The Creativity Process behind GRIS

okay so we will be beginning now there's some people outside but they can't enter when they want so we finish your last paper session and the conference is coming to an end but there is still the big closing keynote so today I'm very happy to have here a tank with us who is co-founder and technical director of no managed to do and he will present us about the creativity process of the smash hit videogame Greece so let's thank the speaker [Applause] well hello first of all thank you to the organization to invite me not to

be here I don't know if you all know probably not all of you know about Greece Greece is a video game that we have developed here in Barcelona our company is called normal a studio is our first game as a company and it's kind of a 2d platformer like an old-school Mario but we focus more in the art the music the narrative of the game so for the ones that you don't know the game I'm gonna show you first the the first trailer that we did the reveal trailer of the game [Music] [Music] [Music] well

obviously if 13 December last year the game is out you can buy it so you should buy it so well first of all I would like to say that probably we're gonna beat off track today tonight with this talk I'm pretty sure you're having hearing a lot of great presentations with numbers and data but I'm not gonna be like that this is gonna be different I hope your mind relax and you know don't think about too much just get some inspiration I will explain a bit the story of how we create this game some decisions

we made when we were creating the game design in narrative wise a bit of everything and the whole process of the game so you would know a bigger let's see the bigger picture of how we create this game and some of the things I think are quite cool good things to know when you are creating a new game or when you have decided how to interact with the player in some of the things so first I will introduce myself as you and says I'm Adrian Cuevas and technical director and one of the founders of no

malice to do but when I started I started here in Barcelona I started my university here my first work was actually a sabado mechanical engineer I was working in motion capture for that biomechanical analysis and I decided that I wanted to do video games so basically I quit and I went to England looking for a for a job my first job was in Brighton where I was working for bass a lot of people don't know in Europe was kind of a big thing this is an interactive TV show that you play in the PlayStation with

these big red buttons and colors and after that I had a chance to go to Ubisoft Montreal I work in our Cry 3 for more than two years then I went to Denmark where I work in the Hitman franchise and finally I came back to Barcelona I start working in use of Barcelona again and here I work in several games probably the most important one is Rainbow six siege then briefly I will introduce you my two partners one is Roger Mendoza he study in Barcelona with me that's where I met him and he has working

giving soba Montreal for like almost six years he worked mostly in Assassin's Creed and also some white squid some white skateboard in and also Rainbow six and the third part of the this team is Conrad rosette he's a renowned artist from Barcelona what he's actually from terraza and he has been working with big advertising companies for a while he has done some adverts for Adidas Nike Disney Coca Cola so a lot of things but probably his most well known exhibition has been this work is called mooses and he has been exhibited all over the world

has been exhibited in London San Francisco Los Angeles pretty much everywhere and the thing is that he never worked in videogames but he always had a niche for it he he liked a lot with playing video games and like most of the good adventures in life our adventure started in a bar that's what we happened basically I had to go to Montreal again for four months to work in Rainbow six and I was doing like a farewell party and by chance we met with a friend I was celebrating her birthday party and Conrad was one

of the guests of the birthday party but we didn't know him basically we sit all together and by chance we said Roger me and Conrad together and start talking I'm basically Conrad told us that he always wanted to make a video game but never did it before so he was looking for people to help him do it and to be completely honest with you we were quite drunk so I thought this is going nowhere I'm going to Montrell in two days let's forget about it but I was saying yes obviously but yeah luckily for me

Royer stay here in in barcelona and kept talking with Conrad and four months after I came back oh yeah I forgot by the way this is the first draw that Conrad did of the game when we were in the bar he throw that in a paper and he said I want to make a game where the colors are very important I want to start yeah you can see yeah but is it like okay that was everything we saw I like okay it's pretty it's just yeah but he wanted to study in black and white and

getting colors that's kind of the key part of the game now and anyway so as I say I left but luckily Roger kept talking with with Conrad and when I came back they told me hey we have been still talking about this we want to make it are you in and I said well of course so the first thing we did bear with me is very rough but it was a small prototype trying to show a bit the idea of the game we have in mind it's just a very small part of the game that

shows which type of game because sometimes it's hard to explain which type of again you are making you need to do even if it's a small prototype this one as I say very rough very sketchy is like a two three frames animation for the character very ugly but it's Sosa with what I am where I'm talking about [Music] [Music] well as you see it's pretty rough but it was so inner with the mood that we wanted to get with the game so that was the the first thing with it and we when we saw that

