Darkest Dungeon: A Design Postmortem

[Music] um I'm Tyler Sigman I'm the co-founder co-president design director um Trashman I don't know whatever it's a small

company so we all do a lot of things of Red Hook Studios um when I was putting this talk together so it's a post morning we're going to try to cover things that went well things that didn't go so well um but as was putting the

talk together in particular I think on the what went wrongs uh I'm going to focus a lot on one thing not because there is difficulty in finding lots of there's no ubis of difficulty in finding lots of things that went wrong but I think there's just a couple things that

were more interesting so hopefully you'll forgive it's not an exact standard five and five like the old GD mag format so darkest dungeon uh is a

turn-based Gothic horror light fantasy RPG about the psychological stress of adventuring and this is we throw this screen up the minute you start up the game uh to make sure you know what

you're getting into and of course no one reads it because no one reads tutorials but this gives us the ability to come back later and say we told you it was it was going to be bad and this is what it looks like in

practice come on heer come on healer come on healer baby you got to [Applause]

go survival is a tenuous proposition that's okay come on healer sprawling Tomb come on Y come on

healer healer come on come on come on that's fine as long as you give me

one more [ __ ] hit injury find it in no short supply don't do it [ __ ]

[ __ ] [ __ ] Tim after all [Music] [ __ ] so that's Ezekiel uh 3 he actually U still likes

us and did play darkest dungeon after that and has actually played it since um and so yeah that's nice so he has gotten some more enjoyment out of the game one of the things we set out to do with

darkest dungeon that that made it unique is is trying to create emotional attachment so I think we succeeded um sometimes maybe not exactly in the ways that we we planned I mean I wouldn't say

that was like one of our design goals but when we were coming up with the game idea so Chris braso was originally his idea Chris and I were friends and we would we would get together and talk about working on games

together we worked at other studios in the past um and this one kept just it had so much weight every time we would talk about it we' get excited and the main thing is we're we're RPG fans and

there's so many great RPGs out there I've been playing them my whole life you know on and off the computer and one of the things we really conscious of is just that you know we didn't want to just make an RPG because we love them we

wanted to make make an RPG only if there was something maybe different or new that we could add that might make it stand out and the the real concept here is that of Heroes are human and Chris like to say it's about the sword arm not

the sword it's not how big your shoulder pads and giant glowing sword are it it's it's the human wielding it and how willing they are and able to fight and

so along with that you know becomes the whole range of of human emotion so moments of Despair these uncomfortable decisions we putting you in as the player U confronting you with loss and

permanent consequences and but the real secret is we're not actually ssts the moments of dispair they are only in so far as to create moments of Triumph because what what is an act of true

heroism without the possibility of cowardice and we felt like a lot of RPGs are all about heroism you have one hit point you're fighting the dragon whatever hang in there oops didn't go well reload try

again a little bit about my background uh because it's relevant to what's next is is uh I've designed a bunch of games on and off the computer and a bunch of different genres I like to say every time I make a game I enjoy I have to do

penants and make a racing game um which I do not enjoy way and I'm not particularly good at uh but I think that diverse range of just you know non-collectible card games to weird

hybrid um action straid games to turn-based really helped because darkest dungeon has a ton of systems in it it's a small game made by a small team you know when you look at something like The

Witcher 3 it's kind of ridiculous for me to say there's this big scope to the game but I think there was unexpected scope the main pillars I guess you could say of the play experience are this town

exploration combat and camping we talked a lot up front about how much time should the player spend in each of these phases um you know combat by far is I think well combat and exploration

together are the line share of your time but that's not to minimize the importance of the time you spend in camping or some people spend an awful lot of time in town looking at their things and you know putting their guys into treatment but generally you're

walking side to side through a hallway finding things built around those those four cores though are a ton of systems and

one of the challenges of the game was that a lot of these systems are um Innovations I guess which is is not trying to say that always worked but the Affliction system uh you know was the real hook of the game that that was

something you know it's like how do we psychologically model uh these Heroes meanwhile the cost of Entry making RPG you still have to do all the other things combat leveling quests monsters

you know all these all these sorts of things and so when you start layering in a fliction system and torch light you know some innovation it it was a lot at times so I think one thing that went

well is that you know a lot of the systems are not particularly elequent um some of them certainly deserve a second pass a third pass that maybe never got

it and some of them are outright clunky but together it all worked and you know sometimes I guess I say it went well because it's just a great side relief for me that some of this you know it

felt like at times that any one system that didn't do its job was just going to ruin the whole mix um you know like you over seasoning the toew and it's it's too I can't recover it now but I I think in this case um one of the things you

know I'm just most proud of in the game is is just that it did all hang together duct tape and bailing wire and chewing gum and the whole bit um to support the goal of the game which was this heroes are

human and part of that too it's really important what we didn't do uh for all those systems that we you know that I just showed there was a lot that we wanted to put in and these are just a

couple of them um crafting or the idea of of a more meaningful upgrade system a more meaningful gear loot system um you know the the characters have this armor

and weapon progression it's just linear progression you can go from level one upgrade to level five and armor level one to level five and weapon you have two trinket slots and of course we could have done a whole bunch more we could

have done paper doll you know etc etc but that would have taken away especially with our team and you know with the budget that we had set out to make the game with if I was spending time on that I wouldn't have been been spending time on the affli system and

that would have been a mistake uh similarly and you know this this was led really strongly by Chris the creative director is our focus on emergent narrative meant that we weren't doing

these other cost of Entry RPG features like extensive dialogue trees you know going into the Abbey talking to the Abbott before you commit treatment like hello Mr Abbott what's new today what rumors have you heard um none of that

the quests are not particularly in-depth you know they're they're kind of the equivalent of go get the 10 wolf belts um and we really avoided heavy lower at every possible opportunity and that that

was uh that was a creative choice but all these also support kind of what we were trying to do um we we you know your ancestor called you to the estate and

you need to go to the wield and fight things or the ruins you know so it's very archetypal but in doing so that means you have to construct a lot story in your head and ultimately what we wanted to do what we you know were

really after is the idea of kind of like these old Rogue likes where you you make your character and you go on these crazy adventures and then you can stream together this story of like well that time with all the slugs in level 10 was rough I barely got out of that thank God

