'Valheim': Vikings, Roadmaps & Buying a Horse During Early Access

[Music] uh so welcome and thank you for coming uh for this talk um hope you can find some value in this um but I'll go ahead and start so first off a little summary about what I want to talk about today um we're I'm going to go through a little bit about what a valheim is um and and and a history about valim how everything started uh with the release um the launch the reception about that going a few War Stories happened along the way um I'm going to go through the different patches that we've done uh since release we're still not at 1.0 um I'm going to go through a few Challen challenges that we've had during that time um I'm going to talk a little bit about Early Access how that has worked for us um some thoughts on that

and about getting to 1.0 and first off I want to say um I'm not an expert in any of this this is just my perspective on everything uh the thoughts are my own mostly and uh yeah so take it or leave it uh there's also going to be some spoilers personally I hate spoilers so yeah if you're you could definitely go to the Allen wake talk instead uh if you're if you don't want to be spoiled and also thanks for my team for helping me out on this talk uh giving me some feedback uh to make sure that it's not just a bunch of uh hopefully and yeah um overall this talk is just basically giving you an insight to what we've been doing how we do stuff and yeah but first off um an introduction so my name is Jonathan smars or smos in Swedish um and I'm the leader engineer on valheim uh also

designer uh you have my email up there if you want to get a hold of me um I'm also on Twitter or X I've post stuff about valheim and other projects as well um also called a lot of other things at the office uh J bloat Johnny longt talk are some of the more politically correct ones so I'll leave the other ones uh off um I started off uh when I was 10 or 11 with rid dream Studio 5 I don't know if anybody recognizes that name at all it's a 3D application in the '90s uh making models and stuff I got into modding Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament um I made some cars for a game for an un unreal mod called onwheel uh which made it into PC Gamer it's the uh this the the caterpillar truck down there uh when I was 13 which was really huge for me at the time uh it felt really awesome so I guess that's was kind of my start of feeling that yeah I really want to make

games uh I did modding for a while I got my first industry job at dice 2006 I worked on Bad Company uh so depending on how you count that I guess I got around 20 years uh in the gaming industry which sounds like a lot uh and crazy to me uh because yeah I mean I really don't know what I'm doing still so yeah uh I'm also volunteer volunteer firefighter um you can see me working on valim from the fire truck in one of the photos there uh after a fire um I love traveling and hiking in saunas and jumping in legs and stuff like that and I have four lovely kids uh that I try to spend time with um I also just want to that sounded bad sorry I we were uh we have an office which is awesome and but I work mostly from home so I do get to spend a lot of time with them which I'm really happy for um I also so like besides modding

which I think is great it's a great way to get into the industry I also have done a lot of game jams and which is the little yeah all those little icons down in the in the bottom there and just a small tip for anybody wondering like getting into the industry learning to make games like what what should I do and all that I would personally really recommend uh modding or game jams because it really teaches you from start to finish how to make something it gives you a deadline you go through all the steps and you can get feedback for what you've done and improve on that and also you have something to put in your portfolio because you're making stuff put it in there it's really nice to do them in person that's the best ones but there's also online events I'm sure you all know this already so I'll just go ahead so what is valheim um I'll just it's a game made by Iron Gate um and published by coffee stain both both of us are located in a small town called quda in Sweden with about 40,000 people

uh it's in between you could say it's like yeah in between Stockholm and gothenberg um the game was made by a very small team um and we have grown a little bit since then but not a lot um and it's amazing team I just want to give a huge shout out to everybody on the team and at the company um it's a really a lot of talented people doing a great job and also all our talented partners are publisher coffee stain um The Animation Studio brick which made these awesome uh animated trailers that I was showing before we started off um and which you'll see during this talk um also like lots of other partners Patrick and Dennis for amazing music and audio and pic fish labs for for porting and stuff like that so yeah um I said that already uh so the game is a brutal Viking exploration game for one one to 10 players um it's a huge proc

procedural world with nine biomes uh two of which are unreleased um one is coming quite soon it's it's called a survival game and I guess it is but originally this was thought of as an adventure game and we still think of it as that mainly and but it's yeah so um the design of of valheim is based around three design pillars are ABC which is Adventure building and combat and we try to keep an even even balance of these three throughout the game uh and not lean too heavily into any of these um and these lead to one of the things that I like most about the game and I think is one of the reasons why it's done well is that it gives players um a lot of different ways to play the game

