Weaving 13 Prototypes into 1 Game: Lessons from Edith Finch

[Music] all right everybody ready welcome please silence your cellphone's and yeah we're

ready to get started so there's gonna be talk on how we created the prototype for you to Finch and then how those evolved

into the broader game itself and this is the the team one snapshot we started the game with three people on the team and then grew to about 15 and then tape it

off towards the end so sort of a medium five team not not too small but but certainly not not triple-a the game itself for those who don't know or it's

been a while is a collection of short stories and each of the short stories has a totally different game mechanic different from the rest of the stories

in the game but then also hopefully different from anything else players have ever experienced the game is an attempt to try to keep players in

this kind of beginner's mind I've never quite understanding what it is that the game is about so they're always gonna feel like they're discovering new things as they move forward so we did a lot of

prototype for each of these stories and each of the prototypes also had the constraint that there are no tutorials in the game because the game is about this sense of discovery so we wanted to create things that people had never seen

before but also things that were discoverable that people could learn how to progress by playing the game and

instead of focusing on traditional goals like challenge this game is focused on evoke a feeling and in that case it's the feeling of the sublime which I'll

talk about in a minute here's a quick trailer

[Music]

all right so that's the game and in this talk I'll be beginning with the kind of high level approach to what how we

approach the overall design for emotions and then talk about how we figure out which emotions we're gonna be focusing on in in the particular game we're

making and then get into the nuts and bolts of actually making those prototypes that try to evoke those feelings all of these kind of tie into the problem of how do you make something

when you yourself are kind of a little unsure about it which is part of the appeal as this developer that we're making things that we ourselves are kind

of actively exploring and the games that we make tend to be themselves about a sensible exploration because that's kind of what the game development process for us is like the development process of

Edith Finch it's kind of a worst case scenario of going in blind but hopefully a lot of these things will seem somewhat familiar for games you might be working on where there are at least you know a

few aspects that are not very well thought out but hopefully you know a little bit more about your game than we did when we started making it so

starting off just to give you kind of a philosophical perspective my sense of the way that the games work and stories and an emotion and the difficulty there

is that it really boils down to attention and what you can expect players to be focused on and it's difficult in games because there are a

lot of things there going on compared to a play where people are generally like pretty much sitting or going to the bathroom one of those two things for the

duration of the performance but in games the problem isn't just your game it's every other game that players have experienced coming into it in their

lifetime has come train them to approach the experience of the game often as a life-or-death situation usually you know if you stand in one spot for too long you

we'll be destroyed in a lot of games and genres or you will lose or whatever it is so players aren't used to taking their time I'm not used to stopping to

take a breath they actually have to be encouraged to do those things so we try to create a space that evoke you know that feeling and kind of encourages them

to approach it differently than they would a more traditional game so this is kind of our high-level plan of attack

which is you know that we start off by you know not giving them hopefully too many distracting toys I mean we try to balance it there are times in the game where you become like a giant tentacle

monster eating sailors but those are not the same moments where we're trying to you know get you to pay a lot of attention to a specific area you know

some alternate these very small scenes with broader sillier moments and then yeah this in a nutshell what we are

trying to do is to create interesting spaces and tools to explore those spaces and those tools are the gameplay prototypes that we'll be talking about a

little bit later and instead of relying on an explicit story and you know setting up character and conflict and plot in word dialogue we try to do as

much as we can just with the environment itself ideally it's something that you know is like a silent film where you don't need any audio or text in the

beginning just the experience of being in that space already gets you to ask questions as a player and wonder like what might be happening and get you into

the mood of it and it's a lot easier and more reliable because players don't have to pay attention to context it's something that you know they can kind of

absorb through osmosis and instead of starting again with with like a written or didactic story we start with a very

broad goal of voguing a certain kind of feeling and what we found is that when we start with something that is a little more open-ended like that even

though there's a lot more uncertainty it's something that actually has a good chance of making it to the finish line because games tend to go through a lot of changes as you realize you know how

many of your initially sound saving ideas aren't gonna work for a number of reasons but when you hold on to a little bit of an uncertainty and you bring it

with you you know that that gives you enough room to actually preserve the original intent even though what ends up at the end you know not what you would

have expected but it is you know if it's something like a feeling there's a good chance that that's gonna carry through in the case of Edith Finch the game

began as a way for me to explore a particular moment that I had in my own childhood when I was scuba diving as a teenager and saw the bottom of the ocean

sloping away into like a seemingly infinite darkness and that moment where something was simultaneously very beautiful but also unsettling which in a

word is the sublime in this moment where you you feel you know the transcendent beauty of the universe but also you yourself you know acknowledged to be very small and a fragile part of that

and so this game was trying to explore that initially it began you know by literally remaking that teenaged scuba diving experience more or less and then

I just looked it was way too gamey and didn't actually feel like what with in my head and so it went off and I'm obviously very very different tangent

and then once we have a better understanding of that particular feeling which the next thing I'll talk about then we move on to making prototypes because those prototypes are the most

difficult part of the whole process and have the most kind of emergent complexity and changes that arise out of the process of making them story comes

in like we begin with a best effort and at the very start of like okay we think these are the characters and this is you know roughly what's gonna happen it's gonna be story of a family for example in this case we we knew that it's going

to be senator Edythe but we found a lot it was a lot easier for us to rewrite everything once

we had the experiences which is like a classic chicken inning problem but we would have people play the game you know as it existed in a more or less complete

prototype and then ask them about how it felt to play the game and then write more to that experience so instead of trying to you know make an experience that tracked with the story we just like

adjusted the story to track better with what the prototype was that we had made okay next step is finding that feeling in this case you know we started with