I drank the random potion and polymorphed and got away uh we wanted you to do that with the heroes and so the more that we force fed down your throat that wouldn't have worked so it was it was very important for us not to

do things um our design process also went well yeah you're welcome uh Chris so you know I'm designer on the game design director but there's a lot to do

with this game and a lot of design and a lot came from Chris um and I working together very early and this isn't always the role I filled on every game it's kind of funny but in this game it

be it very much became this role of Chris you know drawing all day long and having time to think cuz he can draw and think at the same time I cannot spreadsheet and think about anything else at the same time um and so he'd just be spouting ideas you know and well

okay not always spouting he carefully thought of something and you know I kind of got into this role of like batting stuff back over the net um and then sometimes he'd really really really want to talk about again back

over the that and you know I could sit with it and get comfortable where it might have gone um In fairness also my role in the game was was to Wrangle all these things and then do the detail design like okay afflictions okay how

does that work you know how we doing stress what triggers an Affliction what kind of things can they do in the Affliction but um kind of managing that whole cloud of red stuff was was at times just completely maddening but also

fun and the creative direction of the game having that established really strong up front was what we needed to be able to resist that design feature creep I mean I think you know I'm a designer and it's we all make games and it's

really hard sometimes you wake up and have a shower and you think of this awesome thing you'd like to throw in and maybe it goes into the game and sometimes you got to resist the temptation and then also don't want to minimize the rest of the team uh as

coming up with great ideas being there to like reject something that is really bad that you know just doesn't fly and it you know sometimes it was hard because you can't listen to all ideas

from all places but the rest of the team was was really important also a vetting and trying and all sorts of these things so the fliction system is the hook of the game um and that that's really what

we call the whole system for Your Heroes Being Human and sometimes basically being a bunch of unly Toddlers and that's built on events and situations if you think about it being an adventure is a really really terrible

job um you might be running out of food you're in search of this elusive gold it's kind of like startup culture um you know you're in the the dark running out

of light it could die at any moment and so there's these events and situations that lead to stress and uh everyone loves to make fun of how you can read a book and it can just blow your mind in our game but

that's very Li crafty and to be fair so stress Builds on the heroes once it reaches 100 we have what's called a resolve check and that um that's that's a test of their metal and that resolves

one of two ways if you're lucky they become virtuous excuse me like this courageous but more often than not um they become Afflicted and then this manifests in

their behaviors and their stat bonuses or penalties and uh narratively in the things they talk about the inspiration for the Affliction

system was not games really uh although about to show an image it was more you know Human Experience um that's that's fictional you know dramatizations movies

TV shows Etc but also just life being a manager we talk about a lot uh being a you know in a relationship with all you know all these things your Human Experience it's pretty easy to mine that

for how we react to stress um and and that's a really important point is darkest dungeon is not a game about mental health or mental illness darkest dungeon is a game about the human response to stress and those are very

different things so this is an image I I I really like banded Brothers Europe obviously based on real events and there's this character Buck Compton I think that that's his name played by this actor Neil McDon and you know this

great he's he's tall he's handsome he's tough you know he's been on a bunch of missions he's kind of just this gregarious energetic guy that's holding the squad together in a way and they're in the Battle of ardin and getting

shelled through the winter and you know he watches a shell land in a foxhole with a couple of his buddies and they're they're just gone it's like they're there one minute the shell lands they're gone and there's this great scene where he just comes up and he he just has the

thousand yard stair shell shock takes off his helmet and he's just done that's it his war is over and I think like that was really a moment that you know in a

way we wanted to capture there's always game over man um you know Hudson and his you know he's the most boisterous I love watching especially Extended Cut I think there was even more talking him at the

beginning just being total boisterous [ __ ] and then you know of course the minute things go to hell he can't handle it and Ripley is the one you know civilian that shouldn't be able to handle it and was made of steel but War

Games and Things have done morale for a long time and to some degree what we were doing is bringing a morale system into um into an RPG and so these aren't necessarily new ideas it's just kind of

maybe packaging them in a different way the Affliction system had seven afflictions four virtues and one of the neat things is that we have 15 different character classes in the game and we've got custom

strings and multiple variants for every single class every single fliction virtue every single act out they can do you know that's one of the things we really invest a lot in in paying out I think the game has about 70,000 words of

text now and that's funny for a lowless game with no dialogue trees um so it snuck up on us and if you play the game you know they they say it might be a

little hard to see here but here um the Helens being masochistic is like please cut me I want this um here I think the uh Highway men's being abusive and

basically berading as party members and this well this is too hard to see it's a little small you know more the more the same someone made some fan art which captures the feeling you get

in the game a lot um if you can't read it can you people hold your [ __ ] together and hit something for five minutes please um that happens a lot but so the important thing about the Affliction system is it's really the

hook of the game I mean you know the game is is universally looted for a lot of things but this is kind of always there and and if you know if it didn't work the whole game premise

falls down and it's built up of really pretty simple subsystems and we purposefully obfuscate part of that when you're when your character is masochistic we don't tell

you what could happen we don't tell you exactly what act outs they might do or how they might you know know run to the front or reject healing we want you to discover that through play we don't want to have a tool tip or as much as I love

tool tips Chris knows I love tool tips um never met a tool tip I didn't love uh but at at the same point here the uh we don't want to show you everything we need want you to discover it but it's

really important that stress we could not and we thought about it we we toyed around with obus skating stress but then you know we could have the characters talk as they're getting more stressed like hey I'm getting stressed but then you never really know where the breaking

point is and you can't make any tactical or strategic decisions of how far to press or what to do or when to you know Camp if you don't know so it actually worked out really well to just make it like a health meter um we worried it

would be a little boring a little dry but that that certainly enhanced the game certainly enhanced the systems you know they're about to break and that was really important fliction system also features the loss of agency which I'll

talk about a little more yeah it worked and I mean that's that's why I say it's something that went well and I think one of the biggest reinforcements to me that it worked was

