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

Alex Hutchinson gears up for a GDC demo that means the world

As soon as the teaser trailer for Journey

To The Savage Planet hit the internet, we heard a few things. Among the most frequently asked were: why is there no animation in the video, and when will we see gameplay? The first question is easily answered – the video was put together from in-game assets, bubblegum and string, and we didn’t have money to splash around – while the second requires some nuance, although the basics are also simple. We weren’t quite ready to show gameplay, and we also want to have a rollout of assets so we can build interest over time with a series of (hopefully) newsworthy or shareworthy announcements, instead of dropping everything in one hit at the start.

But now GDC is upon us and we’re prepping a demo to show gameplay for the first time, which is probably the most pivotal moment in any game release schedule. It’s the first time most people will look at it, and if you do it poorly, it may also be the last.

So as I’ve explained previously, this will involve me standing awkwardly in a (hopefully spacious) hotel room for nine hours, three days in a row, as members of the press file in, tap away on their phones, briefly raise their eyes, then shuffle out again, usually giving no outward indication of whether they’re going to declare your game amazing or awful. This prospect fills me with equal parts dread and excitement. I think we’ve got the game in a good place, so I’m looking forward to highlighting some of our weirder ideas and hopefully getting a few laughs from the audience. But by the third day of demoing you are usually so bored by your own ideas that it’s harder and harder to do your game justice.

More terrifying is that any demo you’re presenting will have issues and unfinished areas in it. We remain the only creative industry that starts its press tour before the project is finished, meaning you won’t have your full feature set in place, and some of it may be working but not in a fit state to show people who aren’t regularly exposed to workin-progress features.

And even though these days you’ll never have a finished build, you should at least prioritise your development to let you establish the two or three features or elements that set your game apart from the horde. For Savage Planet it’s humour, meaning we need to show player decisions that get consequences that hopefully provoke a laugh, and a combination of platforming and combat against bizarre creatures and crazy map layouts which we hope will look fresh and challenging.

And because the game isn’t finished, you’re usually unsure as to the exact art specs you’re going to be able to squeeze onto your target platforms, meaning you need to be careful about what you show. Nobody builds a demo thinking they won’t be able to ship it, but reality can be cruel in the last months of a project and sometimes harsh calls need to be made on art assets.

Even worse is highlighting a gameplay feature you end up cutting, even if the reason it gets the chop is it wasn’t actually any good. And this doesn’t have to extend to Molyneux levels of design-by-interview. I remember being told many times that the GDC demo for Spore was false advertising, despite the fact that the only difference between it and the shipping game was the ability to drag dead bodies with your creature’s mouth, which we cut because it had no purpose in the finished game.

And even when you’ve vetted every corner of your demo, shows like GDC or E3 are barely-managed chaos. People will be late, some bookings run over, some disappear, and some are inserted, so your demo also needs to be flexible. You need to know all the shortcuts in your demo, what you can skip or drag out, and best of all try to target your demo to the audience you have. On Far Cry 4 we worked incredibly hard to emphasise the player story over the game story, but that meant that we were never going to be the big cinematic experience that some media prefer. In those demos I consciously went out of my way to say that we were not a narrative game in order to try and head off any assumptions that this was something we were trying to achieve.

It’s not an exact science, and for me it’s as much about managing each demo on the day and seeing what your audience is reacting positively to, but you should only have one goal: to get them to help you put eyeballs on your game when it releases.

Nobody builds a demo thinking they won’t be able to ship it, but reality can be cruel in the last months of a project