Category: News

Every Star Wars fan has dreamed of being a Jedi. But what is it about becoming a monk-like guardian of peace and justice that’s so damn appealing? Sure, the lightsabers are cool, and those robes look ridiculously comfy, but we all know the real allure is getting to use the Force to lob stormtroopers around like bipedal putty. 

Respawn was tasked with bringing that incredibly specific power fantasy to life with its latest release, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. To do that, however, the dev team had to figure out how to make Force powers feel real. Grounding the mystical energy field in reality meant ensuring enemies reacted to it in a believable way. In short: when you hurl cannon fodder against at wall, they needed to sell it. 

As explained by Respawn senior software engineer, Bartlomiej Waszak, during his GDC Summer talk, the studio looked to achieve that goal by employing physical animation techniques. Unlike regular animation, which simply sees an object or character cycle through a series of preset movements, physical animation incorporates rag doll physics into animation cycles to allow for more variety and interaction. 

Waszak explained there are three main ways of driving physics to follow animations: either by using motors, velocities, or constraints. 

“The first method is motors. The motor is part of the joint constraint between rag doll bodies, and they use a specified animation target to generate the local force between connected bodies, That local force drives bodies to follow the animation target,” he said.

“The second method is using velocities. In this case we compute a velocity needed to move the body from one place to another during a given frame time. In this way we can force the body to reach the animation target.

“The third method is using constraints. In this instance, we would create a new constraint between the dynamic body of the rag doll and the animation target, and all parameters for this constraint define how we force the dynamic body to follow the animation target.”

In Jedi: Fallen Order, the Respawn team used motors to add physical animation. The technique was useful for creating believable collisions between enemies and objects like crates and walls. 

The was once instance, for example, where the team needed to ensure a death animation worked in confined spaces. It looked fine in wide open areas thanks to the use of rag doll physics towards the end of the animation, but in corridors or rooms where walls were present, limbs would often clip through objects as the enemy attempted to cycle to the final stages of that animation sequence. 

In this case, the root body of a stormtrooper — which is the ‘hip body’ highlighted in red above — was trying to perform an acrobatic flip in a small area where it simply wasn’t possible. The team still wanted that root body to move in the same way, but needed to stop it clipping as a result. 

“The solution was to keep the hip body as a physically simulated body and create a new constraint for that body,” continues Waszak. “That constraint is between the hip body and the given animation target. This new constraint drags the physics body of the hip bone to follow the animation target, and removes all degrees of freedom. 

“The question was, with this new solution, what happens when we have an obstacle? So what happens when the hip body hits a wall and the animation target still pushed forward? What do we do about that physical body that’s colliding with the wall?

“What we do is monitor the distance between the actual position of the hip body and the desired animation target. If the constant drive for that hip body is unable to hit the target within some threshold, we just switch to a free-fall rag doll mode.”

Switching to a free-fall rag doll mode as soon as the hip body meets that threshold results in stormtroopers slumping into walls when flung backwards with the Force (as shown below). It instantly sells the power of abilities like ‘Force push,’ while preventing arms and legs from clipping through the environment.

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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This is a reproduction of the original post at UpYourGame.

When I was just starting out directing art and experience for games, I was assigned a big, high-priority game project. It was a wonderful opportunity to showcase my team’s capability and make a name for myself, and I was quite excited. The theme of the game was Irish, and the art style was cartoony. I spent a whole week researching art styles, colour palettes and creating mood boards; of the six artists in my team, I chose the most experienced and had a long kickoff meeting where we discussed the project at length and pored over all the research material I had carried out.

A few days later, as I looked at the first sketches, they didn’t feel right. I spent another day looking trying to figure out why it just wasn’t right, and another few hours with the artist. The next day, as I saw the updated sketches, it wasn’t looking any closer to the vision I had of the final game art. I was desperate.

Just then, I happened to pass by the desk of the youngest artist in our team, a lad just out of art school a few months ago. He had his Artstation page open, and I happened to see something that almost made me spill my coffee. It was a Leprechaun, a character done in a Cartoony style that was EXACTLY what I had in mind for the Big Project. I asked him to show me more, and I had found what I was looking for.

I assigned the project to the young lad, thanking the senior artist for his time and effort. Long story short, that game went on to become the biggest hit the studio had for the last five years. I recommended that young artist for a 70% pay rise at the next review, and he was promoted to Senior Game Artist within six months of release. It was the game that made my reputation.

When it comes to making a successful game, great Art is only one of the several pieces of the puzzle that need to fall into place, but it is a very important one. In this post, I will tell you about five hard-earned lessons I have learned from making dozens of games over a period of more than a decade.

It doesn’t matter if you are a game artist, game designer, producer or any other role; these lesson can be applied universally to the game-making process.

