Darkest Dungeon: A Design Postmortem

I'm Tyler stigman I'm the co-founder co-president design director trashman I don't know whatever it's a small company so we all do a lot of things Red Hook studios what I was putting this talk together so it's a post-mortem we're going to try to cover things that went well things that didn't go so well but putting the talk together in particular I think on the what went wrong I'm going to focus a lot on one thing not because there is difficulty in finding lots of there's no hubris of difficulty finding lots of things that went wrong but I think there's just a couple things that were more interesting so hopefully you'll forgive it's not an exact standard five and five like dealed Gd mag format so darkest dungeon is a turn-based gothic core light fantasy RPG about the psychological stress of adventuring and this is we throw this screen up the minute you start up the game to make sure you know what you're getting into and of course no one reads it because no one reads tutorials but this gives us ability to come back later and say we told you it was going to be bad and this is what it looks like in practice here come on come on either maybe you got to go survival is a tenuous proposition that's okay come on healer rolling come on come on Taylor come on come on that's fine as long as you give me one more [ __ ] head jury find it in no shorts magalie time after all [Music] so that's Ezekiel 3 he actually still liked us and did play darkest dungeon after that and has actually played it since and so yeah that's nice so he have gotten some more enjoyment of the game one of the things we set out to do with darkest dungeon that that may be unique is trying to create emotional attachment so I think we succeeded sometimes maybe not exactly in the ways that we planned I mean I wouldn't say that was like one of our design goals but when we were coming up with the game idea so Chris Brazos originally his idea Chris Robert friends and we would get together and talk about working on a games together we'd worked at other studios in the past and this one kept just it had so much weight every time we talked about it we'd get excited and the main thing is we're RPG fans and there's so many great RPGs out there I've been playing them my whole life you know on and off the computer and one of the things we're really conscious of is just that you know we didn't want to just make an RPG because we love them we wanted to make an RPG only if there was something maybe different or new that we could add that might make it stand out and the real concept here is that you have heroes you're human and Chris like to say it's about the sword arm not the sword it's not how big your shoulder pads and giant glowing sword are it's the human wielding it and how willing they are and able to fight and so along with that you know becomes the whole range of human emotion so moments of despair these uncomfortable decisions we're putting you in as the player of confronting with loss and permanent consequences and but the real secret is we're not actually sadists the moments of despair they're only insofar as to create moments of triumph because what is an act of true heroism without the possibility of cowardice and we felt like a lot of RPGs are all about heroism you have one hit point you're fighting the dragon whatever hang in there oops then go well reload try again a little bit about my background because it's relevant to what's next is design a bunch of games on off the computer and a bunch of different genres I like to say every time I make a game I enjoy I have to do penance and make a racing game which I do not enjoy and I'm not particularly good at but I think that diverse range of just you know non collectible card games - weird hybrid action strata cade games to turn based really helps because darkest dungeon has a ton of systems in it it's a small game made by a small team you know you look at something like The Witcher 3 it's kind of ridiculous for me to say there's this big scope to the game but I think there was unexpected scope the main pillars I guess you could say of the play experience or this town exploration combat camping and we talked a lot upfront about how much time should the player spend in each of these phases you know combat by far is I think well comment exploration together the lion's share of your time but that's not to minimize the importance of the time you spend in camping or some people spend an awful lot of time in town looking at their things and you know putting their guys into treatment but generally you're walking side-to-side through a hallway finding things built around those four cores though are a ton of systems and one of the challenges of the game was that a lot of these systems are innovations I guess which is it's not trying to say that always worked but the affliction system you know was the real hook of the game that was something you know it's like how do we psychologically model these heroes meanwhile the cost of entry make an RPG you still have to do all the other things combat leveling quests monsters you know all these all these sorts of things and so when you start layering in affliction system and torchlight you know some innovations it was a lot of time so I think one thing that went well is that you know a lot of the systems they're not particularly eloquent some of them certainly deserve a second pass a third pass that maybe never got it and some of them are outright clunky but together it all worked and you know sometimes I guess I say went well because it's just a great sigh of relief for me that some of us you know it felt like at times that any one system that didn't do its job was just going to ruin the whole mix you know like you're over seasoning this do and they got its - I can't recover it now but I think in this case one of the things you know I'm just most proud of in the game is just that it did all hang together from duct tape and baling wire and chewing gum and a whole bit to support the goal of the game which was just heroes or human and part of that - it's really important what we didn't do for all those systems that we you know that I just showed there was a lot that we wanted to put in and these are just a couple of them crafting or the idea of a more meaningful upgrade system more meaningful gear loot system you know the characters have this armor and weapon progression it's just linear progression and go from level one upgrade to level five and armor level one to level five and weapon you have to trinket slots and course we could've done whole bunch more we could have done paper doll you know etc etc but that would have taken away especially with our team and you know with the budget that we had set out to make the game with if I was spending time on that I would have been spending time on a tuition system and that would have been a mistake similarly and you know this this was led really strongly by Chris the creative director as our focus on emergent narrative meant that we weren't doing these other cost of entry RPG features like extensive dialogue trees you know going into the Abbey talking to the abbot before you commit treatment like hello mr. Abbot what's new today what rumors have you heard none of that the quests are not particularly in-depth you know they're kind of the equivalent of go get the tin wolf pelts and we really avoided heavy lower at every possible opportunity and that was that was a creative choice but all these also support kind of what we were trying to do we you know your ancestor called you to the estate and you need to go to the Weald and fight things or the ruins you know it's very archetypal but in doing so that means you have to construct a love story in your head and ultimately what we wanted to do what we you know we're really after is the idea of kind of like as old roguelikes where you make your character and you go on these crazy adventures and then you can string together this story of like well that time with all the slugs in level 10 was rough I barely got out of that thank God I drank the random potion and polymorphed and got away we wanted to do that with the heroes and so the more that we force-fed down your throat that wouldn't have worked so it's very important for us not to do things our design process also went well yeah Chris so you know it I'm designer on the game design director but there's a lot to do with this game and a lot of design and a lot came from Chris and I working together every early and this isn't always the role if filled on every game it's kind of funny but in this game it very much became this role of Chris you know drawing all day long and having time to think because he can draw anything at the same time I cannot spreadsheet and think about anything else at the same time and so we just be spouting ideas you know and well okay not always spouting he carefully thought of someone and I'm you know I kind of got into this role of like batting stuff back over the net and then sometimes he'd really really really want to talk about again better back over the debt and you know I could sit with it and get comfortable where it might have gone in fairness also my role in the game was was to wrangle all these things than do the detail design like okay affliction okay how does that work you know how we doing stress what triggers an affliction what kind of things