the sense of sublime but it you know had to get a little bit more detailed and then the challenges of you know once you have that idea how do you communicate

that to the rest of the team so for game development purposes I think it's helpful to boil down things into a

couple of very concrete ideas ideally in the case if he's aged like we had three words sublime intimate and murky and the hope was that these were feelings that

anybody on the team could look to for inspiration for how to do whatever it was that they were engaged in that day so you know the lighting artists you know might be working on like the fog or

you know an anime or may be working on a jump animation whatever it is that they could look at and say like oh is there a way that I can make this a little bit more intimate or more murky and even before anything has actually been

checked into perforce people have this collective sense of you know what this might feel like and there's going to be divergences but that's part of the appeal also when you have something that

is powerful and specific but also a little bit open-ended it provides a space for everybody else to contribute their own perspective on these things

you know and add to the richness of the game without hopefully pulling too much in you know opposite directions and then once you've kind of settled in on the

feeling I think it's really helpful to try to find as many really good examples of that in other mediums kind of as a way for you to almost like play the game in your

head years before you ship it in our case there was a genre of literature called weird fiction that like Neil Gaiman and HP Lovecraft and a bunch of

other folks have have written really good stories about the sublime and a lot of weird fiction deals with the challenges of being in a universe that

is stranger than you can possibly imagine and so those were really useful tools for us to you know kind of imagine what it would feel like to play the game

by reading it also soundtracks are great because people have already done the work of saying you know what does it feel like for this you know like in the case of e to finish things like Donnie

Darko or under the skin in a movies that were totally that in that ballpark what might that sound like and so for a lot of the project I just had a couple of

those soundtracks like on repeat and it was a way of kind of getting into this alternate headspace and I'm dreaming in that place also just printing out a whole bunch of references was really

helpful and sticking them up all over the office kind of engaging the visual part of your brain which I'll talk about a little bit later and then similarly updating your

windows their macintosh desktop background is a nice thing just to kind of like put it right in the middle of your face so like here's the the game

that we're working on next that's a

little preview okay and okay here's our first mood board this was maybe like

three or four months into development of the project when we still thought there would be magic and combat and I don't like Edith was gonna take words and put

them together and make spells this is a good nightmare totally different game it had a different name it never would have shipped but this is what it would have looked like and that's

it's kind of like a game we did cold water meant Aveda Finch and I think it's just like the power of having these

kind of specific but somewhat open-ended tonal goals so we didn't ship a story about a microscope you know but there is a lot of underwater elements and certainly the the forest in those

lighting conditions or things that are not too far away from from what we did ship and then next I'm going to show a green light trailer that we made about

like four months in that it's kind of moving version of this mood board none of these things actually shipped but you

know they're what we were imagining the game may be some of those books I think some of those books might have been in the game you can see it's the more haunted house II than the real game but

there is you know still a sense of this very large house that you'll be exploring and you know a little bit of underwater stuff still clinging to that original scuba diving inspiration here's

an invisible dog that we thought would be a good idea we went back and forth a lot on how puzzly the game would be and you know for various reasons yeah we the

game could have had more of those kind of delightful physical interactions but they're just really hard and they weren't where our heart was when it came down to it but this is really weird

we had an underwater sequence in the shipping game you know I got an underwater house that we completely forgot about for several years but it was there for months in we had this

underwater house and and I think it just speaks to you know the game being about this combination of civilized in natural spaces yeah this also did not actually

ship but it's a nice idea and yeah what you're looking for or what we're looking for is you know sense of where you're going but I don't think you really want

a map I mean the producers probably want a map it would be easier to work with but it's really hard to make maps for one and they quickly become inaccurate

and need to be maintained you know think it's easier and it's more fun to to just pick a direction and it also puts you into places where you

can't predict where you're going to be which i think is part of what may eat a Finch such a strange experience is that we could not have expected that that's what we would end up we only kind of

found our way there because we set off in a direction and just you know kept marching for us for a lot of years okay but try and balance this with the

practical needs of making a video game it's not all images like layers of abstraction and confusion and we'll figure it out later we're always trying

to find things that we can put a stake in the ground on and say you know even though we're operating in the sieve unknown and there's no rass of poor

decisions and you know shaky shaky ideas we can still pull out a few things that we can have certainty about or just like feel somewhat confident about and for us

looking at things like weird fiction this literary genre and other experiences that evoke the sublime you know I think it became obvious that for whatever reason they tend to involve

natural spaces people feel a sense of the sublime most often in places like the forest or the beach and so yeah we should probably be setting stories in

those spaces where we can so it gave us a way to focus of all the potential prototypes we might do you know maybe we can try some of those at the beach

similarly with weird fiction a lot of the stories are very short and a lot of them involve very explicit narrators people that are telling the story

writing it down often several layers deep where someone's telling a story to somebody else and that's a way of emphasizing that you're never getting

the full truth you're just getting a perspective on it and making the universe and that much more obviously unknowable to you so that was something that we took wholesale Freitas bench and

there was about like a year or so of us or me particularly like wrestling like what is this sublime mean like how do we make that concrete and eventually

giving up and saying I don't really know how to do that but I do know how to do overwhelmed and that's pretty close so I think overwhelmed became something

that's easier like if an animator is making like a walk cycle or whatever like you can visualize that a little better and it's not exactly what we set out to make it's not as aspirational as

sublime but it's something that's a lot easier for you know there's actually make a concrete version of it and that's

the next just talking about how once there's this idea of this you know feeling that you have how do you communicate that with everybody else and people like to ask for documents you

