HandmadeCon 2015 Q&A (Part 1) — 2016 — Episode Guide

0:00Casey Muratori: Introducing Ron Gilbert, Pat Wyatt, Tommy Refenes and Jonathan Blow

1:50CM: What have you been doing since HandmadeCon 2015?

2:02Ron Gilbert: Working on Thimbleweed Park, having scrapped the voice recordings due to the actors strike¹

2:48CM: You don't think that…

2:50Jonathan Blow: I thought it was limited

2:52RG: It was easier to scrap it than sign new contracts when wanting to use union actors

3:46CM: So, Pat, how about you?

3:48Pat Wyatt: Starting at Amazon Game Studios and working on Breakaway

4:13CM: This is an open test?

4:18PW: Lots of people may sign up and they'll pick a subset

4:34CM: Tommy, how about you?

4:36Tommy Refenes: Writing a scripting language

5:33RG: Start another one

5:38PW: There's templates

5:40TR: I almost did templates

5:46CM: Is this something you're ever going to release?

5:52TR: No release for TommuScript

6:34CM: And Jon, how about you?

6:36JB: What level of involvement counts as worth mentioning?

6:41CM: Speaker discretion

6:52JB: Releasing The Witness in January 2016, and doing HDR rendering

8:35JB: Starting on one game using the Witness engine, and another game in JAI

9:56CM: Let's move on to questions

10:49The_8th_mage Tommy, you tweeted about imposter syndrome, specifically in relation to HandmadeCon 2015. Can you talk a little bit about it, and if and how it influences your day-to-day work and feelings?

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10:49The_8th_mage Tommy, you tweeted about imposter syndrome, specifically in relation to HandmadeCon 2015. Can you talk a little bit about it, and if and how it influences your day-to-day work and feelings?

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10:49The_8th_mage Tommy, you tweeted about imposter syndrome, specifically in relation to HandmadeCon 2015. Can you talk a little bit about it, and if and how it influences your day-to-day work and feelings?

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11:17CM: Imposter syndrome

11:39TR: Natural imposter syndrome, but feeling belonging at HandmadeCon 2015

14:41CM: Self-fulfilling prophesies

15:25RG: Treating imposter syndrome as motivational

16:06CM: So changing one's thinking could help?

16:36boleban The development period of The Witness is much longer than Braid. How did you come through the demotivation and self-doubt part? Is there a general method for everybody?

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16:36boleban The development period of The Witness is much longer than Braid. How did you come through the demotivation and self-doubt part? Is there a general method for everybody?

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16:36boleban The development period of The Witness is much longer than Braid. How did you come through the demotivation and self-doubt part? Is there a general method for everybody?

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17:35JB: Braid's 3½ year development

18:18JB: Project completion skills: 1) Learning how to pay attention to your own mental state

20:01CM: What do you suggest in terms of figuring out your mental state before it's too late?

20:38JB: Learning how to notice, in the context of your identity

22:34JB: Project completion skills: 2) Complete a shorter, successful project first

24:34CM: Anyone else?

24:42PW: Try and get out of the head space of work, to counter the effects of an indubitably false sense of optimism, and ever-growing task lists and dwindling budget

26:14CM: Is the time for triage when you are in that head space?

26:49PW: Being capable of working under pressure

27:33CM: So maybe it's about picking a potentially successful path that is close to the unsuccessful one?

27:44RG: Doing triage the next morning

28:21boleban Are there any differences between debugging a non-networked game and an MMORPG game?

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28:21boleban Are there any differences between debugging a non-networked game and an MMORPG game?

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28:21boleban Are there any differences between debugging a non-networked game and an MMORPG game?

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29:27PW: Figure out how to make your game replayable from the same set of inputs

30:28CM: Is it possible to architect an engine that way with multithreading?

30:55PW: Considering actors independently

31:19CM: Contended shared resources

32:06JB: Multi-user input bugs: 1) Thread-related

32:20JB: Multi-user input bugs: 2) Logic that, when threaded, causes results to differ beyond one frame

33:05CM: The commonness of threading bugs

34:01PW: Recordable job systems

34:20CM: You mean record which cores got which jobs?

34:34PW: Memory corruption bugs could be anywhere

34:41CM: Debugging brief accesses to a shared structure

35:44PW: Try and use job systems with larger, separable blocks

36:01CM: So they have the locking happen at the head end?

36:29PW: Multiversion concurrency control²

37:01CM: So this is for mostly read-only data?

37:16PW: Using a stale version of the data

37:19JB: Multithreading a compiler, for walking the syntax tree and figuring out the types

38:57CM: Job systems tend to be more effective in games that have lots of things to do

39:21JB: Wanting to thread game AI

39:59CM: Recordable job system can help gauge efficiency

40:48boleban For data analysis such as DAU or ARPU

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40:48boleban For data analysis such as DAU or ARPU

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40:48boleban For data analysis such as DAU or ARPU

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41:04PW: Daily Active Users, and Average Revenue Per User

41:16boleban Do you have separate systems for game manager or operation department access? Does the data typically come directly from reading the database?

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41:16boleban Do you have separate systems for game manager or operation department access? Does the data typically come directly from reading the database?

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41:16boleban Do you have separate systems for game manager or operation department access? Does the data typically come directly from reading the database?

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41:56PW: Have multiple databases: 1) Transaction, OLTP (Online Transaction Processing); 2) Analytics, OLAP

42:53CM: How do you tend to structure these multiple databases?

