Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  The other option was to crunch. The Dragon Age team had gone through various periods of extended overtime during Inquisition’s development, but this would be the worst yet. It would mean months of never-ending late nights and weekends in the office. It would lead to, as Shane Hawco, put it, “a lot of lost family time.” “I would love to have no crunch ever,” said Aaryn Flynn. “I think it remains to be seen whether crunching actually works. Obviously a ton of literature says it doesn’t. [But] I think everybody finds a time in their development careers where you’re going, ‘I don’t see what options we have.’”

  John Epler, the cinematic designer, recalled a bleary-eyed ritual in which every night he’d drive to the same convenience store, pick up a bag of Cheetos, and then go home and zone out in front of the television. “You get to the point where you’ve been at work for twelve or fourteen hours, you get on the road home and you think: all I really want to do is watch a TV show I’ve watched one hundred times and eat junk food I’ve eaten one hundred times, because those things are comfortable, and I know how they’re going to end,” Epler said. “Whereas every day is another something coming to the top of the pile, and, ‘Oh shit, somebody needs to look at this.’” When the store’s clerks started to recognize him, Epler realized he needed a lifestyle adjustment.

  As they crunched through 2014, Darrah and crew finally finished off the features they wished they’d been able to nail down back in the first year of development. They completed the “power” system, which would allow the player to build up influence for the Inquisition by roaming around the world and solving problems. They filled Inquisition’s deserts and swamps with side quests, hidden treasures, and astrological puzzles. Ideas that weren’t working, like reactive environments (destroyable ladders, mud that sticks to your shoes) were promptly removed. The writers blew up and rewrote the prologue at least six times, by one producer’s count, although they didn’t have time to give nearly as much attention to the ending. Just a few months before the game shipped they added some features that would turn out to be pivotal, like a “jump” button that would let the Inquisitor hop over fences and gradually scale mountains (through the time-tested video game tradition of leaping against the side of a mountain over and over until you make it up).

  The team had originally scheduled Inquisition for October, but by the summer they’d bumped it back another six weeks for what game developers call “polish,” the phase of development in which a game’s content and features are complete and all that remains is optimization and bug fixing. “Dragon Age: Inquisition had about ninety-nine thousand bugs on it,” said Mark Darrah. “That’s the actual number. That requires a lot of context, because we file qualitative and quantitative bugs, so things like, ‘Oh I was kind of bored at this point,’ that’s a bug.”

  “The number of bugs on an open-world game, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Ben McGrath, the lead environment artist. “But they’re all so easy to fix, so keep filing these bugs and we’ll keep fixing them.” For BioWare, it was far harder to discover them all. It required creative experimentation from the quality assurance (QA) team, who spent what felt like endless late nights testing everything from the intricacies of the crafting system to whether you could jump off the edge of a mountain and fall through the environment.

  During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party.

  After some poking around, Weekes figured out the problem: if you dismounted the horse in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would disappear. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else had ever or will ever like the horse,” Weekes said. “I doubt we would’ve seen it, because it takes spamming the button to figure out there’s a one-in-one-thousand chance that if you’re in the right place, it’s going to wipe out your party members.”

  Mark Darrah, who was responsible for steering the Dragon Age: Inquisition pirate ship into its final port, had a knack for knowing which bugs were worth fixing (like the one where you could jump on your dwarf party member’s head to get to areas that shouldn’t be accessible) and which weren’t (like the ones where your weapon’s graphic would clip through walls). On an open-world RPG of this scope and scale, it would be impractical (and take way too much time) to fix every possible bug, so they had to prioritize. It helped that the Dragon Age team was full of veterans, and that over the years they’d developed a fair amount of chemistry as a team. “Muscle memory is incredibly influential at this point,” said Cameron Lee. “Through the hellfire which is game development, [we’re] forged into a unit, in that we know what [everyone’s] thinking and we understand everyone’s expectations and we know what needs to get done and just do it.”

  Eventually, they did it. On November 18, 2014, BioWare launched Dragon Age: Inquisition, successfully shipping the game despite Frostbite’s many challenges. “I think at launch we still didn’t actually have all our tools working,” said Mark Darrah. “We had our tools working enough.”

  Almost immediately, Inquisition became the best-selling Dragon Age game, beating EA’s sales expectations in just a few weeks. The combat was fun (if occasionally too chaotic), the environments were beautiful, and the companions were fantastic, thanks to top-notch writing and voice acting (including a breakout performance by the former teen heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. as Iron Bull). One standout scene, which unfolded right after the player’s home base was destroyed, depicted the tattered remnants of the Inquisitor’s army, singing a hopeful song in unison: “The dawn will come.” Dragon Age: Inquisition was, in many ways, a triumphant game.

  Look closely enough, however, and you can find lingering remnants of Inquisition’s chaotic development. One of the first things you’d see in the game was an area called the Hinterlands, a quilt of forests and farms that served as Dragon Age’s first open-world environment. The Hinterlands was full of fetch quests—“garbage quests,” Darrah called them—that would send you off to deliver herbs and kill throngs of wolves. They were serviceable timewasters, but they felt like chores compared with Inquisition’s fascinating main story.