during Early Access which we were in for roughly a year we made very very few changes to the Affliction system I mean frighteningly few we thought we would go back and we would add a million more act

outs and we would you know double back on some things that were really rough and you know other than a little bit of tuning and maybe improving the flow of a few things like I think now like if they bulk the heel you go to heal them and

they bulk we we don't penalize you your turn they don't get to heal but you can still use that character uh we made a couple changes like that but in general we didn't and the reason we didn't is

because the community was very clear of many other things that they didn't like or or you know and I think that's important though you know the squeaky wheel gets AG grease a little bit because this was working and I think it

realized the potential of what the Affliction system was supposed to do as you've seen with the Ezekiel video uh we successfully not only made your Heroes Afflicted we made the game

players Afflicted I'm how many of you have raged quit darkest dungeon I don't know if I should ask this how many of you quit but came back and played again thank God okay how many

of you rage quit and are never going to play it again but still came to the talk anyway thank you for your honest what's that a great thank you thank you for the honesty I have met people that are like I like the game I can never play it I

will never play it again and um but it may help you a little bit in your in your hearts to know that we also made ourselves Afflicted a lot um through development we developed a vernacular

vocabulary for understanding how stress was impacting us and actually you should try it on your teams it works quite well uh so you know we we would see that hey you know maybe don't talk to them today they're they're really close to

Afflicted or you know someone would send a nasty email and and then you know we' get on the side don't worry they're they're just abusive right now they'll they'll get over it um and you know to

put myself out there my Affliction is a rationality as my stress builds and builds and builds and then I become triggered then I'll pick some really stupid thing to just Panic about um and

maybe you know just yeah coffee or I don't know what it is uh or make some small point about the game that I want to fight tooth and nail about that's completely meaningless so that's

me a little bit about this is just a show like uh this is what we call the trait Library which is this is how the afflictions are actually hooked up this isn't particularly sexy but what what you can see there and you know these

slides will be on the on the Vault later is is like a series of Buffs to the stats and then situational act outs is what we call them like hey there's this chance of if your turn in combat and

you're abusive you might do this or you know if it's a reaction act out if someone tries to heal you and you're U paranoid you may reject it because you think they're trying to kill you that kind of

stuff and this brings me to one of my favorite things the the Microsoft Excel um and uh I think you were saying Ed freeze said hello and like Ed freeze you

know was head of Microsoft games I like to think of him because he worked on Excel that's that's his best accomplishment so anyway um Excel is my my

thing Excel is huge and not Google Sheets I will add Google Sheets are like for collaboration I'll use it but Excel is is the thing um Excel you know when you're a small team you need to figure

out ways to move faster and one of these sheets is is uh the monster Library there's like I don't know 200 uh 200 monster files or something and that that was really useful to automate that and

so you know usually things made their way from spreadsheet into a Json or darkest so it's not like we have the best pipeline ever but you know the programmers were busy doing important things um and making the game but but we

had enough to get through and so that's where I think the BBA exporters and things like this were were so helpful um you know especially when you're a small team so setting up these parametric equations so that um you know you can

make you can decide all monsters in the whole game need a little more health and you don't have to go through and you know I'm big fan of formulas obviously so a lot of that went well but there's definitely some gaps where we're missing uh Missing key exporters that I always

thought you know we'd find time to make and and never did so there were still like it became a little confusing working with programmers cuz you know we'd make a change for a new feature and it'd be like is this an exported file or a hand edited file I don't know I got to

look through my 27,000 spreadsheets and then um you know so that sometimes led to problems something that went well is our

bad design um so there's a few areas of bad design that I want to focus on so loss of agency that's one uh so in other words your characters do things that you don't want them to do uh they pass their

turns they reject healing they basically just make your life difficult yeah in talking to my partner Chris it does sound like maybe being a parent um and you know or or owning a pet and that's

kind of what they are and generally that's bad design um because you know that you should get positive feedback for the actions you do etc etc but it was very very important for darkest

dungeon that um that you were not in control I mean that that's really just like a founding principle and so even though we knew it frustrate the heck out of you sometimes like in the SK video you know it came to one of one of his character turns I think they passed and

then of course he lost the whole had a party wipe um but this was necessity from the heroes are human um idea this made it a little hard

sometimes because dark's dungeon has a lot of numbers and a lot of systems and it's kind of a tactics it's a turn-based combat game and so how do you you know sometimes you're worried about Balan like hey this this character has like it

DPS is like you know undersized by 5% compared to the other characters and then you have this system in the game that basically can just rob you of a turn entirely and that was sometimes a hard balance to to tread and to get

people to expect because I think for some people they they generally enjoy a darkest dungeon as just you know it would be really cool if not for this Affliction system that keeps getting in the way like it's a turn-based you know neat turn-based combat cool Rogue like

whatever and so that that was hard sometimes to balance because you ultimately there is all this kind of stuff that's taking control away from you um our save system so if you're

famili the game it saves all the time uh actions are permanent there's no save scumming I mean you have to go through Great Lengths to do some save scumming and so permanent consequences were were

what we were after we want you at all moments to be like should I go a little further maybe get a little more treasure do I think I can make to the end of this Quest even though these two characters are afflicted and this one is almost

dead and to do that you know we needed this this terrible save system that is just really really mean and it it's definely mean because in in ezekiel's video he you know he

crashed out of the game and I guess he calmed down the next day came back to play booted it up uh and it had saved right before the hit that killed his characters you know because he he crashed out but it had already rolled

the it had already rolled and the action was was fixed so you know he's like okay we're going to do this can't he had to watch it happen again so um that wasn't

intentional I mean we did not make a use case for you crashing your computer and and out um 15 unbalanced hero classes so we

chose to do more Heroes rather than less and sometimes you know that the cost of that was balance uh you know an attention to each individual hero but it was a conscious choice because every

hero you add to the game gives the ability for more party formations and um you know more more interesting things and we always thought of Heroes as loot like when you go to the stage coach it should be exciting when you're waiting

for a crusader and a crusader shows up when you're waiting for a grave robber and a gra robber shows up and it's funny to watch people uh tweet about this because you know full disclosure there's no crazy systems in that we detect what

