[TYPING NOISES] [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: Hello there, traveler.
Please come sit down. Rest your weary legs.
Grab a marshmallow. I've got a story
to tell. [FIRE CRACKLING] Today we take a look at
the design of Outer Wilds, an award winning critical
hit, which has been slowly building a cult following
since its release in May of 2019.
This is really a game that's best played without
knowing anything about it. So at a certain point,
we're going to hit pause and let those of you
who have yet to experience Outer Wilds an opportunity
to get off. But before we get
to that stage, it's probably about time we talked about
the unique origins of this game. Outer Wilds was designed
by a small studio in Los Angeles called
Mobius Digital Games. But years before, it started
out as a student project. Alex Beachum was completing
his masters thesis at the University
of Southern California. His thesis project would
be a game that attempted to break
new design ground while pulling in
several disparate ideas from some old
student prototypes. [MUSIC PLAYING] ALEX BEACHUM: We wanted to
make a game where you're exploring a world
as it changes over time, in like really dramatic ways,
just to get away from the idea that game
environments are these static things. It works well with
space exploration, of course. Wanted to make something
where you fly a spaceship around to get to that feeling of,
you know, it's dangerous. You really shouldn't
be in space. Really wanted to do
Newtonian flight mechanics, where you're just
drifting with your ship, and the planets are
hurtling around the sun. And then the other
part of the really core part of the thesis
was the idea that make a game where
the only reason for players to explore
is to sort of satiate their
own curiosity. I was inspired by this
part in the Wind Waker where there's this photographer,
and he has an art gallery,
and you can talk to him about the paintings
he's put up on the wall They're all taken,
they're all actual photos taken from real
locations in the game. It's cool because
you see a photo and you're like,
wow, I wonder what this weird statue is,
and he will, like, tell you where
he took the photo. And so if you're curious,
you can go check it out, but the game isn't
telling you to do that. Outer Wilds,
in some ways, was a response to
Skyward Sword. Because I'm a
huge Zelda fan, and Skyward Sword is
emblematic of just all the things that I just--
pain me to see the Zelda series doing. And it goes with the
space exploration theme, where we wanted to make
a space exploration game with a reason
you're exploring space, to learn about the world
and to gain knowledge, and not, like, to
conquer planets. Our ideal version of
real-world space exploration, more in the vein of
2001, Apollo 13. I mean, the things we
learned at USC was the value of playtesting,
the fact that no matter what you do, you're going to
put it in front of somebody, and it's
going to break immediately. I went there along
with Loan Verneau, who was the other
designer on Outer Wilds. We were in the same
class together. Our favorite classes,
I know for us, were the ones that kind of
let you do-- Like you do a project like thesis
prep. You kind of go off and do something,
maybe on a prompt. But then you all
get together, and you sort of talk about and
critique each other's projects. We had a class
at the USC masters, the interactive
media masters program. It was called
world- building. I don't even remember
what the assignment prompt. We just had to, like,
build a thing, build a world
or whatever. And I was just like,
I wonder if I can make a spaceship that flies in Unity
with sort of-- And I got it working.
It's just like a little like, physics box. You walk
inside of it and walk around, go to a cockpit,
and, like, lift off and fly around just like
a terrain height map. Well, and spherical planets,
like Mario Galaxy style, but maybe a bit bigger
in first person, like I made a planet that
was bombarded by meteors and
broke apart, and a bunch of asteroids
with mushrooms on them, and a lighthouse in the fog
with these big anglerfish. And then in the thesis prep
we had this prompt called do something with
the uncertainty principle. And that led to this
prototype of there's the cabin and
all these trees, and they would move
when you looked away, and just sort of
shift around. And then there was
this other project where you flew a bunch of these
little model rockets and then had to
get into a big rocket and the idea was that
once you've played, even though it's
all virtual, once you've played with
the small version of it, the real version
feels dangerous. And so that was just
a one-off thing. There was one where you threw
a probe and had a video. So just like all these
different ideas that sort of just got
duct taped together. And then the final one,
I think that really mattered was-- This was a-- Because
the point of this class was to sort of figure
out what we wanted to do, and I just pretty much
couldn't let that spaceship from the previous class go, even
though it was sort of, like, silly. Just like, we're supposed to
be doing stuff that, like, pushes the medium
or whatever. And I was like, I just
want to play with this spaceship. But one of my colleagues,
Simon Whiscombe, was like, you should make
an emotional prototype. 'Cause I was struggling with sort of like,
what is this going to be? And so instead of doing
all this mechanical stuff, I made this quick prototype
where you roast a marshmallow over a fire. And then you're
on a little planet, and the sun explodes.
And you just sort of sit there, and it's
like a firework show. It was like very rough, but
it was still kind of pretty. And then all the planets
went out one by one. And then finally
it hits you. [WHOOSH] [SILENCE] At the end of thesis, we
had the solar system. We had the planets conceptually
as they are now. Some of them changed somewhat,
but that's more or less the version that was at
IGF in 2015. ANNOUNCER: And the award for
excellence in design goes to--
[OPENING ENVELOPE] Outer Wilds. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] - So when we started Outer Wilds,
we just wanted to make something where the only point
of exploring was to learn more about the world.
And there would be no objectives. There would
be no missions. And we just weren't sure
people would be into it. So thank you
for being curious to explore this janky
world we created. And a big thanks to
the USC games program, the Laguna College of
Art and Design, and Atlantic University College.
Clearly could not have done it without
any of them. WESLEY MARTIN: I remember
sitting at GDC 'cause I was at GDC,
at IGF that year. And I, like, saw
Outer Wilds winning the excellent in design award,
and I was just like, this game doesn't look very good.
Like, what's up with this weird student project winning
all these awards? I could make better
art than that. And so when I heard about
the job, I was like, I could make better
art than that. [LAUGHING] Eh, I guess I'll play
the like, alpha build that's on the internet.