it worked we start working fully in a pas de type basically we quit our jobs and start dedicating 100% of our time on it we hire a couple of people to help us with it this is the studio that we were in a co-working trying to to make the game and what we decided to do is do in like 15 minutes prototype and bring it to Gamescom in Germany to show it to several publishers luckily for us one of the publicists liked it a lot and it was devolver digital do you my know the word

eatle is one of the biggest independent publishers independent game publishers in the world and to be completely honest what we sold in the game we were we have no hope at all because they are more used to do games like this which obviously that's not Greece or even weirder things like that that's I'm not going to comment but luckily they like it so we are in we were able to start a team create a company no matter studio and we're still working in production almost 22 months and after the 22 months finally we released again

this is basically the team that we have in here in Barcelona it's kind of a weird team for a video game company because almost 80% of the studio never worked in video games before so that's quite weird but at the same time it was very refreshing we had a lot of cool ideas they weren't used to work like the video games work especially the artists we had to talk obviously told them what is RAM memory and stuff like that you know like the resolution is not infinite like when you do a poster so things like

that was kind of hard at the beginning but we get along very well and they have really good ideas and they were thinking outside what is a common game usually right anyway so that was very good for us and today I want to show you a bit these five points of the of the creation of Greece first I will start with a narrative art animation design a music narrative for us was a very important thing and I really challenging one because when you have some limitations and resources like we did we have to you have

to try to turn this kind of limitations in strength so one of the first decisions we made was not having any text not having dialogues not having UI so basically trying to avoid localization trying to avoid more work so for us that was very important but it was challenging as well the good thing is that we decided to go for a game that was going to be very artistic the music is are important and trying to express everything with just that gameplay art and music but that that means that sometimes is really hard to express

a story so what we did it was going for a very common story very common feeling that is grief so basically that's the basics of our story and we went for a very metaphorical way of explaining this that has a really good thing and a really bad thing the good thing of going metaphorical is that people can project their own stories so if you just if you just hit the basics have symbolism trying to convey the feelings with the music and the art they will see they can feel that is happening something and you can

convey a lot of feelings but and most of the people actually project their own story on this grief of feeling be metaphorical is this grief feeling also realized - kind of a depression like a general depression so pretty much everybody has passed through some rough phases in their lives so when you are playing the game a lot of people are thinking like well I'm feeling like when I liked what I felt when I lost my father or things like that we have received a lot of emails and a lot of Commons you can see it

on YouTube for example a lot of people playing when they finish is like a catharsis for them they're like this is like when I lost my father I was stuck for a year I received an email of someone that lost his program week before playing Greece and he wasn't able to talk to anyone about it and after playing he sent us an email right away saying that for him also helped to cope with this problem so that's really very rewarding for us it's something that obviously when you do the again you do not try to

achieve that high levels but you would like to and for some people it was really touchy the problem is that at the same time some people didn't really connect with it luckily for us it was just a few but these people they will see just a very plain and monotonous story because they are not telling them what's happening and what what they have to feel if you don't feel it that's the problem anyway for most of our players say it worked really well so how we did this first of all we did this diagram this

kind of our own version of the hero's journey if you are if you know about movies so we did this first so we can have like a map of the whole progression of the game this is the game from start to finish and what's happening in the middle and it helped us a lot to keep the pacing of the game so you know at the beginning must be a bit slower then you go up then you have the classical breaking point then you have to come back well it's a classical structure for movies and then

we map all these big as if they're bigger events that we wanted to have so we can also know that every 10-15 minutes there was always something happening so when we were doing this we contact with a psychologist that is also a game designer actor first day from Barcelona and he helped us a lot looking for symbolism of the story how we could you know I spread some of the things during the game so people could understand a bit that we are talking about this process of grief once we have this we start thinking about

the wall so again limited resources we wanted to go first for an open world kind of Metroidvania that you could go whatever you go whenever you go whenever you want but the problem is that that's a lot of work especially when you have a world that is evolving that is getting colors like ass you will have to do pretty much every part of the world five times because we have five evolutions so because of this we change for a more lenient approach and to be honest I think it was a really good decision because it

also helped us a lot to guide the player when we are aiming to go for people that never play video games before as well so we we try to have a really broad community of players because we thought that with the art that we have with the music that we have a lot of people that never play video games they will see the trailer and we say wow that's beautiful I would like to try it and if it's something really hardcore they will sell well that's too tough I'm not gonna do that it's rich I