you want and then we don't give it to you or anything like that um but you know some people are like you know I'm 20 weeks in and I haven't seen a goddamn Helen um so yeah that's just that's just

roll of the dice but it should be sort of exciting when you when you really desperately need another plague doctor to fit you know to because you lost one from your a team you need you need to bring one back

and we made the conscious choice though of not to try to balance them all uh this to varying degrees of success but it wasn't just because it would be difficult we actually wanted it to feel

a little spiky you know like first edition D and D like it's crazy monks and um you know monks and Magic users are basically just like babies in radio Flyers that you have to pull around for the first couple levels and then you know but then by the time they get to

level 12 it's crazy they're wiping out enti armies and um that kind of stuff and I think that spikiness is really fun you know sometimes there's this like Crusade say to balance the hell out of your game I think it really depends what you're trying to accomplish if it if

it's a multiplayer you know it's Hearthstone yes uh if it's a single player RPG where you know you don't like Helens or you don't like highway men as much it's it's not a critical issue and this we even had conflict in the team on

this I mean there was times that people kind of bring these things to me and I'm just like I'm really not worried by that problem right now and I think it was hard for people to understand but it it was a conscious choice of I'm worried about the Affliction system right now or

I'm worried about something else not the highway men's DPS and also I think something that's forgotten is that characters are the sum of of their entire usage throughout the game in particular combat and camping

and so a lot of times again to reference DPS we like this character's DPS is too low and well what about their camping skills you know what about their versatility what about their range of skills and where they can be positioned

in in the uh in the party and things like that and there were there were plenty of times where a character was underpowered across the board and uh not intentionally and so we did you know that early access was great for that but

I I think a lot of times people look at the immediate usage of something and and not the not kind of the entire entirety another thing that was really

bad about what we did but good was everybody's favorite Lord and Savior R Jesus we have a lot of R Jesus in the

game um a lot of variants a lot of variant intentionally so to you know which is not always great but if you make all the right choices in

darkest dungeon you plan you assemble a great team you experienced you pick the right Quest you etc etc we want you still to get your assc sometimes

basically uh now I want to be clear we don't have an AI director system so similar to I I was talking about the stage coach we don't have something that detects you're doing well and then we swoop in and make it harder for you we

just rely on the beauty of R in Jesus in variance um the darkest dungeon is poker poker everyone has bad beats in poker if you play poker and oddly enough everyone's bad beat story is exactly the

same it's just told differently I was winning I should have won I didn't um and we want you to experience those in darkest dungeon we don't want to like the tuning part the craftsmanship the

design is how often right how often do we you know do we want you to experience that two-thirds of the time no if you prepared and planned and took the right party group into the right dungeon and you know provisioned appropriately and

didn't you know grab every bookcase in Iron Maiden if you didn't have the right stuff for it uh you should do well but every once in a while things go badly and we want to put you in that

uncomfortable space of I should be winning right now this is getting away from me do I run you know do I abandon do I change my plan or do I hang in here and push through and there's a couple

you know this can go a variety of different ways maybe you make that gut check and you hang in there and you win and that should be a moment that you you love the game um you should also applaud yourself for having the self-control to

retreat and go back to town and lick your wounds and I think that it's hard to communicate that and that's why we put that first screen up when I showed you like darkest dungeon is about making the most of a bad situation we're

conditioned to play where you expect success especially in the last few years with mobile games and things you expect success and it's really just a matter of solving the problem to get there and if you don't have success you reload and and and try and try again until you get

there and we fundament wanted to change that and sometimes I think it's hard to communicate that to players that they'll buy the game and then this will happen is just like what have I gotten into and

the game is not intended for everyone um and that that's something that you know we I think went well but it also caused us amount of grief as

well another thing that you know on my role of just of our role of just doing things that you shouldn't do um we you know in our final boss I'm going to show a little bit from the final boss so if you don't want to see it cover your eyes

um if you're still working your way through the game and I'm person not explain it life father and mother Al

and Omega our Dory Bu The Heart of the world come on to your makeer w [Music]

who what nice so yes we did just completely kill a character that he had raised to level six with no death door no nothing we

just took them away um you know and you by that time you probably put I don't know 10 hours in that character maybe a little more who knows uh hopefully it wasn't well actually if it was rain Al or dismus that's maybe all the more

meaningful uh the tutorial characters of course um so yeah that's a terrible design decision like that's a rage inducing thing um but we're so happy we did it we couldn't be happier actually

any there's a whole I don't know if you got a chance to see Chris Chris's talk yesterday on the creative direction of the game but that was really important paying off this Cosmic horror and the overall narrative and when that goes up on the ball I encourage you to check

that out he'll talk more about about that battle but we wanted you to experience that final battle in a specific way and darkest dungeon has been about loss the whole time and so yeah we're a little cheap and we make

you remember that even more uh during the final battle I'm going to kind of get a little faster through some of these so we can go through another thing that was pointed out very often to us of our po

design here was healing versus damage healing it does not keep like the amount of healing the numerical values do not keep uh Pace with the amount of damage

you receive and you know that was repeatedly reminded to us and we're like awesome by Design so yeah the the quests are a battle of attrition the longer you

go eventually your characters should die and become Afflicted and stress out and the whole game is about can you get to the end of the quest before that happens or how much loss are you willing to stomach if this is your favorite

character are you going to I think what do they call it gold breaking it or whatever where you know people always want their guys fully healed don't want to make any risk so you could get one third in a dungeon be like screw this amount um whereas other people are like

