WEEK 10

Two weeks to the Beta and still battling with memory. The game is now installed on the hard disk and this speeds up loading time. I'd like to find an idea for installing it. I know how frustrating it can be to buy a game and then have to wait ten minutes while it's installed on the hard disk. I'm keeping that idea in the back of my head, I'm sure there must be something we could think of.

I spend a lot of time on the direction, improving the scenes where the characters are introduced, particularly making sure they're introduced in the most effective way possible. It's difficult to interact with the team during this period and to talk about Artistic Direction. Everybody is completely focused on the bug report, especially the bugs that are flagged "Beta Failure" and could cause Beta failure. I can't wait to get going. I'm trying to make as much progress as possible with the people available to me. I get the impression I'm doing the AD in secret. I can't wait to get through with all this and get over with the Beta to be able to really work on the artistic aspects of the game.

A few more redrafts (yet again). I'm still surprised at how simple and fast we can make adjustments to the game play in scenes right up to the last minute. I'm trying not to overdo this. The advantage of the HR format is precisely that we can structure the game play of scenes in different ways without changing their nature. On condition that we make the right choices. The team really liked Jayden's addiction scene in the motel room after our last redraft. Perhaps it could serve as an example for another scene earlier in the game. I'm thinking about it…

Good feedback too from our redraft of the first scene in the game. Just as well, it wasn't easy…



The wall near the Camera and gameplay corner is plastered with the designs for Heavy Rain

Lots of marketing/press contacts again this week: a marathon interview for the US (three pages of questions), an interview with a French TV channel and a fair in Paris (the Video Games Festival). I always really enjoy meeting players and journalists. I'm happy to talk about what I do and to share my love for my work. But just two weeks away from the Beta, I have to admit that I'm reluctant to leave the studio.
I answer written interviews between midnight and two in the morning, which leaves my days free to get on with the work. I'm going to spend a day meeting the French press at the Video Game Festival. Paradoxically, we focused our attention more on the foreign press than the French press and I can feel this lack of information in some of the articles. Let's hope this day spent with the French press will bear fruit. I can tell from some of the questions I'm asked that the journalists aren't all as well informed as their foreign counterparts.
I go back to the Festival on Sunday for a public presentation of the Hold Up scene, which we already presented at Koln. It's an opportunity to show the last remaining unbelievers that HR is not a succession of QTEs. Guillaume is in Japan for the TGS and so Caroline accompanies me, playing while I comment on the game. Very good reactions, meetings with fans, everything works out well. I avail of the opportunity to have a quick look round the fair with my son and try out the latest releases before Christmas (kids never lose their sense of priorities).

No connection: my son has finished Batman. I didn't have time to play. Going by his recent Batmania, he seems to have liked it.



David and Caroline giving an interview at the Video Game festival une interview lors du Festiva


David presenting Heavy Rain at the Video Game Festival

WEEK 11

The last week before the Beta. Strangely calm, no panic. Instead the team seems to be quite confident. Everybody is focused and concentrated. The number of Beta Failure bugs is dropping by the minute. The team has fixed an incredible amount of bugs (as many as 150/day last week, more than 600 since the last build). There should be about another thirty to fix before the Beta. We should be able to manage.

It doesn't matter how much experience you have, shit happens. This morning, the day before the Beta, an emergency call from the office: no electricity. It's no easy task to deliver a build without electricity.

A quick phone call informs me that the electrician who was supposed to come last week to repair a defective switch finally decided to come for the Beta without a word of warning to anyone. He set about his work merrily before anyone could intervene. He dismantled the switch and removed the cable all the way back to the electric board and changed the circuit breaker for the lighting. When he'd finally finished (the light had been off since morning), I was stupid enough to let him turn the light back on, thinking that at worst the circuit breaker would pop off. How wrong can you be? When he turned the lights back on, all of Quantic's power popped off.
General panic, checking the servers (fortunately on inverters), checking and changing the circuit breaker on the electricity board, which suffered from the adventure, a few PCs on scan disk when we turn them back on. After a few unfortunate tests, I finally suggest to our friendly electrician that he come back another day before the team tears him to pieces. So we finished the Beta in the dark, as we didn't manage to get the lighting back on (and I have to admit that I wasn't really into electrical experimentation that day).
So, a pretty strange atmosphere: Beta by candlelight. Not unpleasant, subdued lighting, a romantic atmosphere.

