The Dev is in the Details

A sometimes blog from indies who have been down that road.

[monolithdev]

A Look Back: Two Years in Mordor

By: Andy Salisbury, Community Manager

Two whole years.

For two years, you’ve waged war in Mordor. For two years, you’ve fought side-by-side with the greatest smith in Middle-earth’s history. For two years, you’ve fought, built, and dominated armies to do your bidding. And over the course of those two years, we’ve been amazed every single step of the way.

Judging by the reaction of our community and members of the press, you really seemed to enjoy yourselves. As it turns out, so did we. Making Shadow of Mordor was an incredible experience and one we remember fondly.

To commemorate the occasion, we wanted to share a few unheard stories from the trenches, told by those who worked on the game:

“For the intro stealth tutorial I was in charge of hooking up the animations. (The sequence where you’re tasked with sneaking up on Talion’s wife and surprising her with a bouquet of flowers.) We didn’t have the finished animations right away, so I needed to find something placeholder to get the tutorial playable. I looked through all of our existing combat animations for the most romantic paired animation between two characters. The first pass that went out to the team was Talion’s sneaky surprise being greeted by a firm headbutt from Ioreth.” -Brian Frantz, Designer, Systems

“During development, it was so much trial and error to get Captain showdowns to work. And when we finally saw the first examples, we could see that those moments were going to be great! Getting the camera framing just right, the Uruk’s eyes looking directly at the camera, their lips synced, and the right dialog hooked up made the showdowns way more emotionally powerful than I admittedly thought was possible.” -Chris Hoge, Lead Designer, Systems

“It was difficult to pick out just one memory from working on SoM. Every day in the QA department was outstanding. Imagine, everyone you work with having a smile on their face for weeks and weeks, knowing they were helping make something great - something they could be proud of in the end. In the beginning, we were cocky fighter pilots, ready to do battle. By the end, we were war-weary soldiers, trading stories at the local saloon.  

The most important experience for me was getting to work with such talented, creative, and funny people. Talion gave us all mountains of valuable experience, but more importantly, tons of friendships to carry with us when our journey had ended.” -Drew March, QA Analyst

“I remember one of my tasks was to verify presentations from Captains. Now normally this wouldn’t stand out, however one Captain – Nazû, decided to say Hi. “Cool,” I thought, “say ‘Hi,’ then I’ll come defeat you.” Well, when the presentation was all said and done, the camera panned back to me, all the way from across Núrn. Turns out, Nazû is an omniscient being and was able to spot me from nearly a mile away. From Executioner’s Watch, all the way to where you first enter the zone. I saved a photo of him, and named him “Nazû, the Showdown Sniper”. Became my email signature for a while.” -Donald Filmon, QA Analyst

“I have particularly fond memories of our 2014 E3 experience… We had recently announced. and E3 was the first time the public was getting a chance to really check it out. Mike Forgey and Ryan Ladeen were giving round after round of packed gameplay demos and the crowds were loving it. I was on line duty and the level of crowd excitement and anticipation was amazing! It was so cool to hear all the positive comments coming from people awaiting (patiently!) their chance to see the demo.  

To top it off, the steady stream of awards arriving at the booth was crazy! It was overwhelming to see and feel all the love being focused on the game – from critics, members of the press, and the public alike! Mike was losing his voice from non-stop demo commentary, the lines were constantly packed. I’m pretty sure I wore a pair of shoes out during the event, but it was beyond worth it. I felt very privileged to be a part of such a kick-ass project.” -Dayna Smith, Associate Producer

“Out of all the things I implemented to get mounted movement working, the seemingly simple act of dismounting the damn Beasts was the part that was iterated on the most, because it broke the most. There was a period during development where it seemed every week QA found a new way to horribly break dismounting, and I’d have to rework huge chunks of the logic to account for a new edge case that would send the player falling through the world or something. You’re welcome!” -Ian McCoy, Senior Designer

“Among other things, I made all the bugs in Shadow of Mordor! Or, rather, I made all the insects. People typically don’t like to hear about buggy games.” -Matt Rapelje, Senior Technical Artist

“During the launch of Lord of the Hunt, I came in one weekend and whipped together a quick and dirty prototype of Photo Mode. I showed Matt Allen (Director of Technical Art, and all-around nice guy) on Monday morning and he loved it! It was approved to be a real feature, and I even got to do the VO for the announce video.

But now, revealed for the first time, is the very first Photo Mode picture from the prototype. Enjoy!”

-Reed Gonsalves, Software Engineer, Gameplay 

But now, once again, we turn the focus back to you. You’ve been waging the war. You’ve been fighting side-by-side with Celebrimbor. And you’ve built and dominated armies of your own. In the past, we gave you some numbers detailing your collective exploits across Mordor.