  The problem was, too many people weren’t going out and seeing the main story. Some players didn’t realize they could leave the Hinterlands and return to their home base of Haven to trigger the next main story quest. Other players got stuck in a weird, compulsive gratification loop, forcing themselves to do every side quest in the Hinterlands before leaving. (One of my more popular Kotaku articles during the week of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s launch was titled “PSA: If You’re Playing Dragon Age, Leave the Hinterlands.”)

  Internet commenters rushed to blame “those damn lazy developers” for this problem, but really, it was the natural consequence of Inquisition’s struggles. Had the Dragon Age team miraculously received another year to make the game, or if they’d had the opportunity to spend years building up Frostbite’s tools before starting development, maybe those quests would have been more interesting. Maybe they would have been less tedious. Maybe they’d have had more twists and complications, like the ones found in The Witcher 3 just a few months later. “The challenge of the Hinterlands and what it represented to the opening ten hours of Dragon Age is exactly the struggle of learning to build open-world gameplay and mechanisms when you are a linear narrative story studio,” said Aaryn Flynn.

  For BioWare, Dragon Age: Inquisition was nonetheless a victory. Aaryn Flynn, Mark Darrah, and the rest of the Dragon Age team had succeeded. “Dragon Age 2 was the product of a remarkable time line challenge; Dragon Age: Inquisition was the product of a remarkable technical challenge,” said Mike
Laidlaw. “But it had enough time to cook, and as a result it was a much better game.”

  7

  Shovel Knight

  On March 14, 2013, a group of exhausted game developers sat in a cramped apartment in Valencia, California, surrounded by bulletin boards and Ikea tables. Sean Velasco, the messy-haired, charismatic leader of the team, took out a camera and started pointing it around the room, panning across three other tired faces: Nick Wozniak (the pixel artist), Ian Flood (a programmer), and Erin Pellon (the concept artist). On a call from Chicago was David D’Angelo (their second programmer), his head ever present on a laptop above the bookshelf thanks to Google Hangouts. A combination of anxiety and sleep deprivation was making them all jittery.

  “Look, everybody,” Velasco said to the camera. “We’re going to fucking launch the Kickstarter right now. . . . Oh my god. OK. Here it goes. Ready to launch.”

  Nick Wozniak pressed the button.

  “Oh my god, you have to confirm,” Velasco said.

  Wozniak pressed the button again. “It’s launched,” he said.

  “Oh my god,” Velasco said. “OK. All right. OK, you guys. All right. All right. Are you ready? We gotta get to work.”

  The Shovel Knight Kickstarter was now live, asking fans for $75,000 to make their dream game, although unlike Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity, this campaign didn’t start skyrocketing right away. Few people were even paying attention.

  “It was definitely nerve-racking,” David D’Angelo said later. “We spent so much time thinking about it and planning for it and investing in it in our minds. Then you launch and no one notices, obviously, because how do you notice a Kickstarter the moment when it launches?”

  If nobody ever noticed their Kickstarter, the five of them were in trouble. They had quit their jobs to be there, risking financial stability in hopes that enough people would look at their game and think, “I will pay money so this can be made.” Velasco and crew had ambitious plans that they’d need way more than $75,000 to see through. They wanted to turn their blue-armored hero into an icon. With Shovel Knight, they didn’t just want to make a game, they wanted to make the next Mario. Even if it meant going broke.

  Up until a few months earlier, Sean Velasco and the rest of the team had worked at WayForward, an independent game studio around the corner in Valencia that was best known for cranking out an extraordinary quantity of console games every year. Some were licensed games like Thor, a tie-in to the Marvel movie, and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, based on the cartoon of the same name. Others were modern-day successors to NES classics, like the action game Contra 4 and the platformer A Boy and His Blob, in which you maneuver a young boy around various obstacles, solving puzzles by feeding magical colored jelly beans to your amoebic assistant.

  All these games had one thing in common: they didn’t take long to make. In other words, they were cheap. WayForward specialized in two-dimensional sidescrolling games that could be developed by teams of twenty to thirty rather than two hundred to three hundred, on schedules that would sometimes span less than a year—exceptionally short for a modern game. With each game, the company would shuffle people around, placing each developer where WayForward needed him or her the most.

  Sean Velasco disliked this system, arguing that it devalued team chemistry. “I think we were strong people; we developed strong games,” Velasco said. “So they thought, ‘Well if we take this guy and put him here, this other guy put him here, then they’ll be able to cede knowledge to everyone else.’” After working on successful sidescrollers like BloodRayne: Betrayal with the same core group of developers, Velasco wanted to stick with his buddies. “I always use the analogy of the [Star Wars] R2 unit,” Velasco said. “Luke doesn’t wipe R2, and so they work really well and really closely together. At WayForward, they would wipe the R2 unit every time and so you never got a chance to really get that level of cohesion.”

