Post by Lord Ba'al on May 22, 2014 17:31:14 GMT
Jack Attridge
Hello everybody. We are going to have a discussion about iterative design. So we’ve got a list of questions we’re going to fire this off with. Peter, could you describe the design process for one of your games? Godus or else…
Peter Molyneux
Yeah well, you know, in one sense it’s very disappointing because what my approach always has been is to implement something, try it, refine it, change it, throw it away, implement something, try it, refine it, keep it, as opposed to… and I wish I had the skill but I just simply don’t… sitting in a room and coming up with a design bible, the gold-plated design document. For me, when you’re inventing something new, when you’re inventing something new for a new audience, when you’re inventing something new in mechanics and interface, doing it that way is almost impossible. And, you know, the inspiration I give you is this, when… and I’m sure that people are going to pick holes in this argument… when a film is shot, they don’t shoot 2 hours of footage, they shoot 200 hours of footage and then they reduce that down, because sometimes you can only see if something works after you’ve shot the scene. Sometimes you can only see a game mechanic works after you’ve played it. Let me give you a few examples. And this is a huge frustration, not for the community out there because they’re playing an early version of the game and for the team who implements it because many times people, you know, start sticking pins in voodoo dolls when I come in and say sorry guys the feature didn’t work we’re going to have to throw it away. …………………………… example. So, really the way that I design games really started with the first game I really got involved with which is Populous. And in the original Populous I just saw a piece of landscape which Glenn Corpus (
) had done, I then just put some people on that landscape, I didn’t know what those people were going to do, I had no idea. Because I was such a terrible programmer, I couldn’t get the little people to navigate around the landscape, instead I got the player to pull/grow the landscape up. It was the iterative process that found/discovered that game play. Some 2 weeks before the game was due to be released, that’s when I though, you know what, there’s something missing in this game, we need to introduce nights, we had nights in the game. That didn’t come till the very end of the game. It’s the same with Armageddon, the big Armageddon button didn’t come till the very end of the game because we were playing it and refining it and tuning it and balancing it. And it is exactly the same with Godus. I sat in front of a camera and I explained to the world what was currently in our minds that we were going to implement. But some of those things, we implement them, a perfect example of this is the totem, we implemented it, we played with it, we realized that it actually was more distracting or more fiddly or more took you away from the heart of the game, so we threw it away. Now, a lot of this is done in these things which… This is… These are my design documents. All of these are the books that have been filled up in the last 18 months while we were designing Godus. So, for example, I’ll just take one up here. This is the play through… and this is how we iterate by the way, we sit down and we play through… And that play through is done on this document and I write all these notes on the… It’s actually a year ago… well no… on the 5th of August at 12:20 I did a play through and just looking through this ehm… for example, ehm… This is when the totem was in the game, the totem needs a visible area when placed. This is me thinking, playing the game and saying you know what, I need to see the area that the totem was in. Now that was never in any design document. Maybe it should have been. Maybe we should have put it down in the design document. As I said, I wish I was a skilled person to be able to do that. But these play throughs are there and my point is Jack… I know a lot of you guys out in the community are saying, you know, where’s this feature where is that feature, but we have to believe in the ultimate vision. And the ultimate vision is this connected world across multiple devices. It’s a connected world across PC and iOS and god knows what else. We’ve got to stay true to that vision and that’s the thing that we’re implementing and the thing that we’re going to show the whole world in a few short days time, or maybe weeks time, when we release the hub world stuff. That is probably going to change again through this iterative design.
