To celebrate passing the 10K members milestone on the studio's Discord server, Remedy held an Alan Wake 2 Q&A with developers across different departments, and spotlighting crafts which deserve but may not always get the spotlight.
Held on the Discord Stage on May 6th 2024, Vida Starčević (Senior Community Manager) and Julius Fondem (Community Manager) were joined by amazing Dustin Meijer (Gameplay Programmer), Robin Meijer (Development Manager), Karen Soh (Senior Cinematic Designer), and Inka Timonen (QA Tester).
While the session was not officially recorded, we asked on social media if anyone had a recording of their own. Soon after, Frank_T sent us an email with a Dropbox link and very kindly gave us permission to write a transcript so the session could be archived on the site. (Thank you, Frank!)
Writing transcripts is always a little bit of weird experience as spoken language is very different to written. There are always fillers, repetition, and emphasis that feel so natural in conversation but don't quite translate to writing. For clarity, we made very slight edits, removing some fillers to make the answers smoother and clearer. However, all of the words below are those of guests.
Julius Fondem (Community Manager): We are here at Remedy, and welcome to this Alan Wake 2 AMA! We have some developers from the Alan Wake 2 dev team with me here to answer your questions. So, go ahead and introduce yourselves.
Inka Timonen (QA Tester): Yeah, I guess I can go first since I'm next in line. Hello, my name is Inka, I'm the QA tester. I worked pretty much throughout the whole Alan Wake [2] development time as a QA Tester. So, yeah, I know the game pretty much back-to-back. No secrets here!
Robin: You broke everything.
Inka: I broke everything, yes. [Laughs]
Robin Meijer (Development Manager): Hi, I'm Robin. I'm a Development Manager on Alan Wake 2. I joined the team in July 2020, so I've been here since… since the game was in pre-production.
Julius: What does a Development Manager do?
Robin: That's an excellent question, thank you. It is a project manager of sorts. In some studios, they're called "producers" or "project managers". But at the end of the day, I manage the team throughout the entire development cycle and try to make sure we actually ship the thing. Which we did!
Inka: Yay!
Karen Soh (Senior Cinematic Designer): Hi, I'm Karen, I'm the Senior Cinematic Designer. I've been at Remedy since… April 2021? So, kinda almost towards the beginning, but not fully AT the beginning. But I've been here enough to see stuff… come from baby stages to, like, full-grown up adult stages. So, yeah!
Dustin Meijer (Gameplay Programmer): Yeah, hi, I'm Dustin! I've been at Remedy now for five years. I originally joined as a Graphics Programmer, but joined the Alan Wake 2 project as a Gameplay Programmer. Been on the project for roughly two years now, I think? It's been a lot of fun, yeah!
Julius: Great! Of course, Vida is also here, Senior Community Manager.
Vida Starčević (Senior Community Manager): Hi, I'm Vida! I'm also here. I will be here providing support and- ooooh, and echo. [At the end of the sentence, her microphone is picked up on another set of speakers, causing an echo]
Julius: Sorry!
Vida: [Echo] That's alright!
Julius: First question we're going to take is from dwellerdark. The question is, "Were there any unusual occurrences for you during your time developing Alan Wake 2, or another Remedy game? Things like strange dreams or nightmares, or something that actually happened that startled you?" We were talking about this before we got started here, about the jump scares in the game or "horror flashes", as we call them.
Karen: I was like… I was trying to test something, in terms of the cinematics, that I implemented, but in order to test that, I had to play the game a little bit, like go through a couple of rooms. And I did not know that the horror flashes were implemented. I think I was the only one in the room at the time, and all the lights were off. So, I was just going through one of the rooms, and then all of a sudden, there's this horror flash of Cynthia screaming in my face. I literally jumped and did a little scream in my chair. And then I calmed down a bit. Then, when I had to test it again, I completely forgot that it was implemented. So, I did the same thing again. That was a scary development for me.
Inka: Yeah, I have some kind of similar experience, but it's related to a bug. And if you remember in... I think it was the Anger's Remorse mission, there are two wolves before you get to the nursing home? And at one point, there was a bug where the wolves actually followed you all the way to the nursing home. I was not aware of it! So, I went inside the nursing home, and I suddenly hear the combat music, and I'm like "what is happening?! Where is it coming from?" I'm so nervous. And [then] suddenly, a wolf jumps me from inside the nursing home, and I scream. So, I was not in a safe space inside the nursing home anymore. It was so hilarious because I was talking to Rose or something, and suddenly it just jumps me.
Robin: For me, I don't have this with the horror flashes, but I can have the inverse of it. I've been part of so many reviews; we do weekly or bi-weekly playthroughs of missions, and we would usually have a list of the beats that are supposed to happen, and in what state the content is. So, every time we're just playing through it, I was like "okay, we're playing… okay, now it's supposed to do a horror flash… okay, there it is, it works" or it's missing something. So, every time I would go through a mission, it's just going through this mental checklist. "Okay, I'm supposed to be scared now… yes, it works". But, as for dreams, I do recall when we were in the final stage of shipping, there were some longer days, and we were going through so many bugs every day, that I came to the office like "oh yes, this terrible bug, we need to fix it today" but I show up and we're not actually tracking this. I dreamed about a terrible bug… that was actually not real. And then I came to the office, "Oh, I need people to start fixing this", but then the bug never existed.
Julius: So, you dreamt up a terrible bug?
Robin: Yes!
Julius: That didn't even exist, and you stressed yourself.
Robin: It had been within my head as I woke up, and I was like "oh, how are we going to deal with this because it's so-" [laughs]
Inka: It's nice when you wake up.
Robin: Yes, it's fixed! It's already [been] very productive.
Dustin: I don't have a very specific memory of the thing that scared me the most, but I do remember [that], for most of the time working on the game, I'd play through with the debug lighting turned on, because I had to see what the character was doing. I also wasn't aware of the horror flashes being in. So like, the game looks very beautiful with debug lighting even still, and then a horror flash happens, and I was like "…fuck". Very effective!
Julius: What's debug lighting? Can you briefly explain?
Dustin: Ah, yes. So, that is basically just some ambient lighting that is used to brighten up everything so we can clearly see the character and how the character is doing, and not having to- the lighting art in the game is amazing, but sometimes it's hard to see exactly what the character is doing.
Robin: It's like turning on bright lights in a haunted mansion.
Dustin: Yes, exactly!
Robin: It doesn't quite do the trick, but it does let you work.
Dustin: Yes!
Vida: It's like turning on the big light, and everyone goes blerrrgh.
Dustin: Yes!
Julius: Alright, Vida, do you want to grab the next question?
Vida: Oh yeah, sure. I think you might have to mute yourselves while you're doing that- oh! There we go. Oh my goodness, I am not ready for this. Ahhh, let's see… oh! Here's one from Poreyneel, which is a question for everyone. So, "the industry does not stand still, and developers are constantly challenging the new ways of storytelling, gameplay and design. What helps you, dear panel, to expand your comfort zone and what unusual ideas would you like to implement, but in reality, for example, they can't or don't work? " Like, do you have any weird ideas that you want to be part of the game?
Dustin: A bit of a two-parter. Part one is on the expanding horizons, at least, is to try to play as many games as you can, or at least see them to get to see what all the other developers do and their ideas. Hopefully, that inspires things. I have to think about part two, though…
Inka: Yeah, but I agree, playing a lot of different games gives you more ideas and inspirations; what you can do with your own work.