And then it was four in the morning,
and I was trying to get to the center
of Dark Bramble. And I was like, OK,
I have to work on this game. And then two weeks later
I moved here and worked on it. - All right, the 2015 Seamus McNally
grand prize goes to [OPENING ENVELOPE] Outer Wilds. ALEX: Thank you so much.
This is insane, and we're just, I'm just
tremendously grateful for the team and for
all of their hard work, all of our crazy players,
and people who traded stories on the internet.
Thank you for, yeah, exploring, and just everything.
Thank you. - Usually a story like this
would end once somebody won an award,
but the timeline of Outer Wilds doesn't exactly
follow a straight path. Winning the IGF
did change everything for Alex. Suddenly he found
himself at the helm of a game that a bunch
of people wanted to fund and publish. But we're
getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.
So let's rewind. After he left school, Alex
went to work on Project Spark in Seattle,
but had returned to LA to work at a new
studio founded by his former classmate, Loan,
and a surprising benefactor. Actor and producer Masi Oka
was interested in starting a video game studio.
Before his breakthrough roles in Heroes, he had
worked at ILM creating visual effects for movies
including the Star Wars prequels. [STRAW SLURPING] He had approached a head
of the department at USC about hiring one of their students.
Loan was recommended, and the two
founded Mobius. LOAN VERNEAU: I think he's
always been, you know, a very creative person,
and video games were always a big part
of his life. I know he was a huge
World of Warcraft player. Like he cares very much
about the team itself, and our work culture,
and the way we collaborate and that sort of
stuff. So it's been really great. DANNY: In the early days, Mobius
worked on mobile games like Terra Chroma
and Beacon 38. And after a few months
in Seattle, Alex moved back to
join the team. His side project, Outer Wilds,
wasn't part of the Mobius Portfolio, but after
his success at IGF, it had make sense for the
entire team to focus on it. Alex signed a deal with
Masi to bring it in-house, they hired Wesley
as art director, and attempted to secure more
funding by being the first game to
launch a Fig campaign. The original idea was to
give them an extra year to polish this version
of the game and to get it
out the door. But this loop didn't exactly go
according to plan. During this year, they were
approached by Annapurna about publishing the game,
but Annapurna didn't want a flipped
student project. They wanted the best
possible version of Outer Wilds. So after
a year of work, most of the art
had to be redone. But this extra time also allowed
much of the more interesting elements of
story and world building to be added to the game. -Early on, there was
the idea for the structure of the game was that
we were going to have these four major secret locations.
They were each going to answer a major
question about the world that we were going to try
to get players curious about. And then everything else in
the world was going to point to
those, and each curiosity, I think was going
to have about three sort of
connecting clues. The idea was the clues
would point to each other, and also point
to the curiosity and have the clue.
So that structure's like sort of still there,
but we added a bunch of other, like,
clues pointing to you know. It got
more complicated. -Friends, we've reached a
fork in the road. if you have yet to
play Outer Wilds, then this is your opportunity
to get off. Hit subscribe, smash
that like button, close your browser,
and boot up your favorite video
game machine. We're going to try to
skirt around solutions and some of those bigger
reveals, but as a general rule, we're
entering the spoiler dimension here, so
you've been warned. Ready? All right. Let's meet the planets. [MUSIC PLAYING] I do remember it was
early in thesis year. I wish I had a
picture of it, but I just remember, like
there was a whiteboard, and I just like, started
drawing just ideas on the whiteboard
and then just circling like five
or six of them. And one was the
Hourglass Twins. One was just like a bunch
of thorns stuck together. And Brittle Hollow was sort of from
that world building assignment, like meteors hitting a planet
that breaks apart. One was a gas giant,
but just like conceptually, not like the way
it is in the game. Oh, and then the comet,
just because we were like, elliptical orbits are cool, and
it'll look cool on the map. Let's throw a comet in.
Maybe if it gets near the sun, we can do
something with heat. - The joke we always make
about Outer Wilds is it's the game you're
not supposed to make. 'Cause like the way you do nice
lighting in games is by static objects
that don't move. Everything in Outer Wilds is
always moving. The way you, like, make games
is on a grid in Maya. Everything in Outer Wilds
is on a sphere. Any, like, thing you expect out of
game development, we just had to throw away and
figure it out. And so each planet had
its own weird problems to solve where it's like, you know,
we think we've figured out how to make the terrain
on Timber Hearth. then you go to the
Hourglass Twins, and it just doesn't work at all. DANNY: when Wesley applied
for the job at Mobius, he had a few things
going for him. He had worked on a number
of large projects including EverQuest, Microsoft Flight,
and HoloLens. But before he worked
in game development, Wesley spent his youth
growing up in the Santa Cruz mountains
on a campground surrounded by redwoods.
So when it came to creating striking visuals for each
of the planets, he knew exactly where to
pull inspiration from. - Early on, we decided to
reference national parks. Timber Hearth is a combination
of Yellowstone and Sequoia National Park,
and a little bit of Mount Rainier too, 'cause on the surface, you kind of have
like the alpine trees. Brittle Hollow, we looked at
Greenland and Iceland, like the basalt rock stuff,
which at the time, there was like, no games
that did that. and then every game that's come
out in the last ten years has had that
environment in it. Giants Deep is probably
the least based on a national park.
It's sort of loosely inspired by the Santa Cruz beach
cliffs where I grew up And then, at last,
our friend Dark Bramble. You know, it's your friendly
neighborhood planet. DANNY: The stage was set.
Mobius had established its solar system,
six unique worlds locked in a celestial fire circle
the player would dance again and again.
Each of these worlds was designed to be unique,
and so each of them was a unique design challenge.
