Hold To Reset

Alex Hutchinson braces for a flurry of feedback on the first demo

Mid-winter in Montreal gamedev is an interesting moment: it’s -38° outside with wind chill, there’s no Christmas to look forward to, and it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. On one side, there’s a great incentive to stay indoors and work when going outside can be physically painful. But it can also be the moment where everyone looks most critically at what they’ve been doing the previous year without the benefits of vitamin D.

For Typhoon, it’s a pivotal moment. We submitted our first major demo to our publisher at the end of the year, and are now in the process of waiting to see if they will pick up the full game. If they do, then it’s another minor ramp-up of staff and straight into preproduction. If they don’t, then I will be taking that demo on a road trip across the globe to try and secure a new source of funding. This is very different to failing a gate at a big studio, where usually your game was cancelled, but you were still gainfully employed. Here, we keep our game if we want, but we have a ticking clock before we’re all outside enjoying the cold.

Thankfully, both require the same process in the office: sitting down and thinking critically about not only the game we’ve built, but also how we’ve built it, and then trying to find ways to make both better. Historically, this sort of process is handled in a post mortem at the end of a large project, and generally it feels like little more than a placebo. Usually the team is so big that feedback is diffused, and a large percentage of people will be immediately reassigned to another project anyway so they won’t even be around to enact or experience the change. Finally, the franchise has a kind of inexorable momentum, both in terms of content and process, so even the best intentions are fighting an uphill battle.

In our case, it’s more of an existential question. We need everyone to be doing more than just the one job if we’re going to pull this off, which requires a significant level of commitment and focus. If people don’t feel like their voices are heard, then why would they stick around? It’s not so much that everyone has to agree with every decision, but everyone at least needs to understand the reason for the decision so they can work effectively.

So this week has been spent trawling through 20 different documents filled with likes, don’t-likes and ideas, to build up a bunch of key topics that we will need to have discussions about. Everything from tone to the core loop to art direction and worldbuilding process are up for discussion. We had everyone submit their feedback in an email first, to try and avoid the groupthink that can occur in a discussion, and make sure that even those team members who may not be comfortable in a raucous roundtable setting had a chance to get their point across.

Next, I’m collating those emails into key topics that seem big and juicy enough to warrant a meeting. The aim is not to make the final call then, but to work through as many ideas as possible. Many of these meetings will be about difficult features that aren’t gelling, but I also think that it’s worth discussing the parts of the game that people think are already strong. Doing more of something that’s partially working is often a better strategy than trying to fix something.

Hopefully, in the end we will have a list of cuts, a list of ‘more please’, and then a small and focused list of items we need to iterate on. Then I get to present the decisions back to the team in a big all-hands meeting.

I’ve often felt that past a certain point of development, consistency beats a perfect answer, and this has never been more true than it is for us now. On a big franchise game, we were able to place significant bets without risking the success of the entire project, but at Typhoon we need to make one, strong, clear bet and do as little of everything else as possible – which means a highly rigorous pruning process.

And that can be emotionally draining for everyone, as we define a series of rules that we can test the game against that may not be to everyone’s personal tastes. Is it skill based, or more of an experience? Do we want the player to engage in combat all the time, or not? If we get it right, we can be consistent and cohesive. And hopefully, make a game worth talking about, so that it’s an easy job for a future Edge staffer to write a two-sentence summary that still seems fresh and exciting in the preview section. Not that I’m making any assumptions, of course.

Alex Hutchinson is co-founder of Montreal-based Typhoon Studios. He can be found on Twitter at @BangBangClick

Doing more of something that’s partially working is often a better strategy than trying to fix something