  WayForward was a “work for hire” studio, one that could survive only by juggling lots of contracts and making licensed games on very tight deadlines.* Keeping teams together wasn’t the studio’s priority, and in 2012, after they finished the brawler game Double Dragon Neon, WayForward’s leadership split up Sean Velasco, Ian Flood, Nick Wozniak, and David D’Angelo, moving them all to different projects.

  Upset that they were no longer together, the group started meeting up outside work. On nights and weekends, they’d all go to Velasco’s apartment and experiment with side projects, including a smartphone game that didn’t get very far. None of them were really into the touchscreen—they preferred the tactile feel of proper buttons—and it wasn’t the type of game they wanted to develop. What they really wanted was to work together on a proper platformer, one that you could play on Nintendo consoles like the 3DS and Wii U. “I remember saying, ‘I got into the industry to make Nintendo games,’” said D’Angelo. “‘Let’s make a Nintendo game.’”

  “And we all looked at each other,” said Velasco. “And we said, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want to do.’ We all want to make great gameplay-first games. We don’t know how to have a touchscreen. We want to make gameplay games that use a controller.”

  Back in the office, Velasco pitched WayForward’s leadership on a radical idea: what if he and his team did something new? WayForward had two buildings, one of which was currently occupied by the QA department. What if Velasco’s team took over that second office and became its own semi-autonomous entity? WayForward’s management had been thinking about launching a Kickstarter—what if Velasco’s team handled that? What if they came up with something totally original, a Nintendo-style game that they could all be proud of?

  After a few conversations, WayForward’s management said no. It just wasn’t how the studio operated. Moving people around helped the company crank out games more quickly. “Working at WayForward, you have that mentality of it’s a ‘work for hire’ place,” said Nick Wozniak. “They have to fulfill the obligations to the publisher first, at the expense of everything else.”

  During lunch one day at Dink’s Deli, a restaurant near their office, Velasco started talking to Flood and Wozniak about what their dream “Nintendo” game would look like. It would be a 2-D game, they decided, both because that would be cheaper than 3-D and because it was what they all had experience making. It would look and feel like an NES game, minus the imprecise jumps and frustrating glitches that we saw so often during the 1980s. What Velasco and his friends really wanted was a game that felt like what people remembered about NES games, rose-colored glasses and all.

  There would have to be a single core mechanic in their game, and the move that seemed most appealing was the “down-thrust” from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. With this ability, Link could leap in the air and then stab toward the ground, destroying any enemies and obstacles in his path. “The down-thrust just seemed like such a fun, versatile move,” said Velasco. “You can use it to break blocks, you can use it to bounce on things, you can use it to flip enemies over.”

  Someone suggested that the main weapon should be a shovel. Someone else asked: What if it was a knight? They all tried to picture it: A heavily armored knight, roaming the countryside and fighting off monsters with his big shovel. He could stab spiders with horizontal pokes or jump up and use his shovel like a pogo stick, hopping on bubbles, ghosts, and big piles of dirt. The image made all three of them laugh, and soon enough they’d agreed on both their game and their main character, who would share a name: Shovel Knight. It felt sufficiently iconic, like it could be slapped on T-shirts and lunchboxes.

  As Velasco, Flood, and Wozniak sat there in the booth of the restaurant, batting ideas back and forth, they devised an entire structure for their game. Shovel Knight would battle against eight other knights, each with its own distinct theme, as in the old Mega Man games, in which the eponymous hero took on robot bosses with names like Crash Man and Metal Man. Shovel Knight wouldn’t absorb his opponents’ powers—they didn’t want to rip off Mega Man that much—but each boss woul
d have his own themed stage. Polar Knight would live in a frozen ship. King Knight would rule over a grand castle. Our hero, Shovel Knight, would conquer them all. “That was it,” Velasco said. “He’ll fight these eight guys. And each one will be cool. They’ll have these unique silhouettes and then we’ll have a big bad that you fight at the end. We just started from there.”

  Knowing that WayForward would never let them make Shovel Knight, they all decided to quit, gambling their savings on the game that they knew they had to make. Sean Velasco and Ian Flood filed resignation letters.* David D’Angelo, who had moved to Chicago while his fiancée attended graduate school, kept working at WayForward remotely but planned to moonlight on Shovel Knight and then eventually switch over full time.

  Nick Wozniak wanted to stay at WayForward and save up more money before joining the new venture, but when WayForward’s leadership found out he was planning to leave, they fired him. Recalled Wozniak: “[They said], ‘You’re going to leave, right? And I said, ‘Well, eventually, yeah.’ And they said, ‘Why don’t you just make today your last day?’” It was a tradition for departing WayForward employees to gather at the nearby Red Robin (“Not that we like Red Robin,” said Wozniak. “It was just a thing that was terrible that we did.”) and after finding out he’d lost his job, Wozniak called everyone for an impromptu trip there, including his wife. What nobody else knew was that Wozniak’s wife was eight weeks pregnant, and that the main reason he’d wanted to stay at WayForward was to save up money for their new kid. “She was freaking out,” Wozniak said. “She was very nervous.”