Classic Game Postmortem - Populous

[Music] right right yes now so this is going to be a populist postmortem little bit strange this one because of you know damn slight substance abuse is those memories of twenty years ago a slightly hazy but you know we'll we'll do what we can and it's really a tale of you know developments born out of slightly my incompetence and slightly good luck and part of the talk I'm going to separate it into three basic session or sections how I got to start populist and some of the amazing things that happen to get me there the populist development and we'll have a little bit of a dive into some of the technology I feel a bit embarrassed saying that after David ravans lead tool which is read a proper assembly code and stuff like that and and then we know kind of what happened afterwards and then we'll have about twenty minutes for questions so really you know the let's that's wine back to the days before populist because you know I didn't you know I didn't have a career at a university in the games industry I had a little tiny office here this is called so it's a street in Guildford called bridge Street and I had an office that top window looks a bit like Amityville Horror building and indeed it was because on the floor below my office there was this old woman called Kat she hadn't actually left her flat for ten years and the screams from her hemorrhoids very dressed on a daily basis still on me today and it was I had that office because I had a girlfriend whose father I suggested that I set up this business and the business was good called Taurus impact and bizarrely what this business did was to ship baked beans to the Middle East that's how I started in the games industry by shipping baked beans food in at least now I'm culturally for me although I make one cent per can baked beans aren't the most the popular food of choice in the Middle East surprisingly so you know it was amber a hand-to-mouth existence and many times I dipped into my stash of baked beans to actually feed myself and you know things were you know to kind of trucking on okay and then the first of a sequence of unbelievably lucky events happened and when I received a call from none other than Commodore now I was a computer games fan at that time you know Commodore made the Commodore 64 which I played every single day so what I received this call from Commodore I I was astounded you know okay and they said to me oh we've heard about your company and I thought really hopefully you've heard about our baked bean exporting company sells online either anyway I've heard about your company would you come up and be our guests for the day and we'll show you around Commodore and we want to talk about this new piece of hardware the Amiga 1000 and so they brought me me up and with my business partner there's a ger at the time and we were shown round and showing the factory and then sat down in this big boardroom and they said well you know we're going to send you 10 Amiga 1000 s it's going to be some of the first amigas that people receive and you know we really want to see your products on our machine and that's when it dawned on me that there was another torus spelled t o R Us I've produced a networking solution which obviously Commodore were very keen to have on their machine they didn't want baked beans on their machine not in any formal way and that's when the first moral question came to me in this boardroom do I lie do I say yes we're keen to put up what I was in the machine or do I tell them the truth and bring out my sample baked bean can from my case that I've carried out I chose to lie and that and that meant that a shipment of amigas arrived in the next week we had 10 amigas there was only three of us selling we didn't know what to do then we sat on them we made baked bookcases out of them you know it was a generally fantastic time but they there kept phoning up the same we want a product we burned a product and indeed I did do a product not again because at that time Commodore were absolutely fanatical that the Amiga 1000 despite having glitter chips and copper chips and you know but despite being the perfect games machine at the time wasn't against machine at all it was a business machine that was going to take on IP n so what I did was a database program now you can see from this advert my press persona of over-promising was already blossoming at that time because this was the ultimate database for the Amiga that would whiz far far better than ashton-tate database at the time and you know the that kept us going for a little while and we sold a few copies and it was a really hand to mouth existence but we were running really really short of money and that's when the second unbelievably lucky event happened when I was down the pub now pubs in games and games development back in the 80s were very important places there were places you went when you were bored with sitting in your office and you could drink and plan and do that and while I was down in pub at one time the friend came up to me and said oh you've heard you've got amigas a friend of mine has got has developed a game called druid to enlightenment her friend he was talking about bizarrely this is a bizarre circular event when it's none other than Simon and Dean Carter now anybody that knows affable sirs will know the simondon Carter actually Simon Carter still with me today they had developed this game when there were 12 years old and they wanted someone to convert it I was that person that did that conversion I knew nothing about computer games at that time you can see my trick of getting you know games to work at the right frame rate because there's a clue here by making the screen ever smaller so that the you know framerate was on 30 frames I just have the screen basically anyway development went on and Drude - took about 6 months I got paid four thousand pounds for developing druid - and that started this fascination with writing games it kind of gave me the confidence that yes you know maybe if I have an idea I could write again you know the game was finishing and came out and we renamed Taurus