know like written descriptions of how this thing will work knowing that of course these are going to change and then people kind of read them they forget about them the documents you know

become stale there are some limited utility but it does help to write them you know partly just for your own benefit and then also later on in development a lot of people will come on

to the project like various contractors or like you might have you know someone who's only gonna be there for a couple of weeks doing I like shrubbery or whatever is it like that week you really need someone to do

and so having the corpus of documents actually even if it's not super helpful for communicating the original idea is good to just have around for people that come on late but I think what works

better is to try to communicate to everybody in the language that they're most comfortable with which unfortunately is different for every single person on the team because everybody is a snowflake but you know

broadly speaking like artists tend to prefer like a more visual way of describing something so like a collection of screenshots or reference

photos might make the idea of you know your Beach prototype a bit clearer where the artist really wants to know things like like how wet is it what time of day you know that you might not even

thinking about but your reference photos will have you know some concrete version of that like programmers tend to like feature lists but everybody has their

own kind of thing that they're most concerned about so in terms of communicating a lot of it just boils down to talking individually to everybody on the team where that's possible

and in our case that that even extended to TAF tracking where every single department by the end of the game ended up with their own kind of different task tracking tool because they had different

ideas about how much you know work they wanted like how described it should be and so rather than having one monolithic task tracking tool that nobody really liked because we were a very small team

it actually was easier for us to say like okay you guys can just work in Google Docs and you know we can use JIRA and we can use the bug tracking tool and whatever which seems insane but that's part of the like one of the nice things

about being a small team is that you can do kind of insane things and only insane for like six of you it's not like sixty or six hundred so you can mitigate that a little bit and then in terms of

communicating to everybody else nothing beats like a prototype or anything that is moving a lot of it feels like an optical illusion where you

can look at something and you know you swear like oh yeah that's really that's a whole but then you move a little bit and you look out now it's just a painting of a hole you know but it only works if you're the camera is like in one particular perspective and that's

kind of what like a moving prototype does is it gives you a different perspective on the problem and it lets you ask more painful questions than you

might otherwise if it was you know serious of reference photos or whatever so ideally you know any kind of moving object it's a great place for

discussions and ends up solving a lot of questions or raising questions that there wouldn't have been rates otherwise and it's not enough to just communicate

initially what the sort of emotional goal is something it also is incumbent on you to communicate that every time it changes which is like all

time for very good reasons but often kind of complicated reasons like oh well players were getting confused about this thing so even though we really liked it we kind of had to remove it or move it

over here and it's hard to tell everybody every time something changes so what we found was helpful were a couple of kind of best practices like

team traditions like every Friday we would have Show and Tell where we would walk around to each person's desk and the whole team would you know kind of look at whatever they're working on and

then people would give like a one to two minute spiel and show things off which is also really nice for people to brag about what they're working on because often if you know an artist is you know

making some really complicated prop they could spend a week or two on it and it just you know goes into the asset folder in the background and nobody really notices it even though it's very pretty it gives it gives everybody a chance to

kind of clap for them and also it's a very explicit demonstration of like oh that's funny you're making you know props for this like Egypt level or

whatever I had no idea we were gonna do at each level and it's just surfaces a lot of things that might otherwise you know go under the radar it's been my experience on both of the games we've

made which turned out pretty well overall but there are phases and development where a lot of people don't play the game even though they may like it or they may hate it or whatever

they're just long first getting good by where people get very busy on whatever you know their part of the game is and don't actually play the rest of the game

so it can be helpful to force them to do that and we used to have these dog booting sessions where the team would have eat its own dog food and for an hour - everybody would play the game

themselves like at the desks and then we would have a meeting usually afterwards and sometimes we would generate tasks often we would just chat about it and it sounds really stupid but just having

everybody play the game with a really good way of communicating what had changed about the game and you know what we were working on also similarly you know getting everybody to

gather to watch a play test can be a good way to communicate things out I mean ideally people would know that you know you would added this level or change this thing before they see somebody actually playing it but that's

a good kind of last stop for oh yeah now that thing exists because I see it now it's live and similarly showing like for the publisher they'll ask you to demo at

various conventions that's a good place to to get people in front of other players and especially later on in development you can get kind of jaded to the game cuz you've been seeing it so

long and getting a chance to see how happy new players are with the things that you yourself have gotten very tired of it can be can be inspirational also

even though there are a lot of times where in our development process we have no idea what's going on we do have phases where we can make

lists of like oh yeah we need like 300 things done like for the art team if I go here like 300 problems and it feels really good to make that list and then

see it go away and actually like chip away at it there's something that's very empowering about crossing things off and seeing things get completed which when you're working on something where you

have this kind of broad direction but not a very specific roadmap for how to get there you don't have a lot of those opportunities so we would take advantage of things like III for example or you

know anytime we had a big milestone build to turn that into this kind of smaller phase of certainty and you know rather than use these sort of already

really cumbersome overloaded task tracking tools that we all had that we've been you know weird with forever it was surprisingly powerful just to open up like a new document and say

alright here's you know just the 200 items that we're gonna make today and we're gonna see them all you know be done a week from now and you know just trying to balance the certainty and

uncertainty but okay moving on to prototyping so once you have this sense of okay this is going to be interesting space to explore that creates a problem

because there's so many ways initially for it and the prototypes are where the rubber meets the road and there are way for the ideas to actually

start from talking back to you and to work with them in a very tangible way and to discover things often through

repeated failure uh-huh and the truth of what you're looking for I think for us you know because we were venturing into these places that we really had no idea

like how like how a game about short stories for example could work by making a few of these examples and then watching a bunch of people play that we