Karen: Playing different games and watching different movies to get different ideas.
Julius: Something that I've heard that several Creative Directors or Lead Designers usually say is just to have life experiences. Go to art museums, learn a new skill, travel, all of these things are things that inspire you and give you ideas outside of just video games. I've heard that can be very fruitful.
Robin: I mean, it's creative work, right? And part of creativity is applying things you know or have seen in a different context or using them to solve a different problem. And you can be really good at applying that experience to the problem, but just having a wealth of experience really helps. Having seen a lot of films, having played a lot of video games, knowing or understanding how they're made, just gives you so much insight. And then once you're making games and you run into a problem, you have a lot to rely on and refer to. So, play video games! It helps!
Julius: And it's fun!
Robin: Usually.
Julius: Yeah. I'll grab the next question then. This is from A_Witcher. "What was the biggest achievement in your specific department regarding Alan Wake 2 that you're the most proud of?"
Karen: We shipped it.
Robin: We were talking about this question before, and that was the communal response. Everyone's just really proud that the game shipped as it did.
Inka: Yeah, it was like… it was a weird time, the shipping phase.
Robin: Hmm!
Inka: And it was my first time, actually, actually being part of QA and shipping a game, so it was a humbling experience to say the least! And I'm very proud that we did it as a team. Everybody did it together.
Julius: Games are a team effort!
Dustin: [Alan Wake 2] was actually the first game that I actually worked on, from the gameplay side. Seeing the shipping and the amount of work and collaboration that comes into getting features in is super cool.
Julius: Even sometimes seemingly simple things can be actually very complicated. The classic example is doors in video games. Like, you might not think it, but a door is actually very complex in video games.
Robin: I think we had someone in our team who worked on the doors for probably the better part of two years.
Julius: Yep, very true!
Robin: Sometimes on and off. The doors have evolved so much over the course of this video game. And how we interact with doors has been… such a critical part and such a fun source of some of our bugs. So, Simon, if you're still listening, you did so incredibly well!
Karen: I actually have a story about doors. So, there was this one task that I had to do in the sheriff's office where Saga follows Tim Breaker down to the autopsy room. But in order to do that, she has to go through two sets of doors, and I had to implement Tim Breaker walking up to a door and just waiting there for Saga to come along. You catch up to him, and then he can open the door. And those were my first time doing anything with doors, so it took me [begins to laugh] it took me, like, an entire week to figure out how to implement that. But one of the people on the animation team, Kaj [Lydecken, Lead Narrative Animator], he had a ton of experience setting up doors along with the scripted animations. So, bless his patience, because he spent the entire week teaching me how to set up doors, and trying to figure that stuff out. And then, finally, when I got it all set up and working, it was like... OH, the biggest endorphin release ever. Oh my gosh, I set up a door!
Julius: En-door-phin?
Robin: Nice!
Julius: With help from Vida.
Inka: Yeah, I remember many issues, also bug testing the doors like... I don't know, you ring the doorbell at the Nursing Home, and Rose just doesn't answer it. You're stuck outside. [Laughs] That was a funny one, too! "No, you're not getting in." Doors are hard.
Julius: Yes. And, y'know, you can extrapolate from that to video games; if doors are hard, then there are lots of other things that are very hard.
[Mumbles of agreement]
Julius: Vida, you wanna grab that next question?
Vida: I do, I'm just waiting because of the echo. Right, I have the next one from Simy, who is one of our lovely, lovely mods. Shoutout to the mods for being amazing. So, "what would be a question that someone has never asked you but you wish they would ask about your work?" Err, Dustin, do you want to kick us off?
Dustin: Boy, that's a hard one! I think I will quickly pass the [audio issue], to be honest.
Karen: Oh man, what would someone wish they could ask me about work… um, gosh, I can't even think of a question that I would ask myself. I guess, like, how do cinematics get made?
Dustin: How do cinematics get made?
Karen: Well, a camera and another camera, they get together- nah.
[Laughter]
Karen: No. Basically, we get a script from the writers or the narrative team, and they review it with us, and they go over how that is put together. We take that script, and we try to figure out what sort of vocab animation we want from it. So then, we have different directors and animators go and do mocap shoots with our actors. We get the footage back, and then we pick our selects. Then have our camera artists go in and choose different shots that they want with that footage. We come in, and we start editing that footage together. Once we get directoral approval, then we can start implementing that into the game, and then put all the bells and whistles on it and make sure it gels well with the gameplay. That's the summary of how a cinematic gets made, yeah!
Dustin: About a question someone has ever asked me… I don't really know how to frame the question, but I do have an answer to an unasked question. It's about whether you can actually get into game development without doing the creative work, and to that I will say yes. I studied business administration, and I went into production as a project manager, but I very much felt like part of the development team. There are so many people here at Remedy, and at game studios across the world, who maybe don't do the creative work, but are very much part of the creative process. Julius and Vida, for example, they don't sit in a room working on the game-
Vida: We're not creative at all!
Dustin: Well, you are, but it's a very critical part of making this game what it is, and for you to experience. So, even if you're not an artist or you're not a programmer, you could be very much part of the industry, if you'd like. And I can just heartfelt say, I feel very much a part of this development team. So, yes, I think there is sometimes questions floating around that.. Consider it answered.
Julius: And I think, if I can jump on that a little bit, that people in the games industry have a very, very varied background. People will always think they were always a programmer or something, and no. We have people like "oh, I majored in history", and there are people with really different backgrounds and how they got into the industry. And everyone's story is kind of unique, so you shouldn't think that you can't make games because you don't fit some kind of mould. You absolutely can.
Robin: It kind of goes back to the earlier question as well, a large part of what we do is applying experiences that we have to stories or problems that we run into, and that can come from anywhere. I know we have a lot of colleagues who, sort of, haven't originally started out in a creative industry, but are very much a part of doing what they do now.
Inka: Yeah, I'm kind of piggybacking off what Robin said, I also didn't really come from a practical route, you would say. The key way. Because I used to be working in warehousing and doing this kind of more "normal job". I'm not sure how to say… more like cashier, warehousing, usually what people do at some point in their life, probably. And I just kind of happened to stumble into Remedy, and just to get from there, it's been really fun. So, yeah, it's possible! But going to the actual question. Yeah, I guess, working in QA, people usually kinda… [they] think that you're only playing the game, but it would be nice to get asked "what else is actually QA rather than playing the game?"
Robin: What else is QA apart from playing the game?
[Overlapping voices distort the first part of the answer.]
Inka: It's also helping the developers and doing a lot of collaborations with the different teams. We can set up things for if people are coming here to Remedy, visiting, and we need to get a build to them, or they're doing some user research testing for example. We have the UR team. And just, I don't know, somebody asked me like "hey, where does this thing happen in the game". Usually, QA is the best team to ask because we know the game from front to back. We know everything about it. So, it's lots of communicating with the developers, helping to test the new features that are not in the game yet, giving feedback if needed and joining the important discussions like "is this safe to ship?" for example. [Laughs]
Dustin: There are so many systems that have benefited so much from proper testing and help from the QA, like there are things that would not have gotten in otherwise.
Inka: Yeah, and there are different platforms and just all the things that have to do with the platform-specific testing. Yeah, it's so much more than just "playing the game".
