- [tapping] [whirring] - [Computer] Alterra. [dramatic music] - [Woman] Welcome aboard, captain. - My name is Charlie Cleveland, and I'm the design director on Subnautica. An open world underwater exploration game where you are not at the top of the food chain. The hard part was making an exciting and dangerous experience without allowing the player to fight back. [splashing] [chill music] Back in 2013, we had just had the Sandy Hook shooting, we had also just finished working on Natural Selection 2 for about eight years, which was a very gun-heavy, aggressive online shooter. And once Sandy Hook happened, I didn't really wanna spend many more years making a game filled with even virtual guns. I wanted to do something that was gonna be fundamentally non-violent, and a bit more creative. Subnautica is a underwater exploration game where you crash land on a alien water-world. And you need to learn how to survive. And over time you are diving deeper and deeper and finding out that there's mysteries all over the world. And eventually you explore the deep unknown and figure out a way to transform the planet, and transform yourself. Many games have like small paragraphs describing like the game features, high-level, that they want to include in their game. So for us, the main one was the thrill of the unknown. So we used that really as a guidepost that will allow you to kind of know that you're going in the right direction. For me it's the why of the game. There's something about the unknown that gets me really excited. Even in the early prototypes we found ways, like little moments that felt like, okay, this thing is generating a little bit of the unknown. Like, suddenly I start to think, oh, what else is in this game? Not having boundaries around the world. Looking down at the terrain you see this hole that just opens up below you into blackness. You get like a little shiver, you know, like oh wow. We were just noticing the little things that would tend to generate tiny little emotional spikes. You just kinda lean into those things, you know. And we just kept doing that. And this whole concept of emotional design, I think I've only seen one person talk about it, and that's Jenova Chen of Thatgamecompany. He talks really eloquently about this. You know, historically, video game developers are so focused on programming. Now we can make anything we want. So now the question is, what do you wanna make and why? There's so many more subtle emotions that we can get from our players, like sadness, melancholy. At the end of the day that's why people play games, right, is to get positive emotions. Or maybe, you know, thrills, and scares, and stuff could be classified as negative. But people want to experience those emotions, like they wanna go on a rollercoaster, or go in a haunted house. To me it's interesting to have a world where humanity is hunted. We live in a world that's very manmade, and we've changed Earth to really fit our image. It's not very scary, and not very primal. So I think that by making a world that doesn't care about you, where you don't have much power, and you are a speck compared to these giant creatures that have been living in this world for a long time without you, kinda gets your adrenaline pumping. And kinda puts humanity back in their place. It definitely humbles you, I think, and it was also awe-inspiring for us. This entire world of the game does not care about the player. You know, stuff is happening on its own. Radio signals are coming in, The Aurora's blowing up, like stuff is happening whether you want it to or not. It isn't all oriented magically around the player. In the beginning, this whole idea of handholding or helping the player figure out what to do, I think we had many people on the team who wanted to make sure that our hard work would not go unnoticed. Which means things like when the Aurora blows up, you wanna make sure players see it. You know, how do you make most players see the Aurora blow up? Okay well, you have to make it so it only blows up when they're at the surface, or only when they look at it, it's only after a certain amount of time. I fought extremely hard from the beginning, like we have to make sure players never know exactly how the game works. That's the whole point of the mystery of the unknown, the thrill of the unknown. It has to be mysterious. To me, early on, anything that we told the player would just A, treat them as like a dumb person, and B, robbing them of any of that enjoyment. The flip side of that, of course, is that you get frustration. They don't know where they're supposed to go, they don't know how to do something. But we saw when players did figure it out, when they did craft something really big, they had total exhilaration because they did it. And it was like a moment for them. [dramatic music] So here we are with the very first prototype of the game, back when it was called Descend. Okay, so here we are on my really beautiful submarine. So the cool thing about prototyping is you can do it really quickly because it looks like crap. This is the place I wanna go, out there. Okay, I may not actually make it. I may die. Six seconds left. Back, okay. It's surprising how stressful this game is already. It kinda gives you an idea of just how powerful the setting is for this game. Just, we get so much for free, just by being underwater. That first prototype was just about discovery. It was about