Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns

[Music] hello everybody welcome to off-road trading company an RTS without guns for get started please remember to silence your cellphone's alright so alright there we go that's exciting alright so this is this will be angel eyes I've shipped which you know shows that my my main background is a strategy game developer and this is this is who I am now this is my the project I've been working on for last 3 years awful training company and in fact this game I wanted to make kind of my entire career and so I was very excited I finally got a chance to do that and one of the things I want to talk about today is I really feel that real-time strategy is actually an underexplored genre that there is a lot more possibilities out there than what we see from the current RTS games so you know what makes what makes an RTS you know some of the things we often think over you know having a high APM your actions four minutes a game warrior you know selecting a lot of Units moving around very quickly you know our chances have you know fog of war they tend to be they tend to be I hold on I'm sorry I don't know why there we go all right lieutenant short games they tend to involve a lot of combat you know this is what you think of as a Tristan RTS however if you dig a little deeper what about majesty that was a fantastic RTS game that had no unit selection you basically just put down bounties on the map and the unit's kind of moved around based off of like these you know you're basically down so if you if you attack this you know this could work here I'll give you a certain amount of money and the unit's kind of falls around according to those those wishes or Adam Zombie Smasher just a game that had you know no fog of war or what about sins of a solar Empire which you know is almost so like a Forex RTS you know these games gain a game of sins often took three four or five hours so whether the game is no combat and sort of most importantly I did just pick three random RTS games to show that you can buck conventions these are actually all three classics in the genre and you know if you could only play for RTS games you'd be much better off playing each of these three and just one from the first set of games I showed you you know which were Starcraft command & Conquer Age of Empires company heroes they're all great games to some extent they're a little bit interchangeable because they have a lot of the same parts and you know kind of at a core level they're kind of trying to do the same thing so you know how can we make an RTS without comment all right so this is this is awful but the awful trading company looks like and it is an economic RTS so what that means is the conflict in the game revolves around the free market there's a lot of resources of the game you know typical ret as you might have two to four resources we have thirteen and each of them has a price and the price goes up and down depending upon player actions you know players make you know they make a lot of irons and some of them the market goes down the players are buying a lot of food and the price goes up and basically you you do well at the game by figuring out what are the resources that are going to have you know the highest demand and least supply you look around what's going to be worth a lot you know in a couple days and what weather my opponents producing the least of you know that's how you're able to make a lot of money there's no direct combat and the game ends basically with a hostile takeover so the the aggression in the game is in the stock market basic goal is to make as much money as possible and then you eventually win by turning that money taking that money and buying up the stock of your opponents so to talk about how I got here I first want to talk about the games that influenced me to get to offworld because even though off-road is a pretty unusual game there's not really another I mean economic RTS is sort of a sub-genre I basically invented here it actually has a lot of antecedents pretty much almost every element of the game was taken from other games you know almost everything is actually recognizable it just hasn't together in this in this specific assortment so here's here's Beltre it's a very very old hex encounter war game from 1979 and the game I play as a kid and it's what first introduced the idea of going out exploring discovering resources and them having sort of different levels so in belter you would go from asteroid asteroid and you'd roll a dice and you discover if it had low or medium or high iron ore or gas or whatever and that's where I got the basic idea for resources in offworld mule is pretty obvious influence on on offworld that's where I got the basic idea for for for claims and mule had some you have limited claims which is really important like in a traditional RTS you're able to gather resources anywhere there's really no limitation on it where as a mule you get them basically and you claim every turn and that's really what makes the game interesting because you have to make a tough choice of you know you can invest in food or Smitha or energy or whatever and I wanted that same mechanic in in offworld and I also borrowed auctions from mule because it was such a important part of the game I mean our auctions work very differently they're much more like traditional auctions but basically after playing mule I knew that I knew that we had to have auctions is just such a such a cool thing to have more games have influence offer with a lot obviously for people who play that they often often hear that you know off-road feels like you know board games on your computer it's like one movie like way too complex to play but it still feels like a board game which is interesting because people don't necessary that about other RTS games and I think I think the reason they do is because we really commit commit to transparency of the in the rules in off world so here for example you know I've shown you some detail how have a steel mind works and is showing that basically you put in one unit of iron in one side and the other side comes half a unit of steel and all of the buildings and off worlds basically work like that they're very they're very chunky right and even even on the map there you see those little cubes you know that represent iron I mean that's you know that you don't have to take a big jump to kind of think of you know all those sort of your games with little wooden cubes that you said to have so we definitely wanted to give people at that feeling railroad tycoon is another huge influence on us and that was where I kind of got the concept of your shipping lanes that there's sort of a you know a geographical element of you know you have a base somewhere and then you go out and get your resources and then you ship them around you get iron from one place you hear you turning the steel and you do something with that you get water one place you take it here you turn the fuel then you take the fuel and you turn it into chemicals so indeed you know you got to talk about this here which is the the resource chart in railroad tycoon which is you know another really big core part of off world is all of this arrangement how you turn resources into each one turn one resource into another as an aside I think it's interesting you have I spent a long time online trying to find a resource charts for the original railroad tycoon and the only one I could find was in German which ending is very telling because if you know Germans the only thing better than a game where you can turn wheat into bread is a game of which you first going to turn it into flour and then you turn into bread so you know they this is their type of game and this is what the this is what the resource chart looks like in off world so you know actually it's a bell most the same number of types of buildings and types of resources and conversions and some are a little more complex than others you know the electronics factory requires three inputs some spit out two inputs the reactor takes water it splits into oxygen fuel which you know creates some submit risky dynamics in the system but here is actually the big one it's a dream empires and specifically there's just one building in Age of Empires that has a huge influence on off world and that building is the market which you can see here kind of on the left side of the screen in fact it's selected so you can see in the left the bottom left corner of the screen there's this interface which I want to zoom in here so this is the market building where you can there's four resources in in Age of Empires food wood stone gold and using the market you can trade any of those resources at any time for you using gold and the wonderful thing about this system is that the prices are global right so you know I start buying would I get wood but the price goes up for everyone so someone out there notices that the price of wood has gotten really high they can start taking advantage of that they can produce a lot of would turn into gold and gold's really valuable in age of empires you can you know some of those powerful units like Knights are made with gold so they can really take advantage of this sort of market inefficiency by turning basically something worthless like not worthless but less worthwhile that's worthy whatever that word is taking that wood turning to gold turning