(light instrumental music) (typing) - Hello there and welcome
to System Era Softworks, home of Astroneer a, stop me
if you've heard this before, Early Access Sandbox survival craft game you can play solo or with friends. But the game they made here and the story of it's development are far from typical. In fact, I struggle to think
of any development story we've covered that has the souring highs and devastating lows of this one. So, on the eve of the game's 1.0 launch we thought it an appropriate time to come down here and talk to the staff about how it all went down. How a group of dear
friends worked together to create their dream
game, and the strangers that helped them finish it. - My first job was when I was 20, so I've been doing it for 15 years now. It was for, do you know the poker player Daniel Luton Negreanu? - [Danny] No. - I worked on Daniel
Negreanu's Poker for PS2. (laughing) - [Danny] Nice. - It was a super easy
job, I did it from home. It was like open Photoshop,
move a hue slider, and you know, save dollars, it was great. And then got my first
my first in-house job at a studio that's
actually kind of similar to what we're doing here at System Era. A company called ThreeWave, they made CTF or Quake back in the day. And I went out to Vancouver and there was six of us and we grew up to 90 people. Before leaving Triple A to do
Astroneer I was at Ubisoft, I was assistant art director over there. - [Danny] What did you work on over there? - Last project I was on was Watch Dogs 2 - [Danny] Oh, cool. - And then I was an art lead
for Assassin's Creed Unity. I was an environment artist. That's where my whole career comes from. I also worked on Splinter Cell which was one of my favorite games
of all time, Blacklist. To work on my favorite
IP's was super cool. - So, I worked for
about six years on Halo, Halo four and five, from start to finish, both of those games. I joined the team that would become 343 before they were called 343. There was about, I think I was maybe the 35th or 40th person on the team and I watched the team grow from that size to 500 people, that was a
pretty crazy experience. The four original founders,
Paul, Adam, and Jacob. I knew Jacob and Paul
for quite a long time, we both worked together at 343. Paul started almost the
exact same time that I did, I think the same week. And Jacob was like a
young, brilliant intern at the time, and then
he came on full time. And Adam I didn't know until later, until the System Era
thing was kinda forming. So, I had met Paul a long time ago and he left Microsoft you know, years before I did and he ended up working at
Valve and then at Oculus. But we always kept in touch. We would go out for lunch or brunch and he would start
dropping all these hints like, so what do you... I would tell him about,
oh I had to work late whatever night, and he'd be like why are you putting in all these hours, are you just working to
make Steve Ballmer rich? Don't you want to work for yourself? - So Paul and I, we met
actually from Polycount. He was an artist who I was like, you know holy shit he's amazing. There's a lot of really
good artists in the industry and I saw Paul as being
an actual trendsetter. He bounced around in software, Valve, 343, Oculus. He worked at a lot of great companies. But he was always on the West
Coast or Central America, I was up in Central Canada. We always just sort of spoke online, sent stuff back to each other. We were very harsh on each others work, which I think is where that
relationship came from. For me personally, as his
friend, I always always inspired by his work but I don't think that it went the other way around. I can just say I was never
as good an artist as Paul. But I was always looking
for, could I impress him? You know, if I do it and he likes it, then it's got to be good, everybody else is probably gonna like it. So, Astroneer started as
actually an art project. A story of this lonely
astronaut that lived in a single habitat that
was super uncomfortable and he was so far away from Earth that it was a one way mission. Whatever he was doing there was for the survivability of humans back on Earth and I really loved this idea. Every single day Paul and I would talk and share back and forth the projects that we were doing and it was very rare that my stuff resonated with Paul. So for the fact that
this low, low, low-poly space thing that I was just kind of pooping out on the weekend,
that it was just this thing, was resonating with him so strongly. I was like, oh crap, okay,
we'll have to do that. I always used to joke
that like, oh you know you should apply to Ubisoft or I'll try to apply to this company and it would be nice to work with you sometime. So, System Era and
Astro was an opportunity for us to do that. And then, we found a
programmer, a friend of Paul's to help us out, Jacob. - And then Jacob mysteriously quit his job (laughing) and I had this weird moment when I was saying goodbye to him in the elevator where he said something that, and I can't remember what it was but I was like, I wonder if him and Paul are doing something there. Just a few weeks later, I get an invite to lunch from the two of them
to come eat lunch with them and I go to lunch with
them and they tell me that they're working on this game, they just started working on this game and they need another
engineer to help them. Jacob was a rendering
engineer and they wanted somebody like me who was more of a strong generalist engineer. They wouldn't even really
tell me the exact details about the concept for the game until later. But I basically shook hands and said okay. (laughing) Paul was like the best
artist, most talented artist that I had ever met and I also trusted his judgment, he was not the kind of guy who would do things flippantly. And I was like, if Paul thinks something is worthwhile, it's worthwhile. - The four of us were like, okay we've got two coders, two artists, we could probably do something here. So we quickly started on
that, and very quickly Riley was emotionally attached to it 'cause he saw something in there and he was a friend of Jacob's. - I remember Jacob and
I would exchange emails about games, like really design stuff every now and then, and then he's like oh yeah I quit my dream job at Halo and it's like, what? Why would you do that? He's like, oh I think I
might work on some REM game. Like cool, that sounds awesome. If you want sounds I'm happy to help. It was one of those like, oh it's just a side project thing and then that turned into a full time thing. - And we slowly started to turn away from Astroneer being about greed motive, like I'm gonna drink
that person's milkshake, to let's talk about the
betterment of humanity. There's too much of this crap going on in the world right now, let's make it not doom and gloom sci-fi,
but bright and colorful and you're out seeing
these amazing planets and you want to explore them