being underwater. There's like no fish, there's no lighting. There certainly was no story. There was no creatures. There was ambiance. So you did have that feeling of like an evocative scary feeling. We played that, we put it in front of people on the team, they gave us feedback. So this is the fourth prototype. Our sub has gotten a lot of upgrades. We have creatures, really terrible looking creatures, but you know fish and stuff swimming around. We would actually look at the number of minutes of fun. So that first prototype was like five minutes of fun. The next prototype we're like, okay, how can we make 20 minutes. Add a couple loot types, we can allow you to craft this one new thing. And then we just kept on doing that. Over time those minutes of fun starts getting exponential. Okay, this is actually the eighth prototype. I think here is where we actually started experimenting with a new biome. This is the beginning of the SeaMoth. Again, placeholder art. We now had the core of the game that was functional, and it looked terrible. With no art at all. But it was still creating some of those feelings. So we knew we were kind of on the right track. We would then take that moment and start building the artwork for real, doing concepts and all that stuff, and fleshing it out. After a year and a half of that production we felt like we had enough that we could release publicly a minimum viable product. Which is basically the smallest possible version of your offering. Your dream product might be quite different than your minimum viable. But if you can get something out there in front of people, then of course, they can start giving you feedback to tell you whether it's working for them. You need to be embarrassed with your first public release. If you're not embarrassed by it you're probably waiting too long. If we had waited another year, we would've been building all the wrong stuff. So yeah, this is our early access build. We have this sparking radio. We didn't actually know what we were gonna do with this. But later we turned that into a story device. You know, the game is starting to look like the game. Oops, I'm a nub, I just completely died. The game is starting to come together here. Even though it's really, really painful to play. In 2014, PAX East I think was the first time we released anything publicly that resembled kind of what you would call Subnautica today. About, I don't know, six months or 12 months after that, that's when we were out of money, and so we knew we had to release an early access. Probably four or five hours worth of gameplay. Yeah, we wouldn't have released then if we didn't have to. But in retrospect I'm really glad that we had to. Into early access we had not that many people playing. Not that many people were buying. And less people were buying than mouths to be fed. So, we now have a shelf life, we have like two months, three months, where we have to get our act together. We have to sell better, or we are, we're done. With the non-violence in the team, I think everyone on the team was initially receptive to that idea. And they were generally excited about that. Of course, when players are asking for, please just give me one harpoon. Like why does this game not have a harpoon? Why do you have big creatures attacking me and I can't do anything back? That's where their resolve gets tested, all of our resolves. You know, we did have a lot of people who, on the team, who did want more combat. In a normal kind of survival, or kinda crafting type game, you know, they have combat. So something like Minecraft, or Terraria, or Don't Starve. You would, you know, explore the world, you find loot, you find monsters. You kill the monsters, you get loot from the monsters, you bring it back to your crafting station. You use that to build new weapons and ways to traverse or survive. So kind of at the core it's explore, fight, craft, and the crafting helps you kill, basically, either kill or explore. By removing combat, we removed one third of that loop. So now we just have explore and find stuff. We had to make sure that all the stuff that you crafted would help you traverse and find stuff. So we had things like the flashlight, which allows you to, you know, navigate when it's dark. Which is, you know, a third of the time, when it's night. We allow you to build submarines, which let you go deeper. Air tanks, you know, scuba stuff, so you can stay underwater longer. Which means you can go deeper, which give you access to more loot. In the beginning that wasn't enough. I think what we realized over time, was it wasn't missing combat, it was missing excitement. We had some of the unknown in there, but we didn't have any of the thrill. In my mind, I was thinking, you know, we have this non-violent game, there'll be all this science you can do, and all this studying creatures. To me that all sounded pretty interesting. But there was no thrill there. And I think our players really noticed that. They didn't know about our goals for creating the thrill of the unknown. That was nothing that we ever told them. I mean, I wouldn't say they were bored. But they could see that there was something good here. But they weren't really captured. You know, it didn't really grab them. [splashing] [upbeat music] So when we realized that the combat could be replaced with excitement, that's where the big creatures filled the gap. That's where even like the Aurora