so we cater to uh a bunch of different play Styles which is which means that you can play the game together with a group of friends even though they're not all into the exact same kind of a game um it's a co-op game you play it on your own server and in your own time um and um some people can somebody wants to go out fighting somebody wants to uh stay at home and build a house somebody else wants to farm and and make food and somebody wants to go chopping wood and uh we don't have a uh traditional leveling mechanic where where you have to stay at the same Pace all the time or or you'll fall behind so uh everything is based more on items and there's there's a small like skill leveling system in there as well um but it but it works pretty well uh I think and it also has kind of an iconic like retrographic feel um which is uh oops wrong key here

wait there I'm supposed to scroll on these notes which doesn't want to work so yeah but it's um it has it has an old style of Graphics but with modern lighting and effects um it also has maybe you could call it Retro Game values we don't have any microtransactions or like uh require you to be online or battle passes or like invasive DRM and like that I think that's a lot of things that people appreciate I don't know um yeah a short history about how did everything start and uh this is before my time so I shouldn't be the one telling the story um but here I am giving the talk so here it goes uh it all started out as a solo project by Richard senson he did it in his free time um he was working at pieces and directive and he he let's see what I got there yeah yeah he um he got his friend

and colleague Henri tonist to join him as a co-founder St and formed Iron Gate in April of 2019 uh and at the same time they also hired their first employee Robin who's sitting right here awesome guy you can talk to him afterwards uh he loves food um originally the game was supposed to be a peer-to-peer MMO um called f which is why our networking model is not a traditional server client model um but individual clients are owners of the area that they enter which makes it's it's quite good for um a game where you're exploring in different areas because you will have zero lag even if you're on crappy Connections in different areas of the world but it also means that if you are and you're in the same area some people yeah a lot of people complain about this as well um

so let's see uh a little bit about how we do stuff and what we do at ironate um one of our like principles to to work after is the good enough sentiment uh trying to make everything good enough like not trying to make everything perfect not over complicate things spend tons of time on uh overs scoping certain things this is also something that we constantly struggle with um so it's not easy to it's easier to say than to do I guess um worth work ethics I think is an important part uh something I wanted to mention because it's not it's not always great in our industry um at ironate we believe that people have to have a healthy work life balance uh to make the best games possible so we have like s hour work days um six weeks vacation um we don't do overtime we don't Crunch and

these these were things that were established before release as well before all the success and everything so um yeah just want to say let's try to move the industry in that direction and we'll get better games and you'll get everybody will earn more money in the end anyway so let's try to help each other out on that I need to see if I can scroll yes I can good okay so small team uh um we are I think 13 people at the moment in total at the company and uh we want to stay small there's a lot of value in this for us um it means that um that we have a lot of people who do a lot of different stuff like wear many hats uh and that's the type of company that I really enjoy working on you can do a little bit of each thing um I didn't say that in the introduction but but I started off as a 3D artist now I'm

a programmer um but um yeah um and we like we want to stay focused on our vision for the game uh which is basically make the best possible game that we can um without worrying too much of the other aspects of business and too many opportunities and things like that which is a luxury we can afford because we''ve had success um so it's not it's easy to say that and it's might not be easy for everybody to to do that but we're happy to be in a position where we can um and yeah everything we do is for the greater good of alheim our fans might sometimes disagree but we also there's also a lot of people who offer us support and say that yeah keep doing what you're doing you're doing it good and so on so we uh we're happy for that and also I just want to shout out to to QA which I think is sometimes um

undervalued uh and it deserves a lot more I've had the great pleasure of working with great QA uh which is really a big help having fast iteration time always keeping the game everything working really well not ending up in a buggy mess um yeah so the launch um on February 2nd 2021 valim launched into Early Access um it sold five million copies within the first month you can see that on the graph there I think that's two months on the graph um and 10 million within 6 months uh which was a whole lot more than anybody ever thought or expected or could imagine in any way and it's completely crazy but uh yeah it also launched on Xbox um Microsoft store first in 2022 and then