impacts stop shipping baked beans to the Middle East and we renamed it bull for productions now the team at that time was principally the people at the back let ger the person on the left your left and he I'm in the middle you probably didn't recognize me because I have a stuff called hair at that point which I am this evil cat and then most importantly the person to the right was Glenn corpus he was the person that had done all the graphics on drew - now you may notice that lays in that photograph doesn't look like a CF oh I mean he probably will regret that photograph the rest of his days because he thought he was do you know it was a funny photograph but there but there you go so that was the team those that background and one day this is a this is the actual pinnacle moment web where populace was kind of born one day I me and Glenn had been playing virus David Ragan's game brilliant game insanely hard but absolutely brilliant and Glenn was fascinated how David had put the landscape together and he started to draw these little isometric blocks and I came into the office and I said oh that's really good send me those blocks and I'll start playing around with now at the time I was smoking vast numbers of su cigarettes I'm proud to say I still do drinking huge amounts of Coca Cola and consuming vast amounts of pizzas the idea of girlfriends or social life was completely out of the question so you know I said I literally sat down and obsessively started working on this landscape and that's on my Amiga or my trusty Amiga 1000 and that's when I really started seriously coding now pop penis wasn't written in a proper man's language it was written in a fluffy girl's dress of a language it wasn't written in a similar code or machine code I'm even the name the words machine code it sounds you know hard and thrusting it was really fluffy girl's blouse EC and actually I did you know go down the pub with David Braben and Jess Ann who were you know proper coders and they really were they almost laughed me out of the pub for programming and see but there was one bizarre thing about the structure of my C code and here's a little kind of snippet outside simulated the whole of my code because of my trusty monitor had to fit in 79 cognate columns why because my monitor if anytime a single character went on the right side would do espares nautic wave dance so I you know the idea of tapping or cotton so completely and utterly out of the question and but anyway I started coding and started playing around with with you know creating first of all this landscape and it was literally a landscape which was you know green hills that Glenn had drawn and animating water them that animated between two friends so Tech was was simply and very basically a 64 by 64 map of bytes each of which held a block and a second map which was called map ho I didn't had never really learned about linked lists you know that was out of the question that I knew about how to do link this in very advanced and 64 day 64 map of bytes of map whoo that just held literally held what was on each block and 64 by 64 byte of something called map steps which we'll talk about in a few seconds and up to an astounding number of 256 peeps or people on the map at any one time which was you know seemed like an incredible number at the time so this is the block file as you can see you know there was you know Clem was pushed the limit of drawing graphics here and you can see the tile set across the top there were 16 basic tiles if you include the swamp tiles and then it was very simple how it worked is that a block would either have a blank block on it or it would have one of these houses put on top and then I had a second file called a peeps file which contained all the pointers or the animation of all the people of what they do and the animation of all the effects and are very important boss creatures which was you know a feature that came in incredibly incredibly late now interesting in my mind and when I did finally talk to the press I was that even in those days talking about look at the expression on those people's faces now as you can see the one pixel I you could actually wink at you which were you know I felt was you know a huge advance for our bonds for wording in facial facial animation and I'm sure if they had been a pixel for the mouth I would have been talking about lip syncing now let's talk about the actual game so this was about I suppose it was about about a month into the development of the game and that's when the first really all I had was a landscape was the green thing with the animating water and I had the ability for little people to move around the map and I had implemented this map step thing because I wanted the little people to move around kind of naturally and exhibit signs of what I thought was curiosity so I had this mat step array and which basically said if someone walked on to a block one of these little people waterway in incremented map steps by one and whenever anybody walked around they looked for the lowest number around them so that didn't people seem to explore the land but I hit my first big hurdle as a programmer is that at that time there was no raising alone land it was just a landscape little people moving around in it and the hurdle was this is these little people used to walk up to the shore and then try and get over the water but they couldn't you know they collided with water now in today's world I could have just gone on to Google and typed him wall hugging routine and downloaded a wall hugging routine but that was completely other question there were no books or reference books in those days it was literally other than you know highly complex academic play furs there was really not much to inspire you for in gameplay terms and so after struggling with it for it and what seemed like an endless amount of time and actually was about two days I kind of gave up and I implemented a system where with the mouse you could left-hand click to raise the land and right-hand click to lower the land so that when a little person met the coast I could just click the land up and they