The 2017 Failure Workshop

[Music] my name is michael mullen Airi developer of a failed game called city stream an experimental live game launched in January 2016 lasting for a whopping two months before we shut it down while this is a talk about the ultimate failure of the game there were many interesting things that came out of it so I'd like to cover those as well to help paint a clearer picture of its history city stream was a strange combination of idle games twitch plays games and real-time DMing it was created as a way to counter the experience of earlier twitch plays games like twitch plays Pokemon or our previous game choice chamber the game was still played via the chat room of a live internet broadcast but this time the aim was to make each player's actions feel like they mattered no matter how many concurrent active players there were while the game's potential popularity was unknown before launch we still prepared the engine to be able to handle thousands of simultaneous players using staggered update cycles and accelerated variables to compensate our peak player count was around 100 so things never quite took off as we had hoped in the previous game we made choice chamber we added a few viewer interactions that celebrated individuals while they were small successes we wanted to make a game that champion to every action of every player making anyone's efforts feel worthwhile the most obvious design change was to almost completely remove timed polls and instead allow players to interact at their own pace performing tasks as they saw fit this ended up being realized as a collaborative city building game with elements of tower defense and RPGs each player had their own avatar responsibilities stats and inventory persistent across play sessions and all saved locally on our host machine saving all data to a single file wasn't a very safe or smart method as crashes and bugs forced us to keep a daily backup should the world state need to be rolled back in one case some players exploited a glitch overnight for which they apologized the following morning the save data needed to be rechecked against the previous days to rollback specific players as a punishment for abusing a broken feature while the idea of a job wasn't formally assigned most players took responsibility for what they did best forming a community that did in fact work together as a team there is even a player that was present at every stream every day for two straight months this isn't to say any given player did one thing while playing but enough time playing with the same group of people allowed them to become quite efficient since the game was played from the twitchchat there was no additional software to download no additional logins to create and no cost to play this low bar for entry excited us though we would soon realized such a feature was relatively lackluster when the game itself had troubles getting people excited most importantly it was only playable from one channel hours giving us full control over how and when people experience the game this was especially useful in monetizing the experience for those who wanted to help support development it's not uncommon for a twitch viewer to want to continually pay money directly to a broadcaster to not only show support but to make sure they can continue doing what they do players who made contributions were rewarded directly in the game in real-time most perks were cosmetic as a way of literally showing support though there were some perks that acted as super attacks during battle in those instances the super attack would benefit all players not just the contributor helping to cement the idea of this being a team effort we didn't want a player to feel like they were inferior because they couldn't afford to spend as much money as someone else the cosmetic perks were helpful in showing support in the game while advertising their benefits but weren't quite enough to entice a lot of players they were also permanent missing an opportunity to continue at receiving income from players who wanted to help so history went through constant iteration both before and after launching we were in a rush from twitch to launch in time for their twitch plays gaming category debuting with the smallest of core loops after a mere six weeks of development we would go on to add new content to the game every day for two months including tweaks and bug fixes timed polls are a major element from almost every twitch plays game including our own choice chamber but they turn a group of people into a single number making an individual's vote not seem to matter we noticed in other games that viewers would participate most often when their decision had the chance of making them feel special for this reason we wanted to do away with polls completely but if you remain for major decisions accounting for less than two percent of all possible commands we eventually move polls to the top of the screen to prevent City dress from halting for one minute at a time a feature request from players who had a schedule to keep in the city all other interaction the game was done as an individual player where the sum of all player's actions contributed to game progress to prevent the already flooded chat room from being more crowded we added a whisper bot to have a private chat with any player informing them of their status inventory and other events unique to them this also helped out with the video delay that could range from 15 to 60 seconds dictated by a viewers location and connection we actually needed to get whitelisted by twitch so we weren't marked as a mass whisper bot which we were this worked fairly well aside from a few nights when the whisper servers were down forcing us to manually tell individual players their status much of the game's progress was gated by time to both add weight to player's decisions and to make a rather simple game left far longer than I really should have every action took time to execute some taking seconds others hours we encourage teamwork by allowing most actions to complete faster as more players helped out diminishing returns were added for each additional player contributed less than the one before to prevent a mob of players from going around completing every task immediately most buildings would perform their functions linearly as players entered such as offensive towers shooting lasers equal to the combined powers of all players inside other buildings like the XP farming disco stopped operating if too many players were on the dance floor forcing them to manage work and play carefully these kinds of things led to emerging specialization which was pretty cool suddenly players would have to communicate outside