'FTL: Faster Than Light' Postmortem: Designing Without a Pitch

hello everybody my name is justin ma i did the art and half of the design and i'm matthew davis and i did the programming and the other half of the design um we are pretty much the only two creators that were on ftl we had a few important contractors like music and for writing it was pretty much just the two of us the whole time um it was about an 18th month project that we started shortly after leaving a bigger studio about two years ago now i'll start by introducing the game for those of you that don't know what ftl is there's a screenshot that's pretty typical of what you expect in faster than light the core concept is that we felt that a lot of games were putting you in the pilot shoes instead of the commander's shoes in science fiction we watched star trek and firefly and we watched the captain and he's the center of everything and it's not the pilot and so we wanted to give you that captain kirk feeling the the controlling your crew and telling where to aim and what to do and so we have the basic game screen that you see all the time is just centered on your ship in the left there and then the enemy ship on the right and it's a kind of a tactical combat where you're targeting different systems and you're managing your power and you're commanding your crew to go repair stuff and it's all very kind of abstracted out because there's no actual ship movement it's also uh largely proceed procedurally generated and um so each time you play the game it's very different and uh very high difficulty is another hallmark it was something that we did intended to be very hard from the start so just to introduce this talk a bit um first we're going to go through our design process to come up with how ftl would work um the whole process from the beginning until the the game and then um the second half is going to be on how our experiences with actually releasing and turning into a commercial product which wasn't initially in the plan um so first the first half which we call designing without a pitch i have to clarify by pitch you know pitch can mean a lot of things in this specific situation i'm saying it means that a very clear idea of what the game will be the game mechanics the structure the pacing all that sort of stuff with ftl we did not have that we had a more sort of nebulous overarching feeling that we wanted to achieve which matt will go through now um all we had in the beginning was one page i wrote a quick page of just kind of a summary type of game that that we could picture but it didn't describe the game it described more of just an atmosphere and a a theme if you will and the bottom quote would be pulled straight from it and it's kind of really captures what we're going for this concept of we're out of food and half the ship was on fire and there's these aliens in the ducks so we need to vent the rooms and kill some people but we saved the day and meet scorpions so the idea is that you have these very layered problems with a lot of different exits and solutions to them that and that was kind of a core concept but not much of a game on its own they're also this kind you know we we focus on spaceship simulation so there's some things we knew we wanted like we had crew members you'd move around you had certain systems you'd have to manage and they're probably a text-based adventure thing involved as well but that on its own not really a game you could go anywhere from there and we didn't really know where we wanted to go but we were eager to get going the one kind of image whenever we tried to describe it to friends as we started was that maybe it would end up kind of like a sim city but for balsa galactica or the enterprise we would have thousands of crew members and you'd have morale and food and kind of a big picture control instead of the micromanaging that we ended up with very abstract representations of everything morale food et cetera yeah that kind of stuff and then with forex which is very traditional for the space stuff would be more trading in open world maybe even building up a fleet um just a lot more open-ended with a lot more content than what we ended up with and with the prototyping there was also one moment when we were kind of picturing almost a diner dash in space whereas just these if you picture one scenario in ftl where you're like you have that half your ship is on fire and you have three borders or something's happening we would just pre-set up those scenarios and it would be like different levels you'd get scored on once you beat it and that was when we were really kind of desperately trying to figure out a way to turn things into a game which we'll go into shortly but we had to start somewhere and so the initial focus was because we're eager to just start programming and get going on it so the initial focus was a single ship that's largely because you know practicality's sake what's the easiest thing to start working on is a single small ship so this drawing was probably the first drawing i did for ftl and you can see how we knew that we wanted a sort of cross section if we're showing the interior of the ship we weren't certain how big it would be you could see they're labeled by by color for like um engineering versus medical or even living spaces so there's a lot of things that we weren't um sure about this at this point i even was playing with the idea of having a cargo ship attached to the bottom because i like the idea of uh in aliens when you have to abandon everything and you basically ruin the whole point of your mission um obviously that wasn't used the strange part is with this image is it was pretty much the description that was on the previous page and that image were all we had for design docs when we started programming like that was what we started with we had very little as far as structure in mind yeah we so we just wanted to dive in and see how things felt because i mean initially we thought this was going to be a three month project just for fun on the side so we wanted to just start jumping and trying things out so the first thing we thought you know if we're going to have a ship in the layout the easiest thing is a grid so all the rooms would be on the grid we thought this would be a temporary feature which turned out to be in the final release as well and that's pretty much a running theme on ftl as we would have this simplest way to quickly get it into the game and then intend to maybe improve or make it more complex later but there are some systems especially like the grid that stayed right to the end very surprisingly even a lot of the code which can cause problems as well but um so um as you can see in this picture i was enamored with the idea of uh working with a negative space in the ship being able to see if the power goes out to a certain room you could see the actual power lines that have gotten disconnected if they're you know engine breaks you can see the various things you could see oxygen flow like there'd be a series of overlays where you get to see what's working on the interior of the ship and so you know none of that very detailed atmosphere was used but um you could see how i keep trying to want to desperately add that in kind of a native desire to always think bigger than what you end up with yeah as pretty much everyone in the room probably knows so matt's going to show a little bit of the first playable that we actually had uh running so here is um the first version of ftl uh you can see it has a lot of the same hallmarks like crew members that move on a grid basically the different systems in the room um however there's no real game all it is the only goal is to survive a torrent of asteroids you just open up that shield so to clarify the little squares of breeches and red squares are fire we also have algae which is kind of the anti-point of fire it sort of heals crew members and spreads in no oxygen