The clock is ticking here, folks. But I still think we
have enough time to take a trip around
the solar system. [MUSIC PLAYING] WESLEY: The first one we did in
after the Fig campaign was Timber Hearth. We
worked on the village, which shouldn't have been
the first thing that we did. It's one of the most complex
series in the game. I think we remade the village
about six times throughout development. The village
was sort of like we would keep coming back around to it.
Every time we would improve the art style,
it's like, all right, How can we make
the village better again? We need to fix all these
things 'cause, you know playtests would show
that people weren't finding the
right tutorials. -There were a lot of problems with
that version of the village. But people also just weren't excited
to go into space because everyone they were
talking to was like, why would you do that?
Why would you go explore
the cosmos? Really early on, they were like,
kind of antagonistic about the idea of
going into space. We were like, OK, we're going to make--
the player's going to be the one who's excited to go into space,
and everyone else is like don't do it. Like, oh, this is
having the opposite effect. And so Kelsey and
I talked, and came up with idea of OK, you're the
newest astronaut in the space program. Your village
has a space program. People actually want to do this
stuff. It's a bit quirky, but we're going to get you
excited about space by having everyone else on some level
be excited about space. - The last version of the
writing for Hornfels was is the person who gives
you the launch codes, and he's also the only
mandatory conversation in the entire game. Initially
we were trying things like giving the player the option to
ask what their mission was or where to go next,
and then he would go like, eh, it's
up to you. And what we end up
with instead was we reversed it.
You, as a player, What do you want
to do next? That ended up
really working like surprisingly well, because
you know, you have-- It's a selection. We gave
them a few ideas too, right?
It's like if you didn't know what to do,
we still give, like, yeah, there's some things you could
be interested in. [MUSIC PLAYING] Giant's Deep was originally just going
to be a gas giant. It wasn't going to have an ocean.
But we wanted there to be islands, like, floating in the sky.
But we were like, How are we going to get
islands? Like why? Like how are we going to get that
to work physics-wise, also, like
just conceptually. Like, well, maybe there are two
layers of fluids of different densities,
and it's like, well, one of them can just be water.
Oh, it's an ocean planet. Then we're going to toss 'em up with
tornadoes, 'cause we can do that. My favorite planet is Giant's Deep,
just because I love storms. Like I was really into tornado movies
when I was a kid and that kind
of stuff. So getting to make these giant tornadoes
was a lot of fun for me. -We have the fluid system,
which is like pretty pretty simple, but it's
a student project. You just sort of take the things
you have and just use them over and over
again, and so we used the fluid system
for the geysers, for the sand funnel on
Hourglass Twins, for the water on
Giant's Deep, for the tornadoes on
Giant's deep. It's just us reusing, like,
the same idea. We're just going to, like, take
a force and fling something to sort of lean into
the idea that just it's all these pieces moving around,
and you're just caught in the storm. WESLEY: Yeah, Dark Bramble is
sort of a weird case. The challenges there
were very different. The biggest challenge was just the
scale of Dark Bramble. Because when you fly in, like,
it's covered in fog. So you can't tell, but those
environments, like, they're just huge in comparison
to anywhere else in the solar system. ALEX: It was largely motivated
that we wanted at least one of the planets to be
a zero-g environment. And obviously there was
something very large that we had to hide
inside Dark Bramble. The planets in the game are,
like, not that big. And we just embraced the idea
of these sort of dimensional pockets that
you fly through. It works really well
with the lights. LARA COLSON: Dark Bramble
has ice around it, and it's like, all right, easy,
just make some ice. Well, it needs to look specifically
like Dark Bramble ice so when you see it on a different
planet, you be like, hey, that's some stuff
from Dark Bramble. I can't just make it
look like ice because I used the ice looking
ice over here on the comet, or on, like,
Brittle Hollow, or stuff like that.
So it's like, OK, how can I make this ice
still look like ice but look different from
this other ice? ALEX: A binary planet seemed
cool, and just the idea that something could transfer
from one to the other over. 'Cause we're just looking for ways
that we can change things over time, ideally in a way that is
like, easy for us. And I remember originally,
it was like, oh, it could be like water flowing
between the two. And then sand just seemed,
just couldn't resist the idea of you getting closed
into these knowing you're just like,
oh my god, I'm trapped. And I'm going to die
a horrible death. It was too good
to pass up. In the final release, the tech
and the art teams did some really cool stuff
to make it look more complicated than
a sphere getting bigger and a sphere
getting smaller. But that's, like,
all it is. WESLEY: You know, we think we figured out
how to make the terrain on Timber Hearth. Then to go to the Hourglass Twins,
and it just doesn't work at all. And so we had to come up with
a different strategy there. And so each planet
had that. For the Hourglass Twins, it's that
it's full of caves. And so as I mentioned before,
you have two different curvatures at the different
heights of a planet. And for the Ember
Twin, you have caves that slope from
one of those to the other. So not only do you have
two different curvatures, but you have a ramp
that has to match one curvature at the
top of the ramp, and a different curvature at
the bottom of the ramp. And then you got to
put all the props in there and make it feel
good to move on. So it's just like a compoundingly
difficult thing to do. [MUSIC PLAYING] ALEX: We didn't have it in the
alpha, but we had the idea for it melting, and then
Loan was the one who did the first pass on it. And then
at some point I went and did a pass
on the surface and came up with the
idea. 'Cause the comet wasn't that fun
to navigate just moving around on it,
'cause there's not much there, and it's like
well, what if-- What if the ice, you can just
like, slide on the ice? Is that too goofy?
