All Systems No: Learning from the Doomed Launch of Brigador

[Music] [Laughter] survive Thursday night only one more day to go okay so I'm Hugh Monaghan I am the co-founder and designer at stellar jockeys my brother jack is the other co-founder he ran a design blog called design reboot for a while and worked on some other projects Brigid or and stout jockeys have the prestigious quality of being the first thing that I've really worked on in the games industry so take all that in mind when we go through this before we really get started a couple things you know cell phone so you guys know the drill I also want to thank Chris Charla he was my advisor on this and you know i I've only shipped one game he's been around for a little bit longer than that so it gave some good context so yeah so this is all systems know learning from the doomed launch of Brigid or or eyes I've been calling it just how I cocked up our launch not a big deal okay so what did I mean by doomed and like what's this overall thesis for this talk the 1.0 launch was a failure before it happened I didn't know it but a myriad of factors went into basically preventing us from ever getting any kind of real momentum with the game so the real question though is was it doomed as in nothing I could do about it or doomed as in all my fault yeah and that turns out that something that you need a lot of time away from it to really get the context you need so yes I'm sure anyone who can you know anyone whose ship the game can vouch that like that month before and after is you know everything's kind of a blurry you don't really nothing really makes sense and the other thing is that when things don't go well your immediate instinct is to look to the other right so okay this project didn't go so hot who screwed me and thankfully I kind of just let that sit for a bit and now we're nine months out from that original launch so I've got a little bit more context and I think a little bit of a cooler head to be able to talk about this stuff so before we really get into it though we need the context for the launch for the game the studio just everything so we were four full-time devs between 2011 and 2016 well mostly full-time early years were kind of off and on this was the first commercial game for 3/4 of us like I said my brother had done some contract work and had worked on darkest of days at 8 monkey but for the rest of us we were freshly minted game developers this project was 100% self-funded and so I mean specifically I mean we took no outside money we did not work with a publisher and because we were you know fresh in the industry we also had almost no connections at all so we also scratched both the engine this is something we took a lot of flack for a lot of armchair generals in gaming forums and the thing that I wanted to point out there is it's important to remember the context for this in 2010 2011 the landscape for licensed game engines was very different than it is now unity was not quite what it is and unreal was also extraordinarily more expensive the other thing too is that because we didn't have full funding for this project by necessity it was a passion project for me personally that was you know getting to be a designer and putting all my bad ideas into a game and for the programmers that was being able to make their own engine unlike me Harry and Dale both the the wonderful programmers on the project had much better offers ready to go for them and they chose instead to work with my brother and I on this project and so you need to be able to bring something to the table when you're asking someone to sacrifice a very very healthy wage on the west coast and permanent sunshine with near poverty wage and living with me for three years so the goals on the project one was to make a unique game with a high skill ceiling I should qualify that so Brigid or was a ridiculously ambitious project especially given our means and experience at the time much of that was driven by a communal desire the team members to make something distinct you know if we're gonna go through these tremendous pains of developing a game then it should be one that sort of bore our distinct imprint something it hadn't been done before at least in some respects and which respected player time one of the things we talked about a lot was the doom rule which is that you know you get into a game you spam enter and within 1 or 2 seconds you should be in combat playing the game if you boot up ragged or that is absolutely true and it also kind of pervades the overall mindset with the game is that there's only downtime if you want it there's nothing worse for me than having these sort of designer mandated wait periods either there I mean it's understandable in the case where it's a disguised loading screen but if it's not necessary to actually you know a mechanical component to the game I prefer to avoid that and regarding the high skill ceiling part of that is just having a game that's reactive to the player and some component like if we wanted to be able to reward players who were willing to put in the time in the effort on a game to truly learn all the mechanics and I think we accomplished that and it was also relative to one of the programmers Dale's an avid counter-strike player and so that that kind of mentality for precision play is something that I think continually crept into our design the second goal is to make enough money to do it again that's fairly self-explanatory I mean it's nice if you break even great if you can find another project the third goal was to keep the team together after ship one of the unfortunate realities of game development is that oftentimes a team doesn't really jail until the you know getting towards the end of a project and then you know you ship a game and then things happen Studios closed people move on and so our hope was that this was the first step in a much longer journey together as a studio and the fourth goal was to build a reputation as a high quality developer the best way to sum that up is just I mean you want to be known for being the guy who like makes really good stuff pretty straightforward there