Category: News

Losing the use of your hands can be a devastating blow to both your career and your lifestyle. 

However, there are people out there who face that very issue every day and are able to persevere and adapt. Austin-based developer Rusty Moyher is one such person. A voracious coder, Moyher faced a repetitive strain Injury (RSI) diagnosis five years ago that threatened to derail his career and passion as a game designer.

This is a real concern for game makers, for whom using a keyboard and mouse can be one of the most efficient ways of creation and communication. But for someone with RSI, the two peripherals become an almost insurmountable obstacle, making the prospect of using a computer an intimidating task.

However, Rusty was determined to learn how to create a game without using his hands. It took him a year and a half and learning an entirely new way to interface with a computer, but Dig Dog, the fruit of his labor, debuted last month on PC, console and mobile devices. 

Reinventing the keyboard

Moyher still technically has the use of his hands, but his injury means that spending hours hammering away at code with a keyboard and mouse is a no-go; to get back to his passion he had to completely change his approach to interacting with a computer. In the beginning, he tried multiple types of non-traditional peripherals, with no luck finding one that fit his needs.

“I’ve actually spent way too much money on ergonomic things only to find out that they just wouldn’t help.”

“I had tried a lot of different ergonomic devices. I’ve actually spent way too much money on ergonomic things only to find out that they just wouldn’t help,” Moyher tells Gamasutra. “Like vertical keyboards, [and] mice that are vertical. I have this roller mouse that was like $250, and it was okay, but I think the human body is different for everybody, so it’s hard to find something that really works for you.”

Moyher’s first breakthrough was when he found a video on coding by voice (embedded below) published by Travis Rudd in 2013. Rudd is a coder and developer that also has RSI, and his video shared how he customized the voice recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking for use as a tool to write Python via voice commands. 

[embedded content]

Through contacting Rudd, Moyher learned about the NatLink and Dragonfly toolsets that allow users to use custom key phrases as triggers.

If you’re not familiar with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, by default it focuses on translating a person’s voice to standard text. Without additional toolkits and programming, coding with Dragon would be a time-consuming nightmare of a task.

By using Dragon in conjunction with Natlink and Dragonfly, Moyher was able to begin developing a set of triggers in a made-up language that allowed him to use vocal commands, yet utilize the syntax required by programming languages simply and effectively. However, it wasn’t exactly an easy adjustment according to Moyher.

“It took a while for me to actually solidify the toolset,” says Moyher. “That was even before the project was set up about a year and a half ago. I was just researching these tools, trying to build things that would work for me.”

According to Moyher, much of the work came down to simplifying the input process so he could work without worrying that one piece of the chain wouldn’t fail and cause him to lose work.

“Some of the examples I had seen people using with this kind of voice coding, [they] would set up relay boxes…they would run all of Windows and all of Dragon inside a virtual machine, like Parallels, and they would use that to communicate to their operating system of choice from the outside,” Moyher recalls. 

[embedded content]

“This added even more complication to the whole toolchain process, so I ended up simplifying it. I just used Windows directly so that there were less pieces of the chain. It means that less things could go wrong. Once I was able to shrink that, it became a little bit more manageable for me to kind of build up from there.”

Another issue Moyher experienced was that he couldn’t just take the commands for Python that Travis Rudd had developed and use them as-is, since Moyer’s integrated development environments (IDE) of choice are Visual Studio and Xcode. Not only did he have to develop new voice commands, but because of how much more mouse-intensive these environments are he needed a new way to input cursor commands.

Let’s talk about controlling your mouse with your eyes

Although Moyher had tried a host of different peripherals, none of them really clicked until he tried the SmartNav 4 from Natural Point. The SmartNav works by tracking a reflector attached to Moyher’s hat. The sensitivity is such that he only has to move his head in small increments to propel the cursor across the screen. However, Moyher admitted that the SmartNav 4 wasn’t entirely ideal.

Stock image of the SmartNav 4 in action

“The SmartNav 4 was something I found online that made sense immediately, because I knew for me the best thing I can do is take breaks and just use my hands less,” he says. “It ended up being a good mouse replacement, or at least good enough. I think it can be a lot better. It’s very rough around the edges. The software is old, and it’s kind of a finicky USB device.”

“I guess after having used it I’m more grumpy around it,” he adds. “I’ve gotten a lot of good suggestions from other people about eye trackers and things that I haven’t actually tried before, so I’m interested to dig deeper and see what other things are in this area.”

Of course, figuring out how to move the mouse without his hands only solved part of the problem. Moyher needed to be able to input mouse clicks as well. The solution for that problem was a lot simpler than eye-tracking or voice recognition, though: “I’m using a foot clicker, which is relatively cheap. just as mouse clicking replacement, and that actually kind of works with just a little bit of tweaking to some sensitivity stuff.”

Making game dev as hands-free as possible

Making games is hard work, but it’s even harder when you’re facing the sort of limitations Moyher was. Dig Dog started as a simple game centered around a dog walking around a desert. Moyher was interested in a platformer, but once he introduced digging, the game became more centered around that mechanic. 