'cause they're beautiful. There's some hazards
there but they're also kind of pretty at the same time. And we really wanted to make it about the joy of exploration
and the joy of discovery versus the gold rush and I'm
gonna do as much as I can to soak up all this stuff and screw over my fellow Astroneers,
there was lots about that. - [Danny] Capitalism in space? - Yeah, yeah. It was just like, these things were really hitting strong with people. That's where the motivation came from. You know, I've had things
that have resonated well with people before and Paul certainly had but it was sort of like when my wife was getting interested
in it and people that were outside games was
kinda seeing what we were posting and talking about it. - [Danny] The friends thought
they had something interesting but Astroneer would change a
lot over the coming months. Both tonally and in terms of the codebase, shifting from unity to unreal. Adam and Paul were used to creating things with hundreds, thousands or
even millions of polygons, but were loving the
speed of creating assets in this low-poly style. Turnover on making stuff was
taking hours instead of days. The game was coming together quickly, they had a strong vision. But if they ever wanted to realize it, they need more money. - There was sorta three options. Get a publisher, do kickstarter, or do Early Access and self-fund. The publishing side was difficult. We were kind of being
presented with two options. One was either maintain
more level of control that we wanted to have over the title, but for cost of a very low budget while still being under the
pressure of publisher milestones and things like that. Or, accept a much higher
budget but really give up most of the effective
ownership of the title and there were deals that, you know, there were publishers that are around that will say things like yeah, you're gonna keep all of your IP but we're gonna take what they'll call exploitation rights which effectively gives them the IP without giving them the IP. It was important to us to be in control, that was kind of one of the reasons we wanted to be independent. So Paul and I, we had saved
up money from our jobs in triple A and so we had
something to fall back on and even fund a project a bit with. We kind of did a calculation
and said okay well, if we can put something
out, put out something in Early Access around April 2016 and then we'll fund the rest
of the project that way. We thought we could afford
that just out of pocket. Jacob was already full
time, me and Paul quit around between September and October of 2015 and then Adam was at Ubisoft at the time and he couldn't afford to
quit and we had no funding so he stayed, and he stayed working part time with us until the beginning of the next year where we did secure some funding from some friends and family, sort of like a little angel investment group through at some of Adam's acquaintances. So a bunch of people back in Canada pooled in some money and gave us a little bit of money to kinda get us going and it was just enough
for us to just scrape by, covering our living expenses
till the end of the year. That enabled Adam to quit
his job back in Toronto, he was still working
at Ubisoft in Toronto. We had raised some amount of money, a couple hundred thousand dollars this way and then of course,
Paul and I had injected probably close to a
hundred thousand dollars between the two of us as well. The plan was, we're gonna
release something in September and it wasn't gonna be any multiplayer and then in the beginning
of springtime I was like, I think we might be able
to get in multiplayer, but we will need more time and so we did a deal with Microsoft
to bring the game to the Xbox, which brought
in some quite generous developer funds as well. And that would put the game on the Xbox and also allowed us the time
to squeeze in multiplayer which was important for
the experience we wanted that being able to just play
with these very toy like objects in the world with your friends was really, really fun. So, we wanted it, that was important. - [Danny] The four friends
had no idea if Twitter hype would translate into sales,
but with a mixture of self-funding and the Microsoft deal, at least they now had
enough runway to release the Early Access version they wanted. Astroneer was now set to launch on Xbox as part of their Early Access program, but over on Sony's console,
a different space game was grabbing all of the headlines. The team were worried
about launching too close to the orbit of No Man's Sky, and so they pushed the Early Access launch over into December. But when No Man's Sky launched to a highly critical reception, there were no bottles of
champagne being popped in Seattle. Aside from the fear induced by seeing their fellow indie studio being battered by the game playing public,
they were also worried that the well had been
poisoned on space games. They worked doubly hard. Going through weeks of intense crunch to make sure that Astroneer
wouldn't suffer a similar fate. - So I was living in Toronto. We launched on December 16th. I flew in December 14th 'cause like 24 hours before launch, kinda thing. And I can remember, I was
like okay three days from now if we sold 30 thousand copies
of Astro, I'll be happy. When it's work where working
out of where we work, the five of us were crammed
in this little tiny office, and the mood was excitement. We were just ready to
get this out of here. And it's really kind of liberating to work on a thing where
you kinda don't care about the problems 'cause it's
just so fucking fun, right? It's just this thing of
like, people will get it. If we talk about it honestly, they'll understand what we're doing. We'll tell you not to buy it if you don't want to buy a broken thing. We'll be as honest about
this thing as we can, but we're just kind of really excited to get this thing out there because A it's been resonating
for so long with people on social media and our friends
and family that we've shown. (laughing) We launched I think at light
midnight on that night. We were up very late,
we were the only ones in the WeWork office. It was dark and everybody had their own little things they had to do. Brendan was uploading it to Steam, Paul was getting the social media ready, Zimbere and Riley were doing bug fix and Jake were doing bug fixes and all sorts of different stuff. It was awesome, it was great. - [Adam Behind Camera] Do it. - Three, two, one. (clicks) - Oh, enter the passcode. It's like an extra. (laughing) Release my app. - [Adam Behind Camera] Did it
make you type out the words? - Yeah. - [Adam Behind Camera] That's awesome. - Okay, blog post is going live now. Blog post is out. - [Adam Behind Camera]
Here's Paul working on our Twitter image and Facebook image. It's all very exciting. - Hi world. - [Adam Behind Camera] Hi world. Right, cheers guys. Job well done. - Cheers.