can they do in the affliction but kind of managing a whole cloud of red stuff was with the times just completely maddening but also fun and the creative direction the game having that established really strong upfront was what we needed to be able to resist that design feature creep I mean I think you know I'm a designer and it's we all make games and it's really hard sometimes you wake up and have a shower and you think of this awesome thing you'd like to throw in and maybe it goes into the game and sometimes you got to resist the temptation and then also don't want to minimize the rest of the team as coming up with great ideas being there to like reject something that is really bad that you know just doesn't fly and you know sometimes it was hard because you can't listen to all ideas from all places but the rest of the team was really important also abetting and trying and all sorts of these things so the fliction system is the hook of the game and that that's really what we call the whole system for your heroes being human and sometimes basically being a bunch of unruly toddlers and that's built on events in situations if you think about it being an adventure is a really really terrible job you might be running out of food you're in search of this elusive gold it's kind of like startup culture you know you're in the dark running out of light it could die at any moment and so there's these events and situations that lead to stress and everyone wants to make fun of how you can read a book and it could just blow your mind in our game but that's very Lovecraftian to be fair so stress builds on the heroes once it reaches a hundred we have what's called a resolve check and that that that's a test of their metal and that resolves one of two ways if you're lucky they become virtuous it gives me like this courageous but more often than not they become afflicted and then this manifests in their behaviors and their stat bonuses or penalties and narrative Lee in the things they talk about the inspiration for the affliction system was not games really although not to show an image it was more you know human experience that that's fictional you know dramatizations movies TV shows etc but also just life being a manager we talk about a lot being a you know in a relationship without you know all these things your human experience it's pretty easy to mind that for how we react to stress and that's a really important point is darkest dungeon is not a game about mental health or mental illness darkest dungeon is a game about the human response to stress and those are very different things so this is an image I really like to enter brothers Europe obviously based on real events and there's this character buck Compton I think that that's his name played by this actor Neal McDonough and you know this great he's tall he's handsome he's tough you know he's been on a bunch of missions he's kind of just a scorer garius energetic guy that's holding the squad together in a way and they're in the battle gardens and getting shelled through the winter and you know he watches a shell land in a foxhole with a couple of his buddies and they're just they're just gone like they're there when men at the shell dens are gone and there's this great scene where he just comes up and he just has the thousand-yard stare shell-shocked takes off his helmet and he's just done that's that his war is over and I think like that was really a moment that you know in a way we wanted to capture there's always game over man you know Hudson and his you know is the most boisterous I love watching especially extended cut I think there's even more talking to him at the beginning just being total boisterous [ __ ] and then you know of course the minute things go to hell he can handle it and Ripley is the one you know civilian that shouldn't be able to handle it and made of steel but working some things have done morale for a long time and some degree what we were doing is bringing a morale system into into an RPG and so these aren't necessarily new ideas it's just kind of maybe packaging them in a different way the implosion system had seven afflictions forward virtues and one of the neat things is that we have 15 different character classes in the game and we've got custom streams and multiple variants for every single class every single affliction virtue every single act out they can do you know that's one of the things we really invest a lot in and paying out I think the game has about 70,000 words of text now and that's funny for a lower list game with no dialogue trees so it snuck up on us and if you play the game you know they say it might be a little hard to see here but here the Hellions being masochistic is like please cut me I want this here I think the high woman's being abusive and basically berating as party members and this well this is too hard to see a little small you know more the more the same someone made some fanart which captures the feeling you get in the game a lot if you can't read it can you people hold your [ __ ] together and hit something from 5 minutes please that happens a lot but so the important thing about the placing system is it's really the hook of the game I mean you know the game is universally lauded for a lot of things but this is kind of always there and in if you know if it didn't work the whole game premise falls down and it's built up of really pretty simple subsystems and we purposefully obfuscate part of that when you're when your character is masochistic we don't tell you what could happen we don't tell you exactly what act outs they might do or how they might you know run to the front or reject healing we want you to discover that through play we don't want to have a tooltip or as much as I love tooltips Chris knows I love tooltip never met a tooltip I didn't love but at the same point here the we want to show you everything we need want you to discover it but it's really important we could not if we thought about it we toyed around with obfuscating stress but then you know we could have the characters talk as they're getting more stressed like hey I'm getting stressed but then you never really know where the breaking point is and you can't make any tactical or strategic decisions of how far to press or what to do or window you know camp if you don't know so it actually worked out really well to just make it like a health meter we worried it would be a little boring a little dry but that that certainly enhanced the game certainly enhanced the system do you know they're about to break and that was really important selection system also features the loss of the agency which I'll talk about a little more yeah it worked and I mean that's why I say it's something that went well and I think one of the biggest reinforcements to me that it worked was during early access which we were in for roughly a year we made very very few changes to the affliction system I mean frighteningly few we thought we would go back and we would add a million more act outs and we would you know double back on some things that were really rough and you know other than a little bit of tuning and maybe improving the flow of a few things like I think now like if they bulk the heel you go to heal them in the bulk we we don't penalize you your turn you they don't get to heal but you can still use that character we made a couple changes like that but in general we didn't and the reason we didn't is because the community was very clear of many other things that they didn't like or you know and I think that's important though you know the squeaky wheel gets increased a little bit because this was working and I think it realized the potential of what the affliction system was supposed to do as you've seen with the zql video we successfully not only made your hero's afflicted we made the game players afflicted I'm how many of you of ragequit darkest dungeon and I don't know if I should ask this how many of you ragequit but came back and played again my god okay how many rage quit and are never going to play it again but still came to the talk anyway thank you for your on whatsit thank you thank you for the honesty I haven't had people are like I like the game I can never play it I will never play it again and but it may help you a little bit in your in your hearts to know that we also made ourselves afflicted a lot through development we developed a vernacular vocabulary for understanding how stress was impacting us and actually you should try it on your teams it works quite well so you know we would see that hey you know maybe don't talk to them today they're they're really close to afflicted or you know someone would send a nasty email and then you know we decide don't worry there they're just abusive right now they'll get over it and you know to put myself out there my affliction is the rationality as my stress builds and builds and builds and then I become triggered then I'll pick some really stupid thing to just panic about and maybe you know just yeah coffee or I don't know where it is or make some small point about the game that I want to fight tooth and nail about that's completely meaningless so that's me a little bit about this is just a show like this is what we call the trait library which is this is how the afflictions are actually hooked up this isn't particularly sexy but what what you can see there and you know these