Incidentally, Moyher says Dig Dug was not the inspiration for the name.

“[Dig Dog] it’s not a Dig Dug reference. It was something that, I guess, it started as sort of a desert walking dog game. I was really interested in doing an iOS platformer at first, and it kind of grew from there,” he says. “At some point discovered digging, and then it became a game about digging, and at one point I think I had the name as Dig A Dog A Bone, but in the end, Dig Dog was just too good of a name to pass by.”

To code Dig Dog, Moyher had to rethink his approach not only on how he input code, but the way he laid out code in general. Even things as simple as vertical scroll speed proved to be a factor in just how the game was laid out.

“The process that kind of changed a lot for me as I was building it is I became more of a foxhole coder as I was building the code,” says Moyher. “Back in the day, I used to just bang out code. I would just fire it out with my hands without thinking and work really fast.”

Unfortunately, one part of the game did require Moyher to use his hands: playtesting.

“Yeah. It was a platformer, and there’s a lot of like game feel,” he says. “You have to really play and experience that with a controller, so I guess that’s what happened there.”

“How can I play this as someone totally, totally without my hands”

Moyher overcame a lot of obstacles to code Dig Dog, and he plans to continue to pursue his passion for making games. His condition hasn’t blunted his love for coding, and he continues not only to design games, but also play them — and think about how games could be designed to be more accessible.

“Something else that kind of came up as I was building these things is I was experimenting with the SmartNav 4, and I started playing games with the mouse and the foot pedal,” he says. “I was playing games using just that, mouse-driven experiences, and I was kind of looking at like how could that be done.”

“I just had to be really patient with it as opposed to being like, ‘I don’t even know if I can do this.'”

“There’s a game that came out. I wanna say a year and a half ago, THARSIS. It’s a dice game.Yeah, it’s like a sci-fi dice-rolling survival game…I played the whole game front to back, many playthroughs, just with the SmartNav 4 and the foot pedal,” says Moyher. “And I was like, ‘Wow. I can play this whole game this way.’ And I started looking at other kind of turn-based games, and looking at how can I play this as someone totally, totally without my hands.”

But while speed of play is a factor, Moyher says the real trouble comes when a game has lots of little fiddly bits the player needs to mess with in order to succeed.

“I think things that work well are games where you have large hit targets to click on, and games where it’s more turn-based,” he adds. “I think I tried another game called RimWorld, and that one was too difficult to play. Too many small things to click on, and the inaccuracies of the mouse made it hard to really fine-tune those pieces.”

Moyher’s story just goes to show that if you’re passionate about something, you can overcome any obstacle. Moyher’s parting words to be should be an inspiration for anyone working in game development:

“By the time I started the project, I had the tools enough in place that I was like, ‘Okay. I’m pretty sure this is possible.’ I just had to be really patient with it as opposed to being like, ‘I don’t even know if I can do this,’ he concludes. “Coding, I think can be hard to learn, but I know anybody can do it, too.”

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s highlights include Bennett Foddy on the pitfalls of perfectionism, a piquant analysis of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, and lots more besides.

It’s the 78th weekly Video Game Deep Cuts (without ever missing one!), and we finally made it over 1,000 subscribers, thanks to a reader linking the Ars Technica DMCA piece we linked last week & prominently plugging the newsletter – thanks for that.

A brief reminder – I’m Simon, I used to make demoscene music & design video games, now I help run GDC and Gamasutra (for my dayjob) & advise/invest in an indie game publisher and work with the Video Game History Foundation & MobyGames (for lulz), and I consume a LOT of video game media, digest it, and excrete it out in your general direction. Thanks for reading!

Until next time,
– Simon, curator.]

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The state of iOS game development, according to the creators of Alto’s Odyssey(Samuel Axon / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“Ars spoke with three key members Team Alto—creative director Ryan Cash, producer Eli Cymet, and designer/developer Jason Medeiros—about what’s new in Odyssey, what iOS game development looks like right now, what implementing Metal support for the first time was like, how Android distribution differs, and more.”

How Slay the Spire’s devs use data to balance their roguelike deck-builder (Samuel Horti / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“So just how have Seattle-based Mega Crit managed to keep the game feeling so tight? And how do they approach the mammoth task of balancing a game this intricate? The key, developers Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano tell Gamasutra, is player feedback. Specifically, it’s about collating data on every single run and turning that into informed, specific changes to particular cards and enemies.”

What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special (Game Maker’s Toolkit / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Developer intention can often come at the expense of accessibility and player preference. In this video, I look at some recent games that have found a middle ground.”

Weta Gameshop, Dr. Grordbort’s Ray Guns and The Hunt For Magic Leap Gaming (Brian Crecente / Glixel – ARTICLE)
“If it weren’t for Magic Leap you might be playing a new version of Team Fortress 2 created by the Weta Workshop special effects artists behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy. [SIMON’S NOTE: big Weta fan here – I own several physical Dr. Grordbort’s guns, haha – but it’s going to be interesting to see how they make it work in AR, esp. given it’s their first interactive game product.]”