um and there's a lot of things that are different obviously the the positional shields i really we really both wanted um sort of x-wing versus tie fire style shields if you open a door you can vent your crew out into space which happens quite frequently and accidentally and a little bit more uh dane oh there's a bug but um so and you can also see like an early version of the systems we knew that we wanted power management but in this build it wasn't particularly successful um there wasn't really much point to changing it yeah you could overclock your systems which is interesting and that would drain fuel but uh that wasn't really fun in the end you pretty much just always have to overclock it if you want to survive you can notice the the cat portraits those are matt's cats which you'll see as we go through the screenshots they stay a lot longer yeah they stay pretty they stay pretty long um uh what else anything of interest i think it's the important stuff oh yeah and so um we basically the first things we added was movement the systems fire oxygen um and like so from that we started to feel like okay now you can feel like there's problems going on in your ship how can we make you feel like you're a captain like guys go to the engine room so those are the first things we had we knew that ultimately there would need to be this ship simulation and the stuff that we started with that we felt was fun for a ship simulation was oxygen being probably the very first system in the game followed by people that could walk around your ship and it was just it was always built from just let's make a really simple representation of a ship and then we'll figure out where we're actually going to put the ship and what type of game that ship is going to exist in yeah i remember being very um shocked by the scene in balustar galactica where the event where they bent part of that ship and all those people died so that was like something we knew we really wanted so from this build which i don't know how long it took um about a month a month into our work um we found out that the micromanaging the well the managing of crew around your ship dealing with problems that was pretty enjoyable focusing on the interior well when problems were very scalable you get a very small thing which can cascade into a series of of impossibly to impossible to recover from problems and all that was really exciting and we thought it worked pretty well what didn't work pretty well uh was the abstract lack of game goal there's no real game there the micro managing i don't know if you noticed but you can move crew based on squares and fire spread based on squares so you need to like surround fire and move around and then work as a group to move like that and that was not fun at all you would be caught pausing constantly even more than the current version of the game and just yeah getting three crew members to fight one fire yeah otherwise your ship would just completely be destroyed yeah so i mean it was i always if you liked micromanagement it was kind of fun but it was it was not the direction we wanted to sort of this commander feeling not this like very detailed focused uh feeling so um where could we bring the game from this point we felt the most important thing to add next would have to be combat because that would have to be in the game in some form or other so they may as well try and add combat to the mix and see how that feels we went initially for the very traditional type of combat where you immediately picture with with a space two dimensional shooter type thing where you you zoom out and you can manage your ship on a 2d space and you're just kind of shooting at each other the it wasn't very tactical and that you couldn't target specific systems you couldn't really do anything other than broadside each other and you'd have to be zooming in and out on the ship to manage your crew so you you'd manage your crew zoom out and see in position and when you zoom in half your ships on fire and halfway who's dead while you were managing the space battle but it was also a lot of fun to zoom in on the enemy ship and see half their ship was on fire as well and nobody was having a good time one other aspect we were pretty um we really wanted to have multiple ships and this would be an easy way to have like a mini fleet battling and if you played like weird worlds or you know countless space games an image like this is probably pretty familiar um it also will allow us to do the sort of shield the positional shields as well as positional based weapons like weapon cones so you have to organize and strategize where you want to put your weapons based on strategy and you can also turn your ship to sort of protect a certain side and at this point we were actually generating long lists of different weapons and designs that we thought would work really well with this type of combat um and that's basically the same oh there was another thought with the because of the lack of crew control because you're zooming in and out there was a moment that both power and crew control we'd considered automating it so you would when you zoomed out your crew would still do their thing so you wouldn't actually zoom in and find half the ship dead but it was not something actually implemented but it was intended for if that actually went forward but when we stopped to consider this well there were a lot of things we thought were fun um like zooming in and seeing the enemy get destroyed and some of the positional combat can be interesting we felt the vast majority of it wasn't fun and at this point i actually thought the entire game wasn't fun the micromanagement didn't work it was too heavy and then when you're zooming out to do combat the combat was muddy and didn't work well and the mic management failed but everything nothing was working together and we weren't capturing the feeling we wanted at all it was hectic and and difficult to know what was even happening instead we realized as we thought about it that the commander aspect if you're going to capture star trek if you're going to capture a firefly the positioning of the ship didn't matter it was that flying around wasn't something you ever watched the most you ever heard of captain yell was delta formation and that was the extent of the of the movement that you ever saw on star trek and so we started to consider if removing ship movement was even possible and it wasn't something we could really pull on other games for the overriding image in my head was tetris and this idea that you're sitting here dealing with a bunch of cascading problems as these bricks are falling and your enemy or your opponent is dealing with their bricks falling and then every once tomorrow at least in some versions if you're successful you get to throw a bunch of bricks at the other guy and that was the basic concept of what we could see ftl working on and that you're both frantically fixing your ship and every once in a while you get to throw a bunch of problems with the other guy one of the other things that we realized was just that we have to be able to show everything on one screen there's there's no two ways about it we um the the moving between screens to get additional information just would not work um and so from this point we tried to focus on that those those feelings as well as uh consolidating the ui we became almost phobic of putting of making you ever open anything other than the one main screen yeah um so then this was after matt had the the tetris idea which really it was at that point where like wait a minute this could actually work um and okay let's let's go back in and try really hard because i think it could possibly work this screen was the first version where we tried to implement that you can see we still have multiple ships that you could potentially fight we still had the very unusual system management which wasn't particularly functional and some