Julius: One thing that I've always found really helpful in QA, because I used to work in production before I switched over to community management, and I've shipped several games, and the investigative work that the QA does is something that is incredibly valuable. When you have a bug and you have to really burrow deep into what is causing this issue to pinpoint exactly where the problem is. QA is invaluable. It's hard to put into words how valuable this work is to get those details for a bug, because sometimes it can be a critical issue, it’s just really hard to solve, but it's blocking you from shipping the game, and you're like "this is really critical", and QA is… yeah, irreplaceable.
Inka: Yeah! And if you're lucky, you may enjoy some events sometimes, and do some on-field work.
Julius: You got to, right?
Inka: Yeah, I went to LA, actually with Robin, last September, and we did the whole preview event there, and it was really exciting because it was my first time in America.
Julius: Nice!
Inka: It was a really valuable experience.
Robin: And it was kind of fun.
Inka: It was very fun!
Julius: Nice. Then switching to something a bit more specific in the game… ReadyWakeBear has a question saying, "The question I have is: what was the inspiration gameplay-wise behind the shadowy-Taken combat from Alan's sections. What was the most challenging part of that to execute? What part of the combat overall did you have a challenge to make?"
Dustin: Inspiration gameplay-wise, that's… well, the gameplay inspiration, that's something that the game designers would have to answer. But the part of combat that was a challenge to make… part of the things that I did (and that I got a lot of help from the program team as well), was to get the flashlight to work well. Make the ray casting work as well, so we could actually detect proper hits for multiple enemies. There's a lot of hit detection there!
Julius: What is ray casting?
Dustin: Ray casting. Ray casting is the act of trying to find if there's something colliding between two points. Casting a ray through the world and either finding a collision or, sometimes, preferably no collision, depending on what you want to do.
Julius: You shoot a laser, essentially. Invisible lasers.
Dustin: We shoot invisible lasers, yes. We check the world if it hits anything. So, there are quite a few of those that are being sent out for the flashlight to approximate the actual cone you see in the game. So, that you see is what you hit. That needs to work for both hitting the enemies and also working on the more exploratory elements in the game. For instance, the Words of Power, they need to be light reactive. That was hard to get to work well. You need the ray to be the right size, so it passes through the geometry but hits the right things. And then the tracking of; if you boost the flashlight, we try to help you a little bit when it hits an enemy. That took quite some iterations to try to get to an okay place, yes.
Robin: I have something to add there! Throughout the development of the game, I've worked with managing various teams and for a year or so, I worked with our visual effects team. The Fade Outs in the Alan Wake sections-
Julius: Which we called the Shadows.
Robin: The Shadow-Taken. They took us quite a while to get right. The Dark Place is a place that is all about uncertainty and things that change, sometimes when you're not looking. And we really wanted that to be reflected in the combat as well, so there are a lot of these Taken that basically fade out when you approach, so, at a distance, you never know what's real. But the whole place is shifting a little bit, so you don't always even know if there is one of these taken out there, and trying to get that all to work together visually took a really long time and a lot of iterations. I really loved where we ended up with that; our visual effects team is filled with amazing people. But I think that is actually combat-wise, that is actually one of the hardest things to get right. The combat in the Wake section really reinforces what the Dark Place is actually about.
Julius: Thank you. Vida, do you want to take a question?
Vida: I would love to take a question. Alright, so this one is from- AHH, just one more thing regarding Dustin's whole thing about the flashlight and the invisible lasers, as they are known in official language. I think it's so fascinating how often we, who don't work in so deep in game development, like we who are outside of it in a sense and don't work in the engine and so on, forget or at least I forget that there is so much- if you can hear that, that's my cat, I apologise, but there is so much in the game that just doesn't exist until people make it. You have to put in how something will bounce off of something else, and if you don't put that in, it doesn't do that, and nothing happens. Anyway, gaming is incredible. Video games are incredible. My question is a question I stole from Codex, erm, and she is asking, "Is there any part that you are personally proud of, all of you, that you don’t see people talk about quite so much?"
Dustin: I'm not that aware if it's talked about a lot, but these seamless teleportations in the Dark Place?
Julius: [whispers] I don't think they know.
Robin: What teleportation in the Dark Place?!
Dustin: Yes, I mean, it was quite a lot of effort from a lot of different crafts to make it, so that, in the Dark Place-
[Audio cuts out on Discord. During the pause, the conversation switches over to Inka, who talks about the first encounter with the Dark Presence.]
[Sidebar: After we finished writing and double-checking the transcript, we reached out to Julius about this answer. Though it had been going back a while, he did remember that part, stating he believes that Dustin was explaining how the game teleports the player without them noticing. To make this work, the two areas need to match visually so that the player doesn't notice that the teleportation is taking place. If you're interested in seeing where this takes place, you're in luck! Following the AMA, the studio shared THIS video on TikTok. A huge thank you to Julius for this!]
Inka: -came to life, and I remember it was in a very rough state for a long time, but when it started to materialise into the thing that it actually is now in the game, I was really impressed with the sound design they made, with the Dark Presence, with the first encounter in Initiation 2.
Julius: Yep!
Inka: When it bursts through the collapsed tunnel, and you get to see it for the first time. I think the sound is very effective and I was very impressed [by] it-
Robin: So cool.
Inka: - when I saw it for the first time. I don't know how much people are talking about it but, for me, it was a really impressive thing that I hope people are talking about.
Karen: One thing that I thought was impressive is how a bunch of the cinematics... this is the first game I've worked on where there are different types of cinematics. Not just in-game, but you also have live-action, and then you also have pre-rendered, and they're all stacked on top of each other basically, and it still amazes me how well they just come together so cleanly, and it's almost like an effortless switching between them.
Julius: Hmmm.
Karen: And to me, it's sometimes like "wow, we did that! We did it!" So, yeah, I'm still impressed by how that worked out.
Julius: Do you have anything, Robin?
Robin: Umm, nothing quite exciting, but what I personally feel really good about, that I don't see many people talk about, is some of the living world animations, because I actually got to do a little bit of mo-cap for some of the townsfolk. In Bright Falls [the townsfolk] are doing stuff that I did motion capture for.
Julius: What's "living world"?
Robin: "Living world" are some of the background characters, if you're walking through Bright Falls or Watery, for example, not everyone will have dialogue, but there are just some people around going about their business like you would in a regular town, and that's what we call a living world. They're not too involved with you, just going about their business. And I got to do some mo-cap for it, most of the other capture was done by Daria [Merkulova, Gameplay Animation], one of our animators, and she actually got all the stuff in the game in the end. But I feel real good about those animations.
[Distorted audio]
Distorted Male Voice: Chatting before when they got out, and it was like "…Robin?"
Robin: I was watching friends play through the game on Twitch, and they were doing this thing where they look at someone in town like, "Is this Robin or is it someone else?" And it actually worked out quite well! And my personal favourite there is, together with Daira, our animator, we did the coffee twin scene in Bright Falls. So, the first time you come to Bright Falls, there's Charlie in a coffee mascot suit and he sort of waves down the street, but it's a very silly wave that we did. But that was me! And I loved it so much because they waved down the street, they sort of wave at Saga, and it was like "everyone sees this, and I love it so much!" So, yes, not a lot of people talk about this.
Julius: That's fair, that's fair! It's a big moment.