Double Fine’s indie publishing biz aims to grow and help devs ‘rise above the noise’ (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“It’s been roughly four years since the debut of Double Fine Presents, the indie publishing business Double Fine has been loathe to brand an indie publishing business. Presents has been intriguing from the start: an indie game publishing program in all but name, run by an established indie studio with a history of getting burned by other publishers.”

Bennett Foddy on the pitfalls of perfectionism (The Creative Independent / Kickstarter – ARTICLE)
“It’s better to put something out there that’s flawed and have people respond to it and criticize it and then come back to their criticisms with another piece of work than to try to sit and endlessly polish something until it’s completely beyond criticism.”

DF Retro: Panzer Dragoon/Panzer Dragoon Zwei: Sega Saturn Masterpieces (Digital Foundry / YouTube – VIDEO)
“DF Retro takes a look at two genuine Sega Saturn classics – Panzer Dragoon and the phenomenal Panzer Dragoon Zwei. The technology, the ports, the art direction – these games are wonderful pieces of work worth celebrating today.”

Road to GDC: I’m Not A Doctor, but I Simulate One in VR (Noah Falstein / Glixel – ARTICLE)
“We are moving into a future where games train our doctors, monitor our health, and treat our illnesses. It may seem a bit outrageous now, but if comic books led me into a career making video games and often become the basis of mainstream movies, why can’t video games inspire the next generation of doctors and become the basis of medical treatment?”

Into the Breach turns mech vs. kaiju battles into a game of sci-fi chess (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game, along the lines of the Advance Wars series, where players control futuristic mechs fighting off an invasion of giant, bug-like alien monsters. It’s basically Pacific Rim crossed with XCOM, and it’s from the creators of the addictive spaceship simulator FTL: Faster Than Light. If any of those words sound appealing to you, you’re going to like Into the Breach a lot. [SIMON’S NOTE: my ‘this is a review & you should really check this game out’ link of the week…]”

Video Game History is Black History (Jeremy Saucier / Strong Museum Of Play – ARTICLE)
“Although Africans and African Americans have been (and remain) underrepresented in game development professions, pioneering black engineers and game designers such as Gerald “Jerry” Lawson and Ed Smith played important roles in the burgeoning video game industry. Working in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, Lawson led the team that designed the Fairchild Channel F (1976), the first home video game console with removable game cartridges.”

How Augmented Reality Is Shaping The Future Of Play (Arielle Pardes / Wired – ARTICLE)
“If you ask 13-year-old Keanu Snyder what he wants for his birthday, he won’t tell you about Nerf blasters or Playstation games. He’ll tell you all about augmented reality. Maybe a new shooter game that lets you zap digital targets around the house, or an experience that makes you feel like you’re traveling the solar system like a galactic explorer. [SIMON’S NOTE: related – ‘The AR & AI tech taking New York Toy Fair by storm‘.]”

Let’s talk about… violent video game research (Mark DeLoura / Gamasutra Blogs – ARTICLE)
“Politicians pursue these conversations because of the concerns they hear from their constituents. Moral panic about new technologies is not uncommon — witness the flood of concerned articles about smartphone overuse, for example, or you can flip all the way back to Plato and read his concerns about the terrible impact learning to write would have on people’s willingness to exercise their memory.”

Predicting 2018 sales based on past data (Jake Birkett / Grey Alien Games – ARTICLE)
“Cash flow is super-important. I need to know how much money I can expect to earn from game sales, tax breaks and whatever else may come my way in order to know how much runway (months I can afford to pay myself to work) I’ve got… In order to predict cash flow for 2018, I looked at my 2016 sales and worked out how much revenue has dropped by in 2017. Then I used that drop to predict 2018 sales (see below). [SIMON’S NOTE: a very practical article for devs with a game catalog, but interesting stuff nonetheless…]”

EA Spouse, 14 Years Later: How One Person Tried Correcting EA Culture (Matt Paprocki / Glixel – ARTICLE)
“A minute past midnight on November 10th, 2004, Electronic Arts labor practices came under fire in a Live Journal post titled “EA Spouse.” In the weeks and months to come, the anonymous EA Spouse was found to be Erin Hoffman-John, author and wife of an EA developer. In the first full paragraph, Hoffman asks, “I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?””

Three Short Arguments on The Secret of Monkey Island (Innuendo Studios / YouTube – VIDEO)
“The adventure game has long positioned itself as the genre that treats games as a storytelling medium in the same way the novel treats prose and film, television, and theater treat performance…. But The Secret of Monkey Island, what I’d argue is the most influential graphic adventure game ever made, has a theme. In fact, it has two. [SIMON’S NOTE: do not miss this, it’s RATHER good – read the transcript if you have to.]”

Cave STG – 15th Anniversary Interview (Arcadia / Shmuplations – ARTICLE)
“This interview first appeared in the March 2010 edition of Arcadia magazine. While the machinations of Cave have been covered exhaustively on shmuplations, this interview still manages to have some new, meaty conversation about the design of Dodonpachi, Esp.ra.de, and Ikeda’s early days at Toaplan. [SIMON’S NOTE: Nice to see Shmuplations back after a looong hiatus.]”