basic weapons from this point this is a mock-up it wasn't in game but you can see at this point we came up with the idea to another turning point in the game was having the power bars the way the power bars work having them be representative of many different things it was it's the how much power is being used it's the strength of the system it's the potential strength of the system it's the the damage it's whether you're repairing it it's whether it's on fire so like all these things are shown in this very small um in this very small icon which previously was in throughout the whole ship um so this was a first trying to add those into the game as well as trying to figure out how we could potentially show weapons and um how much information would need to be shown with them and you also see an early version of what i call the croissant ship and also the um collapsible menus so we were still worried that there would be too much information at any given time so we're playing with the idea of things being hidden and popping up when necessary and that also was abandoned for the same reason of being just too much um too much movement and you really need to see everything there's no moment that you're like oh i don't care about my weapons in the middle of a fight so the idea of collapsing was definitely unnecessary um now we sort of figured out the basic layout that we wanted to show the information and how to have the weapons uh fit on the screen more cleanly um we also realized that at least for now we'd have to do a single ship combat we just wouldn't be able to add multiple ships for the time being um other things no this is when we started to realize that this the size of the ships were problems were a problem we we you know we really felt this project was just going to be just for fun a small thing so we so there's a couple structural things which came back to bite us in the ass um such as the the very limited screen resolution um and so once we realized we had we're going to use this screen resolution and that we were using this pixel art things like slightly screw shrinking the ships or the rooms even become you real we realized it really wasn't an option like it just doesn't look good um and so we had to realize we'd shrink the ships down but that didn't happen yet um if you want to go sorry just a big one on this one um was the consolidation of systems into rooms we used to have systems in individual rooms i mean individual squares in the room so it wasn't really the engine room it was the engines inside of that room and so if you had to work on it you'd have to go to that corner and there's all these white spaces like this long hallway and this giant middle bit which did kind of stick around but really started putting systems like cloaking into it later and it was this consolidation so that the system was the room and there was no distinction between them really helped that the streamlining effect and the whole commander feeling because it stopped being you know go to a1b1 of the engine room and do something it was just you get to the engine room you get to the shield room and it was very straightforward a much more elegant solution than trying to pack the rooms with individual details which at one point we were really trying to get very detailed on sorry um and and also that was a precursor to us realizing we needed room based movement for the crew which didn't come around until a bit we stuck with the micromanaging from far longer than we should have yeah um and in this mock-up uh this was the full-size version of this proto-kestrel which um i was this was me trying to really go back to the atmosphere inside the ship and if we had a much slower paced game which was you know we could have gone in that direction we could have had a lot less combat more trade all that kind of stuff um if we had gone that way i would have wanted to have the inside of the ship be very atmospheric um you can see there's in the airlock there's some little spacesuits you guys go walk over there put on a spacesuit go outside and fix a breach or uh or take off a drone that's attached itself to a ship if a system is uh under duress it would be smoking and eventually break and shatter or whatever um and so or like you'd see the captain go walk over into the cockpit and sit down in the chair and then start typing and so all these things were you know ideas from bygone age which i was still trying to cram into the game but we quickly realized that that wouldn't be possible especially since um we started really figuring out the type of gameplay that we wanted to have and so um this was uh when was it six months six months into the development when we had like when it be when we were uh preparing to submit to igf china 2011 we basically in three weeks turned a whole bunch of weird ideas and gameplay systems into an actual game um and so that crunch period was like pretty intense but it was uh it was very useful for the whole game and for example during that period um my brother who's also a game designer um he was like you gotta get rid of the circles you gotta get rid of the circles and we're like what's wrong with the circles i like the circles and then so at this point we added crew members and we had we also separated the subsystems because we realized we wanted the power management to be more functional and more interesting at a core of the game and that wasn't the case earlier so you see even though we got rid of the circles the crew just kind of stand there awkwardly in this version and adding consoles was such a major change for the atmosphere like the biggest thing for me when we first added that was that instead of the enemy standing around awkwardly while you destroyed them you saw the little guys typing fiercely away to destroy you and it was just really kind of a scary atmosphere moment that this was a living ship with people doing things on it which as you can see from this screenshot it just doesn't really have that same feeling um yep and so at this point we about six months we felt like we had the core game we sort of fumbled around through our ideas constantly and eventually arrived at what would progress to the final game we had some events we had uh seven events you know like you fight a pie you fight a pirate you're fighting a pirate in an asteroid um and with that and the sort of very basic sector map we had um this this side this core game which we uh felt like could potentially work um and then so for the rest the rest of development a whole year was just spent polishing that that game idea so in this final screenshot you can see the game at release which we basically just added tons of content and polish the ship doesn't look as hollow there's various alien races and places you can explore we abandoned the kitties for um little crew portraits um tons of weapons and more complication due to ion versus uh locking your system for for when you use it and of course the weapons they that were exterior to the ship which added tons of atmosphere to the game as well so um that is the end of the part one um just to sort of recap a bit we we started with this very vague idea for a concept and we use that as a sort of guiding principle guiding light for the whole for the whole um project and so by having this one singular focus we were able to abandon everything else that didn't fit in line we we felt like we really wanted multi uh multi-ship fights but eventually that just had to go we want spatial movement but because that didn't fit in that core feeling um we were we felt the freedom like we could just ditch it and keep on moving keep on going to that singular goal um and so if if anyone wants to use this specific thought process in their design i mean technically that focus could be anything it could be a certain type of visual aesthetic it could be uh one game mechanic that you want to be really focused on could be audio or could be a story so