Jack Attridge
So you’re saying that people shouldn’t worry if what they’re seeing right now isn’t what seems like a complete game. I know you’ve mentioned it to me before about the Dungeon Keeper example with chiseling walls out for instance.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, I mean Dungeon Keeper is a very good example, is that the original Dungeon Keeper, the imps didn’t really chisel out the walls. It was only… Originally when I showed Dungeon Keeper we didn’t have any of that, that came in relatively late. In fact, a lot of the features 9 months before we launched Dungeon Keeper we started and rewrote all over again. This is true… Another great example, in Black & White, if you remember, one of the key ways you controlled your people is making these things called disciples, so you picked a person up and put him down. We launched the game in March, we didn’t have disciples until December, the December before we launched. And again, if… There are a lot of brilliant genius game designers that can think through every single problem before they start a single line of development and especially before they talk to the world, and I have a huge amount of respect for those. Myself, if I try and sit down and write every single point of design out I often find that, you know, I get it wrong. I think… I’ll tell you what would be great, if I still got it, is the original… I don’t know if you remember this… the original spreadsheet idea with all the features that we need to be in Godus. Now if I still got that I think you guys should have a look at it, because it’s only… I think it was 111 lines long? And those were all the features in the game, there was just sentence after sentence after sentence so have a look at that stuff.
Jack Attridge
What are the dangers of going from day one and saying this is a solid golden plated design document and having a 110 features that you have no idea how they’re going to work? I mean, there’s times it seems in our development as well that we’ve been very specific about design document, we know what we wanted, but for the basic innovative features, what would be the danger? What is the initial danger of doing that?
Peter Molyneux
Of not using a document or using a document?
Jack Attridge
Of using a document.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you are… you are… the more… There’s a fundamental problem with this and it’s almost a psychological problem. If I talk through an idea with you, you start having a vision in your head of what that means and I start having a vision in my head of what it means and that very often can be different, if just the two of us are talking. If you’re talking to an entire team, if you’re writing this idea down for an entire team, they’re still interpreting that. And they often interpret it… differently. So, you’ll say… We need a totem to go down… Unless you’re going through the finest detail, as in almost asking a programmer to program, you know, the individual lines, it’s going to be slightly misinterpreted, because those big steps can be misinterpreted. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you end up relying upon imagination to such an enormous amount, to balance the game. Now that’s fine if you’re going to do something like something else. So say we were going to do a game like Minecraft, you know, if I was going to do Minesculpt. Then your document can say, well, the way we’re going to dig out the land is by holding down the mouse button and a torch comes out and zaps a block. That’s fine because our imagination has got Minecraft as a reference point. But something like Godus, if you want to invent something new, something totally new, which is what I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a lot of times… I think that, you know, there was nothing like Populous, there was nothing like Powermonger, there was nothing like Syndicate, there was nothing like Magic Carpet, there was nothing like Black & White… if you’re going to invent something, you haven’t got that reference point then.
Jack Attridge
So why is it for instance that Godus might not seem as successful in its first and early showings compared to say another Kickstarter that was released after 18 months of development rather than 6 months?
Peter Molyneux
Well I mean I think there are some wonderful great teams working on Kickstarters and I have nothing but respect for those teams. We did go out to Kickstarter very very very early. While we were doing the Kickstarter the team out there was doing the first prototype. And our thought was, let’s reinvent the god game. Now that really is the only line that people should pay attention to, which is a very scary thing. Let’s reinvent the whole god game genre. If you’re going to reinvent something, then what we don’t want to do and what we never wanted to do is say it’s going to be these bits from Populous and these bits from Black & White. We always said we were going to be inspired from things in Populous and inspired from things in Black & White. And that lead us down a path of invention and iteration which meant that some of the things that we said in the Kickstarter video have come true and some of the things haven’t. It’s meant that, you know… Very often in iterative design you focus on something. You focus like… We focused on sculpting, we did and because we focused so much on sculpting we didn’t focus so much on multi player. You focus on hub world, we’re focusing on hub world, we’re hoping to release to the PC players in a few days or weeks ehm the hub world version. We’re focusing on hub world, that means you’re not focusing on something else. So I wish in a way I could go back in time to the early days of Kickstarter and just say some very important lines. Maybe I said them, maybe I didn’t. We’re going to try and reinvent the god game genre. Here are the features that we currently think are going to work, but it’s going to change. It’s going to change in the first month, in the second month, in the sixth month and here’s our plan. Release in early access, learn from that release in early access, focus for as long as we possibly can on the PC, but we’re going to have to go to the mobile at some point because, you know, we need to spin round there, then focus on mobile and then come back to the PC. That’s our plan. PC first, mobile, which we’re almost to the end of our focus on mobile, well we’ve probably got quite a few weeks left on that, and then go back on the PC.