 
The ‘damn’ fuses in the background…

We start the upload at 11:57 p.m. – a full three minutes ahead of the official delivery date for the Beta (real professionals ;-) )

Charles and I decide to give the team a few days' rest while waiting for the QA feedback on the build from Sony. I can feel the whole team exhausted and it's going to take all our energy and lucidity to make it to the Master.

So Quantic was practically deserted for the next two days. I avail of the opportunity to refilm some scenes I really like at my leisure and start getting ready for the next stage. I know that now I'm going to have to refocus the whole team on the reviews and improvements that will take the game through to another stage. Over the last couple of days I improvised a review on the MoCap studio with a projector, a 5.1 system and a sofa. This enables us to watch the game on a screen measuring two meters by three. Not essential but comfortable. Upstairs a second review room has been set up for several months, as well as a station per department. The most difficult thing now will be to structure the reviews and avoid the anarchy of individual initiative…
I start getting used to the idea that I'm going to have to be a control freak, which I've always avoided in order to leave the team some breathing room. The work that remains to be done now is precise and must be coordinated like a rocket launch in order to give global coherence to the AD.

I think I know how to go about it but the timing is going to be very tight. I have to give precise instructions to one hundred people. I'm beginning to think that everything we've done so far was simple. The real challenge is about to begin.

I decide not to work this weekend (the first for a long time) in order to have a clear head on Monday. With experience we learn that lucidity is the most important thing as we reach the end of development. I'm going to have to keep a cool head in the weeks to come.

No connection: I saw the end of the last season of Battlestar Galactica last night. It really was one of the most interesting series of the last few years, one that was brave enough and intelligent enough to have an end. Surprising characters, an original story for SF on TV, inspired directing (in fact some HR scenes are a nod to this). In short, if you don't know it, jump right in.

WEEK 12

A lousy week. Unhappy about where we're at, about how we're advancing. I feel like I'm looking up at Everest with an ice axe in my hand and wondering how I'm going to make it to the top.
The redraft of the first game scene was pretty good but the scene still isn't where I want it to be. There's something missing and I don't know what it is. It annoys me.
The feeling of advancing one millimeter at time is really exhausting. Lots of scenes advanced very quickly over the last few months, progressing from a cosmic void to something quite interesting. It's like someone said (was it George Lucas?): it's the last 10% that demands the greatest effort. I couldn't agree with him more.

Sometimes I really wonder why I'm doing this. Some kind of masochism no doubt. It would be so much simpler to position the enemy and then wonder where I'm going to put the weapons. I know it's a caricature but that's because I'm annoyed, but still, I can't help wondering. Every scene demands an unreasonable amount of work because of the absence of mechanisms. I knew this when I was writing it. Let's just hope it gives the game a little something extra.

I had a 60" TV installed on my desk today. It's not megalomania. The QA had it before but then they didn't want it because it took up too much space. It's true that now that it's set up on my desk (I already have two screens on my PC), it doesn't leave an awful lot of space. My neighbor, who's working on the lighting, asked me to turn the screen around, which means that I'm surrounded by screens on all sides. The upside: I'll have good heating this winter – as well as good lighting.
I availed of the opportunity to correct some graphic bugs (everybody can see them clearly now with the big screen). Some problems with aliasing, a bug in the texture streaming, another in shadow optimization. We're working on it.

Another way to make reviews: the MoCap studio converted into a luxury review room with projector and 5.1 system. In addition to this room, the studio also provides three other dedicated review rooms and several review stations per department.

I finally found the idea for installing. Glitch: everybody seems to like it. A bad sign. Think of something else.

Sony has organized test plays of the first 12 scenes in London for next Monday. Jerome and Caroline are going. I know what still doesn't work. I’d rather spend my time fixing the problems rather than listening to people telling me about them.

