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A Robot Playtested the Puzzles - The Talos Principle Interview at BIG Conference 2024

In Bilbao, we got to speak with designer Davor Hunski about the brilliant origins of The Talos Principle.

Transkripsyon ng Audio

"All right, so we are in Bilbao for the BIG 2024 and I'm here joined by Davor.
Thank you so much for joining us. I attended your panel. It was pretty interesting, even though I'm guilty of not playing The Talos Principle as of yet, because I'm a huge fan of puzzle games and I love, for example, The Witness and everybody tells me you have to play Talos 1 and 2, and I didn't do that yet."

"But the talk was very, very interesting.
Why did it take you so long to make a second game?
You're turning 10 years now and the game released last year, the second game.
Yes, yes. Well, we needed, how to say, enough time for the game to be ready."

"That means that we are excited enough, that we have enough vision for the game that would be sequel to something so special.
So it took us almost five years to develop the story, the visuals, the core gameplay mechanics until we were really happy and, how to say, brave enough to go into this because, you know, making a sequel for such a game is a challenging, scary thing."

"Brave enough, yeah, makes sense, right?
So another thing you mentioned that struck me as interesting is that you were kind of experimenting with ideas for Serious Sam and then you came up with these mechanics that you could put together into a puzzle game."

"So tell me a little bit more about that story.
Yeah, well, that's actually how The Talos Principle, the first game actually happened because I was trying to come up with the idea how to solve the necessity or need to find some key and open some door, right?
So we didn't want to, you know, we can always go like blue key, blue door, green key, green door."

"Like Doom?
Like Doom, yes, something like that.
But it's known for a bad design thing, so I tried to find something that would be more interesting but have the same function."

"And one day, because we had a war setup scenario, like a city that has mines and doors and turrets and stuff like that, so I tried to see what would work there, right?
And I imagine, you know, I've seen, I don't know how, but I kind of thought of this device that you can move over, but that would be able to block electronic devices on a distance, right?
So imagine you have like a locked device, then you have to unlock the device, then move this device and block some kind of mine or door or turret, right?
That would work in Serious Sam."

"So I said, oh, this is really nice, really interesting stuff, right?
So we tried to make a few levels, a set of levels, just to try out how fun it would be, right?
Do people would know how to solve, is it fun or is it just boring?
And then I make like 15 levels, or maybe 20 easy ones for Serious Sam, but my colleague Tomi, he's our lead gameplay designer, he made like some that would fit Serious Sam universe, but some that are much harder, right?
So they don't fit into Serious Sam, but they're like, you know, so he made hard puzzles, right?
And people enjoyed those the most."

"That's actually the core, so when we took a look at this, people enjoy that, and then, you know, we see, okay, this is something special, something really interesting, let's try to think about that.
And then also we try to see if we can come up with more mechanics, something more interesting, so to feel and to start to give life to something new."

"And then we invented actually the laser grid and stuff like that by watching, by seeing or inspired from a 2D game on the iPhone that my son played.
So just a happy accident, I would say.
And then you got these mechanics, and you put them together in a..."

"You made another analogy that was interesting to me.
You put them together like a chess game, right?
For them to be able to work together and to be, you know, like to be combinable in a way.
So how did you approach this design idea?
They are not standalone mechanics and puzzles."

"Well, the very important thing would be to imagine how they would combine, you know.
How many combinations can you get by, you know, when you have a...
You have only, I don't know, five or six types of figures in chess, but you can do infinite number of games and combinations."

"So, but each one needs to have a certain restriction.
There's the key. It's not ability, but restriction to do something.
There's the key for designing a good mechanic.
So we try to... Okay, first two, I described how we get to the first two mechanics."

"But then, more or less, the other ones were inspired by the other games.
So just thinking of more classics, like classic stuff like fans, cubes, switches.
And, you know, just usual stuff, I would say.
There was one special mechanic that required a different way of thinking."

"And it's a temporal mechanic, not spatial one, but temporal.
And it was called the time mechanic, where you have to replay stuff.
And it's a little bit different. Some people complained about it.
It was the most difficult one for people to comprehend and to play."

"But the other ones were more or less classical.
So we had these two core, very important, strong devices.
And then we, you know, more or less easily come to the other ones.
But each one had this quality that you described to be like one of the chess figures."

"So that it combines nicely with the other ones.
You can try to imagine in your head, but then you try playing with it.
And then all the puzzles come out naturally.
And then you have this bunch of puzzles that you..."

"You're telling me how people reacted to them.
And how people loved them or didn't love them that much.
But before that, you have to create them.
And in order to create them, you had like a quality sheet."