mean I will look the video or YouTube or whatever and that's it but then when you have a linear experience you can tell them exactly what they have to do they don't get lost is much easier to control what the player is gonna experience in any case we try to go for a kind of this linear open world you could doesn't make any sense but it's like linear open-world because at the end of the day we are trying to tell you or that you feel that the whole world is changing even that you are not

seeing everything again so what we did is creating this hub this is like the center of the world so the player passes through this place like five or four or five times so he will see how it changed the colors how he changed this part so he can have the idea that the whole the whole world is changing because you are seeing these many times and it's changing and also when you are working a plane on a level and you unlock a color you will still play a little bit mode or that level of that

level coming back and you will see how that world has changed so you see that were changing the main hub changing a more or less your mind things like okay so the whole world is changing is not just that part also another other things that we did for Greece that is not very common in a lot of video games is doing a storyboard for us the color progression what the game was really important so we had this pretty much the first month of production here we could also see all the key important moments of the

game and also you see how it progresses how it is starting this black and white is getting colored and it end up with basically full of color okay arts as you can imagine is one of the our most important tools in the game is our one of the biggest selling points we decided to go for like a handcrafted very warm very common art but it's not common in video games but it's calm is much more common like in a museum or an exhibition so first of all we started to create a lot of concept you

have like hundreds of notebooks with concepts especially from Conrad he did a lot of this ideas obviously not all of them finished in they end up in the game that most of them did actually and creating the character was very challenging but it's very very important because you know it's the thing that you're going to see the most we have a lot of inspiration in fashion design we are back on those days Conrad watch check in a lot of magazines and web pages of fashion and then we created our first character that was our first

idea we liked it a lot but there was a lot of issues with this idea and thus this is one of the important things we learn during the process we wanted to express a bit of the evolution of the story of the game with a dress of the guy so having colors I got we're getting a look as well in the dress but when we were doing this we try a few things and we realized that having that much information in the dress was first of all really hard for animating we are animating frame by

frame animation so that will mean that you have to animate the I the lines the curve the spots every time you do another animation you have to do every frame for that that's that's a lot of work and on top of that we use the cameras a lot to guide the that layer and we also do a lot of big zoom out so you can see beautiful concepts and when you do a zoom out of a character with that much information in the in the dress it becomes blurry and noisy and it doesn't look good

it looks pretty bad so we decided to type to look for something much more elegant and minimal so this is the process that we went through trying to get a character with a bit more lot more simple and this is the final design of our character this is finally when we have this we start working on the scene on the environment and the maps for us one of the main reference our Disney movies give Lee movies but also my abuse is one of the biggest reference we have and to be honest one of the reference

that pretty much no one realized and it's normal that you don't realize is aquascaping it's quite weird but back in those days Conrad was going through a very dark phase he was creating his own aquarium and he spent a lot of time and money making a his aquarium probably now I don't know where it is but probably nowhere and as you can see we we use a lot of pieces reference there's a part there's a kind of a branch of aquascaping that is called iguazu be is a Japanese Japanese were a culture of a aquascaping

and they pay a lot of attention to elements to create a composition so this is basically how they do it with a few elements they create a beautiful composition composition and we use the same thing that was the same idea for us when creating the levels well once we have all these with decorating concepts a lot of concepts we were doing like maybe five concepts two three five concept every day we end up with more than a thousand concepts of the game obviously some of the concepts make it to the game but some ones didn't

this one for example is from another part of the story of the that we had but he never made it to the game but others were exactly like they're exactly like that in the game right now once we have this concept the story was clear asked the programmers and the more technical guys we did everything we could so the game would look exactly like the concept art so these are a couple of examples that right now it looks very similar in the game ok another of the more important things for us was animation animation it

was as I told as I as I said hand by Kehoe's people frame by frame and it was doing by hand obviously digital at the beginning Cora had the idea of doing everything on paper scan it and paint it obviously that was madness and we convinced him that it was madness there's a few teams that have tried even one in Spain but it is a lot of work is not worth it you can do effects you can put some paper effects play with the scan some watercolors that's what we did and it will look something

like it was done in paper it's not exactly the same but it's very very similar and it's much more convenient anyway the this is the first animation with it for the running cycle in a 2d platformer this is the most important animation of the whole game because you're gonna see that for three hours basically you're gonna be running all the time a few jumps but that's gonna that's the thing you're gonna have to see the most of the time so it's very important you get this right that was the first animation with it to get