I'm willing to lose two Heroes to get through this even Ezekiel you know when he lost that third hero he held it together pretty well he knew he was trying to kill the Necromancer and it was worth sacrificing characters he only

lost it when double death blo at the end which to be fair I think would do it to anybody and so one of the things that worked really well in the game is just breaking some rules

um you know the save one is the one I always come back to the way I love to play games I like permissive save systems who are you to tell me how I you know should and shouldn't save my game but when we talked about darkest dungeon

we realized that would not work it would Rob the player of the experience that we intend them to have and that was an interesting thing to be advocating and fighting for something that you don't even agree with normally you agree with

it for this game and I think that's a really important point you should never lose sight that you are designing for that game not all games or rules of thumb or like make sure you never do this so break the

rules I'm going kind of hustle through this combat is interesting uh we we didn't end up at this at this exact orientation initially we were going to do kind of an Ultima style um top down maybe 2D at

least that's what I was really interested in at first we were very inspired by this classic age Bart's tail I think you can see the DNA and the old B's tail would be like the first four characters can attack in melee the next characters can attack in ranged I think

you see that in our system and that um you know the positional requirements and some classes are definitely more geared towards melee attacks um than others this is a little more the art side but the gold box games panian I know we

talked about how effective it was they just had an idol and and an attack you know they sit there and then they just go and you know I mean not to undersell the amazing freaking art that these guys

did uh you know but we're not a game that's fully in you know animated with all these crazy uh qprint they made the most of of kind of a light amount of assets although a ton amount of work I I

will add um before they kill me they're eyeing me right now it makes me nervous uh we did a lot of visual prototyping this is something that worked well working with Chris this

sometimes saved us having to like code things up or make things and try them we we would kind of he would sketch stuff out we would talk about the system kind of mock up what it might look like find the holes in that and and I think that was helpful here's an example of

realizing hey not only with this new system and the slots but you know we can have characters that are bigger he was working out you know what poses might be required you know trying to figure out tool

tips which is I should I think at one point you guys nickname me tool tip or something I don't know and it ended up like this and I think combat is something that has really served the

game well probably one of the biggest unknowns of combat for me was is will there will there be enough depth in this 1D system and it was still something honestly I fought even up through the the last dungeon The Cove you know was

starting to get like okay how many more like weird moves can I think of or status effects or ways to pay off this but I it had held together and I think there was definitely enough depth to pay

it off so that that was that was good and in particular I think one subsystem of death door that was affected was was this uh or of combat excuse me was death's door and this didn't start in

there you know we were playing combat and as you might imagine without the death store mechanic so the death store mechanic essentially means you can't be killed in one blow so without death story you might be sitting at 2/3 Health someone gets a crit your your

character's dead and with prade death that's crazy like you can never be safe even at full health you can never be safe and we didn't want it like that because then that that robs you of all the the you're either tense all the time or

you're never tense cuz you're just like we're all already dead so what does it matter uh so in this case you know a damaging attack the most it can do is reduce you to death's door and then you have potentially a chance to heal or do

something with that character um you know before before they die now you can still die obviously because sequences of events uh you know you might not get a turn in between your hero may be

afflicted the the character you're trying to heal may be afflicted Etc you may have not brought Healers so you know there's plenty of death but this death door I think it's like for such a simple system it's been so

effective in in raising attention I I love that those moments where your character go to death door and you're nervous and you're confronted with the loss should I Retreat should I try to

heal and that's worked out really well narration you know is is huge uh we we brought this narrator in for our announcement trailer I don't think at that point we had even thought about

using one in the game but he was so amazing Chris had found these Lovecraft audio books read by Wayne June we contacted Wayne Jun got him to read for a trailer and it was just like okay he's in the we have to put him in the game

there's there's no way we can't um a little side tidbit is Red Hook is named after the story hor at Red Hook uh so we're not in Brooklyn which this could you know I wish I would have thought of

that before people like oh we're right next to each other we're in Vancouver but we just thought Red Hook sounded cool uh it was kind of a classic story of like you know power and Corruption um

not maybe the best in terms of love craft cultural sensitivities so in retrospect we feel bad for for naming it after that story but Red Hook sounds cool

so it's really yeah just this quote the narrator has done so much and by remarkability I mean I mean just virality of the game people talking about it and things like that aside from

its quality and this happens all the time it's crazy post a trailer and it'll just be strings of comments of of the narrator Alliance you know or Reddit post or you know twitch channels and

that's really fun to see even pop in places that aren't darkest dungeons someone will say one thing and it'll just go and audio as a whole worked really well I mean this is a design talk but the reason I want to mention it is

it reinforces the gameplay experience um if any of you do play racing games without the sound on I don't understand you um because I think they're a lot more fun with the sound on and it's not

just enhancing like the experience it's it's enhancing the game design um which I'm grateful for narration here is just uh this is where I started to block out like where

should he speak what should he talk about what kinds of things should he say um and just wanted to play a couple lines the human mind fragile like a

robin's egg there can be no hope in this hell no hope at all Grievous

injury palpable fear more dust more ashes more disappointment on that note of disappointment it's a good time to

switch into the other side of the talk um on the narration side I want to say yeah Wayne's awesome PowerUp mastered the lines and did the effects um Chris and I did writing Chris did most of the writing and like some of the lines yeah

are just really fun to see and you know I think even recently someone's like where's the Trinkets and Bubbles line I haven't heard that in a while we're like I don't know it's like a bug but someone remembered the line so well they were very upset it was wasn't playing um so I

love just listening to it and then uh I think for for gim one time power up had Wayne record some other other like joke lines for each of us and it was it was really fun so yeah he's he's got that

voice that sticks out but yes disappointment so how many of you are familiar with the corpse uh the corpse the great corpse event okay not that

many okay um that's good so we we push this during Early Access we we pushed this amazing patch called the hound and corpse or corpse and or I don't know um it had all kinds of awesome stuff the

Hound Master sanitarium features like new and awful diseases um steam Cloud Save which is kind of cool but not as cool as diseases corpses in combat see we were so excited about it was even a

bullet point and this is going to be a real a little relevant here but if you remember the end of The Dark Night where um basically things start going poorly for

