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0:36
This is Rand Miller from Cyan. I'm a co-creator of Myst and Riven and more recently Obduction and working on Firmament.
0:50
If you as a creator can have freedom it means that the game gets to have an identity. People who, I'll say build worlds, but it can be in a novel or a movie or a
1:04
game or anything like that, you want to get better and better at your craft. And part of that is: is there, you know, is there anything that makes the world a better place in what I'm doing, or am I just building a chest of drawers? Am I carving a chest of drawers? And there's nothing wrong with carving a chest of drawers. They're beautiful, and the masters of that craft do exquisite work, but there can be a little more. And that gets really hard,
1:31
and it gets tricky because you know then things have agendas, and and yet people sometimes like it when they learn a little about themselves in something, or there's a there's a deeper soul to it. Hi there, this is Robyn Miller. I co-created Myst and Riven... many years ago. When I play a game I am kind of a little obsessed by the environment and when I leave the game I just can't stop thinking about the world. The environment itself of that place, if it's a good game,
2:09
becomes the character. And that's what I get to know. And that's what I think is the power of games.
2:17
Hi, I'm Chris Sutherland, and I am a director at Playtonic Games. In the distant past I worked on games like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie... more recently you may know me from working on games like Yooka-Laylee and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair. And I work on software and usually player control. My name is Hamish Lockwood. I'm a designer at Playtonic. I've worked on Yooka-Laylee and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair also... worked on some smaller indie games like
2:48
Volume, Stealth Inc, and a couple of others. It's easy to get lost in lots of little ideas, whereas if you're having something that you focus on at the start and you develop these kind of pillars that underpin it and say well this is what it's all about.
3:06
Over just a few years at Playtonic I've noticed that we're approaching projects in a different way. Now we're in a position where we can properly plan. Like, it's taken two games to to be able to sit down and go okay let's do some proper planning, be much more thorough. I feel like I'm learning so much each time that each project you do seem to approach it in a different way.
3:27
Hello, my name is Darren Corb, and I'm the audio director and composer at Supergiant Games.
3:33
It is an effort by several people, but that mainly comes from our creative director Greg Cassavin who is the writer on the games and spearheads a lot of that stuff. I'm making decisions based on what i think is going to reinforce those ideas by just experimenting and sort of theory crafting first and then experimenting within that space and seeing where that takes me.
3:58
Hi, I'm Mike Rayhawk. I wrote BrikWars many many years ago now. It's a tabletop game about wargaming with construction bricks like LEGO or Mega Bloks or any other lesser forms of construction brick. It's a game about subverting the idea of war gaming with LEGO bricks as much it is actually wargaming. So it is going out of its way to teach you to do everything wrong. The philosophy of BrikWars is to chase those moments when things are going wrong to kind of
4:29
take that power trip that you're chasing in most tabletop games and make that the thing you want to avoid or or at least to make a joke out of it which flies in the face of most war games right hi uh my name is ken i'm the director and writer uh composer of freebird games so over the years i've been mostly working on the um to the moon series which is to the moon finding paradise and the upcoming imposter factory and i also got some uh some secret projects for the
4:59
long term in the background for the soul of a game to me it's really about finding what a part like what matters really matters in a particular game that can be very different between different games having every component of the game working toward that is really the ultimate ultimate goal and to make something feel cohesive especially when we have you know so many disciplines coming to a medium like game you know you have the artists you have
5:26
the writers you have the programmers you have the uh you know musicians but sometimes the best way to do something within that particular discipline it's not the best way to fit into to you know make the whole project shy so if you look at a writing by itself and judge it versus writing with the cohesive whole with the music and art and everything else it's very different you know it's a very different standard to make true of the saying how does it go
5:52
how like a fist is stronger than five fingers that that is really keeping the soul of a game intact
6:29
i was just thinking of the the latest zelda game where you start off in the game you start off on this plateau um you kind of learn the ropes a little bit but you can go right to the end of the game almost immediately or you can just take so much time wandering all over the universe you feel like you're in complete control and i loved that about that game as you have you really feel like it is your universe and you can do whatever the heck you want you can try
7:00
if you want you can try to beat ganon which you don't have much luck with or you can just play it really really feels like you have agency in that in that universe
7:19
you know if you look back to the original banjo game there really wasn't a kind of much of a guide in terms of where you should be going next it was up to you to explore and i think that was something that people loved about that game and that era of games there wasn't really a thing that said these are your quests this is where your next quest is there's an arrow telling you where to go there's a mini map but without those there's people who've been brought up on