slides will be on the on the vault later is is like a series of buffs to the stats and then situational act outs is what we call them like hey there's this chance of if it's you're turning combat and you're abusive you might do this or you know if it's a reaction act out if someone tries to heal you and you're paranoid you may reject it because you think they're trying to kill you that kind of stuff and this brings me to one of my favorite things the the Microsoft Excel and I think you're saying I'd freeze said hello and like and frieza you know it was head of Microsoft games I like to think of him because he worked on Excel that's that's his best accomplishments would so anyway Excel is my favorite thing Excel and not Google sheets I will add Google sheets are like for collaboration I'll use it but Excel is the thing Excel you know when you're a small team you need to figure out ways to move faster and one of these sheets is is the monster library there's like I don't know 200 200 monster files or something and that that was really useful to automate that and so you know usually things made their way from spreading into a JSON or darkest so it's not like we have the best pipeline ever but you know the programmers were busy doing important things in making the game but but we had enough to get through and so that's where I think the BBA exporters and things like this we're so helpful you know especially when you're a small team so setting up these parametric equations so that you know you can MIT you can decide all monsters in the whole game need a little more health and you have to go through and you know a big fan of formulas obviously so a lot of that went well but there's definitely some gaps where we're missing missing key exporters that always thought you know we'd find time to make and never did so there we're still like it became a little confusing working with programmers because you know we'd make a change for a new feature and then it'd be like is this an exported file or a hand edited file I don't know I got to look through my 27,000 spreadsheets and then you know so that's sometimes led to problems something that went well is our bad design there's a few areas of bad design that I want to focus on so lots of agency that's one so in other words your characters do things that you don't want them to do they pass their turns they reject healing they basically just made your life difficult yeah in talking to my partner Chris it does sound like maybe being a parent and you know we're owning a pet and that's kind of what they are and that generally that's bad design because you know that you should get positive feedback for the actions you do etc cetera but it was very very important for darkest dungeon that that you were not in control I mean that's really just like a founding principle and so even though we knew it frustrate the heck out of you sometimes like in the Ezequiel video you know it came to one of the characters turns I think they passed and then of course he lost the whole had a party wipe but this was necessity from the heroes or human idea this made a little hard sometimes because darkest dungeon has eleven numbers in a lot of systems and it's kind of a tactics it's a turn-based combat game and so how do you you know sometimes you're worried about balance like hey this this character has like it's DPS is like you know undersized by 5% compared to other characters and then you have this system in the game that basically you can just Rob a turn entirely and that was sometimes a hard balance to tread and to get people to expect because I think for some people they generally enjoy a darkest dungeon as just you know it would be really cool if not for this affliction system that keeps getting in the way like it's a turn-based you know neat turn-based combat cool robe leg whatever and so that was hard sometimes about because you ultimately there is all this kind of stuff that's taking control away from you our save system so if you're familiar the game it's saved all the time actions are permanent there's no save scumming i mean you have to go through great lengths to do some save scumming and so permanent consequences were what we were after we want you at all moments to be like should I go a little further and they'd get a little more treasure do I think I can make to the end of this quest even though these two characters are afflicted and this one is almost dead and to do that you know we needed this this terrible save system that is just really really mean and it's exceptionally mean because in the Quixote video you know he crashed out of the game and I guess he calmed down the next day came back to play booted it up and it had saved right before the hit that killed his characters you know because he crashed out but it had already rolled that it already rolled and the action was fixed so you know he's gonna do this King he had to watch it happen again so that wasn't intentional I mean we did not make a use case for you crashing your computer in and out 15 unbalanced hero classes so we chose to do more heroes rather than less and sometimes you know that the cost of that was balanced you know an attention to each individual hero but it was a conscious choice because every here you add to the game gives the ability for more party formations and you know more more interesting things and we always thought of heroes with loot like when you go to the stagecoach it should be exciting when you're waiting for a crusader and a crusader shows up when you're waiting for a grave robber and a grave robber shows up and it's funny to watch people tweet about this because you know full disclosure there's no crazy systems in that we detect what you want and then we don't give it to you or anything like that but you know some people are like you know I'm twenty weeks in and I haven't seen a goddamn how so yeah that's just let's just roll the dice but it should be sort of exciting when you're when you really desperately need another plague doctor to fit you know - because you lost one from your a team you need you need to bring one back and we made the conscious choice though of not to try to balance them all this to varying degrees of success but it wasn't just because it would be difficult we actually wanted it to feel a little spiky you know like first-edition dee dee like it's crazy monks and you know among some magic users are basically just like babies and radio Flyers that you have to pull around for the first couple levels and then you know but then by the time they get to level 12 it's crazy they're wiping out entire armies and that kind of stuff and I think that's biking this is really fun you know sometimes there's this like crusade to balance the hell out of your game I think it really depends what you're trying to accomplish if it's a multiplayer you know it's hearthstone yes if it's a single-player RPG where you know you don't like aliens or you don't like highwayman as much it's not a critical issue and this we even had conflict in the team on this I mean there was times that people kind of bring these things to me and I'm just like I'm really not worried by that problem right now and I think it was hard for people to understand but it it was a conscious choice of I'm worried about the implosion system right now I'm worried about something else not the high woman's DPS and also I think something that's forgotten is that characters did the sum of their entire usage throughout the game in particular combat encamping and so a lot of times again to reference VPS we like to characters DPS it slow and what about the camping skills you know what about their versatility what about their range of skills and where they can be positioned in the in the party and things like that and there were there were plenty of times where a character was underpowered across the board and not intentionally and so we did you know that early access was great for that but I think a lot of times people look at the immediate usage of something and not be not kind of the entire entirety another thing that was really bad about what we did but good it was everybody's favorite Lord and Savior ahran Jesus we have a lot of our uses in the game a lot of variants a lot of merits intentionally so - you know which is not always great but if you make all the right choices in darkest dungeon you plan you assemble a great team you're experienced you pick the right quest you etc etc we want you still to get your ass kicked some times basically now I want to be clear we don't have an a director system so similar to us talking about the stagecoach we don't have something that detects your doing well and then we swoop in and make it harder for you we just rely on the beauty of RNG this invariance the darkest dungeon is poker poker if everyone has bad beats in poker if you play poker and oddly enough everyone's bad deep story is exactly the same it's just told differently I was winning I should have won I didn't and we want you to experience those in darkest dungeon we don't want to like the tuning part the craftsmanship the design is how often right how often do we you know do we want you to experience that two-thirds of the time no if you prepared and planned and took the right party group into the right dungeon and you know provisioned appropriately and didn't you know grab every bookcase and Iron Maiden if you