Don't Starve: Creating Community Around an Antisocial Game

okay if we're all good to go I guess we'll start my over here hi I'm Kevin Forbes I'm a developer at clay entertainment and this is don't starve building an anti-social game this talk is kind of a design post-mortem and production overview for the game we built this game a lot differently than we had built any of our previous games and we learned a lot at least as a studio and thought it might be interesting to share what we found building a game this way with you all I'm a programmer by training gameplay programmer specifically this is not a programming talk it's kind of very designing almost production airy which is a bit scary but if you have any technical questions at all about the game just ask me afterwards and I'll try my best to answer them cool so just a quick show of hands here who's all played don't starve also anyone played on Chrome old-school all right if you haven't played don't starve or what's the marketing speak for it it's an uncompromising wilderness survival game full of science and magic and when asked about it I usually describe it as kind of a survival horror crafting death simulator you play as this this little scientist guy named Wilson who's been trapped in this mysterious wilderness and he doesn't really know why he's there it's got some window--the hubris and he has to you have to guide him to explore his world and eventually exploit it and try to escape although spoiler alert you can't actually I'm sorry if every in the game for anybody yeah so it's it's it's it's basically you walk around you pick things up you build things on the other things need avoid getting your face eaten so don't start I've actually started as a game jam at clay with you game jams every year just before we leave for Christmas break it's a great thing by the way that you can do it your studio it's great for morale and just gets that creative juice kind of flowing don't starve actually came out of our inaugural Game Jam I think in late 2010 myself and another programmer at Clay Julien Kwan threw together this I guess he called a game it's like this little PI game thing with stolen art from the internet because we were just programming and you basically play a 16-bit link and you have a fire that's the that kind of comes and goes and there's a day/night cycle and the the goal of it is to survive as long as you can your health I think your health and your hunger were the same thing it was always going down and these Pig creatures show up like at the periphery your camp every night and and they're kind of shy at the begin with but once there's enough of them because more keep coming every night they start to kind of crowd your space and rub into you and and your health starts to go down and the only way to get health back is to pick up the the Castlevania acts that's often the shadows there and then run after them and turn them into meat and eat them so took two days most of that time was spent trying to get PI a game to work I think there was a weird with OpenGL at the time which just has been fixed but yeah it was fun it wasn't much though and we didn't do anything with it for the longest time because we were busy both Julian and I were working on shank to shank to is a sequel to shank surprise it's a it's a side-scrolling beat-em-up game you play as a very violent gentleman who's running from left to right and and shanking people I didn't design that one but it's it's a large game I guess is kind of the takeaway it's it's a linear narrative heavily content heavy thing you run by a lot of really beautiful art that you only ever see once and it's quite expensive to make a game this way we're not a huge company like our thing we're currently at like 30 30 or 40 people at most were a peak I think right now but like you know this took dozens of people a year and a half to make so you we needed to get publisher support to kind of get this thing off the ground and and you know you always see a little bit of creative control with that and there's all sorts of crazy lines have come in and crunch happens and all that kind of crap that we're all used to but shake - at the time the jam I think we're halfway done and then by the end of 2011 beginning of 2012 it was wrapping up we had another project going on at the time mark of the ninja which is a much better game unfortunate I didn't I didn't work on that one but most of the studio was working on that people would transmission off shangkun and go to ninja as needed but they didn't need more programmers really it was kind of set it was using the same engine and everything so there was a bit of extra capacity there that the studio had and we decided that we would we would run a little experiment because we'd always been making these like really for us keep us laughs if you're from like EA or something I'm like yeah that's really expensive it's a million dollars but you know we've makin is like for us expensive games we wanted to see if we could create something very cheap something so cheap and so quick to create that we could self publish it and have like full control and be you know masters of our own destiny and that kind of thing so the plan was to take a very small team we're talking like four people or so build a game as quickly as possible get it to a minimally viable state and put it online and let people play it like I mean usually people didn't play shank to until you know eight nine months in the development when you know we really knew what it wasn't it was a sequel anyway so you kind of knew what it was to begin with but yeah we were going to just get something out there see if people liked it see what kind of sticks we throw stuff at the wall and then start to iterate I mean this is a free-to-play was kind of coming on the scene at this time at least in North America and a lot of kill a lot of ideas like analytics we're kind of new or at least new to us at the time so we were thinking well maybe we can use analytics maybe we can use all that all this new technology and all these like new distribution platforms let you publish and update a game even if you're just like a small little stupid company in Vancouver Canada and can we actually grow that into something bigger so that's what we did we took four people three programmers and one artist and again some support staff like our sound guys on every game that kind of thing and and we and we started looking for an IP to actually create and when we we racked our brains and we actually decided that that little game jam that we did about a year previous would be a good candidate to make this game and then also as kind of the the singular design constraint for the game we wanted to make it free-to-play you know this this was if you'd been the GDC around that time if you talked to anybody in the industry we were all scared right because like you know our launch was getting eaten but by these free-to-play upstart people and it seemed as though it would be good for us to at least try see what that design space is like you know it was kind of a hard sell with some of the team especially me but you know given given the option of like can you create your own game by the way house be free flavor like oh okay sure we'll give it a shot clay it actually had a little bit of experience with this in the past we had created a kind of a this was happening right when I joined the company in 2008 but it was like Smash Brothers kind of online thing for next on that called a sugar rush that probably no one's ever heard of but it was kind of fun but it for business reasons it didn't ever get off the ground anyways so there we are we want to take that little game jam and and make it free-to-play and get it online as quick as possible and see what we can get so looking at the game jam and working with with our art director we came up with this this concept art for for don't starve and I mean if you if you played the game this is not what don't starve looks like at all this is you know it's kind of like happy colors and and lots of round characters this guy kind of looks like Barney Rubble nothing is too threatening like the pig creature looks kind of weird but he's just gonna slobber on e or something if he catches you so you know it's it's for lack of a better term it's a bit bland right like it's it was made this is us trying to appeal to a casual audience and really acting outside of our wheelhouse because you know we at the time we were starting to play all these games and kind of see what these things are like and this is this is I guess our impression of it at the time so working from this art and those design constraints our original design documents Elizabeth yeah was a doctor we don't read a lot of documents but there was one for this our original design is something I now call mayor of pig town so in in mayor of pig town the game was kind of split into two arenas you had your persistent online base building and this is where you would spend most of your time you would