the feeling of the rest of the animations so that has to be perfect we iterate a lot over this this is the first iteration with it of the run in we thought it was a bit too crazy so we told the animator to go for a slightly more real go for something like this then well as I say we iterate a lot one of the times we told him okay go crazy with it he created basically a flag but you know you have to try to explore as much as you can and we finally came

up with this animation this is a running cycle we have right now there's still a few changes again this leaf will remove it for the same purpose it wasn't really it wasn't really adding anything and it's more work for animation and it was also noise in the dress so we remove it and this is actually the cleanup face of the animation so it's much more clear it goes straight to the point that even still a leg on is still practical as well so that was the best then we decided to express all the abilities of

the character with the dress and so we could go a bit crazy with it this is the animation of the heavy ability so basically the dress becomes this heavy cube and if you want to see it in the game this is how it looks so again we work a lot on those animations this is another example this is a more like Anna scripted scene so it has a bit of these Disney vibe this is how it looks in the game [Music] well once we have the main character we start thinking about the antagonists the antagonists

of Greece is this Blackbird we thought that having again that the idea was being full of colors the antagonist would be nice if it was black ink so that's basically these black Chinese ink but to be honest we weren't sure how to animate it and we were very lucky that our animator found this animation on internet when we saw this we liked it a lot we liked this fluidity this kind of physical fluids and liquids so we went for this kind of movement for the ink for the for the antagonist of the game when we

were creating the biggest sequences for these antagonists first we had to do this kind of a storyboard with a storyboard the technical and the animators and the artists decided which parts were gonna be with animation which parts would be with particles or with programming we had to decide that what we have that they do the first pass of the animation for the first pass of animation you try to skip frames you just create the keyframes and in a rough line with this you can bring it right away to the engine and try it so you

can place everything and see if everything makes sense if the camera is nice and with the character and the and the bird fits all together while you have that you create the in-between frames you clean the lines and then you just start doing the coloring and finally you put it in the inner game this is just the coloring and now is with their with the textures and this is how it looks in the game [Music] another of the characters we have is this eel this is another part of the antagonist and that was especially challenging

because the eel we wanted to make it go pretty much whenever we roll whenever we want it and it has kind of this long body so doing is everything with 2d will be a lot of work so what we did is doing like a mix we did the head of the eel is traditional frame-by-frame animation and we attach it to a 3d body with the skeletons let me see oh sorry right doesn't play it doesn't play I think No okay well I'm sorry but anyway so yeah basically we attach it to a 3d body that

is with bones so you can animate the the bones and they won't react they can twist they can go forever wherever you go and the head is synchronized with the with the body so it doesn't look like two different parts let me see if I can show you how it looks obviously we wanted to all this with the animation it will be way too much body works perfectly for us okay then I will talk a bit about design obviously for us is very important this part because it's a videogame but especially the challenges we have

is that we wanted to go for a broad audience and trying to appeal to a lot of people and still not being boring is really hard so what we did first of all is getting some references obviously one of our biggest reference is journey but then we have others like limbo Rory we always say define when we were looking for a publisher where we defined Greece as a mix between Ori like journey and already under blank forests that's exactly the thing we wanted to go for and we start deciding the abilities of the of the

game this is the main mechanics we have we wanted to try to express also the evolution of the game with the abilities and also link the abilities to the phases of the game for example when you get the heavy ability the girl is able to break stuff and is heavy and you can you can break floors and jars so that's when it's link it to the more anger face of the girl or if you go to the die favilla to that dive abilities when it's in the lowest point when it goes to the depressions you're

going to ak' if it goes too deep in there in the world so that was our way to show into showing this but then we have our biggest challenge of all which is not having there in the game when you have this beautiful concept art you have jumping on the rocks bla bla bla but then they will happen if you fail and you can not die so that was a really big challenge for us when we were designing levels we have to make a game but the failure was not dying you don't have points you

don't have time basically you have to and you still have to do these beautiful things so what we end up doing is doing a lot of contraptions and trying to design the levels properly so if you fail you can always come back this is for example one of the ideas that we have for this area if you fell there is a floor there and there's a contraption that bring you back and as soon as you are up it gets out so at least you still see the clear and clean concept art this is again another