#1: UNDERSTAND THE ARTIST’S STRENGTHS AND MOTIVATION

This follows from the story I just narrated; every game Artist is unique in what he or she is good at, and more importantly what he or she aspires to do. The closer a project is aligned with the artist’s personal goals and preferences, the better it is likely to go. Asking an artist to create game art in a style that is far removed from their preferred one is pretty risky; it takes hundreds or maybe even thousands of hours of practice to develop a particular style, and most artists will struggle to work at short notice in a style that is alien to them.

This does mean that you are kind of limited when it means exploring art styles for your game; there are a couple of things you can do to change this. Firstly, plan well in advance and allow the artist sufficient time and space to practice and develop the required style, and secondly, find an artist who can do that art style! This is one of the reasons why many game studios doing lots of small projects work with art outsourcing studios instead of hiring full-time artists.

Personally, I like to maintain an art team with a wide variety of skills. I have one artist who does great concept art for environments, another does cartoony style really well, one old-school artist who can make super-realistic poster style art and a few more generalist who can do a bit of everything among them.

#2: THOROUGH PRE-PRODUCTION AND PROTOTYPING

This is absolutely vital; I have seen many, many projects crash and burn because the team just did not take the time and make the effort to ask the three questions: WHY are we making this game? WHAT are we making? HOW will we make it? Game art needs to closely support the game mechanics, narrative and player emotional journey, and to achieve this, it is vital that the team (or individual) goes carries out a systematic pre-production before the production art phase of the game (creation of assets) begins.

From an art standpoint, the following questions need to be asked (and answered)-

> What are our resources for creating the game art (this means number of artists available, their experience level, availability in terms of hours per day etc.)? > Will this art style support the game mechanics?

“If we want to do a side-scrolling platformer, is Voxel art really the best choice?”

> How many hours (approximately) will it take to create the game art? This is where game asset lists come in really handy! It is a big help to the game project if you have an idea (however rough) about how much time it will take to create each art asset, as there will either be a programming, world building or design task dependent on it!

> Can we actually pull this off? You might think a steampunk-inspired game world with fifty different characters would be awesome, but do you actually have the expertise to create everything AND make it look as good as it does inside your head?

Prototyping is a fantastic way of reducing the risk of your project. If there is a game mechanic in there that involves very specific art or visuals, build a prototype at the pre-production stage! If it works well, you’ve just completed a key part of your game and you can then build the game around it. If it doesn’t, then you just saved months of work that would have gone down the drain. Prototyping unproven mechanics is a win-win!

#3: REVIEW PROGRESS REGULARLY

There’s nothing worse than spending a hundred hours making an art asset and then having it rejected out of hand (and needing to start over). So if there are other stakeholders in the game project (such as a client, an Art Lead or a Producer) that have a say in how the game looks, regular reviews of the art should take place (ideally every day, or even twice a day) so that if the artist takes a wrong turn, he/she doesn’t proceed too far down that path before being corrected.

As a corollary to this- if you are the one reviewing the art, learn to look at Work In Progress art and imagine what the finished product will look like. Use your imagination and try to picture what the finished art asset will be (after five or six more hours of work); it takes some doing, but it is very much possible.

Even though I’m game art director, I get artwork approved by my own boss (the studio head) and sometimes domain experts on particular games. On some projects that have a very particular ask, such as an art style that we’ve never tried before, I don’t wait for my artists to finish the artwork; I keep sending my boss sketches as well to track that my team is on track.

Sending these through e-mail and getting feedback can be a bit tiresome; this where collaboration software like Trello comes in very handy. I use it for the projects where there are multiple stakeholders like myself, an external art team, product managers and technical team (developers) involved.

#4: GAME ART LOOKS DIFFERENT WHEN YOU PUT IT INTO THE GAME

Art assets (characters, props, buildings) may look good when seen in isolation, but that doesn’t mean that they will look as good once you put them into the game; this is because the game has an aesthetic of it’s own and there is usually a “Hierarchy of Attention” for art assets that depends on what you want the player to do, look at, and pay attention to.

For example, if you want the player to play a level where he/she follows a path through the forest guided (subconsciously )by a particular tree/leaf colour, you won’t be able to tell how clear the path is, unless you put trees of different colours and types together into the game and play it. This will take several iterations of leaf size and colour, tree height and probably texture/colour of the ground as well. It may well take a dozen tries to get right, so it is probably a good idea to hold off on final polishing of the tree mesh/texture until you understand which one works best.

Therefore, it is a good idea to keep deploying the assets into the game before ‘clearing’ them; while they look good all by themselves, they may not actually work as well when they are deployed into the game build due to how they work with the other game elements.

#5: CONCEPT ART IS THE BEST THING EVER!

So there’s something called a “Game Art Pipeline”; it’s called that because to maintain an efficient workflow, in most cases a particular sequence needs to be followed as regards the game art production process. Two important points to remember here as regards the game development process-

a) Game projects can have many stakeholders (designers, artists, developers, producers, product team , marketing team, company execs) that have wildly different ideas about how a game should look, and

b) A game project may have more than one artist working on it, where each artist has a unique and particular art style.

