Basically Iāve always just been a game fanatic I'm old enough that I did play like Space Invaders in the arcade and, you know, had Pong at home and Atari 2600 when it wasn't retro And I think just I've always kind of had a passion that I've always just filled a part of my life that nothing else has I don't think I totally understood that game design was a career that I could pursue my previous career was aerospace engineering My first job out of college was Lockheed Skunk Works which was like the dream company that I wanted to land at and I got there and I found myself spending all day thinking about games I didn't know anyone that made games for a living and there weren't as many materials online so I was just like well I guess I'll just try to make some games so I made this trilogy of non collectible card games called I still love this name, Night of the Ill Tempered Squirrel I watched the movie Ed Wood with Johnny Depp about this auteur, horrible B movie monster director Ed Wood so I made this game about you're trying to make the worst movie possible and then Witch Hunt which I got inspired after going to the Salem Witch Trial Museum that was a game all about falsely accusing your friends / neighbors and getting them hanged for witchcraft and you want to win by having your villagers survive to the end and then the third one was Shrimpin' which was after watching Forrest Gump and the whole bit where he opens up a shrimping business with his friend for whatever reason those three games alI happened really fast so I packaged them together and I sold them as like a trilogy, but they weren't printed they were print-and-play so this was like 1999 or 2000 so I was kind of a pioneer in the early print-and-play board games which I also like to say is as a pioneer as a person that got shot with arrows and murdered because who wants to download and print out their own board game but what it allowed me to do is like learn how to make and publish a game without having the money to like actually physically print a game I'm a kind of game systems designer with no artistic ability at all so board games are still really where just you and a paper cutter can make this happen and it's the purest isolation of game mechanics which is kind of especially so but I ended up doing aircraft engineering for a good eight years before I finally broke into games full-time but during that eight years I was doing board games and stuff moonlighting basically, you know nights and weekends so I grew up, my parents got me a Sega Master System when I was pretty young And I played a lot of Wonder Boy and Alex Kidd and as many games as I could get my hands on they got a PC, it was like a Tandy 286 or something I think Eye of the Beholder 2 was one of the first games where I really like immersed in it and the sense of wonderment and uncertainty and like dread that came from exploring and stuff like it was the first game of think they really elicited an emotional response any more so than just the standard ādid I beat it?ā excitement, that kind of thing I loved superheroes growing up I was always drawing, emulating what I saw in comic books and you know, trying to like at age 13 develop my own style which is insane you know one day my style would be Todd McFarlaneās style and the next day my style would be someone else's, I was just copying but I learned like anatomy and all that stuff slowly over time and I got this issue of X-Force it was like a Rob Liefeld comic but he did the first two pages and then Mike Mignola did the main section of the book is like a flashback or something and I remember I hated it I felt like comic book art should be super detailed like I just decided that at some point so I was super pissed off when this like hardcore black and white was in the middle of the comic yeah I read it and then I got mad and put it away and then I was like 'Who even draws like that?' and I'd rummage through my stack and pull it out again and look at it and really it actually just stuck with me how sculptural it was and how minimalist it was this was such a rejection of those like fundamental beliefs that I had built for myself that I think like that it kind of shocked me and really opened my eyes to like wow there's like a million other ways you can draw things that was my first exposure to Mike Mignola and obviously it was a big influence on me and didn't know what I wanted to do with myself after University I got accepted for an animation diploma and I hated animation, I fucking hated animation but I liked doing the texture painting and I liked doing the concept art and that kind of thing and during that time I kind of created like a 2D side-scroller along with Dana Fortier who works here now So this sidescroller I did was called Hateful Chris like I read No Logo by Naomi Klein and then I watched Fight Club and then I lived in a tent and then when I came back I was like consumerismās the worst so I made a game about it and we even got a PS2 publishing deal with Ubisoft Unfortunately they canceled it but that was my first you know foray into the games industry officially was like I kind of created my own job in a sense and then after that kind of fell apart I just did some freelance here and there and then got picked up to work at Digital Eclipse which became Backbone I think within the first year of me working there and I worked on a massive RPG for the N-Gage phone It was really cool it was a fun project I learned a lot but the screen kind of left a lot to be desired so I joined Backbone Entertainment in 2004 and that's actually where I met Chris at first it was just you know I had a lot of respect for his artistic ability and then gradually as that happened then we start becoming friends I think I just recognized in Tyler that there was someone who valued some of the same things in terms of game design like he's a real systems focused guy and I really like that too but I don't have the math background to pay those checks I think we recognize that we had complementary skill sets and we also like got along and shared sense of humor and that kind of thing I think we really bonded over poker actually that kind of became like the foundation of our friendship was just like games and poker and uh, and whiskey you know companies go through these ups and downs and growth periods and various diversions and we both weren't too happy there after a couple years I remember we are both getting kind of itchy feet at the same time and I was like I want to be the first one out the door not the last one and then Chris is like āhey I'm leaving,ā and Iām like damn it we both kind of gone for different opportunities that popped up I went to a little company called Big Sandwich Games and I've been working for this film and television company and I was phasing myself out of that so I freelanced again for a little while and then did a stint at a Microsoft Studio and then that game got canceled and uh I have a storied history of canceled games Our kind of actual careers kept doing this where someone would kind of become free and the other person- well I'm busy but we always had that kind of in the back of our heads and we would talk about a lot that hey you know we should we should work together sometime he had come up with this cool idea that we had been talking about and this idea we just kept coming back to like every time we get together weād just talk more about it, oh you know what we could do there we could do this or what if this, that would be crazy you know if you really think about it it would really suck to be an adventurer it kind of started as a joke the way power and the power fantasy of video games has always represented in like the measure of a man is like the size of his sword in games almost and I felt like there was an opportunity in there somewhere to sort of subvert that idea because really you can give me the biggest most powerful battle axe in the world and if an actual skeleton was coming at me I'd be terrified so scared I probably wouldn't even be able to swing this giant magical axe we talked a lot about like firemen and policemen and soldiers and people who commonly are referred to as heroes but then they go home and you know some of them chain-smoke and others gamble and they all have Theyāre just people theyāre flawed and I've always really loved the idea of the duality of someone who can be aspirational in there public life but then also have their own struggles like we all do the name darkest dungeon all of that was just kind of like these loose ramblings in sketchbook I just like the name big fan of alliteration There was so much material there to start riffing on and then like every time we were together weād just get really excited you know we could just fill notebook pages with different things that we could do and so it had