um by having this one focus and and letting that direct your whole thing your whole experience you can basically approach your builds uh slightly distance and be able to uh look at it and find out what's actually fun what should we actually keep that will make the game into the experience that we want which you know very often you can get bogged down when you spend months designing a certain a whole game play system and it just doesn't work and you just keep spending months and months like trying to make it uh cram that in and uh and so it was helpful that we didn't have pages of design documents before we got going for that reason yeah we just said we just had this one idea and then we just dove in and um it probably doesn't work for everybody but it definitely helped us stay agile and actually find a game mechanic and a game gameplay system that a we didn't know could exist and b we hadn't had seen precedent for i hear there's other games we ourselves hadn't played other games like this so it allowed us to sort of stumble on that and be open to seeing uh what was interesting in it um for part two we'll kind of talk about a lot of the stuff that happened in our final six months of development as we as we got to kind of in the public eye through our kickstarter and a beta we finally kind of came out of our cave if you will to to see how the game and the design got changed because of that um at this point right about the time that we released it for china igf um the ftl wasn't a point that it didn't have a lot of the stuff still it didn't have boarding it didn't have cloaking it didn't have teleporters it didn't have a lot of the features that you know are really important to the game and the and the biggest problem with it then was this lack of the layers i i still at this point didn't think the game was fun it was we found success that i'm grateful for with the china igf but i was still really nervous about the game and felt like it just didn't keep you busy enough and there wasn't enough going on and so the main goal going on from there was this layering of of more things to keep you busy it was fun though and just the there was a potential there it wasn't any more like we even considered abandoning it we just knew that we needed more content to keep it going sadly about a year into development is when we're running low on funds since it was started as a hobby project we never really intended to go as long as we did and so we turned to kickstarter since it was kind of um it was not quite as well known back then it was we launched about um a week after double fines uh double fine adventure uh game and we had just known it from friends who had done like uh film projects or starting a farm and that sort of thing and double fine as just drove thousands to kickstarter and we were lucky enough to be sitting there with a game that people thought was kind of cool and we ended up with 20 times the 10k that we needed to finish the game and it was about 10 000 backers that did that and it really influenced the game for the better but it also caused a few extra stresses that we might not have known going into it um the first thing i want to talk about is how the having 10 000 people watching us um changed the game and we were very used to being able to cut and move around very agile by ourselves in our cave without really worrying about what other people thought but when we had this giant audience come that kind of changed everything we had overnight fans like talking about our game which was really cool and really weird that there are these other people that were just as excited about this game as we were and so it really drove the motivation but at the same time it was just immense pressure there was only two of us and people put their faith and their money into our hands and it was absolutely terrifying and many sleepless nights knowing that we had to create this product to make these people happy um the expectations of course varied the it was difficult sometimes to balance it as you'd expect ten thousand people have different thoughts but we took the time to talk to everyone that we could anytime we got a question posted to our forum or emailed to us we took it very seriously and and answered it and tried to talk through it and that really helped us as well and just kind of explaining our own thought process even if the idea were like that's not at all what we want but i've never really had to explain why that's not at all what i want and so it was fun to have to to verbalize it and really structure the game in that manner one of the biggest things that was difficult for us with the kickstarter was that we had these list of things we said we'd put it in the game we put it up there as of course these would be fun stuff like the aliens and ship customization this idea that you would when you start your game instead of choosing a ship you'd you'd have a more of a shell and you'd add weapons to it and add systems to it and kind of min max what you want for your ship it sounded fun on paper as as and it's still something we get requests for literally every day and they once we got it in the game though it didn't really work and it just it wasn't as fun there weren't that many options when you have every option in front of you it kind of muddies the options that are actually available and there was an obvious choice and a less obvious choice and the we were ready to cut it immediately but because we had 10 000 people who expected it in the game we were very worried about cutting it prematurely because of something that they might want and so we put on probably another week or two of development time and balance time trying to see if there was a way to crack this nut and make it work and it's hard to say the time was wasted but at the same time it was a little bit wasted we had a lot of stuff to do before we could release the game and we spent more time than we should have on ship customization especially considering the fact that we had also promised for a release date um which was not too far away so like every week was super important during that period our release date we finished the kickstarter in april and the release date was supposed to be in august that's largely because we also thought you know we would just get around ten thousand dollars maybe a bit more if we were lucky and that we would just work with our small focus for the game which was considerably smaller than the final game and then so that leads us to which leads us to how the money actually changes things the extra 20 times what we needed to kind of do the vision we wanted for the game um was was awesome and it let us really think about the bigger content of what we could do but it's also really difficult because you have a game and you have a vision for a game and it the scope of the game and it's kind of complete in your mind the design is there and just because you have some extra money doesn't necessarily mean you can improve the game it just doesn't necessarily work that way you can't just throw money at something and it gets better and a common request would be something like multiplayer for co-op or competitive um it's just we never saw it in the game and we still don't think it would fit in the game but it's something that people kind of think about when you have extra funds and maybe you could fit it in now because you have more time and you could hire people to do it just for some perspective this was our kickstarter was also before the whole stretch goals was a standard as it was now so we had zero plan for um previously for what we would do if we would reach uh x amount of money so we hadn't even thought about it the idea that that could even happen was beyond us we thought ten thousand would be kind of eked out we didn't think that 200 000 would come rolling our way um and so we had this difficult balancing act of how do we improve the game how do we take advantage