milestones we found that a good way to break it down and phases is like effectively get it working get it working right and then polish it this deliverable is way too big and complex and way too early into in development about a thousand you're gonna miss a lot of things you're gonna fail in some areas but that's okay we've never nailed the thing and yet we do it time and time again go into this thinking about the spirit of the deliverable can you honestly say the team's ready to go into production does the team have a solid idea of what it's going to take to make the game do you believe that the player experience is there is the fun that you're desiring this it hasn't been delivered like doing a lawyerly checklist against specific assets in the missed milestone as the only means for measuring progress this is going to be futile leave everyone frustrated I mean you're too early in development for such things and the bigger picture about the player experience whether or not the system's working together it's much more

important the final thoughts is like much of executing on this comes down to balance doesn't mean feature or content complete it's not a finished game the key within this deliver to determine the most important things the team needs to be worked on in order to go successfully into production the act of knowing what you're making importantly how to make it to go in there that that development phase as painless as possible work with the team to determine the end goal for this deliverable which in our opinion is realizing the player experience again can't happen without necessarily defining the core gameplay core loop systems and features that some people frankly focus on instead make sure you aren't doing this through total smoke and mirrors you have to hit something that's realistic and not an impossible and unreachable bar and quantify and track the team's technical debt how much is acceptable to your particular situation how much tech work are you're going to have to do in production is that okay have you scheduled for it when you're

done with the deliverable be objective analyze the results and have uncomfortable conversations it'll be worth it in the long run if you rationalize where you are we'll set the team up for pain really try and quantify where you are do you need more time before going into production if so it's probably a good idea to get it if you can basically we believe that a longer pre-production cycle is more important than a shortened production cycle despite knowing you won't nail anything everything it's still worth it the scary things lying there waiting to be uncovered are going to be there regardless it's best to uncover them upfront if you can again the vertical slice could help with that and internally abolition we're still improving about how we tackle this beast and despite all the angst and uncertainty that comes with this deliverable we still attempt them I personally believe that nothing worthwhile is easy there's no good progress without at least some struggles and I think the majority of us in this room and at this conference you know we love making games and we get involved with the whole schedule profitable fun

because we like the end result and working with creative people it's too challenging otherwise and why sign up for it so we believe that the vertical slice can help ease with some of the pain so hopefully you got something out of this talk I think we're all getting better at sharing ideas and best practices through conferences like GDC and hopefully the end result is by doing that learning from each other we can make better games which is something that we all like so thanks very very much for coming I really appreciate your attention and I think we've got a little bit time for questions if there are before we take questions I want to make sure it's like make sure you thank the conference associates in the back there this conference doesn't happen without their help please fill out the questionnaires they appreciate that and also thanks to volition past and present presence members who helped me with this talk so thanks very much appreciate it [Music] [Applause]

if you cook if you have a question they were supposed to go to the mic right all right hi question do you think that it's worth in any practical case of doing specifically a visual bar at the expense of any component the vertical slice or is it just better to move the art team straight to the vertical slice and focus on that I think I think the vertical bar is a double edged sharpest sword I mean in again I don't think you have the right answer for this it's you have to work with smart team members to figure out whether or not your vertical bar is something that is attainable if it isn't then you know you shouldn't do it I think you've worked with rendering programmers and whatnot it's like okay this is a vertical bar we don't have the technology there yet but we think we'll be able to approach that in the case of saints row the third we just went went in say and we're gonna make this Lucas we're not even gonna consider whether or not it's possible that's the issue looking back in hindsight 2020 for us we

need to we need to work better with the technology and the rendering guys to say does this make sense for us can we hit this target we did that in a vacuum I don't know if that helps does that answer your question well sort of it kind of sounds like that's biasing it more towards being a true visual vertical slice and that the visual bar by itself doesn't really have much sway unless there's someone there adding text sanity to it I think I guess the way I would answer is having a visual bar way way earlier in pre-production helps at least likely characters take that as an example we want our characters to look like this pull from movies other games and then the character artists are working towards that with a contingency plan knowing that may have to scale back the triangles repolish whatever later on once the text is figure it out thank you a key theme in your talk seems to be being a learning organization I found that quite hard to get my organizations to learn well so clearly volition does learn from its past I'm having trouble hearing you I'm sorry isn't that better yes so how do you make sure that your

how does volition go about learning and keeping those learnings for those company because many games can be struggle with learning well it's not easy for us I mean after we a lot of coordinates we do that with all the teams it's open the entire studio before when we had core dumps with multiple teams everyone would be invited and we record on that and frankly it's upon to comment upon studio management to make sure that the key takeaways from those core dumps that we're not forgetting them but we failed with that a lot I mean it's like the Saints Row t1 it's like we were trailers had not invented here philosophy and I was guilty of that it was like we didn't I mean that's it's part of the learning process I mean we all have egos right we're almost like well I can do this totally better and it's a matter of trying your best to check the egos at the door and say let's not go through this stuff again and make the same mistakes I mean again it's like I don't have any like clear answers I can just tell you what we've done and we constantly have to remind ourselves to go back reread the core dumps talk about this stuff over and over again check each other keep each other honest it's like all right have we done this the same way in the past are we going down this road again the way we shouldn't

it's really hard high in your experience how much the actual content of whatever you produced for vertical slice goes into the final game do you scrap it and just use the systems that you've explored that's the there's the rub there right I mean you always want to go it's like alright we're gonna hack this stuff in and we'll fix it later for the final game but you never have enough time to do that and it's really scary so Saints Row 1 I mean internally we would called it spaghetti code you know it actually had code dating back from Summoner and just like you things are so busy never have the time to sit there and properly architect everything the way you want so in regards to specifically answering your question I think it's dependent on the situation you do your best to schedule you know I don't know how you're scheduled but it's like here's some times to get it in and then here's the time to properly architect but the other hand you know demos come up and it's like you have to hack things in I personally feel like demos are a good problem to have people aren't asking for demos the no one's interested in your game and you

know I think programmers get really mad at me but I think if you had to choose between the two hacked or properly architected I'm gonna go with hack because if you go with properly architect the whole time you may not ever have a game come out thank you any other questions all right thank you so much for coming - really appreciate it thank you