Reimagining failure in strategy game design in Into the Breach (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“What’s in a failstate? For many games, from RPGs to tactics games, failure comes with the death of your characters. Your party might have met a sticky end in the bowels of a dungeon, or your fighters might have perished at the hands of mercenaries in a battle. Success, on the other hand, is getting them through unscathed. Into the Breach, the excellent new turn-based mech tactics game from Subset Games, developer of FTL: Faster Than Light, is different.”

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine review – the joy of sharing stories (Edwin Evans-Thirlwell / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Created by Gone Home programmer Johnnemann Nordhagen in partnership with a scattered throng of writers, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine sees you wandering a rich yet desolate continent, collecting tall tales and sharing them so that they can prosper and mutate. The game’s key thrill is of hearing a yarn you know well come back to you in a new, outlandish guise. [SIMON’S NOTE: another ‘please read the review and check this game out’ klaxon.]”

Tone Control 21: Meggan Scavio (Steve Gaynor / Idle Thumbs – PODCAST)
“Anyone who’s been to GDC knows, it’s a massive, vibrant, overwhelming, inspiring event. As a game developer, it’s one of the most important weeks of the year– and holy hell, it seems like a lot to manage, generally! So I spoke to Meggan Scavio, longtime General Manager of GDC (who’s now moved on to be President of the AIAS, running the DICE conference instead) about her years helping to shape what GDC is, and how she came to run some of the biggest and most exciting game development events in the world.”

Designing Florence to convey the ineffable feeling of being in love (Joel Couture / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
““Florence is like a map of a whole relationship,” says dev Ken Wong, creative director at Mountains. “Being able to find yourself on that map, or remembering that you once walked the same path and made it through, is reassuring.””

The Story Behind the All-Woman Team Who Invented the Otome Genre (Anne Lee / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“Otome games can span thematic genres from samurai drama to sci-fi, and sometimes include RPG or simulation game elements. However, despite the fact that they have gradually gained popularity outside of Japan with titles such as Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom and Amnesia: Memories, there is little information in English about the ground-breaking development team that started it all.”

The Secret Hunters Of Destiny (Jason Schreier & Kirk Hamilton / Kotaku – PODCAST)
“For the past few weeks, Kirk Hamilton and I have been producing a special scripted episode of Kotaku Splitscreen, our weekly podcast. It’s about the Secret Hunters of Destiny, a group of hardcore players who spent thousands and thousands of hours digging into the nooks and crannies of Bungie’s popular shooter. Since Destiny launched, the game’s intrepid Secret Hunters have found elation, disappointment, and plenty of exotic weapons.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

If you were a fan of last year’s Horizon Zero Dawn, and happen to be also be attending GDC 2018, good news! Not only are there a billion* talks about the game, there’ll be an entire postmortem of the game’s design process from Guerrilla Games lead designer Eric Boltjes. 

As has been the case for several weeks on Gamasutra, we couldn’t wait to hear Boltjes give his talk, so we invited him onto the Gamasutra Twitch channel for a chat about his work on Horizon Zero Dawn. You should absolutely still make time to see his session at GDC, but while we had him on, we tried to get some helpful insight for game developers hoping to learn from Horizon Zero Dawn’s success. 

You can view our full conversation up above, but in case you’re staring down a Thunderjaw as we speak, we’ve highlighted 3 key takeaways for your perusal below. 

*not actually a billion

Using DLC to subvert player expectations

Our time on the stream was spent in the new content that exists in The Frozen Wilds, Horizon Zero Dawn’s story expansion from late last year. What’s notable about this section of the game, and something Boltjes emphasized about its development, was that it became a space to upend player expectations about the game loop, and create creatures and scenarios that fly in the face of patterns taught in the main game. 

Boltjes admitted that was sort of a risky move, especially with the new Burner machines, dog-like robots that shoot fire and explosive ammunition, and whose attack patterns defy a lot of the “large creature, slow movement” rhythms that make up the rest of the game. Elsewhere, a typical open-world “climb the tower to get the map objectives” encounter turns instead into a fetch quest that introduces one of those difficult new Burner enemies…as we learned to our dismay during our stream… 

For other developers, it’s worth looking at The Frozen Wilds and considering the risks of making DLC content like this, especially when it’s primarily aimed at a fraction of your core player base. 

Tuning stealth indicators was about analyzing a “return” to stealth, not losing stealth

As our conversation rolled along, one viewer in chat asked Boltjes about tuning the game’s stealth mechanics, most noticeably in how enemy characters detect the player when they’re trying to be stealthy. Since Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t primarily a stealth game, Boltjes says, but rather a kind of hunting game, stealth takes on a different role, so designing a “detection” system took a different level of thought. 

According to him, part of the way to achieve this was to give players more leniency in being caught the first time by AI opponents, but making it difficult to fade back into stealth, to encourage players to follow through with whatever battle encounter they started. It’s a kind of stealth design that (hopefully) helps reinforce the sensation of hunting, even though the ‘prey’ is these oversized machines. 

