Tooth and Tail: Building Community Within Open Game Development

[Music] Hello. Hi everyone. My name is Andy Wynn and this is going to be a talk about building community within open development, but more specifically how you can use community as an additional tool to help you with your development. So, as a quick overview for the layout of the talk, I will talk about what I mean by community development as a as opposed to community management. Community management, I believe is something more about maintaining what you already have and community development is more about integrating the community into your development process. I talk about how it began, our most important tool that we're currently using for community development, which is Discord, and then how you can get started with it. So, who am I? My name is Andy Wynn. I work at Pocketwatch Games as a producer and a designer. And we're most known for having released Monaco back in 2013, for which I was the level designer. And my most important role right now for our current project is that of a business

and community developer. So, our current project is Tooth and Tail. It's a real-time strategy game. It's not out yet. And the goal of this game is we wanted to make a real-time strategy game with simplified controls that was playable on a controller. And the idea here is that real-time strategy games are sort of notorious for having overly complex controls or a high barrier to entry and we wanted to see if we could make a real-time strategy game that was just as engaging though without that aspect of having to learn to play well in order to enjoy the game. So, here's a quick picture of what it looks like. It's you know, player versus player. You can play one V one or two V two, etc. But more importantly, it's story time. So, about six months ago, I was in Korea. I flew out there for an event called BIC Fest or Busan Indie Connect Festival. And it was in Busan, South Korea. And it was have I was having a great time cuz it was the one of the first times I've ever flown out of the country. Though I was setting up shop by myself and I found it really challenging to sort of communicate how

to play the game with new players. Even if we had sort of streamlined gameplay, it was not easy to talk to somebody who didn't know English and explain how to play the how to play the game, how to explain the controls, etc. So, I'm kind of freaking out and I'm trying to come up with my own way of describing how to play the game. And I know it's Korea, so the closest thing I ever got to communicating with them was I could point to the game and say Starcraft and they're like, "Oh, Starcraft." I'm like, "Okay, great." Then I'm like one step closer. And I could point to a worker and I'm like, "SCV." And they're like, "Yeah, SCV." Wow, I know like Korean words now. But that's but that's the closest thing I ever got to actually teaching them how to play the game. And so, about 30 minutes in and I had to do this for like the whole weekend, this individual comes up and he places his laptop in between the monitors and there's an image of the controller. And then he starts telling people how to play the game. He's really enthusiastic. He's cheering on one side, he's cheering on the other side. He's telling them what to do. He's like, "Go attack him here. Go do this here." And then when he

wins, he's like, "GG." And I was like, "Whoa, what is this?" He goes and takes a selfie with me. He's extremely nervous and extremely shy. And he pulls up his phone and through Google Translate, he says, "Hi, I'm from the community and I traveled 2 hours here to help you." This was like one of the most amazing things I ever had happen to me as a developer cuz it saved me it saved me in that moment. But it wasn't the first time something like this happened. Six months prior back at PAX East, there was a Boston local named Chris and he contacted us and he said like, "Hey, I'm in Boston and I was wondering if you wouldn't mind if I could help out at your booth." So, we let him. And it was a very simple volunteer job where he, you know, got us water, got us food. But he loved the game so much and he was one of our best players at the time that having that extra pair of hands at a trade show is incredibly valuable. And anyone here who's demoed at a trade show will know how exhausting it is. So, to have somebody just help meant so much. And the thing that is still kind of

unbelievable to us is next week is PAX East and we have 12 volunteers from our community coming to help us. We actually expanded the size of our booth to accommodate them. I honestly don't know what to do about that. But it meant made me feel like there was something special. And I feel like everyone here can achieve something special, too. So, the community within Tooth and Tail is a closed alpha, meaning that we don't let everybody in and we've only been running it for about a year. We've had 3,500 applications for this alpha. And among those, there are 2,500 members who have been who are part of the community, of which 500 are online daily. So, these are very small numbers when I think about you know, some some developers have Twitter followers in the tens of thousands or Facebook likes in the hundreds of thousands. But I think a lot can come out of these small numbers. So, here are a few community examples. Clash of Comrades is an organization that is entirely community-driven. In