Batman Batman takes a lot of a lot of blame for some things um leading up to the corpse in town so we launched Early Access on February 3rd of last year and you know it did I mean there's no two

bones about it it did far better than we thought it was going to do you know we we were just we were launching into a climate of Early Access really being looked down upon um you know there had been some kind of high-profile maybe

disappointments and you know there was even this whole Early Access was dead you know Everyone likes to proclaim the death of the next thing so Early Access is dead you know and we're like okay

we're about to launch um you know and we launched into that environment I mean we put our best foot forward we delayed because in the fall we originally want to launch Early Access it wasn't ready we delayed

honestly we were all running extremely thin on our personal runways and um you know that that we kind of had to launch there we're like all right um but we had no idea it was going to be received so

well to be honest um and I think you could ask well actually Kier Kier thought it was going to be received well the rest of us were nervous as

hell um a month later my dad died so I went from the highest high of my professional life no question to the lowest low of my personal life um I'm

grateful he got to see the launch um I got to share with him how that was going um but when you're a small team you know and any one discipline that is taken out

of action your whole team is is derailed I mean not everybody's not taken out of action but how you going to push a patch that incorporates all disciplines uh when one person is out of action this is

my dad in his natural environment um so we had planned this fiend and fringey Patch which was our first you know real big non- like support update and originally it was probably going to try to go in March or April but you know

that didn't happen I was kind of out of commission for a while and so we we uh pushed it in May and it was received pretty well I think um yeah and things have been just rolling you know so the

corpse and Hound was really though our first time cuz the F and frenzy had been pre-planned in a way like we knew our content and aside from some gameplay tweaks um it it was sort of pre-loaded and the Corps in Hound is the first

chance to really like collect collect info from the community and step back and go what game systems are not working what's not working the way we want what can we do and one of the things uh it technically wasn't in

the corps and Hound it came in fiend and frenzy was um around that time was was heart attacks so what would happen is the players that were getting good at the game could do these dark runs they would basically push their team to full

Affliction um and they realized that the afflictions were not incapacitating so far that your team couldn't function and so they just stopped caring about stress or torch light or anything they would just go they would just go run these

people through and that that definitely wasn't the feeling we want darkest dunge we want you always to feel in a precarious situation and so the heart attack system came into play which basically was at 100 you you have your

Affliction check and and then that resolves but stress continues to build you have a little bit of a shock absorber there but if you get to 200 and the smiley face you're dead no warning

um it filled a very important gameplay role a very important role in terms of what we're trying to get you'd experience and at the time actually you know there's a little bit of you know a little bit of like oh this is a little rough but not general not outcry so then

in the corpse and Hound we did corpses which which was was very important too so what you see here in this uh screen image is a corpse in the front there and so there had been a dominant strategy

the you know the table saw strategy which is focus fire everything on the first enemy um take them out and then that collapses everybody forward and the the enemies in back generally they they

just like Heroes had skill prerequisites so if you're an archer in the back you get collapsed forward you can't use your uh you can't use your attack and so um it was just too strong to to focus fire

in the front and it it kind of reduced the rest of our combat system to maybe irrelevance in terms of like positioning ranged attacks debuffs Buffs Etc so the corpses the way they work you you kill

the enemy they leave a corpse it remains there they hold their formation they don't collapse forward and uh the corpse will eventually go away or you can spend some extra actions or resources to to eliminate it and this enhanced this did

a lot of things it fixed the dominant strategy it enhanced the systems that we had built and we thought it did so thematically uh we didn't implement it as up to our usual standard and that's

partially for reasons I'll get to in terms of like you know usually we we try to blow you away visually um and this was no fault of the artists you know was it was a gameplay experiment in a way so every corpse looked the same we didn't

have custom corpses per enemy and things like that and also we had thought of a lot of other ideas or at least I had in terms of could buff up the front rank enemy melee enemies to generally be a lot tougher these sorts of things um so

it was better than the other design options oh yeah well I thought people were going to love it they lost their minds um it's it's really hard to

overstate how much they lost their minds it's definitely I mean at least for me but I think Chris would agree it's the hardest thing we've had to deal with on the game um and we've had a lot of challenges on the game and hardest probably just

emotionally uh it splintered our community which had been big and growing and excited and generally really we had had it very very good it was very positive everything had

been received well generally you know and people were kind of patiently waiting for us to plug some holes in the game um it created this changing wave of sentiment and it was an easily told

story this promising game gone bad that wasn't fun to look at at Steam and look at you know the helpful reviews and see literally four pages of nothing but

negative um this is a whole story in itself but this also coincided with people that were not just unhappy that we had added this into the game but that decided that we were basically the most

terrible people on the face of the planet and remain to believe that way today and I think this narrative versus truth was hard for us because what I mean by that is people who played the

game and said I I don't like the corpses a you know that's we respect that opinion um people are like I heard they ruined the game you know it's like well where did you hear that from that was

tough because we were we were also you know still continue to develop the game and and we had been excited by how well the game been received this patch launched in July and uh I remember

thinking you know people are going to be they're going to grous a little bit it's a big change but then they'll get used to it and I was in Colorado so my my father had been cremated I went back to Colorado where we're from to to intern

him and you know be with family Etc and you know a few months later after he died and I remember it was either the night before we're going to bury him or the night after Chris calls me up and we're having this talk and he's like

it's getting really bad like I don't know what to say like they're not they're not getting used to it they're starting you know the community is blowing up um it was it was a tough it was a tough

time and this is one way to illustrate it um in July we were really lucky to have you know very popular website that serves a lot of Gamers that are exactly the sort of Gamers that we want to reach um they put us in this top 50 RPGs of

all time I mean these are like games like Ultima are on there and it was a huge honor they're like this is the only Early Access game that's even on this list and this was just like yeah it was it was hard to overstate our excitement

of that that was July then we pushed the corps and Hound patch this was August from the same publication so what you know I'm fully flicted to this point for sure um you

just pegged at like 190 stress and we didn't have our death door mechanic in the heart attack thing yet so that was rough um and I I kept hinging on these three words a sad fate I mean when I

read that something just clicked in my head you know that just it was just hard to even comprehend because we were still in Early Access and we had been this example of an early access game done

right um and now basically we're being left for dead on the roadside like they they they took this great game and they drove it into a concrete pillar um you know and I couldn't get over fate like

we're still we're still working on the game here and this fundamentally changed my view of Early Access I'm super pro Early Access for the record I would happily do it again uh I think we're

just we know more what to expect but I thought Early Access would be a time to experiment with gameplay mechanics and I don't know that that's

really true um especially if your game's already working that's rough if your game's not working I think you have the onus you know you need to improve it but massive changes to people that have already bought your game is a it's a

tough It's a thorny problem it's even ethical they paid for the game now you're changing it you know that that's hard um so Chris and I spent a lot of time uh

talking a lot of time talking a lot of Google Hangouts some drinking um some pity parties some anger you know the full range of emotions and but what it always came

down to is didb you the right thing and I remember just thinking like okay like guys just laid on me just tell me did I you know was this a horrible mistake cuz corpses were my idea and I had sold it up through the team you know just tell

me I don't care I'll eat crow whatever it is I just want to make the game right you know and I was losing my ability to see objectively so it was great because Chris and I spent a lot of time switching positions Devil's adate all

these discussions about what to do meanwhile we have this Community Management crisis it's not like we have time to just do this calmly and you know