to a really powerful unit so you know you can see there's kind of a direct line here from the from the market in a dream empires right to our resource market in offworld in many ways you can say that we made an entire game about just this one building in Age of Empires and there's something interesting I like to note which is you see there's actually two prices there right so you could sell wood for 76 gold and you can budget you have to spend 142 to buy it so they're actually kind of like they're hedging their bets basically they're putting the system there they're doubling the price to make sure people don't do too much trading it's an interesting part of the game but it's just something to decide it's the supplement to the main game they didn't want this part of the game to take over by having those two prices to buy and sell price be too close and when I first made offworld I actually I just adopted what they did I had to buy and sell price because I had the buy price be double the sell price and it wasn't really interesting the game really never really took off you know internally when we're playing until I decided you know I don't know it was working I just collapsed the price into one price so when you buy it you sell it the same price and then the game suddenly became so much more interesting because then it was there are so many new ways to get an advantage off of the market you know it was at that point it was all about arbitrage you know and like the market could change within a few seconds and you know you can make you know you can make a huge profit on something very quickly we're here you know you buy wood for 142 you have to wait a long time for the price to get high enough for you to make sense to actually sell it you know you probably are never going to be able to like make money that way so you know collapsing into one part smooth a huge difference all right so but why why build a game about a free market at all and you know for me it comes down to what I'll call adaptive gameplay which you know that said gameplay means you're adapting your strategy to the current environment which is really the core of strategy gaming that you know there's not one choice you know there's not this is an RPG we're not letting you kind of like decide how you want to play the game the whole point is to see what environment the game's rating is sending to you and then try to make the best choice depending upon that's adaptation and I think all good strategy games have that and I want to kind of go into all of the things in off world that enable that a lot of these things you'll see come back to a free market so you know number one you got the random maps right and different types of train favour different types of resources so you might have some maps where the flow of iron and very little water or you might have another bath where there's the reverse and that totally changes the dynamics in the market you know if you see a map where there's you know there's there's very little water then you want to might want to make sure that you monopolize that early maybe you try to grab up as much of the water as possible because you know that by the end of the game the prices of all the life support materials are going to be super high and everyone's gonna have to buy that from you we have random events in the game you see on the on the left there there's a there's a fuel shortage and iron shortage which is causing sort of like a temporary spike in price for those resources on the right there's an oxygen surplus and a chemical surplus which is you know sort of doing the opposite so these are other things that can you know sort of mix up the you know this is why demand ratio on the market we introduced random prices for when the game began for the when the game begins on the left side those are kind of what you say are the base prices for all the resources so you know the kind of the more advanced resources like electronics and glass started out more expensive things like water and and iron and aluminum things you can just get straight from the ground started out cheaper and so at some point I was like well I feel like I really want to have the game a little more variety make the game have a little variety because when the game starts at the same prices you kind of end up always starting with the same buildings you know based off of that that kind of dynamic and so it's like well let's just roll the dice and see what the prices are and so what I did I did what you see there in the middle column whereas it just said you know kind of prices all over the place and that sort of works that sort of like works at a high level it definitely made the game have more variety because things were very very different but the problem was there was there's too much cognitive loads on the player with the game began you know they look at though that numbers and it's just kind of like it's just a master numbers you know it there it's hard to process all at once and so what we did instead is what you see in the right column which is that we either double a resource the double resources price or half it and then we also give a little colored hint so you can see immediately when you see that and the game starts you know this is exactly what the marketer looked like you click quickly you're like oh there's four resources our double price and two resources a Half Price you know and that can that could usually affect you know how how you want to start so here you see iron is green it's forty bucks that means it's double price so you might want to grab two iron tiles instead of one to be any of the game here's another thing random auctions so over the course of the game usually every 24 24 hours basically you get an auction comes up and that can be for a patent it can be for tile and before something on the black market and that's an interesting you know sort of thing that the game can throw at you because the players can't anticipate what's going to come up and what you're seeing here is some fan art that was made based off of a sort of a game that's become infamous among our community it was from a tournament where two players both started the game where due to random prices steel was like I think double price and iron was half price so they both were going to be very clever and just build three steel mills to take advantage of that you know price discrepancy and just create a lot of steel right the bat but since they both did that it basically drove the price up price of iron up so high that then the steel mills became unprofitable and basically both players got stuck they couldn't even upgrade they were both just sitting there kind of like waiting like well what should happen now and what the game decide to let happen was suddenly auction off a high iron tile and that was it basically is like well whoever gets this tile wins the game I guess so the oxygens kept going up and up and up and just for for reference here a typical auction usually goes for maybe twenty thousand maybe thirty thousand if it's something really desirable so I went up to sixty thousand ninety ninety eight 128 under ninety two eventually the one guy got it for 200 24 thousand dollars and just for reference if you have you know two-player games you have $400,000 you can probably just win the game at that point that's probably enough to win so he got the high iron tile but this is what you call the winners curse at an auction you spent so much that when you spend that much goes directly into your debt and his basically a stock price immediately collapse to $1 and and the other player won just by basically buying them out so the thing here is they just said they had never been in this situation before like how do we value this high our entire entire tile there is some correct price it was probably maybe 90,000 be my guest but I'm not sure you know it's just you got to figure it out as the game goes right that's what's that's what's great about adaptive gameplay right you know you have to you know this is this unusual situation you got to figure it out on the fly so here's the black market these are a bunch of items that can basically mess with your opponent's things like an EMP which knocks out their buildings or mutiny where you'd literally steal their buildings dynamite where you blow out their building you get to get the drift there's some positive ones here like an adrenaline boost that make sure your stuff go faster but yeah you know like when we started out we had maybe six or seven and that seems like fun I was like well we could push this more and so you know we eventually we shipped but maybe like 18 or 19 effects and you know that's an obvious place to basically mix things up which game it's like there's a deck of black market items and you draw up seven each game and the way the whatever comes up you know can greatly influence how you want to play you know if the game has no pirates that changes the dynamics then you're safer it's safer to ship valuable resources over long distances because you know someone is gonna be able to steal them from you but here's the really big one which is opponent decisions right the choices the other players make in the game you know it you know you start at one place but again the game ends in such different at such a different place you know we see a lot you know our community has a bunch of terms that they run kind of regularly