can developed our own internal sense of how these things would fit together and over time there's a way in which the game itself starts to kind of talk back

to you or like another way of looking at it is that you've already made a lot of decisions intentionally or unintentionally and now you start to see the repercussions of those decisions and

you know a lot of times those can be actually positive moments like for us two of the things that we discovered you know that it wasn't that we planned these things but just in watching play tests that really changed the way the

game ultimately feels were when we fought play tests we found that a lot of

players would get very focused on whatever their objective was that's kind of a traditional player behavior that is a little bit frustrating when you might want them to you know open up and take

their time and take a breath but you know because it's so engrained in players to follow instructions we ended up making a number of stories that are

about that process of what happens when you get so focused on something that you ignore everything else that's going on in your life just because that's what we

saw a lot of players kind of were headed towards without us even you know pushing them we also had it's a very kind of garden-variety design problem of you

know most games are about trying to prevent your death how do you make a game where death is inevitable the player don't feel like you know that's a sign of failure so we tried to make those

moments feel a little more positive and in doing that we created these comes strange moments where players would you know kind of march happily towards their

death which was something that we hadn't experienced ourselves in any other games and felt like a very kind of canonical Pyncheon moment for us so that became

something that we found in a couple of stories and really emphasized so it started as just trying to solve a particular problem and then you know ended up being something that was more

interesting and that we put you know more love into than we expected okay jumping into some nuts and bolts prototyping tips from the trenches the

first suggestion I have is 3x5 index cards are a really good way when you're dealing with a lot of ideas to try to get other parts of your brain involved

so like a lot of the talk is really just about dealing with you know kind of this combination of complexity and confusion and and the unknown and these note cards

are one way that I personally have found really helpful just drawing really really crappy visual representations of whatever you know is here I think it's

like motifs in the game trying to figure out like what are the primary and what are secondary and what are bad and by making them visual it engages this other

part of your brain that is enormous like a huge part of our brain is dedicated to visual processing but if it's something that you know it's just in a text document or in your head there's a limit

to what that part of your brain can work on like 7 plus or minus 2 is about the things you can keep in your head at any given time but if you put it out into

the world in some way you can think about a few more things which is helpful when you know you have a game that's about in this case like 13 different family members here's another version of

that in a spreadsheet form where I looked at this document like proves every day for the last two years of the project it's just a really terse

summary of all the different stories and what the order is and some of the different you know values here like the gender of the story and trying to balance those things out and just trying

to kind of wrap my head around what this whole game was going to feel like and obviously these pictures you know don't really look like the stories but they're enough of a shorthand that you can kind

of imagine what a whole games worth might gonna feel like and run through it in your head just by making it more visual also just a note about the brain

I think it's really helpful to write down all of your ideas because if you don't then your brain tends to hold on to them I think your brain is like a second grader who's got their hand up

and really wants to like tell you the answer but if you don't call on that second grader then eventually they just kind of shut down and what I got a lot

of the time the solution for a problem would come when I was in shower or doing something else and not really thinking about it actively but the only way you get to that point I think is if you reward your brain by saying like yeah

I'm listening to you I'm writing these things down even these ideas don't seem like they're that great there's a power of just getting it out of your head also so even if it's not a great idea

like it makes space for something that might be coming up next that could be great also even though game development is very collaborative I think early on when you're making prototypes it can be

really useful to just do everything on your own because as soon as you involve anyone else it's just like a lot of complexity that you're borrowing that can be really helpful if it's something

very technical that or difficult or you know that you really don't know how to do but often you can get a lot of the way there just knowing a little bit about a couple of programs like Anita

Finch it's like a 3d modeling tool like a very basic knowledge of unity and some photoshop is enough to get a lot of questions answered positively or

negatively before you you go out to somebody else and then there's you know beyond that tons of things in get development that you could be learning that are really useful for from making prototypes

also when we make prototypes the very last phase is actually making the prototype itself a lot of time is spent

kind of in the like phases where you're dreaming about it in different ways so just like downloading a whole bunch of images and finding reference is is a

really great way of getting you know your brain kind of spinning on possibilities particularly the reference photos of real-world things like if you're doing a father-daughter camping

trip in the 1970s you know you might stumble across an image of like alright they had you know different kinds of cans for opening soda back then with little peel tabs and stuff that you just

think what do you normally think about but finding references can give you a lot of free ideas and help you to think of things in different ways

we also did a lot of work in unity even though the game itself was made in unreal it's I think kind of nice to work in a completely different space because

there's a lot less pressure in some ways like it you know that it's gonna look really shitty if you did all of the art and yet it actually like you know in this particular case of the prototype for the swingset story you know starts

to get to a point where you can ask some you know valid troubling questions about should this story have hands for example you know should the the rope you know be

bending at all should that rope instead be a chain a lot of questions that once you start to get things moving at all rear their ugly head that you know might

not have been been visible if you were just on a white board and then the last thing we do is is in engine prototypes because they're a little bit more heavyweight okay crinkly damp Springs

that's like one dimensional mathy sort of value for how you move something like may feels like a real spring that we

used everywhere and particularly on cameras places where you want really smooth motion there are things that I've worked really well well for prototyping because they're so simple so I'll just

talk really briefly about them but here you can see like on the top this is just like it's a box moving you can see at the very end it's just kind of clunk like that but a spring there's just this

tiny little piece of code and it feels much more expensive much more magical and the other great thing about Springs is that they're really easy to tune

because there's only two values like how springy they are and then whether or not they overshoot their target so even though they look really nice they are

also really easy to adjust for designers later on in the process and here's an example of taking like just like a raw input like if you have the analog stick

