Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson prepares to boot Typhoon’s debut out into the wilds
Closing a game, finally putting it into a box (either metaphorical or literal) and watching it go out into the world is something I’ve always loved. I even love the few months that precede it, despite the fact that designers and directors get less and less input as our requests to edit or tune things become riskier and riskier, and project managers start launching press tours to get us out of the office. There are no more endless meetings, no revisiting previous decisions. It’s when final choices are made, people are forced to commit to them and everything starts to happen at an incredible speed.
At Ubisoft there is a person called a ‘closer’, who shows up towards the end of a project to help teams finish their game. When you’re thirdparty, you will usually get an external producer who will be shuttled into your location to help you close. When it works it’s a fresh set of eyes, unencumbered by the hope embedded in earlier decisions, who can help you make better choices about a feature that needs to be cut or the pointlessness of clinging to something that is clearly no longer going to happen. At its worst, it’s an external person arriving with little understanding of what you’re trying to do who behaves like a bulldozer, ripping through years of hard work with little regard for the vision just so you can finally get something out the door.
It’s been a little different on Savage Planet as we are nowhere near big enough to have dedicated closing staff and our external producer quit a few months ago, meaning we’ve had to figure out how to finally close this project all on our lonesome. We’ve had a pair of dedicated development testers for most of the project, which might sound a lot (ten per cent of our headcount!) but it has helped us stay stable. Better still, they have now played the game through at least 300 times, meaning I can yell weird questions such as, “Do you find enough silicon in the forest near the Wilds of Zyl?” and get an informed reply that helps us tune or adjust.
We’ve also employed outside agencies that do player research to perform long playtests with brand-new players to get objective data on how long it takes people to get through the game, where they get stuck and what features are their highlights or lowlights. If people consistently report the same negatives, then recently I’ve decided it’s probably better just to remove that area or feature altogether rather than spend an unknown amount of time trying to fix it. You need to be able to get close enough on the first attempt that people can at least see what you’re going for, otherwise you’ll just keep burning money and time trying to fix what’s probably a dud. Better still, with a quick early cut you can put all that time and attention into features people enjoy. It’s infinitely easier to make something that’s already good into something memorable and amazing.
And even though we’re independent, we have ended up with some big-game challenges by agreeing to ship a physical version as well as digital, and to simultaneously ship on PS4, Xbox and PC. The physical media challenge is just that you cut six weeks off your dev time to make room for manufacturing. Multiple platforms mean fixing more bugs that are unique to one console or the other, and different lists of requirements courtesy of each hardware manufacturer.
The result of all this investment is thousands and thousands of bugs, plus hundreds and hundreds of suggestions, which we need to trawl through one by one. Nobody ever wants to ship a bug or ignore an issue, but towards the end of any project time becomes your most precious resource, so we rank them all in order of severity or desire, then pour them onto the team and go as fast as possible.
On bigger projects the rate of change at the end can be incredible, with thousands of issues being fixed every day. With our team, we’re lucky to hit 100, although fortunately there’s nothing monstrous left in the database. We’re basically down to player comfort and clarity issues, with a few new crashes and horrible corners popping up each week to be immediately smashed.
Since I’ve been kicked out the door for more press tours, it’s almost time for me to let go and start thinking about game two: what do we keep, what do we jettison and what do we add if we’re lucky enough that Savage Planet sells a few copies? After almost three years on the project, the idea of a blank page again feels pretty enticing.
We have ended up with some big-game challenges by agreeing to ship a physical version as well as digital