These two have the potential to cause massive conflicts (and disruption) to your game. I’ve seen it happen many, many times- there is no agreement on what style the game should follow, and the artists end up doing rework upon rework as a result of trying to make everyone happy, which never happens. Or, different artists create assets in their own style which, when integrated into a game, give the art a disjointed, mis-matched feel.

The key to preventing this, is to build a game art pipeline that starts with concept art! During the pre-production process, the concept artist starts making sketches of what the visuals of the game look like-characters, props, environments and user interface among others. These sketches should then be shown to the stakeholders, and any changes that need to be made, happen at this stage. This prevents conflicts, takes into account the concerns (and opinions!) of the different parties, and shortens the time taken to create the final art of the game. It also prevents fatigue, burnout and loss of motivation among the artists!

If there are different artists working on the same game, the concept art acts as a style guide to what the production art needs to looks like, so that their output is in sync and matches the overall aesthetic of the game. Trust me, this is a very big deal- without concept art to guide them, all artists default to their individual styles and it’s a big mess.

Now I do realize that good concept artists are hard to come by, and are quite expensive to hire. If you can’t afford to hire one, I strongly recommend getting a freelancer to help you out. It’s well worth the money, time and effort!

And to wind it up, here’s a ‘Bonus’ secret thrown in: Your art is only as good as the sounds that accompany it. Great music and sound effects are the secret sauce that bind game art and experience together, so don’t neglect your game’s sounds and music.

Thanks for reading, I would love to hear about your experiences with making games and game art; do comment and let me know all about it.

Mobile developer-publisher Big Run Studios has netted $5.25 million in seed funding, meaning it has raised a total of $6.6 million to date. 

The funding round was led by early stage venture capital company Transcend Fund and joined by Galaxy Interactive, which previously invested $1.4 million into Big Run back in March. 

The cash will allow Big Run to expand operations as it prepares to launch its next mobile title, Big Cooking, which will join a roster than includes other mobile games like Farm Sweeper, Blackout Blitz, Big Hearts, and Big Run Solitaire.

“The additional investment expands our capabilities and accelerates the exciting games we’re cooking up for players,” said company co-founder and CEO, Andrew Bell.

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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In my last post on free to play and mobile design, I talked about gacha and lootbox design. I also mentioned trying the game Arknights and how I was still in the honeymoon period…well, that is over, and it did not end well. For today, we are going to discuss the real wall of playing free to play games.

What Free to Play Values

As everyone knows, the lack of a paywall to get into a free to play game is a major attraction for people to try them out. Without it, designers need to find a way to generate revenue through the player base itself. Even though many mobile games will use ads, that is not the same as gacha and lootbox design as a way of keeping someone invested in playing.

The more addictive games know that if you want to keep someone playing (and hopefully turn them into whale) you need to get them invested, and to do that, you need to create value. A free to play game is not the same as a retail title whose initial paywall covers the investment on the player’s part. Obviously, we are ignoring retail games that have microtransactions for this discussion.

There are only two areas that are left to create investment in free to play games: Time and Money. Many years ago, Valve gave a talk at GDC about the two aspects when it came to Team Fortress 2 and how the game went free to play and generated revenue via the Mann Co store.

In that presentation, they spoke about the concepts of time and money, and how every player values them differently. For one person, they could play a game for hundreds of hours and will rebuke spending even one dollar to buy something; just as someone will happily spend hundreds of dollars if it means accomplishing months of tasks within minutes.

F2P designers have been courting both personalities for years. You can see similar elements across mobile titles: a massive in-game store and banners for people who value time; designing progress around repetitive tasks and grinding for those who value money.

There is nothing “stupid” or “lazy” as gamers have said about developers who make use of these tactics, they know what they are doing, and it is about generating the sunk cost fallacy.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

The sunk cost fallacy is a term used to describe that tendency for someone to keep investing in something due to already having done it before, hence the sunk cost. Free to play designers know that the goal is to get someone to spend money one time—even if it is just a dollar. Once someone has invested into a free to play game, they are more willing to do it again, and more importantly, keep playing.

When we usually talk about the sunk cost fallacy it has to do with spending money, as that is the popular interpretation, but this can also apply to time. For someone who does not want to spend money, there is always the option of spending time. Resources can be earned by repeating content already done, or constantly logging in to repeat a task.

In Arknights, characters require multiple resources to upgrade their various traits. If you do not spend money, you are going to have to repeat missions again and again for those items. Even putting the game at 2X speed, you are still waiting anywhere from one to four minutes watching a map on autopilot to collect said resources. Even though that does not sound like a long time, all those minutes do add up. Again, you are going to be doing this constantly, as said resources are not guaranteed drops, and you have at minimum 11 characters to do this for.