I redid some changes in the opening credits sequence today, mainly editing and a few adjustments. It's almost beginning to be good. A few adjustments to the music, adding a piano in the middle of the track that wasn't originally planned for. There's not enough piano in video games (famous quote).
That reminds me that I was woken up this morning by my son's music teacher. She played Debussy's Clair de Lune to perfection, a piece I've been laboring over for months (interspersed with all-night milestone sessions in the office). Annoying too, for that matter. Someone should make a law against playing like that.

When I got home last night my son had left a note for me on the box where we keep the goodies: "Dad, please don't eat my chocolates. Mom bought them for me". There are days like that when you wonder why you bothered to climb out of bed.

Never mind, tomorrow's another day. It's the after-effect of two days' rest last week. You feel like you've just got off your bike in the ride up the Alps in the Tour de France. It's good to stop for a while but when the time comes to get back on the bike, you think maybe you should have just kept going.

Right, so tomorrow I'm going over that damn first scene for the hundredth time, going over all the things that don't work right. After that I'll move on to the second scene. Once I'm through that, I know the rest of the game will just fall into place. I know it. It'll take a while to retune the seventh scene, which is a bit slack, but the rest should be all right. Don't worry, it'll work out.

WEEK 13

Another weekend in the office. I tried to find a way to organize production after the Beta. The solution came quickly when I realized that we were exactly seven weeks away from the Master. It helps make things more concrete. I have the unpleasant feeling that we're never going to make it. There's still a considerable amount of work to be done to get the game to where I want it to be. I gave the team a week's respite but now we're going to have to get back in gear.
Seven weeks, 70 scenes. I decide to get to work on five cycles of one week each, about fifteen scenes a week. That leaves us two weeks to sort out the last few problems. It's tight.
Monday morning, a general meeting with the team (I regularly review the situation with the whole team). I explain the plan, remind them of the schedule. I talk about the playable demo we're going to have to produce, even if it's somewhere between a Beta and a Master.
The team reacts well. I can feel that everyone is tired, but I think the idea of being able to see the end of the tunnel is reassuring in a way. Though not for me…

Sony has organized three days of Play Tests in London to test the game for three hours with different player profiles. I specifically asked for Hard Core Gamers, Casual Gamers and Non-Gamers. I can't possibly abandon the studio for three days. I decide to send Caroline and Jerome.
They give me their report over the phone every evening. Lots of interesting things in the feedback, particularly a relatively unanimous evaluation of the pacing at the start of the game, considered to be too slow. I spend too much time setting up Ethan, I knew that when I was writing it. We've been having this discussion in the studio for several months but I was reluctant to modify the balance at the beginning of the game, although I knew it didn't work right. The feedback from the Play Tests helps to make the decision. In all, three scenes cut in order to get to the core of the story faster. Strangely enough, I experience this as a sort of relief. Those scenes would have taken a lot of work to get them to function properly. And there's enough work to be done on the rest of the game.

Especially since the Play Tests sent back another important piece of information: in two hours of play, not a single player got past scene 7. Which means that we undoubtedly have more game time than we imagined. It's hard to know exactly. Both our QA and Sony's QA have played the game so much that we no longer discover it in the same way as a player would.
I remain focused on my original idea. I don't want to make the game too long (more than ten hours). It becomes very difficult to maintain the tension and the player's attention if the game is too long, not to mention the player's comprehension of the story. So no regrets, speeding up the beginning will be a great improvement.

However, good news this time, none of the player types seems to have had any problems with the controls or the navigation. Feedback concerning the interest level of the story was pretty unanimous (some players continued to play scenes quietly after the end of the tests to see what was going to happen).

Sheer torture, these Play Tests. The players are alone before their screens. They're filmed and observed from behind a two-way mirror. Everything is recorded, their voices, their faces, their games, in order to figure out what they're feeling. It's really unbearable to watch them stumbling over simple things, looking for the way through when it's obvious, not doing what they're supposed to do. Unbearable but informative. As a rule, I would tend to be skeptical about this type of exercise. The Nomad Soul play tests taught me nothing, nor did the Fahrenheit tests. The Heavy Rain tests are helping me to shape the game.

When Jerome and Caroline get back, a last report, and we elaborate a battle plan to implement the modifications and get moving as quickly as possible. The changes are considerable but they should be relatively easy to do. The whole game is assembled inside a tool, which makes changes fast and easy to make.