kind of wander around and there was these the pig creatures were there and they were kind of your citizens and if you did well you would get more of them if you didn't do as well they would kind of leave but it wouldn't be that bad right and you know you'd share this with your friends and you'd buy like truffles with real money and give those the pigs or I don't know stuff like that in addition to that we had this idea of having adventure runs and in an adventure run what you would do is you would leave the pig village and you would go out into the wilderness and you would go on an adventure and you would probably you know explore an ancient ruins or or you know kill some Beefalo or something really do something exciting to gain a resource to bring it back to your base to make your base better and of course that was gonna be stamina limited because it was 2012 so you know that would that was their idea for the design and and we set about to implementation we were we were writing this for an online distribution platform at the time we were using Chrome they dove client really cool technology lets you run a game like near native speeds with OpenGL rendering in a browser so exactly what we were looking for because we didn't want to learn too too much and we wanted to be able to update this thing like on a fly like everyday if it came to it to make the game better for the players who were playing it so three programmers one artist we set out engine was mostly from scratch mostly the C++ I mean we stole some ideas and concepts and even code from the shank and ninja engines as needed but again this was in our minds at least destined for a much more casual audience so the the min spec was going to be a lot lower so we did make things a little a little cheaper here and there and a little we optimized not for like super fidelity graphics but more for like you know it'll run on anything most of the gameplay code is written in Lua that was kind of new to us we'd use it as a data definition language before but I'd heard good things so we said I'm making a mountain of Lua code took us a while to kind of tame that mountain really happy with it now and it is great for modding and that kind of thing but at the time it was a bit of a source of bugs yeah so we started we started implementing and after about I'd say about a month we had little characters walking around on screen in in kind of a world that you know wasn't just a blank screen no gameplay yet it was mostly just character keyboard interaction stuff and and on to this we we wanted to start prototyping the actual gameplay well mayor a pic town the the town wasn't all that interesting to us and it needed like a lot of HUD elements and and that kind of thing we didn't have a system for that yet so we decided that you know the game the the real fun the really selling point of this game was probably going to be those adventure runs so you might as well start there don't starve is a very systems driven game lots of very simple things are happening in the environment lots of very easy to understand and easy to implement little loops are going on all the time and then of themselves are not that interesting it's like a tree grows congratulations but if you put enough of those things in the same system and allow a player to kind of run rampant through it and try to figure out things and and and and use the affordances you know given by I know what an axe is and that's a tree I guess I should chop it down the idea was that emergent gameplay would happen interesting stuff would be found by the player and that would be enough to keep them engaged and keep them playing and make them buy truffles for their big villages or something or rather as an initial test run of this idea we wanted to create a loop where the player would craft the trap use it to trap a rabbit capture the rabbits cook it and eat it to make their hunger go up it being a survival game at all and this is what that looks like and don't starve so you know you collect some stuff in the environment you craft it the the fact that you got that far tells us that you know you've figured out the crafting menu you've probably used the crafting menu to see what you need to pick up in order to make a particular thing you find a rabbit hole rabbit is probably milling about about it you've maybe tried to catch it with your hands and chased it away so you know so there's there's something more to this so you know you put one and two together you put the trap down rabbit doesn't go for it then you notice oh I have a carrot my inventory because I obsessively picked things up because it's a video game and then you take the carrot and you bait the trap and the rabbit falls for it and you get a rabbit in your inventory and you can murder it by right-clicking on its slot and then it gives you meat and you're like wow this is great I can eat the meat but meats raw and it actually kind of hurts you a little bit when you eat it so I mean you can do that if you have some other way to heal yourself but you've probably been picking other things up too so you know you make an axe you've played Minecraft so you chop down a tree and and you get wood and you make a fire because we kill you at night if you don't and there's more on that layer and then you know by hovering the meat over the or having many different objects actually over that fire you might notice that there's a cook option and then you know a little spark goes off you're like wow this game so deep I can cook me didn't eat it and then you eat it and and a little dopamine here it goes off and and you're well on your way to becoming a don't starve fan so that's the low level stuff and we actually found that that worked like we we were not public yet with everything we but we were bringing people in from Craigslist like we've just put an advertise like hey kids if you like to play a video game that kind of sucks and then they would come in and we'd pay them something and then they'd play the game and and we would watch them and then interview them afterwards and you know it took it's like a couple of weeks of iteration and UI changes and and you know just changing the way the environment was actually structured but people were getting it and when they got it they really liked it so it was like oh we're onto something here that's cool so this is a this is a kind of a slide about the high level game place so I mentioned before that you would go on an adventure runs well what's the point right like you know you need some kind of a goal for this thing to work so we actually you know given that we were coming from the perspective of people who make these linear narrative experiences lots of set pieces and explosions and things we said about making a level editor I called it feast I called the engine famine I really wanted that to be a thing but no one no one followed my lead on it so it didn't take off but yes we built this in-game editor it looked like a really bad version of unity like you could you could place things entities and you could tweak their component properties and whatever and you know actually I built this big level full of trees and I think the problem I self and the initial scenario that we want to get by was that it was really lame what was it you started in this really easy area and then you would you know figure out the controls of the game and then you would walk over and there was a hard area what's world like these carnivorous spiders that you really didn't want to be near by yourself because you're really weak and don't starve so you'd run away from that you find a pig village that was just kind of there by itself and you could befriend the pigs and then they would help you fight and there was a pig king and the pig king is like the stereotypical like RPG quest giver and he'd say oh I have a spider problem you should kill those guys and then I'll give you a key and then you could continue so again you know all the real game designers were busy with marker than ninja so we'd played some RPGs so we look let's make that sure it took about a week we got it in there was some text that had to get built for it but you know it was it was terrible it was really boring and and people didn't get it and turns out there's actually a lot going on with level design thought so you know we it was failing on two accounts one it took way longer than 10 to 15 minutes to play this thing like people would you know take an hour and it was really drawn out and you know maybe we could've got that down with tuning and all that but to our production level it just could not stand like that the original design called for like lots of these things that was what we were going to be monetizing right like here's all these adventures you can go on and you only get to do three a day unless you pay us and so we would need to crank these things out and it took us a week to do a crappy one so you know two three to make a nice one once we kind of get good at it so it just wasn't going to happen we went back to