on Xbox series and one uh in 2023 um reception it's I mean it's done incredibly well we're very happy for that um at the time of release it was the fifth most played game on concurrent players on Steam uh ever and since then it's been passed by a whole bunch of games really successful great games um it was called the rare exception of Early Access ear exus has had kind of a bad name um for various reasons so that's a very nice thing to hear um we also got the game of the year award from PC Gamer which is awesome uh it was the first Early Access game to get an award get that award we also got the gdca uh two Awards two years ago sadly none of us were here at the time because of covid um and uh yeah I like this uh this gift over here showing like the search

queries for the US uh which was uh every single state for 10 days straight was just Googling valheim which is to me insane that it's like not something more important uh but yeah it's it's yeah it's kind of funny um so uh why did it go so well and uh yeah I'm am not the person to ask um everybody has their own theories your guesses is good as mine um yeah nobody was expecting it to go this well internally their hopes were to sell like 10 or 20K to be able to continue working on the game uh otherwise we maybe would have like have to stop working on it and start or they would have to start working on something else um we don't have any real metrics or science of why it went well um but some of my I don't know if you care why I think so but I think some of the reasons why besides being a kind of a uh

approachable gameplay Loop that worked um that was both like challenging but also accessible uh but also let you do whatever you want in the world combined with releasing during covid when everybody was stuck in their apartments and allowing them to play a game like up to more a co-op game with more than four players uh together with your friends just running around in the forest chopping down trees uh I guess that was appeal in uh so timing was good um it also had a very low entry barri on price um funny story about that the price was set to $20 I think but the steam um like automatic translation to different uh different currencies set it at 16 something Euros so at at launch and you could calculate how much was lost pretty easily from that if you want to uh which turns into whole lot of money but to be honest I think that it

was good because every single like every single reason to make the game easier uh an easier buy will make uh I think it increases the chance for a game to go well and personally I think a lot of games on Steam are overpriced uh not for the value that they provide definitely not they should be priced much higher but uh your main focus uh for a debut game should I think should be um getting the game into as many players hands as possible possible and just having people play it spare spread the word of mouth and uh better to sell 100,000 copies at $10 than to sell 10,000 copies at like $30 or something so yeah um also small download size I wanted to mention uh the game was like one gigabyte per at launch and I think it's one thing I haven't heard mentioned too many times but I I think it's could be an important factor considering the

amount of people in the world who have uh pretty bad internet connections and also maybe they have full hard drives there's the steam deck now to consider and all things like that so I think like buy a new game and it's like install 125 gigs and yeah that's I think it's just crazy so I think that's a good thing to try to strive for if you can and also it had trees that would fall on your head and kill you and I guess that was a good reason as well uh okay so I'm going to go into some War Stories um some funny things or not so funny things that happened during uh that has happened during our launch um first off like I said nobody was expecting huge sales uh coffee stain our publisher have this funny thing where they do internal betting uh at the company and I've been told there's no Stakes involved I'm not sure that I'm

trusting that but uh it's just for for fun um but uh here are the numbers anyway uh for what they believed that valim would sell and the rating on Steam they would be uh thankfully our producer then or our publisher then uh Amelia was the second highest uh she's sitting right here she's now the studio head of coffee stain so yeah she believed in us the most and we're happy for that so yeah it's just a funny little list there um then we have the road map uh which is part of the title I guess so what happened was um our publisher thought it not Amilia she was actually uh on maternity leave um at the time I think uh they wanted us to publish a road map because that's what Early Access games do um and this was like May not very well communicated and it was

kind of hacked together um at the time and it showed up while Richard and Robin were just trying to fix bugs and get the game working and everything and they're like oh what what are these things that we're going to release um in 2021 this year uh so it was never meant to like have a big promise list of features and set a set a deadline like that that was yeah didn't turn out so well because the community the internet never forgets and they like to remind us that we've promised this and that we're hor horrible developer for not filling our promises um that said it's definitely great to have a plan and communicate it to your players but maybe uh do only the things that you know that you can do then we have this other thing we bought a horse

supposedly um this is Lisa she's also sitting right up here our fantastic 3D artist then also Community manager um the real story about behind this is that a local writing Club was having some financial trouble uh during covid so they just asked if we wanted to sponsor them uh for a not so huge amount and to buy a horse and uh we said sure that sounds like a fun idea we can help them out uh we posted this uh in one of our updates Lisa thought this sounds like a good idea uh so uh and they named the horse valheim so it's it's worth it just for that I think it's awesome she lives in KDA somewhere if you want to visit her I'm sure you're welcome too um but uh yeah that's all we did nothing more but the community also thought like why are you wasting your time uh you should hire more people finish the game do all those things uh