The Tools department

We have scheduled other Play Tests in our offices up until the Master date in order to continue to get feedback, watch people playing and see what we can improve. A painstaking and laborious task, let's hope it pays off.

The number of bugs continues to drop. Nearly 3000 bugs on the bug report, which isn't much really. The team fixes about 300 bugs a day, which is a good average. But still their numbers are dropping by only a hundred a day because of the new bugs being entered daily.

It's hard to have an idea of what we're doing. Impossible to say whether it's beautiful, interesting, intriguing or just slow, boring and uninteresting. We spend so much time looking at bugs, parts of scenes, adjusting a look at a given moment, adjusting the camera work, modifying an action or a movement, we lose track of what we're doing. The build up of fatigue and nights in the office erodes lucidity and I try to pay as much attention as I can to my physical and mental state. Working too much gets the game moving forward but it's bad for lucidity. Everything is a question of balance. A balance too between the confidence you have to have to motivate the team and get the game to progress, and the doubts, both healthy and necessary, that you have to have constantly in your mind in order to question what we're doing. I have somewhat more doubts at this stage of development than I want to have. I don't think we made the wrong choices. I just wonder whether we're going to achieve our objective once we have mixed up all the ingredients, fixed all the bugs, adjusted the game play, done the last camera adjustments, I wonder whether the result will live up to our expectations. Impossible to say for the moment. I think the game is going to be surprising. Now we just have to hope that, after the surprise, the emotion will come.

WEEK 14

I get home from the office at two o'clock in the morning. I spent the evening reviewing scenes. No time to eat this evening (didn't even think of it). I'll finish off a bar of chocolate before going to bed (great for the figure). My kids who haven't seen me for the last week will storm my bed at 7 tomorrow morning.
I got a strange impression playing the scenes this evening. I tested ten scenes I hadn't seen for a while. A real graphic shock, a good few gameplay problems to be solved, some problems with the sound, the cameras, the animation, amazing things, a few disappointments, but most all of this strange impression.

Oddly enough, people think I know what I'm doing. They're wrong. In fact I discover what I'm doing as I do it. There is an element of discovery in any creative process, an element of surprise, the unexpected. Particularly when the work in question is the result of a collaboration between two hundred people. It's hard to know what you're doing before you do it. You can have hopes, expectations, but it's only at the end that you know whether you got what you expected or not. It's a bit like having children. The first time you wonder whether the baby will be pretty, whether you're going to love the baby, whether the baby is going to love you, what others will think of your baby. And when the baby comes along, it's never like what you imaged. You learn to discover them and love them. It's stupid but I feel the same way about the game.
So, a strange impression in this strange period when I'm learning to get to know my game. I played a scene, took notes, noticed some problems. Then I played another scene, and another and then another. After a while you forget the game and you become interested in the story and the characters, you forget it's a game. And in fact it isn't one. I don't know exactly what it is, a sort of strange experience. And then I played the "finger" scene. I got goose bumps. It's the first time that's ever happened to me in a game. It's got to be the most disturbing scene in the game.


The ‘Finger’ scene…

I wonder how people will react to it. It's impossible to know. There's always an element of doubt. The best and the worst of things. Causing me to constantly re-examine what I'm doing. Preventing me from being relaxed and confident. Four years' work, nights and weekends at the office, weeks without seeing my kids, for a few hours of a game, a few weeks on the shelves, a figure in a magazine. Sometimes I wonder why I do it. As I write these lines, I'm not so sure that I know why.