the drawing board and found inspiration in like the roguelikes that we were playing when we weren't thinking about free-to-play and and made made the levels procedurally generated I don't know a ton of the technical details because they'd actually work in the system one of our programmers alia McCutchen really took that system and ran to town with its like this is area of interest but but the gist of it is that like the version on the left is is the the first one is we actually ship with this in the early days and the circles are this is like a really zoomed out map right the the circles are narrative nodes I suppose like there's semi handcrafted in that like it says like this is what the biome is gonna be this is the kind of these are the kind of things we're gonna spawn there like there's there's some with like lots of spiders and some of lots of trees and some of the pig village and little algorithms would kind of place things down nicely within those and these these narrative nodes would be arranged into these chains and that the chain would tell a simple little story like you know like you craft an axe and then you you go to the spider lair and you kill a spider and then you go to the pig king and you know there was a couple of these things and they're very loose Grayson sorry very very suggestive things they weren't like this is what happened to Wilson when he went to Wilson land it's it's it's very much this is something that you could do and if you do something ability different on the nodes that's cool too but the important thing is that it gives a sense of place it seems like you're going from place to place and the world around you is changing and has a logical reason to exist so that seemed to work pretty well actually like people people were having more fun in that than in our handcrafted level in the final version of the game that actually we actually shipped it looks more like on the right something something for annoyed diagram something something makes that work but the general principles are really all the same Ally is at the booth at the igf booth if you want to talk to him I'm sure he'd love to tell you details so we had our low-level structure in place matter high-level structure in place and as I said we were doing plate tests with people that we bring in and we we didn't really want to make a lot of tutorials for the game because tutorials suck they're hard to make right like you gotta make a list throw away code kind of has weird hooks into every every little system and is able to pause things and like put up game kind of UI text at inopportune moments and stuff like that so we didn't have any of those systems built out yet so we're like okay we'll just make it so they can figure it out themselves and in order to kind of emphasize the point and because we were playing those roguelikes that i mentioned before i don't we and we just threw in permadeath and so to this day like it it's really polarizing in the don't start community right like you either really like it and you and you kind of get it or you like this game is just what are they doing and and I I empathize with that because you know on the face of it it shouldn't work it's a game where you spend like hours and hours and hours crafting this environment and bending it to your will and get this awesome base and then some spider just like surprises you and you die and it's game over ha I mean I am a bit of a misanthrope especially with respect to the games that I make so I think it's awesome but you know not everybody agrees and there's always a mod system if there are lots of mods on Steam Workshop that you can use to kind of allow that experience to be a little more forgiving and even ways in the game you can build these kind of save points but it takes resources and know how to order to do so but yeah I mean I think what it did is a kind of gave don't starve two things one I gave it an identity like it's that game that kills your base like you know something that someone's gonna tell someone about when they're talking about games it's it's something that kind of makes it stand out and be it really an emphasize that learning like there was the the carrot of the dopamine hit when you actually you know figure out how to how to craft something and you finish one of those kind of intention loops that we created and that's really cool and all and then there was the stick of like oh you forgot to make a fire bunk bed so it was it was working for towards two ends I think this 1 million dead Wilson's early in production we were counting right because we're using analytics and we hit a million we made a big deal out of it so special art so that's just kind of happening on the on the design and programming front the the art side was busy as well so this is kind of the evolution of Wilson we go from you know casual friendly Barney Rubble on the left here and then it's just I don't know if they were being in flu by the by the the meaner mechanics and the more desperate tone of the game that was starting to seep in from the mechanics side or if we were watching their art and shifting to match that as well but there was this great like kind of confluence where we decided the game became less and less less and less what we thought other people actually wanted and and more something that we thought fit as a as a gestalt designer word so you can see like he he becomes kind of black and white it's sketchier I mean there's production reasons for that and makes it easier to to bang out costumes and animations for them but also like it just kind of gives you this this certain tone the certain ambiance a certain sense of desperation that you know the player is experiencing as they play this game given given its mechanics and then you also are able to kind of like project onto the onto the player it's under the player avatar itself and it's like it just kind of all comes together right so after two months this is what our prototype looked like if you played don't starve it'll look pretty familiar I mean the entire UI got thrown out like four or five times like that always happens on every game ever and I think the Wilson art isn't quite final in this particular screenshot but the basic loops of the game were there was missing a ton of content but but there was enough to kind of keep you busy the biggest difference between this version of don't starve and the SCHIP version is that goal text at the top given that we just kind of excised all the the high-level goal stuff in favor this really loosey-goosey kind of procedurally generated a narrative note chain thing we figured well players are still probably going to need a little bit of hand-holding and you know something to guide them through the experience that they don't try to do something stupid and get themselves killed and and decide that a games not for them too early so so this is what we came up with it was kind of like achievements almost and that there were really simple tasks and it was kind of there was an escalation of these tasks as you would play so it's like you know the first one be like a craft the next that'd be cool and then go kill a go kill a Pigman and feed the meat to his buddy and make him your friend leading up to like these kind of like gauntlet marathon things like survive X number of nine and the idea with that at least we were thinking was that if you can survive that time after we've taught you all the mechanics that you've learned how to play the game and then you're gonna go off and explore the game and kind of take it out of take it as it is it worked and it didn't I mean I think it didn't work because it worked too well with the people that we were bringing in to play the game they would follow all the goals and they would they would learn they would get everything that we put out in front of them it's like aha this is really working but then of course we haven't made very many of these things yet so we would run out at a certain point you know after a half hour 40 minutes or so and then they would be playing and then the goal texture disappear and or I would say like hey you're on your own now and they would turn us and say well what do I do now I'm like well it's it's open-world go craft something or whatever you know you should you should want to do something and they didn't they had optimized for boredom really right like survive for nights what they would do is they would build their fire collect enough like vegetables to kind of fill their pockets and then just stand there eating feed the fire feed themselves feed the fire and they'd do that for like four nights of eight-hour days right very boring but they were winning the game as we had presented it so after a lot of discussion we actually we actually took these goals out we wrote them we wrote a paper about this actually and submitted it and it was in the Penny Arcade report which sadly is no longer with us I think if you google around for don't starve intrinsic motivation there's there's a big write-up on our on