Like is that tonally dissonant with what you
learn in the comet? WESLEY: The hardest planet, we often
referred to as the final boss for the art team,
was Brittle Hollow. Because it's the biggest planet,
because it has both an outside and an
inside surface, it's one of the biggest planets
just in terms of diameter, and then it's one of the most
complex in terms of level design and pathing, and
all these different things that need to go there, like
two giant Nomai cities. It was the hardest
for every discipline. The game design,
tech, art. Like for everyone it was
the final boss. Brittle Hollow was originally,
like, had a molten core. There was
no black hole. And the pieces, I believe
the pieces they were going to get
just sent away from the planet. And at
some point it's just like, this doesn't actually
make any sense. Like why are they going,
why are they drifting away from gravity? Like, OK,
can we make them fall in?
How would we, like-- Where are they
going to go? Are they just going to like--
OK, there's black hole and it spits them
out over here. I remember prototyping a version
of that and then changing my mind, being like nah,
this is too much. Just like too crazy
and weird, and like it's not as colorful because
the black hole's all dark. Let's just go back to
the molten core. And we'll add geysers that,
like, from the core, shoot water, and the
geysers shoot these pieces of the crust
off into space. And then at some point
was just like, nope. Nope, the black hole this was cool.
Let's go back to that. And then weirdly the geysers
ended up on Timber Hearth, And the idea of pieces getting
thrown into space ended up on
Giant's Deep. [WIND HOWLING] WESLEY: It was like, hard to tune the
pieces falling at the right time 'cause it's a simulation.
They have hit points, and they get hit by meteors,
and they fall. And it's not scripted in
the sense of, like, it happens in a
specific pattern. It took a long time for
design to, like, lock it. And then art had to
go in and, you know, just fill it out.
And there's just so so many rocks
on that planet. Just thousands and
thousands of rocks. And we put all those
there by hand. It's not, like, procedural,
so we make sure that you can see in the right places, and that
it feels good to walk on and all of that.
And then with that planet, you also have to make
sure that like, in between the crevices, you know,
you can't fall through in some but you can fall through in
others where you're supposed to. Pretty much any challenge
that you can have we did have there, and
there's all the normal normal Outer Wilds problems of
you have curved surfaces with different curvature
based on where you are on the planet,
which is not something that a lot of games have
to deal with. LOAN: It was supposed to be
a bit overwhelming at first. Right? Because you arrive in a setting,
and it adds to the whole feeling of
wonder when you arrive and it's like, [GASP].
Oh, my god. There's so much. It just
treats this like one piece of one main
piece of content. The first thing you
would find when entering the district. Like
another one of the districts you arrive, and there's
a big waterfall That sort of like frames
three white-- We call them Nomai whiteboards,
but there's only one of them is, has
text on it. And you're like, oh, OK.
I probably need to find the other two somewhere, right?
So the first thing players see or the first thing players
experience should give them a question.
And then, like, the natural impulse
is like, if the player has a question
in their mind, hopefully by then,
they'd go, OK, let me answer
that question. [WHOOSH] [SILENCE] [MUSIC PLAYING] - [SIGH]. Mobius had made
an entire solar system for the player
to explore, but this solar system didn't have
any explicit objectives, mission markers, or
fast travel. So how did they let
the player know where to go, and
more importantly, how did they let players know
when they had accidentally found something important? - We didn't want players
to go and look behind every tree
and every rock and every nook
and cranny. So what he made sure of
was that detail would always only be
where content was. So like if you look at
Timber Hearth, you have like, fast
expansive grass on the surface and
such. Just grass. Nothing there. And then
each of the actual craters with content
have incredible visual density of
detail. -It was like a challenge
of trying to stick as close to the gray box
as possible. Because every time it's like,
ah, I'll put like a nice little tree over here,
or like a pot, or like some little thing.
And then the designers would look at it and be like, oh,
like, actually, there's like a very specific
viewpoint you need to be able to see this clue
that's across this chasm, so if you put
too much stuff there, you'll block the view.
And it's like, ugh, god. LOAN: Lighting as well
sometimes, just like if you keep everything
relatively dark or like, same tones
and then put bright blue or something
light there. And it's like immediately
you notice that. Audio as well, like there's the
traveling music when you're traveling around, and then there's
music when you're in places with content. So like if you enter
a Nomai ruin, suddenly piano starts coming in,
and you hear the music coming in. So it's all these little
self clues. If you don't have
that instinct, there's something here, there's
not something here. Because of the way we
structured the game, it is very easy to
hide things. We wanted certain
paths to be the path you use.
Just from a narrative perspective,
it was a nicer way to find
that place. But then we wanted
quick shortcuts to get back
to these places. And we were all
worried about how would we hide these,
and had all these, and it's
like, no. Because we trained the
players to not look behind any
nook and cranny. We learned a lot of
things in relationship to a player, the
way people foresee things, and the
way, you know, players naturally go about it.
Some of it was frustrating, like the
natural impulse to to see text as lore was
definitely something we had to
fight against. The natural impulse that
most players have to meet a goal. Hopefully
more and more games do away with that, and so
I'm hoping that slowly it'll be
easier, actually to do the sort of things we
did in Outer Wilds as people get more,
like, willing to set their own goals
and get a bit more proactive in trying to
read things as the way to progress. DANNY: Outer Wilds is
such a complex design challenge that
it's easy to forget the technical complexity
of the project. While Alex and Loan
led the design team, the game's engineering was led
by another duo. Technical artist Logan Ver Hoef
had graduated CS games at
US Santa Cruz, and was a year behind Alex
and Loan at USC. While software engineer Jeffrey Yu
had graduated USC as an aerospace engineer with a
minor in computer science. - So technical art
is writing shaders that run
on a GPU as well as parti-- Setting up
particle systems and setting up lighting and
that sort of thing. So I did a bunch
of math that makes the singularities
look like they do. I did a bunch of math
that made our lighting work the
way it does. A lot of tools work, half
the gameplay code. - Other than designers, it's just
the two of us. - Yeah. - Doing all the
code, so. - Yeah. This is Timber Hearth.