43:13PW: Replicate to a slave database capable of answering to read-only queries, and think of it as a stream of events

44:03CM: I think the rest of us are probably single-player

44:19jcdelannoy Both Braid and Super Meat Boy were extremely successful games. I'm wondering if there were parts of the game that you weren't quite happy with and that you would have liked to have spent more time on, or is everything exactly the way that you wanted it?

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44:19jcdelannoy Both Braid and Super Meat Boy were extremely successful games. I'm wondering if there were parts of the game that you weren't quite happy with and that you would have liked to have spent more time on, or is everything exactly the way that you wanted it?

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44:19jcdelannoy Both Braid and Super Meat Boy were extremely successful games. I'm wondering if there were parts of the game that you weren't quite happy with and that you would have liked to have spent more time on, or is everything exactly the way that you wanted it?

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44:59TR: Cut content from Super Meat Boy

45:54JB: Neither Braid nor The Witness shipped with unsatisfactory bits. Debugging graphics driver issues

48:52CM: Tommy, where is the crowd-sourced system configuration bug database that we were promised last year?

49:01TR: My part is done. I just don't have a web person

51:18Just use JQuery!

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51:18Just use JQuery!

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51:18Just use JQuery!

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51:32Rosto Was using pixel art in Thimbleweed Park your very first choice or did you consider some kind of stylised 3D, like in The Cave? What are the pros and cons of each approach in a project like this?

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51:32Rosto Was using pixel art in Thimbleweed Park your very first choice or did you consider some kind of stylised 3D, like in The Cave? What are the pros and cons of each approach in a project like this?

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51:32Rosto Was using pixel art in Thimbleweed Park your very first choice or did you consider some kind of stylised 3D, like in The Cave? What are the pros and cons of each approach in a project like this?

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52:19RG: Pixel art was the first choice for Thimbleweed Park, as a key component in the charm

53:35CM: So going high fidelity means that people lose the ability to apply imagination?

54:20RG: Pixel art is hand placing every pixel

54:52CM: Is there anything else in the pros and cons part?

55:30RG: Memory saving benefit of pixel art, and allowable short cuts thanks to imagination filling things in

57:18Rosto What was more important while designing Thimbleweed Park: to innovate and push the genre forward or to preserve that warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia? How hard is it to resist the sweet taste of member berries?

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57:18Rosto What was more important while designing Thimbleweed Park: to innovate and push the genre forward or to preserve that warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia? How hard is it to resist the sweet taste of member berries?

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57:18Rosto What was more important while designing Thimbleweed Park: to innovate and push the genre forward or to preserve that warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia? How hard is it to resist the sweet taste of member berries?

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57:40RG: Applying new techniques to point and click games

59:02CM: So the person's brain has painted with a new brush what Monkey Island looked like?

59:21RG: Mark Ferrari: "People want to go and live in the Renaissance Fair, they don't want to live in the Renaissance"

59:43William_Bundy How do you approach making and designing in-house tools? Do you devote time to designing workflows for them? What do you want from third-party tools, other than fundamental things like stability, speed, and functionality?

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59:43William_Bundy How do you approach making and designing in-house tools? Do you devote time to designing workflows for them? What do you want from third-party tools, other than fundamental things like stability, speed, and functionality?

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59:43William_Bundy How do you approach making and designing in-house tools? Do you devote time to designing workflows for them? What do you want from third-party tools, other than fundamental things like stability, speed, and functionality?

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1:01:11RG: Deciding to make a tool after finding no available tool, e.g. Thimbleweed Park's room layout tool

1:02:19CM: Often map construction is custom

1:02:30RG: That's the only custom tool

1:02:36CM: So that was entirely foresight?

1:03:00RG: Knowing the importance of a room layout tool from SCUMM

1:03:13CM: How did that tool for SCUMM come about?

1:03:21RG: SCUMM's organically growing room layout tool

1:03:37PW: Consider team size and desired fidelity

1:04:38PW: The importance of crash recovery for tools

1:05:09CM: So Jon, did you have anything?

1:05:12JB: Weighing up the costs and benefits of tool building and licensing

1:07:29CM: So morale can also figure in?

1:07:43JB: Having a good time, and non-coercive company management

1:09:28CM: Enjoyment is an additional metric

1:09:39JB: Poor predictions of correctness

1:10:21TimothyB What was the process for getting a new puzzle into The Witness? Did the engine have a line-puzzle editor?

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1:10:21TimothyB What was the process for getting a new puzzle into The Witness? Did the engine have a line-puzzle editor?

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1:10:21TimothyB What was the process for getting a new puzzle into The Witness? Did the engine have a line-puzzle editor?

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1:10:34JB: The puzzles in The Witness were written in C++

1:12:46miotatsu What has been your happiest moment with programming?

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1:12:46miotatsu What has been your happiest moment with programming?

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1:12:46miotatsu What has been your happiest moment with programming?

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1:12:54RG: Writing an incredibly complex animation system that worked right first time

1:13:54PW: Doing the fog-of-war for StarCraft in x386 assembly³

1:15:25TR: Thinking about how to recode Super Meat Boy's replay system, doing it and getting it right first time

1:16:48JB: A period of 3–5 weeks making a side project during The Witness

1:18:22JB: Implementing compile-time execution in JAI, and seeing a way out of C++

1:21:04CM: Thank you, everyone. We'll be back in 15 minutes

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