yeah so uh quick rundown about the updates we have made since release um here is a little uh what say overview about the patches that we made um we've had five bigger like one big update and some small updates and 79 like tiny updates with mixed things we have Ashlin coming up quite soon and after that we have deep North with 1.0 coming I put some graphs in because people like graphs and uh it's showing kind of like the first one at the top is like the concurrent players of alim's entire lifetime and then since that kind of to zoom in a little bit showing the updates below there um just to see what the updates have for effect and it's nice I mean it's definitely really nice um but uh ultimately it's not really our like our

goal to like make an update just to get more players in or or to sell more copies or anything like that we just want to do what's right for the game um make the make the game in the best way that we can and we're learning as we go definitely making mistakes along the way so the first update was Hearth and Home first kind of bigger update it we we worked a lot of the systems balancing work added some build pieces and added like writable nameable creatures um the community was were like there's no progress there's no progression so uh that's too bad I guess um there's a picture of one of the interesting bugs that showed up like we just were're going to add a hot tub uh but turns out you can go swimming under it and also if you destroy it the whole world would have that ocean level of the hot tub so from just like wanting to do one simple small thing often turns into uh more headaches

so then we did an Abomination update which was we wanted another creature uh for the swamp uh this is not the final version uh it's like the yeah I mean it doesn't look great but the final form is like some of some of our favorite creature in the game still um it was that we were thinking like we wanted to release a patch and not mention this so that people would just be running around in the swamp and then all of a sudden it's like um but we realized that people didn't appreciate when we make things and don't write it in the patch notes so yeah we started making more detailed patch notes after that um it's based on a Swedish folk tale called root VTA which means like a a fallen tree stump with roots and the story is something like uh don't play close to those or it will eat you um I guess because it can like flip up and they can get yeah um the next update was Ice Caves uh

we thought the mountains were a little bit bare uh we added a dungeon to the Ice Caves uh we had an armor set mini boss uh one of those stories where like oh we just need we just need a dungeon turns into one more thing one more thing one more thing um we also had a there was a like we were finishing up this update and it Felts like something is missing and uh Robin like Friday morning he's like I made a concept for a bat and then he just like threw together this model textured it and threw it over to Christopher sitting over there our animator uh animated some stuff threw it back to me implemented stuff made it work put it in the cave and it was all done um within one day which that's why we call it bad Friday and we try to we try to say oh should we have a bad Friday this Friday uh and then eventually we haven't had a lot of those but uh something that we strive for it's

also been renamed to feature creep Friday uh which for some reason gets canceled every time um so yeah I'm yeah I'm a supporter of those um after that mland was our first big uh update with a new biome uh it had lots of new content of every type uh of the game items and monsters and and food and everything uh neutral neutral creatures it had a whole Magic system and uh yeah big update uh the community was positive mostly I mean it was well received but some people did not were not huge fans of the Mist covering a lot of the area um the last bigger update we made was hilder's request which is um it started out actually I think Lisa wanted to make or was it that Robin to I'm not remember yeah Lisa wanted something to do between an update and

Robin was like yeah you can make some cool clothes or something uh so she made some nice dresses and stuff uh and then so it was meant to be just like tiny little thing and then one day Richard biked to the office and he's like oh I have this idea let's make a new NPC and and uh and um a whole like you have to do this and this to get those things and yeah just kind of ran away again and grew into this like much bigger thing uh which makes like everything takes time so um sometimes it's good to ask like is this progressing our are to the goal that we are trying to reach or like it's also good to make like side content as we call it but but in the end like people are always asking like oh mland when Ashland when um constantly so um yeah it it grew a little bit bigger but it's I think it also turned out quite nice we also had a world modifier added at the time which was something thing that it's like allowing you to

customize the game is difficulty but also settings making like being able to play without a map uh without portals or customize it in different ways um which kind of goes hand in hand with our philosophy of like it's your world it's your game do whatever you want with it um and at the same time uh it's not like it was a little bit mixed uh internally like we also think it's interesting thing to to say like oh you can actually beat valheim now you can turn it down and it can be easier so yeah it's not completely um given but but I think it's something that a lot of people appreciate and it's also from for myself personally I like to be able to say oh I want a bigger challenge let's crank up the difficulty a little bit but also I want to be able to play with my kids so I can turn off the P like Monsters and stuff we can rock around in the world uh we go into a dungeon filled with skeletons and my 5-year-old asked me like what are the skeletons doing here because they're just passive like just