would carry on to their objective and I played around with this I thought we this is really nice it's really fun just raising allowing this land and it was only because I couldn't do the wall hugging I just didn't wasn't good enough programmer to do the wall hugging that that what was called nibbling obviously slight sexual session there nibbling and the landscape came about and it was only because of that and that was really the birth of what I felt was you know what is the core of populace so after playing around with that the very next thing that I did was I implemented via the rs-232 lead multiplayer said that Glenn and I could play around with this you know at that time it was just a very simple raisin though the land and whereas we were playing around with it we realized that it was really great fun to actually raise the land and sink Glenn's people in the water and raise my people out of the water and that's how that this core mechanic really came about then using the the next thing was that happened is that we had all these people moving around the landscape but they didn't you know they they just constantly moved and there was more and more of them so I needed to reduce the number of people down one landscape so we thought very simply a very simple mechanic if a little person was over a blank piece of land they would turn into a house we wouldn't have to but I wouldn't have to process them anymore I wouldn't have to you know wine through the peep slit they would turn from a person into a house and then we realized the more lands that you had the bigger the house should be and so you can see here in this example you can see that they have settled and they've settled on a nice flat piece of land meaning they had a hut and again now that gameplay was absolutely evolving partly or almost mostly at the knee not to process the little people and then we taught ourselves how do we get those people out again out of the house again there was two ways that we did that you can see the little flag here is the indicator the first way was to UM the first way was to remove the land underneath them now bear in mind we weren't thinking about a God game we didn't think you were a God at that time at all so you could just click the mouse underneath the house and it would raise the land up and they would have to come out again and they using map steps they would then search around for an extra bit of land or you can make their land bigger and supersuit slowly this game was evolving and then Glenn and I would play you know at least a game of day of this and you know it was it was a huge amount of fun but there was a frustration you know it's all very well just sort of nibbling up-and-down and changing the landscape but there was this feeling that you couldn't control the people in any formal way and once that was really really nice it was also really frustrating and that's when we created I think you can just see it this little ank in the middle something called the papal magnet quote why we came up with the name papal maybe I can't really remember but it was probably alcohol fueled and maple magnet when you turn the people magnet on instead of people coming out of their house and finding a place to settle people will come out of their house and go towards the papal magnet and that means you get lots of people in your papal magnet and then you could turn that mode off and then those that those people would create lots and lots of houses and it felt really really great but again you know we played around that with a number of days it was really good fun but it still felt there was something missing and that's when we came up with the idea of natural disasters why don't we have a volcano why don't we have an earthquake or a swamp or something called Armageddon why do we have all these things and mix them all together allow the player to set them off but we didn't have a kind of currency for which the player to do that so we had you know quite a few sessions where you could just cast infinite volcanoes and infinite amounts of earthquakes and he kind of got the game got less fun and it was only when we hit upon this idea of mana why do we do this simple mechanic if a person is moving around the landscape they're generating no manner at all but if a person is settled in a house if they have the bigger the house was the more mana regenerated and that's where you can see the scale on the top right-hand corner slowly increased and increased by the number of houses the number of settlements that you are land had and that triggered off these events and then suddenly what was a frustrating a a mechanic flipped into a really enjoyable mechanic but still there was still this feeling slight feeling there was something missing and there was there was one of the things that was missing was kind of an end game there was no you know you could build these colonies up and you could have this earthquake we would endlessly serve bombard and earthquake each other and that's when two very important rules they're really just about the last rules came in one of which was called the knot and that was the ability to turn your papal magnet which up to that point was just a way of collecting people and then spreading them out again into a warmongering night that would go out and attack the opponents and suddenly that became a huge amount of fun because we're a race to get matters save yourself against volcanoes it was also in a race against a race against the clock and the opponent before they could strike out different volcanoes and then very the very last thing to come in was the Armageddon spell because our multiplayer games were going on hours and hours on end and there was no winning side so we introduced his Armageddon spell which is right at the end of the of the of the manor scale which would literally push everyone out of their houses and they were collide and fight and now we were really really enjoying the game you know we thought if after you know it was it was pretty fantastic mainly because it was multiplayer now and while all this was going on Glenn was working on the interface