of regular play to decide where each one skills could be best utilized some even create a chat BOTS to automate certain processes though they soon retracted them when they realized how much fun that removed from the experience one interesting thing we added was a building that buffed adjacent buildings but only if they were all the same color this led to players designating neighborhoods territories and even having gang wars as they fought for control of different districts where they were once arbitrarily deciding building colors they were now arguing over the benefits of having a chocolate lookout post versus a smoke research lab in a particular spot tying in to the game's end goal of reaching the moon we had special events occur during real-world moon phases to add to the narrative this made players change up their strategies even planning ahead based on the lunar calendar after the game had finished we had a one-day special revival of city stream on April Fool's Day called city stream extrusion where all variables were cranked to 11 there were nine moons and a bunch of rainbows and explosions players accomplished as much that day as they did in the first one and a half months the first time though this can also be attributed to the game actually containing all of its content from the beginning early on we felt it would become boring to stare at the same steady grid for hours even days of the time and decided to create a narrator EEP who you see here connect to connect with players and give them a focal point for communicating with the game similar to how you see a green screen human player in the corner of any other twitch channel beep was supposed to be driven by AI to have dynamic conversations with players but we couldn't get something so complex working in the short time we had not wanting to have him have predictable canned responses to everything we took shifts playing his beep to respond back to players directly acting as a man behind the curtain they loved him so much we continued DMing as them each day making sure to keep players engaged through the Manatee of crafting us in one resource at a time unfortunately this meant we had to cut the broadcast to about 8 hours each day using the rest of the day to continue working on new content tweaks and bug fixes we continued expanding beeps arsenal of emceeing from a dozen animated emotions - wearing hats for various occasions such as a generals hat during battle and a nightcap when it was time to end the day stream it was so important to us that be maintained this relationship with players that we created a system to remotely control his responses by sending private whispers to the game via the twitch mobile app this was especially attractive to us as it didn't require creating additional software it allowed us to go out to dinners and functions completely ignoring our friends our original idea was for this to be a 24 hour live channel that ran itself only needing to be taken down for servicing but with having to play as beep during the day and working on the game in the evenings our days turned into double shifts combined with poor revenue and retention overall this ultimately forced us to discontinue the game after 2 months we could have continued making tweaks and adding ways to get players excited but working 14 plus hours a day at less than minimum wage made us consider the possibility that maybe we should cut our losses and apply what we learned in future projects that's the only picture I have of our battle station that's Chelsea playing as beep the players could actually tell when I was playing this beeping when she was playing this because she was a much better storyteller than I was monetizing a game like this was tricky since it was unlike anything else out there not surprisingly this is where our design fell apart the quickest we offered additional cosmetic in gameplay perks to players who subscribe to the twitch channel are donated for a third-party system however almost all perks were permanent offering little reason to continue supporting this is a missed opportunity for diehard players to have a long-term contribution we noticed our most generous players go from throwing hundreds of dollars at us to tossing a few coins after just a couple of days mostly because the game wasn't compensating them accordingly but also because we never thought someone would want to donate so much at a time thereby never designing for it oops it actually says oops on my sledge here to avoid constant grinding we added a wishing well where players could offer some or all of their inventory in exchange for a chance at winning big some players became addicted gambled away everything then grinded resources to do it all again we try to break this habit by time dating additional wishes after jackpots but that simply let them grind more resources at a casual pace we also didn't monetize wishing for legal and moral reasons despite this there were still ways to manipulate the system allowing some players to build entire districts on their own overnight it was a broken system even after continue tweaking battling was a huge component of the core loop where players would stop building to defend the city from an army of creatures offensive buildings with fire from afar while brave players would use melee attacks and weapons on battlefield and if they creature made to the city and destroy a building it was permanently gone from the game the difficulty of those battles was intended to be automated by a system that accounted for the number of active players and their combined potential player power curating the experience to be challenging it possible this system also did not get finished in time so while we were playing as the narrator beep we were also deciding how and when every battle unfolded even with this human control many battles appeared either too easy or so unfair we had to roll back the save file because every building was destroyed we improvised these moments two players usually mentioning a time machine of some sort but they knew we screwed something up even the final battle had to be painstakingly curated to make sure it lasted more than a minutes but didn't erase two months of work unbeknownst to us some players had been stockpiling on explosives via the Wishing Well and decided to use all of them at the same time defeating the final boss fast and we can give it another health boost another problem that only got worse over time was onboarding new players as the city UI and commands grew more complex the game became ever more puzzling to a pair of fresh eyes this was largely because all information had to be on screen at the same time and a late-game newcomer couldn't start at