Every F2P game starts out easy to progress, but then puts up this wall as kind of a test to see if the player is invested in continuing to play (or pay). As we talked about in the piece on gacha design, it never truly ends.

From One Wall to the Next

Supporters of F2P design will often say that skilled players do not need to spend money or are good enough at the game to make progress. Another aspect of F2P design not often discussed are the multiple walls of progress. Once you have spent enough money or time on a game to get past that initial wall, many basic tasks or challenges become easier.

During my time in Marvel Strike Force, I routinely earned free materials because my team was high enough to complete special challenges. Arknights features a similar philosophy with daily events whose reward goes up the harder the version you clear.

Breaking through that first wall of progress is like getting a massive weight off your shoulders, and is often that point where players become committed to a game. The sunk cost fallacy is in full effect: “I can’t stop playing, look at how far I’ve come.” And when the player gets committed to one aspect of a game, chances are they are going to commit to everything.

Unfortunately, here is the dirty secret around monetized F2P design—there is always another wall. To keep making progress, you are going to need more resources and higher up characters, which, you guessed it, means more grinding or spending money.

A F2P game that runs out of grinding to do is a dead game, and why they are designed around long-term play and continued updates.

The beauty about scaling content is that there is no such thing as running out of numbers. Every free to play game imaginable has some system that could be extended indefinitely. In Marvel Strike Force, during my time playing the developers kept the rarity system, but raised the max level of characters to 75 instead of 70. Those five additional levels would cost about a million in terms of in-game currency to make that jump.

Not only that but for character-driven games there can be further grinding to unlock a character, and then restarting the grind for each new character the player unlocks.

Gameplay Hostage

What frustrates me as someone who understands game design is how many of the F2P games I’ve looked at have legitimately great systems to them, but as I said in my last post: A game that lives by its gacha design, can also die because of it.

The elements that I complain about: the grind, the repetitive nature, the lack of evolving game systems, those are intentional by the designers. With Arknights, I really like the idea of a character-driven tower defense game, but the elements surrounding that lead to frustration. What hurts the most is that these games are so tethered to their monetization systems, there is no way to make a “retail version” without requiring an entire redesign.

As I said in the previous piece that game titles that are tied to gacha or heavy monetization can live or die because of it. Somewhere, there must be a middle ground between a retail experience and the traditional monetized mobile games. After catching the developers of Arknights in a lie with how they give out premium currency, I have no intention of ever spending money in the game, and possibly just deleting it.

Before the pandemic scuttled all plans in 2020, there were talks about governments cracking down on F2P games in terms of their addictive nature. I have made a promise to myself that I outright refuse to play any videogame that demands my constant time or money to enjoy it. Personally, I think it is a matter of when, not if, for governments to talk about this again, and when that day comes, a lot of games (and their consumers) are going to be left scrambling.

If you enjoyed my post, consider joining the Game-Wisdom discord channel open to everyone.

Final Fantasy VII Remake has shipped and digitally sold over five million copies worldwide, according to Square Enix. 

The developer broke the news on Twitter, but neglected to mention how many of those sales were digital downloads. 

The PlayStation 4 exclusive launched on April 10, 2020, meaning it has passed that milestone after little over five months on shelves. 

Square previously revealed the title had shipped and sold 3.5 million copies within three days of launch, again touting “exceptional digital sales” at the time.

There are a lot of ways to distribute loot in video games. From the loot drops of MMORPGs, to the Pokemon Card Game’s booster packs, to just plain gachapon-based systems, players love to spin the wheel and see the multicolored loot fly out. 

But it turns out when balancing a loot system, it’s not just enough to say “common, uncommon, rare, epic,” seed the loot by power level, and call it a day. The experience of making finely-tuned loot experiences—known in the professional tabletop world as “collating,” is a fascinating mix of art, science, and data. At GDC Summer, former Heroclix game designer Eric Engelhard took the time to break down a series of principles that can help developers make better, more fair-feeling experiences for players. 

To help break down some of Engelhard’s math-laden examples, we’ve selected a few key lessons you can take away from his talk. (But be sure to watch the whole thing once it hits the GDC Vault). 

Build a randomization strategy that lets you communicate EXACTLY how items should be distributed. 

The core component of Engelhard’s talk was the notion of a “Fixed” method of item collation. In fixed collation, a designer creates a randomization formula that first divides the items into rarity tiers, then calculates how items should be distributed by precisely specifying which cards of which rarities should be in which booster packs, which are then arranged into sets of boosters (referred to here as “bricks”), and then boxed again as “cases.” 

This creates specific rules for how items should be arranged in what is encapsulated as a “packout.” If loot is distributed only along the lines of a simple randomization chart, it creates a system that’s not only difficult to fulfill at a physical factory or in programming terms, but also creates long gaps where players won’t have the great loot experiences that make buying booster pack-type items so rewarding. 