Crafting economies are tough to test

Boltjes’ biggest tease for his upcoming GDC talk was a discussion about Horizon Zero Dawn’s crafting economy, and how it was really difficult to tune and test because it effectively involved measuring run-throughs of the full game. He explained that it was really easy to test how that economy worked within the games’ first 8-10 hours, because a playtester working through that section of the game. But playtesters who were focusing on finishing the story over 2 or 3 days weren’t able to provide feedback on what it would look like if they also focused on side-quests or over-gathered resources in certain areas. 

Boltjes didn’t have a solution for us on stream, but if you’re working on a crafting economy, stories about his struggles may be of use to you when analyzing your own game’s long-term flow. 

For more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

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The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: London, England​

CCP London is currently building a new team to lead development on a new and highly ambitious MMORPG. We are looking to grow a relatively small, tight-knit team, capable of delivering big ideas through experience, smart process, and world-class tools.

As part of this, we are looking for an experienced Engineer to join the team, who will be responsible for developing a wide range of gameplay features and games systems. You will maintain exceptionally high standards in code quality, polish and “gameplay feel”.

You will be an experienced programmer, with good knowledge of C++ and ideally experience developing with Unreal Engine 4. You will have experience in the implementation and maintenance of various game systems, including AI, navigation, combat and real-time networking, as well as experience with game debugging and optimization. 

We are looking for someone who is versatile and proactive, and willing to contribute to a wide range of engineering tasks. While experience with developing gameplay and game systems is essential, it would also be great to hear of your experiences or passions with other aspects of game development, including tools, UI / UX, build systems or rendering. 

A passion for video games is a must, and experience developing or playing MMOs is definitely a bonus. If this sounds like you then we would love to hear from you! 

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

This interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.

Echo takes players to a palatial space station, one eerily filled with clones of the heroine that shift and adapt to the player’s style, taking their actions as their own. Before long, players will have to learn how to defeat their own tactics and combat movements, constantly trying to stay ahead of themselves.

Gamasutra spoke with Martin Emborg of ULTRA ULTRA, developers of the Excellence in Visual Art-nominated title, to talk about creating the striking space station players will battle through, as well as the thematic and gameplay concerns that were addressed by the game’s art style.

What’s your background in making games?

After graduating from the Danish Design School, I got a job at IO-Interactive, and I ended up staying with them for almost 10 years! During that time, I got to try my hand at many of the disciplines that go into making a good gaming experience, learning from some wonderful people – a few of which actually ended up joining Ultra Ultra to make Echo!

How did you come up with the concept?

We’ve been asked this many times, but man, it’s a hard question… The Palace itself was probably the original spark, inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, which Christel (who wrote Echo) had introduced me to. We both have a strong affinity for high concept science fiction, and especially the kind that confronts you with the unknown. We wanted that sense of awe and wonder, and the idea of a planet-sized splendid maze certainly had the potential to provide that. But what would you face in those maddeningly infinite halls? It’s hard to separate idea from process after the fact, but somewhere along the line came the idea of you coming face to face with yourself, and we ran with it!

What development tools were used to build your game?

We build the game in Unreal 4 – We shipped on a modified version of 4.11. It was awesome to be able to just download Unreal and then be operating at AAA levels from the word go. As for software packages, beyond that, we’re all over the map. People just use what they’re comfortable with.

How much time have you spent working on the game?

Around three years. A half year getting the company up and running, finding funding and being anxious about the decision, and then 2.5 years of actual production.

What drew you to use the striking art style of Echo? What thoughts went into creating the striking, palatial space station players explore?

Beautiful malevolence is just so much more unsettling than the decrepit kind, in our opinion.

The palace aesthetic tabs into many aspects of the game, both from a narrative and thematic perspective. I don’t want to give too much away by going into the culture that created the structure, but let’s just say it reflects their arrogant world-view. Hopefully the environments also convey a sense of having entered some kind of afterlife, one containing both the elevated and the outcast.

Thematically, the repetition and symmetry of ornamentations found in real world palaces like Versailles and the Winter Palace just fits perfectly in a game called Echo, where you play against replications.

What do you feel this style added to the unsettling experience of being stalked by clones of yourself? In setting the game’s mood?

As mentioned above, our objective was to transport players into the unknown, and they are completely used to the typical dark oil-rig/submarine style space stations, having experienced plenty of games and movies set in those! So, in order to take them out of that comfort-zone, we take them elsewhere.

From a more practical perspective, we wanted a bright location so that the effect of the blackouts would be clear, but at the same time we didn’t want the surroundings to be too easily read. We wanted the eyes and minds of the players to be continuously scanning and searching the surroundings, so the high frequency of detail in an ornate Palace hopefully achieved that.

There is a beauty in the UI that surrounds En (the heroine). How did you come to create this endlessly-shifting flow of information and give it a visual form?