and you'll often see these games or two players you know very high-level player is Bill Gannon siege of the first game it ends very quickly in like four days majority by out in the next game it's this huge long affair goes ten twelve days and with a bunch of off-road market for the most advanced buildings and it all kind of goes back to kind of ease these early decisions that those players meant that made the game spin off in these different directions so you know put all these together there's a lot of things that are different about each game of off world which is how you get you know such high replayability and so talking about opponent choices one of the real big ones here is when you found your headquarters which of the there's four headquarter types would you know kind of like you know Starcraft you know are you going to be Terran you're gonna be Zerg and you'd be Protoss but one thing that was just one of our testers came up with an idea early on in the project he said like you know what you know what if you chose your headquarters after the game began right and that was great and that was that was sort of like a breakthrough like break your idea because it you know going back to the opponent decisions you know like that is such an important one like what headquarters can be because that radically changes the market no I'll get to that a little bit I just want to point out that you know when you work in a genre you sometimes you're not aware of the baggage you're inheriting you know I never really thought about like well maybe you should pick your headquarter type after the game begins because every our chests have ever played that's something you do in the setup screen that's just sort of a given and doing it this way was was great I mean we it was like badge idea came up you know I implemented it that afternoon we tried it right away and like immediately we're like we knew that was you know that was what we wanted to do so the what to headquarters you choose is so important because it really radically alters your relationship to the market you know the first one here is the expansive now they are sort of like the vanilla HQ they just kind of a lot of source straightforward bonuses you know make some good make some a good one for for new players but they're not going to radically change the market unlike these guys the robots they don't they don't consume any life support so you know IND they ship they use as if using fuel to use power for their further vehicles so that's obviously going to radically change the market you know you you see the but there's a bunch of robots coming in the game well probably the prices of food oxygen if you are not gonna get all that high it's not a big one the the scavengers they use carbon and steel for their buildings and for upgrading their headquarters most everyone else and what everyone else uses steel and feels like this super key early game resource you know when you're at level one you almost certainly want to build some steel mills and they kind of like they are able to ease around that you know they can just focus on carbon they can actually basically ignore iron entirely so they're playing a game where they only care about four resources which makes them you know potentially really powerful and then here's my favorites headquarter type the scientific they're able to put their buildings directly on primary resources so a farm for example turns water into food right so first the scientists they can just put their farms directly on the water they don't need a water pump to make the water and then send it to the farm they can't do it directly so that changes the market to because they're not going to be producing primary resources which often end up you know flooding the market by the end of the game so there's actually a bit of an Achilles heel here for the for the scientists which is that if you're playing them they're probably don't have any iron mines they probably don't have any water pumps so if you're their opponent you can start producing some water yourself and I'm getting a little ahead of myself here because I'm going to talk about a hacker rate but that's the building where you can basic you can basically artificially create a water sword that's shortage so you can drive up the price of water I know you'll make a lot of money just yourself because you know that the scientist part doesn't have any all right let me talk about some of the sort more advanced buildings in the game this is the pet lab this is the kind of like really unique technologies things like you know teleportation you know if you don't need ships to move your goods around something like cold fusion let's use water instead of power plant drilling to kneel on it means you can like it's sort of the I drink your milkshake patent you know like you basically get to like use the resources in tiles adjacent to yours so if someone else got a monopoly on a silicon or something you can get slant drilling and then just claim a tile next to high silicon start you know minding his resource feels great but so each of these has kind of like a really kind of strange interesting orthogonal effect and you know I was like oh it wouldn't be cool you know a lot of RTS games have these type of things right these technologies that you resource that did you research that change things about the game and I thought I was going to be real clever me like oh oh what if we caught victim patents so that when you research it only you get it and like everyone else is locked out from it and and like so there's this a rate there's this race to get these patents in like oh wow I came up this awesome new game mechanic except sounds pretty familiar if you play the little game called Civ for because I basically just reimplemented wonders I actually even realize that someone just told them brought this up in a press interview I'm like oh yeah alright yeah I guess you're right alright and so here's a hacker a which I mentioned earlier this is a really new one I love this building so I told you there are the you know storages and surpluses that happen in the game those happen randomly you know there's just a little you know RNG thing in the background that kind of rolls every once awhile and decides you know what's going to happen but with a hacker array you can basically trigger these things artificially so you can create for example an aluminum shortage you know you find out that it's coming and then the Illuma story has happens but the other players have no idea whether it was this a real alumina shortage or artificial one the effect is the same but the trick is if you if you find out something is artificially shorting aluminum they're probably doing that because they bought up a huge stockpile of it and you know they're basically trying to drive a price to take advantage of that and so you want to make to basically take an action against that you either want to create your own alumina surpluses or make sure you sell your own loom to drive the price down before they do but I don't it's just a neat thing crates a lot of paranoia and we took it further in multiplayer so that when you put down a hacker array it's covered with a hologram which basically makes it look like another building so you're not even aware if your opponents have hacker arrays so you get a lot of people talking back and forth when the game goes like when you see event you see a shortage like oh is that the real one or a fake one and you leave the the gig sort of up when it happened when the same and same shortage happens like twice in a row then you're like oh okay he's going for it alright so let's talk about a black market so I said there was no combat in the game and maybe that's a lie because there's the black market there is a way to kind of like blow up people's stuff and cute down their blimps and do stuff like that and however what I say is where when we started the game we kind of like we took out all of the zero-sum combat mechanics right like when you have when you have tanks and you know you know barracks and military stuff like I mean that that stuff tends to dominate so we wanted to go to the other extreme but once we went once we went there then we're like well maybe we can start introducing some of this stuff back into the game but we seem to figure out a way to make sure it doesn't dominate and what what was it was neat about our solution was it actually kind of fits as like it's sort of like a free market mechanic which is the idea here is you see each of those black bar items has a different price like you see pirates they're the second on the left is $6,000 and so what happens here is if I buy pirates the price goes up and it goes up for everyone in the game so if I buy it for six thousand then next person will have to buy for ten thousand and the next person after that will have to buy for sixteen thousand owe me twenty five thousand it eventually the price will get high enough that it just doesn't make sense to to buy Pirates anymore and that that basically solved the problem because you know each of these you know black market items is only going to get used so many times until many times in the game and they also have this nice side effect of like when you saw the price go up that means you know your opponent just bought one so you know if you saw that the price of dynamite just went up and you know that he's probably going to