the beginning we tried to ease the introduction via a helper bot and an online manual but despite to the efforts of these and chatroom moderators helping out we got the same question up until the final moments how do I play we realized this was a problem as soon as we had trouble ourselves telling someone in person what the thing was to do first in addition to our struggles with the game itself it was tough for twitch to promote a game that didn't present well at a glance even with beep telling jokes in the corner other than a launch day promotion on the front page it took one and a half months to create a spotlight feature to continue help spreading the word this wasn't necessarily a failure on our part unless you consider our designing a game that doesn't catch one's eye but it does help paint a picture as to why we had trouble getting new players regularly so your stream was a fun experiment that certainly taught us a lot about dealing with emergent multiplayer ecosystems but a time pressure combined with too many design and UX flaws prevented it from taking off as we'd hoped we still believe to this day that all major issues with the game are solvable especially after having experienced them fall apart over the course of a couple months however when the final building on the final spot was upgraded to its final level we called at the end of season 1 and sent players where they had always intended to go to the moon our final stream was a two-hour long rocket ride through outer space featuring a dynamic rolling credits of every player who ever stepped into the game's world as players rode their rocket tower through space and collided with passing stars they gained the ability to shoot fireworks into the galaxy giving back light to a fastly dimming world with that beep put on his nightcap for the last time wishing everyone a good night thank you everybody [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I believe Adrian's really next I think so yes so Peters a minute [Music] hello everyone I'm Adrian young I'm a game designer programmer business marketing person indeed I guess I just really hidden folks yay and today I want to thank you Wow [Applause] so today now I want to reflect on the closure of game oven the studio I co-founded increased in case you didn't know game oven it was founded by programmer Bowen and Ross key and game designer Adrian deal that would be me and we were later joined by marketeer Alena mirrors we are we had an office in the Dutch game garden in Utrecht the Netherlands and we made single planet challenge bamboo French strapped bounden and jelly reef six games we were best known for Fingal which is a sort of like twister like finger rubbing game and we some people know as for bounden which is a mobile dancing game for two people it actually has choreography by the dutch national ballet i showed this at the experiment gameplay workshop two years ago so my talk to you today will have two parts one of being what it's like being a company and sort of our perspective on the closing closing the company and being a team and all the dynamics that happened within our team all right part one being a company so game oven was founded by boy and I because at some point I had this prototype of Fingal and it was sort of weird and fun and it was just awkward and me when I bothe saw oh maybe we need to make a actual game out of this and put it on the App Store but to do that we need the legal entity so you were like maybe we should just dive into it and make a company and game often was born our business plan became to make enough games to collectively bring in enough money to cover the costs of the company and hope for a hit somewhere along the way and we wanted to run the studio sort of on the long tail of game so long tails usually look like this but the thing is if you zoom in this is what you see right so there's various games and the money they bring in every day stacks up and that's what covers the across the company every day so beam of an employed one designer a developer a marketing person and we usually had an art or a developer interned the biggest challenge to this structure was balancing prototyping games and marketing and doing business we hired Alena to with the promise to overcome that challenge but when it got real hot in the oven we still find ourselves helping out with marketing and looking back at this it seems like prototyping and actual game development are much easier roles to mix for one person than making and selling a game but like this is my gut feeling I don't have any like scientific data on this so aside from our in-house roles and skills we always required at least a number of contractors with every project so we always needed one or two full-time artist the music composers sound designer film maker to maker trailers localization company sometimes an extra developer and for bounden we needed a choreographer so that was weird but let's talk about costs because the minimum wage of one person in the Netherlands cost the company about 1,800 euros per month that is about $1,900 and it includes taxes and administration fees with three employees rent software administration and all sorts of little things game often cost about six and a half thousand euros per month we think it's not really cool to share how much our collaborators asked of us but this charge can give you a little bit of a sense of what all these projects costs so yeah one side there's the collaborators how many of them we needed to make the game another side is to studio time in months so bond and Hillary for definitely one of our bigger projects so counting the months on this chart and knowing that game often existed for three and a half years all the studio time listed here doesn't add up to three and a half years because in between these projects we prototyped we maintain the engine and our previous games and we did some contracting work here and there but more importantly this in between creative downtime or project downtime what's still studio uptime and it costs the studio as much as working on a project so you can imagine what kind of pressure this put on our creativity how can you have peace of mind when you know you're burning money every day and you don't find that next big thing and this is one of the reasons we decided to close game often because being responsible for the upkeep upkeep of this of a studio and being creative is damn difficult and yeah we couldn't find a way because well let's talk about game ovens income so in total more than two and a half million people more than two net million apps have been downloaded with grossing about 155 thousand euros which is about $165 thousand dollars compared to