moving around sometimes you want that snappiness but often it feels better if there's a little bit of a delay

particularly with cameras so here's an example the PowerPoint is a little slow there but yeah so on the left it's just like what you get if you listen to the

stick and you say okay oh they moved left great move the camera left that fast and you see it a lot of unity' trailers for games with cameras that

look just like that like they're very jerky and these Springs are so simple there's just a couple lines of code and they start to feel much more like a finished product and doesn't have to be

this floaty this is you know coming closer to the edith finch floating camera that I personally like but the nice thing about Springs is that you know there's two values and you can tune those knobs and because we're making so

many different prototypes tools like these Springs were really useful because we could drop them into all kinds of different scenarios and then still have something that you know we could easily

adjust the feel of and then music is another thing that was surprisingly useful for their prototypes that we made

probably because composers are really good at a vocal feeling they are kind of professionally obligated to listen to people ask them for something you know

to be 20% more wins the goal and then have a cogent response to that they're much more professional in game developers in that way so our composure was really helpful when we had problems in certain stories we're

like it it's close but it's not quite there in a very surgical level of tuning at that point and it's also something

that is very practical to adjust later on like as the door begins to close and you get closer and closer to shipping there's a lot of things that you can no longer change and everyone agrees that

yeah the game would be a lot better if we could you know get rid of this thing or that or whatever but like we can't remember reasons or you know because it's in this sensitive area but music is one of the things that's almost free

usually and there's a little bit of streaming cost but in terms of technical complexity it's very low and yet it has a very significant emotional impact so

for us there were a few stories like swing set for Gus's Calvin's story that that made a really big impact on and came in late but I think it's especially

true for gregory story where we had like four different game play programmers try to work on it and it just never felt

right like it felt too clunky and we got very focused on the mechanical aspects of it and it's a difficult problem like you're doing kind of 3d platforming in a space where the camera is fixed

you're Gregory in the scene like you're a baby it's very hard to judge depth and so it's a lot of time adjusting that and think about like what you'll be doing and why does this not feel whimsical and

you know I think the best answer I mean there were a lot of legitimate gameplay fixes that came in that helped a lot but in terms of the emotional feel that

story just adding the waltz of the flowers got us a lot of the way there something that felt you know like people

have associations with ballet put us into the right mindset of being this kind of balletic frog jumping around a

tub okay play tests are a really nice phase because it's a way of moving out of this kind of forest of the unknown

into a place of a lot of practical intractable solutions and fixes so there are a lot of things that don't have clear answers in the design process and you can you know stay up

very late wondering like oh man there's so many different ways we could do that but yeah that's I'd there are a lot of issues that are quite amenable to just

brute forcing like pathing I think is a great example of that of if players you know tend to like you want them to go say right down the hallway but they keep going left then it's something that you

can just do a bunch of play tests and keep making little adjustments to that like oh maybe make this you know a little bit brighter or maybe add a little bit of motion in or you know however many revolutions it takes if you

just keep doing more play testing it's like turning the crank and things eventually get better and it's really kind of comforting that there are phases and aspects of development that are

amenable to that because again a lot of times we spend floundering in places that are very murky but play tests are a great place to just like I'm not worried about these problems like they may be

legitimate issues like pathing and you know people getting confused about something but there's something that you can just work hard enough on and it will eventually solve itself a few so the

specific takeaways when people who are playing get frustrated often they will have an idea about why they got frustrated and they'll have you know suggestions for what you should change about your game generally it's a bad

idea to listen to them because they're unaware of what has led them to that state often we would see players who would get very frustrated if they for example if they're playing Molly story

and they didn't catch and didn't catch any rules so they spent 20 minutes flying around trying to catch their as the owl try to catch the rabbits and then they would complain about the next

sequence of the game when you become a shark it's like oh the shark sequence is really boring it's like well it's only boring because you like exhausted yourself in this sequence like right

before it but people usually aren't aware enough about that so yes if useful to listen to that they are upset but not

usually helpful to listen to why they think they're upset in a first-person game it's also really helpful to look at where their camera is

mind read a bit there and get a sense of what they're concerned about or what they think is important in the scene repeating anything tends to be kind of death knell I don't think I think any

genre we're doing something a second time is gonna pay off but that's kind of the last step of desperate players and then sometimes people have a lot of

trouble with the game and it's because they're very dumb and it's kind of heartbreaking when you watch them play and like won one of our play tests

someone spent I think like 20 minutes on the downstairs of the house a sequence that usually takes maybe two or three minutes they went upstairs they missed the part they were supposed to go then

went downstairs upstairs again downstairs and I think like the fourth time they found the thing they were supposed to and I thought they were

really upset but they said getting her myself but they're actually really proud of themselves oh yeah no I found my way through it and I think you know there

are a lot of people out there that just have trouble with life and your game like the latest manifestation of that

but it's not your fault so you know it takes a little bit of you know detachment to say like okay what's my

bad and what's just like their fault but if they're having a lot of trouble and they're not upset about it that's not necessarily a bad thing that just might

be like how they go through life so that you know takes an expert's I to to suss out and then we would alternate our play

tests between doing functional tests where we have one person play through with more what we call focused tests where we would have like up to five or ten people play at any given time and

those are released for I think for testing different things like the one person test was really good for very specific mechanical issues of like what might be confusing to a player where the

larger tests were really good for more subjective like how does it kind of feel do these things make sense from a narrative point so doing a mix of those play tests

worked worked well and I think about five players is probably as much as you need after that diminishing returns something that was also really helpful for us with doing batches and play tests

at conferences like GDC where you've got thousands of game developers from all over the world who were here for one week and you can you know call them up ahead of time and a lot of people are