anyway sorry so as far as actually whether we hit that or not excuse me you didn't need to drop that note okay so did we make any unique game um I think we did I'm we're not gonna give any wiggle room on some of the distinctive components I'm very proud of that we managed to capture that granularity of aiming that I mentioned with this counter-strike though the goal was to make a first-person shooter to bring the the the precision that you get in those kinds of games but into an isometric environment took a year of prototyping to get a name scheme that really worked there and there are all sorts of wonderful problems that we had to deal with but we got there we did not make enough money to do it again at least not yet so the the little asterisk there is that even though brigadeiros launch wasn't so hot we've actually been trending up in day to day sales now as much as I'd like to attribute that to my own personal charisma and running my mouth continually on the internet I think there's also a component of the launch itself just being that bad that you know maybe it was just you needed to get the ball rolling a little bit more we did not keep the team together after the ship it was a very amicable parting there's nothing there's no like terror story here it was just we finished the game we didn't have money to do again and we had all gotten largely what we needed to out of the project so I'm very happy with just even though we didn't stay together and that goal wasn't itself met that this was a stepping stone for all four of us to actually move forward in the industry and as for building reputation as a high quality developer I'm not I'm not the person who can really make that judgment and the other thing too is it I don't think you can make those kinds of qualitative assessments until at least your second or third project I mean you know everyone's heard of like one-hit wonders that's mostly referred to I mean you mostly hear that in the context of music or film but I think it can certainly apply to games as well and then just a quick run-through on end results so like I said brigid are shipped June of 2016 after a nice stint in early access starting in October of 2015 we had review scores ranging between four out of ten and nine point five out of ten obviously I prefer one of those our final metacritic score was exactly 70 percent it was 78 and then our very last review was that 40% so now that one's stung we actually are overwhelmingly positive on our steam user reviews that's been a nice vindication and actually we just even though we've been at that percentage level for a while we just hit the minimum review threshold a week before I flew out for GDC so that's a it's a freshly minted title now nine months out from Early's for a game that took five years to make we are standing at 15,000 units sold and I'll let you come to your own conclusions there but we did ship a game a two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack a book and an audio book all as part of our first project and in the double asterisk there is that a lot of those negative reviews we received we're relating to controls something I will more fully address later in the talk but when we went in to ship that whole thing I mentioned about high quality developer and wanting to kind of make a splash I definitely think I bit off more than I could reasonably have chewed and that you end up paying the price for that in different ways but at the end of the day we still managed to produce all of these things so the game itself I've been doing a lot of preface thing without actually talking about the project so what is brigid or it turns out that's actually a very difficult question to answer we were plagued for the entire two-year stretch running into release trying to articulate it in a pithy fashion so the best I could do at the time was just figuring out what it wasn't so it's not a twin stick shooter and this is actually something that if I had taken that to heart much earlier in the development cycle I might have better been able to market it and anticipate some of the issues we had going into launch but it looks like a twin stick shooter but it is very much is not it's a very mechanically dense game it's slower than a twin stick and they're just distinct elements it's not Tiberian Center and RTS I mainly bring that one up because we use sprite-based graphics both out of a stylistic decision and out of necessity the entire game art was produced by a single artist and that includes over about two and a half years of art 130 units and over a thousand environment assets if we were to do that in a 3d pipeline it we would have been able to build a fraction of that we utilized a kit bashing style to produce all of the in-game assets since we didn't have to worry about topology or the you know any of the qualities of the 3d render itself or the 3d model itself all that mattered was the render the we were and right we I mean Jack was able to produce these assets at a diabolical speed by the end of the art pipeline I by the end of the process of art assets being produced he was able to create a finished vehicle for the game within about six hours so it's not a roguelike or a roguelite there were certain aspects of roguelite that we wanted to hit I feel like everyone who's been up on stage on GDC for the last couple years I mentioned spelunky in some capacity it's a very important game that you know kind of tickles the back of everyone's brain since it came out our only real touch touching on to that genre was that you we had an entire segment of the game that was built around these sort of semi procedural runs where you set up your equipment you go and then see either see how far you can get or you know go until you die so the only thing we could figure out was that it's kind of like desert strike kind of like Crusader no remorse but it turns out it's a bit of a problem when your major touch stones came out 22 and 25 years ago respectively of you know a significant portion of our player base weren't even alive when the games that we would refer them to were made and that's just it's a similar