this organic way of it, it just built steam We were both getting older you know and we are being offered other good positions you know we're both management level and we knew that the next play for careers if we wanted was like trying to go to a big AAA Studio say or you know I've always loved the indie thing so it's like gosh do I go to another indie company I just feel like I got to a point where I'd had enough if a project was going to get canceled I wanted to have an intimate understanding of the why and the how as opposed to just being informed one day that that was it and the only thing I hadn't done is really take a shot you know on my own project but yeah just the timing finally lined up we went out for like drinks to like gut check it we went to this beer restaurant they have like 84,000 beers on tap but we just drink whiskey all night and then by the end of it it was just like I don't even want to know what we looked like we had some whiskeys and I remember like looking at each other like no for real weāre gonna do this thing now right and he's like cuz I just got an offer from this company and kept asking each other like are you serious cause if we're going to do this man you know we're going to do this man and back and forth Like I think we just said the same thing for like 4 hours we made this like you know blood pact, whiskey pact to like finish the game and see it through and see how far we can go Red Hook Studios officially came into business in 2013 and it was Tyler and I he was on a IKEA chair and I was on my office chair and we were packed in this little room I can't imagine how bad that room smelled my half of it smelled amazing the concept behind Darkest Dungeon thereās so much with that literally is in the title you know we have like our standard like kind of quips that we would give at trade shows about you know, it's the worst job ever, it's uncertain pay and threat of constant death and that's kind of part of it but also I think we were craving certain adult sensibilities of looking at it you know if you take a film like Saving Private Ryan or something you know where it went from the kind of the John Wayne approach of representing World War II to the like hey you know this is pretty shitty like everything doesn't get tied up in a nice little bow there's mixes of heroism and cowardice and honestly like what is heroism without cowardice it's not that we wanted to make a game about how everything a shitty it's we wanted to make a game about when you really accomplished something heroic in a situation that is horrible then it's all the more meaningful I think it was really rooted in almost like our time Tyler and I spent as managers where you know you can set expectations for people, you can put targets you can talk to people about their performance but you can't force people to do things, you don't have like direct agency over people so I think we both really responded to this idea that the party generally takes their cues from you but if pushed too far they'll begin to act in ways that are outside of your control our particular brand of horror centers around the idea that you could lose a very valuable asset on a coin flip at any time and so that vulnerability and uncertainty is what creates a sense of dread in players and aligns them with the desired tone of the game there was a period when Chris and I thought it would just be us that I would make it in Game Maker and you know he would draw the art and it would be one of these little like 6 to 12 month projects and we would just do it and kinda get it out of our system and hopefully make a little dough I think he believed that was going to happen more than I believed it was going to happen but that was the ostensible plan fortunately we both had saved some money but we definitely knew we didn't have enough to fund through to completion that mean a couple things, we need to search out people that were willing to join us that also could sustain themselves for a while and we also went in search of money you know so we- Kickstarter was kind of always on our strategy and we also pursued what's known as the CMF, the Canadian Media Fund which is a really cool thing here in Canada that helps fund the arts and in this case interactive media They tend to fund alternative things that if they have a human or a Canadian connection thatās even better we had a lot of thoughts but like as part of like the application for that stuff you had to actually write some documents on like what is the product and what is your business plan and all these kinds of things so that was cool because it forced us to talk through like all the different stages of the project and you know like what the game can actually look like it's like one of the first games to really highlight the psychological damages that can happen from just like killing stuff all day and I mean I remember writing like the grant application for those thinking this I mean this- if anything was made for the CMF like this is going to get through I thought it was a slam dunk and they reward like these Innovative games and uh yeah, we got rejected When the CMF rejects you they write up kind of a little bit report but I need never know for sure exactly what the case is cause I think it's a bit of it like a jury selection process Where multiple people are judging it or whatever and yeah we got some feedback and I remember- oh yeah one of the piece of feedback I thought was funny was when I did the financial projections ācause one part of the application is like you know what do you think the game will do and I remember trying to make a realistic conservative projection because my goal in that was to say hey look, like we don't have to be a hit like if we just do okay you'll make your money back so you know it's a good investment for the CMF and one of the feedback was you know this doesn't look like a strong enough investment for us And I was like well shit I coulda projected it sold 5 million copies then we could have applied again but by that time we were like you know what this take away from actual development our best path is just keep making this sucker and bring it to Kickstarter at the time was a little demoralizing I guess but I think we believed strongly enough in the vision that you know it didn't really slow us down, it was kind of like well you know, we can still find a way to do this originally one of the first ideas we had for the way exploration and combat would work It was kind of like top-down, you're like four little isometric dudes on a tile kind of like a board game I mean a lot of what inspired us early was thinking of board games it started as a top-down perspective 'cause that's the first thing you think of right and sometimes you got to get your bad ideas out first so I did a bunch of sketches and mock-ups of what it could look like top-down We even had this idea where like you know thereād be four people on a square and you could like rotate the party depending on which monsters were coming at you or something but ultimately that just made it feel like a grid-based puzzle game or it also just- it's really hard to relate to the top of someone's head and it just didn't really echo this vibe of like claustrophobia and discomfort and latent horror that I felt like it was important it instead gave the players like a god's-eye view and when your God you're invulnerable and you don't feel threatened by anything and I really felt it was important both of us really felt it was important to threaten the player and make them feel as vulnerable as the heroes in the game And so the bigger and juicier we can make the sprites and the closer and more in-line with their eye line the playerās perspective is with the heroās perspective that would be a better approach and at least more holistically in line with the thematic core of the game and so that kind of led to like this exploration of like, we could do combat side view and I was over at Tylerās apartment and was just like scrawling stuff on a piece of photocopy paper and Iām like no no no check it out then they just smash together I probably like voiced some initial opposition on that like well I dunno 'cause like probably in my head I was already working out a system for the other stuff and it's really easy like once you're partially down the road of like figuring out a system then someoneās like wait, detour But combat was kind of where we wanted to start because we knew that the game was going to hinge on combat working and that new idea of the kind of way when did the positional like the four heroes and four enemies and we haven't seen anything exactly like that before I thought the interesting thing about the presentation how it all tied together is I thought back to games like Pool of Radiance the old gold box like Commodore 