Hi, my name's Adam Sprague, and I made a game called Hidden in Plain Sight. Why do I make games? Games are fun. That's a simple answer. Hidden in Plain Sight is a local multiplayer game, which means that you're playing it in the same room as the people that you're playing with. And so, by nature of that, I think that there's this fun shared experience when you're in the same room with somebody. I think that sharing a common experience is the core of building relationships with people. And, so when people are sitting around a table playing Monopoly, or whatever, I think that it forces and creates bonds between people. And so, I'm a big fan of games in general, but particularly, games where you're not in a room by yourself, but in a room with other people laughing and yelling at each other, and having fun like that. How did I get into making games? I've been a gamer since I was a kid. My family bought an Apple 2 PC back in 1979 or something like that and it came with a couple games, and I've been playing games, board games, video games, card games, tabletop games since, for my whole life. So I've been a gamer my whole life. And then, as I got into high school and college I got into computers and software and I was a software geek and merged my love of programming with games, making games. So how many projects have I tried? Dozens and dozens. I've started and failed more than I can count, projects. I come up with some idea, I start coding something, I get sort of a prototype put together, and come to realize that my vision was way too grand or it just gets boring. Before the Xbox Live Indie games platform, before I learned about that I would start my game and then realize that I didn't really have any way to publish it or distribute it. And that was really kind of a downer to say I'm working so hard to make some game. But then, maybe if I'm lucky, maybe my friends will play it, but as just sort of a solo developer, there weren't really these kind of opportunities to publish as there are more and more today. And so when I learned that I could publish a game on the Xbox, like I said pay the $99 and put a game out on the marketplace, that was a real big motivator that hey I can actually do something and make a game and publish it. The other big piece of advice that I always give to new people who are getting into game development is just start small. Start with some very core, basic idea because it's a lot more work than you originally anticipate, and if you start off with your grand massively multiplayer game with all sorts of design and crafting elements and stuff and you think you're going to be able to get through it on your first try. It would be very, very difficult. How's my experience been, being an indie developer? I was able to, I submitted my game, sort of on a whim to Indiecade in 2012 and it was accepted, and they liked it. And we went to IndieCade and met a lot of people up there. In general, I found the Indie community to be super helpful, friendly, resourceful. There's really no reason these days why somebody couldn't go out and make a game. I don't think there's much information available. There's so much support and it's a nice community of people who are all like-minded and supportive and cooperative, I think. How do I design a multiplayer game in a solitary bay? In this case, I really think I got pretty lucky. I made the game, and for example, Deathrace, where you are racing to the finish line and trying to be the first one to cross. It's by nature, a multiplayer game, but literally no one played it, except for me, sitting on the ground with four controllers in front of me >> [LAUGH] >> Before the game got released. So I did a lot of play testing just by myself. And a lot of sitting down with controllers really to just kind of see whether the game worked in a functional sort of way. And I had some sense that maybe people would like to play it and it might be kind of fun. I did a little bit of play testing with friends. And really only one or two sort of sessions. >> Hm. >> But I really did get pretty lucky, I think, and I stumbled on something more than I, I don't know, I wish I could take credit for how successful the game has been. But I really just thought maybe a 100 people would buy it and then- >> [LAUGH] >> It would sort of drift off the radar, but it's really gone much further than I thought. The first time I had friends play it, was at a holiday party, And around 1 in the morning I had to leave because I needed to come home and go to sleep and stuff. And they'd stayed up playing it until 4 in the morning or something like that. So that was really the first sentence that I'd got that the game was actually fun, and not that they were just playing it to humor me, or something like that. So there's five different game modes. In most of the games, well I guess Ninja Party and Death Race are completes metric. Everybody follows the same sort of rules. In Knights versus Ninjas it's definitely asymmetric. The ninjas are trying to attack the royalty and the knights are trying to defend the royalty. And the mechanisms to balance that are the positions that the knights start in. They get to start in a defensive position. In order to balance that, the ninjas are faster. Another little balance point is that the knights can't be killed, they can be stunned. You can knock them over but then they get right back up again. Where as the ninjas if they get hit then they get killed. And I balanced it by feel I guess. I just