7:39
the expectations that those things exist were really struggling because they were finding that we're where am i supposed to do that the idea that you would have a place where you just explore was like why that was alien to those people sometimes starting out in a game is very intimidating if you give people too many paths at the beginning it's it's it's almost like a phenomenon when when the uh world wide web started where you felt like if you click
8:08
started clicking down paths you would go too far down a path and you you felt like you had a neat need to work your way back out so that you didn't miss something or lose your place or or gloss over something and and and not see it and so the games we've done recently we start out much more linear so that people kind of get a feel and a lot of times it's a simple task at the beginning mist had this too but it's it's something to kind of reassure them that you're on the right path
8:38
it's fairly linear and you can do what you want so they get the feel of the place before you kind of open it up and start giving them choices you give them a bit of security
8:48
i think players do want and even need structure it's just how much you put in there on impossible layer on the overworld it's quite open like you can that there's pay walls at certain areas um but once you level one you go into the new section of the overworld and then there's like another bunch of levels but you could theoretically walk past all of them all the way up to the next pay wall and if you've got enough you could pay to go through to the next area
9:13
but what's interesting is at one point in development we didn't have any paywalls the idea was you'd be dropped in the game and you could go to any level you go to the last level but then we thought that that was too open so we put these kind of more soft uh walls in that allowed you to go into a section and have a bit of freedom and you could have those you have your own choices but then you would eventually reach a final point you then open up this other new area
9:38
so it keeps putting the player back on course and then open opens up again for them and it just like kind of cascades that information to the player so they're not getting overwhelmed
9:48
being able to know the player's state of mind is one of the most important things into the move for example right it ultimately it tells kind of a sentimental story but the tone at least the first part of it especially the first part of it is quite uh not serious you know it's quite uh it tries to go to the comic route and it tries to not take itself seriously so that's kind of the job of the two doctors right so the two doctors are kind of um are syncing with the
10:19
player at least thinking with a type of player so the people who are into dramas to begin with and people who are just dropping by and they got like maybe they just had a bad day they're they're not focused you know they're dropping by to perhaps even have fun and to be able to um be in sync with both of those type of players you really have to kind of meet them both by the door and lead them to one particular hallway right so people who are into drama you don't
10:47
have to worry about them because they are they're ready to go but you have to kind of you know kind of help the folks who are not yet focused not in the right state of mind uh to get there and once they're there they'll they'll be along for the ride right so that that's kind of what the uh from a technical perspective i guess that's kind of what the doctors do that's the core of what makes something work is just to be able to get into the
11:14
same state of mind as the player sync with them and gradually without bricks without sudden jones to break that connection to to lead them where uh they need to be
11:26
you want people to think that they're making choices and they can go anywhere they want but at the same time just to just to make a game just to be able to build it for the most part especially if you're an indie in a small studio you've got to constrain where they do and what they do so that you don't have too many variables to have to build and mess with so that's the balance that we try to
11:58
strike so in brick wars player agency is kind of a carrot i dangle in front of players but never give to them i'm always trying to move them forward but never give them what they think they want so in a regular war game you have the power to send your troops out and kill other things and destroy things and watch them all die in brick wars i want you to think you have that power
12:22
but then as soon as you send your troops out everything goes wrong uh nothing you thought was going to happen happens and you have to continually deal with things not going the way you expected and having that accelerate over the course of the game so the the further you get in the worst things get and that is terrible game design right like like in any other game that is what you're trying to avoid uh you're trying to clamp down on any
12:47
exploding mechanics or mathematics that that take off in a direction you don't expect and here i'm trying to ensure that happens the the more games i can have that end with the ship blowing up or a nuke going off and everybody dying from something they never saw coming the happier i am the the player agency is in setting off these disasters but then the actual narrative agency is often with the person who just had the disaster happen to them
13:14
like starting with mist we were trying to reveal a story in there and this story had a large part in keeping you immersed and involved it wasn't that you were getting a bag of gold you were trying to achieve something because you were part of the story and so um we had this issue at the beginning where people started the game and they wandered around the island but they weren't picking up on
13:35