Our design sensibilities with regards to the suit and HUD/UI was, very much in contrast to the surroundings, completely utilitarian, actually; it needed to be functional first and foremost. The idea for the radar “orb” arose during prototyping – we’d made arrows that pointed towards enemies, but it wasn’t really communicating anything about distance, so the basic task became to try and make a kind of holographic mirror-ball surrounding the character in game-space that would allow you to perceive what was going on around her.

Design-wise I think it’s one of our bigger achievements. Once you get used to it, you almost stop noticing that it’s even there, and it becomes a natural extension of your senses within the game world.

Being attacked by clones of yourself throughout the game should get visually dull. How did you work to avoid this in Echo?

Haha, I’m not sure we did! Perfect copies have no variation after all! In the beginning, as they evolve, and when you encounter one you killed earlier, rematerialized by the Palace, they appear as incomplete, twisted abominations, but we didn’t do this to battle visual dullness, but to tell the player something. The aesthetic throughout Echo is carefully anchored in repetition and symmetry.

Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any games you’ve particularly enjoyed?

Cuphead is just delightful! Insanely hard, yes, but delightful. The craftsmanship that went into that is impressive, and obviously done with a steady hand.

What do you think are the biggest hurdles (and opportunities) for indie devs today?

Being noticed is the biggest hurdle, definitely. You can make a super great game, and still, you’ll completely disappear in the throng. We were lucky to get quite a lot of attention from the gaming media as well as streamers, and still the most frequent thing we hear is “Why haven’t I heard of Echo before?!”.

Valve’s monthly hardware survey reports that the Oculus Rift has risen in popularity on Steam, to the point that it has knocked the Rift from its usual position as the most used VR headset on the platform.

While the Rift’s new number one ranking is notable and bodes well for the headset’s presence on the typically Vive-led platform, game developers should keep in mind that participation in the hardware and software survey is entirely optional for Steam users, so the data shown doesn’t represent VR use of Steam’s entire user-base as a whole.

All in all, the Rift now boasts roughly 2 percent lead over the Vive. February’s numbers show the Oculus Rift accounting for 47.31 of the VR headsets on the platform, while the Vive is now only used by 45.38 percent of reporting VR users. 

Both PC-bound headsets have received a fair number of price cuts during the last year or so that could be responsible for the slow rise in VR usage, and Oculus has notably been more aggressive than HTC when slicing prices. 

The last cut from Oculus knocked $100 off of the price tag, bringing the Rift headset and controller bundle down to $399. One month earlier, the price of the Vive dropped from $799 to $599, though, even with the $200 cut, HTC’s headset is still a fair bit more expensive than the Rift.

Overall, roughly .28 percent of reporting Steam users have VR headset plugged into their PC. Looking at Steam’s entire reporting userbase as a whole, the Rift is now used by .14 percent of users, up .02 percent from January, while the HTC Vive is used by .13 percent, up .01 percent from last month.

While the percentages show an increase, Valve notably doesn’t release the number of users that use each headset or the number of people that opt into the hardware survey overall, so the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Most game releases feel like an explosion. Pressure rises for months until the big boom of the release, followed by an incredibly calm, often boring, period.

The release of The Witcher 3 didn’t feel this way.

It was more like climbing back down after reaching the top of a mountain. You are tired and your feet hurt, but it’s not really over.

From this point on, however, things would slowly get better.

This post is the third part of a longer story. Read part 1 or part 2.

Signs of improvement

A few months after my first raise, my financial situation stabilizes.

It takes most of the money from my raise, but I move into the apartment I still live in today, for an additional 100 euros a month. What an improvement that is! I now feel good when I am home and I am pretty sure the birds sing better around here.

The other great news of the end of 2014 is that I finally reimburse one of the banks, so my payments drop by half.

I am 26 when the Witcher 3 comes out and I earn 1250 euro after taxes. My living expenses, including my student loan, leave me 300 euros. Half of it goes into a saving account, which gives me 150 euros to do things like going out, enjoy a good movie or buy a game here and there.

Things are starting to look better, but hell… I have been living like a student for the past 8 years. Honestly, I don’t understand how people even afford to buy a car in one lifetime.

Surprise, surprise

Let’s jump back to May 2015.

Now that the game has been released, each employee gets called in over a few weeks, for their annual review. It is the opportunity to hear what management and your team think of your work, as well as to give some feedback on how you feel here and what the company should improve.

Crunch, salaries, management, there’s not a single point I forget to talk about. I try to balance everything out with some good stuff about working here: the incredibly talented people, the creative freedom, and the responsibilities. I also hear some very positive feedback about my work, so that’s great.

After about 30 minutes, the review is coming to an end. I am about to stand up when my lead starts talking again.

“One last thing. The release of the game is the opportunity for the company to offer a salary bump to all the employees”

Oh?

“We’ve been very satisfied with your work and agreed to give you an 18% raise. It’s amongst the highest bumps, so congratulations.”

*Animated GIF of a rapper wearing an extravagant outfit and making the money rain*

To create a company… why not?