do something with some dynamite which there might change what you decide to do and we put in pirates pirates are a pretty interesting item on the black market because they kind of or allow you actually steal a resource from another player and actually in the in an early prototype we did actually experiment for a while with having pirates and that you could move around the map and like basically place on people's shipping lanes and you know those wouldn't blow down you know block their ships and get their stuff but they were like well we need something to counter the pirates oh okay maybe we'll let you build police ships and then we'll fly the police ships over and the police ships will shoot down the Pirates and and you know it's kind of like you once you go down that road it's kind of a slippery slope towards just making a regular RTS so and you know without really enough benefit there you know like we're you know we're not differentiating ourselves enough and like that part of the game is never going to be as you know fully features the real RTS so imagine we just pulled it back to like let's just turn this into this you know high level thing that you don't have to micromanage is fire-and-forget you just basically hit click a tile place down the pirates they manage themselves and they basically steal X number of units and then they go away and then it was then it was it kind of fit fit the game again at that point alright so another cool thing on the backlog is the Holograms and spies so you put a hologram down and it basically makes your building look like one of the other other buildings that's adjacent to it and the typical building you want to hide is the Opera Market use s who are the most powerful building of the game it's kind of the end game building that you use to ship resources off world where the prices are very high and they're also constant they don't really go down from oversupply in the market you can sometimes you see in games people will over sup supply the market on Mars which will drive the prices down and then the only way to basically amp the game is to go offworld so because of the black market you really want to hide your offworld market so you want to put a hologram on it right and then the calendar for that is either you know watching the other player really closely or you place down spies and the spies will kind of reveal Holograms within a certain range so you have a little thing going back and forth between how those two things work together however I made a choice early on as soon as I saw the idea I was like oh that sounds great but it'll never work in single-player like people because basically basically it's like a so like it's a catch-22 for the AI there's no way you can write an AI to handle Holograms and spies because let's say you first of all you might just do a bad job all right it's hard to do so you might just do a bad job right in the AI which is not good obviously but what if you do a good job if you do a good job having the AI be able to identify where Holograms are you know and they're able to figure out where you tend to put Holograms and they're able to you know target your buildings because they guessed right people are just not going to believe that the AI played fairly like I can tell you from years of experience working on AI that's exactly what's going to happen so you know there's a lose-lose situation there's there's no way to make people believe VI they never keep players don't trust the AI and they find cheats even when there aren't any however I really like the idea so I just said well let's just do this try adding something that's multiplayer only and it works for eight multiplayer it's not a problem single-player and I guess maybe that's okay all right something I hadn't really tried all that much before in other games when I made were single-player multiplayer where we tried to make it basically the same okay but I think the real crucial piece to make the whole black market works so the black marker was fun right got in the game people are having fun with it but there was also a sense of like you know I lost the game because I got EMP too much or my buildings got mutiny to the key time and there was nothing I could do you know like once the emotes the opponent tried to hit me there was absolutely nothing I could do so we introduced the goon squad which will protect you from sabotage so you put a goon squad on you're off of market someone tries to dynamite it it's blocked however it's not just blocked the person you try to attack with the dynamite gets your dynamite and also normally when you tax them with the black market you don't know who it's good you don't know who attacked you that's that's a hidden information when your attacks on with the goon squad that information is announced for everyone and we found the humans are surprisingly very vindictive so if someone blows up miles Mart or tries to and I find out because the goon squad it's a pretty good chance let me take that dynamite and you hit that person back even if that's not the best move for me to make it just feels good and you just do and that's that right so but the real the real thing about the goon squad is it's not actually that the because there's only gonna be so many goon squads bought in the course of the game its price goes up just like all the black market items it's the threat of a goon squad that's important the fact that you know the player could put it down and the effects of hitting a goon squad are so devastating so it turns into this mind game you know surely surely someone wouldn't be dumb enough to build a geothermally and not goon squad it of course then you know you're tempted to not do in squad it because they never think he would not goon squad yeah so anyway it's fun I want to talk about the stock market a little bit so early on the way it works you buy into other opponents you buy into your opponent's and at some point you have enough money to buy them out and you buy them out you actually get all their stuff you get their headquarters because all the buildings you get everything and that worked okay but the problem was it was just too much for most players to handle it is like I got all this new stuff I don't understand it I don't know how it works and in a player game it was absolutely insane so we want to try something different and so we try to what we call as a subsidiary system where once a player gets bought out they basically get taken over by kind of a very conservative AI that just runs you know runs the company to make money and then that money is distributed to their owners so in this case you see the subsidiary here is King Morgan he's owned partially by blue and parsley by green so his money gets split between them a network great it also the big advantage of buying out a player was no longer all or nothing right we had this problem before where if there are two people a and B we're competing to buy out C whoever ends up winning that battle is pretty good chance to end up winning the game whereas here both those players raymond's get King Morgan they both got half of them they're both kind of like in the good position to continue on to win the game there's another thing that we introduced after that which was majority buyouts which was this concept of once the other players got to own six of your shares you just immediately removed from the game and you really become a succeed here this was important because there is sort of like a king making problem in the game we do support you know like four player six player a player free-for-alls and if a player if it's very clear players going lose you kind of want them eliminated as soon as possible if you don't want them hanging around buying things on the black mark is messing with other players you know you want to get them out of the game also this created kind of an accident kind of like actually a rush boom turtle mechanic in the game and that the majority buy out just sort of like the rush you know you're kind of putting your money aggressively to take someone out early whereas turtle mechanic is you kind of buy up shares of your own stock to protect yourself and then the boom is basically I'm going to take my money I'm invested in my own infrastructure to hopefully make more money in the long run and you're just kind of it's funny how just kind of work work naturally which basically led to totally led to the coyote ID of the lock shares which is that once you get to once you own five your own shares of stock they're kind of like all combined into one super share and so that's a real key point in the game you kind of want to get to those five shares then you know you're safe from dirty buyout so this masquerade mode this is something that also kind of came hand-in-hand with the black market once it came in the game which was this concept of like you play a multi player you get hit by the black market but there's a sense of like oh you hit me because you think I'm the best player or you think I was the most threatening player or you just want to beat me because I beat you last game and that's not fair and yagi among the so it goes so at any rate what what and I actually wasn't a fan of this this was my team they really want to get it and they put it they put it in on their own and it worked I was so you know that's great and the idea here is your identity is hidden so here you see me I one of