the beginning, we used to schedule our own tournaments, but now they schedule their own tournaments themselves. I think there's actually one going on right now. They used to run these monthly, but now they run these weekly. They coordinate the applications, they schedule the times, they stream it, they shoutcast it, they create VODs and highlights. They even produce their own prizes and mail them out to people. They even informed us of other services. So, they uh helped us with discovery by showing us of a service called splice.gg which promotes e-sports games. We never intended for Tooth and Tail to be an e-sports game because it's kind of silly to think that an indie game could be something as big as, you know, the MOBAs of today. And I'm not saying that we are. That was never our intention. But the fact that the community wanted to take this into their own hands and make it something like that, I think is quite amazing for us to us. They take this the these matches that are played across multiple different patches and then they compile data and they send this data us to us. So, then as the

balance designer, my life is made a lot easier because I have data to work off of in terms of what's being played and what's not being played or what's the success rate and what's not the success rate. And I can just do my job and not have to worry about if I'm doing it right or not because I'm constantly getting this feedback. They've even gone so far as to help us with the troubleshooting process because obviously nobody likes bugs, but rather than getting mad because the game crashes, they supply the information necessary to to solve the crash. And then before the crash is resolved, they even go to inform other community members about what the the symptoms and and causes of the crash are so that they can be avoided or resolved on their own. And this is a product of having a community dialogue. And it also has the benefit of basically having community troubleshooting. So, we don't have an FAQ because our FAQ is organic. When people have questions, they're answered by the community. They even go ahead and make like strange

memes of us and they like to spam it with the channel and stuff. So, what is community development? I think this is the key point here versus community management. So, for in our experience, what community development is is it's business development. For example, this competitive scene that was made organically which goes on to produce content, marketing content that we could spend time on our own as a small development team making, but we don't have to because they make it on their own. It's game design because they're playtesting the game constantly and giving us this feedback. And it's also quality assurance because the moment something happens across different platforms, Mac, Linux, PC, or different types of hardware specs, they let us know immediately. And not only do they let us know, they help us diagnose the problem because the worst thing is when someone tells you a bug, "Game crashed." And that's all you get. You don't have any idea what to do about that. So, this is all supplied by the community and and I like to think that uh it as developers, you can leverage these

the community as an additional tool for to your development team. So, our goals when we started out um making Tooth and Tail was we wanted to build a marketing machine. Essentially, we wanted to achieve the point of self-automation. Uh and more specifically, the the goal here is to get to the point where we can just focus on game development because other aspects of development are handled by the community. This was inspired by a talk that I attended back in Team Dev Days in 2014 where Tom Bui at Valve says the community will make the games better because they can experiment and iterate at a much faster rate than you and I ever could. For example, we're a small team of three core members at Pocketwatch. We're literally capped in the sense that even if we work 24 hours a day, there's only so much we can output. And we can think about how to output more than that. However, if you consider that the

community is an additional part of your team and that community will continue to grow, then that's exponential growth as long as you encourage your community to develop alongside you. You can see this through the blood of all of Valve's things. They produce hats, the community produces hats, skins for for League of Legends, skins for Counter-Strike guns. And the community even votes upon what kind of materials they want to have inside of the game itself. So, Valve doesn't have to produce that content. They even go so far as to price use the laws of economics to price these materials for them. So, they don't have to have somebody whose job it is to assign arbitrary price values to these new assets that are coming in. It's a machine that's automatically sort of it's automated by the laws of economics and by the community based off supply and demand. There was a time back in college when I used to love watching these TF2 skits, but they would only come out once every 6 months or so. And so Valve

with this philosophy said, well, it'd be a lot easier if we gave the tools to the community so that they can make the Skits for us. And now you have the Saxxy Awards and there's an infinite number of of, you know, TF2 marketing cartoons rather than once every few years. Other developers do this, too. So, when World of Warcraft came out, you could mod the UI and I think at the time their intention was to allow players to customize the visuals of it. But the most downloaded mod by magnitudes was something called Quest Helper. And what Quest Helper allowed players to do, or what they enabled them to do, was sort of quest in a way where they could understand where to go and what the objectives of the quest And so that was an indic- indication of the game design for Wild. So, in the Cataclysm expansion, they actually just implemented it into the game. So, the results of this sort of process is you now have fans developing content for you. You now have fans developing marketing for you, which makes a better game than you and I could ever make, and it builds a bigger team than you and I could ever be.