WEEK 15

Second round of User Tests in London.
User Tests are the most sophisticated form of torture. It consists of shutting yourself up behind a two-way mirror and observing people play your game in groups of ten throughout the day. You see them not understanding anything, doing the first thing that comes into their heads, getting stuck for twenty minutes on actions that should take one. We see them not reading the instruction, not remembering what they did in the last scene, doing everything except what they're supposed to do. So we scream behind the soundproofed glass, we insult them, curse them, foaming at the mouth, we shrivel up, we beg to be released.
And as if that wasn't enough, then we listen to them talking about the game, still hiding behind a two-way mirror (real FBI-style). And we hear all sorts of things and nothing in particular, generous compliments, sound criticism, players who are affected by the game and those who got the wrong game, the ones who thought for ten scenes that they could control only one character, the ones who missed all the sequences but who found the game easy, those who stuck to the story and the characters, those who wanted Ethan to have a gun. You really hear all sorts of stuff in this sort of test. I suppose that's the object of the exercise. And it's not easy to know what to think about it all, between the things that really don't work and the rest.
Overall, positive feedback for the story, the characters, the interface and the action sequences. I'll settle for that. It's not bad at all.

A weird story though, those action sequences. I spent a year justifying them each time they came up, and now the players are regularly listing them as their favorite scenes.

The other amusing thing was the feeling some players had that their actions had no impact on the story, in other words that, whatever they did, the same thing was going to happen. A lot of them brought up this point in the one-to-one interviews and at the round-table session where all the players compared their impressions. It was only when they started talking about it that they realized they had seen very different things in the scenes, much to their surprise. Because a player makes choices without realizing it. They don't realize their actions have logical consequences and therefore impact on the story. They had to talk about it in order to realize this.

Another strange comment: everybody thought the game was easy, even those who failed in half the scenes and all the action scenes. It took me a few days to understand what had happened. There are no game overs or lives in HR. The player never starts a scene all over again because he failed, failing in a chase scene results in the fact that he doesn't catch the suspect, but you don't start the sequence all over again. And the story continues. As a result, some players didn't even realize that they'd failed in a chase because the game didn't stop and so they thought the suspect couldn't be caught.
It's weird how deep-rooted certain video game codes can be.

We organized our own user tests at Quantic in order to have them more often (every three days) in little groups of three and to try out direct permanent access to the player to see how they were playing, what they do, what they like and don't like. The overall feedback for the game is excellent. Just as well, after the weeks of intense doubt we've just been through.

Same feedback from the fairs where the game is shown and from the presentations I have to do. This weekend, Eurogame in London (presentation and interview all day long), Sunday User Tests in London again, Monday presentation at Micromania Game Show in Paris, then back to development. I took the evening off the following Monday to see my kids. I hadn't seen them for a week and I was beginning to feel the winds of anger rising. "Dad, just because you have a lot of work doesn't mean you don't see your children any more" (my 9-year-old son).
You're right, son. You're entirely right. Dad's gonna try to be a bit more reasonable.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror after two weeks of sleeping three hours a night. Scary as hell.



Players testing Mad Jack at the Eurogamers Show




Eurogamer’s presentation in London. Ten minutes before, the room was empty. I told myself that it would be a fairly smooth presentation… I looked out at the window and here is what I saw. The show was just not open yet. Both the show and my presentation were a sell-out…

WEEK 16

With our in-house user tests progressing intensively (in all, more than 70 people will have played the game, in addition to the normal testing. I continue to review the directing for all the intro/outro dramatic moments in the game to check the cameras, how the music fits in and hone the AD. A considerable job that is going to take me several weeks. It's my last chance to check the continuity and consistency of the narrative. Sometimes we got through some scenes a little too fast, and the fact that there were five of us in the camera team sometimes shows up in different styles. My work will consist of going over it all again.
The whole team is now working full-time on fixing the bugs. There are still more than 3000 left in the base. At the moment we're fixing 400 a day, which is pretty considerable.

In between fixing bugs…An origami family on a PS3. The scriptwriters regularly make them and they can be found almost everywhere in the studio. The smallest are only a few millimeters high, I don’t even know how that can be…

Another instance of our local handcraft…

We began our first presentation to journalists this week and the preview code containing the first 13 (I ain't scared) scenes of the game has been sent to the press in all countries. The first moment of truth. I would have liked to spend a little more time honing the scenes but I was busy on the rest of the game. And I imagine there comes a time when we have to say stop.