Inka: Now I'm tempted to load the game for the suit now, just waving around.
Robin: We talked about this for the launch party, if we could do the dance, but we didn't.
Inka: You should have!
Robin: Yes, we should have.
Karen: Something else that was really cool, at least internally for us, was that one time when there were handwriting auditions for the entire company because the narrative design team wanted handwritten notes. So, they held auditions for everybody to see what their handwriting was like, so they could do handwriting for different characters in the game. And I remember, Molly [Maloney], who is on the narrative design team, was in charge of being the handwriting director. She eventually had everybody come in and do handwriting for different characters, and I was the handwriting model for Ilmo, and I had to do all these arranged chicken scratch notes, like "Cult of the Tree". I remember I just went all out on that, and I was drawing all these little triangles and trees on a piece of paper, and I still actually have a couple of the things that I wrote, and it's on my wall. But it was like, "Yes! I'm a handwriting model!" And, I remember Anne-Marie [Grönroos], who is one of our mission designers as well, I think she did the handwriting for Rose? And she wrote a ton of motivational messages, and a lot of the, I guess, unused copies of her handwriting were just pasted around the offices. They were just motivational. So, anytime you walked down the halls, you saw these happy messages from Rose telling you to keep going or have a great day. So, I thought those were cool.
Julius: Those were really cute.
Karen: Yeah!
Robin: I remember John McKenna, one of our VFX Artists, he auditioned for the handwriting stuff, and he got to write the note. I think it says, "if you ain't wearing a mask", that's somewhere in one of the stashes that the cult leaves behind. But it wasn't selected because his handwriting looked just deranged enough. And he recently moved to another company, but on one of the whiteboards at the office, he wrote "if you ain't wearing a mask" in his handwriting, and I think it's still there? And I love it.
Julius: That's great! Alright, I'm gonna select the question from Vamp, this is to you, Inka. "What is the weirdest/most memorable bug you found during the testing process?"
Inka: I was thinking about this for a while, and I was only going to [say] one thing, and I think my favourite one is pretty much from the early days. Again, the Nursing Home, since I think it was pretty much one of the first levels we worked on a lot from the beginning. So, obviously, there's going to be a lot of issues with it. But when you get to the, go inside, and there's the room where Ahti is hanging around. There was a bug one time where he wasn't standing there, but he was spinning in the ceiling. And I remember the warning logo; the warning logo is the kind of thing where we can see if something is wrong in the game and needs some attention. The warning logo was warning a lot about an object spinning fast. [Laughs] And I remember, I was so amazed by it, I actually recorded a video of it where I was playing Sankarin Tango really fast on top of it. And I still have the video somewhere.
Julius: Ahti night core.
Inka: Yes, it was Ahti night core.
Robin: We had more cases of characters inexplicitly doing three-sixties breakdancing. And I remember seeing this also in…. I think the chapter's called No Chance? Where you play as Alan Wake in the motel briefly?
Julius: Yeah, in area four.
Robin: Yeah! Some of the cold corpses were spinning, and it sort of takes away from the vibe when that happens.
Dustin: Slightly! [Laughs]
Robin: And, about the Ahti room in Anger's Remorse, I remember playing... we talked about jump scares earlier, there was one time where, because the power goes out during that mission, and I think at one point Ahti would leave his room if that happens, because he's usually in his room, but then he would leave it and comment to you while on the landing. But because the power goes out, and so much is already happening, the fact that he appears suddenly behind you-
Julius: HMM-MM!
Robin: That, for us, was sort of meant to be like he would tell you to check out the basement again, but it was such a jump scare every time that I think we put him back into his room.
Julius: He still appears. He still does.
Robin: Oh, okay!
Julius: He does appear. He still does appear behind you like "hey"- Oh no! I think it's when you try to go to the Writer's Room?
Robin: Oh yeah!
Julius: -in the old folk's home, then he appears behind you. He's like, "You shouldn’t go there… Sorry!" Yes, that's a jump scare.
Inka: But yeah, spinning-Ahti is my favourite bug ever.
Julius: Do you have a video that you can send to me?
Inka: I can! I actually have two, maybe?
Julius: Okay, send them to me, please. I'm gonna cook up something.
Dustin: We also had a memorable bug, but this one had to do with the projectiles in the Dark Place, where, if you were in after you collected the flare gun, you would go back down into the Subway Station, and you would shoot it. Sometimes it wouldn't appear, and sometimes it would come in like an airstrike from somewhere. I had to figure out why that was happening.
Julius: So its spawn point was like somewhere completely off?
Dustin: Yeah, yeah, it would spawn itself at, like, world origin and teleport itself close to where you are and then try to go where you shot it. Very interesting to fix. It was really nice to be able to do airstrikes with the fire gun for a while.
Robin: We had more cases like that, I think, where things would go to world origin. Things would happen, and we'd be like "where did it go?" and then eventually there was a pile somewhere underneath Cauldron Lake that had stuff floating around it.
Dustin: There's a similar one, it's related to this same issue, which was not specifically with the flare gun, but I think it was one of the throwables? If you threw a lot of them, they just wouldn't appear. And you would walk up the stairs, and then suddenly you would hear a huge clattering of objects somewhere. You'd come back, and you would see all of the propane tanks that you were trying to explode falling out of the air. Which, yeah, is also related to the same thing.
Julius: That is funny.
Inka: Basically, when[ever] you fall out of world, it's always hilarious, but I think the funniest one was when you dodged, you suddenly fall out of the world.
Julius: Peace! I'm out!
Inka: Yeah... I don't know, maybe the collision got disabled while you were dodging, and then it was enough to make you fall?
Julius: Amazing.
Karen: I remember a specific bug for the Nightingale autopsy cinematic. It wasn't mine to fix, but I thought it was hilarious, and this was at the very early stages. I'm not sure if this is a PG-13 bug, but it was when Nightingale's body was on the autopsy table, and somebody wrote a bug saying that one of Nightingale's appendages was too stiff.
[Group laughs]
Inka: I remember that!
Dustin: I have that bug printed out!
Karen: It should be placid. It was only because the rigging team hadn't gotten to it yet, but once they had it was a quick and easy fix, so. I just remember that being the most memorable. [Laughs]
Julius: Rigor Mortis.
Dustin: Yes! Yeah, no, that's my favourite ticket.
Julius: Vida, do you want to take the next question?
Vida: Yes, I wanna- can I name my favourite Jira ticket?
Julius: Absolutely, go for it!
Vida: My favourite Jira ticket that I want people to talk about, I think... I think we have people on this call who can talk about it? But my favourite Jira ticket was the sauna door has a metal knob, and how that was flagged as being a "blocker bug", I think?
Dustin: Yes!
Julius: Because those of you who are not Finnish would not know this, but you can't have a metal handle on a sauna door.
Dustin: No.
Julius: Because it will heat up and then you- it will be unusable, and y'know, Finnish video games, of course, it's a very important bug fix.
Inka: It was a matter of pride to fix it.
Julius: Pretty much!
Vida: But yeah, yeah, I do have a question. Umm, where is it? Right, so we've been talking a lot about bugs, and I've been laughing the whole time and wiping tears from laughter, so I want to kind of continue on with that, and get a question from Ryan Shera in. We've talked about some of the weirdest glitches and bugs that you guys have come across during development, but I wanna know if- or Ryan wants to know, if "any of the bugs made it into the game on purpose, or did they inspire an idea that made it into the final cut?"