We are about a year after the release of The Witcher 3. Since then, I had the opportunity to work on the first big DLC for the game. Some people crunched to make it happen. I didn’t.

Among the improvement that followed the release of the game, there is the more lenient policy on crunch. It’s still a thing but much less encouraged.

One thing I haven’t talked about yet is my long-term goal for my career.

When I started school, I built a clear plan: I would work 10 years as a designer, to gather experience, then create my own company using what I had learned.

Since then, I had cut it down to 8 years, so that I would create my company when I would be 30 instead of 32. Round number, nice and smooth.

Only I start to meet several people who already own a company while working at CDProjekt. Apparently, to create a company is not such a big deal. One of my good friend, Łukasz S. – the designer who actually interviewed me 4 years prior – tells me he can set me up if I want.

Is it that hard to create a company?

Here is how it works:

• He gives me the contact to an accountant friend of his
• I pay her a 50 euros fees per month
• She takes care of everything. Opening the company, keeping it running, taxes. Everything.

Running a company in Poland would apparently cost me 100 euros per month for the first 2 years, then 400 euros monthly.

I basically just learned that for 150 euros per month, my dream can come true right now. Of course, I wouldn’t have any employees or anything but…

I have been working on several side projects since few years, even in the middle of the crunch. I just cannot help it, having my own projects is, weirdly, a way to get my mind off work.

I am thinking that doing something more serious with these projects on the side could compensate for the money that I am not making. Indeed, I learned the concept of “Financial freedom” recently.

It’s the idea of having a cash flow that does not require you to work full time on something but still make a living out of it. For example, having a bunch of apartments that you rent, or in my case, building an online service that does not require constant maintenance.

Financial freedom means that you work because you want to, not because you have to.

I also live by a saying that I made up: it goes something like “You will run out of time before you run out of fear”. Meaning that if you wait to feel ready before taking action, you will often be too late.

This works for every situation where I need to gather some courage or prepare myself for doing something – like giving a talk in front of 200 people or, worse, approaching a stranger.

Fun fact: I rewrote this saying for this post, cause it initially was “if you wait to be ready, then when you will be ready… it will be too late”.
Why don’t you come up with a saying before judging, hm?

Plus, this 2 years timer before I have to pay full price is the perfect kind of motivation to push me forward. You are never as productive as when you have your back against the wall.

So I give it some thoughts, and a few days later, decide to contact the accountant.

I will open my company while still working at CDProjekt RED.

About the name of my company

It actually took me weeks after I contacted the accountant to give her the go. I spent all this time trying to come up with a name for my company. I may be opening it on the side, but this shall ultimately become the company of my dreams.

It deserves a proper name.

Since I am a kid, my goal has always been simple: I want to make the best games on earth. The baseline is still the same nowadays but my experience added to my mission statement.

You see, one day, during a heated meeting where I was being vocal against the idea of crunch, someone from management told me something that represents the views of many:

“Ryan, do you know a single game company that produced a critically acclaimed game without crunching?”

This single statement is the whole reason why crunch doesn’t disappear.

The answer that ran through my mind – but not through my mouth – was “I’ll show you”.

I could talk about crunch for hours, but I will just summarize my beliefs here. It’s quite lengthy, so feel free to skip if you are not interested.

• I believe that crunching for one or two weeks does boost productivity. It’s actually even fun and creates some bonding in the team.
• I believe that the results of 10 hours of intellectual work when someone has been crunching for more than two weeks is below the results this same person would provide with a fresh mind, over 8 hours.
• I believe that when you force people to crunch for more than 2 weeks, the amount and duration of breaks they take explode. This make them work about the same amount of time as without crunch, only without the feeling of rest.
• I believe that you never have enough time for a project, no matter its size, and crunch always appears as the only solution. If we all agreed that a normal day was 18 hours long, crunching for 23 hours would still feel like the only possible solution.
• I believe that if we could go back in time and give all critically acclaimed projects we love 6 more months to be developed, the team would still crunch and think “we would not have been able to make it without crunch”, even though the version they had 6 months ago was already top-sales worthy.
• I believe that a good team will always produce a good product, and a bad team a bad one. No matter how much time they have to put it together.
• I believe that crunch still exists because people still feel cool when they say “I haven’t slept in 2 days”. I sure do.
• I believe that crunch is the result of the line of thought “If they can do this with 40 hours a week, imagine what they can do with 60!”, which is the same concept as “If Usain Bolt can run 100 meters in  9.58 seconds, he can probably run around the globe in a few days”.
• I believe that once you started to crunch and you are still running late, it’s impossible to say “Let’s work less”, because of how counter intuitive the idea is. The right thing to do is to start working smarter, but that’s way less intuitive.

On top of making great games, what I strive to build is a company that would do things in a way I believe is right. A company that wouldn’t just do things because “it is how it is”. There are so many things I truly believe to be wrong and that we still do because “everybody does it”, or because it’s the easy answer. Because it makes money, even if it’s commonly accepted as bad.

$9.99 price tags. Why are they still legal?

I want to build a company so that next time someone says “Do you know any successful company that doesn’t do X”, a Ryan – or any other name – somewhere can answer “Yes” and point at it as an example.