64 game where there were cute little pixels and then when they attacked they just have one keyframe they were just like whack and a little sound effect but I still like kind of satisfying like wether you hit or miss or crit it just felt good like I picked that game back up in the last year or two and it still feels strangely good And we got that to work and then we had this like whole thing of like okay well how do you even explore a dungeon 'cause the risk is like if you do a side-scroller will then now they have to jump and then we have to have things for them to jump over and then there's four of them so do they all jump and then are we making a platformer now oh my God that exploration was so stressful I think the side-scrolling in the dungeon I think that came about because hey we're in combat we're already seeing the side of these guys we should spend more time looking at them this way it'll be weird if we're just cutting from like a top-down running in a dungeon to like side-on in combat and so it kind of came out organically in retrospect all it has to do is tie together the combats and so we originally started it was going to be really simple like you just automatically walked your guys are just walking and they'd hit something and you make a decision that keep walking And that felt terrible I had like nightmares of the review being like 'Darkest Dungeon: Moving Right Into Shit' or something you know just like- like cause I just felt like maybe we're not gonna pay it out properly and it wasn't fun to just watch the guys so like, okay well what if you just pressed forward and held it and it seems absurd but that made all the difference in the world, it made it a lot more fun oddly enough to just press forward just adding to where it's active, you move forward, you can stop when you want made exploration feel tons better and we realized it all worked I tried to develop an art direction for it that reinforced a lot of these thematic and mechanical characteristics of the game so I looked alot of medieval woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts I looked at a lot of old comic book art, Chris Bachalo, Mike Mignola The Marquis by Guy Davis was another big touchstone for me these sort of stark and almost like in the best possible way they're ugly you know a lot of hard edges, thereās not a lot of round, smooth lines in the game to sort of reinforce this idea that your decisions are tough and uncompromising it's an edgy sharp world it's not a comfortable world the pooling blacks and having everything sort of recede Into darkness is meant to sort of evoke this idea that you're constantly fighting against being swallowed up either by you know desperation or fear or some affliction or some monster literally swallowing you up overall thereās a sense of like grit and noise in the art and that's there because I wanted the game to feel like it was almost made in the time it's describing I wanted the game to feel old and papery the assets themselves look like theyāre kind of well worn the way the heroes are well worn in the way the players get well worn after 80 hours of failure so it works on a couple levels you know, I had worked with Chris like twice before and I really liked his imagination and like his creativity Iām a visual person so that was a sort of thing that really drew me in at least the beginning and then when I saw the mechanics and how all these systems and things are going to tie together that was like oh wow okay cool this is a really neat the original idea was to not even really have any animation before Chris approached me they were just going to have kind of like little standy guys that may be moved around like that but it didn't work it didn't look good so I was like okay and let's just fully animate everything I really wanted to show off a lot of detail in his drawings so it was very much about moving like all the little things having everything move We were kind of like simultaneously trying to find a way to market the game as well as develop it and one of the ways that we did that is by making a kind of announcement trailer that also kind of served as a visualization you know of what the game should look like the trailer kind of served two purposes, one was for us to start of that our own decisions and see if we could actually make the sidescrolling thing feel like it was cool and like a paid out and the second was to gauge whether or not there was a market for what we were doing And so in working through that teaser trailer I grew to understand more about how we could do the presentation and what was important and what can get sort of left behind You know, the footage in that is sort of faked or mocked up I mean we weren't trying to be disingenuous, we never said it was gameplay footage it was really just an attempt on our part to sort of come as close as we could given the tools we had at the time but it was really valuable especially from my standpoint because I got to kind of really explore the writing tone and develop the art style and then see it implemented in a way that was representative of where the game would ultimately end up Chrisā art style I think lends itself to a very distinct type of sound that we wanted usually audio itās sort of like the last pillar that gets involved in production so we usually try and see art and then animation and effects in for any given asset and then we design our sounds to it because I love horror movies so much I was always wondering why certain movies were scarier than other movies to me and Darkest Dungeon allowed me to really explore what I wanted to do in a video game in the audio realm my involvement was testing out the viability of this product so had gotten in contact with Wayne June to do some narration and Stuart Chatwood to do some music and we got their assets and saw video footage of what the trailer was going to look like and we just got to work I was just blown away by the look it's exactly what I like writing music for it's like dark, gothic and you know deep I feel there's a schism in the audio world with composers where a lot of composers want music that serves the story and if you notice the music, they go to the extreme where if you actually notice the music they're not doing their job 'cause they want the music to be almost like an underscore blending in with everything myself I'm a fan of John Williams like a lot of people and you know I love bursting out of the theater and like singing the song as I walk down the street or getting ready to go see the movie you've got the song in your head so there was that idea in the back of my head that I did want music that would be timeless and memorable and luckily they shared the same vision for that There is a place beneath those ancient ruins in the moor that calls out to the boldest among them This must have been 2002 somewhere around there I was doing HP Lovecraft audiobook productions HP Lovecraft is a horror author from the early 20th century Heās kind of known as being the the father of weird fiction "At first I should be called a madman madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium later my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror" I got an email one day from a guy named Chris Bourassa who said He liked listening to the stuff while he was working and that was pretty much that until 2012 when I got another email from Chris Bourassa saying we're going forward with a game, it's got an HP Lovecraft theme so we'd like you to do the trailer for it You know since he heard my HP Lovecraft Productions you know he's just give it that gravitas you know, give it that weight and give it that feel the first time I heard a voice I was immediately enamored with it we basically had him act as himself because the audio books he'd done were mostly Lovecraft so it's really- I think it wasn't an easy process for us because it was already in his wheelhouse A couple weeks later Chris said he'd been talking to his partner Tyler Sigman and they had decided they wanted to expand the role of a narrator's voice in the game And would I be interested in doing that so I said course and the rest is history Chris had sent me some of the artwork that was going to be a featured in the game and the second I saw that I was just ecstatic because the artwork was crazy good and the fact that he understood Lovecraft few people do it seems the theme of the game was Lovecraft, Chris Bourassa he knows Lovecraft and appreciates Lovecraft you could tell by the lines he wrote for the game that he got it Lovecraft uses kind of archaic language, 19th century stuff almost you know inspired by Edgar Allan Poe some of it stylistically You know he uses archaic words and Chris had āem all he had all the weird adjectives so I was like Iām in with the two of us working together on that