The Making of Pentiment - Noclip Documentary

(gentle music) - Hey, I wanted to answer a question asked on my Tumblr by The Beard of Andronicus. He asked: Why aren't historical time periods used more as settings within RPGs? There appears to be potentially interesting, well-known periods, fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Crusading period, Early Middle Ages, Renaissance Italy, et cetera, et cetera, that would make for an interesting backdrop for an RPG. But developers seem content on relying on standard fantasy fare, judging from the last few popular releases. Is it a lack of interest on the part of the public,

developers, or something else? That's an excellent question that I've been asking for about 15 years. (gentle music continues) - [Danny] Producing a documentary on the development of "Pentiment" is kind of a no-brainer for us here at Noclip, because there's simply not another game like it. "Pentiment" is a 2D historical RPG set in 16th century Upper Bavaria. You play as a journeyman artist working in a Benedictine abbey overlooking the alpine town of Tassing, a unique concept for a game which produces unique design challenges. But the story of where it was developed is also remarkable, as this

wasn't put together by a small indie studio. "Pentiment" was created by a team of about a dozen developers inside of Obsidian Entertainment, A studio drenched in role-playing game history, from the Black Isle days of "Icewind Dale", "Fallout", and "Planescape Torment" to Obsidian's work on "Fallout: New Vegas", "Pillars of Eternity", "The Outer Worlds", and of course, another 2D RPG, this one set in 21st century Colorado. But "Pentiment" isn't aping any game from Obsidian's past or anyone else's. From a design perspective, almost everything about "Pentiment" feels like new ground. Its setting, gameplay, art style, its use of

typography, Explorations of themes of faith, monastic life, Middle Ages society, war, revolt, and spiritual justice. In this documentary, we're going to explore as much of this tapestry as possible. We're gonna talk about the challenges of finding the game's art style, the difficulty in trying to contextualize critical historical concepts without boring players to death, how the team built a town full of distinct characters and animated them, how the font was designed, The pressure on historical fiction to be accurate. And yes, we're gonna ask them about all those weird little animals hiding in the margins. We're gonna

avoid the major spoilers for this game as much as we can, but the final chapter of this documentary concerns the final act of the game, so we're gonna give you a heads-up before we get into all of that. But for now, let's start before quill hit parchment and explore just how a game like this gets greenlit in the first place. - I've been at Obsidian since 2005. First game I started working on here was "Neverwinter Nights 2". I took over toward the end of the development as the lead designer, so I closed that out. And

then, after that, I worked on a few projects that got canceled, and then I directed "Fallout: New Vegas" and then directed "Pillars of Eternity 1 and "2", and most recently, "Pentiment". (soft choral music) It's weird, because when I talk about the inspiration for it, it was just the inspiration to make a historical role-playing game. That was about it. But the game that I drew inspiration from way back then was an early '90s game called "Darklands" from Micro Pros. And it's a pretty janky game. Even by the standards of the of the day, it was fairly

janky and difficult to play. It was 320x200 and it used a stylized font, which is a weird choice And a weird combination of things. But it was very intriguing because it was a historical role-playing game and it incorporated fantastic elements, but it really did feel like it was rooted in 15th century Greater Germany, which was the Holy Roman Empire. That got me interested in history, and then I also studied Shakespeare's histories 'cause I was initially in college in music and theater, and then I went over from the conservatory of music into the college to study

history. I got my degree in history. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I got in the games industry doing web design because I had taught myself web design. And when I got in the industry, in my mind, my thinking was, "I wanna work on a "D&D" game, which I got to do immediately (laughs) 'cause I worked on "Icewind Dale" at Black Isle. I wanted to work on a "Fallout" game, which I didn't get to do, and then I later got to do. And then, the third one was a historical game. And it eluded

me for a long time. A lot of the people I talked to about it were very skeptical about the idea of historical games in general. I think it's a lot of cases people have bad experiences with history in school. They don't like the way it's taught. It's very memorizing dates and things like that. So, I said, "Yeah, I'm gonna skip the boring parts, right?" (laughs) When I say I'm gonna do something historical, assume it's the cool things in history. But it took a very long time, And around, I would say 2018 or so, I had

played "Night in the Woods" and I had thought about the idea of doing something that was structurally similar to "Night in the Woods", but aesthetically more like late medieval, early modern illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts and more of a narrative RPG, really, so focusing not on combat or stats or anything like that, but just on choice and consequence and storytelling. And that's where the idea started forming. But I was like, "I don't know how I would make that." And then Microsoft acquired us, And around that time, I was like, "Okay, they have Game Pass and I'm

pretty sure that they want smaller, unique titles for it, and this is probably the only chance I'm gonna get to do this." So, I just went for it. - [Danny] What was the process of making that pitch deck, I guess? - Oh, I never made a pitch deck. (laughs) Yeah, I went to Fergus while we were being acquired and I said, "Hey, man, I'm pretty burned out from working on "Deadfire", So if I'm gonna stay here, I gotta work on something really small." And I said, "I promise you it's not gonna be more than a

dozen people." It was 13 people, but it's not gonna be more than a dozen people- * Baker's dozen. - I'm not gonna work on it forever. I'm not gonna lose money, and then I'll go back to working on more traditional stuff if that's what we need at the studio. And he was like, "Okay, you can do that." There was no resistance. He was like, "Okay, yeah. You wanna work on that, that's fine." At first, the only other person I really had to work with, and it was part-time, was Hannah Kennedy, who's our art director. And

I knew that if she couldn't build the art style, that I would not get any traction. So, I described it to her. I said: I want elements of late medieval illuminated manuscripts, I want elements of early modern woodcuts, but I don't want to copy them directly. I wanna synthesize something out of that for a singular art style. So, Hannah worked through that, and she's extremely analytical. She broke down what makes up those art styles, what defines them and what distinguishes them, and then she started ideating on it. Even her early examples showed a lot of

promise. The early examples are quite different from what we wound up with, But it really didn't take that long to get to something where people are like, "Whoa, that looks pretty cool, that looks really interesting." - I tend to approach problem-solving like that in a very puzzly way, especially when you're put in this position where it's like anything could be the answer. So, I have what I'm personally excited about, and so, for, I think, myself and Josh, we were both excited about the historical context and getting able to reference that And be spiritually true to

just calling back on that look. But then, I knew that right away there would also be challenges of, like, if we just did this one for one, if I just copied this look and tried to make a game that functioned with that look, here are the things that would be difficult about that. So, figuring that out right away beyond preference of just, what are our limitations if we did wanna make this look exactly like a painting? There are some things about textural complexity, things getting really, really crunchy-looking, Things being difficult to navigate if you were

trying to, you know, a painting is beautiful, but it's a fixed frame. With games, you have to think about the composition similar to film, similar to animation. You have a moving camera that the player also has control of, and all of that influences your limitations on what the look can look like. I think we went through a phase of establishing, all right, this would be challenging to see. We know we want it to feel at least this big. How can we make it feel large without still making it a completely open-world exploration space? I tackled

it having that bullet list of, here's all the things that might be limitations, and also, here's the things that I think would be really cool to be able to do. And then, after having that, that's when I sat down and did some experiments, then, of taking reference material from history, reference material from other games, and then reference material from animation, Knowing that those were gonna be the three spaces we were majorly pulling from. (contemplative music) We spent through a prototype really landing on exactly what that look was gonna be. It's not like we just did

a, like, "Here's our test phase and we're gonna do a whole bunch of variations, and then go, 'That's the one,' and go forward." It did evolve over time as we encountered problems or things we still needed to solve for. One example was, We didn't really understand it was gonna be a limitation of traversal, going into a scene when it's all 2D, because then you have to think like, "Okay, is the guy gonna shrink as they walk away, or does it stay the same, and then they technically are moving up?" And that's one thing where it's