exploding filled the gap. And, of course, we added story elements, so that helped. But we really just needed danger, and excitement, and the thrills. And once we put those in, I don't think anyone complained or noticed that it was missing. And then the loop is actually pretty much the same. It's just you're much more focused on oxygen, and depth, and, to an extent, protection. So you can ward off creatures in the more dangerous areas. We didn't want players killing the creatures, you know, we don't make a non-violent game where all of a sudden the game is motivating you to kill creatures. So, obviously, they could give you no loot. If you want players not to do something, if you penalize them, that's not enough to get them not to do it. If you don't give them a reward, that's not enough to get them not to do it. You have to make sure they don't get feedback. So when you kill a creature, it just like lamely does nothing. If you sit there, and you craft a knife, and you knife a Reaper Leviathan somehow, 1,000 times, and you finally manage to kill it. It doesn't play a sound, it just kind of falls limp, and it just kind of drifts down to the bottom of the ocean. It's really unrewarding. And I think that's actually the reason why people don't kill a lot of creatures. I mean, we also had to think about just how we thought about our creatures, or monsters. I mean, in most games they'd be monsters. For us, it was really important that we thought of them as creatures. You know, a great white shark, or a lion, can be totally terrifying, and scary, and dangerous. But they are clearly not evil. They have no malice in them. You know, they're looking for food like any other creature. And to us it was really important to maintain this idea of representing nature properly. And man's place in nature. I thought it was really fun to think about humanity not being at the top of the food chain. When you don't have all your cool toys, like you're kind of in the middle. You're definitely not at the top anymore, which is a fun thing to play with. Instead of thinking about ways to interact with the creatures, it was more about, you know, how can we experience the majesty of the creatures. It's less about a game system, and more about an aesthetic experience. But we did make them exciting, and beautiful, and cute, and funny, and scary We kind of just covered them emotionally instead of game systems-wise. When we saw our first big creature in the game, we saw how players reacted to it, the Reefback. It's just this big like turtle creature. And it has no relevance to the game. It can't attack you. And I wouldn't say that one was as much of a thrill. We could just see this like, you know, expression of awe on people's faces when they saw this giant creature floating above them, and like moaning into the depths. [creature moaning] Our art director, Cory Strader, when he saw that, he's like, we need some other big creatures, we need some scary stuff. And he immediately started working on the Reaper Leviathan, which became probably the scariest thing in the game. And I was always against all that stuff, 'cause I didn't want it to be like horror based, or, you know, really conventional in any way. But seeing players reactions to it, you know, we had to try it, it looked like it was gonna be fertile ground. Then we released the Reaper Leviathan, people went completely bonkers. And it's like we just lined up all these other big creatures, not all scary. But that fundamentally changed our development, by watching players and seeing what they actually responded to. When you see these giant like underwater essentially sea dragons, and they're like attacking your sub, 'cause you're, you know, you're getting close to a place that they're guarding. You know, in the beginning we were like, you know, we have these creatures that are attacking, it seems so dramatic, people responded to it. What can you do in response? Is it just random, do you always have to run away? That didn't feel that great. And then we had this like moment where we realized, instead of thinking about gameplay, why don't we just make the experience of them attacking you so awesome, it's like a plus not a minus. Like even though they're hindering you, it's such a cool experience that you don't mind. So that's where we had this idea about doing this like Das Boot, or Hunt for Red October feel. You know, there's a scene in Das Boot where the whole crew are sitting there at a really deep depth. And their ship is creaking, and you're wondering if the pressure is gonna give out or not. Are they gonna live? And it's all about the tension. [rattling] Hunt for October, it's similar though, I mean, that was more about reading gages and stuff to see where the torpedo was coming. You know, you can see this giant creature on the sonar, this little blip coming towards you. They're attracted by light now. They're attracted by sound. So we added all of these control panels to like turn off the lights, turn off the sound, turn off the engines. And sit there in the darkness, and just basically hold your breath and hope that they don't find you. So it was all about creating the tension, and creating that experience of hiding. Make the player love being hunted, instead of fighting a creature, or avoiding a creature. So we had to just change our mindset completely. Adding kinda lame weapons, I would say, it's a surface level fix because people use those