After PAX ended this year I made the four-hour drive from Seattle to Spokane to meet up with the team over at Cyan, famous for making the PC gaming classics Myst and Riven. I got to see a very early look at Obduction, a game “that harkens back to the spirit of Myst” and was Kickstarted to the tune of $1.3 million—a preview you can read here.
I got a peek at the fabled “Myst Vault” too—a physical trove dedicated to Myst history and general Cyan knowledge. It was insanely cool, and I took plenty of pictures.
But I also got to just sit and chat with the team for almost three hours. We talked about a lot of stuff that doesn’t really fit into an article per se—but it’s stuff that’s still interesting in general and especially intriguing if you’re an old Myst fan. Thus, this… thing.
It’s not really an article, because I’m not going to comment on every little thing. However, it’s also not really an interview transcript because it leaps around in time—trust me, you don’t want to read the full 40-page transcript I wrote out. This is just the cool stuff.
It’s disorganized. It’s messy. But it’s full of interesting information straight from the brains of Cyan.
On having a hidden office
VICTORIA ALMOND (VA), PR and QA at Cyan: We’re about to be revealed to the public with our sign.
RAND MILLER (RM), Co-founder: Oh that’s right, we’ve never had a sign.
VA: We had this white square with 14617 on it.
RM: That’s been our sign for…however long we’ve been here. Since Riven.
VA: 19 years. Yeah, it’s been a while.
RM: We have people…the building’s too big for us now. We’ve rented out other portions.
Cyan’s front entrance
PCWORLD: Yeah, I noticed there are six or seven different companies here when I came in.
RM: There weren’t for a long time, but now it helps because renting out portions of it helps pay the bills.
Designing Obduction
Am I seeing super-secret Obduction stuff on this whiteboard over here?
VA: Should we close that?
RM: Nah. Yeah, that’s super secret Obduction stuff. [Laughs, then does a double-take] That actually…that is actually super-secret. That’s some of the key gameplay towards the end that we just changed.
It’s good they’re here [gestures at others in the room] because what we do is, the guy Richard [Watson] who just left, he and I are sort of the first front of design. We plow through and sort of get at least this big-picture, then we start digging down. Then what we do is we present to the whole team, and then they have the chance to mull it over without us in the room, and it’s kind of like “Put down your ego time.”
ERIC ANDERSON (EA), Art Lead at Cyan : Rand’s favorite days. [Laughs]
RM: [Laughing] Oh I dread these days. It truly is like, “Okay, must detach emotional side of brain.” Your confirmation bias is going, “No! I spent a lot of hours on this and it’s so good and I own it!” No.
Here’s how Obduction’s introductory level looks currently.
What we do make them do is not just be individual critics. They need to get in a room together and come up with a list of priorities. “We all agree this sucked. And this.” And they try to come up with ideas or paths or complete fixes for those. So then Richard and I go back in and churn on it, maybe make another presentation, and they’re like “Oh, that’s good, that’s good.” It’s part of the honing process that we’re pretty close to done with, except that it gets honed over the whole thing anyway.
How many people are on the project?
RYAN WARZECHA (RW), Project lead on Obduction: The company right now is fifteen people.
VA: When QA comes on board, we’ll get bigger.
EA: We’re real programmer heavy right now. Myself and our concept artist are all we have for art. We don’t have a very pretty looking game but we have a game that functions well.
RM: We’re doing that whole “Let’s play the whole game through, let’s get all the puzzles done, and then make it pretty.”
EA: Turns out art’s expensive!
RM: Press that art button.
RW: RealMyst Masterpiece was done in Unity. We knew going into the Kickstarter campaign we really wanted to use Unreal 4.
All the lights in this scene are currently dynamic, thanks to Unreal 4.
EA: I’ve been trying to drag Tony, our president, into the Unreal camp for years but it just hasn’t been feasible. We were trying to do smaller projects.
I don’t have a programmer bone in my body…
RM: You say that. You have like, a closet programmer hidden in you just clawing its way out.
EA: The tools in there are just killer. Being able to make production tools that the rest of the team can use in just a day of connecting nodes together. For years, I was like “I don’t know, the idea of coding…what if something goes wrong? It’s this black box. Debugging it.” It turns out…maybe we got in at the right time, because maybe Unreal 3 wasn’t the best, but Unreal 4 is great. We’ve had issues where, yeah, maybe their black box doesn’t work the way we want, but we’re full licensees so we can jump in and tweak it.
RM: Better than Riven.
EA: As far as production tools?
RM: Just feedback. A lot of stuff’s changed since RIven. We had the whole build-your-own-engine Myst Online stuff in between, but that whole pre-rendered Riven stuff… Riven was the height of that and it was just a nightmare. It pushed that as far as I’d ever want to push that.