So after weeks of searching, I decided to call my company Lodestar Team.

Here is a definition

Turns out, in Poland, people don’t really care much about the name of their companies.

So my accountant went ahead and registered my company as “RYAN GAMES”.

Fortunately, it’s not so hard to change the name your company is registered under and I eventually got it changed to Lodestar Team.

 

Promises

Creating my company was only the first domino on the chain that would lead to me quitting.

After the release of The Witcher 3, I get contacted by headhunters on a monthly basis.

The thing is, I am starting to feel good again at CDProjekt RED. I moved back to Cyberpunk 2077 and I have crazy responsibilities. I am in charge of the design of the A.I and systems for the whole game. Crunch is now a thing of the past (and even if it was not, I already decided that I would rather lose my job than crunch again) and my finances are good enough for Warsaw.

However, for months, I get hammered with stunning offers. And if you remember, one of my rules is that I now want to be paid fairly for the time and skills I put in a project.

The final hammer strikes when I decide to follow up with a job offer for London.

Just to see how it goes.

The temptation

The first interview goes very well and they fly me over for an on-site meeting. There, I end up having lunch with the CEO and some other high executives.

I am happy because they are paying and I haven’t had such expensive food in forever.

I end up talking most of the time – sharing my experience on The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, as well as at Ubisoft Paris -, the mouth full of delicious sweet potato fries.

Their projects look interesting, but the only problem is that they are Free 2 play.

Free 2 play (or F2P) are games that you can play for free. These games have a reputation for being designed in a way that exploits psychological tricks so that players will buy in-game elements.

Not all F2P are evil or born from bad intentions. But I do have a problem with the idea of designing a game mechanic, not for the love of creating an entertaining experience, but as a way to push someone to spend money.

A week after this event, I am back in Warsaw when I receive their offer (it was in pounds but I’ll translate to euros): 42k euro per year.

That’s 3400 euros per months. It’s exactly double my salary.

I am flattered, but really, I wouldn’t be happy working on F2P, plus is not really London but a small town nearby.

I tell the headhunter to say that I am happy they liked me but I don’t think I want to work on such projects. I also hope they will find someone because they are great guys.

Less than 30 minutes after, the headhunter calls me again. The new offer is 44K euro, 3600 euros a month. It’s not such a big difference with the first offer, so I stay on my decision.

One hour later, another call. 49K euro. 4000 euros a month.

I am speechless. I tell him I need time to think it over.

I think it hard. Will money make it okay to do something against my beliefs? I mean, it’s not such a bad F2P… these people are just trying to make it work, not to abuse players…

I fight myself until I agree that I don’t want this job. What I want is the money. I spend way too much time trying to convince myself, it’s obvious that I am not interested. If it was just about money, I could have picked another job.

I ultimately refuse and decide to stay at CDProjekt.

It’s the headhunter’s turn to be speechless

 

A seed was planted

From here on, things are not the same anymore. Companies are willing to pay a lot to hire me, and I am working for the one that pays me the less. It’s a hard thing to ignore.

Eaten away by the thought, I explain the situation to my Lead.

Just a week later, I have a meeting with HR, my Lead, and the Design Director where they explain that they have plans for me.

First, they were already talking about giving me a senior position. They believe I deserved it, and I just need to improve some small areas to get it. They chose to be open and tell me what I have to improve, to make sure I get the promotion within 3 months.

For the second thing, the director shows me a graph on a big screen. It’s an organigram for the whole team. Something he has in mind for Cyberpunk 2077.

It goes from the left with Adam Badowski, Head of the studio, then move to the right to the Directors, Leads, Seniors, Specialists and finally Juniors on the right end. He points at a little square close the left edge and says “I would like you to take this position”.

Lead AI Design. A whole team of designers, just for me. Oh yes.

I do the calculation, a promotion means a 20% raise, the maximum possible. I will get one for moving to Senior, and another 20% on top of that for a Lead position. Ok.

I thought about it later, and even with the two promotions, I would have ended up at 2200 euros… which is half the offer I had.

But I still have another 3 months without any salary improvement, and the promotion is not 100% guaranteed. So as a sign of good will, the Director tells me that they decided to throw in a 6% raise, effective immediately.

We are at the start of 2016 and here I am, at a fork in my career. The Lead thing is not meant to happen before another year.

• Do I stay in this company for one more year, with a salary way below what any other company would pay me, and trust that they really have plans for me?
• Or do I leave now, stop living like a student and save so that I can build my dream company and a better future for myself?

I would pick the first option, stay and get almost all that was promised to me.

All but one crucial thing, that would justify my decision to leave. The one thing that is tied to all my history with CDProjekt RED: money.

Stay tuned.

Read the 4th and last part:

• Raising up
• Recognition
• Stress
• Standing up for something, or just making excuses? Why I left
• Freedom to fail
• Saying I quit

This series is taken directly from my blog My startup fails, where I share my experience as someone who left his dream job in the game industry to become an entrepreneur.