he did the writing and I did the talking since we both understood where I was coming it just worked out great he's a man after my own heart Wayne June was exceptional and I think we used him to great effect in the trailers and I think just the overall tone and mood was enough to sort of wrap people in the conventional wisdom when you make a trailer or teaser is to like put flying text on there in case they watch with the volume off it's to cut every 2 and a half second or something, show new feature every 6 and a half seconds I was like that's all bullshit like all that is is a template and so that's not what our game is it's not flying text, it's not new things popping up on the screen every so often Our game isn't like a lineup of shots at like a bar, it's a cognac you know what I mean it's a red wine that you sip you sip and so I wanted the teasers in the trailers to all feel like that It isn't bombastic, it doesn't come at you with screeching metal and flying text it just settles into this somber narrative driven by one guy and in there there's the spirit of the game but it's not trying to show you the game it's trying to sort of give you an imperfect look at the experience you're going to have and I think that was really important too finishing that trailer I mean we were stoked ourselves we were excited like we could watch it and get pumped It captured so well like what we were trying to do and so it's something that was not just useful for showing other people but I mean it kept our hype up just the whole āWe are the flame,āyou know itās cool I just love that arc of weāre just a bunch of badass adventurers we're going in here, were going to kick ass like every other game ever and then they just get murdered and then it ends in like you're nothing type of vibe and so that is that is Darkest Dungeon and their screams will echo amidst the pitiless cyclopian stones of the Darkest Dungeon When we launched the Terror and Madness trailer it got really good numbers on like Twitter and YouTube and stuff it was a high time for sure and it felt like you know suddenly we had stuck our heads out and people wanted to see more and we even showed it at like a local Vancouver indie meet up and everyone was like clapping and cheering everybody that I knew or that knew Chris was like wow that's really cool that's going to be- there was a lot of excitement and buzz around town about it and everybody thought it was going to do well I was as excited as everybody else It looked extremely professional, we were hitting all the points that I thought we were hitting audio-wise like the music was great, the narrator was Incredible The reaction to the trailer was really good, it gave us a lot of validation for what we were doing I try to be the vision holder for the IP and so to see that there was like a good excited response to what amounted to like a fusion of that you know this writing style, this narrator, this art style, this music all of those things coming together and resonating with people was like hugely encouraging and that sort of gave us the confidence to say okay we're ready to like really hammer on development and build to a Kickstarter campaign we did a lot of work on the kickstarter so we felt like we had put our best foot forward you know we were hoping to get what we asked for which was 75 grand and we would have had to dramatically scale back what we were going to accomplish But we could make something for 75 grand in addition to our personal savings fewer monsters and enemies from a granular standpoint but probably a little bit less ambitious in terms of a narrative scope and even down to the animation polish, the number skills like we would have just pared everything back to try to just deliver the same core experience but I don't think obviously it wouldn't have been as good because there would have been so much less of it but our commitment was always to make the game you know was hoping, I was hoping it might double you know if we got to 150 maybe 2 that would be amazing you look at the success scenarios like the Banner Saga and they had gotten like seven hundred grand or somewhere around there and Hyper Light Drifter I think had already come out and so those were two we looked at a lot to learn from but also to see as what we felt were like the cap of what an unknown indie team could get and we definitely didnāt think we would get there I mean I think itās generally a bad idea if youāre planning for like the hit level if you plan to be a hit it's almost a guaranteed failing business but we got up higher than I thought we were going to get We I think I got like 85k in 24 hours and I think we ended it like three 3, 313 I remember that very clearly like we funded in a day, that was incredible I would get up at like 2 in the morning 4 in the morning like check Kickstarter, check Kickstarter did it go up, did it go up by how much, it actually went down a little like and just you obsess about it and I just remember talking to Tyler, Iām like well they can pull their money out any time right And heās like well yeah but you're not gonna and Iām like but they might so the whole month was like okay yeah we funded in a day but like I just felt like the other shoe could drop any minute and it would all just disappear We had gotten a loan actually from Klei and that allowed us to sort of set our ask for 75k on Kickstarter to this day like if you look on her splash screen for the game it'll show Klei Entertainment a lot of people ask like oh were you published by Klei, no we self published but we wanted to ask for an amount on Kickstarter that was realistic to what we can make something with And in order to ask for that low we needed some other money lined up so I think we showed the game to Jamie at Klei and he really liked what we were building so that was a huge vote of confidence he gave us a bit of loan and then funny enough to Kickstarter did well enough that you know like a month-and-a-half later weāre like here you go itās back over funding allowed us to pay the loan back and sort of told us that there was actually much more of an appetite for what we're making them we'd initially thought especially at that time in my life I recognized how hard it was to earn a dollar and so when somebody pledges for 250 bucks or something Iām like wow that's insane because like it's just a web page right now you know so I really wanted to honor all of those pledges and do everything we can to make even the Kickstarter a great and entertaining and engaging experience I did a bunch of live streams and drew things on Twitch and talked to people about what we wanted the game to be and just tried to show how passionate we were about the game I'm sure every game creator says that, I even hate that it just came out of my mouth but it's true our plan was to actually finish the game in 18 months after the trailer came out I don't know when the scope actually started to sort of change things get a little hazy for me because it was a lot of work We were just a couple people in a room just trying to hammer on this thing The way that we developed Darkest Dungeon which I wouldn't necessarily say is good advice is we barely showed anyone except for just like snippets we did hardly any playtesting We uh- weāre a very small team and we came in very hot Weāre always saying we're coming in hot on Darkest Dungeon 1 you know the sort of expression like coming in landing on aircraft carrier at like faster than you should be and that was pretty much every single milestone for us on Darkest Dungeon Chris and I are a little maybe over sensitive to like we only want to show stuff when we have something really impressive to show we had such a specific vision I guess that we felt like it wasn't worth showing until we had something that was representative of what we wanted to make and then if they're like I don't find it fun not then we really wanted that feedback the problem is you really want to get feedback early and so we would show some stuff to other developers but honestly like until we were happy with it we didn't want to show that because we're like we could show this but I already know a million problems with it when I first signed on the game looked very done the game probably looked about 80% as good as it does now and I was looking at it and kinda going like oh this is almost done this will be done very quickly so once actually getting in there and coding realizing like what was left to do was definitely daunting So yeah it was just a lot of like refactoring kind of changing of things to get it where it needed to be and then like every boss that we get added to the game would kind of unravel like I remember something like the Siren was a huge thing And something like the Swine Prince itās like with didnāt really have an AI system at