like people that have made a lot of platformers are probably like, "Yeah, that's an obvious problem." "Of course you have to consider that." And I was like, "I've never worked on a game In exactly this structure!" Just none of us expected that to be a thing, and when we encountered it, we were like, "Okay, no walking into scenes, only diagonally up staircases one way or the other, or hills. And then, that also then in turn influenced the look and the way that the scenes were laid out. - I mean, that honestly was one of the

bigger challenges that we struggled with on the project. I mean, it's not nearly as complicated as a 3D project for example, But that is the challenge of a 2D project in the perspective that we were driving, with the art style that we were driving was, how do we handle the layering and the sorting? And especially when you have a character that's cutting something on a cutting board, how do you get the character to be over the sprite, but some of the character to be behind the sprite kind of thing. Figuring out those processes and figuring

out how the artists and the animators were gonna set that up was definitely a challenge. I was number four or five on the team, so I was one of the, the principals that was hired on. You can't do much without programming, so we're the first ones to come on the project and one of the last to leave. I worked on "Pillars of Eternity" for about three weeks, and then I was shuffled onto "Tyranny", so most of my time prior to "Pentiment" was on "Tyranny". And then, I left for a bit, and then, when "Pentiment" was

in development, I was an option that came up and the project was just very irresistible to me. A small team with the resources that Microsoft and Obsidian have was pretty hard to turn down, so yeah. The majority of an Obsidian programmer's time is tooling, to be honest. We're a design-driven studio, so we really focus on making sure that we develop the tools and the processes in place to empower our designers and our artists to do the work themselves. - When we got Alec Frey and Brett Klooster and a few other, Cathy Nichols, That was our

core prototype team and that allowed us do the prototype. And at that point, honestly, the game looked, I would say, 85% like it did at the end. Obviously, the end game is much bigger and it has visual effects and more polish. But the visual style was established, animation style was established. And it wasn't until after we already had the prototype that we showed it to Xbox, and they were very enthusiastic about it, So it went well. The prototype focused on the abbey. One of the things that we talked about early on was, much like in

the film of "The Name of the Rose", "The Name of the Rose" was a big inspiration for the game in a lot of ways. There was a film in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Annaud, and he chose to have extremely unique-looking people cast for the monks, because he said, "If you have this big cast and it's all, basically, with the exception of, like, one guy, it's all white men in robes, largely indistinguishable. You have to have people that are very unique-looking." And he tried to cast people that looked like men from his village that he thought were

just like, he said, "Pretty ugly." (laughs) But it made them very memorable. And so, Hannah said, "Well, we face sort of a similar problem." We were actually inspired a lot by Cartoon Saloon and the approach that they took, for example, in "The Secret of Kells", where, also, they had quite a few monks, But they really exaggerated proportion and bodily features and things like that. We didn't go as broad as they did 'cause theirs are really exaggerated, but we toned it down. But we said, "If we can distinguish between the monks and the nuns in this

large cast of monastics, then we'll probably have a pretty good chance of being able to extend that to the villagers." - I think it was a cruel joke that Josh put it in a monastery where they're all gonna be wearing The exact same outfit. (laughs) Now, that was one of the most immediate challenges right away. At the beginning of production, the cast, for all of us, we had anticipated it being a lot smaller. We knew that we wanted it to be a large community-feeling environment, but we knew that we would need to imply a lot

of that. And also, we just hadn't landed on the scale yet. We never would've imagined that we would've had, I think it was in the 700s As far as the amount of character states, discrete character states we had by the end of the game across all three acts, which is a lot. And not all of them have as many facial animation states or outfit states or they're not as bespoke, but that still is a lot of things to set up. But at the very beginning, who we knew for sure was we'd have a handful of

farmers, a handful of villagers, and then the Benedictines up in Kiersau. And so, how far can we push the realism, here, Of what the shapes of the habits would be? How much of, maybe pieces of their hair or things you'd see coming out of them, and then playing with stature and proportion and stuff just to make those characters very recognizable. That was something that, working on the monks and nuns first helped figure out, like, "This is gonna be the most challenging group. Now, we can move on to the villagers, where we have a little bit

more clothing diversity and things." But then, I also found right away That the hats were gonna be super important 'cause that's the kind of thing that you can play with the head shape. So, everyone's headgear was made exaggerated or made very specific colors, depending on their family, which is a goofy thing that wasn't, that was just supposed to be subconscious association. Just because you're all in the baking family doesn't mean you'd all be wearing yellow clothing, but we did that just to try to help you remember association between characters, because there were so many. After

we had worked that out and gotten the flow of the stylization for the outfits and how to make them different and how to make people feel related to each other, we got hit with the challenge of Josh at one point, after reviewing some stuff and talking about situations that he wanted to include in games, we wanted to have these scenes that took place inside the home. And he was like, "Oh, yeah, of course all their hats have to come off." And I was like, "No, we need those!" And so, I was like, "Do they really?

Can we forego that little historical accuracy bit?" And he was like, "No, they definitely do." So, then we had to design them with their hats off, which was challenging, again, to try to make them still feel like themselves even though we incorporated that into their designs. I think especially, too, with when they grow between acts and making them readable as the same person. Some of these people were babies to children to adults, or young adults to very, very elderly in the final acts. And there were, it was fun figuring out how we could still get

the player to feel like they were looking at the same person, even though they maybe had dramatically changed since they first saw them. Which was a lot of just finding some specific feature to incorporate into their design, whether it be a specific mole and birthmark on their face or just always leaving their eye and nose facial proportions the same regardless of what else you change about them. That was a very fun challenge And I think we ended up, we have the narrative context to help support that as well, but I think people like that gratifying

feeling when they can recognize them on their own, and they're like, "Oh, I know them! I've met them before, they're different now." (contemplative music) - The first approach was, the prototype was set in the abbey only. It was actually about the murder of Brother Guy. I said, "I want, that's not what it's gonna be in the end. I want someone else to be the murder victim." But I said, "Whatever structure we choose for quests and stories here, I wanna throw it out because it's a prototype and I don't wanna get too attached to anything we

do here." The only thing that we did keep, actually, from that, although I reworked it heavily, is the sequence with Sister Illuminata where you go into the books and walk around in the books. That aspect of the prototype, we kept, and a few pieces of background art, but we refactored them heavily. And of course, in the final story, It's not about Brother Guy being murdered. But that was really the prototype, and it was, you were just thrown into it without much explanation. Said, "Here's a murder, Andreas. Figure it out." (laughs) And then at the end

of it, the archdeacon showed up and you would explain it. And we played through that and talked about, what aspects of this feel good and what feel not good? And then, we revised that for our vertical slice. - I don't think there was anything that really stumped us For a super long time. I think there were things that we were trying that didn't necessarily work out, but we discovered pretty quickly they didn't work out. Something that we had really early on was this concept of having an alibi, having a weapon, having a motive. And we

thought about, how can we make that really interesting in the aspect of walking around, talking to people, and finding all of this stuff. And our early prototypes actually basically required That you find a lot of these bits before you're really able to strongly accuse somebody, and we found that some of those bits are much more interesting than others. Obviously, motive is exciting, and getting to talk to people as a player thinking about why they would wanna kill somebody, that's a really exciting thing. Finding a weapon is useful, but isn't necessarily as big of a tie-in

and maybe should be less of a requirement. That's all stuff that we had to trip through With our early prototypes and see what felt good to actually gossip with the town about and investigate and things like that. Some of those things became a little bit more sidebarred as we developed, and some got lifted up as the main thing that you were looking for. I think really early on, because it was mostly just people messing around, coming up with ideas, testing things, doing concepts. It was just organizing that and getting it into a space where we

could maybe start making something. We did a pretty good job of not really pursuing a final version of any of the art assets or any of that until we were really comfortable with the scenes and how they played out. We did know basically day one that the game was gonna take place in a monastery and the town nearby. Knowing that, we spent a lot of time really early on, Josh drew out the map of what he wanted the town to look like and the monastery to look like. The layouts of the scenes themselves shifted a

lot more Where we would place things here, we'd have walkways over here, and then we'd be like, "Eh, it's confusing to run into this before this." And so, we'd shift those around. We were told the scenes from Josh when he laid out the town that we wanted. We built out all those scenes with just, I actually built them. They were just a piece of parchment paper as the background of the scene, and I wrote the name of the scene. It would be like, "Kitchen", And then there would be a big line across the bottom that

was bright red that you could walk on. (Danny laughing) And then I would place the characters in the scene, which were all, they all looked the same. One of our characters, Father Gernot, was the default character in the game, that we had programmed him in as that. And so, every character was him, and so, we just turned him bright pink so that you knew that that was temporary, and then we wrote the name of the real character on him So these people would walk around with, like, "Piero", but it was a pink this guy. And

we'd place those in the scene, and then you could walk up and talk to them and the dialogue all triggered, and you could see what it felt like to interact with those characters in the scene, walk to the next scene, see how many scenes away it was. And that really gave us a decent feel of what the whole game was gonna feel like. Once we started to get confidence In the storylines and things like that, we started to be able to build, like, "Okay, well, we're definitely using these characters. Let's make the art for them.