just don't hit them they'll be nice if you're nice to them they live here oh okay yeah oh there's a troll do they live in the forest and so on so yeah um Ashland is our is our upcoming second biome to be released uh it's said to be released quite soon um it's beginning to reach the end of of the IES that we have promised um we're getting to the play Styles a lot uh giving a lot of new items lots more content new mechanics and everything it's going to be very interesting to see how it is received um let's see yeah so a few other challenges that we have had along the way um the workload balance is like we are a very small team um uh to to decide on what do we put our time on like do we want to fix bugs work on

like side grade secondary stuff improve stuff polish all things work on the next biome uh optimize the game um do Platform work for other platforms U take care of the team uh do community engagement and things like that it's always a real uh balance of trying to figure those things out um being on multiple platforms is definitely does take some time like we have a really great porting Studios that have helped us out on this but uh because we want feature priority everything that's put into the game we want it to be the same on PC as on Xbox and everything um it does it there's always some overhead keeping all the branches in sync um and things like that so um yeah and also we want to support crossplatform multiplayer uh which sounds like of course you want to support CR platform multiplayer and I'm now I'm glad that we do because it's best for the game but uh

knowing the headache of making sure that everything is 100% in sync and also um uh having to be so careful when releasing like previously we can release on Steam at any time uh we can hot fix stuff all the time it's so easy that's uh really nice and now having to go through sech and make sure that we're timing everything much more carefully that's uh can be a nightmare um also so like the lowest spec machine the Xbox One is um makes us have to spend some time well mostly the porting Studio but still spend time looking at optimizing the game but in the end it's also good for everybody so yeah it's a mixed bag I guess um one little not so funny story uh what happened on Xbox even after tons of of QA and testing on Xbox um at release there were some reports like oh uh my house fell apart there's this

mountain where there isn't supposed to be a mountain and things like that like the the the map would be 99.9% identical except in certain spots and it took us a while to figure out that I don't know how many of you are programmers but like there was like some tiny tiny discrepancies in the float rounding Point calculations between uh Mano uh the old version of Mano and the il2 CPP on Xbox which make the which is fine for all cases except if you have like a huge long list of random procedural generation that uh becomes cascading wrong at certain points like it just flips like at one point this the switch is flipped and then and then the rest after that will be different so that was that was also a headache uh to to get that fixed um yeah spending some time getting merch done I have some here for those of you are not bored uh and leave before the end um starting

a company uh with a new team getting everybody synced and working together um growing that growing the team people changing roles within the team um and spending time on team building making sure that everybody's um work can work together and and are healthy and so on um creating creating an office space uh moving between offices like there's so many of these practical things that that uh that might not be considered uh part of like pure game development but they do take time um production pipeline changes like in the be um in the beginning when there's very few people then the how we work with just like oh this is a cool thing okay let's make it and there's like three people in that room and that is that that becomes made and after that like move over to like we had Google Sheets uh which was not great and then we moved to Trello and then we move to Monday which is what we're working on now but

it's like it's it's a big difference like every single person you add to your team is adding complexity um and making it yeah like there's more overhead involved in the production also engine upgrades I'm sure everybody loves to upgrade uh to the next version of of uh Unity or any other game engine uh it works great most of the time actually but there's some hiccups um so I don't know how I'm doing for time maybe it's okay uh Early Access then um why why does early axes exist and is it good or is it bad or what is it um I don't really generally like making lists of pros and cons it's much too uh black and white for me but I did it anyway um because it's good to yeah I don't know give to list things up um so but everything everything is a gray I would say so first off why would somebody do Early Access uh obviously

for funding um you don't have enough money to work on the game for five years so you want some some extra funding for that um that's a very valid reason um early evaluation like this is really both good and bad but it could be a good idea to get to know is this going to be a good game like do people like this game or not uh or should I should I spend more of my time making this game or should I make something else and uh that is a good thing but it's also a bad thing if you're presenting something that is not in a good state so if when you release to Early Access make sure that it's in the best best presentable state that you could be because you only do release once uh uh in that regard so it's both good and bad um um two releases uh which is kind of true