didn't have the right stuff for it you should do well but every once in a while things go badly and we want to put you in an uncomfortable space of I should be winning right now this is getting away from me do I run you know do I abandon do I change my plan or do I hang in here and push through and there's a couple you know this can go a variety of different ways maybe you make that gut check and you hang in there and you win and that should be a moment that you you love the game you should also applaud yourself for having a self-control to retreat and go back to town and lick your wounds and I think that it's hard to communicate that and that's why we put that first screen up when I showed you like darkest dungeon is about making the most of that situation we're conditioned to play where you're expect success especially in last few years with mobile games and things you expect success and it's really just a matter of solving the problem to get there and if you don't have success you reload in and try and try again until you get there and we fund really wanted to change that and sometimes I think it's hard to communicate that to players that they'll buy the game and then this will happen it's just like what have I gotten into and the game is not intended for everyone and that that's something that you know we I think went well but it also caused us amount of grief as well another thing that you know on my role of just our role of just doing things that you shouldn't do we you know in our final boss I'm going to show a little bit for the final boss so if you don't to see a cover your eyes if you're still working your way through the game and I'm gonna make just play it up all my planet of a whole breathe in our displease field so half of the world John Celestine you know it's a gangsta come onto your vehicle [Music] for [Music] whoa you [Music] portal I'm not reliable I forgot how mobile is that you get in so yes we did just completely kill a character that raised a level six with no depth or no nothing we just took them away you know and you by that time you probably put I don't know ten hours in that character maybe a little more who knows hopefully it was in foam actually if it was raining Oliver dismiss that maybe all the more meaningful the tutorial characters of course so yeah that's a terrible design decision like that's a rage inducing thing but we're so happy we did it we couldn't be happier actually anyway there's a hole I don't know if you got a chassis Chris Chris's talk yesterday on the creative direction in the game but that was really important paying off this cosmic horror and the overall narrative and when that goes up on the ball I encourage you to check that out he'll talk more about that battle but we wanted you to experience a final battle in a specific way and darkest dungeon has been about lost the whole time and so yeah we're a little cheap and we make you remember that even more during the final battle I'm going to kind of get a little faster through some of these so we go through another thing that was pointed out very often to us about poor design here was healing versus damage healing it does not keep like the amount of healing the numerical value do not keep pace with the amount of damage you receive and you know that was repeatedly reminded to us and we're like awesome by design so yeah the quest or a battle of attrition the longer you go eventually your character should die and become afflicted and stress out and the whole game is about can you get to the end of the quest before that happens or how much loss are you willing to stomach if this is your favorite character are you going to I think what do they call it gold breaking it or whatever where you know you people always want their fully healed don't want to make any risk so you could get 1/3 and a dungeon be like screw this amount whereas other people are like I'm willing to lose two heroes to get through this even a zekiel you know when you lost that third hero he held it together pretty well he knew he was trying to kill the necromancer and it was worth sacrificing characters he only lost it when double death blow to the end which to be fair I think would do it to anybody and so one of the things that works really well in the game is just bringing some rules you know the same one is the one I always come back to the way I love to play games I like permissive safe who are you to tell me how I should and shouldn't save my game but when we talked about darkest dungeon we realized that would not work it would rob the player of the experience that we intend them to have and that was an interesting thing to be advocating and fighting for something that you don't even agree with normally you agree with it for this game and I think that's a really important point you should never lose sight that you are designing for that game not all games or rules of thumb or like make sure you never do this so write the rules what kind of hustle through this combat is interesting we did we didn't end up with this at this exact orientation initially we're going to do kind of an Ultima style top-down may be 2d at least that's what I was really interested in at first we were very inspired by this classic gauge bard's tale I think you can see the DNA and the old barge tail would be like the first four characters can attack and melee the next characters can attack and range I think you see that in our system and that you know the positional requirements in some classes are definitely more geared towards melee attacks than others this is a little more the art side that the gold box games pull irradiance I know we talked about how effective it was they just had an idol and an attack you know they sit there and then they just go and you know I mean not to undersell the amazing freaking art that these guys did you know but we're not a game that's fully and you know anyway with all these crazy keepers they made the most of kind of a light amount of that that's a little ton amount of work I will add before they kill me there I'm a right now it makes me nervous we did a lot of visual prototyping this is something that worked well working with Chris that sometimes saves us having to like code things up or make things and try them we would kind of he would sketch the foul here talk about the system kind of mock up what it might look like find the holes in that and I think that was helpful here's an example of realizing hey not only with this new system in the slots but you know we can have characters that are bigger he was working out you know what poses might be required you know trying to figure out tooltips which is I should think at one point I was big naming tooltip or something I don't know it ended up like this and I think combat is something that has really served the game well probably one of the biggest unknowns in combat for me was is will there will there be enough depth in this one the system and it was still something honestly I thought even up through the last dungeon the cove you know it's starting to get like okay how many more like weird moves can I think of her status effects or ways to pay off this but I ad held together and I think there was definitely enough depth to pay it off so that was that was good and in particular I think one subsystems death door that was effective was was this earth of combat scuse me with death door and this didn't start in there you know we were playing combat and as you might imagine without the desktop mechanic so the desk door mechanic essentially means you can't be killed in one blow so without death story you might be sitting at two-thirds health someone gets a crit your character is dead and with perma death that's crazy like you can never be safe even at full health you can never be safe and we didn't want it like that because then that robs you of all that that you're there tense all the time or you're never tense because you're just like roller all already dead so what does it matter so in this case you know a damaging attack the most it can do is reduce you to death's door and then you have potentially a chance to heal or do something of that character you know before before they die now you can still die obviously because sequences of events you know you might not get a turn in between your hero may be afflicted that the character you're turning heal may be afflicted etc you may have not brought healers so you know there's plenty of death but this desk door is I think it's like for such a simple system it's been so effective in raising the tension I love that what those moments where your characters go to death door and you're nervous and you're confronted with the lost I retreat should I try to heal and that's worked out really well narration you know is huge we brought this narrator in for our announcement trailer I don't think at that point we had even thought about usually one in the game but he was so amazing Chris had found these Lovecraft audiobooks read by Wayne Jun we contacted when Jun got him to read for a trailer and it was just like okay he's in we have to put him in the game there's there's no way we can't a little slide tidbit is a Red Hook is named after the story or at Red Hook so we're not in Brooklyn which this could you know I wish I would have thought of that before because I'll we're right next to each other we're in Vancouver but we just thought Red Hook