Inka: If any did, I was not aware of them. My job is kind of to-
Robin: Just kind of reopening it?
Karen: I can't think of any, at least not on the cinematics side, like, we tried to-
Inka: Yeah, I don't know if any-
Karen: -squash as many as possible. Yeah.
Inka: Yeah, I don't know if any were, like "it's a feature, not a bug" kind of thing, that made it [in] on purpose. If any made it, it probably was not on purpose. [Laughs]
Dustin: If they can be classified as that… maybe? It's when you get grabbed by one of the Fade Outs, the Shadow-Taken in the Dark Place, and you are escaping. Even if you have no battery, it will do a flashlight boost light damage. I'll classify that as a feature, though.
Robin: Nah, I'm with QA on this one.
Inka: The game is flawless!
Julius: Right, and we'll take this question, it's from several people, including Herald of Darkness, dubbed Gerald of Darkness, and our wonderful Codex, "what was the most difficult section of the game to develop from start to finish?"
Inka: Well, I was not part of the "development" in that sense, but I think… following how their case board was coming together, I think that was a real challenge. It looks very simple, but there was a lot of work that went into it, and it used to be much more… how to say, dynamic?
Julius: Yeah.
Inka: You would be able to place things anywhere on the board and do different combinations and everything, but it got cut down a lot because it was so complicated, and it was causing a lot of progression issues because it was so open-ended for the player to use. So, I think that was, like, a real challenge.
Dustin: Shoutout to Sasha [Alexander Balakshin, Gameplay Programming] from the gameplay team, doing a lot of the data programming on that.
Inka: Yeah!
Dustin: -and the hard work on the narrative team on that.
Inka: Yeah.
Julius: Yeah, I think Molly [Maloney] and Simon [Wasselin] gave a talk on narrative, and they talked about the case board, and I think there was an article written on GamesIndustry.biz where they summarised the GDC talks? And if you want to read more about what went into making the case board, check out- I think it's on GamesIndustry.biz?
Robin: Yeah!
Julius: I think?
Robin: There's also a GDC talk from Alexander [Balakshin], our gameplay programmer, we call him Sasha, talking about how they made it on the technical end. So, if you're interested in that, it has gone through a lot of iterations over the years. It's worth a listen! For me, the most difficult section would be the start of the game, where you take control of Saga, and then with Casey, go to Deputy Mulligan and make your way down the path, to the murder site where you meet Thornton for the first time. That is… It's a very critical part of the game, because you're getting introduced to all these characters, and you're getting reintroduced to Cauldron Lake. But you have a companion with you, and earlier we talked about how doors are really hard, but getting AI characters to walk with you, do what you would want them to, while also leaving enough room to explore or look at things. That was such a hard thing to get right. We have so many clips where Casey would just walk off or refused to come along or if you would stop walking in the exact same spot, or if in a very specific spot, he would jump down the ledge and go "oh, now I'm too far away from you" and he would climb back up and get his steps in that way. That took us a really, really long time, and it was actually quite a difficult part until very close to launch.
Julius: Hmmm. And then, of course, that section also has, where there's a side part where you can go do the side part-
Robin: Exactly!
Julius: -in case he has to wait. And if you go further, he has to catch up to you as well, and then continue what he was doing, so there's a lot of variables.
Dustin: Yeah! I think from the optimisation side of the game, which was the hardest, difficult thing to do was the transition from the RU8; the beach fight, the big concert there to The Dark Place. That was really rough on the memory consumption.
Julius: Okay! What made it specifically rough?
Dustin: Lots of enemies at the same time. Lots of particles happening. And switching from two game worlds, to two big levels at the same time. And that had to happen within a very short span of time. It was hard! Lots of people came together to try to optimise the game.
Julius: Yeah, optimising a video game, that's like a huge undertaking in of itself. And that could spawn an hour-long discussion.
Dustin: Yes, yes.
Robin: Dustin could write a book about this!
Dustin: I think I should have answered as well, when "what's the thing people won't ask me enough about". Optimisation!
Julius: That's usually a part of development that's not very "sexy" so to speak, because it's not, like you add a new feature to the game. It's just "oh, I shaved off ten milliseconds from this" and then.
Dustin: You shaved off some milliseconds this time. Sometimes you shave off "yes, we have five megabytes more space in the memory".
Julius: Now it never crashes!
Dustin: It won't crash anymore! Yes.
Inka: Getting it to actually work on Xbox, and PS5, and PC, where you have multiple different combinations of machinery that people can use it is a huge task. Getting it to work in a way where people don't get angry.
Robin: And I think it's really, really impressive from our engine team, which is a really large group of people that did a lot of work to get it to run as well as it does. Especially now that, with one of our more recent patches or updates, we have more support for the 10-series graphics card. That might seem like we just did some optimisation, but that is a very, very fundamental rework of some parts, and a lot of work went into that. The work there is maybe even invisible for a lot of people who play on a console, for example, or actually do have a top-of-the-line machine. But it is such a massive achievement that this game runs as well as it does and looks as well as it does on all ends.
Julius: Big shoutout to the Northlight team. They are phenomenal.
[Sound is distorted in the recordings, but there's a compliment to the Northlight team.]
Julius: They absolutely are.
Karen: I guess, in terms of cinematics, the most difficult for me were the car transitions. They were basically these videos that play when you drive around from hub to hub. Sometimes they could be a part of the critical storyline, and at other parts they were… just random videos that played as you were driving. And they were meant to be loading screens, so you don't just see a black screen and the little loading symbol going on. And, for me, those were hard to set up, mainly because… well, initially they were supposed to be like 300 permutations of them? Because they were supposed to be dependent on the weather or the time of day, or who's driving or which direction you're going. But, y'know, we don't have time to implement three hundred something versions of those, so we were able to scope it down to at least seven, for the critical storyline. And then a couple for, y'know, depending on if you're travelling from Bright Falls to Cauldron Lake, to Watery, whichever direction you're going in. And, not only was the implementation a bit difficult - by the way shout out to Simon for setting up a lot of the tech for that - it was difficult in that we had to pre-render a lot of those.
And in order to do that, we had to make sure we had the highest possible setting of PC available, or the best graphics card possible to get those all rendered. And I remembered that's when my graphics card got upgraded because I didn't have a good graphics card at the time. So, just getting that rendered out and making sure there are no glitches in the renders, going frame-by-frame, checking each one to see if "oh, is that tree popping in" or "is that headlight running." And, y'know, if anything went wrong, it would re-render again. We'd have to keep re-rendering until we got the perfect one. And then, making sure that the render was a good file size and then converting that into a format that could be played by the game. So, just that whole process, it sounds easy, but it's very tedious and is so easy to get wrong and stuff. So, that for me was the hardest part.
Julius: Thank you. Vida, do you want to grab a question?
Vida: Yes. I do actually have a question that came in during the AMA. It is from one of our new members, so thanks for joining! It's from Ascentress, and it's for Dustin. So, they asked, "What's the average day of a gameplay programmer at Remedy look like? Maybe you can also comment on how you collaborate with tools-slash-engine programmers when gameplay requires changes to the tooling?"
Dustin: The average day…
Vida: Yeah!