really happy because they're already in town you know to come by your hotel room so I think like last year or the year before we had maybe 10 or 15 play tests with tons of really great game

developers you know in a single week that would have been very difficult if we'd had to organize it in Los Angeles in the normal way ok and then just a

note on frustration in particular something that we focused on a lot with our play tests because I think more than anything else frustration have unravels all of the

good work that you might be doing elsewhere it's like the scene in the matrix when neo like wakes up in this amniotic fluid like it's just completely like rips you out of this world and it's

something that can be difficult to get players back into so our fixes for that a couple of them where it was possible things like dynamic difficulty the owl

was the case of that where some players had a lot of trouble catching the rabbits and so if players you know failed a couple of times then the radius

of acceptable you know triggering got larger and larger and that's something where we wanted to preserve we want to make it too easy for all of the players because I think some players really like

to have a little bit of challenge and there certainly isn't that much of an aegis pinch so if we the places where we had challenge existing we kind of wanted to hold on to that but there are some players that you know would spend 30 or

40 minutes potentially on those sections that just felt like it was a terrible experience let's try to help the people that are having trouble without hurting the people that you know are doing just fine so dynamic difficulty was way to do

that there are a few places where kind of like there were two ways or more that kind of made sense like example when players come to a ladder

that's below them they might press forward on the stick because they want to go like forward and down the ladder or it might make sense in their head to press it down on the stick because

they're going down a ladder either of those kind of work but what we ended up doing was supporting both of them so when you get close enough to the ladder whatever direction you press we assume

you want to go down the ladder so we just adjust the you know kind of controls to conform to what players expect and then everyone gets the experience of oh yeah I just sort of expected it would work like that and it

did rather than 50-percent kind of thinking it would work and then being you know surprised that it works the other way so if there's no reason it has to work one way it can be nice to just

let it work the way that players imagined that it should and then even though there are some people that struggle and I think it's fair to just say like it's fine you can you can

struggle there are times where people will struggle and then never get through it places like actually even in something as simple as the swing set story

most players figure out okay if I move my right stick like that'll move my right leg and the left stick blew my left leg but some players just never figured that out because they got the feedback of moving one of the legs and

they just got so focused on that leg that they never thought of moving the other leg so the fix for us was to after and he's like a minute or two we

eventually spawned some little letters that swirl around the leg that you haven't moved just to try to get people to kick that other leg and I think that's something that you know it seems

really stupid when you watch someone not figure it out when so many other people have had no trouble with it but it's the kind of thing where everybody has those moments I don't think you have to be too

much of an outlier but there are places where like about 5% of the time people would just you know not because they were necessarily being dumb but it just didn't click with them and for a game

like Edith Finch you know if you have 13th stories or whatever like 5 percent failure rate on any of the stories it's silly that's going to add up over time so we tried to find places where if there was going to be some kind

heart failure where people would get really really stuck you know we would lend a helping hand if they spent minute or two without moving forward and then some one of those cases to where most

people will never see that and it won't bother them that I you're offering this little hint for something when I could have figured it out but after a minute or two of not figuring out something very obvious just throwing them a bone

helped move things along and then the last tip is it kind of part and parcel of this the difficulty of working with things that you don't understand is that

it can be really effective to change a lot of things at the end when you do understand them so I think at the end of the project you're at this point where

you know you've been struggling and suddenly things are kind of clear and you also have the ability to affect the changes you want but there's not a whole lot of time although hopefully by this

point you do have a sense of what are the things that you can change without your breaking everything else so you can be a little bit more surgical also even though we did make a lot of changes it's

a kind of rolling phase on the project where as you get closer and closer then the scope of things that you can you know make changes to does get smaller over time but I just want to jump into a

couple of specific cases of places where I think the game really benefited from the team continuing to be open to embracing those kind of changes so like

one of the bigger changes was a week before we did our final dialogue recording we did her last pass on Edith vo and rewrote like a huge chunk nearly

half I think or more of what's in the game because we finally understood kind of at a macro level what the concerns were and you know what players were confused about and a lot of it came down

to very simple things like just adding mom and uncle and like being very clear about the familial relationship so we

changed a whole lot of dialogue in small ways at the end and we also not quite at the very end but a few months before we finished the game we did our last

bedroom so we kind of worked in stages from the fluor working up to the top and or may like Oh nearly last bedroom for Louis's

room and we decided to make him a little bit more of a character like he's more of an overt archetype he's very much like a pothead and we had resisted doing

that on earlier bedrooms because we really wanted these family members to feel like distinct real human beings and didn't want them to feel in any way

cartoonish but you know by the end what we realized is that in order to understand someone like if the challenge is understanding them from their bedroom then a regular person generally would

fail that like I know my bedroom it's not that expressive of who I am I mean there's like a few details but it's nowhere near what Edith Finch needed to be in order for players to cruise

through and in like a minute or two you know pull out a couple of high-level details about who that character was so for the very last bedroom we finally realized like oh right this is what we

should be doing the whole time and then we went back and redid every single other bedroom and a lot of the characters like Barbara for example you know went from being just an actor or like someone who liked performing to

being a child star which is like the you know more caricatured version of that but also you know a lot easier to design that bedroom for and have people

understand immediately the dead character was and then the appropriately the the last thing SOG about is the ending of the game which took of a good

year or so of my life making terrible prototypes things that did seem promising and then just didn't coalesce and we realized after a while that the

problem was essentially we're trying to write the last episode of The Twilight Zone like we had created all of these weird you know bespoke unique stories and then we wanted something at the end