This is what it actually looks like
in our scene. Here's, like, the moon
over here. DANNY: So how do you like,
work on this, considering it's like a sphere?
Like how do you get in and that
sort of stuff? LOGAN: I mean, you just
learn how to sort work like that.
So you just-- We're actually looking straight
up right now. But you just-- Because flying around still
works the same. DANNY: Right. LOGAN: You just
learn to sort of work in this weird way.
Sometimes people, like, work like this or
something, or that. And anytime we're
working on the underside of a planet,
I have to do this sort of a flip,
kickflip here. And now right and
left is reversed. DANNY: Oh no. LOGAN: But I remember
that I'm in this mode. So I'm just automatically
like, OK. Each planet is a
rigidbody, like a physically simulated
like, object moving through space,
affected by forces. And so is everything else, like,
everything in the game is. You know if we were
a different game, we could get away with
saying, like, you know what? We'll just, like, you know, fake it
when you're on this planet, and it'll look right. But
because Outer Wilds is a game about simulation
and about truth in systems, that was
top of my list for things I didn't want to do
was fake anything. That is one of those things
where we try to just like, tighten it.
We reduce the number of colliders on the planet. We
reduce the complexity of them while still
having it be a surface you can
walk around on. So like if this
coffee cup were a physics object,
you know, the the rendering mesh
has all this detail and curvature and
all this in it. Physics could probably
just be like a eight sided cylinder, and
you know, that's enough. You can fly around, hit the wall,
bounce off, roll around. - Maybe even make it just,
you know, a four sided one. - Yeah. If you don't need it
to roll, four sided. If the player's just
walking into it. So going in and
finding places to cut back here and trim
a little bit there is good. A lot of people wonder
like, hey, are they faking all the caves
inside planets? DANNY: So the zero-g cave,
it's literally zero-g because it's in the middle
of the planet. LOGAN: Yes, yeah.
Because you're no longer being attracted to, like,
the sum of all the mass. Now you're there, and all the
mass is around you. And so it's all pulling
on you equally in each direction. So
this is actually physically correct. If
you leave a planet, we do a bunch of stuff
to optimize it while you're not there. We switch
to, like, a super low res version of the planet,
you know, handmade by like Lara or
someone else. - Colliders-- LOGAN: Yeah, turn off a
bunch of the collision so we aren't updating all this
collision math while there's nothing there to collide with.
We suspend a bunch of scripts and a bunch
of objects. The issue is that
if you leave your ship on a planet, then
you go somewhere else. It still needs to
collide with stuff. JEFFREY: We need colliders there.
So leave colliders. LOGAN: And furthermore for
this philosophy of the truth in the system,
if there's a geyser going off and should
be hitting that ship, it needs to keep
hitting that ship. If the sand level's rising,
and it's like, trapped underneath something, it needs
to respond to that. That mean we have to keep all
the collision and scripts running when the ship is
left on a planet. When you leave a probe
on a planet, you need to be able to
take snapshots of it from across the solar
system, which means all the rendering, all the
visuals need to be turned on. - If you have it right
next to a geyser, the geyser has to go off. [WIND BLOWING] ALEX: The worst thing you
can possibly do in that game is have the scout, yourself, and
the ship all on different planets. And if you really want
to go hard I'd put the Nomai shuttle
on a fourth. But, like, don't do
that. Don't. It's 'cause you--
We have to have-- We have to render at least
some of what's going on. Like if you leave your ship
on Brittle Hollow and a piece breaks, your ship
needs to go through the black hole and get
spit out the white hole. And if you leave it on Ash Twin,
we need your ship to to get sucked up by the
sand funnel, even if you're halfway across,
you got teleported to to Giant's Deep or something.
And that was really important to us. We tried
really, really hard. And the tech team kind of
worked really hard to make sure we didn't
lose the sense that this is a world that doesn't
revolve around you. 'Cause that was one of
the main design pillars. It's like, not a player--
It's not supposed to feel like a player
centric game. The world doesn't stop simulating just
because you're elsewhere, right. - At one point we thought about
making this an achievement but then thought
better of it. - Oh, no, we didn't think
better of it. Annapurna got, uh,
miffed at us because one of our
suggested achievements was called "Critical
Performance Hit." And it was leave your
ship on one planet, and your probe on another,
and go to a third. And they were like, you
cannot have an achievement be the player crashing
their Playstation or Xbox. Like, no
absolute. Are you insane? And
we're like, yes. JEFFREY: We're purposely making
people get frame drops. LOGAN: But good point though.
Yeah, it's like, don't encourage people to do this.
And we're like, OK. You're right, but
not as fun. DANNY: Like everything in this
world is moving, right? I guess the sun is
maybe the only object that's not technically moving? - Technically it is too.
Because the way we-- with video games you
got to keep the camera near the center of the
world's coordinate space. DANNY: OK. ALEX: Or you start running into
floating point error and everything starts
kind of jittering. And so we have to keep
the player near the mathematical origin of the world.
And the way we do that in this game--
A lot of games sort of, like you reach a threshold,
and they like reload the next
zone, right? But because ours, everything's
moving relative to each other, what I
ended up doing back when it was a student
project is just every time we apply a
force to the player, we just apply an opposite
force to every physics object in
the world. DANNY: Wow. ALEX: That's currently simulating.
And it doesn't actually really do anything to performance because
we're already doing that. We're already applying
forces to every object, because everything's moving.
It's just another number on top of numbers.
So when you jump in Outer Wilds, technically
every planet's jumping out from under you, and you're
more or less not moving. So it works, and we
haven't changed it. DANNY: There's some cosmic
horror about that or something, Some like science-- - Yeah. DANNY: It makes me recoil a little
bit now hearing that. - I love that, because
we're always like, ah yeah, the player's not
the center of the world, but technically you are.