Jack Attridge
So all people are seeing right now is a barebone version of the game, something that is a lot closer towards our mobile launch but we’ll swing back around and we’ll start seeing much more of a significant PC game.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. That’s why… I love the PC. The PC created me, you know, as a designer. And I would love to give that original thought, reinvent the god game, a living breathing world which you can be proud of and we can interact and we are connected with. And I want to spin back on that. I need to get mobile out there, because it was always… we always said it was going to be a multi platform experience. And then we’re going to go back to PC. And I can assure you the team is rearing to go back on that PC side, it really is. We need to get hub world implemented for you guys so we can test a bit of that stuff but don’t think that multi player battles have gone away. They haven’t, we’re just not focused on it. We just took it out because it is using a thing called a photon server and there was a lot… you know, it meant that Fabs and Gary and Tim had to focus on the photon server, I need them to focus on hub worlds at the moment. Here’s the main thing Jack and you know this and I’m saying it to you. We love what we’re doing. We want to make the ultimate game for PC players! We want to make the ultimate game for mobile players! We want to make a game that brings people together in a connected world! And we’re most passionate and dedicated and focused on that vision as ever. I know people are angry with us because we said certain things in Kickstarter but we’re only doing these things because we really truly believe in it. We’re not doing this to make a company that we’re going to sell off to somebody, that’s not why we’re doing it. That’s why we started 22Cans to reinvent something that needs to be reinvented. And we’re as passionate and as dedicated as we’ve ever been. And I understand people ranting and raving and I understand that people would love to have a design document. And Christ you can have one of these books, you can have them, you can have them all! But they’re not going to really make any sense. The thing that makes the sense is noticing how the game is improving and changing. And soon, very soon, it’s going to go, this is going to be an important step, it’s going to go from 49.5 to 51 percent. That’s when it starts getting really interesting because that’s when we’ve got the bits, the pieces, the ingredients of the recipe and we’re ready to bake the cake.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s going to be a scrumptious cake when we’re done. A plateaud cake. Well, I mean, that might be a good point to wrap up. There is a final question on here. One big discovery you’ve made with Godus starting development, that you didn’t predict has had a real positive impact on Godus as a whole and, you know, yourself the designer going forward. Take a moment to think about that one.
Peter Molyneux
God that’s quite the question. I mean I think it’s this. It’s that I was very down on analytics. And we are using analytics all the time to learn things about our game, to learn how we balance and change things. Now, we’re getting at doing that. It’s taken us a while, especially an old dog like me, to realize that I’m as much a curator as I am an ideas person. And the way I curate things is by looking at these numbers. Looking at how people are progressing, looking how often people come back. The frustration for me, and for everyone else, is I can look at a number now and I can say, you know what, this means we should move the event temple, or this means that we should have a whole new of event type of game. But it may take 8 weeks or 12 weeks to get that idea implemented. So you have to look at something, make a decision about it and then, you know, it goes into the queue of things to be implemented. And our queues are long. We’re currently… We no longer got one queue, we used to just work on one thing, we’ve got two queues. We’ve got this thing called short sprint which is the fast little changes, this Thursday you’ll see one of those changes come out, and they tend to be little things like bugfixes, and then we’ve got the long big meaty things like hub world going on in parallel. So sometimes looking at those analytics, making a decision about the game, changing something, can take weeks or it can take hours.
Jack Attridge
Lovely.
Peter Molyneux
Aaaaaah yes.
Jack Attridge
So we’re halfway there.
Peter Molyneux
No. We’re point five off being halfway.
Jack Attridge
Point five of being halfway there. You’ve heard it here first. Well, I guess we should probably get back to working on Godus.
Peter Molyneux
We should get back to working on Godus. And that is a delight and every time we do one of these videos we have to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support and, you know, for pledging on Kickstarter, for supporting us on Steam early access. We are passionate about doing everything we can to make a brilliant game and to justify the support you’ve given us. Thank you.