the players and then there's Clark and Herbert Asimov and those are I don't know who those are so you can't you can't attack a specific player you have to you have to just kind of like attack the person who looks like enduring to lead and anyways play board games knows this is a classic dynamic you get around the table of course there's no way to hide people's identity in real life but cannon offworld so it is something we did here with multiplayer to kind of like we're not we don't have a huge user base but the people who play multiplayer love multi players we want to do as much as we can to enable them to play with each other so we did things like when you go to the main menu the game if someone is waiting in the queue in sort of our rank play to play with someone we tell them a it is a game available and you click on that the screen on the left in case you the screen on the right and there says oh there's a match available for 1v1 or there's three players waiting for four-player so you really want to help you know bring people into the game let them know that you could if they join they could start a game right now also when you're in the queue waiting for a match we actually let you play single-player so you can play play a skirmish game you can play the daily challenge you can watch a replay file you can do all this stuff while it's waiting for an opponent as soon as you find that opponent you'll get moved into the multiplayer game I think this has made a huge difference for like keeping our multiplier community alive even with a pretty low low multiplayer player base yeah so I want to talk now a little bit about early access and and to start out with I want to kind of give you a sense of like what our project looked like throughout development so you know I started the game basically in the summer of 2013 so that lovely shot in the upper left is what the game looked like right off the beginning and then you know in January we started introducing hex tiles and terrain basically and then you know and then you can see things kind of like slowly slowly improve step by step the August 2014 is important date that's when we had what we called our founders program which was you could come to our website buy the game we actually didn't show people what the games look like so they were actually buying a blind so I will be always grateful to people who took part in that program but you know they bought into it we sent them a scheme code they downloaded the game and then they were able to serve plane and this is what it looked like so it looked passable right you could imagine that could eventually become a game and this is the the rest of the development the one in the upper left there is that's what it looked like when I launched an early access and then from there on you know it it looks like it's interesting winter up here early actions we've heard a lot of people say oh wow this looks like a finished game but you can see clearly like you know just look at the cliffs for example like they're you know it's just it there was so much more that we could improve in the game but it was really important to me to release it early so that I could you know I could learn about the game from our players while we still had time to do something about it so well I think really access is important is the most common problem the industry is waste and that is people making decisions and having to wait months or even years before they know whether those decisions were good or not right and I learned this lesson while working on sip three and sieve for sieve through was made completely in a vacuum the only people who ever played sieve three before the game came out where either the people in the development team or the testers that's it right and we shipped the game it had a lot of issues and the worst part is a lot of the issues were fairly obvious there's the things that we should have caught and that we could easily done something about if we just knew about them at the time so this before I want to do completely differently after sip three-shift I got I really embedded myself into the sieve community found you know found some of the best voices in the community and help them guide me to know how those basically patch sip three so then the next step was well we let's bring these people on board create sort of this private testing group where they could place it for early and I mean really early they played it in the first half of the project like you know it was sit for about a two and a half year development cycle and they played it at about the 12 month you know twelve months after development so they played it one was really early it was really ugly but I think that's the key reason why SIF for it was was really well-received is that we had this great iteration time with the fan community you know with with actual players who are outside the team and didn't have all the prejudices you have inside of your team and you know we saw we saw this immediately once we went up on early access that we were we were blind to certain problems in the game and probably the most obvious example this is the the reveal map option so the way we had made offworld was it has a scanning mode when the game begins which is based the exploration part and you just start clicking around the map revealing revealing tiles slowly until you find what you think is a good founding location and that works great in single-player but the multi player community just found it completely unacceptable because basically you imagine two players one of them scans one direction one of them scans the other direction the person who went east finds a great found you location puts down their headquarters person who went west feels like they lost the game because they just randomly went the wrong direction now we had game mechanics to basically balance that of like well whoever found second you get extra claims and so on and so forth but the main thing is is perception like at that point perception is reality it felt unfair to people so we tried something different and this happened like within a month or two of early access we like we know we gotta do something about this so I came up with the the reveal map option which means that basically the game the map store is completely revealed and you have basically kind of like a reverse auction that you could found immediately if you want to but you have to take on $200,000 of debt and that price is just going to go kind of like slowly tick down I got this idea I think from frozen fine apps they had kind of like a similar idea of like you know show the whole map and then you kind of bid on the different certain location but like you know basically the number kind of keeps ticking down until it gets to the point where you're like well I think this the best spot of the map is worth say $40,000 of debt so you're able to you know so you commit you're the first mover you get it and then you find out if you made the right choice you know over the course of the game and like that worked like the multiple you were like yes that's it that's the way they play the game period and this if we had been a traditional game where we you know we didn't go through early access we would have found this out you know two months after launch instead of 12 months before launch right that makes a pretty big difference because we then had 12 months iterate on just this option itself it became a core part of the game instead of like a you know kind of a hacky fix that we had to do post launch another thing that was really important is that I knew we're going to make major changes in early access and there have been gains in in early acts that have made major changes that have really upset the community and this is a hard thing there's no simple answer here because the mmunity thinks they have one game they're happy with it's only the game changes what would you know like and if they're unhappy with it it can lead to you know to read some really bad feelings bad reviews lead to controversy basically we just want that to happen so what we did is anytime we had some major change come through usually this meant something on the stock market like the majority buyout feature what we would do is we'd say hey we got this new feature but it's an option we was introduced as an option when you set the game you can decide whether you're going to use it or not but what we also did then is you know we do we do the update the new feature is here hey and we're also going to have we're going to host a community tournament but if you play in the tournament you have to play using this new feature right so which would encourage people to opt in because they want to play the official you know mohawk tournament they want to win so it's not just the games inside of the tournament but people would start practicing using this option of course because they wanted to get good at it so you know immediately we get all this great feedback on this feature you know it's kind of like you know using you know by incentivizing them to try it out supportive sort of forcing it on them you know I believe it's really important to get close to community this is this is my friends list on Steam and you see these are some of the you know the hardest core off-road players you see people who have played games here for thousands of hours and you know this is a sign to like I'm really close with