kind of not true it's definitely both good and bad like you release at Early Access you get your 1.0 um like I'm not sure all the steam um algorithms work and stuff like that so maybe it's like it's not really two releases but still um it's it's it could be a point of buying two lottery tickets instead of one um you get play you get a lot of play player um play testing and feedback from from people um some people expect this to be kind of like a beta of some sort which it is not most players treat it do not treat it at it early access and they will give you bad reviews but uh you do get feedback like if it's well planned you can get the feedback that you need to make the game good for your 1.0 release um and it also is like helping you growing the community engaging the community making them kind of part of the game development like depending on how much of the how much feedback you're taking like balance changes and improvements uh it's

it's a really good way to engage players in your game it's also very inspiring to have people play your game and say that they want more rather than sitting by yourself in a basement in a garage or something like that and just waiting um conss uh bad First Impressions what I like I already said um um it's a really bad idea to to release a game if it's not in a good State then it's better to keep it uh in so that will lead to negative reviews on Steam if you choose steam as your platform and um you might think that uh yeah there's the Early Access reviews and all that but uh and people might come back but I don't most people don't come back to change the review they're done with the game if it's a bad game it's going to keep being a bad game like youreview score is going to be there and it will also demotivate you a lot if if

you have a release and it turns into like mixed or or mostly negative or something like that what are the chances that you're going to get more money from that or get more sales I mean the chances are you're going to abandon the game and then move on to something else um so make sure that that uh don't release it too early um also the two releases uh I wanted to point out that while it's good to buy the two lottery tickets um the chance of snowballing uh or getting like a really good uh viral effect is also decreased because a lot of people avoid Early Access games and want like why would I play an early access game there's like 10 million games I could play that are done and my steam library is enormous um I don't know about you but yeah it's true definitely true for me um so it's also it also makes sense to to to not do that and the final point I

want to make is about managing expectations which is for us really the big one um when you are working on your game by yourself you can of course do it in your own time take your time no stress from the outside um and when you're done or if you need to spend another year doing it then you do that as soon as you've released your game I'm getting into this one uh as soon as you release your game uh you have to tackle a bunch of other things as well um the first of them being is that your game is no longer only your game and in some ways it's almost more the players game you sold them something they paid for it they own this if you break their new toy they're going to be pissed off um so if you want to be able to like keep the the pure like if you want to be able to make like really rough decisions or big decisions changes in to the end of your your game then it's probably a good idea

to not release it before that and you can of course do it but the response will probably not be great um also staying relevant for like many Early Access games like us are Early Access for multiple years and uh and it's it could be difficult to feel motivation after a number of years uh with player counts dwindling and thinking like okay how many people will actually play this once it's done because we had our time at some point um and providing support like technical support for both both actual customer support like answering emails and stuff like that but but fixing like jumping over to fix bugs uh for for current players rather than actually just work on the game that you want to make and and and do those things later uh so that that changes this whole workload balance thing quite a bit um backwards compatibility this is of course different for different games but

uh I think it's applicable for a lot of Early Access games um especially for us where we do not want to like people spend in some cases hundreds of hours on their world uh building and exploring and and making this world theirs um we would not want to post an update uh that would force them to reset their world and start from the from the beginning like sometimes would be beneficial in some ways but we we do we have to put down a lot of time making sure that everything works like with a world that was created at Early Access launch even um and that turns into a lot of extra work in some cases both technically and also design wise like um yeah that being said I'm not completely promising that there might not come a point where that happens but uh hopefully not uh it also goes for I want to mention I it also goes for save games um making sure that

they don't not get corrupted or anything like that and we've had cases where sadly many cases where something breaks and we get emails like my I spent 400 hours building a city and now my world is gone and to be honest we've had a lot of sleepless nights over stuff like that like posting an update thinking this is going to be good and then like waking up the next morning to hear like oh there's five people who lost their worlds so that really really does hurt a lot and we do a lot like we really do as much as we can to try to prevent that and we I think we have had a lot of cases where we've been able to recover this in some way uh which also takes time um but we've also put in systems like backup systems and and like better cloud cloud save support and things like that to prevent that from happening um it also raises the standards um both internally and externally so if valim never went into Early Access it