Hello everybody. We are going to have a discussion about iterative design. So we’ve got a list of questions we’re going to fire this off with. Peter, could you describe the design process for one of your games? Godus or else…
Peter Molyneux
Yeah well, you know, in one sense it’s very disappointing because what my approach always has been is to implement something, try it, refine it, change it, throw it away, implement something, try it, refine it, keep it, as opposed to… and I wish I had the skill but I just simply don’t… sitting in a room and coming up with a design bible, the gold-plated design document. For me, when you’re inventing something new, when you’re inventing something new for a new audience, when you’re inventing something new in mechanics and interface, doing it that way is almost impossible. And, you know, the inspiration I give you is this, when… and I’m sure that people are going to pick holes in this argument… when a film is shot, they don’t shoot 2 hours of footage, they shoot 200 hours of footage and then they reduce that down, because sometimes you can only see if something works after you’ve shot the scene. Sometimes you can only see a game mechanic works after you’ve played it. Let me give you a few examples. And this is a huge frustration, not for the community out there because they’re playing an early version of the game and for the team who implements it because many times people, you know, start sticking pins in voodoo dolls when I come in and say sorry guys the feature didn’t work we’re going to have to throw it away. …………………………… example. So, really the way that I design games really started with the first game I really got involved with which is Populous. And in the original Populous I just saw a piece of landscape which Glenn Corpus (
) had done, I then just put some people on that landscape, I didn’t know what those people were going to do, I had no idea. Because I was such a terrible programmer, I couldn’t get the little people to navigate around the landscape, instead I got the player to pull/grow the landscape up. It was the iterative process that found/discovered that game play. Some 2 weeks before the game was due to be released, that’s when I though, you know what, there’s something missing in this game, we need to introduce nights, we had nights in the game. That didn’t come till the very end of the game. It’s the same with Armageddon, the big Armageddon button didn’t come till the very end of the game because we were playing it and refining it and tuning it and balancing it. And it is exactly the same with Godus. I sat in front of a camera and I explained to the world what was currently in our minds that we were going to implement. But some of those things, we implement them, a perfect example of this is the totem, we implemented it, we played with it, we realized that it actually was more distracting or more fiddly or more took you away from the heart of the game, so we threw it away. Now, a lot of this is done in these things which… This is… These are my design documents. All of these are the books that have been filled up in the last 18 months while we were designing Godus. So, for example, I’ll just take one up here. This is the play through… and this is how we iterate by the way, we sit down and we play through… And that play through is done on this document and I write all these notes on the… It’s actually a year ago… well no… on the 5th of August at 12:20 I did a play through and just looking through this ehm… for example, ehm… This is when the totem was in the game, the totem needs a visible area when placed. This is me thinking, playing the game and saying you know what, I need to see the area that the totem was in. Now that was never in any design document. Maybe it should have been. Maybe we should have put it down in the design document. As I said, I wish I was a skilled person to be able to do that. But these play throughs are there and my point is Jack… I know a lot of you guys out in the community are saying, you know, where’s this feature where is that feature, but we have to believe in the ultimate vision. And the ultimate vision is this connected world across multiple devices. It’s a connected world across PC and iOS and god knows what else. We’ve got to stay true to that vision and that’s the thing that we’re implementing and the thing that we’re going to show the whole world in a few short days time, or maybe weeks time, when we release the hub world stuff. That is probably going to change again through this iterative design.Jack Attridge
So you’re saying that people shouldn’t worry if what they’re seeing right now isn’t what seems like a complete game. I know you’ve mentioned it to me before about the Dungeon Keeper example with chiseling walls out for instance.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, I mean Dungeon Keeper is a very good example, is that the original Dungeon Keeper, the imps didn’t really chisel out the walls. It was only… Originally when I showed Dungeon Keeper we didn’t have any of that, that came in relatively late. In fact, a lot of the features 9 months before we launched Dungeon Keeper we started and rewrote all over again. This is true… Another great example, in Black & White, if you remember, one of the key ways you controlled your people is making these things called disciples, so you picked a person up and put him down. We launched the game in March, we didn’t have disciples until December, the December before we launched. And again, if… There are a lot of brilliant genius game designers that can think through every single problem before they start a single line of development and especially before they talk to the world, and I have a huge amount of respect for those. Myself, if I try and sit down and write every single point of design out I often find that, you know, I get it wrong. I think… I’ll tell you what would be great, if I still got it, is the original… I don’t know if you remember this… the original spreadsheet idea with all the features that we need to be in Godus. Now if I still got that I think you guys should have a look at it, because it’s only… I think it was 111 lines long? And those were all the features in the game, there was just sentence after sentence after sentence so have a look at that stuff.