things so rarely, it's not where the game excels. I've never heard people say, oh I love the stasis rifle in Subnautica, it's just so fun, and interesting, and cool. Like, it freezes creatures. The scanner, even though it wasn't combat, it actually had you chasing down creatures, and kind of keeping them in your sites, and kind of avoiding them, making sure they don't hurt you, so you kinda have to know how they swim. And it kinda got you up close with the creatures in a way that kind of felt like a slightly challenging combat replacement. Extrinsic motivation is where you have achievements and gamer score, and gold, and leveling. Intrinsic rewards are when you're happy to play a game, or to have an aesthetic experience, or to feel satisfaction at doing something just because you did it, you knew it was hard, you did it anyways. We want players to figure out their own goals. But of course you can't just dump them into a world and have them be able to figure it all out. Sometimes we actually want them to do something, and we trick them into doing it. But over time those are training wheels, they fall off, and eventually you get to the point where you just want to draw a map of the entire world. Or you want to get down to a thousand meters using your Seaglide. Or you just wanna catalog every creature in the world. Or kill every creature in the world. These are things that you come up with, you're excited about. That is a good reason to make a game, because players are gonna play it because they actually enjoy it. Not because you force them or trick them. Ultimately the most powerful tool for us was reframing. This idea of like reframing combat. If we reframe it from challenge to experience, that moves mountains, instantly. Because now we no longer think about pigeonholing crappy combat into a game that doesn't warrant it. Instead, we now focus on the experience of being the mouse where the cat is chasing you. And we didn't think about, hey guys, we just need to deploy the reframe tool. I mean now, I can start to think about it that way. We're feeling stuck, okay why are we stuck? Okay, can we reframe this? Now I'm gonna do that a lot faster. It's funny like, whenever I talk about this game it makes it look like we knew what this stuff was in the beginning, but we had no idea. It's only in retrospect that we can start to understand what was working and why. But making an original game is filled with despair and difficulty, and it's super vague, and you never know if you're doing the right thing. And that's just par for the course. I've learned that now. This is just normal for making any kind of new game. It's strange to have all those hopes and dreams with a game, and then to realize, that's just not in the cards. Or you could actually stick to that and do it, but then the game's not gonna be as good. So, of course, you want the game to be as great as possible. At some point the game is just fully telling you what it is. And you're just listening to it, and making it. - [Creature] I am what you seek. Want to help you. - Stephen King talks about this when he writes, his characters are telling him how to finish his stories. It's slightly mystical and abstract, but I think that's quite appropriate for making games as well. And the big lesson is, even though I'm game director, I actually didn't design all this game. Not even close. Because there's so many decisions, I mean even the story structure alone, there's no way I could fully understand that without taking a step back. I guess that's where I like the pillar idea, because the whole team can kind of go in that one direction. I think that you can make a much better game when people are empowered to, you know, contribute in their own way. We're working on Below Zero now, which is like a mini-sequel, I guess is probably the best way we could explain it. It is a stand-alone new game in the Subnautica universe. One third the same as Subnautica. But, you know, one third new, one third improved. I'm not actually very involved with it. So we have somebody else at the helm. So that's a huge experiment for us. We want to allow our team to grow and have more than one game in production at a time. I would probably tell the super rookie version of myself, it's gonna be really difficult, and it's gonna be really fun, all the uncertainty is normal. If you don't have that uncertainty, you're probably not making something very interesting. So embrace it, and take lots of ideas from everywhere. It's not your game, you need to take input from everyone. That's where it really takes off, is when everyone is focused in the same direction. I don't think we ever added anything to the game that we didn't want to. It doesn't really matter how vocal someone is, if we don't agree with them we're just gonna say that's not the game we're making. I think the only times we had to compromise are scope, where we didn't put in all the cool things that we wanted, we have tons and tons of creatures that never got made, and tons of biomes. But we also shipped lots of stuff that we never planned on in the first place. So, I mean, we kinda got some extra stuff in there too. There's no way I would ever tell you if there's something you missed in this game. That would just be antithetical to the entire reasoning for making this game. And the whole point of the game is to make sure that you're always questioning whether there's something you missed.