We figured it was time for a progress report:

Thank you all, for the time you’ve spent in Mordor. We’re always thrilled when people like spending time there as much as we do.

[tinkerhouse]

Easily the most terrifying Yoda car decal we have ever seen. Easily.

[lonesharkgames]

Why I wanted to make Thornwatch

Hey folks, thanks overmuch to all of you who are supporting Thornwatch, our first foray into the Eyrewood Adventures line. Now that the Kickstarter is live, I wanted to take a glimmer of your precious time to tell you about the game we’re working on, and why I wanted to make it.—Mike

I’m not the best game designer in the tabletop game industry. I’m not the best writer in the industry either. I’m not the best puzzle designer. And I’ve proven over and over that I’m not the best company president. I’m good at all those things, but I’m not the best. However, I might be the best collaborator. Everything I do, I do for one express purpose: to bring together the most enjoyable people under the same roof and help them create the most magical things.

You can see it in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, where I assembled the best co-op game developers to make a breakout game. For the Conundrucopia section of The Maze of Games, I got the world’s best puzzlemakers to craft puzzles set in the 1890s. In the upcoming Apocrypha Adventure Card Game, you’ll see the best game-loving fiction writers writing our fragmentary memories—people like Pat Rothfuss, Erin Evans, Kris Straub, and Kij Johnson. For Widow’s Walk, our first expansion of Betrayal at House on the Hill in 12 years, I threw together the most eclectic collection of haunt writers, creative geniuses like Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward, Borderlands writer Mikey Neumann, Angela Webber of the Doubleclicks, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, and Cards Against Humanity humorists Max Temkin and Eli Halpern. I want all these people working with me on the craziest, coolest stuff.

Which leads me to Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins. 

Jerry is a contributor to both Apocrypha and Widow’s Walk, naturally. That’s because his mind is a bonkers madhouse of lore and flavor. Everything grows out of control in that brain, like a narrative kudzu. For Jerry, there is no separation between the world in his head and the world his head is in. And when he first described the Eyrewood to me, I knew I wanted to live there. For a time anyway. A time before the ebb ensorcelled all. A time when Lookouts still believed they could stem the monstrous tide. A time when the Daughters surrounded themselves with fearsome beasts and ravenous briars. A time when, if a child tied a bramble knot in a birch tree, the Thornwatch would come. 

Now, admit it, that’s not the story you expected me to tell. You expected me to wax rapturous about the creation of Mike Krahulik, he of the mechanical invention of the core of this game. I’m a rules guy, and I can spot a good rules system when I see it. That’s what I saw in Mike’s design. Also, all the lush greens and malevolent purples of a corrupted, fantastical biosphere. Truly, a trove of amazement issued forth from Mike’s light pen on an hourly basis. I will wax rapturous later on the elegance of the wound deck and the sublimeness of the skill card system and the gleam in the dead eyes of the Skelemans. Later. For now, I want to talk about what I heard from Jerry’s mouth.

When Jerry speaks of knots, he can’t see them tied. He imagines reasons for people to tie them. When Jerry speaks of camping spikes that hold plots of the Eyrewood in place while the rest gyres around them, he can’t see them staked into the earth. He imagines opportunities for stories of the roiling wood. When Jerry bedecks Lookouts in badges named for dark-hearted monsters, he can’t see them arrayed on an accoladed child’s sash. He sees tableaus of monsters burning and petrifying the ones who didn’t get their badges.

You ask Jerry for a hydra, he gives you a giant four-headed snapping turtle that sings travelers to death. He names it the Swamp Choir. And then he asks if you think it’s good.

It’s good, Jerry. It’s so good, people sing it back to you.

So it’s my job to build a design collaboration around that insanity. He’s already got Krahulik, and their buddies Kiko and Feh and the rest. So I bring in my crew: Lords of Waterdeep co-creator Rodney Thompson to build it all up, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game lead developer Chad Brown to lock it all down. The rest of my devs start pruning and tying knots along the edges. Me? I’m the shepherd, the one who tends the field and keeps the foxes at bay. I make sure we’re thinking large, uniting all the facets of Thornwatch and Lookouts and Daughters into a creative whole. I say “I desperately need to know what this element is” and then I watch this masterwork assemblage forge it from the aether. And then I bring it to you.

You have an opportunity to join us for this journey into the Eyrewood. I hope you come along. Jerry’s guiding us along the trail, and quite honestly, I’m pretty sure he’s carving that trail through the forest with his mind. Slash the strings on your scabbards, for there are monsters ahead.