would have been done by now um the last biomes would have been done maybe a bit leaner um if you compare them to other uh biomes uh but because of the effect of having a a successful game and having people wait for that and they've waited for a while then you really have the the pressure of okay we really want them to like this like we don't want to disappoint our players uh which raises our own standards which makes us like spend even more time building the next biome which raises the standard even more and then it's a vicious cycle it just Builds on itself um so that is yeah something that we struggle a lot with trying to find what is The Sweet Spot of good enough and what is like no no this isn't good enough uh is it going to be good enough yeah so on um and also to think about what is your ultimate motivator on why are you making this game what is

your point what is your focus on your next update um uh I mean it makes sense that some games are like like if you're if you just want to sell more or if you want to like increase your player account and have this like I mean of course everybody wants to make money and so on but and have to but uh is that your goal like are you thinking only about the next update or if you want to release an update every single week or every single month or something like that um that puts a lot of stress and changes how the game will be in the end um for us like I mentioned earlier uh we we approached this just wanting to make the best possible game um uh which is a luxury that yeah gladly we can afford um yeah that's basically everything I just said um why did why did valheim go into Early Access uh it was for the same reasons which I

also mentioned maybe but uh because funding um did not uh like we needed to make sure that it was worth putting more money money into this or not we the publisher wanted to make sure it's worth putting more money into this or not um and that I guess is a big reason why many people would do that one thing that we do though is that we do not treated as Early Access um which is one like really important point is that if you're releasing your game on Early Access if you think about it as Early Access and think oh it's fine we'll just put work in progress missing that button doesn't work ah there's some bugs over there don't walk over there then that's what's that what that's the experience that people are going to have and we do not want to put anything in the game that doesn't feel good enough or done um which is why we made say the first 60%

of the biomes done and the last ones are basically missing rather than making 60% of them done individually and have like this half half broken mess missing a bunch of stuff along the way uh and I think that is a big reason why we get a lot of um nice comments about saying that it doesn't feel like an early access game um that's very nice because that's what we were hoping um we do not release tons of updates um uh it's it's great if you can and if that's part of your plan but um that's not how we do it um we try to have a good Community relationship uh communicate on a lot of different like we have uh Discord and Reddit and lots of different places where we communicate um I also think that it's not really hard to get in touch with us like uh the actual developers which I think is could be kind of rare like a lot of us will respond if you write to us in various

places um and I think that could be appreciated um we also have uh some trolls on social media uh my favorite is um Twitter account dedicated to asking why there's not bikes in valheim at every single update so yeah that's I think it's funny Lisa does too so um yeah staying true T Vision uh well also listening to feedback this is the balance which is really difficult uh maybe I'm uh repeating myself again but but while we want to stay true to this Vision uh it's also there are cases of course where we have this idea and we realize with the feedback that we're getting no that wasn't a great idea um so then we can tweak it then we can think about it one more time so and also take in feedback of of various types U

of course so yeah yeah just want to make the best game that we can like AR said so is your game suited for Early Access um let's see this was supposed to be that I was going to click them down but I guess I did miss that just supposed to say no um so if you have to ask I would say no uh if you don't have to and if you have to ask then or if you're unsure I would say don't do it better to wait keep it in the oven make sure it's really really good even if you do release make sure it's really really good but uh yeah also I would say single experience games uh it's not an expression but like games where it's you're meant to play it more or less one time from beginning to end story based games or or like uh very specific like say Metro Vania where you have like you want the this this one progression that you probably do one time um I would say don't do that then uh also live service

like I don't know like they're they're going to make updates forever anyway so it's basically just the same thing why call it early access I think that's weird um but games which are more like focused on replayability where you need balance uh feedback or you want a lot of balance feedback you want to you want to um iterate on that a lot um that is um better suited for that and multiplayer games which you will be playing and coming back to a lot let's see how are we for time not so great um is valheim suitable um it's kind of suitable uh it's it did go quite well um but um it definitely made the game development take a little bit more time but in the end I think it will make Val into a better game um so bottom line it depends it's not for everybody it's not free money um and also again I'm not an expert at