So, why did we take this approach? Well, Tooth and Tail is a multiplayer game. And for Indies, multiplayer games are sort of infamous for having this uh chicken and the egg problem where if nobody is playing your game, no one's going to buy your game because you can't play against anybody. But if nobody buys your game, then no one's playing the game. And so we knew we needed to seed the community in the first place. We knew we would require constant iteration on the game because if AAA companies are even struggling with the balance of the game, how could a small indie team with limited resources consider balancing the game? And we felt like this was going to be a challenging game design for us because we wanted to take all the core philosophies, concepts, and experiences of a real-time strategy game that you know and love like uh Command & Conquer or StarCraft or Age of Empires, and then boil it down into something that was really accessible but felt the same. And so as a result of this approach, what we did was we created a suite of automated tools for community development. And this is how we began that process.

So, uh for a comparison, Monaco took the avenue of traditional press. Uh we got some IGF awards, we did a bunch of interviews, we went through the traditional press outlets like uh IGN or blogs like Kotaku or Joystick at the time, etc. So, for comparison, what we did was before we made Tooth and Tail, one of the reasons we made Tooth and Tail was we wanted to make a game that was streamable, or in other words, as fun to watch as it is to play. Because we knew that uh in back in 2013, it was sort of the the verge of Twitch becoming of the phenomenon that it is today, and YouTubers were beginning more uh they were talking directly to consumers better than the traditional blogs were. So, we wanted to make a game that encouraged this kind of content, and it in- in essence, encouraged community development. Another reason why we we chose this method was back during Monaco days, uh we felt like one something that was sort of essential to the sort of indie marketing that is a

lot a lot of us Indies do is Twitter. And it we were not very successful in achieving the amount of followers or the amount of virality or retweets that other developers were were getting with their with their games. And so we felt like maybe Twitter wasn't something that was in our company's blood. We weren't good at tweeting. But what we were good at is we were good at engaging the consumer directly. And with Monaco, we did this to some success, but not to the scale that it is today. Uh with Monaco, we were good at getting fans to talk with us and love developing the game alongside us, and essentially become evangelists for the game. Ambassadors for the game that promote go out there and they talk about the game for you. And that goal is very small. That goal is very achievable achievable. It's not hundreds of thousands of followers, it's like 10. And that's all you need, which is great. So, when we took this approach, we decided our marketing outlets would be Twitch and Discord, or at the time it

was mIRC or IRC, which is basically developer chat. So, Twitch, the way it began was at the time in 2013, streaming development was sort of something that was becoming very popular, and a lot of developers still do today. We still do it. But it was very much a traditional dev stream. Uh Andy Shots would be on a computer and you'd be coding. He's talking about the game. This is a very early ugly prototype of the game. But what happened organically was as the game became more fun, we played the game on stream in a way that was very competitive, and we were sort of role-playing this idea that even though the game was a ugly ugly prototype, we were imagining the game as it was in its completed state, and it set a culture of competitive play. We were shoutcasting the game, we were doing highlights, we were talking high-level strategy, we were getting excited over the back and forth of the competitive match, even though it was

just a simple prototype. And as people watched that, they participated with us. And this is part of our open development style. So, it's like you can talk to us as developers as we're sort of engaging in this back and forth. And we acquired alpha members through that through that method. So, essentially, what I'm talking about here is establishing a culture of the kind of community members that you want by acting as the as the community members you want, then engaging with those community members directly. And so when you acquire them into your community, they're now sort of replications of you. Then our second the second avenue for which we have done community building is through the community chat itself, the direct line to the community members. And we've made sure that all of our marketing avenues focused to this point. So, the Steam forums, the tweets that we do do, our Tumblr, etc., they all tell the the consumer to go to the community chat. It started with IRC.