Engelhard’s example lets you control, say, what Heroclix figures appear in what boxes, but you can apply this to an MMORPG’s loot table too. If a boss just follows a randomized loot formula, there’s a good chance the rarest loot, though it’s statistically likely to appear, will never drop for some players, even if they defeat said boss at every possible opportunity. (Source, me, having flashbacks to my days raiding Zul’Gurub in the summer of ’07).

Ensure your players can always get a rare item of some kind.

Depending on the sliding scale of your game’s rarity and item-total, you may wind up in a scenario where your distribution system doesn’t guarantee the rarer, high-value items that make your loot system feel good. For instance, if you’re using a 4-tier rarity system (common, uncommon, rare, super-rare), you may wind up with a scenario where players have a 64 percent chance of receiving a rare item, and a 32 percent chance of receiving a super-rare item. 

Applied to each respective item, those values make sense. But combined, they create a 2 percent chance that a player won’t receive either item in a pack. Engelhard demonstrated this with an example from an anonymous online RPG, where he opened 88 booster packs bought in one bulk package. According to the game’s publicly released values, higher-value items were supposed to appear in every 1/8 packs, which should average out to 11 of those items.

He got zero. “A lot of players would have quit the game right then and there. That kind of thing is the rough edge of randomness that I try to minimize with what I do.”

Consider the cost to collect, and make sure your math doesn’t skew it

When distributing loot through randomized systems, there’s still a fixed cost of what it will take to collect items at each reward tier. When figuring out the odds of your individual loot items, this can create some wonky math where even though your loot is prioritized appropriately, once the cost of an individual pack is considered, it creates disparities in an item’s relative value. 

For instance, in one example Engelhard drew up, it was possible for the cost of acquiring common items to be GREATER than acquiring uncommon items. This was because even though the distribution of common to uncommon cards felt ‘fair’ in an isolated instance, it created assymetrical values and drove up the cost of common cards across a larger item set. 

Engelhard’s solution in this example was to increase the chance of common items being found, and decreasing the chance for uncommon items

Don’t let the costs to collect balloon from rarity tier to rarity tier

Once your loot system’s cost-to-collect values are consistent, you may encounter another problem that Engelhard discussed; the cost differences between your different tiers may create an un-fun experience. 

For instance, in a loot set, it may cost $50 to acquire all of a set’s common items, and $80 to collect all its uncommon items. Then it’s $100 to collect all of the rare items. In this case, the delta from common to uncommon is greater than that from uncommon to rare.

Even if your loot system doesn’t have a monetary cost, but measures ‘cost to collect’ in hours played, Engelhard argued it still can create a disjointed feeling for players. 

Re-examine your loot system to make sure it has fun flavor

Once you have your loot table spread out, Engelhard argued that it’s worth diving back into what makes opening packs so much fun, and not just counting on your players being satisfied with another cookie-cutter randomized loot system. While a strong balance in a packout can help ensure your game’s power curve is managed fairly and profitably, he argued that players are still more attached to the surprise factor of opening these packs than the power itself. 

In digital games, this can be done by creating specific rules that help players guarantee valuable loot after a certain amount of time. (Think how Apex Legends guarantees its 1 percent-rate ‘Heirloom’ drops within 500 packs). 

In collectible games broadly, you can think of bonuses that add value to your lower-rarity items. This can happen on the game’s design side, where specific lower-value items have synergy with higher-value items, or on the flavor side, with alternate art schemes or unique aesthetic characteristics that make unspecial items feel more special. 

One of Engelhard’s pleas to developers watching his GDC talk was that they not treat item collation as an afterthought. Engelhard acknowledged that much of the reason that loot distribution systems can feel bad is that designers often don’t have the knowledge on best practices in the world of collation, since the random nature of the business means collation formulas have to be kept a tightly-guarded secret. 

By sharing the tips above (and others that you can see in his full talk), Engelhard hopes that developers can finally outgrow the short-term memory syndrome this practice creates, and establish long-lasting loot principles that can be rewarding for players and developers alike. 

Despite having the word “games” in its title, Riot Games spent the better part of the 2010’s building off of the release of a single game: League of Legends. Late last year, that all began to change with the release of Teamfight Tactics, an autobattler in the vein of Auto Chess, a mod that grew popular in the DOTA 2 community before multiple gamemakers began to develop full titles inspired by it. 

At GDC Summer, Teamfight Tactics design lead David Abecassis finally got to deliver a design-oriented talk that covered why Teamfight Tactics has been such a huge hit: in particular, why it’s been so successful with League of Legends players who may have drifted away from the original game.

Abecassis explained that Riot employees became obsessed with Auto Chess at the start of 2019, loving how it embodied some of the high moments of MOBA games, but compacting them into a more relaxed, non-confrontational experience. If you’re wondering how a game can embody the MOBA genre, but still be “non-confrontational,” Abecassis credits the game’s free-for-all/Battle Royale-type experience, which mathematically lowers the player chances of winning. “It’s quite different from 50-50 PvP games, where if you’re not winning, you’re losing,” he pointed out.