stuff and we initially didn't have the um the four chamber we put that in later realizing that oh p people need a little bit of a of a boost and we can start the story just a step earlier if we put a message from atres to his wife in there that something's gone awry as robin has said many times it missed felt like an experiment you know it was just us learning as we went and that was one of the things we changed and i think for the better also i think that missed was early
14:08
i think so many games have taken that basic idea i think it would have happened anyway and taken it a lot further it was a very small story a very simple story but now you see these massive stories i i think it's very exciting to now see and play these huge novelesque type worlds and you you just are constantly encountering story elements and that's crazy and insane and super fun
15:04
so i think game theo actually shares a lot of commonality with uh what we were talking about with the soul of the game i kind of think of it like set bonus you know for collecting gears in certain kind of games right so each individual piece might not be particularly good by themselves compared to some other ones but if you collect them in such a way that you know the set bonus really sets them apart because they work well together with something like rpg makers
15:29
certain things are definitely more set than others so you have um so you're already left with kind of an unbalanced toolkit which is actually not a bad thing i think because a blank sheet of paper is more dangerous than something with something already drawn on it so in that sense i i i wasn't too troubled by by rpg maker's limitations as a whole at least for what i was doing a large part of the uh the void that was left was um to be filled with things like music for example
16:00
which are not limited in any way a big part of my approach to placing people in the environment of one of our games is trying to create a musical setting that feels like it comes from a specific place you know the music isn't all diegetic in the games but i try to make the components of the music feel as if they are meaning i try to make it so that the music feels that it comes from this place you know i ask a series of questions to myself at the beginning of a project and through
16:32
the first part of a project through all the way through sort of the pre-production phase and the questions are like what would the instruments in this place be what sort of music would the people in this place listen to what sort of music would they write so i'm trying to sort of discover the answers to those questions as i'm coming up with the sonic palette based on what tone we're trying to create in a specific place and what that place should feel like texturally
17:01
the essence of the game feel we kept it very simple just a mouse and one button anybody could do it and we evolved that as we went now we got into some rather sophisticated use of a mouse and one button you know with clicking and dragging all the things that that apple did as well but it was it was just so simple we wrapped everything around that interface and so when we came to do mist it was it was only natural to kind of keep that going and i love that i really
17:32
really love that i am not a fan of interacting in a world with a controller with a gaming controller it's a line in the sand for people that breaks the uh the ability to learn how to play for a lot of people i think with miss one of the reasons it was successful is it was just so freaking easy we sat our mom in front of it and regardless whether she continued to play or not she could click on the mouse and step forward and you know kind of get the idea of it now that said
18:06
it's hard it's just a hard thing to really maintain always and do things simply vr is a whole new challenge in vr games there's such an ability to like be in the world and use your hands even and it really feels like you're there i love being in certain v you know virtual reality games and you know if they're built correctly you aren't really thinking about interface anymore there's all kinds of vr games that do it in all sorts of different ways but it's
18:39
it really is a magical experience oh but vr still the controllers do have buttons on them and thumbsticks and you know all that stuff too that you have to try and implement things that way and that's the hard part i don't like that i wish i could do everything with just hands
19:02
i really really invest into the tactile element of the game this is something i didn't realize until a decade in or so if the game is about the bricks then everything should tie back into the bricks so every every ability every device every feature of your character is another brick it's got to be represented by something that can be broken off and taken away or put on something else and then
19:26
i took that even further by fetishizing the dice themselves so now the actual dye that you hold in your hand has power and some of your minifigures actually know about it some of them can see the dice and and some of them can't and it's it's this whole religious thing where some believe and some don't these aren't figures that represent soldiers right these are the actual soldiers like if you're
19:48
if you're doing damage to a helicopter and you hit a piece that holds the front part to the tail part those things are broken apart that's not written on a sheet anywhere it's just you know that that's held together by that one piece because the physical model is held together by that one piece if his leg has a crack in it then the actual characters like has a crack in it right
20:08
for me my main first audio pass is when you look at the game anything that looks like it should have a sound i go through and i make a sound for and try to get it hooked up anytime a visual effect happens anytime there's a impact or contact or you touch something or that you know if anything visual happens you usually want some sort of sonic component to it then you'll notice other things that feel like they should have sound because those things have