other apps on mobile stores these numbers are not amazing but they're definitely not bad either speculating over what drove our game sales we think it we think we made unique games and potentially appealing to non-gamers and using phone features in unique ways but we were always constrained by the designs of our games to mobile platforms which already has a lot of competition and we were really in the mood for a free-to-play business model from 2012 to 2015 piracy nerd piracy and our games which is crazy so most of our Chinese Russian and Turkish players parted our premier games both on the iOS and App Store and yeah especially with boundaries released we were baffled by how much how much percentage it was so in the end what we made offer sales wasn't strictly speaking enough to cover the cost of the studio and pay our collaborators and so we hunted for additional source of income lots of you know subsidies government grants contracting work Humble Bundle app campus which is the it is or was a program by Windows to get more games to their to their platform and we want various awards so with all these additional sources of income about a total of 144 thousand euros we were actually easily able to cover the cost of the studio and in the end we probably even had enough funds to do another project so again like game ovens income wasn't the main reason we closed the studio but rather the pressure of our monthly burn rate on the creativity for that next project okay so that's part one being company let's talk about being a team because as founders bullion and I had you could say some struggles during our three and a half years of working together and I might present these struggles here as if they were really straightforward but we went through months of reflection and to try to understand what happened why we were occasionally so frustrated with each other my deep motivation to make games has always been very different from Boyles motivation to make games I've always had this thing for truly social games whatever that means while Boyan didn't necessarily and as an example Boyan really really did not like french traps while I consider it one of my best working concepts ever and bullion became father after bounden money and being sustainable became even more important motivators to him so before jelly reef the last game came up and made Boyan had not been able to motivate or convince me to work on any of his game ideas mainly because I looked for a social component in buoyant ideas that he never focused on to me it felt like Boyle never understood what he wanted to accomplish with his games or that his games didn't have a bigger vision and for bullion it felt like I never took his ideas seriously and this kind of frustration was actually very difficult to deal with for both of us okay the other struggle I was primarily the face of game oven I was maybe a bit more extrovert and better connected internationally but unfortunately many interviews with journalists presented me as the sole creator of gave out of game offense games even though they were made as a team effort there was one particular interview unbound and that heard Boyle most writing about me is the genius inventor bound and while never mentioning it was made you know by a whole team and this struggle actually came back quite often too often as as what should be necessary everyone wants to be credited for their hard work and so simply making this very explicit that journalist keeps everyone happy on the team so if you're a journalist please take this seriously like I know I actually know for a fact we are not the only ones who have struggled with this okay the biggest struggle however that we faced resulting from resulted from never strictly defining our roles so Boyle didn't want to narrowly define our roles as he wanted to have a say in business and marketing and design as well as being the technical lead having to stay in all aspects of running a game studio for a small studio like that was why he wanted to be a founder in the first place and I think that's very reasonable but unfortunately resulted in a pretty bad few pretty bad scenarios and I wanted to give you guys three of these scenarios because yeah yeah I want you to understand how important this this was for our decision to close the game to close game oven so after the quite underwhelming launch of BAM flew our second title I decided after maybe three or four months of prototyping that game ovens next production was going to be friends trapped and this quirky little game with no beef other than being really awkward and weird Boyan just didn't feel anything for making it to me feeling that you know studio up time pressure it was one of the prototypes with the most potential we had at that time but to boil it felt like he had no saying when a friendship should be made or not and but he did feel as responsible for it as much as I did but I you know I took the best decision I could and I don't think I I still think we didn't have any better alternatives back then so the lesson here is defining roles comes down to trust and letting go of the things you to feel responsible for one long argument Boyan and I had was about a timer inbounding so at some point during the project violin took on the challenge of making a timer one that you know should convey where you are within the dance but while he was making it I came to realize and I saw him play test that the timer was actually not as relevant to the broader picture of the game and so I sort of you know had to discard the idea within the whole design and replaced it with a much simpler solution but at this point it fell to boil as if I only wanted to include my own designs while you know I was only trying to model a coherent player experience for bounden so the lesson here is I was often not able to communicate my bigger vision of the game fully to boil which made it very difficult for Boehm to understand why his contributions could sometimes should not should sometimes not be included and what complicated matters was that the vision and execution of that vision changed constantly sometimes even radically so another difficult scenario was a jelly reef in its entirety so from the start with all our previous issues in mind and all our struggles and minds I want to boil to be the creative owner of jelly reef and he felt that role well but somewhere along the way jelly reef turned into a procedurally generated game which meant that my rule for jelly reef became unclear I wasn't able to help boy encoded I was just not a good grammar like that and so not only did I had to leave most of the design up to boil I also had to work on a game that didn't align with my big motivation