We're definitely using these scenes. Let's make the art for those." Then, future acts of the game really are just later versions of those scenes, so we were able to do things like, oh, now this scene needs to exist in the fall. Well, let's knock the leaves off the trees, change the colors, Make the buildings look maybe like they need to be swept up a little bit. And then, we need to show it in winter. Well, let's bring some snow in here. And it was really just an evolution of previous stuff. We spent a lot of

time in our vertical slice building the whole first act of the game, so once we got that really good, we were like, "Cool, Act 2 and 3, breeze." The acts definitely got, the first one took probably two to three times as long as the second one, And the second one took two to three times as long as the third one. And it just, yeah, it got a lot smoother as we went. - I picked the time and the general place because it's what I know best. I only have a bachelor's degree, so it's not like

I have a PhD or something or I'm a professor. But it is the area and the time that I know best, early modern Europe, specifically the Holy Roman Empire. I've traveled to Germany and spent a lot of time there. My grandmother was born in Bavaria, And so I had an affinity for that general area. But then, the more I thought about the setting and I thought about what Umberto Eco did with "The Name of the Rose", which is set it at a fictional, in his case, nameless abbey in, I think it's Piedmont. By doing something

fictional that is framed within historical events, it gave me a lot more freedom. I'm actually very happy about the fact that Bavarians have played the game, and they're like, "Where is Tassing? Kiersau, this seems familiar." And it's because I actually lifted specific elements from a dozen communities, religious communities or secular communities, usually in Upper Bavaria, but sometimes just more broadly in Southern Germany or even in Austria. Whether it was like, St Mort's is their patron saint, or there's an abbey built on top of a Roman fort, or there was a double abbey, or there's a

legend about a well or a spring, and these are all things that are present in communities, But not all of them together. And so, by creating Tassing in this location where it's in the mountains and it's near the border with Austria and it's not on the road, but very near the imperial road, so you can get traffic from Italians coming through and all these things, it created this ideal location to tell the specific story that I wanted to tell without being burdened by, like, "Well, this isn't really like what happened in Tolz, This isn't really

like what happened in Innsbruck," because it's not a real place. It feels like it's a real place, but it's not. I thought pretty early on that I wanted to have quite a large cast. I've told this anecdote before, but I was watching a film called "The Mill and the Cross". It was based on a book examining "The Procession to Calvary" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. And it's this beautiful mannerist painting showing hundreds of people in this valley, and Christ crucified in this inconspicuous spot, Which is a very mannerist thing to do. And there's just so

many people from all these different strata of society. And then, there is a mill in the background, and this mill is towering on this impossibly tall cliff. And in the film adaptation, Rutger Hauer actually plays the artist, and he says at one point, "My painting needs to be big enough to hold everything, everyone, all the people." And I was like, "That's awesome!" (laughs) And he described the idea of God as the miller, Watching over the world. And so, there's a couple things that I pulled from that. One is actually the mill, which, there weren't windmills

in Bavaria, which is something we address in the story. But the idea of the miller looming over the town almost at the level of the abbot, this hated figure. But then, I said, "No, it's important in the story that it holds charcoal burners and printmakers and bakers and artists and nobles and all these people, and also to show different perspectives on, For example, vocation, being called to monastic life. And for some people, it's something that they take very seriously, and others, it's grudging. And for some people, it's an opportunity. People came to that life and

still come to that life from all different places, and their experiences in it are very different. And I didn't want to try to portray any individual occupation or strata as, "This is what everyone here is like." There are some pretty decent and nice nobles And there are some pretty awful nobles, and there are some monks and nuns that are very pious and some that aren't. So, it was to give that breadth of experience. Thinking back to it, I wanna say that Claus Drucker was the first person because I knew I wanted a printing press to

be an important central feature of this town. Would there have been a printing press in a town in the Alps? Probably not, but it's my town. I can say whatever. And they explain, well, there are Italians coming through and we print things for them and all these travelers, and there are people going to the shrine, so we can print for them. And then, I knew there would be a parish priest, a town priest, because, yes, there are the monks and the nuns, but they're separate. They have a cloistered life. And then I think I had

the idea for Sister Amalie being attached to, in her cell, attached to the church. And then, after that, I think I started to develop a few other things. I talked to Winston Black. One of our consultants actually went to school with him, although he went on to actually become an academic. But his specialty is in medieval medicine, so I worked with him on the idea of the town doctor and his relationship to the midwife. I knew that I wanted a midwife, I wanted a town doctor who was actually university educated, and then the peasantry. And

we really built out the peasantry. I said, "They should be the most numerous because they were the most numerous. Takes a lot of work to get all that food made." And I wanted to really distinguish those farming families, but also show that, in a lot of ways, they are interconnected. There are marriages between them, there are marriages between those classes. So, I knew I wanted a lot of the peasantry because I did think, again, to show the breadth of experience and intelligence and attitude. There are some peasants that are truly awful and there are some

that are extremely kind and nice and hardworking and intelligent, because they're just people. And I think it just went out organically from that, until I looked at this map. I think very visually. I think of characters in terms of a name and an image in my mind. And then I start building traits around that, and then I start working them into story elements. That's how I naturally do it, and it's also, I was interested to find out that when Umberto Eco started "The Name of the Rose", he started with just a list of names of

monks and their positions. But that's just how I thought about it. And then I thought about them in the town and where they would all live and how they would be arranged around the commons. And that's how I just thought about it. And for a long time, a lot of the story doc, other than the most bare-bones elements of it, Was just a list of characters' names, a very, very brief description, their age and general appearance, and then a sentence or two about, like, this is their deal. And it was about getting that spread of

contrast so when you read through it, you started to just get a sense of, yeah, this is a whole community of people who are quite different and quite varied. Yeah, I think that was the process. It was pretty organic. (upbeat music) - [Danny] If you're finding this documentary interesting so far, we just wanted to let you know that we have extended cuts of some of the interviews, along with some bonus patron-exclusive scenes available over on our Patreon. That's patreon.com/noclip. Pentiment is a game entirely focused on people, their motives, relationships, and what role they occupy in

the town. But creating a cast of memorable characters isn't easy When there's just so many of them. So, how did the team populate the town of Tassing and the adjoining abbey, and what about the character of the town itself? - The characters that were only featured once or in their own specific context, really fun to work on as well because it was interesting trying to give justice to their story and draw attention to them, even though they might only have a couple small moments. All of the memory palace characters were really fun Because those were

getting to push the limits of what we wanted to do for character design, do the really ornate kind of, that was a fun one as far as having historical vetting and notes given on the project. I had given all of them the rings around their heads, the halos in the first one, sort of like, "These are holy figures and they're imaginary, so this might be appropriate in the setting!" And it was a very strong reaction of, like, "Well, in all Catholic portrayals, Literally the only people that have those are saints, so it should only be

saints." And then, it was funny, 'cause it was like, "Well, I guess Grobian gets to keep this," and he's the awful one, but he's the only one that's actually at sainthood status in this whole lineup. So, that adjustment, it was like, "Okay, well, this one is a philosopher and this one's a king and that one's a saint, I guess." I tried to do as much research as I could on those things In the places that it would have the strongest impact, at least. I think, with something like historical costuming and stuff, a lot of what

there is record of, A, we're not a studio that's based in Europe, so there's not as many places that have physical pieces of historical textiles and things that still exist here. Textiles in general just don't hold up in the same way that architecture does, so I think architecture references were a lot easier to find examples of, Because buildings from that time period from all across Europe still are standing. You can look at them and backwards-engineer what the materials were maybe made out of. And with fashion, that was a lot more difficult, because I think what

mostly has remained is clothing of extreme nobility or very specific religious clothing and things, the pieces of history that people deemed important enough to try to preserve over time, where commoners' clothes just really didn't exist. So, that was where we needed to get a bit more flexible As far as where we were pulling the visual references from. There were paintings and stuff that were from a very similar time period, but Flemish, or slightly outside of the region that we were at, or German paintings that were a little bit before and after the historical setting that