20:34
sound and then you kind of go more granular more granular the menus in our games tend to be pretty expressive i think so the sounds in the menus of the games tend to be themed around that world you know in pyre all all the sounds were like book paper themed so it's like flipping through pages whenever you toggle through a menu in uh transistor they were it was all like using some weird alternate universe like mac in bastion it was all building sounds like hammering nails and
21:03
and in hades you know the the mirror of night menu for example it's sort of like um mystical powerful almost creepy thing that instills in you some sort of unholy power you know and you and so it's got some of that vibe but it's also got like kind of glass like tinking like that sort of mirror like you're tapping on a mirror almost so it's got some like textural components in there too and and i tried to give the the actual darkness resource like kind of like a liquidy like kind
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of quality because that's what it looks like so i'm just trying to theme all the ui sounds after you know some central uh element of the game when you play a game that's in development or even just like a game that comes out you kind of know if it doesn't feel right but it's hard to know exactly what doesn't feel right about it and i think the solution is just like lots of little things really
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it's like you know the correct sound effects and the correct animations and timings of animations like just a few frames can really change the feel of something yeah i mean the challenge is is often getting this um digital inputs that you're making on this joystick and translating them into something that's an analog experience from what you want in your head so you're wanting a character to run around on the spot and you thinking well what they're trying to do there
22:18
what would that feel like if you're doing it in real life and so you might then make it so the character leans in when they're they're running in a tight circle so you're trying to that's not something that you're kind of imbuing via the controls directly there's not no control to say lean in but you're trying to go well if he's doing this kind of motion then he's probably trying to do this and therefore from that we'll amend the the particles or the you know the angle
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the character to accordingly and then you've got challenges where if you've got animations that you want to put in sometimes the game play requirements are such that they conflict and the classic example is you want to jump and then you know from the best animation point of view you'd have somebody crouch and then jump but the idea that you press the button and then character squats down and then jumps doesn't work in a fast action game but you know it would work in
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some titles and sometimes like a lot of the time actually like hamish said it's trial and error you kind of have an idea in your head of what you want to get to you try something out and then you go well that's not quite right why is that and you then have to analyze and go why does that not feel like i expect it to and it's like how how you know maybe character movement interacts with other things in the game as well so it's just like just tons of little just tinkering around you
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know to to get it feeling right i don't know if it's an exact science yeah you just just tinker
24:13
so the gameplay comes first before the audio implementation for sure i'll try to assess like what's an interesting way that we can incorporate the audio starting with transistor we've had multi-channel music with stems that we could kind of turn on and off on command based on different game states and stuff we've done that to varying degrees of complexity pyre being the most complex where we had i think eight stereo stems playing simultaneously like all
24:49
the time or whatever so in different combinations once we tried to optimize the game realized oh maybe that was a dumb idea i don't even think rock band has that many stems playing at the same time we do something similar in hades but we are aware that players are going to be hearing the music in hades a lot more because of the roguelike nature and and the way the content is doled out and the
25:15
volume of the content it's a lot i think part of it is trying to find an implementation that will keep it fresh we kind of tried to like randomize it a little bit more for example the music that plays when you're exploring the biome maps and you're progressing through a run we have an intro section that plays for a couple of chambers that's just sort of like a pulsing pad essentially
25:37
building anticipation and it opens up into sort of the quote-unquote mediterranean folk arrangement of the piece and then when you get to either a mini boss or a boss it will call a transition to the next section which is the big rockin section and then when the final blow is struck on the boss and they die it calls a transition to the ending tag which is like a satisfying like conclusion to the piece so it should feel theoretically seamless but it's going to be different each
26:08
time you hear it to zoom out a little bit that's sort of one of the general challenges of video game scoring you're taking this linear medium and sort of trying to put it into a non-linear medium mechanically i try to make the most interesting parts of the game the parts where you're failing right if you if you swing a sword at somebody and you hit them and they die that's it that's over like there's no extra material that goes into that but if you swing a horse and hit somebody
26:37