to make games in the first place and it was at this time that I got us together and you know set those four painful words I want to quit boy and anna-lena understood that I was a fundamental member of game oven so we decided together to finish galleries and close game often afterwards but finishing jelly with the disbanding team was a nightmare [Music] Boyan worked his ass off to make the game happen regardless Lee but it was he was increasingly frustrated with the lack of effort by his team members everyone had their minds on the future and in hindsight I think we should have just disbanded right there and then and even even though that felt maybe too disruptive to our lives at that point okay so those were three struggles that we had but I do want to end on a positive note because only talk about our struggles makes us look like we should have never worked together in the first place but we office obviously had super-fun times to go into the office every morning with like a little adventure and we make something new quickly that day together figuring out how to help to do it and even with all the struggles that we had Blaine and I didn't close the studio hating or disliking each other we we've had times where we you know we could punch each other in the face but not when we closed the studio and in a way our struggles are still marginal compared to our achievements I think seventeen awards and nominations for Fingal and bound and major features in the AppStore stories of relationships crushed and babies made because of single working together with the Dutch National Ballet coverage in the New York Times The Guardian BBC The Verge Mashable or more than 14 and a half million play sessions that's a crazy ride so I want to conclude game oven with you in contrast to what most people initially think game oven did make enough money to sustain itself so strictly speaking our game sales weren't enough to keep us running but only looking at once or one of our sources of income would be a narrow point of view what was difficult for us to maintain what the rigid structure of a studio as opposed to the flexible structure of hopping on and off individual projects our problem was studio up time during project downtime and we worked really hard to close the gap between our projects but leaving responsibilities scattered throughout the team keeping our roles fake magnified the pressure between us and caused many struggles between us and eventually those personal struggles made us decide to close the studio and ultimately that is the more nuanced conclusion to game often so I hope you draw lessons from game often our failure and if you have any questions please do come talk to me afterwards thank Tim you're up next [Music] hey I'm gonna hello everybody oh hello everyone my name is Tim Rodgers I am the founder and director of interactive electronic objects research design development and consultation studio action button entertainment I am the game designer and director of video ball video ball is a digital sporting good product which is available now this makes a difference for personal computers and for PlayStation 4 or Xbox one video game console hardware's somebody commented on the YouTube videos my talk last year that it sounded like I had to go to the bathroom I really did and I really do right now so I need to stop doing this all right okay so video ball is a 4 player sport in which two teams of two players each project triangles and circular balls to push them push a ball into your opponent's goal to score a point the longer you hold the button the bigger your eventual triangle bigger triangles push harder triangles also stun players and eliminate one another regulation video ball is played with three balls on the screen at all times and here's a little video of some some experts playing the game so video ball represents an attempt to make a serious electronic sport so through what I can run pretentiously described as a scientific scam design process we started with simple core rules and eventually arrived at what I call quote unquote a compact expression of all sports mechanics video ball launched on 12 July 2016 and my life has been a garage sale ever since one of my earnest goals with video ball was was this being perfectly honest now the first time one of the earnest goals of video ball was to make the burberry scarf of video games up here on stage last year said the Muji coffee cup of video games that was me being modest I wanted to make the burberry scarf of video games a luxury video game so you can buy a scarf for a dollar and it will keep your neck warm or you can pay roughly $400 for a burberry scarf so why pay the extra I never meant to charge $400 for video ball so but why pay the extra $399 well a burberry scarf represents a perfect intersection of history science and art so I personally don't really have any history or art but I know a little bit about science so I thought that I could you know fudge the other two so Burberry the company is existed for over a century the founder Thomas Burberry invented gabardine a waterproof fabric which is still appreciated today and their trademark check pattern the pen their trademark check pattern is a monolith of graphic design so I would define a burberry scarf as a fine thing and this would be what I would want in my video game that is the burberry scarf of video games so it's a run through the list a fine thing is not too hot not too cold lovely to touch beautiful to look at and wonderful to think about so I am NOT however a ridiculous enough person to vocalize this mission statement while promoting video ball before it's released but the game's not for 8 months and I'm wondering now if maybe I should have been that ridiculous I'm always you know checking my ridiculousness so instead we promoted video ball as a digital sporting good product video ball will empower the players the players or characters the game is a thing and I'm working on another game right now I'll tell you about it later and my mission statement just in my head that my mantra is video games can be things and hopefully that would be much EDC talk in 2018 that would be the type of video games can be thing look forward to it or you know you don't have to if you don't want to okay so I got a lot of weird copywriting out of the video ball mission statement and my favorite thing is something I said here last year which is video ball has the best graphics of any game ever because video ball is a perfect one-to-one simulation of itself and this this in addition to being a funny joke is also that was something I sincerely believed I thought why not make a game like that wouldn't it be cool if there was something like that