them they see something wrong with the game they'll message me immediately and you know we'll talk back and forth about it we'll use it to twitch I think I think which is great we stream on it weekly and we use it we use it for tournaments and I think what's great about it is it's just it's just this public space where everyone can come together you know you start streaming the game so all your fans start to come there and it just kind of like snowballs from there because they meet each other and then they make connections and then they'll start streaming themselves the fact that's one things we did earlier with our tournaments is we basically said if you're going to play in our tournament you have to stream your game which meant that a lot of our hardcore players then suddenly became twitch streamers and then you kind of like you know multiplied from there so that's something that work great discourse I don't know how many of you guys are using discord yet for games but I think this core is gonna become a really big deal it's kind of completely replaced our forums are dead our residues there's all of the action now is on discourse and it's because it's real-time interaction and so in fact when you go in the game we kind of point people to discord right away like hey Joyner just scored Channel it's a really friendly healthy community you'll often see people come on there and like hey I'm new to the game and people say oh welcome like let me help you give you advice about how to play I really I really and I also it's a place where we can see here the channel a man has actually like a feedback a private feedback channel I have for some of the more core players so like it's a way to also kind of like bring them all together in one place to talk about stuff that's coming further down the road this house having to expose everyone to that and here's one of the nice benefits about being so close to your player players so we have a daily challenge in the game means you play you play a single-player game on the same random seed that changes every 24 hours and we have a replay feature where when you finish the game the replay gets uploaded and then you can all the other players can download and see how everyone else how did someone get that great time in the daily challenge so what I would do is I would come into the morning I opened up the daily challenge see who got the best score watch the replay and I'd be immediately like oh they're using this they're using this strategy against the AI or they're doing this thing or like they're using this thing and I think that's tholian balance so what I would do is like I would then see what they did I would change the AI I would make a build I push it to steam and then I contact that person like hey try what you did this morning again right and then I would find out whether I fix the problem or not I mean this is amazing right this is like 24-hour iteration directly with the community you know like I never dreamed that like in like working on step 4 even though I had players like you had this like weeks of lag between when you do something and when you find out whether your decisions were good like this is it's amazing to be able to do this and you know community extends your game right like we had so many people playing the game you know putting up videos that like within the firt you know within our released week you know we had done you know a million half views you know some of the some of the superfans eventually you know kind of help out with the team whether that means streaming or testing or blues designed our last DLC that just came out you'll see people on on discord basically say like hey post your you know for new players run hard time post your replay I'll take a look at it I'll give you advice it's just a you know commune's important to me people hope you understand that alright so however they're probably some things we do differently about early access if you get it again one is we had basically a full QA past each we would do kind of a big monthly updates and which meant we're going to did a full QA pass because we wanted them to be polished you know that's that's fine but it's kind of grueling on the team to put them through that process because you know like you're releasing every month we're a small team you know we want to be you know we want to be moving quickly so we did a couple things to help ourselves out we had a next version branch which is basically one we could update whenever we wanted to without going through QA because you guys that kind of like opted into it so that helped but I think that you know next time around probably what I do is I would just have a build machine that automatically updates the public version every Monday and if there's a rollback if there's a problem just your rollback or hot picks like it's okay I I found keep you know if you're if you're in touch with the community like it's okay like I think that they're there they're generally forgiving of problems if you're responsive all right I would probably also wait a little bit longer to go up in early access you know be aware that you're really your only Free Press hit comes when you when you launch on early access that's kind of like when the press concedes conceive of you as a new game a lot of the big youtubers and streamers were only interested in the game the first time around when we had the final launch they kind of had had moved on basically and in some cases you have the worst cases we had one very very problem that YouTube reviewer if people asked like when it came out in early access okay are gonna review this and he said oh I don't do reviews of early access games but then when we came out you know for real he basically forgot about it so you know that's that can happen this is how I like to do early access which is the more steps you have from you know testing game internally to releasing it the better you want a whole bunch of like smaller incremental steps to get to the final release what we did was yes we had a private beta and then we jumped all the way to early access and I would really like to have two steps in between there at least a public beta where we're like okay now we're going to show our game publicly and let you buy it through our site you know the way like a game like factorial work for example and then the next step would be like an unlisted steam page which is the idea that your games up on Steam people can buy it but only if they have like an external link to it the kind of like one of those like private YouTube videos you only watch if you happen to have the link in your your game wouldn't show up on see like searches or in the top sellers or it wouldn't be promoted that type of thing so that's a great way to kind of like have that stream infrastructure because a lot of players who don't want to buy a game until it's on Steam period end of story so if you have this you're able to pull in those players even if you're not kind of like getting the full-on hit of being up on or it's full-on pressure being up on early access so this is a kind of an interesting question we were 40 dollars in early access which was like made us one of the absolutely most expensive games on there and I think it's you can if you want to charge less when you're in early access and then raise the price which is unusual you don't normally get a chance to do that but I think you know you can pull it off there but I'm not sure if I'm not sure if we should lower the price because although it did having a high price definitely hurt our review score on Steam but it definitely kept we didn't have too many players to deal with the players that we got during the early access we're really like all high quality players they're ones who would like want to be part of the Velma process and they were they were good to work with so I'm kind of unsure about this um but this is kind of like my big general feeling about early access and about games in general like your eventually your players always understand your game better than you do and being able to do early access means you're like fully committing to that that true like that's just that's just the way it is what you like it or not I also have some suggestions for what valve should do as I mentioned the young list of store pages as I understand I think this might actually be happening now I also think there should be an early access category for reviews qualities of games can go up and down over time and you know it makes a lot of sense that again when I was early access is going to be better after release than before release so I don't see why you wouldn't want just have a a separate you know category for those type of reviews and I also think there shouldn't be sales or refunds sterling your access this is a quote from a subnautica developer and you know he points out that you know you know when you when you have a when you lower the price you get a group of people who are you know less decade your product and there's pretty good chance here leave a negative review because they didn't really research it they generally know that what they were getting at - so you know that and I'd say that you know the goal here is actually to get fewer players you know you want there to be kind of a bigger hurdle for people to buy your game when it's on early access so they know they're doing something different they're not just buying a