(This is technically true of the autobattler genre as well, but when you have 7 opponents enter and 1 leave, that’s a different experience than the tense team-based combat of League of Legends.)

Since Riot happened to also have a globally popular MOBA lying around, they realized they could build something similar to capture that experience. To that end, Abecassis said it was important for Riot to identify who’d even want to play “League of Legends Auto Chess” anyway. He described the ideal Teamfight Tactics player as someone who still enjoys the competition and mastery found in League of Legends, but who isn’t interested in testing pushing the physical capabilities that the MOBA demands, in favor of a more relaxed experience. 

These players do exist (especially on the older side), and may be an audience orbiting multiple game franchises. 

That characterization informed design decisions on Teamfight Tactics, such as how players acquire units during the game’s planning phase. An earlier build of Teamfight Tactics required players to quickly click around during a 30-second timer to manage their units, in a process called “juggling,” that let them purchase more units than they could store on the bench in order to find the most strategically viable advantage. It was a mechanic that fits the game’s balance, and rewarded high skill, but punished players who couldn’t process information or click quickly. 

The solution was to keep the timer, but limit the total units a player could purchase, and deny them the ability to purchase more units than they could field. This raised some feedback from playtesters, who objected that the juggling mechanic helped the best players rise to the top. But by shifting the team’s design goals, the notion of what determined the “best” players had to be adjusted to fit the game’s new direction. 

Obviously not every developer has the resources to muster a whole other development team to capture a portion of their audience that may be exhausted on their primary game, but if you’re trying to retain a fanbase, it’s an interesting development exercise–even over the span of a year, your players’ tastes and motivations may change, leading them to drift away from high-level play on your live game. 

When this happens, the Teamfight Tactics development story may be a way to help them stick around and still be part of your community. 

This week Blackbird Interactive’s Rory McGuire and Elliot Hudson delivered an interesting GDC Summer talk all about how the studio wound up creating space salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

Launched onto Steam’s Early Access platform in June, Shipbreaker has already earned critical acclaim and a significant fan following. To help fellow devs better understand that success, McGuire and Hudson walked through how the studio came up with the novel concept and, after multiple huge pivots and changes, turned it into a fun game.

Hudson began by outlining Blackbird’s goal to, like Psyonix, Gearbox, and Digital Extremes, build up its internal tech and talent by working on projects for others while trying to succeed with its own original games. After Blackbird shipped Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak at the start of 2016, the studio held an internal game jam to give everyone some room to decompress while keeping busy between projects. 

Five teams of seven or eight people got to work, and when the studio gathered together afterwards to evaluate the results, one project stood out: a game prototype called Hello, Collector that put the player inside the helmet of an astronaut climbing through a debris field adrift in space, a la the film “Gravity” or ADR1FT. 

“The sense in the room was electric, that we had to make Hello, Collector into a game,” said McGuire.”Everyone produced awesome games for the game jam, but I probably had ten people come up to me afterwards that weren’t on the team talking about, are we gonna make this game.”

It was popular enough that McGuire says “it literally took about two days before we had a full green light” to start development; work began within a month. He said the studio was careful not to set specific sales or profitability goals on the project, to avoid influencing the team’s decisions.

“It’s a very human thing that when you set a goal in front of someone, they try to solve it,” said McGuire. To keep the team from being too risk-averse, Blackbird set three general goals for the Shipbreaker team: “We want you to ship…we want you to make an original game that is unusual, and…we want it to be an original IP that is ours.”

Development began with expanding upon everything folks liked about Hello, Collector, starting with the debris field. The team built out a whole space station that was in the middle of collapsing, refined core mechanics, and began honing the tone of the game’s narrative elements.

“We found out we aren’t above gates and milestones”

Work steadily progressed and since it was an internal project, the studio initially decided to enjoy not having to meet any milestones. But within six months or so, the team switched over to a milestone-based production system because it offered convenient, regular opportunities to have people at Blackbird play the game and discuss it together.

“When we first began development…we felt that milestones and gates were…part of the social contract, that business contract, that you get with publishers,” said McGuire. “We realized, actually gates and milestones…let us take a moment to evaluate the game.”

By the end of 2016, the team hit a milestone “confidence check” and the feedback the team got was that Hello, Collector had developed a sort of “cosmic horror” tone with a “dark, slow plodding pace” that didn’t fit with the games Blackbird was making.

So the studio took a month or two to retool it, and by the start of 2017 Hello, Collector began to evolve into Falling Skies, which Hudson simplified as “Fruit Ninja in space” — an exciting, action-heavy game about grappling between warships falling towards Earth and cutting them apart.

But it proved to be too dramatic a shift.