problem as anyone who's making like a truly new game I don't know if any of you caught the the for honor talk about its development but that I mean that that is a game that is truly unique and so when you don't have any of those kinds of natural touch stones to draw from you know Brigid or it's like Dark Souls plus tanks oh man you know we didn't have it like that easy short hands to pull from and so the best we found was and I'm just giving a sampling of what we did get PC gamer review said it's a colorful and chaotic isometric to DMX shooters set in the world steeped in 80's futurism it's a lovely description but it's also a mouthful and if you just walk up to someone and say that they're gonna kind of give you a little squint we have a pretty active Something Awful thread the forum and someone described it as a tank Western that has a nice romantic quality to it but again it's not super useful and the one I ended up using the most in talking with press was it's a kool-aid man simulator that was because I lacking the ability to have distinct game touchstones I started to move into just the voguing the feeling of the game and something we had started saying internally was that you need to feel like the kool-aid man least when you're in the you know the big giant building sized tanks and mechs [Music] so for little context I don't know how familiar everyone is with the game but I'm gonna play our early access trailer so this was when we launched in October of 2015 [Music] [Applause] so don't not supposed to happen okay so the interesting thing about that trailer is that it's a very good trailer for a different game when we went into it original trailer which I'll actually play later was very slow it was very it was more concerned with atmosphere and our assumption was that going into our actual launch we wanted to show gameplay show that liked the bombastic quality of hey and bring or you can blow everything up a whole the whole stick of our game the whole premise is that the entire game world is destructible when we figured we would highlight that through these you know high-intensity quick cuts things blowing up you know people like explosions but the problem is that it showed the game as a twin stick shooter and the urban destruction elements I mean it kind of got highlighted at the end of that trailer but it was still more of a peripheral element to just like all this is like a high-intensity loud thing we're like the music never changes apparently this trailer got about a third of the views of our original launch trailer now part of that I think is just natural diminishing returns once people know the thing exists they're less it's harder to build up excitement on subsequent trailers and press releases but it also it just wasn't as effective we weren't able to draw people in okay so the one way that we did manage to draw people in was through me running my mouth on the Internet so back in February this is prior to release febrile a sneer excuse me we had a poster on our steam thread who was very sistent that brigid or should cost $15 and not 20 which is fine I mean I don't agree with you but you're welcome to post your opinions the the last straw came when he posted back again on it genuinely confused and insulted that I hadn't taken his advice and a mic it's actually like like genuinely sad and perplexed like why didn't you take my advice I I could have helped you so my initial response to that was two in the morning two or three beers in and just a long list of uh you know and because I had a good English teacher in high school I decided to do a second draft sat on it for a bit and then you know realized that oftentimes the best way to reach people is through humor so I rewrote it just as like okay here's all the things that you are willing to pay $20 for and that people don't really ball cap things like a Nickelback poster or you know a case of beer toilet plunger all these sorts of things that because of the context and the usage people have completely different valuations of those things so I wrote that reply and this actually relates to a very important lesson that I learned which is that most virality is has to be stimulated or I mean manufactured makes it sound kind of evil and dubious but so I wrote that post and if I had just left it on the steam forum I don't think anyone it wouldn't blown up and maybe some people would have shared it but instead I wrote that post at very late in the morning but then I emailed it to everyone I had made contacts with both high as developers and as journalists the the few that would listen to me emailed I just did a big big blast with this just say hey here's this thing that happened to us you might find it interesting cool beans and then I woke up eight hours later with my face plastered on some of these different sites and with coverage on Kotaku all these kinds of the response to that was the coverage that we'd been trying to get for the game itself and had failed at miserably so so then later about two weeks after our launch in a less considered fit of frustration we were two months out of launch and we had yet to receive a Metacritic aggregated rating I can remember if the minimum was four or five but whatever it is we were one below that and I was furious at this because it was like we had done our due diligence and it seemed like MP was emblematic of what I perceive just like well everything that was wrong with the games industry and so I wrote this big blog post on imager about how don't become a game dev it's terrible I you know you have terrible health problems leading into launch all these kinds of things and yeah that got shared around and it ended up with me doing a follow up interview with Mason great Nathan Grayson on Kotaku I would prefer a slightly different headline but again that was that interview with him alone was ended up being about 85,000 views the imager post was about 70,000 views and that doesn't even include just sort of word of mouth elements as well this one's my favorite though because this actually was following the the price post I made a few waves with that soon after Jane from fire watch