and he did a brilliant job of you know defining the book as being the map and you can see the icons around the side were the gameplay so you could use the keyboard or you could use the icons it was an a nightmarish programming job to get the mouse to translate from the isometric view to the flat view I'm sure you people would do it ten seconds flat but this took me almost three days to program which seemed like an insane amount of time we were about six months I suppose about six months in I mean if you take that in true coding terms I Pro it was probably half that but you know we've been playing the game so much that we haven't been doing to add too much programming and while all that was going on we were also doing some crazy things like we invented the leg at the populous Lego board game so you can see here that we had these rules we had a you could um depending on the number of little houses you had little Lego bricks which you could use to place down which simulated that the placing down of blocks in the game and you could cache those Lego bricks in to build houses it actually was a completely rubbish game when energy didn't balance the game at all but woman came to doing press it was a fantastic story and we actually had we actually had Lego themselves come to see us but that's you know another story and time and while this was going on let's head God they are CFR oh the funny people are funny the bloke in a funny picture was going out to publishers now at that time you know this was 1989 and there was a pretty much an obsession with them as there is now there was an obsession with shoot-'em-ups and killing and firing and you know space not a bit more advanced than space invaders so every publisher that there's took the game to and a variety of terribly written demos - you know most publishers turn around said were you were just not interested in that you know if you get them to shoot each other we might be interested but you know originality is not what the public wants at the moment they want you know I can't remember what the John Doe they want this they're you know they don't want you know something new and eventually let's talk pop this round to a company that had fairly recently started up in Europe called Electronic Arts I met up with someone called Martin Lewis and David Gardner and because they had a you know hole in their in their spring schedule they said okay we'll get populous to try and we signed our publishing contract now unfortunately whilst we were you know fanatical games designers and games players we were in no way fanatical contract negotiators and the Electronic Arts spotted my weakness straightaway and my weakness was this right back these little puppies so they only had to wait you know the one hour 40 minutes before my nicotine addiction kicked in in the full before bringing up the most essential clause in the contract which was things like royalty raids to actually to actually get what was or a pretty atrocious contract I think our royalty rate was 10% rising to the dizzy heights of 12% after 1 million units and pretty much more no funding up front but we got the publishing contract and then event at last we finished the game off and it went into testing testing in those days there was nothing like the testing today it was nowhere near as robust they had this this 24-hour period which was this intensive test period which was you're slightly scary it's equivalent to cert these days and populace went into this cert process and as part of that they had to test the complete game from start to finish and interestingly they phoned us up I've burned about our 19 and said oh well you know Baba this is such a big game and you know there's almost 500 levels and you know we haven't got time to play through more we're pretty confident there they're fine but could you give us a cheat to get us to the last the endgame sequence and that's when we realized we hadn't quite finished the game because we had forgotten entirely to put any form of endgame sequence literally you got to the last level and nothing happened at all now we did have this thing called the goblin Lord that came up and judged you between each level and after a serious design brainstorming we decide that a absolutely appropriate and completely emotionally engaging end of game would be for the Goblin Lords left eyebrow to raise three pixels and him to go good well done mortal and this was you know a frantic programming effort and managed to get it back into syrup within it within a few hours and so populous was born it was born out of really out of my inability to to program a certain feature it was born out of this fanatical playtesting that me and Glen the me and LEM through and it was borne out of you know a passion and fueled by cigarette coca-cola and and pizzas but the story doesn't end there in fact there's two several interesting stories because what that enabled us to do was to be introduced to the press now I'm very you know I'm great fan of the press I think they have you know fantastic people that have a very hard job and I've always admired them and at that time one of the most that one of the magazines that I loved the most was called ace and the this journalist was going to come down the publishers are publishers have phoned us up and he they had said look we want to we've got the ace review but before this journalist wants to give you his final score he really wants to meet you and he so he's coming down tomorrow and you know please make him feel welcome well this I became insanely nervous and so when this gay guy came down I obviously immediately wanted to ask him what he thought of the game but I just didn't have the courage to do that so I my obvious tactic was to take him down the pub now we went down the pub about 10 o'clock in the afternoon and it wasn't till about four o'clock in the afternoon I had drunk enough 14 pints as it was and I had thrown up in the toilets and I then I do I thought right now is the time now I'm going to ask David what this score is you know what he thought a populist so I went back into the pub and he was sort of kind