Jack Attridge
What are the dangers of going from day one and saying this is a solid golden plated design document and having a 110 features that you have no idea how they’re going to work? I mean, there’s times it seems in our development as well that we’ve been very specific about design document, we know what we wanted, but for the basic innovative features, what would be the danger? What is the initial danger of doing that?
Peter Molyneux
Of not using a document or using a document?
Jack Attridge
Of using a document.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you are… you are… the more… There’s a fundamental problem with this and it’s almost a psychological problem. If I talk through an idea with you, you start having a vision in your head of what that means and I start having a vision in my head of what it means and that very often can be different, if just the two of us are talking. If you’re talking to an entire team, if you’re writing this idea down for an entire team, they’re still interpreting that. And they often interpret it… differently. So, you’ll say… We need a totem to go down… Unless you’re going through the finest detail, as in almost asking a programmer to program, you know, the individual lines, it’s going to be slightly misinterpreted, because those big steps can be misinterpreted. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you end up relying upon imagination to such an enormous amount, to balance the game. Now that’s fine if you’re going to do something like something else. So say we were going to do a game like Minecraft, you know, if I was going to do Minesculpt. Then your document can say, well, the way we’re going to dig out the land is by holding down the mouse button and a torch comes out and zaps a block. That’s fine because our imagination has got Minecraft as a reference point. But something like Godus, if you want to invent something new, something totally new, which is what I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a lot of times… I think that, you know, there was nothing like Populous, there was nothing like Powermonger, there was nothing like Syndicate, there was nothing like Magic Carpet, there was nothing like Black & White… if you’re going to invent something, you haven’t got that reference point then.
Jack Attridge
So why is it for instance that Godus might not seem as successful in its first and early showings compared to say another Kickstarter that was released after 18 months of development rather than 6 months?
Peter Molyneux
Well I mean I think there are some wonderful great teams working on Kickstarters and I have nothing but respect for those teams. We did go out to Kickstarter very very very early. While we were doing the Kickstarter the team out there was doing the first prototype. And our thought was, let’s reinvent the god game. Now that really is the only line that people should pay attention to, which is a very scary thing. Let’s reinvent the whole god game genre. If you’re going to reinvent something, then what we don’t want to do and what we never wanted to do is say it’s going to be these bits from Populous and these bits from Black & White. We always said we were going to be inspired from things in Populous and inspired from things in Black & White. And that lead us down a path of invention and iteration which meant that some of the things that we said in the Kickstarter video have come true and some of the things haven’t. It’s meant that, you know… Very often in iterative design you focus on something. You focus like… We focused on sculpting, we did and because we focused so much on sculpting we didn’t focus so much on multi player. You focus on hub world, we’re focusing on hub world, we’re hoping to release to the PC players in a few days or weeks ehm the hub world version. We’re focusing on hub world, that means you’re not focusing on something else. So I wish in a way I could go back in time to the early days of Kickstarter and just say some very important lines. Maybe I said them, maybe I didn’t. We’re going to try and reinvent the god game genre. Here are the features that we currently think are going to work, but it’s going to change. It’s going to change in the first month, in the second month, in the sixth month and here’s our plan. Release in early access, learn from that release in early access, focus for as long as we possibly can on the PC, but we’re going to have to go to the mobile at some point because, you know, we need to spin round there, then focus on mobile and then come back to the PC. That’s our plan. PC first, mobile, which we’re almost to the end of our focus on mobile, well we’ve probably got quite a few weeks left on that, and then go back on the PC.