our thoughts while we were made doing all of this but what what that actually meant I think people have archived it so you can even find it there so that's what we had at two months it was fun we were enjoying it people were enjoying it they wanted to play more the problem was it was nothing like what we had set out to do right like half the game wasn't there there was no persistent village monetization was just not going to work right we built this game about like bare white knuckle kind of scarcity and just hanging on and and you know the thought of like actually allowing people to pay for like a bucket of meat or something that's to allow them to live a little longer just flew in the face of the entire design so so we had a bit of soul-searching to do lots and lots of these really long kind of team-building meetings where we would kind of hash out ideas and and and blame each other and eventually we we decide to give it one more go this this slide is not really meant for legibility it's more just the impression but this was our free to play loop version too and the idea was that we would take the game as it was and then think okay well how can we how can we monetize this as we understand free-to-play and not kind of subvert the central meaning of the game where it tries to tell you that life is meaningless and finite and what we came up with was that it would all be one world there was no kind of like to two world thing no stamina based instance runs or anything you would just be dropped off in the in in the wilderness and he would build your base or not depending on what he wanted to do and every so often we'd have this little call to action some kind of Klu in the environment it would send you off on a quest and it was very simple quest was like kill that big thing over there or whatever but we wouldn't actually say kill that big thing over there just be there would be a big thing and you should kill it because it's a video game so so we would do that kind of thing and then you would go out you would gather materials defeat the ruins kill the deer clubs whatever bring stuff back to your base improve your base and then you probably want to show it off so like the Celicas kind of like social hooks where you can show your base to people and that kind of thing but then all of the actual monetization was going to come in to aesthetics and n options so with that procedural world generation that we were experimenting with there was a lot of knobs and dials that you could turn you could put in new content and get new like new biome types and new rules for placing biomes and new monsters so we figure out what we can sell sets of that we can we can if you like the game and you want a little more fine-grained control over your experience you know give us a dollar or two and then and then you have full access to like you know customizing your world that doesn't really compromise the design of that's fine it's kind of like a shareware demo and then you know we're gonna sell hats cuz yeah and and and finally like we're also going to sell something else that I forgotten but anyways the idea is that we're trying to find ways to build the game adapt this free-to-play mindset to the game without compromising the core design in the end we decided not to do that I mean I think it would have worked after a fashion but it actually came down to a couple of reasons primary to me was that we were going to be monetizing the game's economy I mean I'll be it indirectly through this this world generation stuff and like Oh more content were going to sell you like DLC packs and stuff like that but because we were monetizing that stuff like it had to really work and be non exploitable like if people could find a way to get like an infinite heat fountain or something like that then then you know we'd have to patch that because the economy is broken and monetization will shut down and you know we're a small team we're like three programmers who barely know what the web is and the thought of being getting a call at 2:00 in the morning saying oh you have to come in and fix it because the company stopped making money is a great motivator to make you not put yourself into those design that those design corners so it was making us very conservative in our designs like we weren't gonna add a lot to the game we're gonna take very many risks because it had to be so defensively coated and if for a game like don't starter for us like this open world kind of rollicking like watch what crazy things can happen with emergent gameplay that's kind of deaf like you can't really make that happen you lose the soul of the game and then also like you know I've kind of very related that just quality of life flies like we were a small program we're a small programming team and we're I mean our background is mostly in like console games right we're used to like the the finish everything ship it a little bit over time to get that to happen and then and then back to normal the thought of being always on call just did not appeal those it was too hard of a sell for the programming team for for too little benefit I mean given that we thought it was going to compromise the game anyway so in the end we decided just to roll with what we had the game became the antisocial game and we wrote a document for like the first time codifying our four pillars and the four pillars are going to be dark humor the game was going to have this kind of morbid tone it was kind of it was pretty foreboding but it was winking at you at the same time and you know it influenced by like those classic LucasArts games like that kind of thing where the character would like turns to the screen flaps his gums and says something funny about the background that seemed like a good way in order to make the game appealing to people on a surface level number two constant scarcity the game is not about overcoming the environment the game is not about becoming powerful and having this kind of power fantasy like like we just made shank to right like there's a cutscene where shank like dives into the ocean and rips a shark in half and I think throws it at a helicopter and it explodes so we've had enough of that I really wanted to explore other design design areas so like what happens if you make a game where the character is really weak what kind of feelings and emotions can you make in a game where the goal is not to overcome everything and if you try to do that you're probably getting gonna fail so so that would that was very interesting to us number three player discovery so this this is really just a codification of like the findings that we had with with the goal experienced and and with and with that whole kind of emergent small chain of events thing that we were doing with people from Craigslist at the time and then finally mysteries I think this is really important in games I mean we all play these big I call them like spectacle shooters where the game is it's a third-person action game usually and you go from like level to level to level and crazy stuff happens like you're you're climbing these buildings and the buildings are falling down and you're beating people up as you do it or whatever because it's always violence right but the idea is that it's very linear you see all this content it's like what playing a Michael Bay movie right and I didn't want to do that we didn't have the money to do that like we really just couldn't we couldn't afford that so when you build a game like that you make sure that everybody sees all the content because you know how much does it cost to make that building fall down how much does that cutscene cost it's all very expensive you have to justify this stuff so the idea with the mysteries was we were gonna make the game seem a lot bigger than it was by not letting you see everything in a single playthrough don't start we're gonna only see like you know 50% of the content 20% of the content there's an entire like Sam handcrafted sort of narrative endgame called adventure mode that we don't even tell you about you have to find it it's hard to find and and once you find it like then you can go through this kind of portal and it takes you from like world to world and at the end you get to confront the the big vat of the don't starve universe but but yeah like most people don't even know it's there so when you do find out it's there it's really cool and and you're likely to tell your friend like hey did you know there's like this whole of the game in there and that worked really well it made people talk to each other about don't starve and that was our primary way of motive but that was how we were we were going to market this thing was to try to get people to kind of word-of-mouth it right unfortunately like reviewers didn't find it yeah whatever so this is our production timeline details I guess but but the the gist of it is that it was going to be a a slow roll out kind of a staged increasing audience thing so we spent a couple of months making a prototype and then you know