and they don't quite die now you have a bunch of interesting decisions to make like did you top their or actually they have a bunch of interesting decisions i let them decide whether their arm fell off or they took a mortal wound and they're gonna die later but they get to make a speech first in the same vein if you make a really great role a critical success you do more damage and it's over but if you make a really poor rule now you as players get to debate like what kind of
27:01
disaster happened the goal is to move as quickly as possible past all the standard war gaming stuff and then really invest in all the parts where things go wrong and where chaos is happening
27:14
i mean i think in impossible there we had a an idea that when you have this move which is called buddy slam which is really a ground pound kind of move and we said oh really if you're going down at that speed we should be able to convert that into a roll a forward roll so you'd hit the ground and then go forward at high speed and so we put that in that made sense that was fine and then it was only i think a couple of weeks later that we were playing it and somebody spotted
27:41
the because when you roll at any point you can jump when you ground pound you go into the roll if you immediately press jump you could then do this really large long looping jump just as a side effect of that move and of course part of the thought was should we get rid of that but then why would you not be able to jump then but then also it felt like actually this is kind of cool but it does feel intuitive as well actually there wouldn't be any sense of taking out because if
28:08
the player thought well i can ground pound and then i can boost so if i can jump at the same time surely that should work and so if you naturally discover it it's like oh it feels good like my approach is like there's the very early parts of development where you're trying to build the game and the systems at the same time whereas later on in development and there's this like nice sweet spot where you've kind of got all these systems and stuff there and so you've
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kind of got this toolbox to build levels and experiences and puzzles with and so when you've got all those systems there you can really play with them together it's like what if i use this and this together and what if i use this and this together it's almost like like a mario maker you know they give you all the tools and you just you just combine them and see how they play with each other and all this sort of stuff kind of like a frustrating part of development where
28:54
just through the nature of it you you get to a deadline where the game's going to release and probably by that stage you've only just had a chance to have all of them to be mixed together and and you and all these sweet ideas coming out but it's like oh no we have to release soon
29:10
i think robin and i had a certain luxury as we started out and moved up the chain because we started just with the most simple children's games you could imagine the mac had come out it was a single button mouse and so our philosophy kind of just latched on to that people didn't even know how to use a mouse yet they didn't have computers and you know sitting down and understanding that moving that mouse and seeing the cursor on the screen and how those two things coordinated with
29:43
one another that was actually a learning experience and so then sitting and playing mist we could not have that be any more of a learning experience on top of that whereas now today you know my eight-year-old daughter sits down with a nintendo switch and she's just like you know immediately all the complexity playing you know any game she immediately just learns it now maybe that is because she is eight years old but we have grown so accustomed to learning these
30:15
computers and what they do and you know it's easier it's so much easier for us to adapt now i still think we should try to make things as easy as possible so i'm torn it just leads me to think more about the way tutorials are handled for example portal right that or platform zombie where it's it eventually becomes such a complex system but the way it's being approached or it's been taught it's so gradual and natural
30:42
complexity built upon simplicity that's the that's the best systems in my understanding
30:54
so
31:33
there's something inherent to human nature that makes you wonder what's over the hill or what's around the corner or what's in the cave we have this desire we went to the moon i think for the same reason i mean what what is on that thing so it drives people our parents took us on a lot of trips we lived in at one point albuquerque and we used to go like all over the place national parks and there's just so much you know in those
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surrounding areas to see and do i think we were instilled a lot with uh the idea that there's a lot in the world out there that is you know kind of amazing and we like to explore
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making use of that in a game it seems only natural and the more you make the world feel real the more it seems to tug on that natural desire to explore and the more people will overcome little bits of friction that you give them and then the reward becomes what is around the next corner you get to see it you get to see what was there and i think mist really did a great job of that because it was so diverse what was around the next corner meant what was in the next book and
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you solve those puzzles you go to great extremes and it's frustrating sometimes and you put it down but then you pick it back up something comes to you you go in there you realize oh my gosh around this corner is something completely different than the world i'm in right now it's not the same it's a different place and it'll have its own personality and its own pieces and parts and normally we have to go a long way to get that kind of variety so mist was condensed you know it gave