sounded cool it is kind of a classic story of like you know power and corruption not maybe the best in terms of Lovecraft's cultural sensitivities so in retrospect we feel bad for her naming after that story but Red Hook sounds cool so it's really yeah just this quote the narrator has done so much and by remarkability I mean I mean just virality of the game people talking about it and things like that aside from its quality and this happens all the time it's crazy post a trailer and it'll just be strings of comments of the narrator lines you know a reddit post or it you know twitch channels and that's really fun to see even pop in places that aren't darkest dungeon someone will say one thing and it'll just go and audio as a whole worked really well I mean this is a design talk but the reason I want to mention it is it reinforces the gameplay experience if any of you do play racing games without the sound on I don't understand you because I think there are a lot more fun with the sound on and it's not just enhancing like the experience its enhancing the game design which I'm grateful for narration here is just this is where I started to block out like where should he speak watch if you talk about what kinds of things should he say and just want to play a couple lines the human mind fragile like a robin's egg there can be no hope in this hell no hope at all grievous injury palpable fear more dust more ashes more disappointment on that note of disappointment a good time to switch into the other side of the talk on a narration aside I wanna say yeah Wayne's awesome power up master the lines and did the effect Chris and I did Ryan Chris did most of the writing and like some of the lines yeah are just really fun to see and you know I think he can recently someone's like where does the trinkets and baubles whine I haven't heard that in a while we're like I don't know it's like a bug but someone remembered the line so well they were very upset I wasn't playing so I love just listening to it and then I think for forgive me one time carp had Wayne record some other other like joke lines for each of us and it was it was really fun so yeah he's got that voice that sticks out but yes disappointment so how many of you are familiar with the corpse corpse the great corpse event okay not that many okay that's good so we push this during early access we push this amazing patch called the hounding corpse or corpse and hound or I don't know it had all kinds of awesome stuff the hound master sanitarium features like new and awful diseases steam cloud safe which is kind of cool but not as cool diseases corpses in combat see we were so excited about it is even a bullet point and there's going to be a real a little relevant here but if you remember the end of the Dark Knight where basically things start going poorly for Batman that man takes a lot of a lot of blame for some things leading up to the corpse in town so we launched early access on February 3rd of last year and you know it did I mean there's no two bones about it did far better than we thought it was going to do you know we were just we were launching into a climate of early access really being looked down upon you know there had been some kind of high profile maybe disappointments and you know there was even this whole early axis was dead you know everyone likes to proclaim the death of the next thing so early access is dead you know and we're like okay we're about to launch you know and we launched into that environment I mean we put our best foot forward we delay because in the fall we really want to launch early access it wasn't ready we delayed honestly we were all running extremely thin on a personal runways and you know that we kind of had to launch they were like all right but we had no idea was going to be received so well to be honest and I think you could ask well actually care Keira thought of me received well the rest of us were nervous as hell a month later my dad died so I went from the highest high of my professional life no question to the lowest low of my personal life grateful he got to see the launch I got to share with him how that was going but when you're small team you know and any one discipline that is taken out of action your whole team is is derailed I mean not everybody's not taken out of action but how are you going to push a patch that incorporates all disciplines when one person is out of action this is my dad in his natural environment so we had planned that fiends in frenzy patch which was our first you know real big non like support update and originally it was probably going to try to go in March or April but you know that didn't happen I was kind of out of commission for a while and so we pushed it in May and it was received pretty well I think yeah and things have been just rolling you know so the corpsmen hound was really though our first time because the frames and frenzy had been pre-planned in a way like when you were content and aside from some gameplay tweaks it was sort of pre-loaded and the corpse in town was the first chance to really like collect collect info from the community and step back and go what game systems are not working what's not working the way we want what can we do and one of the things it technically wasn't in the corpse in town it came in screens in frenzy was around the time was heart attacks so what had happened is the players that were getting good at the game could do these dark runs they would basically push their team to full affliction and they realized that the afflictions were not incapacitating it so far that your team couldn't function and so I just stopped caring about stress or torchlight or anything and they would just go they would just go run these people through and that that definitely wasn't the feeling we wanted our we want you always to feel in a precarious situation and so the heart attack system came into play which basically was at a hundred you you have your affliction check and and then that resolves but stress continues to build you have a little bit of a shock absorber there but if you get to two hundred and the smiley face you're dead don't worry it filled a very important gameplay role very important role in terms what we're trying to get you experience and at the time actually you know there's a little bit of you know a little bit of like oh this is a little rough but not generally not outcry so then in the corpse and hound we did corpses which which was very important to so what you see here in this screen images of course in the front there and so there have been a dominant strategy that you know the table-saw strategy which is focus fire everything on the first enemy take them out and then that collapses everybody forward and the the enemies in back generally they just like heroes had skill prerequisites so if you're an archer in the back you get collapsed forward you can't use your you can't use your attack and so it was just too strong to focus fire in the front and it kind of reduced the rest of our combat system to maybe irrelevance in terms of like positioning ranged attacks debuff buffs etc so the course is the way they work you you kill the enemy they leave a corpse it remains there they hold their formation they don't collapse forward and the course will eventually go away or you can spend some extra actions or resources to eliminate it and this enhance just did a lot of things it fix the dominant strategy it enhanced the systems that we had built and we thought it did so thematically we didn't implement it up to our usual a standard and that's partially for reasons I'll get to in terms of like you know usually we try to blow you away visually and this was no fault the artists week you know it was a gameplay experiment in a way so every courts look the same we didn't have custom courses per enemy and things like that and also we have thought of a lot other ideas or at least ahead in terms of could buff up the front rank enemy melee enemies to generally be a lot tougher these sorts of things so it was better than the other design options oh yeah well I thought people are gonna love it I love device it's it's really hard to overstate how much they lost their minds it's definitely I mean at least me but I think Chris would agree it's the hardest thing we've had to deal with on the game and we've had a lot of challenges on the game and hardest probably just emotionally it splintered our community which had been big and growing and excited and generally a really we have had it very very good it was very positive everything had been received well generally you know and people were kind of patiently waiting for us to plug some holes in the game it created this changing way of sentiment and it was an easily told story that's promising game gone bad that wasn't fun to look at steam look at you know that helpful reviews and see literally four pages of nothing but negative this is a whole story in itself but this also coincided with people that were not just unhappy that we had added this into the game but that decided that we were basically the most terrible people on the face of the planet and remain to believe that way today and I think this narrative vs. truth was hard for us because what I mean by that is people who played the game and said I don't like the course is awesome you know that's we respect that opinion people are like I heard they