Riven’s pre-rendered graphics were gorgeous for 1997. They also took up five CD-ROMs.
EA: Nobody’s going to sleep overnight to monitor a render.
RM: The crazy thing is…it’s hard. We keep fighting with this ending thing that doesn’t make sense to us. “Why is that guy not…Why does this happen?” We keep fighting it and fighting it. We’re in this habit of “Once it’s down, it’s canon.” Well, no. This is the first project of non-canon, so toss it out. This morning even, it was like “Why don’t we just make this thing a completely different thing?” Okay. There aren’t any constraints, it’s so freeing, and now the story will make so much more sense because we don’t have to shoehorn it in.
I mean, it’s not to say even redoing the Myst games didn’t serve their purpose. We bootstrapped our company again by doing those which is awesome. We get to be indie still because we got the rights back and put it on those platforms. But it’s nice to have no constraints.
RW: It was a little surprising to us because before we did the Kickstarter campaign we went back and forth. Do we do another Myst property or do we do something new? The whole sequel idea…If you do another Myst property it comes out to be more of a sequel.
RM: No matter how hard you try.
RW: Even though this is brand new. Eventually Rand came about and said “Why don’t we do Obduction.” We had this idea, but it’s changed a lot since that idea. It was nice to see the fan community, even though it wasn’t a Myst game, they still wanted that kind of game. They understand that we’re not going to be constrained.
RM: I’m still going to be really curious once it’s done…I’m just going to be curious to see how many people beyond the Kickstarter people are interested in buying it. I just don’t know. It’s like an experiment. In some regards I keep seeing a bit of backlash against shooters. They’re looking better and better but you’re still just shooting things and playing the treadmill game. This may not be the perfect game but…I’m curious if there’s room and people go “This is cool. We should do more like this.”
RW: Next year, we want to show it at PAX Prime. The funny thing is we’re so small, our marketing team is this right here.
RM: Is anybody who can market.
RW: We’re not going to have a huge marketing presence unless we can get some marketing funding somewhere at this point.
When are you hoping to release?
RW: For the project, I think we decided Fall 2015. It’ll probably go longer but we definitely want to try and hit that.
RM: The design’s taken longer than we thought, because we tweaked it a lot more than we thought we would. But the production’s actually going faster than we thought. I mean, one art guy and how much we’ve spent on building tools, it’s actually like, “Wow, we’re getting things done really quick.” But you know how at the end…it always grinds at the end.
What size game are you looking at?
RM: Heh. We were looking at Myst-size is what we said. It would be similar to Myst. The number of Ages and stuff. But with the design where we’re at, we decided we’re bigger than Riven now easily.
That’s pretty damn huge. Riven’s a big game.
RM: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s what we keep saying in basically those words. We still probably need to take the machete to it. We talk about it all the time. We’re going to have to. And we’ve started that with some of the stuff. Chopped this. But then we added a new thing.
RW: But it makes it better.
RM: Yeah, it keeps getting better. So we chop one thing out and we’re like “Oh cool, that’ll save a lot of time,” and then at the same time put this new stuff in like, “Oh that’s sweet it’s going to be awesome” but it adds a bunch of time.
But I’m really pretty optimistic based on what we’ve mocked up. We’re pretty close to a…We’re doing this different than we did before. It’s massing model playable. A prototype that has no looks at all but you can go through the entire puzzle-play more or less. That’s been surprisingly easy in Unreal. Even the stuff they’ve done…they’ve prettified a couple things. Even that has gone so much faster than I thought it would be.
I don’t know how long it’ll take. We’ll have a better view in six months and an even better view in nine months. And then once it gets to QA that’s when all hell breaks loose. That magical bug curve that grows and grows and grows and then you finally peak and start heading down and realize “Okay, now we might be able to finally ship sometime in the future.”
RW: And like Rand was saying before, too, we probably will have to chop things just because time and budget scope, but.
I was amazed, going back and playing Myst again this year…that game is a lot smaller once you know all the puzzles. I think I finished it in four hours?
RM: It’s so true.
RW: That’s what I’m really concerned about with this. We know what we’re doing and it’s still taking us time [to finish].
RM: It’s big, and there’s some good puzzles. I feel like we’ve got some really good stuff in here. Some really satisfying stuff.
I love the psychology of the puzzles and the story. And I love that unfolding. I like my hands in the artwork stuff too, but let’s face it, Eric and Derrick will do a much better job setting that style. Some of it is defined by story and the history of how these people worked and all that, but I just love that…I call it psychology because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s that “A-ha!” experience you get when you either realize a portion of the story or realize a portion of the puzzles. It’s really…I think I take as much pleasure out of doing that sort of stuff as anything.