of this awesome new clump of resources but at the same time how do we hit our release date and keep everyone happy and so the easiest way to do that was to kind of improve or double the content that we already planned that fit into the pre-existing design and so some of it was aesthetic stuff like the music the the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant um we could have gotten by without it but we all know that the game wouldn't be as good without it and without ben um we wouldn't he was able to devote a lot more time because we could pay him a lot better and so you could stop working for the time at all yeah he was generous enough to work pretty much for free up until this moment and so flying funds his way let him stop working full time and put a lot more time into the soundtrack which ended up really awesome it's something that people love and we love one of the things i'm most proud about coming out of the game is that we helped make this awesome thing of music come out too and the similarly we were able to contract out an extra rider to expand the events as we're going further into the game we realized that the text-based events were extremely difficult or more difficult than we expected to kind of get out and keep the variety up we you know we thought mistakenly that there's some it's just text you just write a few more and then you have a lot and then you and then there's a lot of variety in the game how hard can that be but it's amazing how many words we needed even if it's something like 15 000 when we bought on the writer wasn't anywhere near enough words in the game to create the variety that we needed and so with the extra money we're able to get the guy um thomas toms in england to help us out and really expand the game greatly which was awesome he also helped us expand kind of our alien and ship world in general and that he gave a lot more backstory and a lot more we just had little sprites that had no purpose they were created for game design reasons like we thought it would be cruel if an alien could power a system and that was the extent of why that alien existed and the writer really helped us flesh it out into something that mattered and changed the game so about two months after the kickstarter we were ready to launch our beta the beta was for 3 000 beta players um that paid about 25 to get into that private closed beta at that point we thought the game was actually i finally felt the game was really coming together we had every layer on and it was a lot of fun the only big problem was that there wasn't a lot of replay value there wasn't a lot of reason other than finding new events which as i just said we were having trouble filling out to come back and play and so we needed stuff like the ship unlocks and the achievements and the things we would add that would help and drive people to come back and we were hoping that during the beta we could figure out what made people play the game and then kind of capitalize on that so since there were the three thousand players that paid 25 dollars so more than anybody else has paid for ftl these were our most hardcore fans these were people that loved games like ftl and wanted games like ftl we had already started with the game being very difficult as we talked about in the beginning it was intended to be something that was challenging the it was harder going into the beta we did reduce the difficulty but we reduced it down to a level for players that love that type of game and are good at that type of game so that's why we still ended up with the difficulty that ftl is known for we feel that balancing to that group the group that plays it for 300 hours was a good idea the the game was taken off because of that difficulty the people that love it really appreciate that it's tailored to that type of experience and it also helps that replayability issue if the game was too easy then you beat it and then you're done and if you beat it every time there's not a lot of interest there but getting your ass kicked every time you played actually kind of drove you back to play it more and so it got that replayability that we needed um for example the the easy mode was added a final a few weeks before release or something like a month before release and so like that's why you know that's why it's labeled easy versus normals because normal as opposed to being absurdly difficult mode um but that was the experience that we were actually trying to create for people because we wanted to make a game that we ourselves would enjoy that was the highest goal early on yeah not all 3000 of them loved the difficulty i guess there were a few that wanted it slightly easier um they're also very effective i mean anything out of a beta that you'd hoped to get is effective bug hunting and feedback and these guys were awesome for that as well what was interesting going into the beta is that we also we had a lot of these visual effects that we had put into the game very early that we weren't sure about the stuff like that jump animation that was made 18 months ago now that was put into the game in an hour to just we need a jump animation let's get let's get that in we always intended to go back and change it and the same idea that we had about five backgrounds and half a dozen planets and that was all we had in the game and we always assumed that that's all part of the visual polish we do leading up to release but it's something that nobody mentioned during the beta there were tons of complaints and issues and feedback that we got but not one of them had anything to do with our really crappy jump animation and so that animation's still in the game everything that all that stuff kind of fell to the back burner there was no reason to do it we felt because that's not what players wanted what players were talking about were it was the gameplay it was more content it was more balancing it was the stuff that they were really latching on to that mattered and so we pretty much forgot about that throughout the window and focused on that yeah or the fact that um the only ship that actually has thrusters that do anything is the kestrel no one has ever mentioned that to us either as a result though you can cater a little bit too much to this group of hardcore players and one of them as we talked about the as i just said the gameplay that we were expanding kind of started to lean on future creep we had at this point the bombs and the iron weapons and a lot of different types of weapons but it was so many types of weapons that we still envisioned and if we had piled those into the game any new player or even medium player wouldn't figure anything out the as by roguelikes nature everything's open from the beginning it's just there it is when you start the game and we didn't want to overwhelm it with this top heavy advanced gameplay which is what the new weapons would be naturally they lead to tiny small places you'd need it for little strategic holes that we wanted to plug in the gameplay but it was just not necessary it would make the game bloated and we were warned by some of our player tester friends as well that we needed to just leave it the way it was and and make sure it was just balanced um one thing that happened from it was in the very beginning we made it very simple decision for how to unlock player ships if you've played the game there's you know there's events that you randomly come across that if you have certain equipment like you have your engines and your med bay and your teleporter then you can unlock a player ship and the event plays through another little story and you can kind of figure out what you need based on what happens in the story like oh no he died if only we had a better med bay it's not that obvious but enough to kind of make you figure it out and it was more of a quick solution so we could get it out the door to the beta players and see figure out something from there but