it's the game that no one ever thought
was going to exist we like doing all
sorts of things that are not common
depending on the layout of the engine
that can be very difficult having made
games for 20 years i almost feel
lazy in the amount of polys i can push
through
this engine and still run fast and
efficiently
[Music]
double fine productions has been around
for 20 years now we're here in san
francisco uh california we're about 70
people we started making our first game
in 2000 uh which was psychonauts our
flagship ip um and we just made a sequel
to that now so that's the 20-year
history in a little bookended nutshell
there
can you book in a nutshell
beware the cows not all milk is enriched
psychonauts is a very special franchise
for double fine we learned how to make
console games making that game and a lot
of the same team is still here 20 years
later you'll need one of these
now we're talking it's kind of our
legacy to be honest it's this strange
game that would not normally get made
but we made it and it's kind of the soul
of the studio
bacon it's very very important to the
identity of the company and we obviously
took building a sequel to it very very
seriously
the only reason we wanted to make second
last two is because there are people out
there who love psychonauts one and so we
knew that that group was watching and we
couldn't get the spirit of the
psychonauts wrong we wanted to make sure
that we maintained the original feeling
and character that the original game had
but at the same time was really
important for us to modernize kind of
how the gameplay felt
[Music]
unrail was a good fit for psychonauts
too because it checked all of the boxes
that we needed to check on the art side
for sure allowed us to quickly iterate
on levels and
build a massive game with a pretty small
team
the unreal engine gives us a really
robust content pipeline that allows us
to tackle all kinds of different things
from gameplay to visuals and allowed us
to focus on adding new things and not
have to deal with basic rendering
functions which if we were rolling our
own engine we would have to worry about
here goes nothing it also provides a lot
of extensibility to the programmers with
full source code access we can go
through and modify anything that we need
to add any new features that we need
which given the kind of setup that we
have for a game like psychonauts 2.
there's lots of custom stuff that we're
messing around with
one thing that was a boon to us is that
we took the spline mesh actor and we
made our own version of it called the
multi-spline mesh actor which allowed us
to take a statically built object and
organically populate it through the
world based on a spline if we hadn't had
that bit of technology there's no way we
would have been able to make enough
content to fill this game and we
wouldn't have been able to do that
without unreal engine one of the things
that's really helpful about unreal is
that using blueprint designers can mock
up an idea for gameplay and see if it's
fun or not before they
actually request a feature to be coded
by a programmer so we can do a lot of
experimentation which is always good to
test out ideas in a rapid way it's
really nice because it acts sort of like
as a common ground where designers
artists and programmers can all
contribute to projects that's stored in
blueprint like a lot of studios we had
to deal with shipping a game in
quarantine and i feel really fortunate
to work in the games industry because we
were able to work that whole time a lot
of people couldn't work during
quarantine but we could keep going and
we ended up shipping psychonauts to from
our homes having full source code access
was really really important to us
because we were able to quickly develop
this custom application that we used in
order to
synchronize drive data cache when
everyone started working remotely and so
being able to distribute that work
across a lot of different machines saved
up a lot of time over the last year and
a half having all of our files be in
sync was the thing that helped us the
most just having source control on this
project was the only thing that kept us
going without that it would have been
madness
we wouldn't have been able to make this
game without it ew
the slime is so sticky after all we've
been through the ups and downs has been
quite a roller coaster and then to make
a game that's been so well received at
the end of the 20 years it just feels
really good because it feels like we
i don't wanna say still got it but maybe
someone will pretend someone off camera
said that oh still got it yeah that
sounds good still got it
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