Cheat Codes for Creating Legendary Videogames: gl hf dd

Transcript

all right good morning everyone Thanks for uh being here to listen to me talk a little bit about video games so just to uh start this whole thing off I'm just curious uh how many people even know what the name of this talk is and what those letters stand for any hands few people so this is a saying good luck have fun don't die and as near as I can tell it originated back in Starcraft days when you'd play a multi play a three-on-three game of Starcraft usually with strangers and this would be the first the way you'd always start the game is by saying

these words good luck have fun don't die which meant please don't mess up as my teammate uh so the reason I show this one is it's actually the first game that I worked on as a game designer in the industry so a lot of my career was at blizzard and entertainment and my background is in game design so I was the lead game designer on uh Starcraft brood Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft and then around that time where blizzard really started scaling like crazy we went from I think 500 employees to like 4 000 over the next couple years and then my role also changed and we were also uh making more and more games so these are some of the games I worked

on during my history and then um I left in 2014 which is just right before OverWatch came out which is why I didn't put OverWatch on here and then I took a couple years off and started bonfire studios in 2016 and no we're not making crypto games but Chris Dixon is on the board so he asked me to come talk today and this was um really when we went to Sand Hill Road what we wrote down is kind of our plan of how we wanted to build the company and how we want to be successful which is really around hiring awesome game developers developing the game iteratively but also

making sure that you pick the game that makes sense for your team and then you know making sure to not ship the game until it's ready and it's perfect and it's awesome so this made a lot of sense and I thought it was great because we had dinner that night with uh Chris Dixon and Mark Andreessen felt like it was going really really well and you know we had never pitched to get Venture Capital so you know I asked oh well how how did it go what did you guys think of the pitch and then Mark literally raised his hand and wanted to give me some feedback and he's like it's really really good but we're used to getting pitched a plan and you didn't actually have a plan

there and you know my response was largely like this which is like no no no it is a great plan please fund us which uh happy to say they did decide to do that alongside with Riot games so we were able to found the company and since then we've been working on our first game so today I'm going to talk a little bit about creating legendary games and I know that not a lot of people in the room are probably making video games so I'm going to try to make it a little more applicable to any sort of products that people might be able to make with a team so first I just want to have a little bit of a definition setting so when I say Legendary game uh

you know we're really trying to make games that are those really special games and it's the games that people are going to play for hundreds if not thousands of hours and be you know really become a favorite hobby have a deep and imaginary world that people actually cosplay like uh that Center one we're under immersive world was the winner of one of the BlizzCon costume contests of a Starcraft adjutant and you know you really want to have these games that cause so much love and joy that it had ignites fandom around the world and becomes Timeless so those are the types of games that I'm talking about I'm not talking about how to make a quick mobile game in quick buck

so you know if you want to try to make a game industry Masterpiece these are some of the steps that I think are important uh and we're gonna go through all of them the first thing is it is a talent driven industry just like I think any any Industries are but the thing I think people don't realize about video games is the types of humans that put these things together are really really different from each other you know it's like you have everything from sound design to obviously engineering which I'm sure people here are familiar with but it's also a very artistic industry and you have character artists you have animators you have

special effects artists and you also have game designers and project managers and the other thing that's that's tricky about getting all of these people to work really well together is that they all think pretty differently about how to make creative product and so much of like my job on these teams have almost been like a a translation layer to try to get artists and Engineers to be able to hear each other from the same language since oftentimes Engineers will be talking in thinking words and artists will be talking and feeling words so so a lot of it is really about getting the right Talent first and then from there really started thinking about what is

the big idea you know and I feel like uh so often finding the right idea is put on too high of a pedestal because really you know my belief is great games and probably great products are really made on great execution which is you know not really about the idea itself you know I feel like so many teams have more than enough ideas to make you know more games than their lifetimes will allow them to do so for me it's it's much more about having the right idea for the team and to me um great teams will always Elevate mediocre ideas in execute