Etc and one thing that was also relevant is just the psychology of of change I mean in other organizations it's a whole field of study change management you know some of you may be familiar people

don't like change there's you know who Moved My Cheese and all that and not to throw a team member under the bus but you know one thing that had been in my mind before we did this change is that

you know combat had been working and and Chris and and Pierre worked to add this combat camera which is like it fakes it to look like 3D if you notice in the game um that it like sways to look like

3D anyway I remember put in and one of the guys on the team saw it and said I think this is verbatim this is the worst [ __ ] thing I've seen in my entire life a week later two weeks later I was

like this is cool so I thought that would happen with corpses um so the long story short and I got to hustle cuz I wanted to leave a little time for um for QA is that uh we decided it was right

for the game it it was the right mechanical decision it was the right thematic decision we stood by it um you know that that's of course a hard decision to make and we respect the opinions of of of people that disagree

so we're in this weird dilemma of do we remove this and make what we consider a worse game to make people happy and um this is something that got us through the next 6 months I'm going

to hurry through here but you know Chris kept bringing up like things had gone so well for us to be honest it's like at some point you're going to make a mistake or you're going to you know that

you have to fall off the Peg and um this was hard I mean I say fast forward 6 months but the last 6 months up to until launching January was pretty rough I mean we're sitting here and going is the final story on darkest dungeon going to

be a promising game that was ruined and living with that uncertainty I think is instructive just because you'd think we'd be riding high on the Early Access to sex no we're riding high and like what's the legacy of the or ridning low on what's the legacy of the game going

to be fast forward I think an interesting part of change management is ultimately the changes were received well and even people that had expressed concern in July when they reviewed the game uh they're like I see why they did

this and so that that was good what got us through is just holding to that Creative Vision and um investing in more Community I mean these are things we did wrong we didn't invest in Community Management UPF front um we were too

precious about how to present the game to people in force our way of playing it down their throats so we added toggle options and I think that's something that we needed to do and you know and we learned from this experience and it also

reminded us that D you know we we' always said DD is not a game for everyone and this reminded us that that was the case so that's the the key learning about Early Access um content is always good I think that

you know substantive gameplay changes you want to have Community Management in place you want to warn them of the changes we do this better know hey this is coming down the line just be aware of this what do you think about this we push it in a in a beta Branch let people

try it out and you know that that was stuff we really learned a few other things I'm going to skip through and then this will leave just a couple minutes for questions uh the Bold points are what I want to emphasis other things we have a lot of grind in the game we

didn't even add the ingame till full launch and so we didn't get the benefit of tuning that through Early Access so we're doing that tuning now and you know certainly I think one of the things we've been repeatedly deemed on is is

this grind we like consequence but losing your full level six Heroes and having to rebuild it just causes some people to just throw the game away we don't want that so we've been doing some

things to help help with those exploration was a really tough design mechanic I I still believe like we haven't totally paid off you know the walking and the quests and the curios uh

in particular the game started it was this Auto walk you just they kind of walk down the hall and then things happen it was terrible and we almost were going to restructure all of all of exploration when we made it active it just made it so much better so that was

something that we spent a lot of time spining our wheels on um everybody's favorite mechanic hunger it's not that we can't improve it it's just that we're you know it did enough and after the corpse thing quite frankly we're like if

we make a Hunger system and it's worse oh man um The jostled Free We had these events where you everyone loves J where we had these events where you'd be walking down like kind pull an event

card and something happened one of them is this jostled free it's like hey you're walking down the hallway and something falls out of your pack and uh it just can you imagine the rage and just like your nice trinket just

literally just took it away randomly and so this this this was really good cuz it it brought up what we call the jwood free rule is you know we we do a lot to you

but don't arbitrarily with no you know another way of saying it is is this um yeah never fully C you know it's like go get the 20 wolf pelts um there was a

lot of stuff that that we could have done I'm I'm going to skip right through here because I want to have a couple minutes for questions sorry in the end fortunately the dungeon isn't too dark here's some of the stuff I want to say about retention we're not we didn't design with retention in mind but the

interesting thing about it is just that it's a sign of do people come back and play more and that's important to us when you played it and started it do you come back the next day because you want to play again and that you know mobile

PC whatever that's that's hugely important um more than all those things is we feel like we made the game we set out to make and that feels good um we're ready to live or die by that vision and I'm

really you know we're we're incredibly grateful that people have enjoyed it a little bit about what's coming we're not done we're still pushing some features we're coming to other platforms we're going to enable modders stuff like

that and this is news to even the Red Hook team today I'm happy to announce game number two from Red Hook Studios bright as

all right we got a couple minutes for questions and then afterwards uh you know we'll move out we'll probably get kicked out in a minute we have five minutes okay great what time period does the game

take place in uh this yeah we we we narrowly refin the time period to uh roughly 500 AD to 900 or 18800 no it really is I mean you've got the