Dustin: My average day… Alright, I will try! Usually, every day at least, in the morning, we have a sync with the gameplay code team where we look at all the tickets that we have, and we try to prioritise what we're going to work on. We update each other on any work that is in progress, and if anyone needs any help, we can try to answer questions or get things set up. Then we do calls after the meeting to help, as I did today. I help out as well by finding the information that I know of, and usually when other coders have information about specific systems, they help. Then, depending on what you're working on, you'd have to reach out to either VFX, audio or level design about certain things that you're actually implementing for them. So, you’d have a ticket that has the description with a design that you'd want to do, and in case there's any clarification required, you'd reach out to the designers, and then, if you know what you need to do, you start working on the ticket, implementing things, trying it.
It's a really fun iteration process when you add the new feature and try it out for the first time. You'd hook up some tiny things to visualise what you're doing. Sometimes it's just a very stupid little box that gets shot out somewhere. Sometimes it's just drawing some stuff or printing out some information until you get what you need. And then, once you get to a point, finishing working on the new mechanics, you record a video and you ask for the feedback like "hey, I got this thing done, does it look like what it's supposed to look like" and they say, "okay". Then we review what you wrote for code, then that gets submitted. That's basically an average day, very quickly summarised. The details depend, of course, on what you need to implement. Sometimes we handle bugs, and then we go to debugging, which is a topic on its own.
Juliu: Okay, I'm just going to choose a question here… Vida if you have a question lined up as well, feel free to jump in.
Vida: Oh, I super do.
Julius: Go ahead!
Vida: I have a similar question for Karen, actually, that I just had for Dustin. Thank you, Dustin. I had a question for Karen; "If you can describe what you do at Remedy as a cinematic designer", because I know that our team- our cinematics team has a lot of differently talented people who do a lot of different things. And if you can also say how you collaborate between the rest of the cinematics team- with the rest of the cinematics team, sorry.
Karen: Okay, there are three cinematic designers on our team, including myself, there's Mircea [Purdea, Cinematics Lead] and Anna [Mellor Meecham, Cinematics Designer], and all of us work together with the other animators and camera artists on our team. So, basically, for our- at least on Alan Wake 2, what we were in charge of doing was: first, we'd start off with making sure the environment, where the cinematics were supposed to take place, is kind of there or put together. And we export that for our animators and cinematographers, so that they can go into the mo-cap shoots and can use that as a reference for the actors, and try to figure out what the cameras are supposed to look like. Once they've done that, they give us that footage- at least for mo-cap.Once mo-cap has finished, they give us that footage, and the cinematic designers choose the selects.
So we look at all the mo-cap footage, and we pick the best performances that we think would fit well with the game. This doesn't just include full body performances, but it also includes facial performances, and it also includes VO performances later on when we pick the voice selects. So, we pick the best ones, and we send them back to the animators for clean-up. Sometimes the animators will clean that up and give us the final versions of that. And then the animators themselves will also send a copy of that to the cinematographers or the camera artists.
We actually have one camera artist, Sami [Kastarinen, Cinematographer], he does pretty much all the camera work for the cinematics. So, he creates a bunch of different cameras and gives us multiple shots of the same scene. And the cinematic designers take that, and we go into a video editing software, and we cut up together some edits, using those cameras. Once we have an edit, and then we iterate on that and we get stakeholder approval, we go into the game, we go into the level, and we create timelines for each of these cinematics.
The timelines basically, they contain all the information that are in each cinematics, including cameras, animations, scripts, anything that needs to fire off. So, cinematic designers create edits in the timeline. We also create Lua scripts that specifically fire off different events that happen during cinematics. So, for example, if we want a screen to go black, say that Alan Wake gets knocked out, and then the screen goes black, and he fades back up. Or say that a cultist dies during a cinematic, but we want that body to keep looping, so we'll have a script that fires that off as well. Or, y'know, we have blends back into gameplay, we're also in charge of that. So a lot of our work involves implementation and editing, and just, making sure that everything is scripted in and blends in and out of gameplay pretty well. But, yeah, once we have that, it's all down to troubleshooting and fixing bugs. Yeah, that's kinda pretty much the gist of what we do... and we also do a lot of rendering stuff as well, like how I mentioned before about the car transitions where we pretty much hit the record button and then that renders out frame-by-frame of different cinematics and we had to take that and we have to convert that into proper video format and then put that into the game as well. That's the gist of it! [Laughs]
Robin: It's actually an interesting question here in chat from… It's blue on grey, I cannot read.
Julius: AWitcher.
Robin: It's from Awitcher! So "What's the average turnaround time for one cinematic?"
Karen: It can be anything from a few weeks- it's definitely at least three weeks, but it can be up to a couple of months because we have to fit in with the mo-cap schedules. Sometimes we can't progress until we have footage from mo-cap. Other times it can just be like "oh we need this environment to be done" but we go in as much as we can and we get up to a certain point for, "hey okay, maybe this tree has to be here. We know this tree is going to be here, but right now it's a grey box" or in a rough state. So, we wait for the tree to be done, we might go and work on a different cinematic and then come back. But it can be anywhere from, y'know, a month to several months to just finish, REALLY finish a cinematic.
Dustin: Do you remember which cinematic took the longest time, from start to finish?
Karen: Erm…
Dustin: You can say no.
Karen: They all felt like they did, but I feel like the…. trailer park cinematic with Tor and Odin, where you first meet them? That one probably took the longest [due to] a bunch of different changes in the environment as it was happening, and we also had to figure out "okay, what camera angles were the best". Trying to figure out issues with the cameras because in some shots, the cameras were really far away, and then that made some of the assets in the background disappear. Then, when you move it close again, then they reappear. Or maybe, sometimes the animation is looking weird. Or maybe Tor and Odin's model weren't finished yet. So, there were different reasons why that took the longest. At least to me, it felt like it took the longest. But it was probably one of my favourite cinematics to work on.
Dustin: It's so cool.
Karen: Mainly 'cos I got to look at all the behind-the-scenes footage for Tor and Odin, like the actors. I forgot their names right now! [Stuart Milligan and Harry Ditson]. But they were just really funny in their mo-cap footage, and they were just goofing off a lot. So I really liked working with that one.
Inka: That is one of my favourite cinematics because I love how they all interact with each other.
Karen: Yeah!
Inka: It's kind of… I don’t know, you love to watch it.
Dustin: We have a clip of one of the Tor and Odin actors just saying, "Now I need a stiff drink", and that clip has been around the office so many times!
Karen: It's like our GIF right now. [Distorted]
Julius: That's great! Then we have a question from B292; "Dustin, what was your favourite gameplay mechanic you worked on and the most frustrating?"
Dustin: My favourite gaming mechanic is the one I got to implement as the first thing I ever did as a gameplay programmer: it was the flare gun.
Julius: Ohhh!
Dustin: That's the first thing I got as a thing to work on. At the time, I had to work on how to make a weapon, how to spawn projectiles, and how to get it to explode. This was also the one that I hooked up a little debug box instead to show where the projectiles went, and I drew a little debug sphere to see the explosion. And they were like "oh yeah, it works well and it's configurable with the data", and it was fine, and I didn't see it for three, four, five months or so. And then, we finally had some footage of people playing through the musical where the flare gun got introduced and people shooting it off for the first time. And I saw it with the proper VFX, and the proper model, and the proper explosion and everything. That was beautiful to see everything together. That was such good work from everyone there. Most frustrating?