- Cheers. (mugs clanking) - [Adam Behind Camera] I love
you guys, that was awesome. Watch the beers, they're still liquid. - Oh, shit yeah that got on my- (laughing) - It just tastes like lighter fluid. - [Adam] Jacob your game is out now. Are you scared shitless? - [Jacob] Yeah. - [Danny Voiceover] That
night the team shuffled home from their rented office space, exhausted. The game launched at midnight, meaning that it would
still be a few hours before European gamers were waking up. But tomorrow wouldn't be any easier a day. In fact, it was the start of a marathon. In the morning, they'd have to start fixing bugs for whoever decided to buy the game while they slept. Some of the team found it hard to sleep. None of them could have
expected what they'd wake up to. - It was insane. I've never seen anything
like it before since (laughs) Just to give you some
context, I was telling myself that if we could sell 80,000
copies in the whole first year that would have been good. That would have been, you know, we could at least live on that and that we could keep
doing this every night. (laughing) - I slept on Paul's couch that night. I remember Paul waking me
up by kicking the couch and he's like dude get up, we sold 20,000 copies of the game. Like overnight, at like 7:30. And I was like, fucking what?
(laughing) I was like Steven Seagal axe kicking through his apartment that day. I was so fucking happy. I was like no way! - You know, we launched
it, went to bed last night, came in in the morning and it was like 40,000 and 50,000 copies had already sold. I was actually staying
in Jacob's apartment just crashing on his couch and we'd just sent out all the press emails that night and posted the trailer, posted the game. I think Jacob and I were doing something till like 4am and we're
seeing the numbers roll in. I was like wow, that's pretty good. And we crash at his place and both woke up to be like oh damn, that's really good. - That taught me right away
that I don't know much about (laughing) like my expectations
of what we're gonna do is always kinda blown away. But I was just on cloud
nine at that point. I was like holy shit, people actually like this thing that we're
doing and they're playing it. And the reviews were
wonderful, the early stuff that was coming in was wonderful. You're never really that
much in a positive mood when you're just at
work fixing bugs all day but we were fucking ecstatic. We're like always fixing stuff, we started getting updates going in. Bug fixes were like new content updates at the same time, like
oh yeah, we're not gonna fix it 'cause we know when
we ship this next thing it's just gonna fix all that stuff. It was a good time for the
game, it was really fun. - [Danny] And while that's happening, the sales are still going up? - Yeah, it's getting crazier and crazier. - By New Year's Day we had
sold over 400,000 copies. - [Danny] It's like 2
and a half weeks later? - Yeah, yeah. So it was like absolutely mind boggling. And the streamers started picking it up. You know, we took that seriously and we had a whole
Excel spreadsheet of who we were gonna work with and send it to. We had been targeting kind of more small and mid-sized guys 'cause
it's hard to get the attention of the bigger streamers
but all of a sudden Markiplier and Jacksepticeye
and their whole groups started picking it up just organically. That really drove a lot
of interest, I think. That was like a blessing and a curse 'cause on one hand we were
like, you feel vindicated and you're like, oh this is amazing. On the other hand it's
like, it's not ready. You know, the game it was full of bugs. It was kind of a disaster. The first few days we're
like mad patching it. People with certain CPU's couldn't run it. There was lots of crashes. There was all these problems, and now all these people are seeing it. It was like we're not ready for this yet, you weren't supposed to
all see it like this. (laughing) - [Danny] What was the
personal tole, I guess on going from working in a WeWork, those people distributed
in different cities, you're struggling with
moving into houses and stuff, to then in the space of a couple of weeks essentially being millionaires, I imagine if you're selling 400,000
copies of something. - Yeah, well it didn't
make us millionaires. It could've, we could
have just stayed small and taken most of the money out. But we actually kept the
vast majority of the money in the company and use it to expand. The team is now 20 people
and we have an office, a proper office, and we
paid a whole lot of taxes. We did recoup all of
our personal investments and it did pay well. But, the game hasn't
made us millionaires yet. I think that that would have been a poor, if we did that, then we
wouldn't actually have had the resources to have
properly finished the game. It wasn't just about putting up this game and making a bunch of money. It was like, let's put up the game so that we can build a
company that we love, that's the goal. - So yeah, there was a lot
going on for us at that time. Like, holy shit we're still small. Now we've had the funds to kind of grow we're looking at this stuff. We launched in December, doing
great throughout the year. I think by March we
were like 600, 700,000. And then Paul died. (flat music) - It was March 27th, 2016. We had just gotten back from GDC. And Paul took a... It was before Adam had moved to Seattle, and so Paul went to, and after we came back from GDC, Paul took a trip to Toronto, so that he and Adam can just kinda like work together in one room and really get through a lot of work
and brainstorm together. And they were great friends. And then he had just
gotten back from that trip and I think it was the
weekend, so he hadn't been in the office for
a week and then he'd just came back from that trip. And then that Monday, every Monday morning we would have a little sync up in the office where would just kind of go other things. He wasn't there, and
he was always diligent about letting us know if he