Like literally the center of the world at
all times. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: Like the best sci-fi,
Outer Wilds marries the technical with
the emotional. And a large part of
this heavy lifting is done by the narrative
and musical score. For the story, Alex turned
to his lifelong collaborator, his
sister Kelsey. As children they made
silly plays together, and stop motion mockups of
the Star Wars films starring beanie babies.
Kelsey had been writing her entire life and
had often used a tangential form of note
taking, which inspired the Nomai whiteboards. I was
eager to talk to her about the wonderful
personalization of the Nomai using these interplanetary
telephone logs. But unfortunately, she doesn't
live in the same state as the studio,
so we did the next best thing
and aimed our scout across the country
at North Carolina. [BOOM] [CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS] -Some of them are, like,
literally just meeting notes like, here's what we decided, and
someone else was like, oh, yeah, by the way,
so and so wants to do this other thing. So
having kind of a rationale behind why these things
are getting written down and explained, to me,
just kind of added a sense of logic to
what was going on. Yeah, a little less
difficult to explain things because
they're talking to each other. They need, you know, everyone
to understand what's going on. For how much Outer Wilds
is a very narrative driven game,
I actually really love very character driven writing.
And a lot of my writing is like that.
It's very intensely about characters and
about their evolutions, and I think that's kind of
what the difference. I felt like that was what
was going to be the difference between having an interesting
story with interesting characters versus the
more tropey ancient alien civilization
that was here before us and is smarter than us.
What essentially the player is doing
is they're tracing the same journey
that the Nomai took. And then eventually, spoiler
alert, toward the end of the game, you're, you know,
finishing that journey. And to really feel like
you were connecting with the Nomai.
I don't think people really connect with, like,
a civilization as a whole. So I think it necessarily
had to be very character driven, which
was terrifying because, yeah, we don't
see these characters. And also I had very small chunk
of text to work with. And most of it had to
be dedicated toward quickly advancing a
complex story and then also getting
across your clues. And then, of course,
the clues work as you know, here's what's
happened. Here's kind of the next piece. Here's where
you should go to continue chronologically
in the story. Then there's a little
piece that directs usually backward of like, here's
where I'd go to check out where this piece came from,
if you want to trace the opposite direction
chronologically. And then it usually connects
into other things depending on who the
characters are in that particular, because I use--
Certain characters are attached to
certain plotlines so that when that
character is present, typically that's kind of
the signifier that plotline is coming into play
and intersecting with this other one. ALEX: How do we communicate
this idea to players in a way that is, like,
interesting narratively? Makes sense why the
Nomai would even be talking about this. It is also like,
you know, telling you. You read it, and you're like,
OK, I get what this text is actually communicating.
And we just did just so many revisions of all of this,
and so many playtests. LOAN: This is how you
used to read text in the game. DANNY: Oh, wow. LOAN: Except it's
not working. DANNY: Is it busted? - Probably. - They were busted at
one point, yeah. - You have to pull out your-- - Oh, no, you have pull out
your translator. - Oh, my gosh.
I coded this. DANNY: Oh, wow. - It does that
faster now. - That's, yeah. - From a design perspective,
a certain amount of minimalism was
actually advantageous. Like knowledge is
the only reward. So you learning, you know,
things is the only thing you get. You know,
it's really hard to do because players see
text as lore that's not necessarily
actionable. We really had to set
the example of never having lore
in the text which also applies
to other things. To have lore on like,
pieces of level design or a part of the
environment. So through design, we
actually had to be pretty minimalist, because
we had to make sure everything was actionable
and everything was pointing to the thing it
helped you to do. ALEX: So originally, the ship
log we knew we were going to need. 'Cause we didn't want people to
have to take paper notes. We originally only had
the solar system view, where it's sort of the
planets in a row. We added the rumor mode
with the lines, the detective board, like a year,
a year before launch. Because we had some
playtest people just weren't understanding the
structure of the game, like how to go about
investigating. Let's just show them how
we think about it in-- Like let's just put our design
docs into the game pretty much is
what we did. We needed way to
get people curious about things, and pointing
your telescope at a distant planet
and hearing a sound just seemed like a no-- like,
of course people are going to want to check that out. You can
go to NASA's website and there are these
recordings of, like, sounds from Saturn, where
they sort of interpret data they've recorded.
And there's just, we knew we wanted to
have these travelers around the solar system
on each planet, sort of as the trail guide
or the travel guides for each planet. And it's
like, OK, they each play an instrument, and
wouldn't it be cool to pick up the music in
sort of whimsical fashion? - Back in the very beginning
stages, we were talking about having the different
travelers on different planets. And then I kind of
crafted the concept with Alex of having them,
like, actually all playing the same tune, not
having them play different songs. Like I was like, we should
have them play together so it's kind of grasped
this approach where no matter where you're at,
the world can be like a smaller place
through music, and like, you can
be connected that way. Hopefully captivated that
message by having 'em all apart, but really
they're all in sync like, in a certain way
through this, like tune that's really, like
a premonition to the end of the game.
Really it was based on like, thinking about sitting
around a campfire. Something that's simple
and easy to play but memorable, so like it
kind of gets caught in your head. So, I mean really
the main theme is only a couple bars long.
It's about the joy of life, and like,
the journey, and all that existential
stuff that gets involved towards the end
of the game. And it's sort of this theme
that starts off like when you hear it first,
it sounds kind of happy but over time it
like, becomes this melancholy and like
reflective piece. So that's kind of what
I was aiming for. This bittersweet, nostalgic
campfire tune. Really I wanted it to be
like when music is playing, something important
is happening. It's not just kind of--
Like it's important for it to stand out when
it needs to, and when there doesn't need to be
music, there shouldn't be, especially like when
you get into the desolation of space, and
I think it helps make it a little bit
more fearful in areas where there's no
music, 'cause you really do feel like you're a
little bit more alone. 'Cause all you're hearing is
like your breathing and stuff. That way, people
notice the music, and it actually is meaningful
rather than just always just being around. [MUSIC PLAYING] The second thing I ever
wrote was the main title. So what I did was
I went back, and I recorded myself
playing banjo with my seven years ago self
at the very end just 'cause I thought it
would be cool to literally wrap the game up.