so here's how we advertised that mission statement in the trailer and if you want this guy to do your voice in your trailer there's another thing of video ball is the pool-table because video ball isn't a hostage I think of your television as a dinner table and video ball is one specific video ball doesn't eat berries elde face the rain tanks or even helicopters video volatile at these characters ever real human dream that's right when you were poor you were already with your ball carrier once you toss to put the physio ball Bureau put a hat on funny I'm a good real new real just really so III yeah you know hey you know I thought that was pretty good it got a lot of views on YouTube most of them saying that the announcer sounded like he had a stuff nose so body functions keep getting into my PR so basically in keeping with you put a hat on buddy message we made hundreds of shirts many of them unique most of them unique I promoted these shirts on the web and I even sold some of them up here at the podium last year GD see if anybody remembers that I would say make some noise if you're wearing a shirt though I have surveyed the audience with my eyes and determined that that would be too much noise I actually have the last video ball shirt it is a medium sized American Apparel you can't it's nothing I'm sorry you're you're a robust gentleman you're you're tough you're stronger than me so keep in mind that I have diabetes and I can't afford medicine so if somebody wants to pay me for this alright so one of the video ball shirts was printed on a 1950s vintage French girls terry cloth t-shirt and I was very scared to print on this I have a collection of vintage European sweatshirts I mean because lots of people do so in this this shirt ended up being the object of a bidding war in the highest bid and this is a call back it was $400 and the bidder was the person I actively disliked so I did not sell however pleased with its having obtained a $400 bid I felt comfortable selling it for $50 to a wonderful couple from Belgium because I like Belgium and also because they promised me that they would do something good with it so a month later they sent me a couple of photographs so upon seeing this photo I realized that in fact my first daily mistake my entire life had always been not knowing that a statue of jean-claude van Damme as he appears in the 1988 film bloodsport literally stands in a park somewhere in Belgium but despite the Jean Claude's best efforts it was already too late video bought that cost me all of my money and when the game shipped I was broke I could not afford to spend even a daily hour promoting it so by now you may be thinking how can a game with a $400 t-shirt on a Jean Claude Van Damme statue in a park in Belgium be considered a failure well I'm glad you asked because strictly speaking it's not because that rules video ball is not a failure because it is my favorite game however on the other hand I have literally five broken teeth in my mouth and I dared to have a dental check-up last month and the dentists words were and I quote you can't a lot going on in here it's not even a joke so put put put bluntly video ball is a failure because we spent too much time and our message was weak okay so and let's get into what I mean by too much time and week so Thanksgiving weekend 2013 we played video ball for more or less 20 consecutive hours so video ball was perfect two years before we released it and I can't prove this to you because I don't have two hours to talk but so I did give it two hour lecture about why video ball is there's a couple people who were at that lecture uh so black Sunday 2013 so two years before we released the video ball some friends and I gathered in my house in Oakland California for what we called the first annual Little Caesars hot and ready Bowl because we're idiots and because I maybe wanted to die we bought four Little Caesars hot and ready cheese pizzas this was back when there were only five dollars now there are six dollars this economy huh so we had among us we had over 2,000 hours of video ball experience in the room we played along tournaments on a grand scale so this is a very prototype looking video ball that we were playing where this was during the game design process that aforementioned scientific process so we played a long tournament on a grand scale so here's a clip of the final round you're going to hear a cacophony of voices shouting bizarre phrases I realized today that any game able to provoke this reaction and my friends despite its flaws should have been released as immediately as possible instead of us taking extra years to polish it instead we perpetrated a cataclysmic waste of time okay so here's this I mean if the game looks like nonsense but listen to these people screaming there's a part there's like 12 people in this room somehow there was still two slighted seats left Hunters Point Oh what [Music] can you help keep them busy why oh my god okay uh so I look at that and it's like compared to if the sound were off I would be like man this game sucks like and that's you know what I thought then I'm like oh there's a whole lot of stuff I want to do with this game and you I would just forget about that the next day immediately after resuming work on the game I would forget for some reason what's wrong with me I would completely forget that those people had that much fun playing that game so we should have released it pretty much right away so that's what I want to talk about real quick here we should have released the game simpler and differently so let's talk about simpler indifferently so here's why we didn't release it simple and different so the terrifying screams the video ball prototypes cause we're so voluminous as to attract a publisher so I signed with the publisher because they offered money and I liked that the money would be enough for myself Brent Porter and Michael Kerwin my my partners to concentrate on finishing the game it didn't seem impossible it was a game we wanted to make anyway I hated the contract work that I'd been doing on the side to support the development and I liked the guy who was the publisher but uh so what happened we agreed to the publishers expectations which was simultaneous launch on PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 Steam PlayStation 4 and Xbox one which is a lot of work for three people to do in six months they also expected cross-platform online multiplayer which quite hilariously did not happen so so we were now being paid to work on what we've been doing for fun so we subconsciously divided the work into stuff we had to do such as getting it running on all the consoles and the unnecessary stuff we wanted to do