wasn't gonna be in that day and we just didn't hear anything from him. - System Era is a pretty relaxed company. We have a policy still to this day, if you wake up on a day and you don't wanna come in, stay home. That's the policy. It's an unwritten
policy, we just make sure that folks know, you
know, let everybody know. Sometimes in those moments you don't even wanna talk to anybody, you
wanna just kinda stay home. And I understand that that's the case. Paul had a day where he
stayed home the whole day and wasn't answering
phones, and stuff like that. A couple have us have
had moments like that. Yeah, that day just felt
like one of those days where he just wasn't answering
his phone 'cause he... - Yeah, as the hours wore on we started to get more and more worried and we just couldn't get ahold of him and eventually Riley and I had to call the
police and go to his apartment and find him and it was very hard. (light music) - [Danny Voiceover] Paul
Pepera was found by his friends on March 27th, 2016. He was just 31 years of age. At the time of his passing, Paul's family requested privacy and we
will extend that wish here. But they also gave his
friends their blessing to talk about their experiences. Some of them spoke to us on camera. Others asked that we
not ask them about it. Some came to talk to us privately in between interviews to tell
us stories about their friend. How much of a talent he was and how much they still miss him. The weight of that day pulls
on the studio like gravity. The further they get from it, the easier it becomes to shake free. But back then it was impossible to get any distance from the event. You see, at the time of Paul's passing the three remaining founders
were in the thick of it. Earlier in the year,
Jacob had left the team to start a new career outside of games. And months into Early Access, they had just made two key hires to
help with the mounting work. - I think we had just
hired Samantha and Veronica and they hadn't even started yet. They were starting like in the next week. The hardest part for me
was writing that email. I remember going to Paul's
apartment and dealing with the police and just
kind of feeling so numb. But, it was only when I had to write the email to tell everyone
else that I totally broke down. Me and Adam had a heart to heart
talk where I was like, look I get it if you don't want to do this anymore, now that he's gone. But if you want to do this
still, I wanna do this still and I need you out here. 'Cause he was like my
partner and even though I had three partners or four partners, I always felt that Paul and I, we were always the ones
doing everything together, trying to build the business together. We were the ones who you
know, would rent a van and go buy furniture
and schlep things around and we were always in
the trenches together. I always felt like as
long as I had Paul working next to me, everything was gonna be fine. So without him it was just hard to know how we'd go on the same way. And so I got on the phone
with Adam and I was like, I need you to move to Seattle. 'Cause I need somebody here to work with otherwise it's not gonna work. - Yeah, there's a thing that I feel a lot. This is gonna span from that day to now. This still happens. Every single time we have a success, which happens a lot, which
I'm very fortunate of. A success to me is like, we
made somebody really happy. I love reading those kind of comments, that's a success to me. Every time we have this there's like this shitty little black cloud that shows up in my head. And I know that we have
ten out of ten moments but I don't ever know if I ever feel it myself that way. Certainly a nine out of ten. And I'm loving my life,
it's just this thing that is very hard to not think about because it was this thing that I finally had his admiration for and from. And then for him not to sort of see that all the way through
is selfishly, it hurt. It's kinda the reason why I watch people on Twitch, I watch people play
a game on Twitch every night and it's one of the reasons, seeing their faces just makes me happy. - [Danny] Does it make
grieving process harder that you're kind of locked into it? Like if you went and worked
on a different project- - 100% Yeah, I also didn't go to his memorial because I was in the visa process and I didn't wanna travel. So there hasn't been a lot
of closure through there and you know, I'm reminded of him everyday because of the stuff we do. (sighing) Yeah, it's a hard thing, man. I love what we're doing, I love Brendan. I'm very lucky. It's incredibly serendipitous
our relationship came to be. Sometimes I even feel guilty saying that. Like, I had to lose a
friend to make a friend to then follow my passion. And that person we lost
was a big part of it. It's just, I don't know,
it's really fucked up. (wind blowing) - [Danny Voiceover] Adam
entered the visa process in the hope of joining Riley and fellow Canadian
Brendan in Seattle soon. But even then the team wasn't
sure if they'd ever recover, making video games is hard. They realized making games in
Early Access was even harder. But on top of that, they
were working on a game covered in the finger
prints of their friend. Every asset Paul had worked
on would remind them of him. In meetings where once
sat a confident creative there was just an empty chair. While nothing could
replace their old friend, thankfully one of the
new hires was an old one. Somebody who had worked with
them on live games in the past, at 343 on Halo and later in
the world of mobile games. - So I worked with Brendan,
Jacob, and Paul at 343 and I actually played games with Adam on a game dub TF2 server that I was part of. So I knew him by his handle. - [Danny] What was his handle? - It was 'Man Child' - [Danny] Okay. (laughing) - Not sure he really wants that out there. So yeah, I started at the
very beginning of April which was a tough time all around. It's like you want to
hit the ground running, you wanna do these things,
you wanna just be like, okay I am here, I'm gonna