Like when you first play it, it's like
me playing at at the beginning when we started
and then at the very end. It's like multitrack
banjo, and one of 'em is me from seven
years ago. And one of them is me from
right before the game came out, so like May. Yeah.
That's why I was like, I have to do it,
I have to do it. DANNY: We talked to the team
at Mobius about design for over two days,
but as you know, time is precious, so we
can't fit it all in the doc. So if you're interested in
watching some bonus scenes, you can do so on our
Patreon for the price of a few bags of
marshmallows. Speaking of paywalls,
Outer Wilds had what you might consider
to be an untraditional launch. For PC, it would be an
Epic Game Store exclusive, while on consoles, it would
launch as part of Xbox Gamepass. We
asked the development about the reasons
for both of these partnerships, and they
said those decisions were made by Masi
and their publisher Annapurna. The game launched in
May of 2019 and has been slowly
building positive word of mouth as the
studio continues to tinker on it. The Ash
Twin project has gone through several redesigns,
as the final puzzle has stumped
a number of players. While the game was
brought to Playstation 4 in October of 2019. - Yes, I would like to
publicly apologize for the Ash Twin
project puzzle. I mean, sort of--
We are, we are still working on that
actually. Yeah, we're-- We keep-- There was one
where you just didn't have enough long form playtests. We did
do long form playtests, and we knew that
was an issue. It's not as easy as going
in and like, just telling people the answer, because we don't
want to invalidate all of the other clues. So we're
trying some new stuff our new patch, actually,
that's coming out pretty soon. We'll see. We're watching people
play, streamers online you know, still
taking playtest notes. LOAN: We've been
really happy, you know, with
Game Pass. It really has brought
so many people that may not have played the game,
and now then they have. They're just enthusiastic
evangelists for us. So that has been a really,
really great experience. Because it's a game
that's so easy to spoil, you try to say as
little as possible, which makes it
hard to sell. So like a game that is
in itself a mystery will definitely benefit from
the subscription service because it's like,
people are like-- They won't buy a
mystery, but they may try out a mystery
and then be like, oh, my god. You
have to try this. WESLEY: I remember one of
my favorite moments when we first first showed the game off
at PAX East, someone was playing on Brittle Hollow, and
they like parked their ship. And they went down and
explored for a while. Then they were looking over,
and they saw a piece falling. And then their ship just sort of,
like, tumbled off the top of the fragment
and like, bounced off as it was falling
into the black hole. And they were like,
"my ship!" And they were like, chasing
after it as it's like falling into this black
hole, and I was like, all right, we made
a cool game. I spent a lot of time
on it, like several people on the team
spent basically a year of our lives working
on that ship. And we had all these, like,
grand ideas of, like how we want it to break apart,
and we want all the little gadgets to be
actually useful. And like in the middle of
development when you're just trying to ship the game,
it's like oh, there's no way. It's just going to be
a box that moves around. I guess we'll make it work.
And then when we actually managed to get, like,
the damage in there. We managed to get the
destructibility in there. And just the more little
details we could add, it just really feels right.
And seeing people fall in love with the ship,
and have adventures where the gravity crystal breaks
and they're floating around, hurtling towards
the sun, and they're trying to repair things.
It's just so exciting for me every time I
see something like that. - I mean, when you're
a musician and a composer, you
want to be listened to, and you want to be heard,
and like, have your voice like, speak a story through
your musical voice. And finally that
has happened on a large scale
where people are noticing my work.
So it's like finally stuff is paying off
after all this time. The community behind
Outer Wilds is really passionate about
the music, too, as well as the game,
so that's been like incredible to have
people reach out and, like, tell me how much the
music means to them or that they've been
listening to it nonstop. And, I don't know, it's really--
Like, it feels really good. [MUSIC PLAYING] [WHOOSH] - All right, it's time we address
the elephant in the room. There's probably a bunch of
you who clicked on this expecting us to be
talking about something else.
A different game set in space that
came out in 2019 and was developed by a studio
based in Los Angeles. - I think we were just
in a class, and a few of us were brainstorming.
We were just tossing ideas, words that felt
good. I think will-- I remember at one point, we
were like, Cosmic Wilderness. Then we were like,
all right, well, wilds is shorter than that,
and then, you know Outer Wilds somehow, you know,
you just kind of slot the words together.
Eventually it's like, Outer Wilds.
Yeah, all right. And it stuck. DANNY: Do you remember
when you first saw that there was another game
coming out that had a somewhat similar name? - I do. 'Cause it was
almost exactly a year ago at The Game Awards. DANNY: Oh, right. - Yeah. Actually, no.
We had seen it. They'd filed a patent
or like a copyright. We had seen The Outer Worlds,
and I remember looking at that being like, wow, I really hope they like,
hear about our game and don't do that. But The Game Awards,
we saw that trailer, and it's just like, all right.
All right, cool. The Outer Worlds and
Outer Wilds together in 2019. They obviously are
a bigger studio than we are and have a
bigger kind of reach, and I think ultimately
it's probably good for us. 'Cause people talk about
it like, wait Wait, these aren't the same game?
What is happening? DANNY: Have you ever met any
of the folks from Obsidian? They're pretty close.
They're in Irvine. - Are they really? DANNY: Yeah. - No, man. You know, we
talked about that we should do some sort of
cross-promotional thing with them. Just like a-- Just anything.