Julius: Here we go!
Dustin: There were a few things, maybe? But I think the most frustrating, most difficult one, actually, to work on was getting the holstering, unholstering and equipment and inventory to work well. We had a lot of interesting bugs with that system including being able to make your own uber gun by equipping everything at once. It was amazing. That's a gun that I actually want to make once. Yeah, it's a crossbow with a [laughs] anyway. We don't have a camera, and I couldn't describe the piece. So yeah, there was a lot there to make it sync up properly. With the animation, make the logical state of what the game was actually in, change at the right frame so that the animation remained smooth. And then, of course, the thing that makes it very difficult is; at what moment in time, what action can cancel another action or interrupt a different action. And what restarts, what doesn't restart? What can be completed earlier than the animation would allow so that there's a better gameplay feel. That took a quite while to get to the point it is now.
Robin: I know you spent months towards the end of development working on how we work with the inventory and what we put when. And I think, as a player, it seems like such a straightforward thing to do, but then once you actually have the game, there are so many moving parts to it and so many things a player can do at awkward timings.
Dustin: Yep!
Robin: Or they're dodging or they're getting hit while they're switching weapons, for example. There are so many exceptions to this process that it really- there's probably years of development time into just making the end result of it. That's where QA also comes in. You probably spend a lot of time messing with inventory.
Inka: Yeah, the inventory testing was a really painful process. [laughs] So, I share the pain of actually developing of it.
Dustin: It was not possible without all of the help there. It was amazing with all the help… but it works now!
Karen: It turned out great!
Julius: You shipped it!
Karen: Yeah.
Dustin: Those are sometimes two different things, but we definitely shipped it. [laughs]
Julius: Vida, you got something in the chamber?
Vida: I do, yes. Let's see… ah, okay, I have something for Inka. I'm just scrolling to find it. There we go! It's from Paige Branson. "QA is often overlooked as a major part of a game's development. From your experience, how important is QA to the development pipeline of the whole game is QA?" I did say it was for Inka, but all of you work with QA, so from your experience, how important to the development pipeline is QA?
Dustin: Crucial!
Inka: Oh my god.
[Laughs]
Dustin: Without QA, I would not be able to do my work without them.
Inka: Yeah, I guess this kinda… relates to the things I already said before, like, QA is much more than just playing the game because we are helping the developers and making sure that not the worst bugs come actually to the player. And doing a lot of work that often feels overlooked, but developers actually recognise it in Remedy, so I'm very grateful to be here. We're working with so many people that actually love the QA. And I always say, QA is the best team. Sorry.
[Laughs]
Julius: QA is incredible.
Inka: Yeah. If we don't have QA, who is actually playing the game that developers are developing? Because developers have to focus on actually making the game. There's no time to actually play it. Obviously, we have the UR [User Research] tests, but it's not enough to actually do some heavy testing on it. So, I think it's very important that we have some sort of area in game development… what's the word? Company! Sorry.
Dustin: There's also a lot that I think QA does in terms of testing edge cases as well. And that is sometimes very difficult to test from a perspective of, if you made or implemented the mechanics, to make sure that all the edge cases are covered.
Inka: Yeah, because there's as many ways to play as there are players, basically.
Dustin: Yes!
Inka: And that's a lot. So, it's very easy to play the game just the way that it's intended to play, but covering those cases where some player does the opposite that you are expecting them to do. Those are the kind of things that we are usually trying to cover, like with the destructive testing and exploratory tests, how we call it in the industry. [laughs] So I think, yeah!
Robin: It's also, after launch, been really important for us, because our QA team is- we have a couple of people at Remedy and a lot of people, externally, that were also helping us ship this game by testing. But at the end of the day, once a game goes live and you have maybe 100,000 people playing, the amount of hours that those put into the game, very quickly start to exceed the amount of testing we are able to do ourselves. And then cases might come up where people might get stuck in a game because of a bug that we've actually never seen. And then once we get a report like that! Someone goes on Reddit or Discord or they @ our game director on X., and then we'll just get a report from a player that says, "something is wrong, I'm stuck, I cannot finish the game". Then, usually, we give this to QA and do a collective shrug and basically say, "You are our only hope". And then, hoping that with your extensive knowledge of the game and having played through it so many times in so many different ways, you can actually retrofit what actually happened here and help us understand the problem of why this player's stuck and then we try to hot fix it as soon as possible. But we had some of those cases come in around launch, and I think that it's due to QA's help there that we actually got so many fixes out on such short notice.
Inka: Yeah, we did a lot of work after launching the game with the player feedback, and every bug that the player came across, too. Because usually players actually play the game normally and without rush, those are the kind of cases that also might not get as much attention because we're so tightly scheduled, because it takes, maybe, if you speedrun the game, it takes maybe two and a half days?
Robin: Yeah.
Inka: And you need to speedrun it! So, actually like, actually calmly playing it through the whole thing. It might take a week.
Robin: One of the strongest examples I remember from when we just launched was, if you, in Anger's Remorse, you can get into a fight with a binder or a diver, there's the odd chance that they will move a table in front of a door. And then when you return to the mansion in the Deerfest mission, the table would still be there. Just like, minutes before you finish the game.
Inka: I remember that, yeah! It gave me so much pain.
Robin: But then, because of the way that we work on the game, the consistency of "something moved ten hours ago and is now blocking you", that is something that we just don't usually instantly understand or a thing we cover upfront. Yeah, those were good times. I remember someone repro'ed that. I think. They made it happen.
Inka: Yeah.
Julius: That's one of those, you were talking about edge cases, Dustin. That's one of those edge cases where, yes, you can push around tables; the player probably won't ever do that, but this enemy could, under certain circumstances, make the table go here. But it's one of those things that… It's hard to reproduce or "repro" as we say. Another thing about QA that I really appreciated, I didn't work on the shipping of Wake 2, but the previous game that I have is performance testing because it's, y'know, we make the game, we say that the game can run a solid 60 FPS… but how do we know that the game runs a solid 60 FPS? We don't know that, so in previous companies that I've worked with, QA would play through the whole game and say "here are the minimum FPS we saw here, the max FPS we saw, this is the average FPS we saw in each level and these are the spots where we were having problems. And then we'd go "okay, this is where we have issues, let's go see how we can optimise these parts." And then they do another round, and then you optimise again, and then you do another round of that. And someone has to go and play through and collect that data, and then go give that to the team. And it's incredibly valuable.
Dustin: This is true! This is done for FPS, and we also do it for memory.
Karen: I remember there was this issue where I had a lot of trouble reproducing it, and it was during the intro cinematic to the game where Saga and Casey are driving. There was like a performance hit that kept happening, but I could not reproduce it for the life of me, and I was like, "I can't fix this, I don't know what's wrong", and it was QA that came to the rescue. They did testing on all different sorts of configurations, and it was a video card issue; I didn't have that specific video card, but they did, and it was like "okay, now I know who to ask to help me to fix this issue!" So without QA, I could never have figured out what was wrong. I would have just been like "it's working fine, I don't-"
Julius: Works on my machine!
[Laughs]
Julius: The classic.
Karen: Yeah.