game on Steam they're buying a game that's in development like I so I would be totally happy with you know kind of like a smaller group of players in early access that are more committed to the development process also you know be good to you early access customers you know when we when we release we like just automatically upgraded them all to the deluxe edition so you know they start off immediately with soundtrack and the DLC that we launched and like you know these these are your these are your best fans so you know treat treat them well so speaking of team use reviews I wanted to mention a few things about them so here's here's a guy who left a negative review a long time ago we had a big UI change you really really didn't like it and our executive producer at Star doc you know very politely mentioned like hey maybe want to be released the game made some change man watch check it out and so I think he I can't start for me to read I think he came back like eight or nine months later I was like oh this is great you fix everything I love the game and change his review so you know if you if you take the right attitude towards I think that could be you know there's there there's no harm there I mean sometimes you find someone and clearly they're just looking for a different type of game that happens to us sometimes it feels like sometimes people come to off-world thinking it's going to be like a no and we're never going to be able to make the game what they want and so that's just you know unfortunately maybe we need to just do our job how we're marketing the game in that case so here's negative review someone who found the game a little bit like a chewing exercise so it's not a big fan here's one of the interesting things about achievements I didn't expect they're a great way to give context to negative reviews right so I saw him I like I like I feel like off world the exciting dynamic challenging game he doesn't I wonder why I clicked on his profile and I found out oh he only played on the second lowest difficulty level and there's nine difficulty levels and also like the second level is like it's super easy and so I don't necessarily know what I should do have this problem like should we take away the easy levels should we put people the higher levels more I'm not sure but at least I have some contacts about the complaint so here's another big question that people often worry about doing it early access do you get a second launch right and I was very worried about this I asked all sorts of people about devs who were up on early access what would happen when we came out and for us at least we did we actually sold almost the exact same number of units our first two weeks of really access as we did it the first two weeks of release and you know month by month we've done better after after early access than we did while we were on early access so that's what you see these are a lifetime sales the DLC numbers are inflated a little bit because like I said we gave a bunch of DLC away to our early access owners but so it's hard to really judge what that meal would be without that so maybe half those numbers it's you know hard to evaluate but any rate DLC is is our GOC is is doing well and you know we've been able to introduce you know basically one every minute every month or two and there's pretty good pickup on it this is our sales graph from the verb can be really access to like a week ago and I want to highlight a few points on it so this is this is early access release this is our final release so yeah you can see that basically the curves look almost identical which is really encouraging it's nice to know these were our first major discounts this is the first time we were 50% off was actually during the early access phase and the first time we went down to 66% off was actually pretty recently a few months ago and those those first discounts are a big deal you're in a major spike there I think we've actually probably should have waited to go 50% off after release and so that I would I definitely do that differently next time around these are capsule events now weekend deals or when we went up on Steam Workshop and those are those are big deal I mean that's that's the main thing on Steam is visibility you know being on the front page that's that's where the sales come from these are the event sales now the summer sale Starbuck has to sale basically every excuse me autumn and then the Christmas sale and I found this graph really interesting this is our total revenue buy price and so you can see that like 40% of our revenue is basically at full price and actually it's definitely higher than that I suspect it's almost 50% because these numbers don't include early access for whatever reason the numbers I had are all post final release and and nearly access you know we've never really we never went down below 50% so but at any rate that's you know there's there's a sense that once after you're released you're going to make all of your revenue just off your sales and I think this shows that like you're still making pretty good revenue even you know just day after day just selling at a normal price all right so I do want to now get to the end here I think it's important to always ask yourself you know beyond all of this stuff about what the development was like and all different random gameplay mechanics you know why do you make games at all you know and so I often get asked you know whether offworld is a free trade game or anti-capitalist game or you know some other statement on the world economy and I don't think games should be trying to make broad statements like you know capitalism is good or capitalism is bad and it's just you simplistic and I also the game designer is too much power to say that the rules to support his or her own biases and this is what I think our faults about the prices tell a story you know and I in off world if iron costs were than steel then something has gone wrong and you win by taking advantage of these discrepancies you know that puts you in the shoes of a business person person which is really sort of the best that a game can do you know there's there's a reason why everything costs what it does you know sometimes that goes beyond supply and demand to government policy and cultural factors but there's always a reason and if we don't like what something costs we should find out why instead of just complaining about it but more broadly I made awful trading company for the same reason I make all strategy games you know that they are anti ideological in a good strategy game the answer to every question what HQ is best what resource is most important what should i research first should always start with well it depends the point of having to make tough choices and to adapt to the environment is that there is never ever just just one right answer to follow blindly you know and I think that lesson is as important now as it has ever been and that's it thanks thanks for coming [Applause] it's like we time for me if you wanted to right but what impact has the dlcs had on your community did it fragment them or bring them together so we did a few things to basically make sure that it wouldn't happen so like for example we had a series DLC series as an asteroid as large after the asteroid belt alter the location to play at and then you know we were worried about like well what would happen if someone has it one person has it another person doesn't they want to play a multiplayer and we just solved it by saying like if you have the DLC and you host the game anyone can join you or in ranked play it just comes up automatically even if you don't have the DLC like you'll still also be exposed to it you just won't be able to play in single-player so you know you just do that you can basically thanks hey the game is so brilliant but it's so different from anything else in the market I'm curious how did you approach teaching players how to play the game since there's so little to look at from other games some little experience to pull in yeah so and this is flipping a particularly bad ad actually this tutorials I just I'm really bad at that but fortunately my business partner and art director Dorian is Nukem is very good at that he worked hard on the supply tutorials which are amazing and he just you know like fully committed to that part of the project so I'm afraid I don't really have a good answer for it because he's the one who does it and I'm just glad he's I'm working with him hey so when you put the game up sale initially the one where you have no screenshots you also put up the rules there or like a design document I've read very much like a ball game right rules that can you talk a little bit about that what why you chose to do that yeah so you know we weren't showing a screenshot but you know I felt like I'm the most important thing was the rules themselves right and I thought it was we were able to take advantage of the fact that the game has such a board game II feel you know there I don't know how many board games I have that I've read the rules but I never actually played right so like you know that is a phenomenon that people kind of understand what that's like so I thought that they're probably the players that we wanted to get where people who would be good with that right like that they that if they be like oh cool there's a little bit of a small rule book from your read and I will