example we are in the sky it's all beautiful stars but you fill there's a floor there that appears with the lights this is a main mechanic in the game in that level there is a architecture that appears yes with light so we do all these things but it's very challenging when you design a game with no they're really really tiny then creating the puzzles that's very important we were creating a lot of passes with the mechanics and then deciding train each puzzle separately first and then trying to do a combination of all of them and

quickly prototype them even if it's a really ugly prototype like this oops but it's really important that you try the game as much as possible because for us we wanted a lot of people that never play video games to try these prototypes and told us if it was too hard but also people that play video games and told us if it was too boring so basically what we did is if we found some of the puzzles really hard but still we liked them a lot what we did is creating these optional challenges so when you

are playing the game this what we call a collectible and if you want if you feel that you can do it you can do all these harder puzzles and you will achieve a collective all and when you get all the collectibles at the end of the game this is special reward reward for these people anyway so when we try it with everybody and everybody was happy we created the level as I said a lot of people in our studio never work in video games and our level designers never did so he is an architect so

he did all the levels in AutoCAD basically we have the whole wall in AutoCAD so that's how we recreated the levels there is what we have that we send it to the artist and they create the same version with that making it a bit more beautiful then we decided with assets we need to create to create a wall we did a lot of variation of the assets so you don't see a lot of repetition because it's a key thing for us that you see like the whole wall is unique and then we assemble everything and

with the effects and the shades and everything looks like that finally I would like to talk a bit about the music the music sometimes is one of those forgotten parts of a game or a movie and honestly when you see a game or a movie without the proper music it's awful and when you have the great musician to the team it brings your game to another level it's like changing from second division - first division is really really impressive and we were very lucky because we met where leanest Berlin East is a band from Barcelona

and they never work in video games again but luckily for us the main composer is a geek of videogames he loved video games more than anyone in our team he plays a lot every day for hours and hours so we told him about making a video game he was completely on board with it the main reference they have there were these three basically I caused a lot of Colossus and another world I don't know if you have played the games but they have really epic soundtracks but some of the other references they have and that's

a lot of people wouldn't realize is this idea of synesthesia I don't know if you know what is Nastasya but basically this relation between two senses that shouldn't be connected and like for example it could be a taste could be connected with a color and there's a lot of studies and research that have been done between connection between colors and sounds so they look into past studies that you can see here and try to compose the music for the different levels based on the color that represents the level you see for example this has somewhat

some notes that are more used when it's red some somewhere is more well green so they use this way composing the music and as I was saying the music is really really important I really I'm gonna show you one of the examples we did in the prototype when we were creating this part this is a key part of the game is getting unlocking a color and we had to have that in the prototype to show the people what is the game about because it's a very important scene and I was doing I was working in

this we basically in the graphic part and I didn't like it at all I was like this is impossible he's gonna be ugly as hell but luckily for me we try it with the music I saw it to the musicians they taught me a few things and he say okay try with this music and this is how I look and it blows my mind [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see is very very very nice the music that's a lot to this part and we were very lucky that Berlin is what was with us

from the very first day they were working with us even in the prototype and that make us change some of the design sometimes for example there's another scene here and that we were working is where the girl is fighting against some wind and what we're gonna just have some music on the background when but when the guys send us the scent as the the music we like it so much that we change have it the scene we made the music a key part of the moment and also we add some of the symbolism that we

wanted to put in the game in this moment and then we giving this scene and that basically getting into a cave and that's pretty much it but now it's much more epic and we saw a bit of the symbolism that we wanted to show well and as I was saying we don't have dialogues we'll have text so we try to use everything we had to show this evolution of the game and trying to explain how the progress of the girl through in this process and one of them was also with the music for us as

I said one of the most important parts if there is the unlike unlocking the color so we end up coming with this idea of as well as as we're unlocking colors we will be unlocking music as well so during the scene that's the scene that the music of that scene is the same as the intro of the game and we used that theme is the main theme of the of the game for that scene and it will be evolving with the new colors so the first time you hear the this music for the second time

do you hear the music it will be just with the most minimal version of it is when you are unlocking your first color this way you're gonna hear just aa video so you can just focus on the on the music [Music] [Music] you're here is just a basic melody couple of instruments just very very very minimal then when you go for the second color you get you are a couple of instruments and make it a bit longer [Music] again you now see the string instruments you have seen already the blue sequence so we go straight