and that that whole debacle about people returning the game after beating it in under two hours the close proximity there meant that people were kind of putting these two together [Music] but in the process of talking about it everyone who approached it was like yeah there's there's Firewatch everyone loves Firewatch and then there's Bree I don't I don't know what this game is but but apparently there's this price component here so that was I wasn't so good but those three things tallied up for about a third of our sales and that's that's a very very important thing so let's look at total Brigid or purchases from 2015 to 2016 I don't have Christmas in here this is chart was made a few months back but those three posts or rather the posts and the reactions to them so the trailer price posts my immature dev life post and then the Kotaku interview that was actually significantly after it those three elements are directly responsible for about a third of our sales and we've done a few more things after that we've had more more sales and everything but that response of press reaction to I guess you could call it non-traditional marketing and I wasn't even intended as marketing it was just me being angry on the internet but that was a significant role in broadening the exposure of Brigid or so this brings me to kind of summing up all the things that I learned over the course of this launch my litany of doom so the first thing is priming you have to teach a consumer how to react to and interact with your game I'm kind of touched on this a little bit earlier with our trailer and how it was a great trailer for a twin-stick shooter not for Brigid or Oh actually I've got some more slides before that but yeah another thing is that you have to be you have to start doing that before they play it if players in your menu or you know just booting up the first level of your game and they don't have to know exactly what the game is but they need to know to a degree what to expect or how to approach it this I mean for anyone who's not actually familiar the game itself this is a gif of this is a test that we did for what proper full destruction in the game could look like and this is the kind of thing that we should have focused on a lot more we had a pretty good success sharing gifts of the game I mean exactly this kind of thing but the problem was that we didn't convey to the player anything more significant than shoot stuff blow stuff up and what happens is that there's kind of an embedded message in that kind of ethos which is that you are super powerful going in and that it's more it's more of that empowerment fantasy and as a result when you subvert that when you know a player can get killed by walking into a gas station which we thought was hilarious or at least I thought hilarious I think it gave one at least one of the programmers an aneurysm but that's that getting killed by a gas station when you're cool mercenary and a giant mech is like the least empowering thing that can happen in the game and that would that was part of the whole messaging and we didn't players came into the game like they were a bull in a china shop as opposed to something more like a matador where you're actually trying to avoid and Corral this much more powerful force so this was our very first trailer this is February 2014 right before I attended my second GDC Oh let's actually play that [Music] [Music] yeah so that was before we learned how to encode trailers and also there were some some things a little embarrassing there also turns out don't name your game before you do copyright checks and IP searches and also search engine optimization because mattador turns out kind of a common word both in general use and in business doing a cursory Google search for Matador you come up with Matador beef jerkey Matador condoms and if you look ok well let's refine a little bit Matador trailer huh pierce brosnan movie you know so that having to pivot on that didn't didn't exactly help us but that's that's a it's not really it's not nearly as important I think as a lot of these other elements so regarding this whole priming thing let's give me the next slide okay so I'm gonna briefly talk about BioShock Infinite specifically because the messaging for that game was almost entirely based around Elizabeth around storytelling and how like when you play this game you're gonna have this great like it's gonna be great storing like a great you're gonna be emotionally involved and very little of it was actually focused directly on it's a shooter even though it's a shooter and I think because of that focus well first of all it Prime's people for being focused on the things that they did well in like the this not that they did things poorly but like the storytelling elements they put all these energies into those elements of the game and they set up their audience and their critics as well to look at those things too - you know they put the spotlight on it which i think is also why when the cover featured Booker I think that's part of the reason for that backlash is because all their entire marketing campaign leading up to that was putting all the focus away from the traditional shooter setup and as a result those audience members who did remember those players who were who are already like part of that message there was a bit of a dissonance there in that messaging alien isolation I think is just a great example of a game where you had this coherence across okay what the game was how it was marketed how it was presented at trade shows and on top of that they were having to overcome the challenge of the reputation of previous games both from a qualitative standpoint and from a shanwa standpoint I mean this was a you know a proper horror game Tim cannons Tuskers I think is actually given similar challenges that we faced for the players this is how you do it correctly which I wish I could have figured that out about a year ago but with dusters and he actually mentioned this in his talk originally they had a mouse interface on the menu and he said that it wasn't until they when you entered the game from the get-go there's no