I would look at and think, "Okay, with the amount of stylization we're doing with our characters, if we take some creative liberties here and assume what they would be doing would be somewhere between here and here, Then this should feel close enough." There aren't photos from that time period, so you really only have their reference art. And when we're talking about woodcuts and stuff, a lot of those aren't necessarily realism, it was how they drew the clothing at the time. So, then it would be, well, we can just copy that, too. Maybe this isn't necessarily

exactly how the garments were structured, but it's how people portrayed the garments to be structured, and that's close enough. And I think when it comes to the colors of the clothing, that was something where we really did focus on the range of pigments being used in the woodcuts moreso than the type of pigments that would've exist for dyeing clothing, because that gave us a nice, limited palette of, like, "Here's our reds, here's our blues, here's our greens, yellows." We really wouldn't get many of these color ranges, so when we play with what color people's clothing

can be, it should stay within this range because that's what people were using in the art. - Andreas was always the main character. I don't know if I had a fully-formed idea of who he was initially. I wanted someone who felt like they could move between the ecclesiastical world and the secular world. And I talked somewhat, this is maybe some of the most implausible stuff in the story, but I talked with Christopher de Hamel about the idea of a professional artist working within a religious community. And he he said pretty bluntly, "Pretty much all monastic

scriptoria were gone by this point in time. It wouldn't be impossible for one to still be working, but it would totally be on the way out." So, that became, then, a plot point, where everyone is like, "How is Kiersau's scriptorium still open?" And it was explained that, yeah, this is an anomaly, this is an anachronism. And the idea of Andreas as this artist on his Wanderjahre, where he is in his journeyman years, he's preparing to become a master. But he's traveling around Europe and learning from masters and making some money, and this is his last

stop before he goes back to Nuremberg and gets married. And so, there are some things where he would probably have to adopt a habit when he was inside, but you we hand-wave that because it would be a little clunky. But yeah, I mean, secular people would and do work in religious institutions in this way because sometimes they just don't have the people who are actually part of the community. So, Andreas lodging with the peasants and then literally traveling all the way through the town to go over into the abbey gave us an excuse to have

this guy who's literally traveling between both worlds by foot, which I thought worked out very well. Another inspiration for the story of the game and the structure of the game, other than "The Name of the Rose", is "Andrei Rublev", which is a Russian film made in, I think 1966, by Tarkovsky, and it is about a 15th century Russian icon painter. It's an actual historical figure, but the story they tell is complete fiction. It starts with the artist as a young man, and then he goes through witnessing all of these horrible things that happen, and then

it just spans this long period of time, and it's a 3 1/2 hour movie in typical Tarkovsky fashion. It's really slow and really intense. I liked this idea of focusing on one community and following one character with all the people in that community over a long period of time. I was in college in the mid '90s, and at that time, a lot of the focus was on microhistory and social history. And so, it was more about learning about the day-to-day lives of people, and often not super-fancy people. I felt like using the Reformation and using

the Revolution of 1525 as a setting and a context was good and important, and it would inform people's thinking. Obviously, it's gonna matter more to certain people than others. It gets away from the great men, the great men of history. Which, don't get me wrong, I actually think there's a ton of things to learn about kings and generals and pharaohs. But there's also a great benefit in understanding day-to-day lives of people. And because people don't really know this period super well, I wanted to show more day-to-day life and also show, hey, here are people that

are in a society that is interconnected. And so, they're not cut off from, The Reformation is not really happening right here, but people travel and people talk. And so, the abbott is aware of who Martin Luther is and most of the monks are aware of who Martin Luther is. So, when the baron starts talking about it, even if they don't really know the details, they're like, "I know we're not really supposed to be talking about this." And then, the German Peasant War, because it was a popular revolt because the conditions people lived under were getting

worse all over the place. And even though it really happened very little in Bavaria, It was almost entirely within what is now Baden-Wurttemberg, Swabia, basically, there were still knock-on effects because people's living conditions were not that dissimilar. With pamphlets getting distributed, and people can read, then people are like, "I'm reading this and this sounds, this makes sense to me. Yeah, I think we maybe should be upset about what's going on and how our taxes have been getting worse and how there's less to eat." I wanted to use that as a backdrop, but not have it

focus on, "Well, the Duke of Bavaria did this and we're gonna follow him on his campaign to crush peasant revolts within Bavaria," 'cause that's a very different type of story. (melancholy music) - The most interesting tidbit that I learned would be how people walk. That was an interesting one that I had to learn because I'm like, "I didn't think about it." I'm like, "I got shoes, I don't have to worry about it!" But people back then, they didn't have rubber-soled shoes. They had leather shoes with no soles. Really, the only thing they had is something

just to barely protect their feet. Josh showed me, he was just, like, "By the way, people don't walk with heel first. They walk with the ball of their foot first." And so, I actually did a deep dive on that, like: Oh, they walked with the ball of their foot first because if they walked with their heel and they stepped on a sharp rock or a sharp object, then they put something through their foot, And that's potentially very deadly, or they can just not work for a while and then their family goes hungry. So, they had

to step with the ball of their foot first, as he's doing, to ensure that whatever they step on, they don't step fully on. It's more of like an investigation method before they step fully or their whole body weight on it to make sure whether stepping is safe, then, to line up correctly. I love this. - [Danny] He eats it so badly- - [Cathy] And then, this. (Cathy whining) - [Danny] I noticed that- - Bonk, there we go! (Cathy mimics retching) The main thing that I look at when trying to find an animation style for a

game is, what in my mind would look good for this style of game? I looked at it. The art style is, it's older. The style of the characters, like how flat they look, they really don't have perspective to put to them because the illuminated manuscripts really didn't do very great perspective, nor did they do great anatomy. Hannah did a great job actually adding anatomy back to some of the characters to make sure that they actually worked for our character rigs. When I looked at them, I'm like, "Obviously, fully animated wouldn't really work well if we

did it full spline, every frame per second." That would've looked really awkward. It would've made it look really fluid, it would've made it look really puppety. The animation style that I opted for that I actually played around with to get there was a limited animation, but also doing more of exaggerated animation. The limited animation helped sell the art style so it looked like it fit, it felt like it fit, it didn't look awkward. And then, the exaggerated animation Helped sell, one, the character, and then also helped sell, also, the art style. In terms of trying

to find the animation style, basically all it was was just me, I think it was just me and Hannah in a room for a long time. And then we ended up doing, basically, it was like animating on 4s, is an animation term. Instead of animating on 1s or 2s, we're animating on 4s. If we did fully traditional animation, I would've needed a whole lot of more animators And a whole lot of more money. (stirring music) - When we started getting into facial animations and stuff, we definitely had a lot to figure out as far as