that point so we had to kind of like develop AI system to get the Swine Prince to function definitely looked a lot more done than it actually was the game materialized into an actual game that was somewhat fun very late yes Kickstarter was huge 'cause we felt like oh people want this but internally we knew we were selling the sizzle it's not like they played it and said F yeah I'm going to put a hundred bucks to get the deluxe package so you feel a bit like a marketer you know because you're like man I hope we can deliver what we offer and PAX East 2014 which is only a couple months after the kickstarter was the first time that anyone other than someone very close to us played the game man it was a nerve-wracking time the game at that point wasn't completely finished, the story wasn't fleshed out yet all the characters, all the heroes werenāt made, all the areas werenāt created so there still a lot of room for a creative iteration and creative involvement kind of everything was nerve-wracking the game was like one dungeon at that point, like one set of party and town wasn't ready to be shown in like trailers but we would kind of show it to people to give them an idea of the game we're always concerned about how things would be received and that doesn't even really end You know we had no metagame so it's just like we set up this little dungeon for you and you have those four characters and you get in a few fights and when we were setting up to go to PAX East I believe this is a true story like someone on the team was like I don't think we should show I don't think we're ready I think they even said like I'm embarrassed, I wouldn't want to be seen with this thing and that's a gut check like we were we were shitting bricks a little bit That was really hard 'cause I remember sitting in the departure gate with Tyler like okay well if it's a totally bombs then I guess we can just run the trailer and like oh my God and if it totally bombs but that's another check in right like if it is unplayable or not fun for people in the flesh then we really have to think about what we're doing and so going into that show the stakes felt very very high we pushed it really to the end like we were cramming stuff in and we entered into that show really nervous 'cause yeah like we had doubts internally like in the team and man that's just not a good feeling you know it's different when you're like playing and youāre like oh chefās kiss like I can't wait to serve my stew to everyone because it's delicious we were still very much like building the railroad track as the train is going and we showed up at that show and from the first demo on it went great Pax 2014 was an amazing time we just ended up with this like massive crowd and everybody kind of fell into these roles like Brooks was like taking people through the controls like sitting at the computers and then Jeff our audio guy and myself were like out in front of the TV basically like shoutcasting this thing And we thought this was like a quiet turn based RPG like you know you sit down and just kinda play it on your own but that's where it dawned on me that like we had found a good recipe for like high drama and people wanted to even watch people play this even though I had never anticipated that people loved the combat and they were like really interested in walking through and we also let them assemble their party we had a little like menu sheet of like what four heroes you can pick you get loosely speaking 2 kinds of players like the players that just love their heroes and do anything to protect them and then the players that just see the heroes as Crusader 4, Crusader 5, Crusader 6 you know and we love that dichotomy there's not a right way to play the game but certainly we Our intention is that you should care on some level We take a lot of inspiration from like you know X-COM and other games like that but for whatever reason I feel like Darkest Dungeon is more watchable and I don't exactly know why you know it might be the simplicity of the interface it might just be the fact that characters are bigger, thereās less tactical space to think about it might just be because death's door is like a crazy mechanic and you don't know if the guy's gonna die and so they're just like- maybe the peaks and valleys a little higher but for whatever reason we had a bunch of people crowded around these TVs and we were calling out what they were doing and then Tyler we call them āThe Sidlerā because he would circle the back of the crowd and just come up and be like what do you think of this game Itās pretty cool right so we just fell into this like exhibition groove and that was like a very memorable show because it validated and vindicated like all of our assumptions interacting with those people in seeing them like get it and kind of be excited to keep playing it and seeing people that like came back like we had people at different shows that would like come back to play it again which was kind of surreal just seeing so much press reception when we weren't really sure how much we would get was awesome and just seeing Chris kind of be vulnerable and kind of open up a bit and say that like he said like we made a hit game in this like really vulnerable, adorable way and that's definitely a memorable moment We have a good game on our hands now how well it sells, I don't know and whether it'll stand the test of time I don't know but we know that we can sell this game and and we're going to be okay So that was hugely encouraging heading into the sort of like the trench before the Early Access launch We actually had a publisher- we went down to Seattle we pitched them on it and we're almost done like seems like November before we launched it you know we sat there and and one guy kept telling us why it would never work, another guy falls asleep and then three other guys were like super into it and so we left and weāre like I don't know like what the hell are we doing we already had like these PAX experiences and we knew the game was good but you know we were just running out of getting a little bit nervous and finally like a couple weeks later they sent this thing and theyāre like well weāll give you a half a million for 30% basically standard publishing deal and that was like kind of tempting because it would have solved a lot of problems like everybody gets a little bit of money you know a bunch stays in the company weāre okay, we can afford to be maybe some more promotion than we thought but I just- we couldnāt wrap our heads around giving up 30% so late in the game and we just felt like we'd come so far and we already endured the worst parts of the stress and it was just time to sort of live and die by our decisions we'd done what we could to generate hype and then I guess the Steam button wouldn't launch it was like 10:00 and then finally 10:30 it actually like pushed the build up and then we just sat there 'cause you can't get like minute-by-minute metric off Steam so we just sat there like Just watching people playing on Twitch and they seem to enjoy it I don't know and then I think it was around like noon or 1:00 we got the first look at the purchases basically and yeah it was like a straight line Like holy shit like we actually pulled it off yeah I cried the success we had that first week was just- it was insane like we had no idea I can't quote the numbers but they were way bigger than they were bigger than I expected to do lifetime on the entire project everybody sort of like was really excited and then everybody just kind of hunkered down and went into like you know we have to answer emails like I actually stopped working on animation for about eight weeks to answer in the neighborhood of about ten thousand support emails like I was just handling all that stuff and we were on Steam forums, and like bugs whatever crashes, corrupt saves, all these are things we were just trying to take care of as best we could honestly everything had gone great the launch went great people, were really receptive to the patches, I mean there were bugs galore and we were fixing them and added some stuff and you know so honestly the community was loving us, like we were riding high, like it was pretty sweet I love Early Access just like I love Kickstarter, and I also learned a lot about Early Access we looked at Early Access as well this is awesome, we're going to keep experimenting weāll try different things, weāll find the bits that really work and the people that bought Early Access are surely buying into this idea of we're going to fiddle with the game The simplest answer is people love new content in Early Access they hate game changes in Early Access If you fundamentally change big parts of the game, oh man Our combat system is solid, itās a good combat system, Iām proud of it but early on it