“We were really excited about this concept of cutting, but overall we weren’t happy with where we ended up tonally,” said McGuire. The team had over-corrected, and some felt Falling Skies became too generic by leaning so heavily into an arcade action game with a super-capable space-grappling, ship-slicing protagonist. 

“In trying to address the concerns with Hello, Collector being too slow and too plodding, they felt we had gone and done an over-pivot,” said Hudson. “That we’d lost…that sense of relatability, and this personal touch the game had. It didn’t feel unique anymore.”

The development team agreed, and told Blackbird creative leadership they didn’t want to do the project; to move it forward, they collectively came up with four possible directions the game could go. Whether sabotaging space warships, slicing up starships or battling interstellar leviathans, all were first-person, zero-g games about grappling and cutting into things.

“There was one idea that stood head and shoulders above the rest,” said McGuire. “This concept of tearing apart derelict starships in search of value.”

The team decided to pivot again and try to hone in on this concept of slicing up space hulks, pulling the tone of the narrative back from the heavy action of Falling Skies towards a more blue-collar tone with a working-class hero. By 2017 the game, now Shipbreaker, had three core pillars: a blue-collar fantasy, of tactical ship disassembly, and providing a vehicle fantasy from a human perspective (which turned out to be a bad, confusing pillar carried over from Deserts of Kharak that was changed down the line).

A slide showcasing how the game’s core pillars evolved over the course of its four-year development

Since pillars are by now common argot in the industry, McGuire clarified that Blackbird has a system of building “game pillars” for each project which influence all aspects of production.

“We kinda inherited this process [from Relic Entertainment],” said McGuire, explaining that Blackbird tries to follow four rules when instituting pillars of a game project. The pillar should reflect an authentic goal rather than a strategic one, it should be specific (no one-word pillars), it should repeat across the game, and it should be refined throughout.

The benefit, according to Hudson, is that when you collaborate with your team on defining these pillars you can often count on individual members to remember those pillar concepts and implement them more often in their daily work.

With pillars in place, by 2018 the team had progressed to the point where they could create a vertical slice of what would become Hardspace: Shipbreaker. The game was given the green light internally to go into full production, but there was a problem: the team was creating all the ships you break in Shipbreaker by hand, and they didn’t think they could make more than a handful of cool ships in a reasonable amount of time. 

That was a problem because it meant the game could only be 5-10 hours long, and the team didn’t feel it had the narrative elements in place to make a game of that length feel impactful. The team also wanted to release the game on Early Access, and that didn’t seem like a great place for a short, narrative-heavy game.

So instead, they leaned into systemic game design and tried a “systems as content” approach. They revamped Shipbreaker’s design so that it relied on modular, “pseudo-procedurally generated” ships that players have to carefully disassemble while dealing with elemental effects like electricity and radiation (“heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild’s element system,” Hudson added), as well as health and equipment maintenance.

This proved to be the ideal mix, and by this summer the team had finished enough of the game to launch it into Early Access. Throughout it all, McGuire said the team walked away with some key learnings: 

They learned the value of keeping the team size small (never larger than 10-15 people) until the game entered full production, because the smaller team could be more agile about creating prototypes and mechanics. 

However, they also learned that it helps to never move people off the team or pause the team’s work, since it takes so much more effort to get the team back on track. 

They also recommend that devs consider “timeboxing” things by giving a team a discrete time period, say one week, to evaluate a hard choice or challenge and examine whether they can accomplish it. Often, with time, team members will come up with new approaches to seemingly impossible asks or startling changes in direction.

“It’s really easy as a studio, or from a business perspective, to get panicked about change,” said Hudson. “Changing the game, pivoting, and refining it is super healthy.”

Finally, ask for help! McGuire says Blackbird would have had a much harder time building Hardspace: Shipbreaker without guidance from fellow devs and studios; there’s no shame in asking your colleagues for advice.
 

Kellen Voyer wants to help indie devs better understand what they’re looking for in publishing agreements.

Voyer, himself a lawyer with a background in video game deals, tells GDC Summer attendees that, as it is, indie developers are at a double disadvantage when it comes to negotiating publishing agreements thanks in no small part to a lack of free flowing data about those deals.

“As part of this work helping our clients negotiate these agreements, I’ve realized that developers are at a two fold informational disadvantage,” explains Voyer. “First, they don’t know what key publishing terms mean. The second is that developers don’t know what is standard and what is not standard.”

Developers usually end up turning to fellow friends in the industry to find out if that ‘standard clause’ is actually a standard clause because so much of that data is shrouded in mystery.

Aiming to demystify that and give developers a better source than phoning a friend, Voyer collected data from 30 publishing agreements for a variety of non-mobile indie games to give developers an idea of what other teams are agreeing to in terms of advances, revenue share, IP ownership, and more.

(As a note on methodology, Voyer says that the 30 agreements cover indie game deals across most platforms, but exclude porting projects, localizations, and mobile titles since those deals tend to vary quite a bit from the norm.)

