Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson on publisher breakups and notes to self

When we launched Typhoon we were self-funding everything, but within a few months we were fortunate enough to partner with a big publisher, which injected enough money to allow us to grow a small, functioning team and focus solely on making our first prototype. Towards the end of last year we’d put together a solid two hours of our game, which included a fully functioning core loop, and a sample platter of encounters, creatures and mechanics.

And while we were excited and satisfied with the progress we were making, we still had a laundry list of issues. Chiefly, we weren’t happy with our visual direction, and we weren’t hitting all of our design goals, but we had a robust chunk of our game working and you could engage in an honest discussion about what was good or bad with working code instead of just hand waving and hopes.

At this point we expected a discussion on the merits of the software or the current state relative to the initial pitch, but instead found ourselves focusing on how big the game could be in the end (we wanted to start small – they wanted the opposite) and whether we could support some new hardware and software features that they wanted us to push.

It quickly became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to make the kind of game that would fulfill their corporate objectives, and to be honest, even us using the term ‘corporate objectives’ made us realise that this wasn’t why we started the company. So we broke up. It was mutual and very amicable, and the deal has left us in a far better position than six months ago: we have a demo, we have 20 employees hard at work in our own office, and we have a much clearer idea of what it is we want to build.

But we still need to be as critical as possible about our process, our idea, and especially our size. I estimate we cut about 75 per cent of what I would traditionally think of as a ‘triple-A’ scope, but it wasn’t enough. Our original pitch included the idea that while we couldn’t make a massive game, we could make a really focused sliver of those games at the same level of quality. To do that, we cut whole departments. No PvP if the game was not going to focus on it; no big cinematic teams as we wanted players to generate their own stories; no more dialogue and scripting team, since we wanted a silent protagonist who embodied the player, rather than a character you could inhabit; no more level or mission scripting because we wanted a world that was immersive and systemic; and finally no second-screen companion game, 3D TV support or other novelty tech. Honestly, who cares about that stuff outside of a panicked marketing department?

But the scope still wasn’t tight enough. There’s a Post-It on my monitor which reads, ‘Why would anyone care?’, which I think is a pretty decent question to ask yourself as a designer whenever you’re proposing a new game or feature. I’d rather we made a game that people actively disliked, rather than a game nobody noticed. (There’s a reason that if you spam the positive-emote button in

Army Of Two: The 40th Day, Salem and Rios engage in an awkwardly long embrace.)

So we are cutting everything that isn’t either a) physically impossible to ship without, or b) something that provokes a strong emotional reaction among the team. This means we can justify the work as being absolutely necessary, or capable of making someone care about our game.

It’s a surprisingly liberating moment. Sometimes you get caught up in trying to solve the problem, without taking a moment to step back and decide whether perhaps you can just remove the entire feature instead.

On a large team you can cover a few side bets to see whether they bear fruit. For example, the entire naval system for

Assassin’s Creed III and, later, Black Flag, began by flying two engineers from Singapore to sit behind me for a few months. We wanted to at least build a few prototypes to see if we could come up with something that felt good and was worth investing in, and I knew we had something when even the first iterations generated strong reactions. Most people loved it; a few people said that this was turning the assassin into a pirate, but everyone was paying attention.

At Typhoon we only have the time and resources to go all-in on a single bet. And more terrifyingly: because this column is being written while we’re developing the game, you’ll get to see if it works in realtime.

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

I’d rather we made a game that people actively disliked, rather than a game nobody noticed