away to the last one in the last one you will hear pretty much everything we go full on this Carew's percussion strings every instrument we can find in the libraries [Applause] well finally I would like to show you another of the trailers we have so you can see some of the things that I have explained today [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well that's pretty much all for me you have any questions I will be more than happy to answer if you want to write an email or if you want to collaborate I know you do

a lot of things with video games I play testing or whatever always if you want throw me an email and we can always talk about it thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so any question hi I'm Evan from Ontario Tech University in Canada awesome presentation thank you you basically summarized the whole game which was 30 minutes yet what I wanted to ask you you you refer to iteration a lot during your presentation I just wanted to understand how as a design team as the development team how did you make that final decision and what makes it

to the game and what won't make it to the game that's actually one of the most challenging tasks I can tell you a bit about my story Montreal when I was working in use of mantra I learn a role that I didn't know it existed the Anubis table is called the closer the closer is a guy that comes to your project and everybody hates because you have been working five years in fact crime for example and the last three months this guy appears and start cutting things is like okay you haven't worked in a month

a year in that feature is not quality enough he doesn't add up enough to the game and it cuts everything Soviet you hate him bit but is needed it's a really really crucial part of the development you have to know when to stop it will never be perfect your name game will never be perfect so there has to be someone with that role in our case basically Roy and I were the two guys with more experience in to me in the industry and we wanted to create again that was very artistic and very fresh so

what we did is the first year year and a half we basically didn't complain about anything one less it was crazy but most of us that we didn't complain or anything we let the artists to do whatever they want the designer so we try to give them everything but when it was I would say six months before release or eight months before release we start deciding what goes in and what doesn't and telling them okay you cannot iterate over this more this is good enough if he's tuba if he's too bad and we don't have

time to iterate we cut it but that's that's a really really important part of the iteration knowing when to stop obviously especially the artists and they never maybe do games they're always thinking that it could look a bit better that it could maybe I don't know nicer and it's like okay that's it it looks good you have been seen this for a year so you are mad with it but this is really good so you need to tell them when to stop Halon Anika University of Waterloo I was just wondering about the music that you

showed the progression of the different the tip music for the decision on like what's the best he said you iterate it a lot but again I'm assuming this wasn't done in play testing sessions player focused design because he said at some point your design team just made that decision but again based on on what is that decision made and have you just like you explored these different things for the colors yeah have you explored similar research on music and what provides the most impact in terms of game music emotionally yeah well that's fixing Lee that's

something that I the main composer of Bellamy's did he did all this research I cannot tell you exactly what he did but I know he did because I remember that he told us for example for the last scene of the game I didn't know you have played but the last cinematic of the game we told him okay we want something that is very how can you say like like something that will make you change the way of your feeling at that moment you have to be depressed and you have to is a moment of realization

it's a moment that you have to say like it you know I can still be good I can still be I will survive this pain no that's not that's what we said as designers and he's the one saying I know what I have to do he come with us he came with our music he said these muse is gonna make right 90% of the people and to be honest I don't know how he makes it because I don't know but every time I see the sequence I cried I still I am actually I do it

a lot because I like a lot watching people playing that part of the game because it's for me the most important part and I I know it sounds like a probably a sociopath but I love to see people crying in that part of the game I love it I love it you have to youtube it is amazing you end up grace and I know I love it because they cry of happiness is a depression but they cry of happiness of sort of knowing how to overcome that and I don't know exactly how he made it

but he knew when I told him how we had to what he had to do he exactly what to do obviously he has experience he has been working he has been working as a musician for years he had a few albums with balloonist and I know they did some research as well with movies and games like the game sideshow so I don't know exactly with how he how he made it but I know he did I'm talking about the play test well the first thing that he helped us a lot is having this broad team

because we wanted to have a game that we could play pretty much everyone so a lot of people they never play video games literally never so there were the first ones that we wanted to try the the puzzles obviously after probably a few months that I have been trying they are not good enough for testing anymore because now they have played games so what we were doing is bringing it to friends bringing it to people around us and the last I would say the last year pretty much we have an external team as well helping

us in Poland with with the testing and basically they test the game but the first one week or two weeks they give you just the impression as a supply test they don't actually test functionality they just give you the things that they feel where they found it hard so that was another way of having a bit of knowledge about the puzzles but obviously we don't have enough resources to be like for three months or for a month focusing on the play test and iterate yeah but I think it was more or less enough with what