of slightly swaying on the seat and I said I David I've got to ask you what did you think a populist and he said I think it's the greatest game I've ever played and in the first thought that came into my mind was he must never see populist ever again he must have he must have made a huge mistake and then that's when the next piece of luck came about because fortunately the Drummond pub is fishing walk away from the bullfrog offices to mean that we it would be more like a stagger with the 14 points inside us because David then challenged me to a match of populous this was insane I mean God the thought of a that he would play populous again then change his mind from it being the greatest game he'd ever played and be the I was in any way capable even to see the mouse let alone control I think just him so we ended up collapsed in the in an alleyway on the way back to the office and to my mind I think David ever play populist ever again but we did get a great score and that was a fantastic you know as a fantastic feeling to get that first great score and then the game was released and you know that was really my first game release and you know I I you know I went down there I went down the shop and I saw the game and I started this this this tradition that I have now of going down a shop and buying a copy and going back and playing the game as it was and you know fantastic a feeling of accomplishment there was one slight snack which I'll come onto now the time of release was the time when Salman Rushdie knew are they going to think my god where's he going to go now Salman Rushdie had written The Satanic Verses and he had a jihad against him now we were sitting in our office braving in the glory of our wonderful reviews and you know the fact that the the game have been released when I just kept forward to this bit when we got a phone call from the newspaper called the Daily Mail saying were you aware because you've made a game about good and evil that you were likely to get a jihad against you so all our glory about oh my god we've created this game was immediately crushed a bit we we actually I remember Glenn are thinking I'm dude I'm sure sore terrorists on the corner of the street because you know they've got a jihad against us for doing this computer game bizarre though that was anyway that little thing went away and while that was going on I am had all these bills coming in you know although the game had been released we you know bullfrog had no money coming in at all and our you know skillfully nicotine fueled contract negotiation had omitted to say that we needed money until nine months after the launch of the game because of these tricky Clause and publishers used to have called returns of course when you want a cigarette you don't think about returns and they had to they that allowed them to offset the payment of the first royalty for nine months and I had my own little house this was my house in a place called Avondale I'd brought it on my credit cards I worked out that I could pay the deposit for the mortgage on my credit cards and ever since buying at six months previously I hadn't made a single mortgage payment on it it was really an early example of subprime loans in Guildford and so all these bills were coming in and I was getting more and more frustrated and that's when the phone rang and someone called David Gardner from Electronic Arts phone up and said probably the most the worst thing he could say to me he said congratulations Peter you're a millionaire wasn't quite true I think the electric carts were the millionaire's but you know anyway he said you know we've got a mountain of cash here you know I'm he's almost suggested that he was looking at it man and of cash we're going to send it to you don't worry about it this was about three weeks after release well what happened next was it took nine months to for those royalties to come by which time I worked on this sneaky formula of applying for new credit cards maxing those credit cards out and then applying for another credit card so I could stop my house being taken away but a happy end of the story is that finally the royalties came in and they were you know absolutely fantastic and amazing and in the year of launch populace accounted for a third of all Electronic Arts revenues it was you know one of them top ten selling games of all time and it's held that position for you know many many years it was launched in Japan and the Japanese went absolutely insane about populous you know they had populous comics and populous dolls and populous figurines they even we were invited over for this and this was one of the most bizarre things I think I've ever been to in my life they even hired a full symphony orchestra to play the music and the sound effects from populism one and a half hour concert now bearing in mind a lot of the Sanitation poppers were inspired by cats hemorrhoid or problems downstairs you know it wasn't it wasn't one of the most melodic things I've ever heard and eventually you know populists was converted to the Archimedes the atari st - dost pc the turbo graphics Gameboy any cease Ness sega megadrive you know just that this went on and on and on and it really did launch me and us into you know it properly properly into the games industry what we did was with that success was then they start expanding the company up they did you know the company went from essentially three people to six people to twelve people to 20 people and we started working on games like power manga PAH manga was a really interesting title to develop because it was kind of it's obviously inspired by populist but it was much more like an RTS game it would have been a fantastic RTS bang it hadn't been for an insanely stupid idea of mine and that was okay we had this landscape and we could have you can make armies and those armies could go out an attack sounds very RTS II they could attack each other again it was multiplayer and this was kind of even before the sort of war crafts and command and conquers and you know that was all fine but the one thing that I did wrong was the way you issued commands to those