do all of these things, I'm gonna figure everything out. But it's hard to do when you're
also coping and grieving. For me personally, Paul
was a close friend. So it was also a, how do I not allow myself to be overcome with the feeling of like, well what if he was here, what if I had started just
a couple weeks earlier, what if I had gone to talk
to him about this game, is it even possible for
me to try to represent and still champion his point of view? - We were quite slow to
get a lot of updates out and it was because we
were sort of scrambling to put everything else together, to try to recruit people,
to have an office, to kind of set up a business properly. We were barely legally
operating as a business. - The first thing was like, how do we get an update out the door? There had been no content
updates since Early Access launch and there was supposed to
be one and it didn't ship and so in week 2 I had
to pull everyone together and be like, I'm just gonna stand here next to this whiteboard and you're just gonna tell me everything you
thought was gonna be here and where is it all, and who
is the owner for this, right? 'Cause you're also
transitioning with Jacob leaving the team and he had left some work behind. And that's like a normal
development thing, right? People move off, you
have to pick up the work so I had to do a little bit of this, okay what is happening, right what's been happening in the last couple of months, what do have, where is
it, who is responsible, how can we pull together
and update out of this as soon as possible
because we are losing face a little bit with the community. For four months, not
having anything that they felt was a meaningful content update. So that was the first few weeks. I was like, how do we get
this thing out the door? So we got the augment
update out, I believe April so it was just like a few weeks into it. It was real fast. - We sort of sourced from our
personal networks initially, so one of the first hires that we did, couple of engineers and a producer. The producer, Veronica, was critical because we were terrible at organizing. She was a breath of fresh air. She just wrangle our disorganized thoughts and try to herd us cats. We brought in Andrew, who
is our multiplayer engineer and Biddlecom who's was
our first design hire. We brought in Samantha, of course loved her sense of humor and wanted to try to inject a bit more whimsy into the game. - I had seen it, actually I saw it for the first time on Giant Bomb. A UPF on Giant Bomb was
where I first saw Brad playing Astroneer and thought, hey this is of a cool, you know to deform the train and I know that a survival crafting game like Astroneer sort of
fits into a specific genre. Those kinds of games, I don't gravitate toward naturally myself, so
what I wanted to do is before, because I knew if I got the job I would be playing it a lot and
getting very close to it, is identifying that I had
this short period of time where I could learn about the
game from the perspectives of the people who do love
it, that do love this genre. I watched a bunch of streams,
I read a bunch of forum posts, I tried to do my research
so that I could formulate an informed opinion on coming into, what could I do to help the game? The survival crafting in my
did plan was don't starve, and don't starve is pretty
different in a lot of ways. There's a sort of oppressive
nature to don't starve, where you are always
literally about to die. And what struck me about Astroneer, I, sort of, subverting
that trope of the genre was this sense of safety, and safe spaces. So, in Astroneer you have an oxygen tank that allows you to go
out and explore the world until a certain point when
you run out of oxygen, and the danger increases. You can mitigate that danger with tethers, so laying the tether
item out around the world you can expand your ability
to explore the world. I saw this very interesting
loop of home base with a degree of exploration potential and the more you play
and the more you find that exploration potential continues to grow larger and larger. In this 3D space, not
just across the surface of the planet but also into
the depths of the planet, and then across to other planets. Survival aspects in other games sort of come out in terms of resource management and tech progression but also combat. I liked how Astroneer softened the aspect of violence and combat based conflict. It's softer somehow,
even in the confrontation in the way you mitigate
it with a drain tool that's sort of removing,
unearthing the roots to kill the plant rather than like, I'ma take my space gun
and fill this base plant full of space bullets, right? So, that struck me. (eerie music) (shooting) We identified pretty early on that there are a couple of different
archetypes for players. We talked a lot internally about the pioneer player, who
wants to focus on exploring and the engineer player who
wants to focus on building. Because the game requires
both exploring and building that sort of evolved
into, well the pioneer must do a little engineering
to be able to explore and visa versa for the
engineering, they must explore a little bit to be able to
build the things they want to. We spent some time trying to design two different games, right? Like, let's have
Astroneer, the pioneer game and Astroneer, the engineer game. After some time encountering difficulties with that approach, we
did come to the conclusion that the real Astroneer
experience is sort of wavering back and forth. So I'm gonna have moments where I really want to build a thing, how do I do that? Maybe I have the resources already, maybe I have to go out and get them. Or there's a cool thing I
really wanna go out there, I can't, I don't have
enough oxygen to get there. How do I get there? But there's also
sculpting, which is sort of siloed off, which is with
bare minimum investment you can spend as much time as you want just sort of building creative
structures and painting. But then there's a fourth piece, which is the social era, right? Person who wants to