Or like April Fools we just actually
switch our names. I think Logan mentioned
that the other day. We were just like,
it'd be so good though. DANNY: The Outer Bundle. - Yeah, it's been
a good-- It's been a strong year
for outer games. [MUSIC PLAYING] DANNY: We've explored the
origin of this game, the design of its planets,
how the team guided players, the
technical challenges, and the emotional
core of the game. But Outer Wilds is more than
the sum of its parts. It's the type of game that
leaves you with a feeling that can't be explained. It has
to be experienced. And for the team at
Mobius Digital, the years long cycle
from award winning thesis project to
full retail release has been an experience
all on its own. - I think the
nicest thing is even though working on
the project has been like, super crazy,
we haven't haven't had to
like, crunch. And we all work
reasonable hours. I think it's the fact
that it's just a nice chill atmosphere. - Yeah, we try to keep
the work environment good and safe
and make sure people don't overwork,
but to some extent we did not as good of work on
that side for the leads. For me, Alex, and Wesley,
we both had to deal with a lot
of stress, and so yeah, it was difficult.
But to finally see the results and
to hear from people, this dad who played
the game with their I think nine
or ten-year-old kid who told us that at
the end, the kid wanted to become
an astronaut. I was just melting
in my chair reading this, you know?
That's our soul. It's just like, oh,
my god, OK. This was all worth it
in the end, yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING] ALEX: When we released it and
we started to get feedback back in, just seeing the
people who understood what we were
trying to do. It's like, people like the
game for the reasons why we made it, and like,
they got the story we were trying
to tell. And I'm really proud that we told
a story that could only-- In a way that could only be
told through video games. 'Cause we really, we tried
really hard. We wanted to make something that
couldn't have been made any other way.
Yeah, that there's sort of this just connection with
everyone who plays the game, and, like, we added
something meaningful to the lives of the
people who played it is just really humbling,
but, like, an incredible feeling. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Thanks for watching
our video. Shout out to all these
paying patrons who paid for all
these marshmallows which I've been
gorging on for most of
this shoot. They're really delicious.
They'd be a lot nicer if we actually
had a fire here, but setting fires indoors
probably not a good idea. And California kind of frowns,
you know, frowns on people setting fires outdoors for
documentaries about video games. So we just did it
in post, I guess. Thank you so much
for supporting our work. If you'd like to become a
patron and get access to bonus scenes from
this documentary, and a bunch of other things,
then please go to patreon.com/noclip
and help us fund even more documentaries
in 2020. This whole video is of
just me chewing on marshmallows for patrons. They pay for
the good stuff. [LAUGHING] Oh my god. ALEX: We have on that's
like, where we like, lock really. It's like
there's an IGF build but with a lot of the
planets locked off. So they won't be able to
spoil themselves for the whole game. So if you go too close to certain
planets, it blows up the sun. DANNY: Oh, that's funny. ALEX: There's like a spoiler
warning around the planet. DANNY: Right. ALEX: And then there's like,
the original one that we'd like, took it down,
but you can find it. It's kind of fun. LOGAN: You should definitely
get some footage of-- - This is supposed to be
the tower that you-- DANNY: Right. ALEX: This is the tower of quantum knowledge.
You have to wait for it to fall through. except there's like, oh yeah.
That's the original one, right? That's not yours. LOGAN: Yeah, it has a weird
spinny distortion. DANNY: Oh, there
goes a piece. LOGAN: Oh god. DANNY: Whee! LOGAN: Oh, it caught on
one object, but it-- ALEX: Oh right, 'cause
the physics actually-- DANNY: Are you going to
hit this thing? LOGAN: Apparently. ALEX: Getting to the
southern observatory used to be a lot easier.
[LAUGHING] [TYPING NOISES]
Does it contain spoilers?
Really looking forward to seeing this, Noclip does some amazing stuff!
I didn't expect this documentary, but I'm so happy it exists! One of my favorite games this gen, and it's exactly the type of game where a documentary can be really insightful
What makes this my favorite game of the year is the final message of the game, gathering around with friends in the face of certain doom at the end of everything and welcoming a new universe with hope
It's the beautiful sort of message we only see in the best moments of Futurama.
The zero-g cave was zero-g because it's literally in the middle of the planet. Holy hell that's so genius. The physics/technical aspect of this game is seriously impressive.
If anyone hasn't played this game and enjoys adventure games/ puzzle games, play this. Dont look at any reviews or spoilers and trust me that it'll be worth your time
The timing of this documentary couldn't really be any better, with all the awards it has been snatching.
Unless it spoils so much that people don't feel like playing it, I guess.
It's interesting the bit they mention having to update due to difficulty and lack of play testing making the solution less than obvious. It is the one of the only bits of the game I remember when I had to look up exactly what the game wanted me to do.
My gosh I absolutely adored this game. I wish I could re-experience it. I spent 17 hours exploring this little title learning everything and figuring everything out.
I only had to look up the solution to two of the games puzzles. One I was a fucking du mbass about. I should be in the hospital given how much it bludgeoned me over the head with the answer to that particular puzzle.
The second one there really was only one single breadcrumb on how to resolve. And thats all it gave you. I spent a few loops trying to figure it out before I went FUCK IT and looked it up. I was more than annoyed by what the answer was.
Those were the only two low points of the game for me. One wasn't even the games fault. I thoroughly enjoyed every other second of it. So much so I really do genuinely wish I could go at thiis with a fresh mind again. It made me seek out similar experiences but only came up with Subnautica (which is fantastic in its own right).
Great vid, helps put a lot of the game into perspective. It's pretty neat how some of the most memorable stuff in the game came about from them having to change or update original ideas because of the problems they caused. I especially liked when he jokingly apologized for the Ash Twin puzzle as that was probably by least favourite part of the game.
Also that achievement that had to scrap would have been amazing.