how far to push them, because we had this challenge of, one of our pieces of reference material was definitely "Night in the Woods" and looking at how they managed setting up their scene structure and conversations. But with that game, they have very simplified and stylized characters That have huge eyeballs, which is really great for making emotions read from a distance that's looking at it from scene size and not being in a conversation view. And we realized that with the art style we were doing, we don't have as much real estate for expressing with the eyes

in that way. So, then we knew, well, this is why, in animation, things are often exaggerated and stylized and things, because you want to be able to see it within the scene And have the emotions read really well. But we also didn't want it to feel goofy, so we had to do a lot of experimenting, and I think Andreas had four or five different waves of facial animation or facial expression states. until we got that just right. His surprised face for a while was very surprised. Finding the balance of stuff that would read in context

and feel good and not feel like we were being a little too, yeah, silly, or not consistent With the mood that we were trying to set in the story. - When we were making the characters, when I was rigging up Andreas initially, I wanted to be able to do anything that I wanted to do on one of our 3D games. I didn't want to stunt our animation capabilities by having a limited rig. So, I created pretty much a detailed rig that can do anything that Josh wanted under the sun. A character wanted to do a

cartwheel, we could do a cartwheel. The rig can handle that. The only caveat is that we had to then draw more art assets for the actual character themselves, so if we wanted to have them do a cartwheel, we made sure that they had the poses so they could do the cartwheel. For example, on the torso, there's only so much mesh animation we could dig on the torso. We would have to do a new art piece. The amount of bones that the character has are pretty simple in terms of points of articulation. The magic really comes

in When you do the actual mesh animation. For example, the 2.5D face gave us a lot of freedom to make the characters look around and feel more alive and give more acting nuances to a scene, rather than having a character going, (mimics robot creaking) we were able to add more acting choices, like looking around like that. And then, same with the torso, and we see on people's skirts is that we added mesh animation to those as well Where we basically put vertex points all around the art, like, for example, the torso, so there'll be a

bunch of vert points around that. We skinned it to the bones so when the bones moved or if we need a character to turn, the torso would deform with that turn. To make scenes feel alive, there were a couple things that we had to do. For the VFX, we didn't wanna do any kind of real time, I guess, particles. We didn't wanna do realistic-looking cards. So, what we ended up doing was I looked at the art style That Hannah had already established, then I looked at the touchstone art that Josh has already made for the

game, and then I combined all of those references to make the actual VFX style that we wanted to achieve for the game. Because obviously, if we used something realistic, it wouldn't work. If we used something that was fully animated at 30 frames per second, wouldn't really work, because of the limited art style of the characters. So, we did a really limited, stylized VFX for the game. Even the particles that we did for, like, for example, the fire, if you look at 'em, they're not just standard particles. If you zoom in on 'em, they're actually, they

have symbols and stuff that are going on and flutter through them. It's a really cool, nice little detail that we added. To make our game feel alive, we had to do a lot of compiling of different elements, and that was having characters have jobs, Doing random things around the environments. We did a lot of creature work so we can make sure that we sold the rural aspect of it and making it feel alive and that we were in a rural area, at a farm area out in the middle of nowhere, not a big town. And

then we also did a lot of VFX work, even though the VFX work, a lot of people probably didn't notice, but it was more of a subconscious feeling, giving the feeling that, "Oh, we're in an old house. Oh, we're by a pig stall, so there are all the flies," and things like that. We did a lot of subconscious VFX work to sell some life happening in our scenes. (somber music) - [Danny] "Pentiment" had a setting and was populated by a cast of characters, but how was this game going to play? With no combat, perfunctory movement,

and quite a lot of reading, "Pentiment" could easily have been a slog to get through. So, how did the team write a story to pull the player along and what game mechanics were utilized to vary up the experience? - One of the things that we like to do at Obsidian is have choice and consequence and reactivity. The problem is that, usually, you're a wandering stranger, so that reactivity has to happen immediately or in a very short term, or you have to throw that character back into the player's face somewhere way down the road so they

can understand, "Oh, this is how my choice impacted you!" But the appeal of staying in Kiersau and Tassing for 25 years is that we could keep coming back and saying, "Hey, remember that thing you did? this is still going." And it made it a lot more appealing to carry knock-on effects where you don't initially realize it, but then later, you see, like, "Oh, man, that's right, I did do that." That is having a consequence. And so, that was really appealing to me. The idea of the artist and the idea of taking place in that community

over a long period of time was always really central to the idea of the game. I tried to structure the pacing of the story in such a way where you meet a lot of characters, but we space that out over time, and a lot of that is so that you see the murder victim interact with a bunch of people that clearly hate his guts, and you're like, and then later, when he gets murdered, You're like, "Oh, yeah. I remember when everyone was hating on this guy. Maybe I should look into that." So, we try to

introduce really distinctive characters and memorable things, meter them out over time. Character creation, we actually have take place over a number of scenes. We try to make it not front-loaded, not like a traditional RPG. It just happens through conversation because you're only defining About five or six things, really, up front. Hopefully, that can pull the player through all the way until they start seeing more and new and interesting things and getting them involved in some sort of dramatic tension. We introduce Ferenc as this mysterious guy who's rushing in and writing something in the book and

slamming it, going through the books with Illuminata. These were all things to make the player, even something as simple as, we actually added this in the first patch, which is the horseshoe mini game for Andreas, And it was to tell people there's not just reading in the game. (laughs) And granted, those minigames are all very, very simple. And again, we were inspired by "Night in the Woods", and I talked to Scott Benson about that. And it's just to give the players another way to look at the world and a little fun thing to do. We

just try to break things up so the player doesn't feel like, "Man, I've just been walking and talking to people." There's always gonna be something, Like a stick-breaking minigame, a cookie-cutting minigame, whatever that is. There's a card game. That card game is probably the most expensive of them. But there's always something to keep things fresh and keep things moving forward. And then, over the acts, there were things where I knew, I said, "If, yes, we have the seasons change and that is really nice to see, but we want to hold some things back so that

the player in each act, Even though they're just in the confines of this community for the entire game, they are going to see new things." In Act 2, you're gonna see the aqueduct. In Act 3, you actually get to see the inside of the convent, which has been off-limits to you for the first two acts. We always try to have some new reveal and new thing. And especially, going act to act when there's a big time jump, because I've seen this from a ton of players where they get to the end of Act 1 and

they're like, "Oh, that was a pretty cool little game." And then they're like, "Oh, wait a minute! Seven years, I'm still here? What's going on? What's, oh, my God. Okay, wait, okay, let's see what's going on." Yeah, just the thought process was, show the player some interesting things. Not to give them a false expectation, but to say, "There's variety here. There is something that's gonna keep your attention." But if you don't like reading (laughs) And if you don't like this art style, you aren't gonna like the game, and that's okay. That is absolutely okay. And

that's actually one of the reasons why I think, on Game Pass, that's totally fine. 'cause if people dive in, they're like, "Let's check this out! Nope, see ya!" That's fine. But for some people, it's really their thing and it's gonna hook them. I feel like, by the time you get to the end of the first day, I think most players who are into the concept of the game, they start to feel a sense of who Andreas is. They start to feel some attachment to the characters in the abbey, the peasants, and they just wanna keep

seeing how that develops. They know there are conflicts there, they wanna see where things go. And I think it worked pretty well. I think one of the more frustrating things about working on games like this is, (sighs) it's really satisfying when people have, the illusion works very well and they see the things that are absolutely firing and are absolutely reactive, and they imagine more than there is. It just creates, 'cause it's about the experience. It's not actually about the tearing down individual things. But then, there are some players where they make choices and there are

consequences, but they don't notice them, and they make other choices expecting there would be consequences, And there aren't. And then their conclusion is, "This game has no reactivity." So, one of the things that we did do, which, I mean, honestly, we just pulled it from "Disco Elysium", we adapted it to our own purposes. But it's those small choices and the little reactivity that plays into the mechanism of how, when you try to convince something or persuade someone of something, how that works. We try to introduce that, very early on, seemingly minor things that you say