the beta players really liked it they thought it was a lot of fun to discuss the puzzle of how to unlock the ships our forum had long threads of people really talking about all the different ways they might be able to do it and kind of solve this puzzle and so we thought that was really cool and they were enjoying it and so we kept it in the game and we made all the ship unlocks like that but once the game came out and it stopped being this very small audience of people solving the problems it just became a list of things you had to do people just can google the list of everything you need there's no more discussion and it becomes a waiting game of just hoping that the random universe will give you what you need to unlock the ship and it's one of the most common complaints and it kind of fell out of the uh the beta appearing that it was fun but in the actual open world it wasn't um so near what as we neared the release we realized we really just had to focus on a single um a single focused game so like matt was saying we really just needed to stop adding stuff we really needed to find out what is a what is a good you know structured system that has enough events enough variety enough weapons enough things you could learn um as you play the game and enough skill caps and all that kind of stuff and so um part of that as you can see in this image like this is in the final game even that super clean simple power bar which represented a lot of things became ridiculously bloated and it could me there's a lot of information being conveyed that's so i could be like matt was saying really terrifying to new players and that sort of thing or old players and then look at this so the poor power bars we just piled onto them yeah and but that was you know because we were trying desperately to have everything in one game screen and if we added more things that were added that were requested or even planned like hacking systems or or um you know various things that could really make it feel quite bloated so we so we knew near this in this time that we really just wanted to have a good coherent solid game release it and there you go there's our game um so it's just some of the ideas that got cut um that we had really wanted to be in the game or the sort of like in the same way that you have the asteroid field is a special environment you have these special encounters such as cloaked saboteurs who would wander around your ship and you need to have a person in that room to be able to see them and they'd lay bombs and destroy parts of your ship you need to find them or have a slug guy to help you out um various monsters like aliens monster and egg that hatch would infect crew members or spread or then become a disaster aboard your ship potentially killing everybody um i really liked an energy based entity which would wander around and suck out energy from your reactor and that kind of thing the sad part is all of these i still think would be awesome and i would love to have in the game but at the same time just because it would be good doesn't necessarily mean it would improve the game in the end we felt like it wasn't even cutting features because it would make it because it would be not fun it was cutting features because it was good the way it was why poke the deck of cards or the the house of cards if you don't need to and that it's it's sad it really was look at some of these but we know that it was the right decision to keep them out the other things like gas-based weaponry like uh kind of like bombs it would explode in the room and then gas would spread out based on how doors would be opened and it could do various things like knockout crew members or heal them or damage systems and stuff like that something else that we always initially dreamed was being able to uh go to a station kind of like starcraft and be separate from your ship and have certain systems maybe that would be helpful for station boarding as your crew members are trying to rescue a vip from from inside a prison facility or something like that and so um there's a link at the end but we actually put this slide online in addition to a document which has matt's original um kind of stream of consciousness idea for the game as well as just this giant laundry list of features that we wanted and we didn't get to add um so uh but in the end we had to come to to the release date and we were uh able to get a game that we were happy with uh released uh september last year and we released it on windows mac and linux which had its own slew of problems and difficulties which we don't really suggest new developers to do three three operating systems for their first game but um it worked out in the end um and it was especially interesting to us because like we had never intended for this to be a commercial product it was just this weird flurry of of growing um interest and and so that to be able to release the game it was amazing especially since there were so many situations where we just felt up go scrap this go find a job go do something um else you know um and i also have to thank you know this community because about two years too well two years ago i was here i went to the igf all the indie game talks and i was really inspired and i knew that i from that point on that i wanted to make indie games i just knew it and then that convinced me to quit my job and luckily i was able to work with matt um to be able to do this and then two years later i'm coming here and showing off our game which is crazy to us and potentially and hopefully could inspire some some of you out there to to you know make something awesome although i'm not encouraging you all to quit your jobs um yeah we're a good example that you don't necessarily have to know what you're doing to stumble upon something kind of cool so yeah thank you to everybody who helped us and our family and friends to keep us sane and thank you to everybody else we probably ran a little fast here but we're we'd be excited to answer anyone's questions for as long as you'd like hi guys uh firstly just you know great game my sons and i have put many hours into it and they've unlocked everything in the game it's great now obviously the randomness of the game can be a bit punishing at times but you know that as you said it makes you come back to the game did you try to kind of solve uh the negative feedback loops that can occur when you know you get damaged you have to spend money repairing your ship and then you can't spend the money to upgrade your ship and then eventually you know you just have to quit the game and start again or do you sort of think players will just do that i mean um i personally i really like that that is in the game and i i do think it's a sort of different type of person who would get in a situation like that and be like oh quit restart and as opposed to us who would be playing that and you get in that awful situation you barely escape scrape through and then you keep going and now it's now it's a considerably more intense experience you now have one crew member and i love that that's in the game even if it isn't ideal for some people yeah okay at the same time there is a slight balancing for it and the the scrap increase through the sectors is actually very high by the time you get to that last sector or the seventh sector you're getting so much money you'd be amazed how much you can buy last minute right before getting to the box so so the quitters don't win in the end you've got to kind of stick at it and get to the last level i mean if you don't enjoy that you don't have to but yeah so some people do like other people i hear they just they just replay the first sector until they find weapons and if that's the way you want to play go for it yeah so thanks so um like you said uh one of the biggest complaints is the locked ships and everything um have you guys thought about a way to deal with that you know now as like an update