such as graphical polish new options new modes new arenas so we'd somehow decided that we were being paid just for the boring stuff which is a really bad trap that we fell into and so we kept doing the fun work for fun and eventually we were working 16-hour days on this game and I crunched some numbers and it turns out we averaged about four our four dollars and fifty cents an hour for the work we were doing which is a that's pretty bad so and then eventually we took so long making our game that our publisher went out of business and we we had no choice at this point we needed another publisher and I could get into that but that's scary but so our friends at iron galaxy rescued us and so we ended up releasing the game a year later now one of the bigger problems here with the game was that our first-time user experience was too difficult in the wrong environment I accidentally said user and that's this game right there I started about that so uh we had cultivated an abstract color coded visual style because we found this the coldest most legible way to inform players and spectators of the events of the game legibility was our primary concern which meant the game ended up with a look that I have described as preschool industrial which is this look here so the first time players the video ball presumes that the game was as stupid as it looked and the disgusted glares I suffered from Evo attendees left a layer of frostbite on my brain which likely remains today that's an actual quote from a review it's basically pong made for the Millennials and I can't get enough of it I know Millennials are cool whatever okay so uh we had designed our game under a strict law that it was all it would be all skill no luck the players first experience is not as important as their 1000th and we knew that this was not a billion-dollar main stir idea we had decided with conviction that our game would not possess the immediately understandable metaphor and simplicity of a game such as rocket League meanwhile the press had decided that soccer was in fact rocket League without cars so we could have released our game before rocket League we ended up releasing after and eventually players at PAX were shouting to their buddies hey look someone made 2d rocket League and our games I mean rocket League rules but I mean it's I mean that was people's first I don't know I cried so so it was that first timers pressed one button over and over firing dinky little triangles barely pushing balls or they'd Ram insidee I actually was a I was going to show you a video on YouTube but it's almost done so well or they'd Ram it to the ball repeatedly and drop the controller and anger but nothing happened and some people didn't even realize the circles were balls and those who did would recommend hey maybe the ball should move when you touch it you know like in rocket League and you know again I was like I've done science here man so video ball requires four players to optimally enjoy and so it game conventions people don't tend to be walking around with three friends and they also I mean that's not not a diss or anything this is what I noticed and they also are surprisingly not always in the mood to get into screaming fits with three total strangers and if just one player understands the rules of this game and plays well the other three players feel terrible and I noticed this a lot so video ball requires cooperation and observation and if there's just one player of the floor who's good most players are not willing to observe and learn from the behaviors of total strangers in the presence of an expert so no matter how hard a guy wearing a Notre Dame football jacket over a dress [Music] that was me at a PAX 2014 I was Christine loves dress that she loves me so in the number-7 we put too much stuff into the game so in our two years of polishing we filled the game with the bounty of rules score variations music tracks voice announcements backgrounds line variations ball markers and 35 drastically different arenas we put in arcade mode from one or two players we put in one on one and three on three local multiplayer we put in AI bots we did all this even though we knew for certain the best experience was two on two so when we released the game streamers and let's players were playing almost exclusively one on one furthermore they never touched the customization options our game ended up looking dinky and plain we knew it was actually ferocious than flamboyant when we played the game we saw the 1995 NBA Finals when let's players played the game we saw a lone untouched field hockey ball sitting in a tray of fresh kitty litter I swear to god we could have remade this menu if we'd had one more week and it would have been perfect to Dave Lang I'm not going to talk about that menu god-darned menu it there's there's like there's a very simple solution so we spent much much much less than 1 million dollars promoting video ball we spent $0 promoting video ball had we spent a million dollars I promise you I would not be here today I would be at the success workshop next door and I the profits would have likely been large enough for me to buy a 1999 Honda Civic Si which is vastly preferable to the car I have now and for reference this is the car I have now I don't think it's safe it's a Halloween costume with wheels it's like it's like what if Dracula were a cop if you ever see this car driving up out of a lake I pushed it in there and it's coming back for me so I I had a 5/5 conversations with venture capitalists which I drove this car to all those meetings who said they wanted to invest in video ball and none of them invested in video ball maybe I didn't give him a pitch that was any good at all my plan hadn't been good enough and hindsight being what it is I now kind of do have a plan which is a little late but uh so here's the lessons we learned real quick the most important lesson is that our game is great we can make great games and I love this God darn game man so it is amazingly easy to lose confidence in yourself when you're tooling around alone in the dark with the minutiae of a game which is meant for for live human players despite my many experiences with the living room full of friends screaming in ecstasy ecstasy I could not help feeling and inadequacy which drove me to implement too many modes and too much stuff we didn't need all that stuff because video ball is great the other thing I learned game conventions are loud and stupid we should not have taken video Balta panics tax is great for many many games but probably not ours I reside in the San Francisco Bay Area I could have taken the game directly to journalists streamers cool people colleges schools instead of preparing