this if you feel that you want to do it go ahead and do it uh it's definitely up to you um if you do it have a plan um think through what you're doing talk to people do your research uh communicate with the community what your what your plan is there's lots of different models to do this for example uh like ka's great example had had I think it was like a one-year plan of having updates every single month uh and then going into to 1.0 after that um yeah I think I'll skip through that um and getting to 1.0 we have the extra dot there um have an extra strategy don't just go for don't just like silently release 1.0 and call it 1.0 and think that oh it's going to explode try to do something with it make it feel like a actual release so that there's a there's a huge reason to go back um I would say polish

everything um try to go out with a bang um add things like achievements like make it feel like uh high production value uh everything around that maybe think about mod support and things like that um and project fatigue is definitely something to consider you're probably extremely tired of your game at that time but try to don't fall on the Finish Line try to finish up as much as possible and these are the things that we're um kind of trying to think about and and aim for um for our last biome which is deep North which will come out with Early Access uh no uh first 1.0 release um after our Ashland's release and that's it thank you so yeah they did say that we have time

for questions uh because there's not a talk directly after this I also have a few uh items with me which I will um throw out to you if anybody wants some stuff um I don't know t-shirts are probably not going to be in your sizes but uh let's just try anyway you can uh meet at the back if you don't get the size that you want and maybe somebody will trade you t-shirts are horrible to throw that's why they have these t-shirt guns wow oops oops there's one more on the last one there you go see um see I I have more it it's also good to sit in the front I guess if it's t-shirts maybe these will

wait I'll do like this uh no you can come get these afterwards but these I can throw further so a little bit further actually this is going to take too much time there's an Xbox controller I'm keeping that okay there you go yeah so um any questions also I guess we'll run a few questions and if anybody wants to ask us like uh basically most of the valheim team is actually here sitting up here front if anybody wants to meet and talk to anybody individually we'll stick around for a little while after this talk um but yeah shoot

questions all right sorry of course okay okay over there all right thank you for the Fantastic talk to the mic please thank you for the Fantastic talk so informative um I have a question about the world modifiers do you get info back on what players choose and do you act on that if you do okay the question was about do we have any information or metrics about what people choose on world mod firers and uh funnily enough we don't have any metrics whatsoever we did have metrics and it's a great idea to have metrics um but we it was we used Google analytics which was not super popular so we just turned it off really early on but uh maybe at some point we will hopefully add that again talk over there uh I had a really great time playing this game with my friends so first of all thank you for bringing this experience to us uh I my question was uh were you aware of any exploits or sequence breaks that players discovered

things like that and what was your response to them okay so the question was about exploits and sequ uh sequence breaks um I wouldn't say we're aware of them uh at at the time but we are very happy to see people exploring the game in different ways and making uh plays and and speedruns and like playing the game backwards doing all these crazy stuff and we don't explicitly try to like as long as it's not a hard bug breaking the game we don't want to like hard hard lock people away from doing that it's just it's just a great way to play games for people who want to do that thank you over there hi uh you uh mentioned your appreciation for your QA team I'm curious can you elaborate on how they work with the the developers and the rest of your team okay so our QA team at um has mostly been Andreas who's sitting over here uh and he's now the producer uh an valheim a great guy um

and he basically just means that I do stuff immediately send it over to him and he tries it immediately sends it back and says it was not working and I fix it so that there's not like this lag of things being in the game for two weeks before it comes back and having a long list of things but rather like I would basically almost not even come back from getting my coffee or something and he'd be like oh you this is broken like whoa okay oops my bad so yeah and he's Al like yeah maybe you should check this before you push yeah oops so I'm trying to get better at that I'm I'm a recovering uh think yeah thank you over here yeah um do you ever plan on releasing on Playstation um maybe I don't know and and if not uh why yeah I I can either confirm deny the allegations which have been put before me something like

that thank you yeah next hi you had talked about how mands and ashlands were in the original plan to ship I'm curious if you can tell us more about your Cho your choice to uh make the Deep North or where that came from okay yeah so that was before my time uh that would be Richard mainly to talk to and he's not here but you can ask Robin who's been uh with ironate the longest here he probably has a a great answer for that afterwards hello uh could you talk a little bit more about the music in valheim and just the inspiration or process for it okay so we have a composer uh Patrick he's um yeah ask this one to Robin as well he knows much more about this he he directs some music a lot and uh it's um yeah I think it's better we can talk about it afterwards okay thank you probably better thank you sorry okay any more other questions uh then whoever wants to can come up um and yeah

thank you very much for coming [Music]