or um maybe even allow people to purchase them just for cash well we will never do we never can do that oh yeah we will never do any form of just largely because like the same way we wanted you know we were making a game that we wanted to play we wouldn't particularly enjoy that um it's a little bit of a odd situation because we like um we really did want to move on to the to the to the next project and even now we're still um working on the various things that are associated with the game as well it's um maybe possible be able to do small updates but it really wasn't something we were planning to do was just keep adding things to the game because it could just could ruin the experience that we were shooting for it's kind of the house of cards thing i'd be worried about tipping anything and making a decision that would actually make it worse i think it is functional the way it is and i if i had to go back i might say more stuff like the layout b unlocks where it's kind of gameplay based and achievement based um but i think that it if anything i would probably just want to reduce the randomness but keep the same style because it's kind of fun to unlock it through the event and it's kind of a story that you help with this race and that's why you get the ship there's still elements of what we like it's just stuff like the crystal the crystal ship that is just purely a exercise in randomness is excessive i would rather remove the randomness than remove the design entirely uh over there okay um as you've stated that you're a team of one programmer and one artist who kind of shared the design uh sounded like 50 50. did you have any major creative differences as you went through the project and how did you address them we were pretty lucky in that this sort of same like focal point for the game we kind of both uh intrinsically had the same image even though we weren't able to describe it to other people like we wouldn't be able to explain the game so we got really lucky that we just for some reason clicked like that in terms of design nothing major small stuff just small details we would definitely get in fights about small details but it nothing yeah the major direction the project was always very singular and focused impressively so still doesn't make any sense to me so you're always able to kind of come back to that and say well what serves the vision best what serves the vision of i'm just saying that you were able to come back to that and just kind of ask what service division best to resolve those things yeah yeah his main comment cool thanks i think when people talk about your game and they're trying to describe it in a hurry i often hear them describe it as a roguelike in space and it does have roguelike elements i didn't see you mention permadeath or any of these specific elements in your initial uh kind of grand division was that something you just kind of wandered into or did you always want permadeath to be part of the game that actually while it wasn't explicitly said in that initial vision and if you go read that vision it's not there there's another document i don't know if we put it up that has five the beginning i gamepl that having that basic actual like your decisions mattered was so vital especially for being the captain of the command of the starship like i i wanted when you're making the decision for your crew that that decision mattered that there was depth to it and you were stressed about it you wanted to be in the shoes of that captain and without permadeath you don't have that and so the consequences of of your gameplay and your actions is something that i really enjoy and i always and we both really enjoy and so we always wanted and intended to have in the game from day one yeah it definitely works in this game yeah thank you awesome game huge fan um so in the beginning of the talk you talked about how you're reducing the pitch down to the core concept um if you were to since you guys are working on your second project now or going to be some time or something who knows something's going to happen we hope uh would you do the same thing again would you modify that process anyway um i mean i have a few various ideas you know we that we've discussed for what potentially could be another project some of them involve more like i want this type of gameplay structure and some are more um just the sort of experience but i do think that that um even just thinking about now yeah like pretty much always we're just i at least i'm trying to find um what do we want the player to feel like when he's playing this game and that that because probably i wouldn't be surprised if we also just started cutting things that didn't fit into that experiential feeling so yeah and as a programmer first i probably lean towards just diving into it getting things working and moving and tinkering because the code is just as related to the design as the design is so i think that just go for it and move forward on this kind of core random idea is definitely how i would still want to approach it yeah we wouldn't um we probably i still wouldn't make some sort of project where we have like global design documents for every single aspect of the game and then try and make that that's uh i couldn't picture even trying that thank you hey uh as a fan of ftl i'm really glad that the process kind of worked out to produce what it did but um there's probably countless anecdotes about how the process of just sort of we have an idea and we're just going to kind of attach features as we go could go horribly horribly wrong uh what process did you use to kind of prioritize and vet out which features you would work on first or or develop first and then kind of where the line was of what went in the game and what didn't uh it was never anything particularly formal i i think that it kind of what we covered in the first half with this idea that if it served that core feeling um it would work there wasn't in terms of like specific features that would still all fit within that feeling um i guess just a whim just like what we felt like at the time maybe which isn't helpful i know just like well you know i really feel like there should be some weapon that can counter shields um and and the defense drone aka bombs you know so like uh just playing the game a lot figuring out what you feel is missing and that sort of thing i forget the order now i think we're over there and we'll go that way um you talked about your kind of kickstarter backers coming on board with your testing early on um how did you deal with that kind of shift in feedback from just being kind of a very close-knit team of two suddenly having kind of like 5 000 people's worth of feedback how did you prioritize which feedback was important we didn't deal with it very well i could tell you that but um we worked too hard mostly i mean it it was we had a we used get satisfaction to have the actual feedback coming through um with 3 000 people there was a vocal 500 maybe 250 in the beginning and it there was actually enough of a flow that we could manage that while developing we were lucky enough i was terrified going into it that it was going to be this massive people just barraging us as questions and concerns but it did actually end up with a manageable flow that we didn't really have to stress about that too much and be able to do it we stressed about a lot and did it uh part of it is also just that we had had a core group that would go and answer our a lot of our the basic simple questions for us just like the people who just were active in the forum in the get satisfaction page and um and just really help us out in that way in terms of prioritizing i as a programmer i was focusing on the bugs i would always look at bugs bugs had to come first no matter what everything else had to be put back and um it was definitely and luckily get satisfaction this website and as i advertise it for them here has a problem