"Like telling me about the difficulty and how people actually loved them.
And not just people, but actually a bot, if I'm correct.
Okay, we had a bot that playtested the puzzles.
But the bot wasn't giving us the scores."

"Bot was there to make sure that all of the puzzles are working towards the end of the game.
Yeah, something didn't break.
Because you can change something in code that you don't know that will break something.
Some puzzle item. Puzzle 76."

"But bot could play that in fast forward mode for an hour.
And you would get a message immediately.
Okay, something broke on that puzzle.
And we would jump in."

"It's really, really difficult for humans to spend that much time.
Nobody has the will to do that.
It gets boring after some time.
But robots doesn't complain."

"That's regarding the bot thing.
The scores, we gave just two scores.
Like for fun and for difficulty.
When we created puzzles, we then went into testing how fun they are."

"And how to select the best puzzle so that people will love the most.
So we created this sheet.
And we have the system where you play the puzzle.
After you are done with it, the thing pops up."

"And you are about to say how fun and how difficult this puzzle was.
And we use this metric to then decide which puzzles are the core puzzles for the game.
And then, of course, we iterated something.
Quite a bit, actually."

"So that we have a nice selection of puzzles.
But we have to know that for each puzzle it is a game, one or two didn't make it in the game.
So if you need 100 puzzles, we actually developed 200 or 300 puzzles.
That's how it goes."

"Yeah, and speaking about bots.
You guys were talking about AI way before it was buzzword in 2024, of course.
It was 10 years ago.
And when you started, the game was even earlier."

"And you were talking about this sort of dystopian future, right?
And how does it feel for you to have shared that message 10 years ago?
And to see how AI is becoming what it is nowadays?
Well, we always thought, especially in the 90s and 2000s, I would say, that it is not fair not to see the positive side of future and humanity and AI and just technology as a concept and what it can bring to the civilization and culture."

"And humanity, because everything is grim, dystopian, we don't see that it doesn't have to be that way.
The early messages of the early science fiction writers, nobody is seeing the future that way.
Everything was exciting.
It was beautiful."

"It was uplifting.
And now we have everything grim.
And we didn't like that.
We were grown.
We were raised on these old classic sci-fi movies, whatever."

"In the 50s.
In the 50s.
So we had the dreams of a positive future.
And now it's all grim.
And we can try to see, well, it doesn't have to be that way."

"We want to say that.
Now we will see how it will turn out to be, AI, in the next few years, which is extremely interesting.
But I really don't think that humanity should be depicted as something that is bad, grim or something.
I think that our history says that we are a good species on this planet and that we are capable to overcome our problems."

"That's a lovely message to share, of course.
And then 10 years have passed and you guys released a beautiful game last year, which was the sequel.
It was even more highly acclaimed than the first game, if I'm correct.
Yes."

"So then you wanted to be better and bigger.
And also you tried this sort of onion layered approach to the puzzles, which make it even more complex than you just described.
So what can you tell me about this craziness of going layered and trying for every interconnected system to work out with the sequel?
Well, that was hard to develop, actually."

"We wanted to have a game and world that is really rich.
For people who will dive deep into the game, we really want them to be extremely rewarded with a lot of knowledge that you can then interconnect and paint a picture, build a picture, image of something really spectacular.
Something that you would really appreciate and know how deep it is."

"So that's why we built so many different layers.
You can miss them all and you will still feel the game.
But if you want to go really deep, we want a strong message that you will never forget to come out from that game.
That's why you also have optional puzzles in the sequel."

"Yeah, optional puzzles give you an optional reward.
But this is because I don't think that you should be able to solve.
Well, you should be obligated to solve every one of them.
So we made some of them optional so you can choose."

"You need to solve eight puzzles to do one of those 12 clusters.
But if you don't know how to solve a puzzle number seven, you still have two additional ones that are redundant.
So you can select one of them to solve.
But if you kind of manage to solve all 10 of them, then you have the extra reward."

"So once the people that will put more effort, they will get more reward.
And speaking about optional, we've been talking about Talos 1, Talos 2.
For people like, for example, me, myself or others who haven't really jumped into the world of The Talos Principle and we can tell, of course, that the newest game was released last year."

"Would you say it is optional or mandatory for us to start playing from the first game, by the first game, and then going into the second game?
Or is it good enough and it's self-explanatory to go directly into Talos 2?
You can go directly into Talos 2.
And you could even play Talos 2 and then Talos 1."

"It's the same as some movies that you see, like a prequel or something.
But maybe it would be better to play one and then two.
Although in the sequel, we kind of, I think, put enough effort to describe the world of the original game that you are not obligated.
So if you fell in love with any of these games, I think that you will try to also play another one."