And IRC was fine, but IRC is like a thousand years old, and a lot of people don't really want to It's not a It's not like a user-friendly interface. But then Discord came out back in I think October of 2016, and this thing change This application changed the face of how we approach community entirely. So, I would So, Discord, what it is is a free community chat tool. Everyone can use it. I'm sure you've all heard of Slack, and I'm sure many of you have heard of have Discord as it's rising in popularity. It's essentially Slack for the consumer. It's a consumer-facing product trying to replace the days of like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, or all those things like when you used to get into your clan chat and talk with your clan or talk with your guild before you did a raid, etc. Um so, uh about three or four months ago, I was invited to be the first ever guest blog or non-Discord member to to write articles on their official blog. And the way this happened was I was talking to

one of the developers for Discord about how we were using their platform to do development rather than actually just gaming community building, and how we used the tools that they provided that were intended for community building, and how we we leveraged those tools to make uh to assist in the development of the game. And he was fascinated by all the types of uh doodads and whatnot that we had done. So, I um ended up writing a blog about it, and I'll go over some of that with you today. So, um here's how we enhanced our community chat. First off, our permission tools. So, with the permission tools, what essentially it comes down to is you can assign roles or status or different privileges to different members in your community. Now, the typical interaction of this or the typical way this um surfaces in community is you have moderators. So, this is something that's very typical in forums. You have

moderators that delete bad, uh you know, troll comments on forums or whatnot. But what we've done here that I think sets it apart is we've thought about expanding the scope of what permissions mean. And so in Discord, we've I we've separated them out by color and by priority, and we've identified the individuals who serve as ambassadors for the company and the individuals who are super fans, etc. This is a 100% voluntary job. Um and it's driven the the it allows the community to basically help itself. So, we select these members out of the community who we believe represent us in represent the company in a positive way, and we explain to them what they mean to the company. Then we assign them this unique role. Essentially, uh I think the reason why we've chose to do this is because if you're very passionate about your community, having the responsibility to help grow your community is something that's very intrinsically rewarding.

So, we've gone beyond just making moderators. We have guides. Guides, their role is to convert a new player into a non-new player by informing them with of all of the questions they have about the game. They're essentially living FAQs. We even have superstars in which we recognize members who do positive things for the community. Um we mark them as a superstar because they did fan art or they did a custom song for the game or something or whatnot. You can make tools with Discord. So, one of the tools that we did is we have a completely hands-off alpha onboarding process. Um traditionally, what happened in the past was we would have like a form, and individuals would sign up for the form, and then we would basically email email keys out. But this took time off off of our hands as developers, and we don't want to distribute keys manually every morning. So, we decided to make the onboarding process for the alpha be something that was community-driven. So, after having selected the select few

of moderate select handful of moderators who we felt represented the company in a positive way, we instructed them that they now had the power and the responsibility to key members of the community. So, as tons of community members come into the chat, the moderators now identify the ones who they think represent the culture that we want, the culture of positivity or of inclusivity. And then they then they proceed to vote on that individual. And if enough moderators vote on that individual, a bot automatically private messages them a key. And this is how we make sure that we weed out individuals who may be toxic or too salty when they play and encourage that there's like a positive growth in our community. This is done by via a bot, but more importantly, it's done via the community. The bot itself is actually programmed by the community as well. So, we also wanted to make sure that we created retention with this method. So, the tip like I said before, the typical format was to sign have a sign-up sign-up form