In short, an incredibly average publishing agreement for an incredibly average game should, according to Voyer’s dataset, include a $318,000 advance paid out in milestones, with both the developer and publisher receiving a cut of revenue even before that advance is recouped.

Right away, that deal splits revenue 40/60 in favor of the publisher but, once the publisher recoups its advance, inverts to 60/40 in favor of the dev team. This hypothetical developer retains all rights to their incredibly average IP in a deal with a term of 6 years, includes an audit right, and allows the publisher to set pricing but restricts when they can set up discounts or game bundles. 

So, to dig into the data powering those averages, lets take a look at the numbers and advice shared in his full GDC Summer talk, category by category: 

• The average advance to fund a game is $318,000, including both advance and no advance deals
  • Counting only deals with an advance, the average amount is $460,000
    • Lowest advance: $100,000
    • Highest advance: $2 million
  • 18 percent of the agreements had no advance, likely due to higher revenue share
• 68 percent of deals pay advances in multiple milestones
• 32 percent of deals pay in lump sums, more likely in cases where platform owners are trying to attract more users
• 81 percent have advances that need to be recouped
• 42 percent of deals require advances to be recouped before developers see a single dollar
• 58 percent see the advance recouped while both the developer and publisher receive revenue share

Voyer’s advice: Don’t agree to deals that require a full recoup of the advance before revenue share kicks in, and, in the case of milestone deals, negotiate for clear milestone definitions. Otherwise, publishers define the terms, and promises to “hash it out later” are super risky on the developer side.

• The average revenue split sees developers taking 60 percent, publishers taking 40
  • That jumps up to 71 percent to devs in the case of no-advance deals, often seen in deals with nearly-finished games that only need marketing support and the like.
  • That drops to 55 percent to devs when only averaging deals that include an advance
• The size of an advance doesn’t impact revenue share splits, according to Voyer’s data
  • Advances of between 100,000 and 500,000: 55/45 split, in favor of developers
  • Advances of over 500,000: 53/47 split, in favor of developers
• In 45 percent of deals, revenue share varied during the term: It’s not always a fixed number for the duration of the deal! Often terms will favor the publisher, then shift to better favor developers once the advance has been recouped.

Voyer’s advice: “If a publisher comes to you with a 50/50 deal, push back! You always need to push back. And recognize that a publisher’s concerns really are protecting their investment and de-risking things. There’s a higher risk with a lower revenue share.”

• Developers retain ownership of their intellectual property (be it a game’s code, images, textures, characters, etc.) 93 percent of the time
• 22 percent of deals have transfer on breach clauses; if a developer breaches a publishing agreement, they may lose ownership of their IP

Voyer’s advice: “Never give up your IP rights, nice and simple.” Even a transfer on breach arrangement is risky business as publishers often have more leeway to decide what constitutes a breach. “If the publisher pushes for a transfer on breach, find another way to address those underlying concerns.”

• 68 percent of deals include some sort of sequel “right” or “option”
  • For Voyer’s definitions, “right” means developers have the right to negotiate but can take the sequel to other publishers if no agreement is forged
  • “Option” means publishers have first dibs to decide if they want to publish any future sequels, and developers can’t shop around if that falls through.

Voyer’s advice: “Don’t be too concerned about a sequels clause: It is common, but push for a right to negotiate and reject sequel optons.” Never lock in sequel terms: don’t let this first contract dictate the terms for any contracts for potential sequels down the line. 

• Average term, or how long a publishing agreement lasts, is 6.5 years
  • Unlikely to decrease significantly with negotiation
• 64 percent of deals have a fixed term, much more common than automatic renewals
• 38 percent of deals have perpetual terms, which have no defined end and see publishers retaining rights unless they breach the agreement

Voyer’s advice: Limited room to negotiate doesn’t mean developers should let initial terms slide. Pay attention to renewal options, and be weary of automatic renewals. Never accept a perpetual term; instead try to move toward a longer term. Getting the short end of the stick on an agreement’s duration can exacerbate issues with less-than-ideal clauses elsewhere in the contract!

• 79 percent of deals give developers audit rights, but all should!
• A clause that grants devs the ability to review a developer’s books to make sure accounting errors don’t impact revenue

Voyer’s advice: “This should be in all deals, but some of the deals we have in our data aren’t ones we were directly involved with.” “You don’t want to try and figure out if you were shorted by a publisher and have no recourse for it.”

Voyer didn’t offer a ton of cold hard data on how contracts have tackled pricing in the past, but did note that this portion of the agreement shouldn’t focus on requiring a certain retail price as that can be complicated by regional rules and restrictions. Instead, negotiating this clause should define the earliest day a game can be discounted, and, separately, similar terms for how and when it can be included in any sort of game bundle.  “Once you discount that first time, you’re sort of starting that downward trend on the game revenue side of things as the game gets further on in its life cycle.”