Helen which is kind of almost a pictish you know Barbarian on up to the highway men with his you know little scarf and and pistols and yeah that's kind of part of our low is you know we we we wanted

to or the Crusader and his you know heavy metal armor on the way up to the musketeer so yeah we we purposefully kind of have created this alternate universe that isn't super defined

there can you uh speak to the level clamping that was done where the high level characters are no no longer able to go on the low-level Journeys and what reinforced that decision yeah sure um yeah that's what he's talking about is

basically we we as as your characters level up we prevent you from taking them on lower level quests and and you know power leveling your younger Heroes uh it's not it's not super popular all the time but the bottom line is if you can

do that the game is robbed of its tension and you know this is kind of like maybe something that isn't incredibly elequent from a design perspective we're kind of hitting you on the head with a hammer but it was

absolutely critical to make sure that we keep you in this risk um thing so we Loosely justify it and say you know as they L level up they get big heads and they're like I don't want to waste my

time down in your you know like you're the fngs you guys go on your mission I'm I'm sticking with the experienced guys I think even Banner Brothers had kind of a cool thing like that where they're like as they you know as they progress they're just like the new recruits would

come they like don't talk to them they're new if they've lived through a couple missions then we'll talk to them but you know we we're not able to express that so uh but it's ultimately because we want you in a position of risk in the game and

and if we let you do it you can just grind your way through the game and actually not be tense and then we'd rather have you have fun and be tense

then like succeed and and not be tense thank you uh hi first of all thank you very much for the talk it was really great uh I'm not sure for what it's worth um I think you made the right call

I think the game that you wanted to make all your decisions to go towards that and the community will probably get used to it eventually um as far as the question uh you mentioned that when you

were in Early Access a lot of the uh stuff that you changed obviously was on the corpse stuff um what was some other stuff that you changed during early access and uh did any of it like surprise

you yeah I mean we did a lot of you know hero changes based on feedback um a lot of stuff we had planned out you know we knew we were going to make the new dungeons things like that I mean I think one thing we changed in the sanitarium

was uh we split treatment into diseases and quirks we allowed the ability to lock uh lock quirks in and also if some negative quirks could could become permanent and then those would cost more

to unlock so I think that was like really necessary to pay off that system more and that you know that wasn't something we knew exactly up front U I'm trying to think of of some other things uh you know more mechanics every

hero that we tried to put in we tried to usually do a new mechanic I mean the how Master had his pet and the dog treats uh the man-at-arms had the repost and so that was really fun because and also challenging because every time we added a new mechanic we're like oh man I wish

we could retrofit this through the whole game and we weren't always able to do that I think it's one reason that a lot of people like the cve monsters the best mechanically because you know they came the latest and we were able to make full

use of of all the you know the whole pallet at that point um so often times in design you run into situations where parts of the game feel like they're fighting themselves uh like for instance I just

kind of you talk a lot about creating the human connection with the units um but then also like because you get such a large supply of them it's almost better for as a player to not connect

with them so you don't get all tilted when they die similarly you you talked a lot about how you put so much effort and work into the Affliction system where the players spend most of their time trying to avoid afflictions they spend a lot of the time trying to avoid stress

altogether so how do you kind of deal with that as a designer figuring out where to kind of draw the line of what's helping and what's hurting some of it we intentionally don't totally draw a line the hero the hero one for example and

Chris talked about this a little bit yesterday's talk but uh people play the game differently so some people get very very attached they name their Heroes we encourage Name Your Heroes after your friends and loved ones and uh and then

when they die you know you lose your mind that's awesome we love that and then some people become very jaded and they look at them as meat bags that are basically means to an end and you know they don't even name them or they name

them like you know Crusader 2 Crusader 3 um or sometimes you know a little bit like you know Baldwin one Baldwin 2 so they had a name originally and then they keep his lineage up um but a lot of people post you know I love reading

these posts they'll say like this game you know I had these Heroes they're dead I I hate it what am I doing wrong I'm Terri terrible at the game and then people will say okay you're thinking this all wrong you need to look at these you need to just go in there you need to

run them to their desks until you get some money dismiss them pick a few select Heroes to really invest in let the other ones just you know and I I love that interplay there's no right way to do it so there we let that kind of

take care of itself um as far as like the Affliction system yeah that's hard because we want you to be afflicted so the way the way that's a balance issue that if I watch you know streams or get a lot of feedback that man people are just going through and they never get

Afflicted I'm like all right that's a problem when need to increase stress damage you know I want people to get Afflicted and so that that's a game balance issue hi um so speaking of naming

characters after your family um you mentioned highle characters dying and that being a really uh big turnoff I know the same thing happens in games like XCOM um was that something you

didn't think you would be able to fix or was it something that like um reinforce that like hopelessness Motif um and in in a perfect world would you

add something that would help making uh getting your feet back yes so we just did actually we just pushed something to help get your feet back um last week so now we have in the stage coach there's an upgrade tree that allows you to

unlock the ability to hire higher level heroes um and so that's really important what and then the uh what else uh we increased the power leveling benefit from Heroes that have been to the dark's dungeon come back and and have the never

trait and so I would say that originally we wanted that sense of loss but um one minute left we want that sense of loss but really like getting wiped on a full

level six no that's too much like it's too much if someone literally walks away and doesn't play the game again uh we want you to be angry for a night and then come back tomorrow and be Victorious and so I think we just kind

of had to think of how to do that and you know we're losing a level two hero is no big deal losing four level sixes is a big deal so yeah we're actively trying to improve that okay thank you

mhm all right last last question I think when when should a game go early access ah when it's ready I my advice is wait as long as you

can uh because Early Access we've now had a number of of successes and not I mean just there's been lots of good games in Early Access as well and I think that people will always be

receptive to more good Early Access games um but they will very quickly jump on games that are not fun not buggy yet so you really have to make those hard choices of

you know is this game ready for prime time I I think a game that fundamentally has its Loop in place and it's fun but maybe out of balance and missing some content that that's where like if we do our next game I think when we know it's

fun we don't know about the balance and it's maybe you know 50% content complete that might be a good time to launch I think if you're like let's start out there and see where it lands I would do your own sort of private play testing

first cuz there's it's really hard to come back from the perception that it's a bad game all right last we'll think the last one who's on your a

team uh I don't play this game it's too stressful uh thank you very much uh please uh fill out your reviews uh you know when you get the email it'd be great to know and you know maybe they'll

invite me back again after brightest kittens