suffered from this like syndrome where your basically kind of at a table saw you could just chew through the front to get to the back ācause the back row enemies were typically high stress-dealing, high damage-dealing and you could just compress them down into the front where they were useless because where the enemy stacks in the combat rank is really important that's kind of the puzzle aspect of the game and generally the back rank monsters are not as good at fighting melee so if you kill the melee fighters right away, the back rank comes up and now you're fighting the weaker it's basically the best strategy and the core issue was we'd built this really cool system of positional combat and that whole system works because you have this cool attack that only works if you're in rank 4 and you attack rank 2 or whatever it is that's like the heart of the tactical side of the system and that really gets a lot less interesting if there's only two enemy heroes or whatever so it just wasn't working like it was abusable and it was too easy to game I don't mind if people find exploits and manage to break the game in certain ways but it should challenging and it should require some mastery over the core systems to be able to abuse the game so this was just like too juicy a low-hanging fruit for people and it eroded this experience of you know uncertainty and horror and you know the real narrative and thematic goals that really underpin the entire game so on the surface it looks like a combat problem but it's so Insidious that it erodes all of the supporting work like the art, music, narration, sound effects all of that work that we're trying to do to create an immersive experience Is getting undermined by this one combat flaw so there's a lot of different ways to solve it like you can jack up the hit points of the melee fighters you can like you know make them tougher, do all this kind of different stuff thereās just like a lot of horrible decisions that can be made in my opinion so the solution we came up with is when you kill an enemy it leaves a corpse and that corpse occupies space and so they don't automatically fill forward He said theyāre just like null blocks you know and then you can't compress the line and you gotta deal with them Iām like thatās fucking brilliant that's great Itās like one of his best ideas and weāre in Early Access so I don't have to draw corpses for every monster, I'll just do one corpse and then we'll just test that out with our audience right should be great, should be fine I kind of wrote the patch notes in a real kind of taking the piss sort of way like just when you thought it wasn't hard enough, now enemies have protection, and they you know do this and speeds are increased, and leave corpses, and this is more expensive and all these things 'cause honestly I thought everything we're doing here makes the game better so we launched that patch and oh my God the community revolted everyone got mad because on Monday a bunch of strategies and heroes and skills were viable and then on Tuesday none of that shit worked anymore even though corpses don't take up a lot of screen space, the implications were very far-reaching People are very good at being loud and angry and honestly I understand, they bought a game and they played it for 5 months and really gotten good at it you know, strategized and figured out their favorite party comps and what skills they like to use And then weāre like hey, combat works totally differently I think it's justified that we did it because it's Early Access blah blah blah blah blah but justified is very different from like the reality and then we started seeing articles come up on news sites going like Darkest Dungeon, you know the Indie darling or whatever, has lost its way You know the creators are seemingly chasing their own tails to just make it arbitrarily more difficult all it is kind of stuff like that we don't understand our own game and you know this is what happens when you listen to a vocal minority and this tut-tutting sort of narrative started emerging from like a bunch of like well reputed sites And some YouTube pundits and other things the corpse controversy was taxing on the team like it's not it's not a good feeling to see all of those people mad at you it was surprising but also like I totally understand it from a news cycle like there is something about the fall from grace thatās appealing for people To know that like oh they've ruined Darkest Dungeon because of these corpses is a great headline you know you start having this fear that holy shit like it's turning what if we go from like one of the best received Early Access games to like the game that started well and then went in the shitter and that, that's terrifying because people are just gonna remember where you ended up right and so we're like all this success weāve had to this point might get rendered moot like that we killed ourselves, we turned down some money, we did really well for a very short period of time and then we fucked it up not that it even happens, but that's even worse is that someone else tells you a story that becomes truth right and that was my big fear this was at the same time- oh gosh, this would have been July 2015, so my dad died in March of 2015 so we launched Early Access in February 3rd my dad died six weeks later I had my biggest career-high and a personal high too to definitely my lowest personal low of my whole life I was basically a fucking shell and so there was definitely a point where I just kind of like realized I'm like, I need a break I'm not going to be good for anyone like I'm holding it together but it's tenuous and so the Corpse and Hound update is like when I finally first- it was like couple months later could clear my head a little bit and I got excited about the game again and I made all these changes and work through all this stuff and then went back to Colorado to basically have a memorial service for my dad where we interned his ashes and like the night before or the night of or something stupid like Chris and I are on the phone and he's like man this blowback is not subsiding I was kind of manning the fort and I didn't want to bug him 'cause it's very painful experience and you know my parents are both still alive so I know enough about it to know that I don't know enough about it but I'm like you go it's fine, it's fine right, like everything's going great and so we launch it and you know okay there's some blowback, it's getting a little worse oh that's what a review bomb looks like I remember I got on a Skype call or whatever with Tyler and Iām like I hate to be calling you about this at this time but this is like a real thing you know we're just having this talk and I just remember like just feeling so fucking low you know I mean yeah when you're dealing with issues of mortality I think it's like it's pretty hard to understand why someoneās so upset that you changed a tuning value it wasn't that I thought like none of this matters itās like oh my God everything we built you know everything we've built is like on the cusp of people just going you fucked it up I can't remember the article now but it was on a pretty big site and it was just something like I hear that Red Hook kind of messed up their game in the latest update now to be fair, if thatās how 90% of players felt I would want to know that and we would probably changed to suit I have no doubt that for some people they truly believe that and for a lot of people they actually thought it improved but you're like battling this perception it was his solution too so he felt ownership over the blowback I try to relate everything back to Batman like it's just like the end of Dark Knight like they have to hate us for a while, we've enjoyed a lot of sunshine weāve enjoyed a lot of like spectacular success and accolades They have to tear us down, this is the time where there is an appetite to like knock on us a little bit and what matters, just like poker is when you're not getting cards your ability to mitigate damage becomes more valuable than your ability to capitalize And so right now we just have to mitigate damage you know I've heard horror stories of you know people changing the tuning on a gun and getting a death threat you know and these things aren't fun, but I think there's very few design decisions you can make that Are compromiseless I think that the beauty of like a successful design is what your prioritized and what you didnāt and what you left on the cutting-room floor and so just like we ask players in Darkest Dungeon like everything you're doing is a compromise like making a game is a lot like that, and running a company is a lot like that too so we- we went back and forth on this corpse thing and ultimately we decided no, this is the right correct choice it works, did