"And then you have Elysium, which was released this year, which is almost like a full...
I mean, not as big as Talos 2, but it's almost like a full game in itself.
Yeah, it has three different stories.
Very different, unique."

"Three worlds.
So it is...
Actually, this is connected more to Talos 2 because the events in Elysium are tightly connected with the events in The Talos Principle 2.
So I would suggest if you want to play that one."

"Well, it has a flavor of its own, especially the third DLC in that trilogy of DLCs, which is really hard.
So I don't know if somebody's up for a challenge.
Some of those puzzles, I wasn't able to solve myself.
So yeah, if you want to challenge yourself, try that."

"All right, all right.
Yeah, closing one.
We chose this very Talos-like sci-fi sort of connecting puzzle thing and memories and stuff.
And we've been talking about puzzles and a little bit of philosophy and the message you want to convey."

"And I mentioned The Witness.
And before this, I interviewed the guys doing Chants Of Sennaar.
So sort of the puzzle plus philosophy sort of genre is very interesting to me.
And in our review of The Talos Principle 2, our reviewer said that it forced you to consider approaching complex things from very different perspectives and very different angles."

"How do you, as developers, sit down and say, we're going to make the player think like this?
Because I think this is the most captivating thing about this sub-genre.
Yeah, well, it all goes to our beloved writers, right?
They are very skillful and they are very thoughtful and they respect our players immensely."

"And they don't want to push their own view of world onto them.
But we give opportunity for players to see the different approaches to a certain topic, like you have different views.
And neither one is like the right one, right?
But we gave opportunity for people to see a problem from different angles and then select for themselves which one is their own view."

"But it's also very beneficial to see from the other side.
So just for a democratic and scientific approach, you have to see different side of approaching certain philosophical aspects.
I think that's a very good quality for us not wanting to impose certain opinion or style, but giving you options and then rewarding you whatever you select.
Do you realize that that quality of your game is going to be as or even more important than talking about AI 10 years ago?
That is going to be more important today and in 10 years time for people to be able to create their own vision and to add some science to decisions and to their opinions."

"Do you feel like that?
Well, I think this is actually human quality that our writers, for example, have.
And of course, our team is like that.
And I think that we should respect other opinions."

"And this is something that we are missing from today's world.
But I really think that this is a core of our advanced humanity and civilization.
And I think that we should cherish it to the maximum.
I have my opinion."

"I have opinion.
Okay, for us in Croteam, for example, we argue about something.
I think A, you think B, right?
And we need to decide what we will be doing."

"But at the moment when we decide, okay, you're the one that will decide, we'll go B, right?
From that moment, B will be my opinion.
Well, not my opinion, but I will give everything I have to help bring B to life, your opinion to life.
So it's not like I want to enforce my view of things."

"No, no, we are cooperative.
For some reason, opinion B doesn't work.
We will switch to A, and then you will become the one who will push the A, right?
And that's something that we appreciate you as a person, as your opinion."

"And we work cooperatively.
Not that much, but cooperation.
And that's how we work internally.
And that's what we would like the people to feel."

"And in everyday lives, respect others.
And you have your strong opinion, okay, but you have to listen to other people and respect their own opinion.
And, yeah, somehow decide which opinion, who will be responsible for that thing to carry on.
At the same time, while not colliding with empirical science, which is what you mentioned."

"Science is the thing in this world.
It's the only objective thing.
Yeah, I don't feel that personal view of world should be better than objective one.
That's a beautiful way of putting things in a game and sharing a message."

"So, will we have to wait for another decade for Talos 3 to happen?
Well, that's an amazing question.
You knew it was going to come, right?
As I would say before Talos 2, it will come at the moment when we'll have ideas that are exciting enough for us."

"That will excite us enough so we can jump into making the new sequel.
Which, you know, this is a big obligation to our fans, to ourselves, to everybody that loves Talos and respects our team.
And we want to be really excited so we can share the enthusiasm and excitement with our fans.
Because it's because of them, because of us."

"But it's like synergy and we cannot thank enough for people that are supporting us.
And for the team, we have an amazing team and amazing people.
Amazing developers, humans and professionals, right?
So, from this, I don't think that something bad can emerge."

"But when we love, work hard, you know, use our skills and our passion.
Hoping that people out there will allow us to continue making games.
Fantastic. I think that was almost as lovely as your previous talk today.
So, thank you so much, Davor."

"And looking forward to playing both Talos, myself and the DLC.
And then whatever you guys come up with in the future.
Thank you so much.
Thank you."

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