after after that we self launched it on Chrome Web Store we didn't really market it we maybe tweeted once or twice just to get kind of an initial seat of Steve group of people but we didn't actually want a lot of people playing the game at that point the game sucks there was like nothing there but we wanted people to start to self-select that yeah I'll play this kind of broken half there game because it's interesting to me to see how this is going to develop and and we wanted to start to get feedback so that we could improve it so that it would stop sucking eventually we also wanted to see what kind of graphics cards people's had because that's really hard on PC and we hadn't really really focused on a PC development before we did consoles right so that was eye opening after a couple of months of that you know the game had improved we'd made the game a lot bigger we'd stabilized it on a lot of systems we started charging for it on Chrome store the game was starting to make money and that changes the conversation with people like before it was like hey check out this game it's really cool you should play it Thanks - hey give us like eight bucks or something to get two copies of it to share with your friend and the fact that the mirror like act of taking money for the game changed the relationship we had with our players all of a sudden they weren't like just our buddy is helping us make this game they were our customers and we were we were beholden to their requests I've stopped working that was a problem thankfully stuff mostly worked because we had worked out all the major issues like with with the free audience after a couple a couple more months of that we went on Steam and and steam is you know if you're making a PC game that's kind of where the audience is right now and the idea there was that the game was the game was to systematically pretty complete like we knew what the game was we just had to make a lot more content for it so let's pre sell it on Steam this is before the days of kind of the structured Early Access program there so we would pre sell it there and then if you did a pre-order you would get a key you could play the game and it's a bit of Education there to kind of understand so people understood that they weren't actually getting a final game and I think it early access still has that problem in a lot of cases if you read the forums on Steam but it's a it definitely worked like like it definitely brought our audience up slowly over time and allowed us to react to their feedback there they're kind of expanding pool of feedback and then finally we launched about a year and it maybe a year and a half after we started and we actually delayed our launch by a month in order to work on that a venture mode that I mentioned previously and we did that without any any overtime because we were already in the black because we were selling our game it was selling on Steam already and we're a very small team so we don't need to make sell that many copies to break even so we didn't have a publisher breathing down our neck we were able to save well that's best for the game if we delay for a month we can talk to our community they're very reasonable people and you know they can play the game already so it doesn't really matter to them whether it's final or not it's kind of a label at that point so you know we made the decision then to extend for a month it was very very undramatic as I said like you know we were starting to deal with these these increasing waves of don't star players and we had a different way couple different ways to talk to them there was kind of the standard like broadcasting stuff so the servers are down or there's a new update to coming that kind of thing we'd go out on Twitter or MailChimp feedback wise we we were using Google Analytics in the early days it's it allowed us get an analytic system off and running very quickly didn't scale super well it's not really meant for games it's for websites so we eventually replaced it with with custom solution which took quite a while to make but it's very useful for our subsequent games and then finally Oh lark was in the very early chrome days it was this really cool plugin for for the browser and it would let us talk to people in real time as they're playing the game and I mean like we all been working at like you know previously in big triple-a companies and like even even within clay like you know you were secretive about your game and you never actually talked to the players but all of a sudden we were like having these online real-time conversations with people as they were discovering new content and don't starve it's like oh what do you think of that or why isn't your video card working and it was very eye-opening of course it wasn't scalable once we once we were a couple of months and it was just there's too many people playing and you couldn't really address their concerns adequately so we turn it off but given that art the majority of our conversations about the game with our community actually happen on our forums we self we we host these forums and the devs were actually very active in there so like I was in there every day talking to people and and kind of explaining what we were doing and teasing them about with with with upcoming content and soliciting their feedback and then actually acting upon their feedback where it made sense we're saying why we weren't going to if it wasn't going to make sense like it was really it took a lot of training in order to get this to work we have a really kick-ass community team that don't at at clay which kind of took me aside once or twice like no don't tell them that that's that's not how you communicate with the group that'll probably tear you apart if you anger them that way and you know just ways to keep things positive like that's that's the the most important thing about an online community that you want to build around a game you have to make it a welcoming space people can't be yelled at for making a suggestion that you don't like the community can't bully each other you have a zero tolerance policy for that kind of stuff and then also yourself as a developer like you need to set the example you you cannot kind of be snarky and you can't like get into these like little petty debates with people you just need to rise above all that because people will sense that tone and and start to follow it related to that this is there's no really good way to visualize this so I just got a picture of a road we we found that people we knew where the game was going we had we had kind of a clear vision of what the design was going to be in and how the game would get harder over time as we were marketing I was like this like hardcore uncompromising wilderness survival game it was actually pretty easy in the early days because a lot of stuff was missing there was no winter there was no that the hounds weren't there yet there was no sanity mechanic so we actually we had to explain to people very clearly that yes we know that that these things in the game aren't complete yet these things are kind of broken this is how we're going to address them this is the order approximately that we're going to address them in and this is why we're doing it so we actually crafted this document that's kind of a coat from it and the the major points are in the bullets there it was kind of like this is this is what the game will look like at launch and this is how we're gonna get to it and we would refer to this in all of our communications like an we had an update or and it's like okay we put in winter as we said we were going to do in the road map link and eventually the community really took it to heart and it really shaped the discussions that we would have with them they really held it to us right like if you're going to say you're going to do something online and in writing like you better do it right or have a very good reason that you can explain and a very good relationship with your community such that they'll accept the explanation if you decide you can't do it so yeah a little design aside the overlapping threat model of don't starve was kind of the major thing that we were trying to get across in that in that roadmap so and don't starve like very simple systems interact to make the game feel bigger than it is so like day and night in and of itself not that exciting but then yeah winter and summer so you have like kind of four states and you can be in then and then you add like weather so like you know that multiplies it further and then you had this kind of transient insanity thing so like you can be insane and wet in summer at night and that's all that's very different from other states that you can be in the game and things are very loosely bound together so like it's not like in Schenck where like we had a grapple animation for every combination of player character weapon and goon when deer klopse the the guy with the one eye on a right other diagram there when he attacks anything he just kind of raises up and