so at bonfire we went through a process where we actually had everyone in the company pitch ideas and you know during that phase I think we ended up with over uh 35 pitch Decks that were all authored by different people uh we eventually whittled that down to like a top seven that we spent a little bit more time on and even from there you know it was still unknown which idea that we should actually go develop into a piece of software and the question I asked the team to really consider was out of all these ideas which is the one that really this team will create the very best version of you know because you really want the idea

that people already either have the skills or experience or the passion like if you're going to make a new IP or new art style that sure would be great if those artists already you know drew that sort of Art in their spare time so it's really setting the team up for success so we picked one and then you know there's just a lot of what I'd call Journey and fellowship so what I mean by this is uh making games is a long Trek and it uh every time I've you know every time I've gone on a new game project you know I've basically told myself and told the team that the next game that I make is going to be the hardest one that I've ever made because you really got to be ready for the

journey and a lot of what you're doing is as much as you're trying to find the game you're also trying to bring the team together and when it comes to like uh making games making games are incredibly hard for a lot of reasons many of which I've already talked about uh but the big thing is you know there's a bunch of things that people try to optimize with games and you know I've I think I've learned that creative process doesn't allow for a lot of the optimization that people think they can find you know it's like you're going to end up rebuilding the game over three times and as much as we've tried

in the past like oh we can prototype something and this time it we'll be able to uh shorten that time it never ends up working out and well one of my Engineers finally just said oh I just know we're gonna rewrite the game three times but each time we think it's going to be the right one and then it's always going to blow up and you know like I remember uh Warcraft 3 I think was a really good example of this because when we announced the game it actually had a totally different camera angle is going to be like a squad based tactic strategy game uh we'd announce it to the world and then you know I think six months to a year later uh just wasn't really playing the way we wanted to play it and we had to make a

really big shift you know shifted to more of the top down camera that we launched with and you know went on from there but it's like every single project I've been on has had at least one big blow up and the other thing that always happens is at the end of projects we always do these post-mortems and we're always like okay this time when we start the next game we'll follow these other best practices and then we won't make those same mistakes but then you know every game is its own Journey so what I've again just kind of had to learn is like best practices sometimes even work against you in games so then it's really about finding the fun and so much with uh games and I think inner entertainment product is uh

you know you can't really write down on paper and know what's going to have the emotional response and fun is exactly like that as well so you know what I've really learned is you need to uh try to get the game stood up so that you can play it as soon as possible and so much of uh games is really going to be about fast iteration so you know what I really optimize for is how do you get the game up and playable how do you get the tools to a state that uh you can be playing the game every day and making Fast iteration changes with Hearthstone it worked out really well because we could actually play the game in 2D we just did a flash prototype and we're able to play

the game from a pretty early stage and there was another good another one of these good examples where um where we almost had to uh blow up the project because we needed to take a lot of the devs onto World of Warcraft to finish an expansion but we left the two designers behind which could then just play The Flash prototype for the next nine months but what was really great about it in retrospect was it allowed them nine months where they didn't have to feed the rest of the team features and come up with art or come up with features for the engineers to uh to prototype so they're able to actually find the fun in the game so I think so much of it is really

trying to figure out early in the project what can we stand up so that we can start getting those iteration loops and then inevitably there's going to be a place in the project which I always call merkwood for those of you that have seen or read The Hobbit you will know that it is the place where the hobbits got lost in the middle of work mirkwood and that is the place where projects go to die and you know there's the obvious things which is games get killed because they run out of resources they don't have the key Talent maybe the team is dysfunctional the other reason that I've seen Games

die is uh the team doesn't know where to go next you know like we've uh you know I unfortunately had to kill a fair amount of projects back at blizzard and this would be like one of the things I started to look for with teams if uh if they got to a place where they were starting to ask me the answers and ask me for where they thought they should go next then that was really a big sign that the team was lost and we probably needed to kill the project and do something else uh but then there's also the optimistic side of that which is if the team trusts in itself and the team has really good morale uh and they pivot and they think about where they're going to go next