we roll it out properly, no, did we set expectations properly, no should I have drawn corpses for every single Monster so that it was like this fun feature like look at all this new art yeah I should have done that but we didn't think we needed to and that, those were our mistakes but we did and I think this was also a really good decision is we recognized that even leaving 5 or 10% of our community behind would suck so we put in an option to turn the corpses off that remains in the game to this day Of course we default that they're on because we default everything to the way that we want you to play it as much as we do crazy stuff like permadeath where we're never going to toggle that autosave and be like you can turn the save off I mean there are ways to save scum, go nuts they're not that hard but we're always going to configure it the way we want you to play If it wasn't as big of a controversy, we probably would not have ended up with that solution I think that was a really interesting way of dealing with difficulty in our options system like we don't have like easy, medium, hard, we have a bunch of features that you can disable if you want and if you're having trouble which ended up paying out later 'cause we have like a bunch of kinda weird, unique options And then we pulled metrics and like 1% of players were turning them off and we just tanked the review bomb and ultimately it went away I mean people who are new to it didn't know any different and people who used to like not having corpses adapted new strategies and we balanced out heroes as time went on and you know really were talking about a feature in a video game I thought at the time that it was a really good solution and spoiler alert it still is a rush good solution you're never going to steer clear of every pothole and sometimes they're legit potholes that you steered the car into and you shouldn't have And other times it's more I wanted to go right and they wanted to go left but I think this idea of tada we just changed a zillion things with no warning you know we put our foot in it some people don't even necessarily not like it, theyāre just shocked and then the first posts they read are people going this is horrible and they're like oh fuck it is horrible and it can totally happen again you know and we would stick by our guns again and weād have better community management tools but if people ever wondered do developers care, yes they care a lot especially when itās our game the game is the most important thing and we didn't create a game that was fun in the first place by second-guessing the vision and so ultimately the vision is what carried us through there after the Corpse and Hound I think the intensity of the experience we definitely learned from it and and started doing things a bit differently we were able to kind of change our whole approach I think that's when we brought on a dedicated community manager you know and the people that were upset just because of the feature that didn't have an agenda They were like okay cool thanks man, happy to keep playing so it took a lot of pressure off and like things got smoother it felt good like it felt good to be making work and have an audience and people enjoy it and when I felt low I could go on to Twitch and see people freaking out and getting mad at the game because they lost a character which just brought me endless joy and everyone was like firing on all cylinders to try and get the game out the correspondence between Chris and myself at that time, he didn't know when I was sleeping I remember having change request sent to me at like 2 in the morning and I've been by 5 in the morning and then have my kids at school at 7 in the morning and then back at work the game took about two years to make so the sound design in those two years during production changed a lot simply because we were becoming better sound designers by the end we had learned so much more in terms of the implementation, how to mix things properly how certain enemies should sound we just got so much more experienced and better at sound design so we actually near the end before 1.0 was released I actually went back and changed a bunch of The Highwaymen sounds because they just sounded so pithy and small and they didn't sound as large and bombastic as somebody like the Grave Robber who was one of the last ones to be designed The Early Access, there was a lot of changes like we were doing patches three times a week if not everyday initially and then doing big content updates with new art and new gameplay and obviously the whole endgame that's like a game in itās own like the amount of different, unique things for that one of our strategies around the full launch was that we held back the endgame so you couldn't you know actually beat the game throughout Early Access you could play it limitlessly and then we were going to add the final resolution as part of the 1.0 launch and I think that's a great plan because it makes the games launch exciting for people who have even been with you for the whole of Early Access because it's a big dump of new content and finally they can conclude this experience that they've had more or less over the past year some people had you know put hundreds of hours I know there was at least one person who had like a thousand hours in the game like during Early Access And so we were really stoked to be able to be like okay now you can conclude the game and also the story Chris came up with to wrap it all up I thought was really really cool I'm really proud of that final boss the idea there was you can't defeat this like nightmare abomination god thing with a sword like it's insane to even think that you can like plunge a two handed sword into this thing that is bigger than your brain can even comprehend and that you're going to kill it and live happily ever after, like that whole narrative is insane so I'm like I want to kill the entire party at the end of the game, I just want to take them away and you shouldn't do that in games, you shouldn't like grind up a character for hours and hours and hours and get all invested in them in and then take them to the final level and have the game simply decide that you don't get to have them anymore but that's what we did putting in that moment that was like you have to sacrifice a character no matter what was from like a conventional just mechanical game design standpoint was like a really clumsy and never do that but I think all those such a rules are guidelines you know it's just like any other craft, I think like knowing the rules allows you to know when to break them and I think in that case it was an experience that we wanted you to have I think it serves this need to communicate to players just how powerful this monster is is like at a whim you don't exist anymore and I love that, I think that those ideas are very scary to players and I think the willingness to pursue them as developers or as designers maybe set us apart from a few other RPGs that might have massaged it down a little bit more some of my favorite videos are like streamers fighting the last boss and we deliberately break how the UI works and we just sit there with the move name he's going to do announced on the screen and it doesn't play out the way it normally plays out and the player at the time is always like puzzled, baffled, did the game break did it freeze did I *gasp* I have to pick a guy what am I even picking, they don't tell me what I- dead and like the response to that first like sacrifice play is always just like outrage and horror and you realize that like the player is actually completely engrossed in the experience I HAVE TO CHOOSE HER AAAAHHHHH NO WAY Iād be playing the final levels and Iām like this guyās gotta get tougher this guy's gotta- you know, and just the ambient stress of working and trying to get the content done I mean weāre always consistently a little over scoped you get a momentum around like we're going to launch a game and so a lot of other stuff just kind of goes away I don't really think we had many conflicts in the vision because we just didn't have time to be conflicted we kind of- everything had to line up perfectly to hit whether it be a show or a press opportunity And part of the team is buying into Chris and Tylerās vision and that they will figure it out and they will talk it out and they'll have those discussions and then kind of present it to the team and we're trying to implement it and kind of get it in there was a lot of hard problems to solve and a lot of sweat inducing moments so it definitely wasn't easy and that's not the impression I want to give, but I think Darkest had such a strong core concept that the pre-work we did and that core identity for the game and like the pillars, the creative direction, whatever you want to say