or do to people are gonna get tracked. And at some point, when you try to convince someone of something, for example, Martin, just trying to get him to greet you in a friendly manner, (laughs) which is harder than it might seem, those things will be tracked and it will be checked and you'll succeed or you'll fail. There's nothing random about it. It's an aggregation of these little choices that you make. That's very important for establishing the stakes for the player, because we're saying, "Hey, when you're in a seemingly innocuous conversation, actually think about what you're

saying, because even something very small can have an impact." One of the things that we introduced also is with Eva and Otto, because you can flirt with Eva, and we track that. And at the end of Act 1, Otto is like, If you're really flirting, he's like, Yeah, basically, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out." Like, "I'm not sad to see you go 'cause you're trying to hit on my future wife." And then when you come back in Act 2, he's like, "Oh, you come back to try to steal my wife

again?" (Danny laughing) So, some of those things, we try to build up organically over time. And then, there are the bigger things. And honestly, I would say some of those are planned early And some of them evolve organically and some of them happen, actually, some of them happen quite late where we felt like, "Man, this character is around a long time and doesn't really feel like there's anything that you can really do to shape how they work." And so, Ursula was actually one of those. Ursula's little reactivity chain was developed pretty late in the process

'cause she's, I think, two years old when you, she's the first real-world character you encounter. She's poking your foot. And so, I had this idea of, because she has her father who is pretty straightforward, he's a religious man, and then her grandfather is really into the old Pagan stuff, and you have a neighbor, who's Ottilia, who's also into that stuff. And I'm like, "Well, okay, so we know that Ill Peter can die at the end of Act 1." Yeah. If you don't actually get the money for the Gertners' taxes, Ill Peter will die at the

end of Act 1. And that's something where, if it happens, most players, they don't realize that it's a, I mean, we bring it up and it is explicit, we say that. But some people might not go, like, "Oh, crap, I never paid the taxes and that's why Ill Peter died!" And then, Ottilia can die, of course, at the end of Act 1, and you tell that story to Ursula where she wakes up in the middle of the night And you can tell her a story, and either you can tell her a fantasy story based on

some place that Andreas has traveled to, or you can be grumpy and say, "Let me tell you about the little girl who wouldn't let an artist sleep." And that's either grounding her, saying, "Quit being interested in fantasy," or entertaining her fantastic notions. And then, in Act 2, when you meet her again, she asks you about your travels. And again, you can say, "Well, yeah, I was in Paris and blah, blah, blah." And she'll say, "No, no, I don't like, not the boring stuff, tell me something cool." And you can say, "Eh, there's nothing cool." Or

you can say, "Well, I heard a siren on the River Seine," or whatever, "And it's the White Lady." And she'll freak out. But those things are being tracked. And then she asks you, "Do you think I should listen to my grandpa and listen to Ottilia?" Now, if they're dead, that doesn't even come up. But if they're alive, you can either encourage her or you can say, "You might get in trouble for that." But that actually has consequences, then, in Act 3 when you talk to her, because she either started learning things about the pagan ways

and the origins of the village, or she didn't. And then, after the end of the game, there can even be consequences for that. But most of that stuff was developed pretty late in the process. Some of it is thought out from the beginning, some of it comes up when we're working on the act, and then some of the stuff toward the end, we just said, "There feels like there's an emptiness here where, with not a whole lot of work, we could get something that builds over time and gets more reactivity." And so, some people see

that stuff, and they're like, "Oh, my god, that's so cool!" And they imagine even more things that are reactive. But then, other people make choices and they expect there to be reactivity, And there isn't, and they get upset. So, we do the best we can. (somber music) - [Danny] "Pentiment" is a game that is rooted in historical references, terminology, and places that are probably unfamiliar to most of us. So, careful consideration went into building "Pentiment" as an experience that anyone could enjoy. The puzzle of trying to properly communicate these concepts in a way that felt

part of the game's aesthetic And didn't interrupt exposition was a tricky one. And while we're exploring that, let's also talk about the font. Font designers Lettermatic helped on this project, and they've produced a fantastic case study of their work to design "Pentiment"'s various fonts on their website. We have a link to it in the description. But how did the team implement this cursive script into the game, and what about all those fancy lads in the margins? - Well, there were a few people who didn't know what an abbott was, so someone said, "Well, should we

have a glossary entry for abbott?" And I was like, "Well, okay, are we gonna have a glossary entry for every office of the abbey?" And then someone brought up, "Should we have a glossary entry for Jesus Christ? Because this isn't just gonna be played by people who come from places with a Christian tradition." I was like, "Man! I understand what you're saying and it's totally valid, but I think that we're gonna have a million underlines in every conversation." And it was kind of arbitrary, I will say. But anything that I thought that you would be

able to figure out through repeated exposure and context, like abbott, I said, "If you don't know what an abbott is and you keep talking to this guy who's in charge of the abbey, (laughs) clearly, demonstrably, you're gonna figure out, 'Oh, he's the head of the abbey.'" So, anything that was a really proper term, like Martin Luther, most people probably know that name. They may know that he's associated With Christianity in some form, But actually, a lot of people don't know what the Reformation is. They don't know that, "Oh, Lutheran, that guy! He's the guy behind

Lutheranism, that's why his name's Luther!" There were certain things that we defined like that because it was very important to understanding the context. I actually think that the limited space in the margins worked in everyone's favor, because I couldn't blab on and on about an individual thing. I just had to be like, "Okay, What does the player really need to know for the historical context?" This is not Wikipedia. If they wanna go and watch a YouTube video or dig into Wikipedia, that's awesome. That's what I did when I played "Darklands" and I went into the

bibliography, and I was like, "Oh, I can read more about this stuff." That's a desired expectation, but it's not necessary for playing the game. - We did also have the opportunity to, early on in development, we went to the Getty Museum, And they had a illuminated manuscript exhibit there. And I had seen some examples in person, but not a entire collection that was dedicated to just illuminated manuscripts from that time period. These were, again, earlier, of like 12th to 14th century ones, the very gilded, painted-looking ones. But that's when it really clicked for me as

far as seeing a lot of those stylized, goofy cartoons from history, where I knew some of it was just stylistic preference in them painting them that way because they were supposed to be silly Or supposed to be expressive, and that was the standard of the time. But when I saw them in person, I was shocked by how small lots of these books were and the fact that the illustrations are this big. It's like, yeah, you paint a realistic face that's 3/4 inch tall, a portrait of five people! Some of it was just the limitation of

the media because the materials are so expensive, the books were small, and these scribes are doing These tiny little etchings and drawings, and all of it onto books that could fit into your pocket. And so, that was the thing that just didn't really connect to me as a modern artist. I know that they're small, but when you see it and then connect, like, this is why they were making them in this way, was because of that being a limitation or because just the nature of what they were working with and working on. They were using

feather quills and doing these things by candlelight, And it's what I would need a magnifying glass and three LED lights pointed at it to be able to see it. That part was really amazing to think of the craft and the skills required to actually work with the media that they were working with. (quill scratching) (birds crying) Starting out, we knew, we mostly as in Josh, Josh is definitely the primo font enthusiast, as far as he knew he wanted to incorporate fonts that had contextual ligatures, Historical ligatures, historical spellings, just because, if not in this game,

then when? All of that was really cool, and thinking of the whole dynamics of having the typeface shifts depending on the context and the person that was speaking. So, working through exactly, we knew we wanted the monastic Blackletter heavy scripts, and then also have the townspeople scripts. But then, there was still a dissonance. People would see the more casual script and it still felt fancy to a modern viewer, Because again, it's very structured, very elegant type of cursive, even though that was the more casual writing style of the time. Then, we knew we wanted to

have an additional typeface at one point that would be, essentially, peasant scripts. I think at the beginning, we knew we wanted at least three fonts. And as we would use those in context, we'd realize that we might need another one for this specific use case. And then, the Thread-Puller font ended up being unique because we wanted to have that be a part of the narrative context of finding the notes, was that, "Oh, you can tell this isn't from one of the monks in the monastery because it's more ornate than that." And then, when we got