we had hi hi I'm Carlos from the University of York and Goldsmith's University of London this talk was very inspiring thank you much but actually I quote I would like to ask a bit more about the technical side oh yeah yeah go for it I assume like you are very technical right so well did you write the game in your own tools you use any commercial tools and what were the challenges that you faced from a technical perspective well first of all what we use unity as the engine in general I will always recommend to

use an engine unless you have a really really really really really really really really good reason not to make it because you know unity and real they let you customize quite a lot so you can do a lot of tools and work with it pretty well and in our case we went with unity because we know it especially Ramirez we are they were both the only program is that are wearing the team and we were we thought oh so it was better for that 2d game compared with unreal but basically what we did is trying

to customize it as much as possible we end up having the artists used in unity as well and that's obviously kind of a challenge so what we did is creating a lot of tools in unity so they were more comfortable and especially because to be honest they could messed up the scenes so within a lot of tools to check in that everything was correct like for example when you work with the with a 2d game it doesn't matter the DEF position anymore you have to take in account a short intro you know like use drawing

with a sorting layer or whatever so we had a lot of tools just to tell us if two things were in the same sorting layer in the same place things like that or so you could see how everything was a spread or something was too far recent it was invisible we have a lot of tools you have to check that everything was correct and also we have a lot of tools to import from Photoshop to unity that was also another tricky part because they used to work in Photoshop so these tools were very very important

to iterate every time they have to change something you can just drag a file to our exporter you will report everything get it in unity and it was in place no problem so that was very important and take from the technical point of view the first few months Roy and I we work a lot in the shaders to make it look like if he was a real picture so we work a lot with the watercolor sailors with the paper say that that we have but basically that was the first few months once we had that

idea clear after that basically with all the artists work we could do one with why we couldn't and they pretty much get it quite quickly and it was pretty much unless you have something more important that you want to know no animation shown but the rest thank you so much Kristina Silva from the University of Meno I found it absolutely wonderful thank you congratulations and regarding the tools can you tell us which tool did you use for animation yeah well there for this project we use mostly Photoshop right away and we did pretty much everything

with Photoshop but then in unity we didn't use mechanic they can make an even that much is there is the animation and they have we use it but basically all the transitions we called it ourselves because for a 2d game animation is not that important the mechanic because it will help you with transitions it will help you with blending but that's for bones so if you are doing a frame by frame animation you don't need to blend between positions but you need to control a lot work to transition from word frame from which frame to

which frame that's very important so that's what we record everything but for the tools we basically use photo source and scripts that we created so if you don't count the first but the first year was basically making the prototype which we also used to define the game and to create some of the tools but probably for from that year like four or five months was looking for a publisher having checking the contract its signing the deal and after that when we start production it was 22 months from basically from January 2017 yeah yeah yeah 17

yeah - pretty much it was November of 2019 so pretty much 22 months of the full development plus this year of pre-production and paperwork there hello penny Switzer from the Australian National University thank you for your presentation and congratulations on a beautiful game you mentioned that most of your team were not previously game developers I was just wondering where did they come from how did you find them and did it create did it result in a more diverse team well definitely I mean it was extremely diverse as you can see there was most of the

people were artists that came from just advertising or maybe animation so so whatever or just a lot of freshmen like from the University the first graduates and I think it was more or less easy for us especially looking for artists because we had contract and a lot of people in Barcelona knew Conrad so as soon as you say okay do you wanna work with Conrad or set you have a lot of people that want the world literally for free so we pay them all the work even to the interest we pay but it's true there

were a lot of people that didn't they didn't care if they weren't getting money at all especially artists and then luckily well luckily for us and luckily for the rest of the Spain in Spain there wasn't many projects like this so it was really special to tell someone do you work in this kind of game because basically Barcelona is growing a lot and it's getting much better especially now but most of the games are mobile games or you know like in social point cetera but having a 2d platformer various these artists with this music is

really hard to find so for us if you find people that were looking for that it was much easier they were looking for even moving from we had a girl coming from Granada that came here so the level designer the rocket that came from Salamanca and they were willing just to move here we didn't pay much because we don't have that money but it was enough and they decided to go for it so well less is high is good when you have a different project so we are following all the university usually when you when

people look at an artwork you usually have like the the emotional challenge you have to deal with the emotions presented in the art and in the video game then you also have the the functional challenge of people haven't you know sorry um how did you find that these two aspects kind of interacts you mean I the ocean Olivia and the design and the art um how a game played challenge for example if that hindered or if that enhanced and the emotions that people were supposed to feel well especially for our game is very important we