allowed us to just like hang on that all the way through it's like you're in a snow storm and all you have is your compass and you're like well the needle says South so I'm going to keep walking South even though I kind of feel like Iām pointed East right now I don't know I mean I think we were lucky, we had a good team, had a good idea, and thank God it all worked I mean the reviews overwhelmingly were positive but seeing the game do so well on Twitch, seeing the game do so well on YouTube, and just seeing people play the game for so many hours the game just kept growing, I mean to the point now where the game is a point of reference for other games, which is highly satisfying we're actually living in a period of time where thereās games that are coming out that are aping our combat almost exactly and a lot of times our art style almost exactly which is terrifying to me because I'm like how do we, how do we top that like to try to outdo someone who has the benefit of doing what you did after you did it but we've got some ideas it's all pretty surreal it's also very reassuring for people who come into this industry too we just worked hard and had a creative vision and stuck to it and I feel that hanging out with these guys like we're just normal kind of people we like playing Mario Kart We like eating pizza and drinking beer on our weekend and watching horror movies on a big couch you know, we're just normal people and we just happen to have an idea that we gave all of our creative effort into it's awesome like but we never expected it so that makes it even more awesome one of the ones that yeah like was first that really had an impact was like a Rock Paper Shotgun 50 best RPGs of all time and they put us on there Seeing your game against like- like right adjacent to one of the games you grew up as a kid that was like formative in your game design career and why you even want to become a game designer and maybe even how you think about designing games is surreal making a game that people might remember longer than the release year is still something really like touching you know I hope it's not the peak of my career but if it's the peak of my career, it's a pretty fucking good peak and I'll take it you gotta really love what you're going to do, you really got to love it because you have to love it enough that you can go through periods of hating it and still love it you're married to your subject matter you got to love the flaws and you've got to love the ways in which it's great and you have to really enjoy it in your bones because in order to get a game from start to finish, any game at all, the finishing is the hard part I think that the earnestness and like the honesty that we have and the love of the subject matter is sort of what helped inject Darkest Dungeon with maybe a lot of heart I believe it has a lot of heart, the game I think like any work that gets authored, I think the passion of the creator's can come through in a game same as a painting, same as a piece of music, anything and I feel like people pick up on that it's a real labor of love this game a lot of labor, but a lot of love I think one of things we did best and one of things I think we're still doing now is hiring and finding amazing people to work with I mean as much as I've talked about how much I loved the Darkest Dungeon idea and how it was strong You can have a great idea and a shitty team and it's probably not going to work out my partnership with Chris like I need him in that way like there's no way this would have happened in this way and the people we worked with it's humbling but kind of amazingly freeing to be like I need to ally myself with really talented people ideally you'd love to look around the room and be like I'm the least talented person here, you know Itās the old adage of like, have the least expensive house on an expensive block and then that's how you want to buy in Everyone should aspire to be the least talented person on their team but also aspire to make yourself as talented as possible and if those two things come together then you're probably going to make something good Everyone has an idea for a game, or an idea for a movie, or an idea for anything ideas are- theyāre cheap, they cost nothing and they're perfect, that's the thing about of an idea, it's perfect and it's noisy and awful to tear an idea out of your imagination and make it real because when you make it real, you imbue it with flaws because it's only as good as you can make it and it can expose your own weaknesses and I think that's really hard to do and the only way to overcome that I think is to just be in love with that idea we all believe passionately in the conceptual, thematic, narrative thrust of the game we all love the mechanics, we loved what we were making it's a bastard of a game and it's got flaws but we loved it enough that we could tear it out of our minds and put it to code and polish it as best we could it's not enough to be like I want to recreate a game that I enjoyed as a kid that's not enough to sustain you when it gets dark it's really easy to stick to the vision when everything's going great but itās those gut-check moments when things arenāt going great and there's a lot of talk these days especially in like entrepreneurial circles like pivot Donāt be afraid to pivot, you know if it's not working change it and don't be afraid to change fast and early that's definitely not our ethos here at Red Hook spend extra time up front really thinking it through and then just stick to the vision but this would be hilarious if in a few years we do this interview and the lesson I take out a DD2 is ādonāt be afraid to pivot when things are suckingā One of the big learnings from Darkest Dungeon and I don't say this cynically if we were to do the same game again with a 2 on the end I could work myself into the grave and it wouldn't make half the splash that the first game did once something has been made and consumed, the appetite changes so I think we're cognizant of the fact that we have to up the ante we know we have to approach the sequel in a different way and inject that same level of identity but it has to be different from its older brother and it has to stand on its own two feet And it has to be even about something different there has to be enough about it that's unique and compelling that you can talk about both games evenly everything from how we do our art to even yeah some of the tone of the game is different the second time out because we want to create a different but anecdotal experience there's a lot of shared DNA characters are back, art styleās back but we're taking you on a different experience this time
Thank you for this inside look. This helped me change my approach to Early Access games. After having a few that have seemed to have lost momentum. Had I known about this game earlier, I would have been there to support it.
Darkest Dungeon stands on it's own as an original in it's mechanics and art. It's gravely gravity of play, ambiance and voice acting is a masterpiece that I will enjoy for years to come.
EIC from The Escapist here!
Thanks for sharing the doc OP, hope you all enjoy it! It was fun filming this one because when we do docs, a lot of developers face the same issues throughout development, and with the Red Hook team, it was all about sticking to their vision and everything just worked out.
Excited to hopefully go back and see how things are shaping up with DDII at some point!
It's a shame the corpse issue got to the team as much as it did. A lot of the community was actually in support of the change and understood why it was added. It was just a very small very toxic minority making a stink about it and misrepresenting the issue to game "journalist" which resulted in those stories about the game losing its way.
Darkest Dungeon Documentary? Darkumentary.
Seriously though, this is an inspiring story. I really appreciate that idea of sticking to a vision and needing to love it enough to go through harder times and accept flaws. It's always encouraging to see passion projects come to fruition and not have to bend or break due to other factors.
Great documentary, it's quite an inspirational story. I got Darkest Dungeon the day it came on Early Access and I loved it. I'm so happy the game made big waves in the industry and I'm looking forward to Darkest Dungeon 2. That last bit where they talked about it having to be different from the first one, really excited me even more, I think a lot of media that turns into a franchise usually cannot stand on it's own feet and is constantly looking to reiterate on ideas from the original or is too afraid to bring something new because the fandom might not like it. This leads to franchise stagnation usually, so it's good to hear that Red Hook is trying to avoid that.