into things like the errors, that was another thing that we thought would be cool as a tool for differentiating different scribe levels, essentially, how comfortable people were with writing. I think at first it was just a, "Wouldn't it be neat?" Josh had that idea about the intro of the game being very physical, and you're the person scraping the page and stuff to get the viewer into the space of thinking about the physical media of it. And so, I think that was another idea of, it would make it feel like there was a person writing this

down as the game was playing. And so, that was the goal, initially. And then we were like: We could also use this to then, again, Contrast different types of people from different backgrounds and have certain people have really high rates of spelling mistakes and going back and doing a lot of fixes, versus ones that are really practiced scribes that hardly ever have errors that pop up. - [Danny] And then the Druckers doing the wood pressing stuff part, yeah. - Yes, that one was so cool when Josh explained what he wanted there and how it might

work. And then, again, our programmer, Brett, Did the first test, and we were like, "Yeah, that's so cool!" It feels weird. The first test we did, it was doing that pressing every single statement that people would say, and it was like, (mimics press thumping) and it got, again, that was just like, "Well, that's annoying, so we're gonna have to change that." But then it became the first line in a series of threads back and forth between people Is when we would use that. And I think the first time it happens is very cheeky. People are

like, "Who, what was that?" And then you immediately are like, "Oh, yes, of course," having the flipped metal character. Yeah, that was a fun inclusion. I'm very glad we got to do that. - I knew this was gonna be one of the biggest challenges of this project, and to be honest, it proved out to be worthwhile. But initially, it was, Are we sure we wanna invest this much time into this feature? But it was really a keystone feature of the game, is the font system. We had five different fonts that we gathered from external artists

that would generate them, and then we would actually import each glyph and each character separately into a stroke mask, basically, that revealed each letter as it was being written out. Figuring out the tech behind that And making sure that it was up to snuff with what Josh was looking for was really quite a challenge, like for a printing system and a cursive system that would simulate ink quill dippings and things like that, right? This is all stuff that you have to make from scratch 'cause nobody else is gonna prioritize this stuff in their font systems,

right? Yeah, a lot of time was spent on that in the development process. We experimented a lot of that way throughout dev cycle. Like, how is a cursive gonna actually work? Computer cursive works because every glyph is the same. They know when a cursive point is going to end and then progress onto the next glyph. But when you add variations to that, how do you ensure that that's still going to look right? So, yeah, we ended up with a bunch of different randomizations that we would put into the font to make sure that, like, "Hey,

this E is gonna be slightly different," or, "This A is gonna have a loop on it," or, "It's gonna be more compact," or, "It's gonna be tilted slightly." And all those little variations all required their own individual stroke mask, so we've basically done by hand, somebody would go in and draw over each letter to make sure that it would reveal in a way that would be written. - [Danny] And what about the, I guess, accompanying audio that happens with that? Is there a lot of work to try and make sure that feels- - [Brett] Yeah,

I mean, we worked pretty closely with our audio engineer on the project to make sure that that was right, 'cause we knew that we weren't gonna have VO in the game. So, we wanted our VO to be that audio. And they spent a lot of time with Josh to try to get the sound right, to make sure that it was gonna sound like parchment of the time period and everything. Yeah, it was really, it was really quite a challenge to figure that out. (pages rustling) We spent a lot of time with how conversations were gonna

work and how conversations were gonna flow. Like, we needed to know, "Hey, how many bubbles on screen is gonna be too much? How is this bubble gonna transition off the screen, and how much animation are we gonna really do and have it be accurate to the time period?" There's a lot of iteration and a lot of development there that may not be appreciated, but we iterated a lot throughout development on that kind of stuff. That kind of stuff, I'm really proud of how we ended up with it. I mean, it may not be everybody's cup

of tea, But we spent a lot of time just trying to make sure that, how does this journal work and how do we transition from the journal to the game in a way that's not too jarring and flows with the rest of the historical aspects of the game? - [Danny] Can I ask, (laughs) in my notes, I have this written down as, "Those weird little boys in the margins." - Yes! - [Danny] Can you tell us a bit about the, you had a name for them, What were they called, the marginality? - I like "Weird

little boys in the margins" better. I think that's a better term. - [Danny] Tell us about them. - (laughs) I also love them. Those are marginalia, all of those cartoons that happen in that space, and I find them super charming. I think lots of people find them really charming. I think it's fascinating. This is a tangent, but the team behind "Inkulinati", that game was being developed and releasing In a very similar schedule to us. And when we caught wind of that project, initially, we were like, "What are the chances? This is so cool, we have

two games that directly reference medieval marginalia and illustration styles." Theirs is a little farther back than ours, but we intentionally included some of the older styles in ours just because we thought it was fun. I find something so beautiful about these goofy little cartoons, That they still resonate so strongly with people. And I think some of it, there's this impression that we're almost dunking on them or they're drawn bad, and that's why they're funny, and that's not the case at all. They were always drawn to be funny or to be storytelling communications like that, The

margins and type of imagery that got to go in there was lots of times just the scribes and the monks that were making the illustrations having a spot of freedom that was totally their own. So, they got to draw things that they wanted to in that space and that they could. And so, there's something so beautiful about that to me that I wanted to incorporate in the same way of being like, "All right, this is our space to be silly." And so, some stuff that we just find delightful, we wanna be able to include there.

If it felt goofy in the original context, we wanna make sure that that's still there. So, we use the margin space as our contextual, here's some additional information about specific terms that you would encounter in dialogue. And then, we occasionally had some representative images of a person. If it was reminding you of who that person was, we'd include their portrait in there as well, if they were being referenced in a scene that they weren't actually in. But the rest of the stuff was just stuff that we liked, so we wanted to include. And there was

definitely times where I just needed a break from something else and I would draw some more goofy margin doodles that would be in there. And then, another thing that I loved from the reference material is just all of the really long fingers pointing to stuff. That is the cursoring system. I just had a, like when I first discovered the usage of those in various texts from people, that was really common, to be like, "Oh, I'm pointing to a typo," or, "I'm pointing to more specific informations." And there'd be these fingers where four of them would

be going off in different directions And interweaving each other. It was the most absurd thing, and I'm like, "This is so good!" So, that's when we decided we wanted to use that extending cursor system. But the fingers just got longer, and there are some that reach all the way across the scene. I don't know, I think they just liked 'em. It was just the standard, that was kind of, some people saw that being how it was done and started referencing each other. And I think it's just funnier than arrows, and that's probably why they were

doing it. Things like that, it was like, if it resonated with us and we found them really fun, that we knew that that would translate to players experiencing them as well. I loved with the marginalia because some of them, we got to design new, silly thing, and lots of those were essentially copies of just one-for-one pieces that were in historical references. And the player base caught onto that right away. And I think it was not a cheesy, like, "Oh, you ripped 'em off!" It was very much like, "I know that!" Like, "They're referencing this thing

and I know what that is!" The frog was one, and that one of the rocket cat is actually a medieval illustration that has a cat with a rocket strapped to its back that looks very much like that. - [Danny] If you've managed to get this far without pausing the video and downloading "Pentiment", Now is your final warning. In this last chapter, we're going to explore the game's final act, the ending, and how the team felt when it was finally completed. - I was inspired by "Andrei Rublev", which, in the third act, Andrei is not even

really present for most of the act. But it focuses on a young man who is the son of a bellmaker, and he convinces the czar's soldiers that he knows the secret of casting bells. His father has died. And he's like, "I can cast a bell." And he convinces them and he says, "I'll show you where to cast and everything." He's young, he's, I think, 15 or something like that. And they're all incredulous, they're like, "There's no way this kid knows anything." And he's secretly, inside, he's terrified, because the duke's soldiers say, "If you fuck this