The journalists who are discovering the game seem to be fairly surprised, as far as I can tell. Some had come with negative preconceptions (it's gonna be a series of ultra-directive cut scenes with QTEs all over the place) and were surprised to find that the game is quite open, totally interactive and that the action sequences work quite well. The reactions we get most often stress the particularly powerful visual aspect, the atmosphere, the mature and "sound" aspect of the story, the originality and the interactivity. Of course these are just first impressions that tell us nothing about what the final reception will be like. But it's better to have this impression at the preview…

I've spent a lot of time reviewing the scenes and playing, along with the lead game play and the lead QA who shut themselves up for several days to play the game from beginning to end. After several weeks of exhaustion and discouragement, a glimmer of hope in the gloom. Our impressions concur with those from outside. The game really does give an impression of maturity, the story seems to be solid and, above all, a lot of the scenes leave a very powerful impression. Although we know the game by heart, we are in turns stressed out, smiling, shivering, relieved, terrified, surprised, uneasy, above all, we are really carried away by the story of these four characters. I really wonder what the players are going to say, if they're going to feel the same thing, if they'll be sensitive to the story and the way we tell it.
In a few weeks, the team and I will have completed our emotional roller coaster with periods of certitude, discouragement, hope and doubt. Now that the game is almost ready to leave the studio for good and soon will no longer belong to us, I still think we have a wealth of emotions in store for us.

WEEK 16

First week of December. We're exactly 4 weeks away from the Master and, given that there will be a few days off for Christmas and the New Year, we've really got only 3 weeks left. I feel like there's a billion things to do. Sony's QA now numbers more than 40 people, to which we have to add our own in-house QA of ten, and the bugs continue to drop regularly although it's increasingly C- and D-priority bugs. We continue in-house, using reviews to trace two or three times more bugs. I can feel the team really exhausted, with the strange impression that it's never going to end, that the faster the bugs’ number drops, the more new bugs arrive… but the game is progressing by the minute. A few months ago the bugs we encountered were mainly crashes. Today they're details that can be improved, or particularly complicated bugs.
In spite of the fatigue, it's essential to keep a cool head, choose the battles that can still be fought in the time that's left, and forego the others without regret.  I know the game should have been frozen ages ago and in bug fix phase only, but I need to continue to make adjustments here and there. Some seem to be important enough to take the risk. Apart from the few scenes I have to review (a half-dozen), I plan to review all the epilogues this week to make sure the game ends correctly. I heard enough about the end of Indigo to avoid making the same mistake a second time.
Apart from that, the game is finished. I'm trying my best to give the team post-Heavy Rain work to keep their hands off the game. It's definitively finished for the graphs, the anim still has a week of polishing to do, the sound and the cameras will probably continue to work right up to the last minute before the Master.



A part of the Anim team working hard on polishing the last scenes before the Master

I took my Sunday off this week so I could come back on Monday with a clear mind. The team worked all the weekend to finalize the pre-Master build. Next week we'll be delivering the playable demo for testing. The plan has changed three times but we finally managed to reach an agreement on the content and the scenes that have never been shown to the public. We're also putting the last touches to the official trailer for the game. We've validated the pack shot and marketing campaign. In short, it's beginning to feel like the end of the project. I want to stay focused right up to the end, not miss anything, check the smallest detail, and keep the pressure on the team until the last second.
Our last challenge comes this week. We start the last user test session on the full game. Twenty people will play HR continuously for three days and will be the first to play the game continuously from beginning to end. It's our last chance to check that everything is in place, that the last settings are effective. We will have very little time to do the final adjustments if anything important crops up. The last chance to improve the experience even more, to remove the last defects.

When I think of how skeptical I used to be about user tests… By the time we finish, we'll have been doing them non-stop for three months. In any case it's going to profoundly change the way we work at QD in the future.

I'm struggling to project myself into the post-HR future. This adventure has taken up four years of my life, brought me round the planet several times, caused me to meet hundreds of people, drained me physically and psychologically and made me experience intense emotions. It's going to be strange getting up in the morning and not thinking about HR, not going home at three in the morning, returning to a normal life. It's strange, the impression of living physically with a project, like living a relationship with someone.

Post-HR is already in the wings. You only leave an adventure in order to start another.

Only three more weeks and it's all over.


HEAVY RAIN for the ATARI console (one of the coders made this label and stuck it on an old cartridge…). Twenty minutes of side-splitting laughter.