play with their friends, either in a supporting role or in a goofy, fun like let's just fool around role. I'm really interested and
have been really interested in how can we best support social eras? How can we facilitate these
fun, cool space interactions? When we had happy accidents, one example of a happy accident is when we added the new emote system and there was an unintended consequence of if you spam the button then
you'll restart the animation so where you have an animation
that might be like, hi. Then if you spam the button
then you get this sort of thing, like ha ha ha ha ha ha. And that is exactly what I'm talking about for the social era
player archetype, right? Like, that created so many memes. It was just huge within
the player community and just like silly, goofy, dumb fun. A social era thing that
we didn't think was right, for example, is bugs in the rover system, where rovers would fly off into space, or the wheels would disconnect and you'd get all this jitter. Those are the kinds of things
that we knew weren't right, even though they create similar
sort of like fun moments, they're not controllable, they're erratic, they're unpredictable. They can be frustrating,
so they come at the expense of other parts of the
game that people enjoy. And so that's not the right thing. (game play) - Sound design isn't really
like, see a dog hear a dog. You don't wanna just mimic the visual. It's always asking the
question of like, what, why is that happening? And what does it mean? And for games it's
what's the design of it? What does the player need
to interpret from that? And so it's a lot of emotional design. I think a good example is all
the connectors in the game, like the slots of taking one small item and snapping it to another. It's such a simple
concept, but for a sound, visually it's metal on
metal, or some characteristic that's probably I don't wanna support. 'Cause metal on metal doesn't
sound always that great. So instead it's like this
very softer sounding thing, that supports the idea that
this pleasurable experience of socketing one thing into another. So it makes it more fun and light. One of the enemies in the game has this acidy boil sound,
so I record pop rocks both in a bowl and in
my mouth with the mic just kinda pointed in. (laughing) (popping) - What I really like about, even the early builds of Astroneer, is
as you're running around the sort of feel and and the
rendering and the shading really creates a sense that you're playing with action figures. Like, you're playing with toys. I was having flashbacks to
my Superman action figure with kung fu grip that
you squeeze the legs and it does a little punch thing, right? So I was thinking about these Astroneers are running around
doing these cool things. I could totally just
see having an Astroneer, like the Astroneer on
screen is, in my mind, the Astroneer in my hand. And when I disconnect
the backpack and I look at it like this, that's what I'm seeing. And so having this sort
of, I can reach out and touch and feel everything and so this diegetic aspect is incredibly physical and I think really important
to the overall aesthetic and the player experience,
like the richness of the player experience of the game. (somber music) - [Danny Voiceover] Over the
course of Early Access the team expanded to help ensure
that patches kept coming. Large updates came for
research, excavation, basebuilding, crafting, and the rover. Astroneer's original splash had come from the original four posting
gifs of the game to Twitter, as part of game development
Screenshot Saturday. So, bolstered by the response they got while sharing early clips and perhaps fearing the backlash
Hello Games had gotten, the team wanted to be as
transparent as possible. Joe Tirado had a background
in games coverage and documentary work, and spent years with the team producing
dozens of dev blogs that are all available on
System Era's Youtube channel. - The game connected
with mainstream press, but they didn't do any
sort of official marketing, they didn't have a team for that. They had people who obviously
were thinking about it, Riley did a great job
just doing what he could through viral sort of means. But, the game exploded in success once
influencers jumped in. You spend your entire
time developing something thinking like, oh we have to talk to press and I think press is
obviously super important. But, then all of a sudden, two YouTubers play your game and you're like, oh my gosh there's so many people,
like what's going on? - [Danny] It's funny, sometimes
we talk to indie studios and they have had that
experience of somebody like Markiplier or Jack
playing their game, but they've not seen that. So, what do you think was
different about Astroneer that it did result, or at least impact, you know, contributed to the sales spike. - Yeah, so I wanna give
them credit obviously. Super thankful that they played the game. But I also think Astroneer and System Era had a really good title on their hands and did a really good job to visually, I think that's one of the biggest things, it's a visually arresting game. You come across it and it's so beautiful. And so I think a lot
of people were looking for that in the space genre. Every other space game I've played is sort of dark and
gritty and super sci-fi and here's this lighthearted experience where they're leaning into the whimsical side of just like, it's
fun but it's also space. - [Danny] Is there
anything to be said for, I remember working the
game's press and everyone was sort of arrested by
what happened with Minecraft and then it seemed like that generation, like what we're seeing now with Fortnite, you can maybe draw a line. Is Astroneer is there as well, do you know what the
demographic is, yours, a lot of people who bought it? - Well, I mean our main
demographic is definitely still your sort of core gamer,
young adult slash adult. But we have definitely
seen that percentage shrink or it's not as big as maybe what you might expect from a typical game. And it's definitely a younger audience. There are a ton of