mouse input and everything is keyboard only that they stopped getting complaints or having issues with players not only just trying to use the mouse but even having a problem with that direct keyboard interface also it looks like a game you would use the keyboard for and I there's kind of like an intangible quality that but there's you know the the console commands and his overall just presentation of the game was much more in line with the way that players ended up playing it as sort of I think the best way can be summed up is that he the trailers and the marketing for that game much more accurately described the the experience of playing it rather than the physical realities of the game that's the the subjective experience of that game and that was a lesson that I didn't understand which is that we tried to be very literal in everything that we showed with Brigid or it's like you know we didn't have the budget for trailers that didn't exclusively use gameplay footage and we focused on it was also kind of like our counter marketing thing where it's like everything that we're gonna show in this game for the trailers and everything else is going to be unadulterated gameplay footage nothing's gonna be fabricated in that regard and while you know we did that the downside of that was that it was ineffective marketing so you know why do it in the first place the last one I want to say is that Zach Tronics he's sort of a great example of taking that priming and applying it across multiple projects I mean you you know to an extent that you're getting into some serious puzzle [ __ ] when you get a Zach Tronics game you know it's gonna be different and you know you're gonna need to sit down and like have not don't let anyone bug you for a while and just dig in so priming death of the designer what do I mean by that so all that really matters at the end of the day is whether players buy and enjoy your game this is sermon sales and sales determine longevity controls are a very interesting thing so breeder was designed around tank controls where pressing you know WASD or left control stick on a vehicle W is forward not up on the screen so it's relative to the orientation of your vehicle this hasn't really been a common control scheme for a couple decades again desert strike Crusader nor Morris these are touch stones are older than most people's children and cars and even their you know anything of substance in their lives and I failed to account for the fact that with video games most players going into a game it's not the first game that they've ever played that's more that's a problem that mobile developers have to deal with a lot more I think but generally speaking you can usually assume that someone has played a video game before yours and that means that there's a sort of a legacy knowledge set going into it if you made a shooter usually someone's played a shooter before yours so for us we had this legacy skill set of people who had played twin-stick shooters and I don't really know of any twin-stick shooters that use tank controls so we had this entire player base where they were expecting a twin-stick shooter and then not only is the game mechanically very different from a twin-stick shooter but also the control schemes are like why why would you do this and this is a genuine case of my sort of arrogance and enforcement as a designer because in my mind the game was designed around a tank controls control scheme and I both wanted players to experience this like ideal way of playing the game and also because of the limitations of adapting it to a twin stick style control scheme players who tried to progress with that would eventually hit an artificial ceiling in what they could do in the game and so I didn't want to ambush players with this like okay you know gotcha where you put five hours into the game and now all of a sudden you have to relearn a new control scheme in order to be able to meaningfully progress that's just flavor picture so the problem there oh no I thought I had another slide there well so to actually articulate that the issue that comes up there is that a most players don't make it far enough to actually run into any kind of a skill ceiling and B if a player isn't engaging with your game right off the bat very few people are gonna bang their head against the wall for 45 minutes or an hour until they start liking a game very few people can like trust in a game or a developer you have to have some very strong extra external motivators to get people to stick with something that long and what and we had all this data right in front of our noses we found that for most players it took them most players we weren't acquainted with tank controls it took them 45 minutes to an hour to to start to settle into the game now in a testing environment you know you have someone who's either paid to be there or they're your friends so it's like a social payment they're gonna get beers later they are there that they're incentivized to stick around with the game and so we weren't responding to the fact that for most players they would come in not like the controls and just immediately be done with the game it's an instant return we had a whole set of 0.1 hours returns negative review these controls are so dumb so we did eventually pivot on that added in a twin stick style control scheme we added in controller support they weren't ideal control interfaces but again at the end of the day if a player is having fun and they purchased your game that's that's the thing that's important so tying into this the first like the first 60 minutes foundation so the majority of your players also has the ones who fund your company will never make it past the early stages of gameplay this varies depending on John rrah but if you look at steam achievements and like any kind of usage statistics for most games you get kind of like you know at the hockey stick right most people aren't actually making it that far into games so I talked with the guys at 17-bit they had much better data tracking than we did and they told us that 17% of their players dropped out before completing the first level and