So Richard and I, we come in every morning and design puzzles for the entire morning. For Myst Online we would do that all day, our creative team would do it all day, and what we realized is it’s not useful. We’d be pretty fresh in the morning and do some really good stuff, and in the afternoon we’d be like “Ugh, my head hurts.”
Now we work in the morning. Richard then documents stuff in the afternoon. He’ll go and document all the stuff and work on other things, on mocking up things or figuring out if we have inconsistencies, and I’ll go work on other stuff. And then we come back in the morning and discuss. It works like a charm.
And then going over the puzzle stuff, we have multiple prongs so when we all get together Eric is like, “I need it to look like this,” and I’m babysitting the story puzzle and Richard is a consistency guy—No, you can’t leave the puzzles in that state because how’d the last guy get out? He wants it to be super realistic so he’s managing that. Everyone has that aspect they’re watching over.
Are you going really deep again? Are you fleshing out lore and making fake languages and all sorts of crazy stuff?
RM: Yeah. We said we weren’t, but we are. Yeah, we’re crazy. We’re actually trying to manage it a little bit, but one of the changes we just made was this entire system…it’s so cool. It’s this numbering system. It’s hard not to go there because we love it. It gives it depth and makes it seem real. People have systems, so you have to go there.
RW: They really tried to hold back on that at first. They didn’t want to do a number system or alien languages or anything like that but…it came to that.
RM: It’s getting deeper and deeper and it’s really satisfying. It’s big, but I think we can pull it off. We’re pretty good at this after the years. We kind of know what things will take long and where we should cut. The years of experience hopefully are going to pay off.
We are so lucky. I don’t know if we’d be alive if Myst hadn’t built this house. Not paying rent…having it paid for and having a space to work, it means your expenses are so much lower. The small indie guys that have to rent space, that’s a huge chunk of change. I mean, you’re here when we’ve kind of fixed up the grounds again and cleaned the place up, but for years it was pretty slim pickings.
I remember seeing pictures a few years back where somebody said the studio was “abandoned,” basically. I didn’t even think Cyan was still here until we talked last year.
RM: I mean, we didn’t even run the sprinklers for a couple years and stuff just collected. We still had people doing stuff because I think we were, at that point…One of the smartest things we ever did was get the rights to the software to revert back to us, to get the IP to revert back to us. Any indie that can pull that off is smart. You can’t always do it, but. The publisher’s always right in perpetuity.
With Broderbund we said “Well, how about a long time but not in perpetuity. I don’t even remember how long it was, but it was probably ten years or fifteen years. And they were thinking “Ah, we’ll have milked it by then.” But it was great for us because ten or fifteen years later the mobile market was coming up, and we were like “Oh man, if we could just convert some of these we could at least get bootstrap money to fund a little here, build up a couple people.” It’s worked, which is nice. We came back from the brink. It feels good. The place is in a little bit better repair, and we’re just doing what we can.
And you know what? The small team…we’ve said this a few times. We got really big on Riven and even bigger on Myst Online. The small team is just…there’s so much less thrashing. It’s so much more efficient. There’s a question, we answer the question. In Myst Online it was some guy in a building over there had a problem that he would ask his lead of his team, and that team would ask a producer person who would decide whether it was worth going to a design lead, and it was a month before a question would get answered. It’s just silly. I love this. It feels good and we’re slow to ramp up for that reason. We want to make sure we’re kicking on all cylinders before we bring in anybody to twiddle.
What’re you looking to scale to? Twenty, tops?
RM: Tops. Add a few more artists as we need them, and a lot of it we can work smartly by seeing how fast Eric can do stuff and see how many we need before we pull the trigger. It’s nice. Feels right. Feels good. Feels a lot like the early Myst days where you scale up slowly and have a core team doing stuff.
That’s the other thing. We do multiple roles. I’m the Kickstarter database guy, so all the Kickstarter information I am personally in charge of doing the FileMaker database.
We have a great community. They are so forgiving and helpful. They give us pizza parties! Even during the hard times, a box of donuts would show up from fans. It’s just awesome.
On production food
[Speaking of which]
RM: We did…was that during…I don’t think it was during Riven. We did Triple Thursdays.
RW: That was during Uru.
RM: We’d go to Wendy’s and get triple patties.
RW: It was a whole Thursday thing. We’d go to Krispy Kreme and you’d eat three donuts. Then we’d go to Wendy’s and eat the triple patties. Some of the guys after that would go to Cold Stone Creamery and eat three scoops.
RM: What were we thinking? [Laughs]
For more Obduction, feel free to read my eyes-on with two of the game’s three major worlds, and for more Myst history and general Cyan knowledge, check out the photos I took in the Myst Vault.