give me a sense of how the game plays and I'll kind of like imagine it and maybe I'll be off a little bit but that'll like make me kind of want to get into the game I mean I want to give them something right we're not giving the screenshot we have that we give them something okay so I want to address one thing the question of tutorials one other thing we really focused on is in the UI we really focused on trying to give all the information you needed when something happened you want you know you want to build a metal mine you press the metal mine we show immediately show a line to the iron and we show a line to the aluminum like there's another half of it which is you know we try to make sure we always give people the information they need just when you in the game and so that's that's super important to be on tutorials hi I'm you know kind of more on the tutorial side did you feel like you know because the tutorials have like the total story and they had the mission segments to him prep do you feel like you got any pushback or lost any revenue opportunities by not having like an actual official campaign sure so yeah so the campaign is that we have an off world is dynamic it has what you call like a light story touch like there's characters there's not really much of a story part of that is like if I had to write a story it would be absolutely terrible right like this is just this is just not what I do and I kind of wanted the freedom to develop a dynamic campaign as you could do that was replayable right then that doesn't match a lot of players expectations for an RTS but you know I mean I was already not matching anyone's expectations with our ideas anyway so I figured I might as I might as well go for it so I mean I think it's just kind of like yeah we're a small team right like we don't you know seven or eight guys and we have various things that were good at and that was just something to like we absolutely were not good at so I bet there's a lot of players who would get into the game if we had like kind of a more standard story based campaign it's just something and actually I think it's something that we're going to get into there is a rider that we're working with now writer / designer who I've worked with in various projects who designed the patron and Patriot DLC which is a huge expansion of the of the campaign and did have a lot of story content for the new CEOs and so we're probably going to be continued working with him he's coming kind of like backfill a lot of that story into the game great to hear thank you so much yeah cool thanks do you have any plans to plug the game to console like ps4 ah no not right now but it's always possible I mean so I did actually did a I did a mapping to the console controller and you know it's okay right but it's like it's an RTS it's really hard to pull off with a with a controller this is going to like totally be a disaster if we ever decide marking the disaster I just said if I ever have to so on the console but like you know doing I mean it could potentially work right like you're not controlling units right so you could make it work on the console you could make a little kind of tablet right like I mean I think I think there's good possibilities there I just think that you need to like kind of like rebuild part of the game from the ground up so yeah I mean I do think about it like it'd be it'd be kind of a neat project to take on but unfortunately no anything happening right now so thanks thank you yeah yeah just wondering you created the game this is your game do you also help other people to build game are you for hire wait sorry could you repeat that okay do you help other people create games oh do I help other people I work on other teams or alter that type of things I mean um I mean not not very much I mean I I've written a lot about game design I do a game design podcast designer notes but I talk to designers I mean I tried to like spread game design information I mean everyone slaved if there's a small project I mean I have taken on like you know work on something for a day or two if someone just want some feedback in the game so I mean I'm open to stuff like that but but you know I when I work on the game I have a hard time even I've never really even be able to work on two games at once right like when I talk to people to work on three or four games at the same time I find that like amazing that anyone can do that but thanks do you attribute the success of the game to being 3d versus being a 2-d game I'm sorry I came is 3d do you think that that was important for the game to be stopped so was it a portent of it being 3d so when I first did the prototype it was actually 2d just because that was simple well it's like OpenGL but like straight down but for certainly it was 2d and you can make it just 2d but at this point I think the tools the the best tools out there are 3d tools right like we use unity which is great to develop in it basically because it has amazing art tools like our artists were immediately I mean artists I'm almost just just artists right like like the one main guy we had like was able to like become immediately you know five times more productivity has been before we jump to unity and so like you know three years guns the point where sizzle this is very easy develop in 3d and if it was simpler develop in 2d I probably would do 2d I don't think there's anything fundamentally about it that would make to work one way or another my question is that with this game you're taking combat out of RTS right you're playing with that notion the are there any plans for mohawk or you yourself to take on another genre and try to take out a core mechanic and see what's really with it well that would that be our thing once may be enough it is a big jacket say that yeah I mean you know I I mean to some extent that comes to the question of what you should do as in dependable / right like I love RTS games cuz I never gonna be able to take on Starcraft as a small team and that's just crazy right so you have to do something radically different right and so some of the you know games I showed you like Adam zombie smash was a great game is like that's an amazing RTS and you know he just changed some of the basic assumptions about how an RTS worked and was able to make a great game and he wasn't competing but again if anyone else and so that's the same basic idea of what we're trying to do with off-world so yeah I mean probably will always do that with games you know like well you know we're gonna have to figure out how to make something that no one else is making I mean I think that's what you have to do is ended on developer looking forward to the next payment all right thank you alright um oops alright maybe one more yeah yeah I love this I figured out the question what do you think is the future of art yes the future of RTS you know I the hard question for an ant for me to answer because like I'm kind of done with like traditional RTS games like I don't really find them to go into Abell anymore just because I play them so much you know I hope the future RTS games as more games like off world right which are like I what I want is to play a game that takes about 30 minutes that's strategic and competitive and I can play with my friends right like that's what I want and you know off-road delivers that in the way that's interesting and I don't want to do a tank rush anymore with my friends I wanna do something different but I still love that format right just the basic idea of we're gonna play this game over a lunch break and we're gonna have its ups and downs and like after the game like getting together and talking about what happened is going to be amazing that's why I want to have an RTS game right and you know is that going to happen I I don't know but I mean I think that the traditional RTS is absolutely in danger and the big the big one there is because of MOBAs right basically MOBAs have destroyed the traditional RTS game because RTS games as they are are cut terrible right like it's you know you're asking a players a control 100 units spread all over all over the map and you know jump back and forth and pay and you'll pay attention to what they're doing and what all their opponents are doing and it's amazing those games ever worked at all right like the MOBAs are just the micro aspect of an RTS right and so that's why people are like oh this was really fun because now I actually feel like I can handle this game offworld is just the macro aspect of an RTS you know we dropped all the micro cards you know you don't have to make worry about units and because so we you know there's two games in there they're just half of a whole RTS which is a sign of just how you know complex and overburden those games tend to be so yeah I don't think there's necessarily big future for this mission alert yes but I love the format right like playing a strategic game with your friends 30 minutes up to eight players something like that so you know I hope to see more yeah I agree thank you all right thanks alright thanks for everyone [Applause]

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Views: 41,420

Rating: 4.8789349 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, offworld trading company, civilization, mohawk games, firaxis, 4x games, strategy games

Id: o2C4z_apu2I

Length: 69min 0sec (4140 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2017