then 92 percent of their players dropped out before completing the first dungeon which is roughly 2 hours in so you've got 92 percent of your players never see anything more than your intro content like yeah and that that blew my mind I knew to an extent that you had a fall-off I had no idea that it was of that magnitude so this screenshots pertinent because on the left is our tutorials or rather the first hour of playing a game or playing brigid or on the right is what the game actually looks like we did this sort of virtualized abstracted environment for the game but because there was so much the player needed to learn so much of a skill set and also because this was not the first draft on our tutorial and so this was something we had you know banged out right before launch and you know everyone's under time pressure it was easier to do this abstract and environment and not have to set dress it and also because we wanted to get the players directly into the game we actually ended up with a much shorter tutorial as opposed to bridging that gap in player knowledge and skill over a much longer period of time and as a result we had a bunch of players dying in the tutorials because we were putting too much in there the tutorial levels were taking too long so you would die at the end of a tutorial level that took ten minutes to play and then you'd have to start over again and that is not a way that you endear yourself to your players so impedance the more unusual complicated or difficult a game is the stronger the incentive is required to get both players and reviewers to buy in this ties in a little bit of what I was saying earlier but if you if your game is different or not in some way not immediately approachable you have to have something to hook them in either within the game itself or external to the game for us we thought that we were doing that with our aesthetics with the music with the lure and everything but a very few people care anything about lore before they're already like 5 or 10 hours into a game so you can't use that as a poll unless it's a sequel or something and we didn't have the the kind of momentum that you get from a game like Dark Souls which also I mean they did some brilliant sort of I don't know how much they were directly involved in that but the whole Dark Souls hard mentality where there was almost like a social pressure to play that game and to excel at it because like oh man like did you be Dark Souls you know my god I did I did it on you know the naked run with no equipment or anything like that there was this whole momentum behind that game that helped players to stick around when they might normally have given up tangentially related to this this was a post that was going around on reddit a while back this is would have been about a year ago which is that game developers should never ever be afraid to innovate and it's a wonderful sentiment so this screenshot is from the GameSpot October 2000 review of Alien Resurrection the game's control setup is the most is its most terrifying element the left analog stick moves you forward back and strafe right and left while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down you know early advent of what is now the staple control scheme so my my like asterisk for this is that when you do something different unless it is something that is immediately obvious or very easy to learn that you you have to do there's a price you have to pay you have to have those motivators to get people to adapt to that new thing otherwise your innovation actually comes at the cost of a non insignificant portion of your player base so press this transactional let me code that a little bit so I'm working on Brigid or with this mentality of you know Field of Dreams if you build it they'll come it was a very naive understanding of games development of just the nature of how you build hype of how you build interest in a game so I think the most helpful thing for developers to keep in mind when they're interacting with press is what do you bring to the table because you know at the end of day games press are doing a job and they have to earn money there's a very interesting podcast Austin Walker over at Waypoint was talking with Pat CLEP ik I think it was just right after the the new year but they were talking about how Austin has all kinds of things that he would love to cover he has these kind of passion projects or these sort of things either directly relating to games or tangential to it that are they're very interesting but it's his responsibility to put things up on Waypoint that are going to generate views it's a business he employs people he has those responsibilities and so for you as a person who's trying to get people like Waypoint to cover your content the only way you can consistently do that is if you can offer them something in return and that this isn't to kind of cast this like negative light on it it's just understanding that that's that's the way things are there's no free lunch and so if you can figure out how to contextualize either what you're trying to promote or your game in general as an interesting thing in a really common phrase among game developers is it you know what's what's your story what's your story as a studio or as a developer or as a person or like give them something to latch on to because what that boils down to is having a headline having something that grabs their audience because games press are having to deal with their ol hole own host of problems you know I'm not a game journalist so I don't know I I'm sure there could be like a parallel version where I'm giving this talk about how I'm a terrible game's journalist but there's all kinds of things that they have to deal with so you have to meet them in the middle so a kind of articulation of this I don't know if you guys have heard of slaughtering grounds there's this whole debacle a while back as a game cost like one or two dollars and Jim sterling had a thing where he would look at games that he does not think are qualitatively good and then he would say things about them and then sometimes they would say something back there