bam and that's a nice animation right but it's the only one he has and there's a reason for that because we can use him in all sorts of different ways and the world is internally consistent like we kind of set this consistent visual quality bar mostly writing on the style such that we didn't need to be very detailed about everything and it allowed us to to kind of keep up that mystery approach where that it seems like there's a lot more the game going on there because there's stuff that even we haven't seen because we don't know how the deer clubs and like the bees are going to interact until we actually see it happen so that emergent stuff where like surprising things can happen like what happens when it what happens when you see a deer clops at night and he kills your fire things like that coupled with our marketing plan of like we were really focusing upon retention like we were using our analytics to try to get people to play longer and longer not because we wanted to monetize them and not because you know they were gonna hit some pay wall or something but because we thought that they would tell their friends eventually were their friends would notice that they haven't seen them in a while and saying what are you doing on the plane don't starve so we were trying to kind of foster this word-of-mouth marketing scheme and luckily enough at the same time Let's Plays happened and twitch happened and we didn't know this was happening until we saw the results in our sales graphs so this is like the unit list sales graph that everyone shows at GDC this is from kind of commercial launch to actual launch I think that that first red spike there right which is like blew us away at the time that's totalbiscuit he did a WTF for don't start in the very early days and we didn't know about it and so we saw the sales are like what on earth is happening you Google around it's like oh what's this guy that's really cool and you know so that that kind of would have a ratcheting effect upon our numbers we'd see all of a sudden this influx of players influx of sales and it would really help us out the the when it gets kind of orange and green that's that steam coming into effect so just a larger market but that that giant spike there the the one on the left that's not launch that's the Yogscast I didn't know about the Yogscast and then all of a sudden we were on like the front page of steam in the top 10 sellers and it's like what on earth is happening these streamers like you really I think we there's a lot of luck involved we made a game with all this kind of cool immersion stuff that could happen and that people wanted to show off and that had these mysteries so that everyone's experience was a little bit different at the same time when people were looking for that precise type of game to show off their stream so just insanely lucky on our part there I don't know how rep reducible that is because there's a lot of games out there there's a lot of streamers but mmm worth a shot the the second spike that that that's launched that's kind of the standard blush spike so given that we were kind of interacting with these streamers and and and these updates started to come a big deal like people knew what was coming and we would kind of say all of what winter is gonna come eventually winter's coming we saw a lot of gifts on the forum about that we decided that you know let's let's try doing a little low-impact marketing on this thing so we actually started to make these posters and these posters would be like once for every update we were updating like clockwork on every other Tuesday that's when the build would go live or we try to put it live in the morning and then would fail and fail and fail eventually would go live at like 5 o'clock at night and people would play it but you know the game was ripped still very small at this point and after an update the players would come in they'd consume all the content see all the new stuff and they're like yeah that was really cool and now what right because you know it really wasn't complete and there wasn't enough to play to tide you over the next two weeks we started adding these posters and there was videos where we would kind of give you previously what was going to happen we start to put like little puzzles and Arg type stuff in in those videos and we did this in order to make the community have something constructive to talk about between those updates so the game kind of had this internal clock during this phase like you'd be like we launch people consume the new content they talk about it they try to find all the stuff we didn't tell them about they add everything to the wiki and and that kind of stuff and then you know they play and that weekend did we kind of spike again as the people who can't play during work hours to try that and then you know speculation was start about the next update and then the video would come out and then and then so on and so forth and it really gave kind of a cadence to things and it allowed us to kind of eat the elephant one bite at a time because you know we were updating every two weeks which is a little bit stressful although not that bad because because we were kind of directing our own development we could say how big each of those updates actually was after you know a year or so of development it came time to actually ship the thing as I as I mentioned earlier we extended for a month to make it that adventure mode and the community was was fine with that because they they weren't really out anything they had the game but they could play and they were getting a better product in the end launch was very uneventful for us we weren't crunching right because the game was always kept in this shippable state the entire time for development every two weeks we had to show it to people so it had to be pretty good at that point so yeah it was the most uneventful launch I've ever seen in the industry was just like oh yeah updates up I guess we're done that's cool and then we just kept on working because we promised six months of more content updates it was going pretty well for us we felt as though you know the game is kind of a conglomeration of all these extras all these little systems and mechanics we could just keep adding more partly as fan service partly to kind of extend the tail right because you know the more stuff we add like it felt as a it felt foolish to kind of throw away this kind of marketing snowball that we had with these updates so you know we shifted to a three week production cycle to put a week of QA in there because it was a shift product and you can't just say oh I'm sorry I broke your savegame alpha anymore rightfully so so you know we slowed down a little bit and we started updating and and most of the content post launch was actually segregated into the caves and don't starve you can go down these sinkholes and it's like a whole nother set of biomes and all these other new creatures and all that that's all the post-launch stuff no one liked it it felt kind of periphery I think and we dragged that way too long like it actually it's like half the whole time that we spent making the whole upper world is like spent on all these cave things and you know some people like it I kind of liked it but it really does feel like a side product one exception to that however was this one up they called strange new powers in strange new powers I wanted to address a design flaw in the original game in the game you get to pick who you are like your Wilson kind of by default and then you unlock other characters of all like ages and sections and they were all very similar unfortunately like at launch like they had different flavor texts they look different they sound different but mechanically they're kind of the same thing anyway it was a point of criticism and I think there wasn't that it was not exciting to try as a new character so one strange new powers there they push them farther apart and added another one and people loved it like this is uh this is a graph of our new form registrations per day over the from from the very beginning to to just the other day and taking this is kind of a measure of community involvement our biggest spike ever was strange new powers like people just pour it into the forums to talk about like oh this character is better than this character now and I love him because and it was great right because that was actually a really relatively cheap update to produce design-wise there was a lot of thought that went into it but like content wise it was just you know tweaking numbers and adding a couple of effects as opposed to like all those cave monsters we made and no one really appreciated so lessons learned I think that for me at least it this proved of the market is broader than you think like at the time we started the conventional wisdom at least in our circles was that you had to be free-to-play gaming is dying the consoles are dying online downloadable games like if you charge for something no one's going to come to your door