On November 12, AdHoc Studio released the seventh and eighth episodes of its workplace superhero comedy. Send. This is the first Wednesday in a month that the team isn't releasing two episodes at once and locking in a build for next week's entries—not sweeping revisions, but last-minute tweaks and tweaks.
“We haven’t been able to fully enjoy launch day until today,” AdHoc Studio co-founder and Send Creating director Nick Herman told Game Developer.
When SendThe first two episodes were released on October 22, and the game peaked at nearly 13,000 concurrent players on Valve's Steam platform. The following week, on October 29, when the next two episodes were released, this number more than quintupled to 66,000 concurrent players. By episodes five and six, views had doubled in the past week to 131,000. SendThe last two episodes were released on November 12 and continued to grow, reaching a new peak of 220,060 concurrent players. Every week Send finds more audience.
The weekly episode schedule typically associated with television works—at least for Sendwhich was praised for its storytelling, animation and voice acting.
Created by former Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio developers, AdHoc Studio is no stranger to episodic pacing. The team is behind in games like The Walking Dead And The Wolf Among Uswhich is often cited as the gold standard for this kind of storytelling. But Telltale Games' episodes were released months apart; The Wolf Among UsThe first episode was released in October 2013, the next in February 2014, and the third in April 2014. This schedule meant that Telltale Games could make big changes to their stories between episodes.
“You would do an episode at Telltale, it would come out, and another team would come in and think about it and start making the next one,” Herman said. “But every couple of months you just create a new game from scratch. Here we had to do most of everything in advance.”
Long preparation for a successful Dispatch
AdHoc Studio worked on the current version Send– previous iterations, including live action, were – about three years. The studio had to have ninety percent of the game ready by the time the first episode was released, with the remaining ten percent spread out over a month of episodic launches. Dennis Lenart, also co-founder of AdHoc Studio and Send creative director, said the format forced the studio to pre-load playtesting All in advance so that it can achieve the desired quality bar set for cinematic films.
“You should test as many games as you can beforehand—interactive storyboards—and we've created a whole pipeline where you can create playable scenarios, playable storyboards,” Lenart told Game Developer. “We tested this as much as possible because one of the key ingredients to making a good game is playtesting. There are a lot of things that should have been blocked a long time ago. There are a lot of things that we haven't looked at for a year and a half because it was only at the very beginning of the process. We had to iterate much more than ever in our previous projects at Telltale.”
The behind-the-scenes little things—that ten percent—consist of fixing mistakes, tweaking the sound, or adjusting the text on screen, not resuscitating or rewriting scenes. However, unique to the episodic format is how AdHoc Studio can perform some internal balancing of the game's “invisible relationship counters” and other narrative calculations required in choice-based games such as Send.
Most of the gameplay in SendBesides the actual computer work of managing and dispatching a team of villains turned heroes, it consists of quick-time events and dialogue options. The decisions you make in Send have both immediate consequences and possibly later consequences. For example, early on the player must decide to kick someone from the team; There are two options and the game changes depending on who you choose. This teammate will later have to be replaced, which again changes the course of events. Sendstory. There are smaller decisions and it's not always obvious what impact they can have, which raises the stakes of the game.
AdHoc Studio monitored player choices as each pair of episodes aired.
“Watching every week, we learned a lot from the players that we didn’t expect,” Herman said. “Parts of the game that we thought were difficult turned out to be really easy for people. A choice we thought would be more divided may have been more divided. We rebalanced the backend a little bit in terms of math, setting it up so that people don't end the game and 99 percent of players experience this one thing, and then there's another part that no one sees because it's not quite set up correctly.”
“That’s the nice thing about live development is that we can do things like this,” he said.
The approach works. Episodic nature Send means that Adhoc Studio is doing something with its player base that doesn't usually happen: there is usually an influx of players immediately after a game is released. Naturally, as people play through the game and complete it or lose interest, the number of players decreases. The episodic format is an incentive for players to come back, but Send not only remained stable, but also significantly increased its player base.
Players don't return because True, this is an episodic release; they come back because the characters are compelling and the storytelling is successful. But the episodic nature really helps the game stay afloat, Herman said. “[It] creates a buzz in the fandom that can be discussed [the episodes] and it also allows people to find out late and feel like they can catch up and not fall behind,” he said.
Or, if players want, they can simply wait a month or so for all the episodes to release and play them all at once. “One of the things that influenced our decision to do weekly releases was the idea that if someone came in and saw the trailer and thought it looked cool, but they weren't in the spotlight at that moment for something episodic, there would be a short enough amount of time between the first episode airing and the finale airing that you might decide to wait and play it when it comes out,” Lenart said.
This is probably what we are seeing now with Send simultaneous number of players on Steam, but the increase can also be explained by the growing “snowball” of interest in the game.
SendThe success means people are already asking – and were asking even before the finale – whether there will be a second season. AdHoc Studio hasn't announced anything yet, but Herman said the expanded cast and robust world means there's “potentially more content in the future if we want it.” But for now, he's enjoying a release he's worked a long way to create; Herman said Send is a project that could have died “five times along the way.”
“It was very difficult to create this game,” Herman said. “We were essentially making a TV show and a video game at the same time, in parallel, and we had to mix them together, which had never been done before. Not many people believed in this project. We have been trying to implement it for a long time.
Lenart added: “We put everything on the line. We believed in this type of experience. I don't think we view this as some random, lucky hit that will never happen again. We're seeing this type of experience and the reception it's receiving further validates the interest in these types of games.”