that would kind of summarize all that and put a bow on it and that just doesn't really exist like they're the last episode of Twilight Zone it's called the bull witching pool and as terrible

it doesn't really answer anything but that was the problem we and the solution for us ended up coming when we just kind of randomly had a

request from our friend Genova to come by and play the game because he had a friend in town and didn't have anything to deal with in that weekend or that afternoon so they came by and they

played the game I don't think there was an ending at that point but you know we talked about this problem that we had and then one of them said well you know it's like a lot of death in this game what if you know the ending was

something about a birth it's like oh yeah that actually might work and they're part of me was a little frustrated at that point cause it's like

well how did they see these things like who are these amazing people that can you know solve our problems for us and I think that the miracle here is really

you know what it's like to be at the end of something like you you go through all these confusing phases but in the last stretch you actually start to kind of

like there's enough pieces there that someone can come in and you know ideally would be you but you know sometimes it's not enough for you to make that like you

can't see it you're too close to it but someone else you know who's not been there for several years staring at it like it becomes immediately obvious oh

yeah all these pieces are there so yeah I think there's this kind of miraculous phase at the end of projects where even if you've been working in you know the

dark for years it helps to be flexible just a little bit longer and Edith Finch benefited a huge amount from that it is really difficult on everybody to remain

flexible throughout that process so you know huge thanks to everybody on the team for putting up with all that and in being excited most of the time to you

know keep making those changes it's also pretty rough on publishers so thank you to all of our publisher friends and thanks to the press - it's been amazing

with Edith Finch to see that even like a year after the game came out people are writing articles on like Edith Gloves like there's a whole article just her glove and that level of detail has

been really surprising and wonderful and then you know thanks obviously to everybody who has played the game and you really open themselves up to it and had very emotional experiences with the

game that are it's a very collaborative effort on the part of the game developer and the player I mean only really works when people are coming to the game you know being emotionally open to it and we sincerely appreciate it and then we're

also the very very early stages on our next game which is gonna be super animation focused so if there's anybody out there who's an animator or an animation programmer or knows good

people of the type definitely let them know that we're looking and I think we've got a few minutes left for QA

so if there's any question a great talk thank you and Watchers I had a question

about your development process it seems very iterative and explorative and obviously no one has unlimited time

and money to make a video game so I've been wondering like you talked a lot about like exploring and prototyping do you have any tips for when you have to

stop and just execute on a plan and or did it just time box it like what what's your technique there yeah I mean our technique was to rely on our publisher to set milestones I mean working with

them but I think that was one of the really useful aspects of that relationship that we would have things like III or like that green light trailer I showed for example was that was a publisher deciding I mean we we

talked to them about the scheduling but I think it is really helpful to have milestones and it would be very difficult if you didn't have a publisher like forcing you to those milestones but that kind of discipline would be really

useful just to say like okay we're gonna show at this conference or do whatever like nothing really I mean it's kind of like the miracle at the end of the project it's like that for every milestone when you have this big goal it

gets everybody kind of together working on you know achieving some nugget of it but yeah I think it just comes down to you need little bits of crisis to bring

everything together and get all of the chickens submitted and you know integrated together because otherwise you'd never ship but yeah look for any way you can add little bits of

crisis all right thank you so as a publisher that terrified me yes looking at the talk I'm like oh that's cool every team uses their own tracking

just terrifying so while the end product was amazing like was there sort of like you say those milestones but was there elements of crisis as well where because

it was like not really formalized and kind of rough and kind of very sort of a humanistic process so was there elements of terror or was there bad parts of it

as well I guess uh yeah I mean there were definitely moments where the publisher was very concerned both both of the publishers but I think we it's

not like we're working in a vacuum and just kind of like in the dark the whole time every week we would have new cool things that would come out of it so we could show the publisher hey you know we

thought it was gonna take us this long and we would have this thing but instead it's taking us this long and we have this other really cool thing so yeah I make us the aim to your question we we

didn't always hit all of our milestones but we did always find interesting things along the way and so I think that was somewhat comforting to the publisher

to say like okay well it does feel like like good progress is being made and it's not very predictable but the publishers also kind of understood going in that was part of the development

process and kind of like what they were interested in making also it was like they had find up to publish a game that nobody really understood like that's part of what was appealing about that but that would not have worked if we

were doing you know a Halo sequel or whatever you know where there were much

more you know fixed ideas there in the back I mean okay sorry um sorry what so

you talked about your mood board slot and the kind of interest me and I was wondering how much they evolved throughout the project and or were they just like a really like your base

it was like a stone for you guys it was a more fluid we didn't continue to make mood boards per se I think that was an early fail like it takes a while you know to put all those things together

and look at them but we did something very similar where like Chris our level designer would put together you know like a couple pages of a bunch of different photos and ideas and

references for kind of like what a middle school girl might make for a crush or just like all these cool ideas about a thing and put them together a little bit more structured increases

depends but yeah so they weren't like mood boards per se but they were kind of in that vein when they were really helpful when design needed to communicate something to art was usually where they would come into play okay so

the mood boards were more like onion wood she's like can't start it with them yeah yeah that was more like what is this feeling that we're thinking about like what are the kind of tent poles

that we think are important here but we didn't keep making them in the same way that we didn't keep making like a game design document for the whole game that was something like initially you take a pass at it and then the game itself

becomes the document eventually awesome thank you hi so in a game like these

that it's very abstract and with a lot of feeling base design ideas how do you manage to balance keeping the vision

that you have a creative director and not like micromanaging the team and giving some fruit to the team to develop their own ideas oh yeah I don't know if I have that's not really a question that