section in an idea section and a question section and so my day would start in the problem section and if i solved all that stuff then i would move on to the other sections so did you find the community was kind of quite disciplined in kind of not not posting you know duplicates of bugs so you get 10 000 bugs that were the same and then again a great thing about get satisfaction is that when you type in your initial bug it runs a search to find if it's already posted it doesn't even let you post without running a search and um in general though they were pretty good about it and in general they're pretty good about not posting bugs or ideas as bugs or vice versa that can sometimes get in the way but it was they were a great community in terms of um the design which i was spending more time on but most of it was just ended up being like you know this isn't something that fits in our view you know like we just it was either a lot of suggestions were either you know things that we had thought about things that we conceived but could never do and very few things that we never even thought of but um but for example like i wrote say we wrote save game in the little screenshot there oh yeah that same game was the big issue they didn't have it in the beta you couldn't save and quit from the very beginning and we didn't want to at it and we were fighting them for like months and they were there was the most complained about thing to not have a save game to like um some sort of temporary save feature and eventually that was the the one thing that we really like caved on we're like fine here you go have your saved game um yeah okay thanks um first of all i want to thank you for the great game um i spent personally i spent a huge amount of time trying to beat it on easy mode i managed to do so uh and the question is uh could you please share uh a percentage uh ratio of user base on different operating systems i'm sorry operating system um how many percentage ratio yeah percentage oh i have no idea i'm sorry um vast majority windows the vast majority of windows as you'd expect um and then i would 5 maybe for linux i would no no smaller yeah and i would guess that mac linux is nearly equal the linux community really did respond to um us putting it on there and while it was extremely difficult for me to release as the program with the three operating systems day one um the linux community really made it worth it because they were so grateful for having us take the time to do that but it they were definitely still a small minority compared to the windows yeah thank you linux on steam really boosted it as well yeah if we a lot doubled these linux users at this point so you guys uh had quite a large following after the kickstarter and everything um i'm sure you guys are aware of like the community that kind of popped up and created mods for it especially with like new ship layouts and everything i was kind of curious your opinions of that and if you guys were to make another game in the future would you kind of accommodate something like that from the beginning um when we were starting you know like i was saying we ideally we you know for this community ideally we would have structured the game to be able to support modding so like you could see if you follow that community there's a lot of struggles to sort of work within the sort of crappy framework frame framework to that we gave them so there's very limited things that they can do in terms of um in terms of like for the next project um maybe i mean obviously it would be smarter to do that especially if we will get a lot of fans who enjoyed ftl and we have the same sort of situation and people wanting to like you know own it and like work with it and that sort of thing we definitely should will we i don't know a more moddable game is inherently a probably a better developed game it's easier for us to add content if if we have convenient ways to modern and less easier to break so i would hope if only for selfish reasons that it would be easier to mod in the future um or a future game would be and and it is a lot of fun it's a little frightening at first seeing a community take apart your game we spent a year and a half slaving over it and then they're digging through your private notes and private scripts like going through your underwear drawers and then posting look you made a typo in this completely private packaged file and it said yeah it's a bit creepy um or weird but we i've gotten used to it and it's a lot of fun seeing the it's amazing what some of the people come out with and the the devotion to the style and the and in the art and the new layouts and stuff a real impressive understanding of the game and and it still it blows me away like like one guy who actively knew that he was turning the ship into an ai ship so that uh playership so that it could be uh ai ships by definition regenerate system so like there's one ship that you can regenerate everything slowly yeah so it's pretty it's awesome to to follow it yeah thank you guys thanks hey guys um in the earlier phases of your development when you were doing all the prototypes and you had like the basic prototype and the spatial prototype et cetera before the kickstarter did you look for a lot of feedback from people outside your group or was it just you two how did that kind of work when did matt when did the mature jump in about five months into the project i think is when we first other than our girlfriends who would see it from the beginning that was about it that was about it for a while then there were maybe two or three people that we gave it to um at about the five-month mark and were definitely incredibly important to the balance and design of the game about um once we got closer to igf build where the game was more complete then we started reaching out to various indie developers and people who that we had contacted and they helped us test a lot as well but we didn't do any sort of massive um qa in any sort at that time or trials thank you one more okay i'm sorry what was it like living in china and how did that affect your game uh yeah so for those of you who don't know we were both living in china for a few years before we started um working on ftl we were working from our separate apartments um for most of the time we didn't have a studio or anything and then uh near the end of development i at least came to live in the us for a while um how did it affect china it's awesome i mean china's a it's it's a especially shanghai yeah stronghold is such an international city and it and there's a slightly lower the cheaper cost of living and so that was an independent developer that was big the fact that we could live on much on a shoestring budget and you can go get lunch for 50 cents less than that and it would be a good lunch too and so there was definitely just the financial benefit of china it was awesome and it's just it's it was it was fun being over there i i it was it's a great place yeah i definitely um i mean i'm not exactly sure how much it has affected development other than enhancing the feeling like we were in a cave um like because we like it was just especially during those times we i left the apartment every once in a while um there was no point i i didn't we released the game and then like two months or a month after we released the game i came to california to go to indicate and that was the first time i met any of our kickstarter backers or really met anybody who knew what ftl was even though that we'd been building publicity and things for a year prior to that and so it did definitely enhance that cave-like feeling of developing over there which was not necessarily a bad thing i guess that's all we have time for so thank you everybody

Channel: GDC

Views: 288,232

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

Id: P4Um97AUqp4

Length: 61min 27sec (3687 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016