was this whole series of oh man there was this video that Jim sterling where he like totally trash talks this dev and then the dev wrote a response trash-talking back and then there was a lawsuit involved and then something happened none of that itself is actually important what's important is that it was a good story so people talked about it it was interesting it was an easy headline I'm not saying go out and like pick a fight with Jim sterling I mean maybe I'm sure it would be interesting don't don't don't do that or at least don't say that I sent you but though I mean it brought something to the table and so here's a game that prior to that hadn't got really any attention at all and all of a sudden you've got most of the major games press sites articulating that like we're gonna be like giving coverage to this thing and then last of all the reserve tank the week after shipping is just as demanding if not more than the week before and this this starts just going into like personal health stuff and obviously of like you know no one wants to take poor care of their health but so that this this was the that imager post that I wrote a while back intentionally trying to be a little goofy with that first picture like oh look at you know naive young cherubic developer and hard and grizzled veteran at the end the part that I talked about in that post though is that I gained 40 pounds over about the last eight months of development and got into a whole slew of very unhealthy habits partly just out of the you know the continuing push the you know we had gone five years in development and still hadn't shipped the game so that that's a very strong pressure but also you know we talk a lot about crunch and it should be talked about it's an important thing to be aware of but oftentimes it's something that is used as a proxy for a lack of time or a lack of money and at the time for me not knowing really like anywhere else to go and not having the experience to contextualize it that was it was the only thing I could reach for it so yeah some final notes that I'll just zip it real quick this is just what the actual game looks like in the menu we tried to do some interesting stuff with pilot related difficulty and making the game as modular as possible from a player choice standpoint so you can change your difficulty through your pilot through your vehicle through the levels you play none of that matters if your baseline difficulty is so high already that no no one's even hitting that low difficult that you know the the minimum level of difficulty and then I mentioned this earlier but yeah so we shipped the game as well as a book in an audiobook that don't I mean that's insane like it was cool when I'm glad we did it but also you know I was in the middle of trying to design levels for the game and then I was editing a 300 word or a sorry a 300 page book and then also because here's the thing we like that book so much a guy named Brad but Brad buckmaster was sort of a technical consultant for us during the game for military hardware so like we would design a tank and we would to ask him about it be like yeah you know that that seems kosher and like you'd help us write a lot of descriptions it was a very natural fit so we decided hey we don't why don't you write a book so he did and it was great and we liked it so much that like okay no but no one reads videogame books unless you're like a big big studio so it's like how do we get someone to read this videogame book that no one reads so it's like oh well audiobooks are cool so we did an audiobook adaptation and again that was also a lot of time and effort and another thing that had to be finished by the time we shipped so the bright side of this is that we had some great reviews I mean even now it's still standing in a five-star review on Amazon books great feedback but the other thing is that this kind of tangential content it was just rather than bringing people from the outside to the game I can count on two hands the number of times that happened mainly it was just people who were already hardcore brigid or fans this was the icing on the cake for them so it was something that endeared us to our fans but from a business standpoint it didn't do a whole lot more for us so that's the audio book and then also we worked with makeup and vanity set they did a killer soundtrack and then on his own he actually did we helped him with a cover art for it but he also did vinyl pressings of the soundtrack as well so we had a lot of cool stuff I'm gonna end on just this was a single steam review that we got that was really cool and I think and you know anyone who's a content when you get this kind of a strong reaction from a user base it's one of those things that helps you weather the storm and also because I didn't want to make this sound like a really terrible lugubrious talk so like the final context for all this is that we're relaunching brigid or this coming June we added localization new content I'm standing down all those really really rough edges and like the the difficulty curve that we'll use to be like a just giant plateau is now going to actually be a curve you know doing all these things that we can manage to course-correct and see where things go from there so thanks very much we've got a couple questions we've got time for a couple questions so anyone I thanks for the talk I bought the game all right I had a question actually about that purchasing experience though you know one thing that I noticed in following Brigid or and then not following it and then eventually buying it is that I heard about it way early before it launched was interested so I played those games back in the old SNES days and was just curious then forgot about it for quite a while and I did not even think about it again and tell the imager post I actually saw the imager post was like oh I completely forgot about that thing and went and bought excited to you know support you guys and I enjoyed that a difficulty curve is insane my question is did you talk at all about the timing of when you started talking about the product to when you could actually launch