33:25
it satisfied a lot of things in a very small space and i think exploration was one of those things but at one point some of that exploration i began to internalize a bit it took the form of paintings and music and then writing it wasn't until really we began making video games that it started to burgeon and blossom and it's like this whole idea of being able to explore worlds as you're making games it's an intensely intensely exciting thing
34:08
oh for me uh the joy of discovery is watching what everyone else brings to the table the stories and factions and units people put together out of their own bricks is so much more than you can get from a character sheet or a store-bought mini that you painted right these are creations that people have built every single piece of them right it's like construction brakes are so atomic like every
34:31
single piece of that army had to come from your hands because they aren't pre-made every little part that you put in can become critical of the story in the way you never expected like including the flowers or you put an extra brick here that you didn't mean to or there's a painting on the wall that somebody takes down and hits you with that's really where the joy of exploration is for me is is seeing how these things you've invested so much precious time into like
34:55
uh precious in the sense of like every single little piece of it is something that you invested time into it all of it could be important in a way you don't realize yet every level design that i do will start with uh some kind of concept that i've got in my head and then i'll begin to build it just like rough shapes and stuff you know maybe i want to go straight ahead or maybe i want to climb a thing in a spiral maybe or whatever but then
35:18
i find that when i'm playing those uh iterations i'll be navigating this like half finish level and then i'll kind of be running a long path turn a corner and then something will catch my eye for some reason i'll think oh that that kind of caught my eye so there's obviously something about the shape and the design that's that's leading me there i'm kind of playing at this stage and thinking like all right let's go back around the corner run around again and let's think like
35:42
what would look good over there you know um and so i'll kind of pretend to run around and see like oh look that's a nice thing that i just found even though there's nothing there and then i'll kind of go back into the editor and then i'll start i'll build something into that little nook there
35:55
we do think about that in other ways as well as in terms of the key objects you see in a level that the weenies or whatever they're called that where you you're basically thinking that's something that's uh significant i need to get to that point and you can see that right from the start or whether it's something as simple as just a placement of a collectible or a set of collectibles that are a cue for you to think oh there's a line of collectibles there
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there must be some kind of platform there for me to get up and get to that and then that's like oh how am i going to get there and that question is put in your mind just by the positioning of three small objects maybe i think as well like breath of the wild is such a good example of that i've not worked on anything that big that's such a huge open world game but it's just like uh that's the game right it's like a master class in that
36:47
uh and i am amazed that they pulled that off on essentially like their first open world game and nailed it i remember playing mario odyssey and breath of the wild at quite similar times you know both of them are like 10 out of 10 games i was playing through mario and i was like the design here is amazing level design is so good and then i went to breath of the wild and it was almost like next level because it made me forget about the design and i think that's what stood out
37:14
about breath of the wild to making it to other um open world games is like in other ones maybe you might open up the map and it tells you where to go whereas in breath of the wild they really encourage you to look in the world and highlight something in the world not just on the map but look at that special structure over there mountain hill whatever put a point on it and then draws it on your map so it's like even just through that you're engaging with the world the way to
37:37
encourage that is simply to reward it you know to to be able to to to reward the player with a with a sense of wonder was a surprise when they do feel that around every corner or around every button press or exploration of the the menu or a combat system there might be something unexpected that's something that would uh allow them to push themselves to to to try to be eager and find out what's on the other side when i am playing a game and then discover something new that i can do
38:12
or some new piece of information about the world usually in roundabout ways that that's sort of the most interesting for me you know hearing something as exposition is often less interesting than discovering something for yourself the the feeling of discovery in a game is very cool because it's unique to the medium in a lot of ways it you know reinforces the feeling of player agency is
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something that can be pretty rewarding if done in a careful way you have to look at a place and know we want to go to this place those days when ran and i here were sitting in his trailer
38:49
like on the outskirts of spokane and we're like designing mist it was all very um impulsive just sort of like scratching out ideas take for example the ship embedded into the stone i started sketching that out and both of us knew there's something magical and weird and interesting about that it wasn't a lot of discussion around that we just like we knew we wanted to go there
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