women who play the game. But you're right, the Minecraft
thing is totally interesting because we ourselves look at it as like, you play Minecraft, it's blocks. And then maybe you move onto
Astroneer and it's voxels and it's a little more malleable and you can get a little
more specific with things. Part of the success in the beginning was a lot of Minecraft
influencers looking for something. Jumping into the game, and then there's all these Minecraft
people who are coming in. But also, as back to that earlier point of then you have five different audiences who all want completely different things and trying to manage that. - [Danny Voiceover]
Astroneer's connections to Minecraft don't end there. One of the more challenging hires after Paul's tragic passing
was that of a new art director. For months the spot lay
vacant, nobody wanting to attempt to fill an unfillable role. It wasn't until a fan
of the game dropped by with an Astroneer statue he had made, that the stars finally aligned. - We first learned about Spencer when he posted a 3D print
of one of our models on, I think we saw it on Reddit. We didn't give him the model, so he had to remake it himself. And the printing was amazing, and you know, he put
all these instructions online about how he did it. And while we're talking
about it we're like, oh you're actually in Seattle. We'd love to commission
you to make one for us. We'll pay for all the materials, we'll pay for your time. Just come by and drop off. Paul had reached out to him to do that. Paul passes away. Spencer knew of Paul's work, was affected by his death and just didn't wanna do the suit anymore,
didn't wanna do the project. We lost communication with
him, it was like six months had gone by, or something
like that before, I think Riley had the idea of like, oh we should just reach
out to Spencer Curran and see what he's doing with that statue. He's like you know, I'd rather just give you the one that I made. I think that would be special
for you all to have it. And it's actually one of our first logs, is him coming by the
office to drop this off. And I was so impressed
by his understanding of what we were trying to do. He brought in the statue,
he also brought in these sort of silver gift bags that had patches and stickers that he illustrated, had printed, had stitched. And they were like the backpack sticker with the resource nuggets
that you could then stick on so you could make your own
little backpack, it was amazing. And then just like in conversation, it comes out that he was a lead artist at Microsoft for Minecraft. (laughing) And I was like, oh shit, okay. - [Danny] It's like there's
a thematic connection. - Yeah, I was like let's go for lunch. In my head I'm like this
is now a job interview and he's been fucking killing it. - [Danny Voiceover] Spencer joined a team caught down the middle. One half still reeling from the
death of their close friend, and another who had never
had the satisfaction of that original Early Access launch, working hard to prove
themselves with each update. Development on Astroneer hasn't been easy. The young team originally
operated as a flat structure and that caused it's own problems. They've since shifted to a more tiered managerial
approach to better tackle the mountain of features they need to get into the game for 1.0 But the pressure from the audience and the drive to make
good on Paul's legacy, are elements that the team
constantly battles with. Keeping a healthy work-life balance is paramount to the future of System Era. But it hasn't come easy. - So, I said earlier,
producer ships a team, right? That is huge part of that. My personal philosophy
has always been that good teams, happy teams, make good games. I think that the most important thing is to have a functional, happy, empowered team. A team that feels like,
maybe not like family, but feels like, like a unit. Like a community, like a guild. - You know, the standing
desk and the nice chair and the loose auras are just sort of going back to being healthy. You know, the loss of Paul early on just really sort of put that into my head and I think in Brendan's head, to make it a big deal of System Era. Then we've ended up finding people that it was important to them, right? And I think that's one of the things that attracts folks about System Era, is that we want you to be able to be you. And if that means you don't
want to come into work 'cause your just, for whatever reason, that's fine, just let us know. We brought in Lego to try
to do it as a team together and just kinda take little mental breaks, the crosswords are up on the wall so folks can walk around and think on things that aren't game related. I take out a half an hour walk everyday that's not on my lunch hour. Usually around 4 o'clock
I'll hit the river, go for a walk. I'm not gonna say we don't crunch, 'cause we don't have a crunch culture. It's not like we're demanding folks are here Monday to Saturday. But we all have stuff to do and sometimes that's gonna take longer days to do it. I will go home at 5:30, 6 o'clock and then work 'cause the kids and Gail will go to sleep and I'll
go back on around nine, I can work from home. We have a lot of people
that just work from home on some days which is totally fine. - It's been really hard. It's hard because we've had
to work really hard for 1.0 and we've had to break
some of those promises that we made to ourselves and that's been really disappointing. And I could go on and on about, yes these are all these
things that weren't our fault that caused all of this, right? But at the end of the day, it's like we need to learn from what
it was like to ship 1.0 and what it was like to go
though the Early Access process. And the best thing we can
do is take those lessons and say okay well, this
is what's gonna set the basis for our culture going forward. And that's that time now, and
I'm really excited for that is to be like, okay we're through it now. Here are all those