armors wasn't by clicking on the map no it was by carrier pigeon the what happened was you clicked on the map and then this little carrier pigeon would fly over the map with the order for their army taking about 10 minutes to get their land with the order I thought it was charming I thought you know that's me but if you know just do SAP to every ounce of gameplay outer out of their game but you could shoot each other's carrier pigeons down so it ended ended up like a duck shoot it wasn't like a RTS game at all that went on to populous to you know fascinatingly at that time there was a kind of shame in the industry for working on sequels I know that sounds insane in today's world but it really was you know when journalists came to see you out you're like I'm sequel I knew if you sold out and you know Popular's to rather than me focusing on the obvious thing which is what people enjoyed and that was you know this little people mechanic and raising low in the land I thought mistakenly as a designer people wanted more destructive effects so I think pop is 2mr beat then then the you know one of my favorite games syndicate famous for introducing mini guns into games and shooting innocent bystanders and classically and these shows you have times have changed because political correctness allowed us to minigun down prams with babies in you know slightly unthinkable in today's world magic carpet theme park and the high octane which I prefer Shore no no one's heard of that then led us to it was in just after magic carpet that we sold the company to bullfrog and then just after I finished dungeon keeper that there maybe I left I left Electronic Arts and startup Lionhead we then went on to make black and white and fable globality to do to dial 2d and all that and so that's the kind of story of populist and if I have any conclusions it is this it is you know sometimes there's a great way and this is some fantastic examples minecraft being classically one of them where games are born they're born out of playing them and tweaking them and and finding out what works and what doesn't and populace was a fantastic I think a fantastic example of that and sometimes what you think of us as a solution and a problem which is insurmountable can often lead you to a solution which yeah discovers your game it was a wonderful classic time and now I think we ought to try running populous because I have got it on emulator here and we'll just see if this works mmm scary start no it's off screen it's not good start here it is here she comes there it is the amiga interface Wow it's so exciting and there's but then there's populace that started up this was this was our cheap icon which was a little tiny screenshot gosh the tensions killing me there there it is and one other person it should be credited is the amazing fantastic incredible ron hubbard because he did the he did the introductory music let's have there you are the intro sequence you this to me was it's a building Schulte bounce boys are these bands I'm here to go back in again mm-hmm sorry otherwise we have to watch the whole thing so will happen just a two minute a two minute demo and then well you know just open it up for any questions in a second interesting I am still working on populous one of my hobbies at the moment is I'm this purely for my own thing if anyone's an electronic arts you please don't sue me for doing this by a making I have I could show it to you I have got a 256 player version of populist with this massive map where you got long as it's pretty cool but yeah so here we are here's populous and you can see the basic mechanics I was talking about this is nibbling up to two less one right and you can see I'm expanding up this is my strategy is to expand up I feel so emotional blindness is amazing expanding up the expanding up the little house into a into a castle because castles produced it produced people about four times faster and while this is going on the incredibly complex AI over the other side of the map I'm running out of manner see I've got to use Manitou to low to build up across the other side of the map is doing exactly the same and doing a slightly better job incidentally the trees spread according to life the algorithm life so if there's two trees next to each other they spawn again no one understood that why I did that I still dancers they're wired about I just had the imagination of you know these fractal patterns spreading across so here we've got my my house and I can I can just sprout the little villager and he can go off and you can see the map steps working now and then I can just build that and back out to a castle that pushes him off again and that's the core of the gameplay more populous now I have one thing to reveal which I don't know will work but I have a cheat in populous that I used in the National populace championship in Japan and that was to put the mouse up in the top left-hand corner and type gothmog this is exactly what happened on stage in Japan the National populace championship it's supposed to is supposed to push everybody out of the buildings there was this insane competition where there was invited over to Japan and this this this Japanese kid was literally wearing this samurai you know this samurai you know I will die if I don't win bandana and we had to play face to face in front of an audience of about this big and this kid was just awesome but I had this plan I would get to the right moment when the camera wasn't focusing on my mouse I'm moving up to the top left and type gothmog and he would be ruined and annihilated exactly the same thing out that happened now I do think gothmog ever actually works she's very sad anyway that's the tale of populist if anyone has any questions I'll just turn the mmm I can remember how to do this I can actually turn this law owner order this off to players oh don't doesn't matter I could turn the computer player on to play my side but they go anybody any questions [Music] hi Peter I'm Ryan from untold entertainment thanks for your talk I was watching your talk and I watched Eric Shaw he's thing this morning and and it struck me