it and how that impacted things because that distance of excitement when people first got into it and to the point of purchase in my opinion and I'm on an indie dev I worked for others you know larger studios but I found that to be a big problem when you talk about something for three years and another comes out everyone just fatigues and forgets yeah how is that changing you've thought about at all and how absolutely so the the short answer to that is that the two-year gap between our first trailer and actually I guess two and a half yeah - and after your gap between our first trailer and our launch was entirely unintentional when we shipped that first trailer we were like oh yeah we got like another 8 12 months of work left like at the worst and because I did spend a lot of time looking at the the distance between first press and shipping for a lot of different indie titles I don't remember them off top my head but like we looked at hotline Miami we looked at Bastion anything John bloated and what I found was that the the minimum time was about three months prior to launch and that's actually most PR agencies that I've talked to they prefer to have at least a three month three month window with which to the hype train and then the longest I found was like three years but um in almost every case anything like that hyper an you ated like longer than a year and a half two years those were either triple-a titles or days those were games that were you know indefinitely delayed you know they're pulling and Duke Nukem Forever or whatever so yeah I if I had my druthers and you know a proper set of experience I think I probably would have shot for a year or less for between an ounce and ship how do you how do you handle that with the uncertainty of being an indie dev then you know because you don't necessarily have a good context for your window it seems like so what kind of advice do you have for people that are trying to figure out how to do that and are trying to figure out what that year window could possibly be when they're not sure what that is yeah so what I found is that um and and this advice that I that seem to be pretty common from everyone that I've talked to with experience in the press is that when you're at indie scale it is better to have as big of a single blast as possible then you know a bunch of small little announcements and things because there's a certain threshold you have to hit to get the general public or like general press interested in what you have to offer and so if you distribute that across a broad set there's a chance that you know maybe you'll get one maybe two times covered but for the most part most of that stuff is just gonna fall under the radar early access is obviously I mean it's not the right choice for everyone for us it was originally burger I had no story campaign it was entirely in this belong key set of here's the freelance mode you pick your thing you pick the mission and then there's some procedural stuff and you either win or you die you start again and when we were launched our early access the universal response was this is a great tech demo where's the campaign so we entirely retooled the game to actually hit that expectation anyway so yeah what I would say is like maybe announced before early access but at a small level I think bundling all that together to actually may be the right way to go thank you hi with a even with a relaunch knowing that there's only so much you can do to change the fundamental design of the game if you were to make a sequel is there anything very fundamental about the game that you would do differently if you don't necessarily have to take on the baggage of the actual prop from the initial development yeah yeah so this is a combination of stuff that got cut from the game as well as just things I learned about the design of the game is went forward so one thing I would do is that in the game you've got two guns broad variety of vehicles you can choose from in a defensive ability so every vehicle has two guns and a special ability and that part was okay the problem is that we had no way to for the player to actively defend themselves so there's sort of assumption built into brigid or that you're gonna get shot and what happened is that ultralight vehicles either means that you had to play super cat and mouse and you know use stealth tech all the time or for the ultra vehicles that you know we added in damage resistances but also we made them slow because you can't have something that's both super tough it's you know a lot of firepower and it just ends up being boring so like something more more active components something we considered was actually having the shielding via toggle that like shielding just slowly burns out as it's on so you actually have to decide when you're gonna have your shielding up I think our whole armor mechanic didn't work all that well maybe have some something akin to like a a guard break where it's like being able to time like flashing the shield these swords more active components we had a lot of concerns about player attention but you know that's a different case the other thing I would say is that we we originally had a prototype for hand breaking in a graves and in tread based vehicles so like there's these tiny little like motorcycle tank things and we we had a prototype where you could like skid around a corner it felt awesome but there was a whole lot of stuff like there was all these horrible edge cases that it was just gonna be too much of a time commitment we were too late in development to get that in so I mean the answer is that there's a lot of I mean the game itself the core would be there but there's all these kinds of refinements to the formula that you know I have a notebook full of them so cool thank you yeah just I think we were supposed to be out of here so thank you very much guys and I'm happy to chat more you

Channel: GDC

Views: 39,900

Rating: 4.6577945 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, brigador, steam, game sales, mech games

Id: qUsuusNLxik

Length: 63min 25sec (3805 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019