up, we're gonna kill you and the entire crew." And you've already seen in the movie some real horrible violence against artists That displeased the Grand Duke, I guess. I like this idea of having a younger artist, who, in this case, is a woman, so there's an extra layer of skepticism on top of it, having to take over an art project where she is capable, but she's young, and there's a lot of people doubting her and focusing on her and making it about her to shift their perspective. And that's how that started. And I liked the

idea of it being Claus's daughter, and I can't remember at what time we decided that Marie and Bert, his wife and son, would die, So he's survived only by his daughter. And so, I wanted that relationship to be really strong and strengthened in Act 2 so that it would be a really solid foundation for the third act. - [Danny] Did the ending change much, then, the last little bit? - Oh yeah, yeah. - [Danny] Can you tell us a little bit about that? - (sighs) Okay, so this is spoilers. You're being warned, here. But initially,

you did not witness Claus die. And people were like, "This sucks." So, he did die, and that was super awful and it came out of nowhere, and there was also the conversations with Father Thomas. There was a bunch of stuff, basically, it was twice as long. And people were like, "Man, I know this is villain monologuing at the end, but we gotta wrap this up." So, I cut that out. I moved all of that into Act 2 and I trimmed it down. We spent a lot more time establishing Claus Being attacked and being sick and

letting you know up front, like, "No, dude, he is gonna die. It's a matter of time." And then, allowing you to actually be with him when it happened. And that was actually direct, people who had had experiences with loved ones dying, and they felt, they actually felt genuinely angry when it happened in the game. They're like, "This sucks so bad, it's actually triggering experiences from my own life. Please change this." And so, we did, and it was way better. And also, yeah, there was no option to marry Otz (Danny laughing) because I was kind of

like, I couldn't conceive it. I wrote a lot of Otz's stuff, and he sucks. (Danny laughing) He's is 18 years old and just kinda stinks, and he's really inconsiderate. And people are like, "I don't know." Some people are like, "I don't know, maybe. Maybe I want to." I was like, "Really?" And they said, "Yeah." I said, "Okay, yeah, we'll put that in there." So, yeah, there was a lot of stuff. And then, just structurally, there were some other things that I can't remember really clearly. A lot of the time flow and things like that in

Act 3 were not really clear, so we cleaned up a lot of that stuff, but it was all due to feedback that we got pretty late. - I think among the team, we were relatively confident in the project. In general, we had, I mean, we had done some play tests with people around the studio with some friends and family. We'd gotten feedback from them. A lot of the things that we got feedback on, we were able to address before we shipped, 'cause again, we weren't super crunched for time on this project. We felt pretty confident

in what we were able to release in the time we had. I think also, I have to give a lot of credit to the comms team, here. We did a great job of messaging the game to the public. I don't think anyone, it was something we were concerned about at the beginning because the pedigree of Obsidian is very much RPGs, and this game deviates from that. I mean, it is a role-playing game. You play the role of Andreas. But the feeling of the game is very much more an adventure game or a maybe a point-and-click

vibe Or something more like "Night in the Woods" or "Oxenfree". And I think when we talked to the press prior, when we would talk to the fans in any way we could, we would often be sure to say that. We'd be like: Hey, this is not exactly what we normally do here. Hopefully, you can see that by just looking at the art and the characters walking around, but don't expect a ton of crunchy numbers. Don't expect combat, don't expect all of that. But do expect that narrative, that choice and consequence, That feeling that Obsidian evokes

through our storytelling. And I think when we talked to the fans a lot about that and talked to the press about it beforehand, their expectations were completely set and we felt pretty confident in that coming out. - I never had any big expectations for how the game would do sales-wise, and I don't think anyone really did. (laughs) Being on Game Pass, the expectation was that there would be buzz about there being a unique game on the platform. And I was happy. I knew that people would perceive it as being unique, and I thought, I was

not actually sure about the reviews. I thought the reviews were gonna be lower than they actually were. As people are very fond of saying at the beginning or end of every "Pentiment" review, "Now, this game isn't for everybody," as though any game is for everybody. (Danny laughing) But this one really is not for everybody, I guess. Yeah, I thought a lot of people were gonna come into it And just look at it real sideways and be like, "This is not it." And there were a few reviews that were very much like, "No, thank you," which

is fine. But it reviewed better than I expected it to. And yeah, I was happy that it got nominated for a bunch of stuff, but we won the GDC Narrative Award and I was very happy about that. And I realized later, I feel like every game developer eventually becomes Act 2 Andreas. (laughs) If they stay in the industry long enough, they eventually get to this fried mental state. And they're like, "Yeah, that's me." (laughs) - I mean, I think the team seniority really helped us out. We really didn't hire any juniors, or even mids, per

se, that were really part of the core teams. Everybody was doing senior-level work on the team, and that really helped us out. Everybody was able to take a feature, break it down, work with each other without any overhead of extra meetings or communication Because of the team size. It really allowed us to allow Josh to focus really on the narrative and that important aspect of the game. We really were on on the same wavelength, and that really is a testament to Josh's direction on the title. With Josh's direction, we were able to really get a

good vibe of what we were looking for. And then, through that, we could just communicate directly with each other. If I needed something from animation or animation needed something from programming, we would just communicate directly and get that taken care of without having to bring it up in some sort of process or thing that might slow down the production. - [Danny] At the end of "Pentiment", Did you feel like, "Oh, these are games," like, "I could make this type of game forever?" Did you get an inkling for something bigger? Creatively, where were you? - Yeah,

I think, coming out of it, yeah, I think I could make smaller games. I think I could make bigger games again. I think what I realized between "Deadfire" and "Pentiment", "Deadfire" was, I was super burned out because it was, even though I was very happy about how it was critically received, it didn't sell well initially, and it was super draining and there were a lot of compromises that we had to make in developing it. And I didn't feel good about any of that. I felt like it was just compromise after compromise after compromise, like, "Okay,

okay, okay, we'll do this, we'll get it done." And with "Pentiment", we didn't take our sweet-ass time on it. It was three years, which, by the way, is the longest I've worked on any game in 25 years. I've worked on other games that eventually got canceled for about that long. But in terms of actually released games, three years is the longest I've worked on a game. But I realized the important thing is that, It's not that you don't compromise on anything, but you can't go into making a game for, I guess, the wrong reasons. You

gotta genuinely be excited about the game that you're gonna work on. And I know that's a luxury, but for me and where I am, I can't make games where I'm not super genuinely fully excited about doing it. I can't come in and be like, "Well I'm not really, I'm not really happy about where we're going with this, But I guess we gotta get it done." I just can't do it anymore. So, with "Pentiment", I'm very happy not only with how it wound up, but the process of making it was not one where we made lots

of compromises. There were things where we said, "Okay, we're not gonna have the budget to do that. We're not gonna be able to do that, that's okay." Those were sane and sober conversations we had. But we never made any choices where it felt like, this fundamentally compromises the vision of the game And the experience that we're gonna give to the players. And that's, I think, the important thing. And especially as someone directing a game, because I have to get the people around me excited about what we're working on. If I'm not super into it, it's

just gonna be, everyone's like, "Dude, the guy directing the game is not even into this. This is not going well." Coming out of it, it was really like, I just gotta make sure that whatever I work on now, I really, truly believe. I have a vision for this. I'm excited about it. I think the players are gonna be jazzed about it and the people who are working on it are gonna be jazzed about it. And if we have to make compromises because that's the world that we live in, they don't just undermine that passion, because

that's where it just becomes like, "Man, what am I doing?" (laughs) - I still hope that someday I can work on a historical RPG because it's been something I wanted to do For my entire career. And I hope if I don't, if I'm not able to do it, I hope I can at least play some more, because some of the best times I've ever had were playing historical games. So, thanks a lot for watching. (footsteps crunching) (birds chirping) (footsteps crunching) (metal clattering) (footsteps crunching) (Mausfanger meowing) (Mausfanger meowing) (insects buzzing) (birds chirping) (keyboard clacking)