were trying to avoid frustration that was the most important thing that we weren't trying to avoid and why because we wanted people that never play video games to play this game so it's really really easy to have them frustrated because just a simple jump they might not make it so we try to have this really a smooth curve of difficulty and that was one of the most important things trying to make the game more or less easy at the beginning trying to explain the basic mechanics of an adventure game for to the platformer so at

the first five minutes of the game is like a tutorial for noobs basically so they learn that you know this is how you have this kind of work of game works and we use also these five minutes to tell about the structure of how the whole world is going to work in a very very short level we explain that you are going to be navigating through a world that you will come back to places and then you will be unlocking things in a very simple way so we will work a lot on that and that's

the thing I mean when you are trying to make a game a video game for everybody there's emotions that you cannot control at the pleiades can experience but for example you can control some things like the type of puzzles if you create a puzzle that is more of walking around and investigating is probably more you know chill is relaxed you don't get frustrated that much unless you get lost if you get lost then this frustration is like where I am but you can control for example that we did that in the fifth level we control

that the people think they're getting lost but they are not we because we are blocking their way they don't know it but we are blocking the way they cannot come back and it's like where I am where I am and then you suddenly are where you should be but we wanted that so we play a bit with that idea of controlling what the player can make and so we can make them feel lost or chill or anxious for example another synth is the ill the ill is pursuing you and we want you to have the

feeling that well this eel is gonna eat me but you can not fail but it looks like you can because if you don't do it and in a way this moral is a penalty if you don't do it right but it's like a it's like a trophy so if you do it wrong you won't get a crowd Rafi but that's pretty much it but we want this tension of oh I'm gonna die I'm gonna die but you cannot die so we have to fight with this kind of a design challenging at the same time trying

to not to frustrate people I don't know if this answers your question but perfect thank you um so Daniel Johnson Queensland University of Technology I have one really selfish question and one you probably won't answer the selfish question like a lot of people I'm about to be on a very long flight and given I'm prepared to cry in front of people on that floor would you recommend the PC version of the switch version move okay oof okay I have to say I like a lot the screen on the switch the colors it looks amazing and

really really really is it looks much better than most of the screens that everybody has in this in their own house so on Dodman and that regard switch is perfect but it is true that performance on the switch is not amazing and our game is all stream there's no loading times is all in one chunk and doing that in a console like Suites it will has been a really big challenge but I think it work more or less okay you want pretty much notice it but obviously if you have a big screen with a lot

of resolution and a sound system then I would say played at home but if you are played at home in a console or in a small TV probably you can play the switch it looks really really good on switch so it's up to you and Tommy don't be shy cry on the plane that's fine can you talk it all about what you're working on now no now we are we are creating a new prototype now and we will show into publisher soon but we haven't announced anything yet what I can say obviously is there are

the story in general the music is going to be very important and we will go for something kind of similar but in a different way of Chris thanks so much for the story is amazing thank you that's it hi so gay works hi so trisko DeHaven from university of york so i've done some work on accessibility and your game is very beautiful but it seems to focus on beauty in the visual and auditory sense did your game think of people with this players with disabilities as far as people with players who are blind and players

who yeah that's something that we talk but to be honest when joining a small team is a fair project you cannot do everything as you would like to especially because something that we talked it was about the colorblind people that's something that we have talked about a I'm actually our level designer a scholar brain so and here I play the game with no problem so that's kind of our test on color right top guy that he designed the level so but anyway we didn't have time we didn't have the resources to to do this because

sometimes when you do that you have to iterate more on the on the levels and on the design because basically this another there's another inputs on the feedback and that's something that we would like to do more in our next games we would like to take more this in account obviously when you go for bigger disabilities is much harder if you go for someone that is not completely deaf or blind that's that's much harder eventually I would like to do something even if it's a small games for this because I think is nice and I

think is also a very creative process when you focus on this for example I remember in in juvey Soph we were doing prototype sometimes I guess for fun and there was this sound designer that was trading a game that it was just with sound so basically well there was something on the screen but it was pointless it was basically they do have to play just with the sound and I think that's a very interesting idea that something he brought with a new ideas for a game so I think it's something that people should explore a

bit more but as I say for a small teams is really really hard to do basically when you do your first game you want everybody to play and that's pretty much it you all have too much time to do it okay so let's close the speech and I think again that money