I can answer one way or the other but you know I feel like the attempt was to

try to define things I guess in very specific kind of directions of like okay we want it to feel like this but not fili prescribed this is how we get there

but you know to leave things open like I think coming up with three words is a good example the place where you can be specific about what you're looking for but you know not being too prescriptive and I guess I just you know comes down

to really like defining the task and hopefully leaving enough room there but I mean the creative director one things that I've struggled a lot with is people that don't want that freedom like that's I

think it's easier when people really are excited about putting their own stamp on something like assuming that they understand what the goals are but I think a lot of times people on the team

especially in our art department they really just wanted to be told what to make which is quite surprising so I think more so than like the challenge of

giving people creative freedom it's the challenge of understanding what kind of freedom people really want and then giving that to them thank you in the

back hi so you said don't give them the gun right and I understand that part of the

feeling that you're trying to evoke you said is sort of being overwhelmed and so you're constantly presenting these new gameplay ideas to the player and that

helps you tell the story so how deep and complex of a mechanic could you present

before you'd say it starts to distract from your ability to tell a story yeah the good question I guess because I

noticed it was part of your design philosophy but it's also part of your emotional message so it's like when you design another thing with another emotional message can you make deeper mechanics or will you lose your player

yeah I mean we tended to for our prototype settle on fairly simple mechanics in some ways you know like they feel embarrassingly simple and you

know like Lewis is a good example of you know mechanic that initially was was very complicated when we were on the whiteboard describing like how fish chopping should work and the other there's gonna be a boss who's gonna come

around and they were gonna be fish that you didn't want to chop and fish that you did and what we found was just like in play testing it the players focus was

so divided so in that particular story there just wasn't a lot of bandwidth so I guess you know an answer to the question and we just would like try something and then we would see how much

emotional kind of headspace the player had and trying to be conscious of the things that are taking from that stockpile like there's like a limited amount of emotional attention

that a player can give and on Edith Finch one of things we were surprised about was when we do the longer play test the people playing the game you know at the beginning to end that when they came into a story they weren't even really fresh like they

were still thinking about the story before and the story before that and so you know in testing them in isolation we would have a different experience from someone you know playing it all the way

through so like in our case we tried to encourage players to stop after stories like we would open the family tree and Edith would talk a little bit and you'll be a little drawing just as a way of

getting some of that attention back because the stories for a lot of players are kind of emotionally draining so it wasn't that we were like designing like

complicated things to a certain level of complexity that we thought would be appropriate for the game it was more like just being an emotion budget yeah yeah like taking the temperature in play tests and trying to figure out like what

you know kind of made sense and in our case like it's kind of embarrassing how simple we you know could make things and get away with it where no one goes planes that this chopping you know needed to be more complicated because

it's not really about the fish shopping its that is getting you to something else and you're thinking about all these other things and our job is to kind of set the table for you in this game

anyway that it was more about you know this context and creating that then it was about you know digging really deeply into a particular mechanic okay thank

you so much hi thanks for a great talk and for making game where fish shopping has a central mechanic what amazing I love the sequence so my question is was

there any prototype that you really really loved but that didn't make it into the game because it didn't fit there wasn't anything that I'm heartbroken about I mean there's stories

that we tried really hard on like Astoria where you lean back and then look at the world upside down and things fall away from the earth where we spend a long time but I think we got really

good after a while painful lessons of realizing what we as a team did well and what was kind of like I think there are some stories that work right away

and it feels like you're bicycling downhill and then other stories even though they may seem really cool it's just fine even after you know a couple of day the prototype and then it's like you're pedaling uphill and you're like

wow it was really fun but I don't know if I want to keep pedaling for six months so nothing that is like oh if only we had time I mean Louis the story and Gregory story almost got cut so

those would have been like oh man yeah really wish we had these stories you wouldn't believe what we had but no nothing that yeah I regret too much

thank you sir okay last question I think um I really loved what you said about like discovering what the game wants to be through the prototyping process I'm

curious if you had any situations where in early prototyping you had sort of like variations on a theme like different prototypes that tested well that fit within the overarching story

but were like directly in competition with one another that sort of like pulled it in different directions but felt equally compelling to you as designers and if you had that situation do you have any best practices for kind

of like sifting through the data and figuring out what to up-res yeah I don't think we had any prototypes where we liked both of them and they were like

competing with each other usually it was more the case of like like the pedaling downhill thing I'm like oh well this is clearly like a story that we should be doing more of and this other one you

know it's really frustrating but I'm certainly looking back on the original design it seems crazy that we would have spells or combat or things like that but we never really got that far into it I

think we we just kept you know we made this pile of ideas and we would take the most interesting idea off the top of it for the next prototype so we just kept

you know kind of sorting that pile and if we had been making prototypes from the middle pile or the bottom you know like the spell casting ideas that we had like I'm sure we would have run into you

know more conflicting stuff but I think just the evolutionary process so what should we work on next was enough to weed out a lot of the

conflicting ideas we also early on like our first two prototypes like the large one ended up being the largest most complicated stories we have in the game Mali story and Lewis's story so in terms

of like how we prototype things we kind of made stories that we really liked but word hindsight like in the Seine that it would not just be like one mechanic but

oh my god there's like five different animals that you get to be in this story and you know these like stories of accommodations where we kind of got away from that from a production standpoint but I mean fact that we had them because

we could take those and eventually ship them but we could only do that because we'd started them really early and we had years and years to keep working on those stories we couldn't have continued to make prototypes like that so in that

way like they were successful we liked those stories but they were also cautionary tales of like let us never do this again we can you know we have space

but two of these in our hearts that that is all thank you alright I think that