for yet another laryngitis so showing video ball at PAX required a lot of explanation and man that place is loud on day two somebody always came back bringing their friends so I could take a break while they played with their friends and then they told their friends how to play and this it occurs to me now that we already had a perfect place to show the game which was the Oakland video ball Sunday Club which I invited people to come over to my house every Sunday for about eight months while we were polishing the game and it was open to the public one week a kid a college student from Berkeley came and then the next week he brought six friends that's like six people you're getting on a bus to come play a game at a guy's house I should have taken that as a sign but you know here's the photos and people playing video ball at the GDC 24 Sunday 2014 Sunday club Dan Tabor took that photo I love that photo yeah so it's so clear to me now we should have shown the game at University sponsored events we could have taken it to events I showed it at a high school and it was way better than showing it at pax so there's none more of that I could have a sent as kids were asking me I call them kids because I don't know they're in college and I'm I'm almost 40 years old and so the kids were asking hey can I have a build of the game to play with my friends and I was like man no I should have done it I should have sent a stripped-down build and let them evangelize the game for me I don't know I don't know man and then we went on to not even let online players organize so this is like the worst thing that we did our online was divided into ranked and exhibition and then further divided into one on one two one two and three on three this was an utter waste of time and a flagrant display of idiotic hubris you can't just make an eSport any sport has to happen we should have left it at two on to one arena and made all matches ranked by including a triple A's worth of options in our online multiplayer for our game we could not afford to advertise all we did was dilute matchmaking into oblivion so that was a huge disaster so here's a comment from a review this is an actual line I can't recommend video ball on the basis of its online multiplayer however because there don't seem to be too many players playing it online at this point so you know if you would recommend it there it would be people this was like an eight point eight out of ten like what is at eight point eight I don't know so finally it's very clear to me that we could have made a Dumber game and I use the word dumb very very affectionately I love dumb games I love the abstract nature video ball I love its devotion to its concept it's my favorite game it's the kind of person I am however maybe it should have been the professional edition of a much loopy er floppier cartoony ER game full of vehicles characters special weapons anime girls loadout modes graphics costumes hats and a robust roguelike single-player mode that's video ball X right there thanks to Dan de stole for the fan art so a a wonderful man named Waseem Salman referenced Frank Lloyd Wright in a beautiful essay about video ball and I blushed however a student who had attended a two hour lecture I gave at DePaul University about the scientific process of balancing video of all speeds and timings such that the average match was three minutes in length later sent me an email celebrating my process as one Bertrand Russell would approve of I almost passed out I know and appreciate Bertrand Russell as an expert of many occupations yet I take it this specific students comparison saw video ball as the electronic game of the fact that Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead in their book principia mathematica famously wrote 362 pages proving that one plus one equals two that's that's a ever read that book and I haven't either because why would you I already know that you know I'm done so uh basically that's a rule of thumb unless you already possess financial security consider any comparison between your video game in the work of Bertrand Russell to be the darkest possible omen so can I say video ball well video bus primary concern is timelessness it runs at 300 frames per second an 8k resolution I mean it does once it sounds like promise I'm not joking so if our game is meant to survive intact as good design for at least a thousand years calling it a failure and giving up after eight months is quite frankly a little bit ridiculous so we can we can simplify the product we can remove most of the menus no more arena selects leaving only the basic arena sorry buddy video ball was born as pong for the Millennials no more rules options every match is two onto three balls first attend no time limit we've got the matchmaking every online matches two onto three balls first attend no time limit every match is ranked there's a pattern here no more customization all the visuals are all random all the time we make the game free we support it with tasteful ads we tasteful ads we always intended for video ball to be a digital sporting good product you know like a principal blank t-shirt so here's the version of video ball video ball white-label as we call it we have done for various clients and organizations who want their their own branded video ball we did this for PAX 2016 we were the final round of the Omega song and PAX East but so yeah then we can take on sponsors build an audience I don't know that if I were giving my pitch to those venture capitalists a year ago this is what I would have told them I wanted to do for the promotion and if you put these sports happens it happens and if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen so if you're a venture capitalist with no common sense and you'd like to talk to me my Twitter DMS are always open and that phone number right there that's not fake so photograph this if you must please do not tweet my phone number so in closing video ball is a failure because I need insulin in closing video ball is not a failure because it is my favorite game and if you'd like to play it at my house on the Friday night or Saturday afternoon or Sunday evening or if you're around next week my Twitter DM s are always open and that phone number right there is not fake please do not tweet my phone number thank you oh and and one more one more thing one more thing truck X trick okay bye

Channel: GDC

Views: 90,939

Rating: 4.8980045 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game design, game development, video games, tim rogers, kotaku

Id: H67itWCG1JY

Length: 59min 1sec (3541 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2017

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