[tinkerhouse]

We loved to help demo this at PAX and are proud backers. Can't wait to see the final product!

[tinkerhouse]

Do Walkthroughs Spoil the Zen of Gaming?

Zen: An approach to an activity, skill, or subject that emphasizes simplicity and intuition rather than conventional thinking or fixation on goals.

The other day I was playing through Inkle’s great little interactive adventure  Sorcery 3 and, without spoiling anything, I can safely say it has that old-school charm in which you pretty much have to accept a constant, low-grade beatdown all the way through. Things never really go entirely your way. It’s fun though.

But after I’d lost yet another one of my prized possessions to capricious circumstance and had another sub-optimal interaction with an NPC that left me worse for the wear, I said screw it. I’m looking at a walkthrough.

At the same time, I realized I’ve done that with a lot of games recently, where the going gets hard and I’m clearly losing out on better results or I simply can’t accept the aggregate losses to my inventory or stats any longer.

But that’s the thing about the old school style; you accept loss and suboptimal results as part of the journey. Before walkthroughs, you had to rely on the oral tradition of your friends, little tidbits of advice passed from couch to couch along the way.

The fact that there was an optimal play through was vaguely known to us but we accepted (back then) that it was bloody hard to achieve. And we rarely did.

Nowadays, I know that there’s an optimal play through and I know how to get it. It’s trivially easy.

On the one hand, I defend my use of walkthroughs because I don’t have as much time to replay my treasured games like I used to. Time is money and all that. So if I’m only going to play a game once, then I sure as hell want to make I count.

I want all the toys, baby. I want every piece of mission content and NPC interaction I’m due.

But the interesting side effect of this has been, at least in my case, an eradication of my acceptance of any result that is less than perfect. If you know there’s a dialogue option that will give you more experience, or open up a new mission, or give you access to better equipment, but that option can *only* be accessed through a very specific set of actions, what do you do?

Part of the problem lies in the fact that missing out on extra XP or bonus content has a direct impact on your ability to succeed at the base play experience. Real failure is on the line nowadays, in that missing out on that extra whatever can mean the difference between a happy ending and a really bleak one.

And that’s not fun. (Not to me anyway.)

So it’s not just about sub-optimal play but abject failure. And I have to believe game designers nowadays sometimes play to the walkthrough crowd.

Because sometimes that obtuse chain of actions—nearly impossible to imagine most casual players stumbling upon on their own—is needed to win.

So I guess what I would wish for, is more games that employ the old school dynamic of “Adventure is hard and you will lose a little bit along the way. But those losses, and the possibility of unexpected gains, will still bring you to an acceptable conclusion.” “Assuming you don’t totally suck, of course.”

That I would accept. And that would allow me to enjoy the Zen of Gaming again, in which I respect the journey—good and bad—as the entirety of the play experience.

But as long as perfection is out there and easily attainable, why would you ever settle for less?

- Tinker Mark

[tinkerhouse]

TinkerHouse

Dwarven Descent

[tinkerhouse]

Twitch and Lag

We are...currently formulating our optimal Twitch content strategy because, c’mon! ARE YOU A DEVELOPER OR A NEANDERTHAL?

In our case, perhaps we were too long in Neanderthalia but to our credit, we didn’t really have a game ready to demo and being yet two *more* dudes playing random vids didn’t seem like our best play.

So we’ve kept making Dwarven Descent, our charming indie dungeon crawler we’re calling “The World’s First Action Puzzle Crawl.”

And when not making up clever little marketing niches for our game, we’re making the game. Or now, making videos of us playing our game.

There may be something we’re missing, but we experienced a lot of lag with our Twitch streams. Both as we were streaming and on playback. I hope that doesn’t continue.

Looking on Reddit and other forums, it seems to be a semi-persistent challenge to endure and/or overcome. 

So here’s hoping our first real stream (not counting all the goofy experiments) will be relatively lag free. Or else we may start Twitching for the realzors.

[tinkerhouse]

A portfolio tip for aspiring contract artists

So this guy sends us his portfolio to look at for possible contract work. I’m sitting in a busy coffee shop doing some light work and so I’m like, “Yeah, okay, let’s take a look.”

I open the portfolio, and a HUGE, huge section of the front page is taken up by an animated illustration of a naked woman with big bosums bouncing all over the place.

Which makes me immediately go, “Wha—!” Followed shortly by an, “Oh, shit.”

I closed the window tut suite, but not before a few of my closest table mates got a good eyeful. Eh, what can you do? Sorry?

Here’s the thing, aspiring young artists: there are *very* few game studios out there that do actual, you know, “porn.” 

Something to consider when composing your portfolio and selecting those giant lead-off pieces.