Robin: Sorry, you were talking about bugs and the car transition? I do recall there was a time we would always have a Saga model in the level and it would be at the central point on the map where someone put it down. But I remember, if you were watching the car transition long enough, the car would eventually just drive past, alongside Saga standing outside-
[Laughs]
Robin: They were so funny! The car is driving as she's just standing there, chilling. This brings up so many memories for me.
Inka: Yeah, me too. I think it's very important. Everyone agrees.
Julius: We all agree. Incredibly important, and I think people can often think that's just playing the game, and you don't need any sort of specific skills, but you absolutely do. And it's a craft that you develop yourself, just like any other craft that we have within games. So it's really important.
Dustin: Learning how to test well.
Julius: Yes!
Dustin: And writing up reports.
Julius: Making good bug reports, like it's-
Inka: Yeah, we have the whole guidelines on how to make actual proper bug reports, and I wish developers would follow that too.
[Laughs]
Julius: If you're a developer, dear listener, if you're a developer and you get a bug report or" a ticket" as it is called often, saying "Saga doesn't work". That's a terrible bug report. Where is this happening? What does "doesn't work" mean?
Robin: Yes.
Julius: Which platform is this happening on? Is it all platforms? Which version of the game? Y'know, which version were they testing on? Maybe it's a couple of days old? Maybe it's been fixed since? And then, having proper reports like "in this moment, when you do this with Saga, all of the controls turn off, and you can't do anything." And then, is there a way to get around it? And do you have a video of it? All these types of details help so much.
Robin: Yeah. I saw someone earlier in chat say they recorded videos of some of the bugs that they run into and shared them with us. Thank you for that because it helps so much!
Julius: I have put those, when I can, into the bug reports that come from the community and put those forward. They are incredibly helpful.
Robin: And it happens internally as well, where people are- they run into bugs while playing but would not be recording. So, actually, a lot of the bugs that we got during development are text-based, and people are trying to describe them the best they can. But it's so hard to, just based on text, try to reconstruct what happened. And there's a real art to this, and that's where QA comes in.
Inka: Yeah, I actually got some praise from… I think it was in The Dark Place team, [Sorav Demitri]. Who said to me personally, "I like that when you make the videos, you point to the direction like 'this is this', and then you point to the actual problem like 'this is where happens'. I was going around the area like here is what the problem is and this is what the actual problem it's causing."
Julius: Nice!
Dustin: That actually happened so much, where we had a blurry screenshot from, like, a Zoom recording. That's how I record all our playthroughs. So I usually just screenshot from that, but then it goes to an environment artist and I show them a screenshot of the level they made and go "I have no idea where this is".
Julius: Yeah, because y'know, especially if you have a big level, what are the coordinates? We were making a linear game, but if you're working on something like an open world environment, if you were working on an open world game, you would need to have the world coordinates. Where in the world exactly of XYZ is this place? Because otherwise, it will take you a long time to find the place. But Vida, we are reaching towards the end of this thing. Should we do a lightning round?
Vida: Do the lightning round! I think you have to do it because of the echo. [Laughs]
Julius: Just one sec, I'll find it. There we go! Alright, "What are your favourite video games, slash Remedy games?" Go!
Inka: My favourite one is Mass Effect.
Julius: Nice!
Inka: One of the Remedy games? Control.
Robin: My favourite game is HALO Reach and there's a TomB292 out there that asked a question. That's a HALO reference. I see you! I love this. Favourite Remedy game is Max Payne 2.
Karen: Favourite video game in recent memory is Nier Atomita. And Remedy game, I guess Alan Wake 2!because I worked on it.
Dustin: Favourite video game list… but somewhere either Outer Wilds or Elden Ring. And favourite Remedy game would be Max Payne 1&2 because they are my childhood games.
Julius: Fair, fair. What is your favourite part, it says "of each Remedy game", but I will only let you pick one Remedy game. What is your favourite part in a Remedy game?
Inka: Oh my God. I'm just going to go with Control and the boss fights. They were really unique, like with the refrigerator enemy, I don't remember… the Former!
Julius: Yes.
Inka: Yes! That one.
Robin: I will say, for me, the favourite part is the stage fight in Alan Wake 1. I think that was such a surprise. I didn't play the game when it came out, but actually quite a bit later. But that was such a surprise and refreshing. Just a very, very cool bit.
Karen: My favourite part in Alan Wake 2 is if you go to Coffee World, and look at the employee roster. Just take a good, close look at that, because some of the photos are of different Remedy employees, but it's supposed to be an "employee of the month at Coffee World" kind of thing.
Julius: Karen might be there.
Karen: Might be! I don't know… we'll see.
Dustin: Max Payne one. Nightmare scene, I think?
Robin: With the blood trail?
Dustin: Yeah, the nightmare level. That one has actually really… that has stuck by me as a story-impact for that game. That was really good, yep.
Julius: Again, what does it feel like after creating one of the greatest games ever made in parentheses and my personal fav?
Inka: It feels amazing and humbling and I'm so happy to be part of this team overall.
Dustin: It's really, really great to see how well it's received; how much people love it. The fact that you people are all here, more than half a year after the launch, speaks to that. And it's really hard to comprehend that the thing that was buggy for three years and we had so much… almost struggle with making it what it is, is now so well loved.
Karen: Yeah, same feeling. It still feels a bit surreal in a way. And to know all the hard work that we put into the game and to see our baby, basically, being so well received is like... It's awesome. It's really like, getting teary-eyed, so, yeah!
Dustin: It's certainly surreal and humbling. It was always my childhood dream to make games, and I finally got to work on one, and so I'm happy it was part of this one. Looking forward to the next stuff we do.
Julius: And then, final question. "Should I visit Finland?"
Inka: Yes.
Dustin: Yes.
Robin: Yes, not in winter though.
Julius: I disagree. I think you should visit either in July, which is the best time in the summer, or February, which is the best time in the winter.
Robin: Yes! True.
Julius: Those are the best times of the year. Spring, not great if you've got a pollen allergy.
Robin: …when is Spring?
Julius: Yeah, that's a… [sigh] yeah. But when is Summer?
Dustin: After fifth winter. A colleague made a joke on Slack saying "Summer is 30 degrees, very sunny and the best day of the year."
[Laughs]
Julius: "Any specific locations we should go to in Finland?" Oh, you should check out the capital region, Helsinki, obviously. But if you want to go to nature, there's so many options. If you can go to a Summer cottage and sauna and swim in the lake, that's the…
Inka: I think that's like the truest Finnish-
Julius: Yes! The quintessential Finnish experience, if you can do that. I think you can rent cabins like that, so you should definitely get to do that. Either in the summer or in winter, because in the winter it's also a very special experience.
Inka: Both are amazing in their own ways.
Julius: Exactly! Yes. Yes. Alright, cool. Thank you very much, Dustin, Karen, Robin, Inka, and Vida, of course, and everyone who came here to listen and to ask their questions. We appreciate a huge amount. Thank you so much! And we have now opened the fan art competition for all of you here on Discord. So if you want to take part, go to the fan art channel, and then submit your fanart there and then react to it with the star emoji and then it will get sent to the 10K fan art competition channel. And there, in that channel, the 10k fan art competition channel, there you can vote for your favourite ones. And then in a couple- in few weeks we'll find out who's the winner and they will get some cool prizes.
[Cheering]
Inka: Thank you so much
Julius: Thank you so much, it was great having you. Alright, everyone, goodbye!