and that really scared us and that that made us kind of go down this pathway but it's not true right like we have new awesome consoles now all of a sudden and and there's more games being produced in awe of all types right now then than ever I don't think that I mean free-to-play is kind of the gorilla in the room and it brought in a whole new audience to gaming and I think that's great right I don't think it's a zero-sum thing I don't think that sucked all the oxygen out of the existing markets if anything the two types of gaming can learn from each other like we we learned analytics from free-to-play we learned rapid updates and heavily heavy community communications with the community from free-to-play very different from the console space and I think we had a better game for that so I think like you know it's easy to kind of turn your nose I felt free to play lies I as I often do in private but you know it's it's not all bad just just don't super monetize number two early access if used correctly can actually improve your quality of life and this was super surprising for me like if you told me yeah you're gonna be shipping the game every two weeks forever I would have laughed and ran you know a year ago but you know if you can shift the game every two weeks and there's small updates and you can kind of continue them as long as you as you need to because you're selling the game already and people are happy and you've already you know trying to profit and and and there's no one kind of telling you to get it out by Christmas because you're just on this other weird kind of commercial space that the big boys aren't playing in then you can actually make a game like don't start with no overtime which was which was awesome because I maintained that over time or crunching is kind of a failure of either production or design finally I think it's important not to be afraid of polarizing design don't starve is not for everybody that permit a thing people balance right but I think it is a lot of what gives it its its its appeal like it has a personality it's not afraid to be what it is as I said with the market being broader like there's a lot of people playing games right now there's a lot of different people who like different things playing games so as long as you can carve out a small a large enough part of them to make your game for it then you're okay you don't need to make like a watered-down kind of bland game for everybody so that's me Kevin Forbes that's my twitter we're clay entertainment we're in Vancouver Canada come check us out it's like we have like eight minutes or so for questions if anyone has any or five minutes sorry yeah how's it going Kevin hi hi I'm Ryan Miller so I wanted to ask because you did do this rapid cycle you were telling us about and it seems like you know it was a new thing you guys are getting used to it how did you manage the content that you created not you know breaking the balance at the previous content like how did you maintain your vision it was the question there's because we were cycling so rapidly and adding new content all the time how did we make sure that new content did not break old content I guess a two-part answer one it was all very loosely coupled as I said like we didn't have like that really tight interplay between components that we did and like the shank game for the ninja games it's a very kind of loose kind of a conglomeration of a game from secondly it did break it broke all the time and we fixed it right like if you're gonna do this you're gonna have to kind of be a bit fearless and just put stuff out there and see what happens and you know I don't think we've launched a single update in the history of don't starve without an immediate hot fix the day after and then a hot fix for the hot fix and then that would go for like a week but it's good though because that's that's just your QA process like you know if you're not gonna have like a giant QA soak at the end of your production you gotta amortize that over the whole thing so you basically were just not afraid of failure since you knew you could fix it yeah kind of thank you thanks Kevin I'm David I wonder you talked a lot about communication with the community was there any idea that you took my baton from the community that was a very good and you said yeah yeah so the question there was were there any ideas that we took from the community as we were talking to them all the time lots lots of little ideas like definitely for balance tweaking like the community played the game and knew the game a lot better than we did in a lot of cases because we were busy making the game and they would play it for like you know ungodly numbers of hours every update so when they told us that something was not working it was probably not working I remember one particular case kind of on a whim because that's how I roll I changed some crafting recipes because I thought there wasn't enough grass and everything and we pushed it live and the community was up in arms instantly like how could you do this to us what have you done to the game and like what just pick more grass but it actually it actually turned out in talking to them over time my understanding of what they were doing in game was completely separate from what they were doing in game like the reason they needed so much grass because they were crafting so many of this that and the other thing and that is not what I intended right so I was like oh you actually are using too much grass so we we balanced all the costs of things and started tried to address kind of the underlying issues that were caused him to build these kind of like the generate bases that were all grass based but yeah stuff like that like absolutely essential essential thank you Thanks he Kevin over on your left oh it's very brightly lights okay I really love don't start but I came to the experience in December and it was interesting because like you had gone over this mountain of updates and so I like walked into this at extremely enormous design yeah with no instruction at all as you mentioned which is one of the game strengths but like I wound up getting into the game by tabbing back and forth to the wiki yeah and I was just wondering if you had any comments or thoughts about how your unique development process where you're you're kind of live developing while the game is being played like what did you feel like that had an impact on the like the post game like after theme is finally right put to bed so the question there is like the the game was very very much bigger after the fact like I especially for that six months of updates there's just so much stuff in there and did and like you almost need a wiki to navigate it now kind of thing and and did did our open development and and and and whatnot affect that and I'd say yes don't starve works because it is is very loosely coupled and because we can kind of pour stuff in there so is it is a game design that kind of lends itself to this iterative adding of more and more content and yeah like people use the wiki I'm okay with that like if that is how you enjoy playing the game then more power to you as long as I don't have to write it right and in fact we actually use the wiki when we're when we're checking things it's like it's like half the art and this thing is from the wiki action it's like I need a picture of the grass I guess the question is like that it felt like the training of the game was playing the game while you guys were developing it yeah it's like is there a takeaway there about like what do you do with the game efforts and more and but no but like for someone like me didn't get that they've like well actually we're making a DLC right now so we're using the same principles to make that DLC it's there's an open bit era a paid beta for it and they have you know updates every two weeks the the lead designer or one of the big designers on that is Bryce who's in the audience there and too many questions about it he'll be happy to answer but but yeah I guess the answer is you do it again probably time for one more yeah I can I have a question about community to do you guys within the game give cues to the players that you can join the dialogue over the communication community yeah definitely that the question is do we have any ingame call-outs to the community and yeah in the not so much once you're playing because that's kind of the magic circle and I don't I don't want to violate that but in the front menu there's actually when the game is in an updating state there's this little countdown timer in the bottom left it's like I pay an axe going for a Pigman and as the update gets closer the axe gets closer and some of the art changes in sky have an advent calendar kind of thing yeah but does that give the players a cue to like join our phone yeah because you can you can you can click on that and it takes you to the thanks thank you I think there's a wrap up room favortie has any other questions we can we can go there thank you very much you