ruin the game you know it's like well where did you hear that from that was tough because we were we were also you know still continued developed the game and we have been excited by how well the game that received this patch launched in July and I remember thinking you know people are going to be they're going to grouse a little bit it's a big change for them they'll get used to it and I was in Colorado so my my father had been cremated and went back to Colorado where we're from to turn him and you know your family etc and you know it's a few months later after you died and I remember was either the night before we're going to bury him or the night after Chris calls me up and we're having this talk and he was like it's getting really bad like I don't know what to say like they're not they're not getting used to it they're starting you know if the community is blowing up it was a tough it was a tough time and this is one way to illustrate it in July we're really lucky to have you know very popular website that serves a lot of gamers that are executives or gamers that we want to reach they put us in this top 50 RPGs of all time I mean these are like games like Ultima or on there and it was a huge honor they're like this is the only early access game that's even on this list and this was just like it yeah it was it was hard to overstate our excitement of that that was July and we pushed the curbs in town patch this was August from the same publication so what you know I'm fully afflicted at this point for sure you just pegged at like 190 stress and we didn't have our desk door mechanic and a heart attack thing yet so that was rough and I kept hinging on these three words a sad state I mean when I read that something just clicked in my head you know that just it was just hard to even comprehend because we're still in early access and we have been this example of an early access game done right and now basically we're being left for dead on the roadside like they they took this great game and they drove it into a concrete pillar you know and I couldn't get over faint like we're still we're still working on the game here and this fundamentally changed my view of early access I'm super pro early access for the record I would happily do it again I think we're just we know more what to expect but I thought early access would be a time to experiment with gameplay mechanics and I don't know that that's really true especially if your games already working that's rough if your games not working I think you have the onus you know you need to improve it but massive changes to people that have already bought your game is it's a tough it's a thorny problem it's even ethical they paid for the game now you're changing it you know that that's hard so Chris and I spent a lot of time talking a whole lot of time talking a lot of Google Hangouts some drinking some pity parties some anger you know the full range of emotions and but what it always came down to is did be the right thing and I remember just thinking like okay like guys just laid on me just tell me did it you know was this a horrible mistake because corpses were my idea and I had sold it up through the team you know just tell me I don't care I'll eat crow whatever it is I just want to make the game right you know and I was losing my ability to see objectively so it's great because Chris and I spent a lot of time switching positions doubles acted all these discussions what to do meanwhile we have this community management crisis it's not like we have time to just do this calmly and you know etc and one thing that was also relevant is just the psychology of change I mean in other organizations it's a whole field of study change management you know some of you may be familiar people don't want to change theirs you know who moved my cheese and all that and not to throw a team member under the bus but you know one thing that have been in my mind before we did this change is that you know combat have been working and Kristen and Pierre work to add this combat camera which is like its face it to look like 3d if you notice in the game that it likes ways to look like 3d anyway I remember put in and one of the guys on the team saw and said I think this is verbatim this is the worst [ __ ] thing I've seen my entire life a week later two weeks layers like cool so I thought that would happen of courses so it the long story short and I got a hospital kids that I wanted to leave a little time for her QA is that we decided was right for the game it was the right from mechanical decision it was the right thing Matic decision we stood by it you know that that's of course a hard decision to make and we respect the opinions of people that disagree so we're in this weird dilemma do we remove this and make what we consider a worst game to make people happy and this is something that got us through the next six months going to hurry through here but you know Chris kept bringing up like things had gone so well for us to be honest it's like at some point you're going to make a mistake or you're going to you know that you have to fall off the pig and this was hard I mean I'd say fast forward six months but the last six months up till launching January was pretty rough I mean we're sitting here and going is the final story on darkest dungeon going to be a promising game that was ruined and living with that uncertainty I think is instructive just because you'd think we'd be writing high on the early access to sex know we're running high and like what's the legacy of the gear running low and what's the legacy of the game going to be fast forward I think interesting part of change management is ultimately these changes were received well and even people that had expressed concern in July when they review the game they're like I see why they did this and so that was good what got us through is just holding to that creative vision investing in more community mean these are things we did wrong we didn't invest in community management upfront we were too precious about how to present the game that people enforce our way of playing it down their throats so we added toggle options and I think that's something that we needed to do and you know and we learn from this experience and it also reminded us that did you know we'd always said DNA is not a game for everyone and this reminds us that that was the case so that's the key learning about early access content is always good I think that you know substantive gameplay changes you want to have community management in place you want to warn them of the changes we do this better now hey this is coming down the line just beware this what do you think about this we push it in a in a beta branch let people try it out and you know that that was stuff we really learned a few other things I'm a skip there and then this leave just a couple minutes for questions the bold points are what I want to emphasis other things we have a lot of grind in the game we didn't even add the end game until full launch and so we didn't get the benefit of tuning after early access or doing that tuning now and you know certainly I think one of the things we've been repeatedly deemed on is is this grind we like a consequence but losing your full level six heroes and having to rebuild it just causes some people to just throw the game away we don't want that so we've been doing some things to help help with those exploration was really tough design mechanic I still believe like we haven't totally paid off you know the walking and the quest and the curios in particularly the game started it was this Auto walk you just they kind of walk down the hall and then things happen it was terrible and we almost were going to restructure all of exploration when we made it active it just made it so much better so that was something that we spent a lot of time spinning our wheels on everybody's favorite mechanic hunger it's not that we can't improve it it's just that we're you know it did enough and after the corpse thing quite frankly we're like if we make a hundred system and it's worse oh man the jocks will free we have these events where you should ever lunch husband where we have these events where you'd be walking down like how to pull an event card and someone happened one of them was this jostle free it's like hey you're walking down the hallway and something falls out of your pack and it just can imagine the rage just like your nice trinket just literally just tuck it away randomly and so this this this one's really good because it brought up what we call the Johnson free rule is you know we do a lot to you but don't arbitrarily with no you know another way of saying it is this yeah never fully cut you know it's like go get the twenty wolf pelts there's a lot of stuff that that we could have done I'm gonna skip right through here kiddo and have a couple minutes for question sorry in the end that fortunately this engine isn't too dark here's some of the stuff I want to say about retention we're not we didn't design with retention in mind but the interesting thing about it is just that it's a sign of do people come back and play more and that's important to us when you played it and started you come back the next day because you want to play again and that you know mobile PC whatever that's that's hugely important more than all those things is we feel like we made the game