kind of like I said, I didn't do a whole lot of play testing. But I just kind of played around with it by myself. And I wish I could say that I made up some sheets and did a lot of number crunching or anything. But really it was just compounded by gut feeling, gut instinct. Luckily and happily as a result. So when you release a game on Steam, you can have little counters and little metrics that you can measure. I recently went and looked and over something like 25,000 rounds of foreplay or knights versus ninjas the knights have won 52% of the time. > >> [LAUGH] >> So that's, I mean that's about as you can get right in terms of balance. >> Yeah. >> So I was really pleased and happy to hear that I was, with so little work done into actual play testing >> I was really scared that if the ninjas were winning 80% of the time or something, that if it was inherently unbalanced, I'd be pretty disappointed. So it was pretty good to hear that it was 52. A reviewer wrote something which I didn't plan on, but he said that in Hidden in Plain Sight, he said the crown is light, and it gets passed along often, and I like that. >> [LAUGH] >> You know, you win but you don't get to stay the winner for long because you hit the replay button and therefore winning is fun. Losing there's not a whole lot of penalty. And the games, the rounds are very quick, and very, they're quick and the turnover is very fast and I think there's something very satisfying about that. I wanted to put each player in an internal state of conflict. I wanted each player to feel like they wanted to do one thing, but couldn't, because doing that thing would put them at risk for being eliminated from the game. For example, Death Race, you want to run to the finish line, but you don't want to run too fast because you would get shot. Same thing with picking up a coin, makes a ding sound. Same thing with the ninjas walking over a statue makes a sound. So I really wanted to put each player, and I wasn't sure why I did this. But I just felt like it was a cool thing to do. Put each player in a place where they wanted to do one thing or the other but they couldn't really do both. To sort of expand on what I was saying, I think conflict. Putting a player in a state of conflict builds tension. And then, when that tension builds and builds and builds and then is released that is exciting. That's fun. That's pleasurable. And I think that's what drama and art is about in terms of literature or anything. There has to be some sort of a conflict and there has to be sort of resolution and that's sort of what drives the whole dramatic art. And I think I stumbled upon that hidden in plain sight. And I've watched people as they play Death Race. They're very quiet, they're focused on the screen. And you can just feel the tension building. The music's building. They don't know who's gonna win. And then somebody takes a shot, and then everybody breaks for the finish line. And you can see the smiles erupt on everybody's faces and everybody starts laughing. And so there's this real tight feedback Loop of creating conflict, creating tension, releasing that tension, and then starting it all over again. I've spent many sleepless months lying awake, analyzing what is fun and what makes something fun. Why is something fun? That's how I came to this whole conflict tension resolution loop. It's certainly not an original thought, but I think that's fun. I think the build up of tension and then the release of that tension creates pleasure. I don't know why, or the science behind it, but taking apart these things is super fun and what it's all about. How did I find the music? My game was made with a zero dollar budget. You know, like I said, this is not a business so I just tried to pull together as many free assets and art and sounds as I could. Music actually, a friend of mine from high school, her husband is a musician. She had contacted me and said, hey do you know any openings and like, she wanted to get into video game music, and I said no I don't. But I kept them as a contact in the back of my head and at some point I wrote to him and said hey, I'm in this game. Are you interested in doing music for it? I said, I probably wouldn't be able to pay you. But if you just wanted to throw something together to have in a game just to say that you've done it, you could do that. And he said, well I don't have time to give you any original music. But here's my library of 15 gigabytes of music or something that you can look through. And so he let me pick or choose whatever he had already pre-written to use for the game. He was very generous to let me use that and he's in the credits for the game. And I actually have made it worth his, made the generosity worthwhile by giving him a little gift because of that. I've gotten feedback from players. I'll get an email, or a tweet that says, you know I played this game with my two sons, and we spent three hours laughing with tears rolling down our faces because we were laughing so hard, and we're punching each other in the arm. And stuff like that is really really really cool. You know it really makes me feel good. And I didn't do this to try and make money. And I haven't made money, a whole lot of money, from it. But knowing that I've had an impact on people's lives, knowing that I've helped build relationships between people, is more rewarding than I ever would've thought. >> Thanks so much, Adam. >> Thanks Adam. >> Thanks, bye. >> Talk to you later. >> Bye. >> Bye.