that these days we talk about iterative game development as if it's like a new thing but you guys were kind of flying by the seat of your pants back when you're developing do you think that do you think that that's a product of its time with their less pressure or do you think we overthink design now with our big Bibles @rg you know our game design documents I think we've got both existing you know I mean I think we've got both things you know I was really struck last night in the intimate of games Awards I was really struck by one thing is that that seemed those people could have existed as they were they could have existed back in 1989 when I was developing populous and they would have felt completely our home is the way that games like Minecraft and the way that you know a lot of games that won awards seem to be a very iterated in desktop dungeons being one of them seemed to have iterated is through play and iteration and that's really how populist was born and that's one spectrum that's one side of the spectrum and the other side of the spectrum is you know very formalized development and especially nowadays when you're dealing with you know motion capture motion capture just changes everything it really does change all the production because you can't mess around with actors it cost millions of pounds if you do you know and that process is it does formulate a different style of game I suppose the dream is and we always have and this is another complete talk by the way so I won't go into any detail a bullfrog up to you know even up to a fable free we still with slightly two iterative in the way that we approach games we would and we you know we still thought about peanuts and these pillars were things like in fable freeze case were things like the ruling pillar and how it would feel to be king and there would be a pillar about the interface and how wonderful it would be not to have a 2d screen an interface and a pillar about emotion and touch and then from those pillars we would all go off and iterate round on those pillars and experiment and you know create you create prototypes around those pillars and then about nine months before finishing the game bring everything together all those those things together and every single game I've worked on have we had there's the same thing we say and people in the audience if you worked on favor we recognize this oh my god the game is 20 hours long we thought it was 10 and so we still iterating now but unfortunately it's very very hard to get drama and quality with that sort of approach so at lineup we've really looked to that approach and we're changing that approach now any other questions little plug for hi my name is Taylor and from Electronic Arts and I would love to see the larger multiplayer populous that you in a right now to show it to you now I don't see that yeah not from the answer your target yeah would you want to see it now you really do gosh now this is like looking into an old man's dirty underwear drawer so you know one is we've got to compile it oh so good start let's be honest okay we go it's called feed name there five I've got my my PR person down stair down here I'm not breaking in comm PR confidentiality things am i because it's not going to be it's just a personal project right okay oh my god is fatal error you can't see it there we've got to fix the bug as we're talking that it's that's hardcore now here we go let's do it no directory era come on your programmers you how to fix this it must be there no look I tell you what I'm going to do I'm wrong animate I'm not going to put you through I'm not going to put you through this but actually if I just run it why don't I just run it and not compile it No oh you see debugging whoa I was eating very hot yeah yes [Applause] look at the frame rate everybody it's tresh this is about three frames a second but yeah it does actually work I mean them D I haven't got Glenn here to do the lovely interface graphics but it yeah it does it you know it does actually work and you can play it across the network and all of that stuff there we go any any last questions we've got about five minutes left yeah well hi Peter I'm Ben morrow idle games um I've played your game since I was very very young writer played lots and lots of popular so lots of trouble missed you know school the the question I wanted to ask you know having played a you know fable and essentially realized that I'd become some kind of estate agent or landlord eventually is whether you have any thoughts with all your experience about how you not only create an experience that works in the beginning and has players discover but evolves into you know the that gives a great experience as the player learns higher and higher levels of what to do with the game yeah it's very interesting it's an interesting question and I kind of agree with you in there there was fable three in a way was a hugely important game in my career because I think it was and I'll be absolutely honest with you here the team did a fantastic job at an amazing job but they did you know it was the only game other than populous that was done in less than two years and the because we were bringing things together very very late on I think there was a lot of edits that and it was too harshly edited so the ruling section was way way too short and things like house buying wasn't properly balanced and what that meant was what we have done is and I'm not going to end up not answering your questions simply what we've done is really thought of a way that we can balance and get to what the game is before any coding starting and so we've got we've come up with this tool which allows us to to define but still be very very creative every moment of gameplay on a minute-by-minute basis before the team actually starts developing the game and in very interesting what that means is that you have the pillars that inspire this flow that you create at the start and then those pillars have changed at the end so I really hope this time that and I've you know I've been talking about this this week I really hope this time that the dream that I know