lessons that we learned. Here are all those things that we want to do better next time and we're gonna do that now. (light music) - [Danny Voiceover] We visited
System Era a week before the game's final 1.0
launch and on our last day we arrived to see them all celebrating with glasses of champagne. Astroneer had just
passed cert for Xbox One meaning that the game
had passed the checks required by Microsoft to be
released on their platform. The nervous tension in the studio felt like it was finally
starting to relax, as the finish line slowly came into view. For some, it would be a game release they'd been pining for for years. For others, perhaps a moment of finality for the grief that they'd yet to shed for their fallen friend and collaborator. One Astroneer who was there for take-off, but never made it to the destination. - Paul's still in Astroneer and he will always be there, but there's also a lot of the other 20 people, and that's kind of like the best possible outcome, is that everybody feels like
they have a piece in it. I'm really proud of the team. I'm so happy that 1.0 is
coming out, I'm so happy. It's such a culmination of a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of passion. But yeah, I'm just so proud and so happy because a lot of people have been waiting for a long time to have this moment and I'm just so glad that it's here. It's the start of I think even, even better things 'cause now we've done it. We've gone through it together, right? It's no longer a, oh but
in early access we did this and now we have to,
it's like no, that's it. No more of those excuses. We've gotten through it. 1.0 is ours, what are we doing next? - I mean, this is not the end of Astroneer it's kind of just the beginning. I think certainly for
the next year our focus is still 100% on Astroneer. We have some future plans
but I think even then we really believe in Astroneer and we really want to support this and we see it as something bigger than one game going forward. Yeah, there's gonna be more in store for Astroneer in the future, for sure. (light music) - [Danny] What are some of the things you are most proud of
when you look at the game? Some of the elements that
sort of stick out to you? - I don't know how good
of an answer this is but I'm personally
proud we're shipping it. And it's not that I didn't
think Astroneer would ever ship, I guess there was a part of
me that just was never sure if we really would, right? 'Cause it's been fucking hard. So, I'm just very proud that we're actually putting this out. And it's awesome. - [Danny] Will it give you some of the closure you never got? - Yeah, I mean I hope so. I'm feeling it more and more
these days, as time goes on. But the fact that we were
able to go from six to four, to grow, the idea of the game at the same time we were growing as a team
and learning how to grieve. The fact that we're shipping this thing and it's really fucking good is like, I'm very proud of that. It's the fact that we
went through all that shit and we still get to do
this and it's working and it's resonating with people and there's folks that are excited. (sighing) I don't know Danny, I think it's just the fact that we're shipping, man. That is probably the
thing I'm the proudest of. - [Danny] Will you be excited to keep working on it once it's out as well? - Absolutely, man. (laughing) It's like there's so much
that I've said about this game that I wanted to do that
there's no way we're done, there's no fucking way that we're done. Like it's not like we
ship and then we just kind of walk off into the sunset. - [Danny] I thought that's
what Early Access is all about. - Hell no. (laughing) And there's this weird thing where like, we can't really say it 'cause I think it doesn't hit the ear in
the way that we want it to. But, this is another beat to us, right? We have a plan, we know
the game we want to make. 1.0 is an extremely huge
beat, it's very loud. But you know, Astroneer is an experience that we want to keep growing. It's not just one and done and we're onto the next thing. It's this whole canon that I want to keep exploring and these emotions that I think can come out of it. Yeah, our first product that officially launches in six days, I think is such a good foot forward for us on that. And that's honestly what I'm proud of. (light music)
Large feels.
Excellent! Can highly recommend.
I was genuinly one week down because of Paul....
I showed his art many friends and didnt want to think about what the team must feel. And now when I see Adam, how he still deals with it makes me way frickin emotional! Fuck.
Thx for all the strenght, I love the team and the game you released!
This is such a moving story. I am so glad the SES team pulled through, overcame their grief, and brought us all this incredible game.
Please like the video, leave a comment and share it on social media.
Really enjoyed this video. Astroneer has become one of my favorite games. Well done!
I really like space, and I really love exploring in videogames.
You know when you see a game and it instantly captivates you? Astroneer did that to me, but being one of those people burned by the NMS launch fiasco (the game it's actually good now) I told myself to wait and see where it was really going...up until now.
I never really suspected that Astroneer was such a labour of passion, love, and commitment. After watching the doc I have the utmost respect for System Era, from a personal and professional standpoint.
From someone who's not a developer or an artist, but a mere sys admin in a completely different field: thank you for showing me that following your dream actually pays off no matter the hardships!
Keep it up!
Yet another outstanding documentary by noclip. This must be an outstanding journey for the development team. Huge respect for realizing that project.
I'm not gonna cry ...
I'm not gonna cry ...
*Adam breaks down*
Okay I'm crying ...
Nice documentary, found the warning message at the front a bit odd to have. Glad for the team, went to HS & Uni with one of them.