and then to give out keys, but I think in the past we didn't have a lot of success with that because once we gave out the key, we had no means of making sure that they played the game or provided us with the feedback necessary. So, instead, our current format is that players now have to earn their keys by contributing to the community. This means engaging in um watching the stream, engaging in conversation, asking questions, providing answers, becoming familiar with the game. And by earning a key through proving that they're passionate about the community, it means that the community itself is ultimately uh full of just passionate people. And less individuals who are just looking for a free key. This really does promote retention. We've also used the tools within Discord to help us make the game. So, Tooth and Tail is an online game with and it doesn't have matchmaking. You can play online. Uh a lobby system and you can make a lobby and play against each other, but there's no way to mark yourself as looking for a game. However, because everyone is in the chat using the bot

that was programmed by the community, you can type ready and it'll now mark you green, so your name turns green. It also marks you as a permission or a role as looking for a game, so you can ping looking for a game. And this is what it kind of looks like on the right-hand side where this is user list, you can now look and say, "Hey, that's every single that's every single person who's looking to play the game." They're green. When they chat, their name's green and I can see them on the side, so I can private message them and tell if they want to play the game. This is great because now it just gets more people to play the game. So, getting started, this is these are some simple stuff that you can do today. Um pick your hub. You can for us it's Discord and we're having a great time with it, but you can pick any hub if it's like a chat hub or a or a blog or whatnot. Set up your roles or define your roles more specifically. And this is something that I I feel like has been has worked out really well for us. We defined our role as a developer. We've defined our superstars as moderators or guides or featured members.

Define what those roles, privileges, and entitlements mean because it establishes various levels of importance with your community. Create a singular landing page so that people can go to this one spot and get all the information they need to know because your community is not just a hub with a bunch of people in in it. It's now an ecosystem. It's It's now It's got its own rules and its own metrics and it lives and it moves on its own. They'll They're going to have questions. They're going to want to participate in it as if it's a game in and of itself. Announce your updates. So, it's important for you not to go dark because your community is eagerly waiting for the next bit of news. So, constantly talk about the little things that you're doing so that your community can have something to engage in. You can do this either Discord or Twitter or whatever hub you have. And then invite them to engage. So, you take your invite or however you want to to ask your community to join this one spot

and funnel them all into one place. In the beginning, we tried funneling them all into a newsletter, but ultimately we worked into just funneling all funneling them all into this chat room. Um whatever it is, just make sure they they know every single step of the way whatever it is that you're talking through where to go. So, whenever we tweet, we Facebook, whenever we make a blog on on Tumblr or or a Steam forum post, it all tells them to go to this one spot, that one landing page that I talked about earlier. And hopefully, if you build your community up enough, then you can have people for some reason meme out about you. That's not Photoshop. That's Andy Shots's face at the Boston Major. So, this is uh some of our moderators. I like think to to give a big shout-out to them. Here's some resources that I used for this talk. And thank you. And that's our Discord page and my Twitter and our our Oops, that's it should say Tumblr or blog or whatnot, but um Yeah, I encourage you to check out our Discord because it's got a lot of really cool fun things you can do in there.

So, thanks so much. [Applause] Oh, okay. Questions, anyone? Hi. Uh so, really great talk, first of all. Okay, thanks. Um So, I have a question. Your game obviously is multiplayer, which is a kind of game that already sort of encourages people to seek out a community so they have someone to play with. Uh how viable would you say all of these things are sort of for a single-player game that is generally more of a solitary experience? Well, I Yeah, I've thought I've thought about this as well. I think the key isn't necessarily single-player versus multiplayer, but something that can be iterated on or have perpetual engagement. So, uh a game like Darkest Dungeon, which is has added content constantly or like Don't Starve or whatnot, can easily foster this sort of community. Some A

game that would probably not work well in this like the most extreme case would be something like a a narrative game that's like a short narrative game that's prone to spoilers because once the consumer can like finishes it, there's not much they can do beyond that. But if you have something that's like a systemic game that is procedurally generated or continues to build upon itself, there's lots of reasons for the player to come back and give you feedback. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Hi. Hi. Um I have a question with uh so, you when you're streaming when you're on Twitch streaming the development, Mhm. what how do you decide what you're going to when you're going to be streaming Oh, cuz do you if you don't want to give away a certain part of a game, Right. part secret or like what makes you decide, "Okay, we're going to stream this, but not this?" Right. So, the question is uh how do you decide what to stream and what not to stream? Uh we We also have portions of the game that we haven't streamed at all yet. They're the ones for us it's the it's