they'll find their way out of it and probably the uh biggest crazy example of this was a MMO project that I was leading at blizzard called project Titan and Titan was a project that uh we had been working on for six maybe even seven years and we believed in it but you know we kind of got to our mirkwood moment where we had to make a really hard decision and we shut down the project and then uh we ended up putting only 20 percent of the team on it we deleted like 80 percent of the code but during that time frame we're able to take the part of Titan that was actually pretty fun and take all the cool IP and concept art and take the

greatest hits from all that and then that's what turned into OverWatch which were able to ship three years later so so the lesson really always is as long as the the team has high morale and they have belief there's always a way out and what you're really looking for and this is the important thing is you really want the team to fall in love with the product uh because once the team falls in love that's how you know that the game is going to be good you know many times the Press would always ask me like well how do you know when a game is going to be a hit and I'd always answer the same way which is it would be the time where I would have to go to the team and tell the team hey you're playing the game too much you

need to stop playing your own game so we can ship the game and every game that I've ever shipped has gotten to that point where I've had to give some version of that speech and every game that I've killed never got to the Milestone the tricky part is you can never put the Milestone on the schedule or the plan uh but it is the most important one to get to so this is how game development often looks uh it does not go in a linear way you know it's like you'll make progress forward then you know in this case you might have to rewrite the server you

know you're trying to get tools online the art style may not may change at some point and what's kind of happening is there's you know creative inspiration comes at different times from the project and every time I've been on our project there's always different parts that happen earlier or later than others and the other thing that I think is counterintuitive about games is what happens in the home stretch which is once you get to that point where the team has fallen in love with the game and they know what they're doing uh really progress accelerates a lot and to use World of Warcraft as the example in the last uh like six to nine months a massive number of like features

and zones and creatures all came online you know these are all things that were added in the beta and what's important is that you know if the team loves the game and you haven't burnt out the team and put them on some sort of crunch Death March then you'll be in a place where you'll be able to add so many things and be really be responsive at the end and the other thing you get when the team actually loves the game uh they put in all kinds of interesting fun things you know it's like any of you have seen wow and you've seen all the crazy dances or all the pop culture references like these are all examples of things that were not in a design document they

weren't part of the vision they were all just things that came out of the output for a team that really loved the game that they were making because they've gone from a place of being a fan of the thing they're making and they get to be do that thing that all fans love to do which is they get to work on their favorite thing so by the end of this you know it's like this is kind of I think what I've learned the most about games you know I know that you can come up with these great thesises and we all want to be really smart and we're going to know what the next thing to do is but the thing I've probably looked at more than ever now is really think about well is the team and level what the what they're

making and to use like a Hearthstone example Hearthstone was a game that most people within blizzard and certainly at our corporate overlords at Activision uh thought was a mistake and thought that we should not be making that game uh and there's many attempts to try to kill that game and kill the team and I also did not necessarily know it was going to be a great game you know Hearthstone and retrospect seems obvious but at the time you know there wasn't really a big market for online card games so it seemed like not a great use of our time it didn't seem like there was a lot of upside but the reason that I protected that team was able to uh you

know provide cover fire for them was really because I saw that the team had a lot of talent and they were in love with their game and I knew if that was the case they were going to make something great so coming back to bonfire Studios the way that I really think about bonfire and I like to talk about what we what we're really doing is you know we're not going to make games for everyone you know we're going to make a very limited number of games but we want to make games create games that we love and we want to do that with people that we love and then we want to share it with a community of players that is going to love them as well and then we want to make sure that

anyone that loves our games can feel like they belong and can be a part of our community and even the word bonfire is a metaphor for the games themselves and for the warm and welcoming community that we want to have around them thank you [Applause]