Channel: GDC

Views: 47,445

Rating: 4.9074073 out of 5

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

Id: 0P3kFXWK07o

Length: 58min 29sec (3509 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/IndigoGosRule]

Good find! That sounds like exactly what we've seen about Hamlet so far. It'll be interesting to see how they pull off their original idea compared to what the game ended up becoming.

[u/warpspeed100]

The "Constant Scarcity" pillar really starts to crumble after the first year. I wish there was more destruction and regrowth in the world.

[u/Dr_Monstaa]

Wow this video really shows what Klei are going for. You can definitely see their mindset about what direction they are trying to go. Pretty funny how the original idea for the best way to get food was rabbit traps.

Quest giver Pig King and adventures based around the Pig Villages actually seems like a pretty good idea though. Would definitely be interesting but only as long as they keep the things that worked.

[u/KegLitJoreb]

Don't know if he'll see this, but the speaker says "uh" and "um" far too frequently, even when in mid-sentence and not mid-pause. I'm sure he's already aware of this, but here's to constructive criticism!

[u/Dualyeti]

I secretly hope they made mega bucks off their phone-release, no doubt they did since that market is huge and the game was constantly top rated. I'm eager for more content, and Klei getting more money is something I'm entirely fine with because that gives them incentive to expand their awesome game.