what we've chosen to be the most uh prone to spoilers. So, we haven't streamed any of the single-player or anything like that. What we typic The The high-level goal of streaming for us is to set a cultural example for the community. So, we stream in the way we hope other viewers stream themselves. And it's worked out because by running tournaments for something as small and as simple as this alpha, we've encouraged other people to do the exact same thing. And it works. So, it find whatever it is in your game that you think you can imagine other people doing for you and then stream that way cuz people you know, you lead and they follow. Okay, thanks. Thank you. So, uh a So, I think two of the biggest concerns in generating an open development community Mhm. is one, the creation of cliques or kind of a sense of elitism or entitlement within privileged users. Mhm. Uh and then also

being held accountable for the actions of those individuals and occasionally having to apologize on their behalf. Right. How do you uh for one thing, incentivize uh a community a type of community engagement that doesn't stratify stratify your uh player base? And also, how do you hold people uh accountable without uh letting it get so far that you're stuck making an apology that you never should have been forced to make in the first place? Uh so, just to go over your question again, is the the first one is elitism, right? Yes. Uh I guess the the first one is how to prevent uh cliques among privileged players. Right. And then the second one would be uh how to make those privileged players self-accountable Right. so that you're not having to shepherd them around. Right. So, this is the these situations have already occurred to us.

Um there have been complaints from other members who are not moderators who felt like the moderators themselves were too clique-like. Um the the question, sorry if I the question is that how do you prevent cliques and how do you hold players accountable for if they're in a position of power and they abuse it or some or something along those lines, right? So, the both have happened to us. Uh as far as cliques are concerned, I've never done anything to actively prevent them in the sense that uh I I don't say I I The moderators themselves do have a private channel for which they talk about moderation. And that in and of itself is a clique. And they they talk about their own things in private. I I don't feel this that this is destructive to the community. And I think a big part of that is a lot of what has has gone into selecting the moderators themselves is to make sure that even though they have their own subsection of which they're essentially the elites, they're vetted so that they're not

elitists. They they do talk directly to everyone else as individuals and I've established a rule page for the moderators to know that they should not talk to individuals as if they are inferior to them. Now, in the in the event that this does happen and it has happened, we've had I've the developers are the highest tier of elites essentially in development and they have to step in, which takes time off on our our hands. Um it has happened like a few times over the year where we have to step in and talk to a moderator directly and then guide them. But this particular correction process allows it uh sort of serves serves as a as a way of uh showing the moderators like how to behave. Like it it is sort of going to happen, I think. Yeah. Thanks. Hi there, I'm Paulo from Brazil. Thanks for the talk. Uh your company has already made a name for itself with Monaco. Yeah. Uh

I'd like to ask if you have any tips or hints for companies that still haven't made a name for themselves to start up to kickstart these communities. Well, uh to be fair, um when we we while we do have a name or a reputation for having made Monaco, when we opened the alpha initially, it wasn't like a flood of people applied because there are new and interesting games happening all the time. And we felt like while we had a small advantage in the in the form of about four people off of our Monaco forums, uh the four the first four people who ever joined the alpha were four off the Monaco forums. That was kind of the initial bump. And it took a while. The first um like I mentioned in the talk, we were IRC before we went to Discord. The first year was less than 30 individuals in our IRC. So, it took a while. But those 30 individuals are also the same 30 that are on every day to this day and they are many of them are moderators now. So, the goal here is not to have a huge

community. The goal here is to find the few that really really will stay with you the whole time for years. And I think that's a a very achievable goal even if you start from zero. As long as you tell people where to go to to connect with you cuz if they don't know where to go, then they're not going to be able to show you that they care about your work. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thanks. The rest of them there's an overflow room and then Okay, sure. Uh thanks, everyone. [Applause]