that I sell to people in the press will hopefully match the game that comes out at the end and because I passionately believe when I'm not doing PR when I do it's the press I passionately believe in that now I'll answer your question what was it that seemed like a rather good answer did it you plow well there you go it was pure luck yeah thank you very much next question um it's kind of sad because it seems like it's going away at least in mainstream gaming but what motivated you to work on games that have so many aspects of simulation and did you have any idea that it would be so successful I think you know even maybe the Sims is a good example how hard it was to sell and then you know now we have three iterations of it later yeah um I think it was a pearl in there was a there was a couple of things that I really loved I've always had I still had this unbelievable passion of creating a world that seemed to live and you know that world whether that world be you know something like populist at the scale of populist or whether it be power manga which was a little bit closer in or whether it be themed part which was you know very close in or black-and-white or these worlds you know I think my fantasy is if you set a work a game in a similar allows players to do stuff that I have never thought of but I think that I still think for me that's a very addictive a very addictive gameplay quality at the time a populist time when you when I said that to publishers they just look to me as if I was completely insane because there wasn't anything like that at the time and it was really strange with Will Wright who is you know unbelievably clever human being and he populist and SimCity came out a month of it within a month of each other and you know he was you know thinking about simulations as well so you know it kind of proved I wasn't completely insane to think of that and I do know I still love that I mean what you all don't realize about fable is and if you actually manage to there isn't achieve to do this but if I had fable here to demonstrate there's this incredible thing with fable is that in a level you can if you go into God mode and fly up you can see people the other side of the landscape and little villages get up in the morning go to work buy things from shops go back into their house cook meals for their for their family players never see that but I still love that mechanic do you think it's gonna start going away now that you know there's these huge checks involved in it you can't handcraft the player experience so well with like these sort of emergent behavior is going on in the backgrounds I mean I you know I think that simulation still exists in games I mean it's probably there and in things like even you know and things like Call of Duty but we have got an amazing spectrum of games being made now you know really in the last two to three years we've got all the Facebook stuff and all the app store stuff and that is a incredible place to experiment with that and whilst I you know I think that games like Farmville and this a very contentious view but I think games like Farmville are a brilliant piece of design those sort of experiences need to evolve if I was involved in that I would definitely rathole on simulation because for me you know those little people in Farmville and and frontier Ville and you know all those just randomly moving left and right they're just missing a beat and that beat is that this is my little field or my little city and you know I can see that more you know the palms I plant plant down have an effect on the little people I think there's a wonderful glorious thing there a lot saying that that you know farmville and that lot are not brilliant designed by the way thank you very much thank you I think this won't be the last question if I'm right yeah I was a big fan of both bullfrog all throughout the 90s and one of the things I thought was so cool about that company was the vast range of genres and gameplay styles yeah that you explored and this actually might share something in common at the previous question but one thing that seems to be quite common is designers who have been at it for quite a while they almost sort of there seems to be this magnetic pole sort of eventually towards I guess character driven first or third person kind of close in John I'm wondering what if you think that if there's something sort of inevitable about that or maybe why your career has gone in that direction and would you ever see yourself yeah III see what you mean and there is you know I think mmm you know the industry is very cyclical and a lot of a lot of this industry a lot of other industries especially entertainment net industries you know they do they follow my lead or an awful lot you know if there's a successful science-fiction film then you have a glut of science fiction films the same with horror films and this kind of could be the six same could be true of the computer games industry I'm a huge optimist by the way I think we're just coming to the time with all these new input devices and the cloud and you know the ability for us to get to people's friends lists I you know I think that is really going to mean that we have changes in the genres but at the moment this particular phase we're in there are a lot of first-person shooters I love them by the way I'm going after your daughter my playing awful lot I think they're you know just having little battlefield 3 little just totally awesome to me and I can't wait to play but I you know I do feel that we as an industry we owe it to the consumers and the people that play our games whether they've just come to the industry or they've been there a long time to actually innovate and iterate and to be brave with what we presented a much remember your evaluation forms and also remember to turn off your phone [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 63,944

Rating: 4.8845806 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: VIaK6y5kdro

Length: 60min 53sec (3653 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2017

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