- [intense music]

- That looks pretty cool.

- He looks really good there, yeah. And I like when he shoots out with still no hat.

- Right, right, without the hat. [synthesized music]

- Hey guys, how's it going? This is our War Room, a lot of stuff happens in there. This is what you do near the end of the game. You kind of get together and triage and fix things, make things better. We're getting to the point where we're trying to integrate everything and make sure it's not only fun, but it's scary, and it's tense. And sort of, you know, all the things put together. [intense music][grunting]

- I think the game should be brutal and punishing, I'm pushing for that, and then other people on the team will, "What, ah, why'd you make it so hard? I'm trying to do my work." You know, that kind of thing will happen, you know, just for fun. And again, it comes back to, what is the experience? It's a survival experience, it's not a button mash. You're not supposed to just walk through the park and defeat the game. We want you to work for it. So this is the point where we're hoping players will get really tense. They turned on a machine, they're expecting something to happen. Nothing happens to 'em right now, it's kind of a decoy moment.

- Do we have anything that signals that something might happen, like...

- We're hoping that the rusher sounds are on, right? And kind of like you scared him out of the room as well, 'cause he took off.

- Okay, so you don't want to hear one in the background here?

- He's gone now at this point.

- Okay, all right. Of course the game is better than the original vision, because you've brought in writers, and you brought in designers, and directors, and artists and they make it better. And so I'm really thrilled about that.

- We have disagreements all the time, and you know, part of taking on a creative endeavor, or anything that is important, is gonna be difficult and challenging, and is certainly gonna have creative friction. Pressure makes diamonds, right? Conflict spurs discussion, discussion spurs creativity, and that's how we kind of build off of each other. Specifically things that we disagree on, or we've gone back and forth on. I think, you know, when we were looking at the level a little bit, you know, Glen was talking about the flashlight.

- How do you guys feel about the flashlight in here, see, right here it feels a little dark.

- [Glen] You think so?

- Yeah, that's on right there.

- [Glen] Right now my focus is on going through the game and looking at darkness. Is it too dark? Can we get around? Can I play through the game? [gunshot] [alien shrieking] Got a couple people, including Steve Papoutsis and Ben Walker, who is our design director. Going through and just making sure that the game is ramped right.

- I'm looking for the combat, the level layout, the objectives, and clarity of moving through the levels and everything. And those all kind of flow together, all with everyone else, with horror being the first and foremost thing that kind of drives all of that. So I will be keeping an eye out for, you know, is this hallway lit correctly so that I know to run down it, right? And do those enemies come out at the exact right time? How many enemies are there?

- [Jacob] Oh, shit!

- [Ben] What weapons do you have at that time? How upgraded should they be? So a lot of factors going into the playability overall, and in the ease, and kind of setting the mood, you know, through the combat in the spaces. [eerie music] So that one came out of the pod, similar to the-

- Yeah, yeah.

- the chest and stuff.

- yeah, no, I like him. Feels like a couple more here and there throughout the game. I mean, ramp it up. Do you have a place where you could do, like, two or three?

- Dave is going through the levels right now and finding good opportunities.

- [Glen] Tunnels.

- Tunnels especially, and stuff, some that just kind of scurry away, so they're almost like rats in the area. We're a survival game, so we want to definitely make the player feel like they don't have enough of everything. But actually you make sure they do have enough to get through the game. So that's the number of bullets, and the amount of health, the number of credits, how many upgrades they're getting. And so it all kinds of feeds into itself and stacks on top of each other. So you really need these longer play-throughs with an eye just on that, to do that fine tuning and make all the right adjustments.

- [Glen] We have a melee, shooting combination in the game so you can play as you want. I'll tell you by the end of the game, you're probably doing 50/50. We have 3D printers around the world. We have the economy, and so you go up to 3D printers and you get your weapons, or you get your health, and jus tall kinds of stuff, more ammo. You don't wanna put too much currency around, because then that's gonna ruin the balance too. It's a daunting job.

- When you think about UI and UX, it's like, in the center of a lot of different things going on in the game. So I really try to listen to all the directors here, especially working with Ben on the design direction, and the level design and even the character as well. Like when we got the health implant into the neck a few years ago.

- How are people liking the new GRP on the back? Is it too new?

- It's too new, but the early thing we got is it's totally readable, slight adjustment, but an hour or so and people are used to it.

- So it's really important for me to hear everyone out and see what it is that they're trying to achieve in a level, and then make that happen. Whether it's, like, tuning something to make sure it's visible, or steering a player in a certain direction by bringing more attention to it with some fictional UI.

- Is that being worked on, Sammi?

- Yeah, we're gonna make this into just a notification so it doesn't auto play. And then you could look at it again, or hear it back in the bio section in the inventory. I think it's a good choice because it might break the horror moment when it's really quiet, and there's a lot of tension building up. [intense music]

- Two years later, that's how long we spent on the gore system. If you look around the world, there's giant fans, and there's spiked walls, and they fit within the world. But you're like, "What is that there for?" Pick up an enemy and you shove him into that, and the gore system goes to work. You can pick up the character, pull him towards you if one far away is shooting at you, you use this one as a meat shield. So after a while he's not a meat shield, because he is just pieces. So it's just, you know, one mechanic grew on the other.

- I'm in charge of the character department, but I'm also looking for different things. But I'm mainly looking at all of the characters and making sure the characters are properly placed, and serving the function, and serving the purpose that the design, and Glen, and everybody else has in mind. The really big part that we were able to accomplish here is how integrated the gore is with the gameplay and with the mechanics. So we built a system that allows you to dismember all of the enemies, the player, the bad bodies, the corpses, everything you see in the game, all of the characters, the NPCs, in many different areas, many different pieces. We have blood coming out of the cuts, we have very realistic skin caps, and all of these different pieces. Most importantly it was built in a way that it gives animators access to it, it gives design access to it, right? So it's not only a very scripted war, it's a system, right? And that system, we do some really cool stuff with some of those devs. [intense music]

- So not only have we had gore in our other games in our careers, but what's really special about it in this game is the team is going for it. Maybe some other people would've been, "That's fine," but, like, the team just takes it to another level. Transmittance, that's a thing that we couldn't do before, right? And so now, like, going back to the gore, like, these characters have blood in them. And so you can see through parts of their skin, the team is able to deliver that.

- We went super deep into the whole rabbit hole of, like, going as real as possible. If you shoot one time at a chest, for example, you may get a wound. So if you shoot it again at the same spot, you would probably get, like, a bigger wound, right? So when I talk about the systems, we built a system that really delivers on the experience, right? So it feels like it's all integrated. We may see the ribs, if you shoot a piece of the guy off, you may be able to break the head in multiple pieces. Didn't we have one that the helmet drops and the parasite comes off?

- We had one where the helmet drops, yeah. And I think we could put, attach the parasite to it too.

- Yeah.

- That's a good idea.

- Especially somewhere on this, on the way back, after you've been through it once. [overlapping chatter]

- Oh, right, right, on the way back, absolutely. You know we have a saying here, we're at the intersection of art, design, and technology. When the three of them work together that's when video games are at their best to make. And that is what makes a game special near the end, is like, "Great idea, man." Little things, right, that the players love, and we're getting that stuff in, we're getting the story in. I don't think anything's gonna derail us, it's just gonna make me extremely nervous and stressed till December 1st. There is no formula for scary, it is about your gut, it's about timing, it's about feeling, right? This is really trial and error. And the thing with being scary is it's like a comedy, man. You can only say a joke once. So yeah, we're constantly looking for scary because that's our number one mechanic, really. [upbeat synthesized music]