we set out to make and that feels good we're ready to live or die by that vision and I'm really you know we're incredibly grateful that people have enjoyed it a little bit about what's coming we're not done we're still pushing some features we're coming to other platforms we're going to enable modders stuff like that and this is used even the Red Hook team today I'm happy to announce game number two from Red Hook Studios brightest in all right we got a couple minutes for questions and then afterwards you know we'll move out we'll probably it kicked out in a minute we have five minutes okay great what time period does the game take place in uh yeah we we narrowly refined a time period to roughly 500 AD to 900 1880 no it really is I mean you've got the Hellion which is kind of almost a Pictish you know a barbarian on up to the Highwaymen with his you know little scarf and and pistols and yeah that's kind of part of our lowers you know we we wanted it or the Crusader and is you know having metal armor all the way up for the musketeer so yeah we purposefully kind of have created this alternate universe that isn't super defined there and can you speak to the level clamping that was done where the high-level characters are no longer able to go on the low-level journeys and what reinforced that decision yeah sure yeah so we've talking about is basically we as your characters level up we prevent you from taking them on lower level quests and you know power leveling your younger heroes it's not it's not super popular all the time but the bottom line is if you can do that the game is robbed of its attention and you know this is kind of like maybe something that there's an incredibly eloquent from a design perspective we're kind of hitting you on the head with a hammer but it was absolutely critical to make sure that we keep you in this risk thing so we loosely justify it and say you know as they level up they get big heads and they're like I don't want to waste my time down and you're you know like you're the F in jeans you guys go on your mission I'm sticking with the experience guys I think even Band of Brothers had kind of a cool thing like that where they're like as they you know as they progress they're just like the new recruits would comment like don't talk to them they're new if they've lived through a couple missions and we'll talk to them but you know we were not able to express that so but it's ultimately because we want you in a position of risk in the game and if we let you do it you can just grind your way through the game and actually not be tense and then we'd rather have you have fun and be tense then like succeed and and not be tense thank you I first of all thank you very much for the talk it was really great I'm not sure for what it's worth I think you made the right call I think the game that you wanted to make all your decisions to go towards that in the community will probably get used to it eventually as far as the question you mentioned that when you were in early access a lot of the stuff that you changed obviously was in the course stuff what was the mother stuff that you changed during early access and did any of it like surprise you yeah I mean we did a lot of care here of changes based on feedback a lot of stuff we had planned out you know we knew we were going to make the new dungeons things like that I mean I think of one thing we changed in the sanitarium was we split treatment into diseases and quirks we allowed the ability to lock lock quirks in and also if some negative courts could could become permanent and then those would cost more to unlock so I think that was like really necessary to pay off that system more and that you know that wasn't something we knew exactly upfront trying to think of some other things you know more mechanics every hero that we tried to put in we tried to usually do a new mechanic and how Nestor had his pet and the dog treats the man-at-arms had the repast and so that was really fun because and also challenging because every time we added a new mechanic or like oh man I wish we could retrofit this through the whole game and we weren't always able to do that I think it's one reason that a lot of people like the code monsters the best mechanically because you know they came the latest and we were able to make full use of all the whole pallet at that point so oftentimes in design you run into situations where parts of the game feel like they're fighting themselves like for instance I just kind of you talk a lot about creating the human connection with the unit um but then also like because you get such a large supply of them it's almost better for as a player to not connect with them so you don't get all tilted when they die similarly you talked a lot about how you put so much effort and work into the affliction system where the players spent most of their time trying to avoid eclipsing they spend a lot of the time trying to avoid scrapped altogether yeah how do you kind of deal with that as a designer figuring out where to kind of draw the line of what's helping in what screen some of it we intentionally don't totally draw a line the hero the hero one for example and Chris talked about a little bit yesterday it's talk but people play the game differently so some people get very very attached to name their hero to encourage you to name your house after your the loved ones and and then when they die you know you lose your mind that's awesome we love that and then some people become very jaded and they look at them as meat bags that are basically means to an end and you know they're going to name them or they name them like you know Crusader to Crusader three or sometimes you know a little bit like you know Baldwin one Baldwin two so they had a name originally and then they keep his lineage up but a lot of people post you know everything's postal so like this game you know I have these heroes they're dead I hate it what am I doing wrong I'm terrible at the game and then people will say okay you're thinking this all wrong you look at these you need to just go in there you need to run them to their deaths until you get some money dismiss them pick a few select heroes to really invest in let the other ones just you know and I love that interplay there's no right way to do it so there we let that kind of take care of itself as far as like the affliction of system yeah that's hard because we want you to be afflicted so the way the way that's a balance issue that if I watch you know streams or get a lot of feedback that man people are just going through and they never get afflicted I'm like are that's a problem we need increased stress damage you know I want people to get afflicted and so that that's a game balance issue hi so speaking of naming characters after your family you mentioned high level characters dying and not being a really big turn-off I know the same thing happens in games like XCOM was that something you didn't think you would be able to fix or was it something that like reinforced that like hopelessness motif I mean in a perfect world would you add something that would help making getting your feedback yeah so we just did actually we just pushed something to help get your feedback last week so now we have in the stagecoach there's an upgrade tree that allows you to unlock the ability to hire high-level heroes and so that's really important with and then the what else we increase the power leveling benefit from heroes that have been to the darks dungeon come back and have the never again trait and so I would say that originally we wanted that sense of loss but one minute left we want that sense of loss but really like getting wiped in a full level six no that's too much like it's too much if someone literally walks away and up and play the game again we want you to be angry for a night and then come back tomorrow and be victorious and so I think we just kind of had to think of how to do that and you know we're losing a level to heroes no big deal losing for level six is a big deal so yeah we're actively trying to improve that thank you mm-hmm all right left left question I think when should a game go early access when it's ready I my advice is wait as long as you can because early access we now had a number of successes and not that I mean just there's been lots of good games in early access as well and I think that people will always be receptive to more good early access games but they will very quickly jump on games that are not fun not buggy yet so you really have to make those hard choices of you know is this game ready for primetime I think a game that fundamentally has its looped in place and it's fun but maybe out of balance in missing some content that that's where like if we do our next game I think we know it's fun we don't know about the balance and it's maybe you know 50 percent content complete that might be a good time to launch I think if you're like let's throw it out there and see where it lands I would do your own sort of private play testing first because there's it's really hard to come back from the perception that it's a bad game all right let's go sleep the last one who's on your a-team I don't play this game it's too stressful thank you very much please fill out your reviews you know when you get the email it'd be great to know and you know maybe they'll invite me back again after Brian if kittens