Jack Attridge
So all people are seeing right now is a barebone version of the game, something that is a lot closer towards our mobile launch but we’ll swing back around and we’ll start seeing much more of a significant PC game.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. That’s why… I love the PC. The PC created me, you know, as a designer. And I would love to give that original thought, reinvent the god game, a living breathing world which you can be proud of and we can interact and we are connected with. And I want to spin back on that. I need to get mobile out there, because it was always… we always said it was going to be a multi platform experience. And then we’re going to go back to PC. And I can assure you the team is rearing to go back on that PC side, it really is. We need to get hub world implemented for you guys so we can test a bit of that stuff but don’t think that multi player battles have gone away. They haven’t, we’re just not focused on it. We just took it out because it is using a thing called a photon server and there was a lot… you know, it meant that Fabs and Gary and Tim had to focus on the photon server, I need them to focus on hub worlds at the moment. Here’s the main thing Jack and you know this and I’m saying it to you. We love what we’re doing. We want to make the ultimate game for PC players! We want to make the ultimate game for mobile players! We want to make a game that brings people together in a connected world! And we’re most passionate and dedicated and focused on that vision as ever. I know people are angry with us because we said certain things in Kickstarter but we’re only doing these things because we really truly believe in it. We’re not doing this to make a company that we’re going to sell off to somebody, that’s not why we’re doing it. That’s why we started 22Cans to reinvent something that needs to be reinvented. And we’re as passionate and as dedicated as we’ve ever been. And I understand people ranting and raving and I understand that people would love to have a design document. And Christ you can have one of these books, you can have them, you can have them all! But they’re not going to really make any sense. The thing that makes the sense is noticing how the game is improving and changing. And soon, very soon, it’s going to go, this is going to be an important step, it’s going to go from 49.5 to 51 percent. That’s when it starts getting really interesting because that’s when we’ve got the bits, the pieces, the ingredients of the recipe and we’re ready to bake the cake.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s going to be a scrumptious cake when we’re done. A plateaud cake. Well, I mean, that might be a good point to wrap up. There is a final question on here. One big discovery you’ve made with Godus starting development, that you didn’t predict has had a real positive impact on Godus as a whole and, you know, yourself the designer going forward. Take a moment to think about that one.
Peter Molyneux
God that’s quite the question. I mean I think it’s this. It’s that I was very down on analytics. And we are using analytics all the time to learn things about our game, to learn how we balance and change things. Now, we’re getting at doing that. It’s taken us a while, especially an old dog like me, to realize that I’m as much a curator as I am an ideas person. And the way I curate things is by looking at these numbers. Looking at how people are progressing, looking how often people come back. The frustration for me, and for everyone else, is I can look at a number now and I can say, you know what, this means we should move the event temple, or this means that we should have a whole new of event type of game. But it may take 8 weeks or 12 weeks to get that idea implemented. So you have to look at something, make a decision about it and then, you know, it goes into the queue of things to be implemented. And our queues are long. We’re currently… We no longer got one queue, we used to just work on one thing, we’ve got two queues. We’ve got this thing called short sprint which is the fast little changes, this Thursday you’ll see one of those changes come out, and they tend to be little things like bugfixes, and then we’ve got the long big meaty things like hub world going on in parallel. So sometimes looking at those analytics, making a decision about the game, changing something, can take weeks or it can take hours.
Jack Attridge
Lovely.
Peter Molyneux
Aaaaaah yes.
Jack Attridge
So we’re halfway there.
Peter Molyneux
No. We’re point five off being halfway.
Jack Attridge
Point five of being halfway there. You’ve heard it here first. Well, I guess we should probably get back to working on Godus.
Peter Molyneux
We should get back to working on Godus. And that is a delight and every time we do one of these videos we have to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support and, you know, for pledging on Kickstarter, for supporting us on Steam early access. We are passionate about doing everything we can to make a brilliant game and to justify the support you’ve given us. Thank you.