Channel: GDC

Views: 340,888

Rating: 4.8840737 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, darkest dungeon, rpg, goth, gothic, horror, steam, ps4

Id: 0IUaGQhlPwo

Length: 63min 22sec (3802 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/_GameSHARK]

An hour long and appears to be from last year, but I can tell you right away that DD's biggest problem is an over-reliance on RNG because of the way it's setup. XCOM has a lot of RNG at work, but the player can control for virtually all of it via tactical positioning - where you engage the enemy, how you engage the enemy, when you engage the enemy, order of decisions (which enemy is the most important? Is it more important to take the 100% shot that will definitely kill the weaker enemy or should you bank on that 75% crit shot killing the officer?, strategic decisions (order of research, how you build your base, etc) - and other things, to the point that if you fail a mission it's almost certainly due to player error.

DD, especially early in the game, can fuck you over even when you did everything right. You may not get a set of heroes that really synergize together, you might have the same person get crit twice in a row and be targeted by all four enemies and die (failing their very first death save) before you can even take an action.

That's not "making the best of a bad situation," that's "because fuck you for playing my game!" It's absolutely horrible design from a high-level standpoint because it very rarely increases tension or enjoyment, just makes the game really frustrating. I can count on one hand the number of times I had a character death or mission failure in a way that felt fair, that actually increased my engagement in the game. I would need several feet and hands to count the number of times I went "wow, that's fucking stupid" in regards to character death and/or mission failures. And this isn't like "I forgot to cover my squad from above so the thin man crit my dude in cover because he had a height advantage I forgot to factor in," this is "ADVENT trooper takes a 1% shot, crits my guy for all his health, and my guy doesn't make his bleed out check."

I'm not sure if anything can really be done about this, because there's only so much you can do with a Final Fantasy style turn-based setup like they have. There's extremely little tactical depth to it, it's mostly about taking the right classes with the right skills and trinkets to the right zones, and using the right abilities in the right order in combat. There's depth to it, but an uncomfortable amount of the game is still reliant on RNG.

DD is a very flawed product. I'm still not sure if I could rate it "recommend" or "do not recommend." My opinion usually improves with time away from the game, and degrades with time spent playing it. Next time I pick it up, I'll probably look into modding it since I think a lot of the RNG could at least be compensated for with "numbers changes" and other simple things like that.

EDIT: To give context to what would be "making the best of a bad situation": you accidentally activate two (or three, or god forbid four) pods of aliens at once in XCOM; even with excellent tactics from here on out (activating multiple pods at a time is typically a tactical blunder in itself, though sometimes you don't really have much choice due to time limits etc) you will probably take damage and maybe even lose troops. Making the best of a bad situation is Mutons or Stun Lancers or other advanced troops showing up a week earlier than anticipated, before you have your tier 2 weapons out.

"The enemy team all randomly decided to hit the same dude, two of them crit, and your dude randomly failed their random death save on the first attempt" is not "making the best of a bad situation." It's deliberately telling the player to fuck off... and guess what? Most of them will.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/mylamington]

The logic behind the corpse mechanic makes a lot of sense on paper but poorly executed. Dead bodies hindering your movement doesn't make a lot of sense realistically. It should be something else that explains why they are still in range distance other than corpses

[u/CertusAT]

The game is too grindy for the level of deadliness it has.

The deadlier a game, the less the punishment for that death it should have, especially if a lot of RNG is involved. In this game you get penalized HEAVILY by losing hours of progression and careful game play.

Fuck that shit.

[u/hbkmog]

I think the game is fun for the first 5-10 hours or so until you soon realize that you are basically repeating a lot of grind to catch up with the game's meta aka town development.

On the micro scale, the game do really scratch the gambler's itch. The heavily RNG based game design serves a great way to stimulate the dopamine release in player's brain. If you strip it to the core, a lot of the enjoyment of the game ultimately works the same way as pulling the lever of a slot machine and cookie clicker. Here I'm talking about the core pure gameplay loop.

[u/Indetermination]

This game is too stressful for me, honestly. I feel like i'm bad at it, no matter how well i'm doing.

[u/[deleted]]

I feel like I'm one of the few people here who really enjoys DD. I'm 24 hours in on this run. Yeah, I've had people die to bullshit thugs. Yeah, that's the game. It literally says how unforgiving it is when it starts up. Radiant mode is much more forgiving and rushing for the Blood Vault district in the CC DLC makes the curse more of a buff than a debuff.

[u/[deleted]]

Does anyone have any recommended mods for this game? I just bought it to play on my GPD Win, but haven't really du into it yet.