The drip

The restaurant is called "Cactus" something. It's Tex-Mex. Daud chose it because the other option, The Cheesecake Factory, sometimes makes him feel ill. And for this meeting — best to take no chances.

Once the water glass and menu situation is sorted, Austin doesn't hesitate. There's no pandering to egos. It's just out with it: He was playing the game, and he was bored. He was so bored, in fact, he spent time zooming in on objects to stare at them and critique the artwork (he has notes on the artwork too).

"Let me start out by saying, I liked lots of things about it," Austin says. But he says he's going to be harsh, because he knows that most of the problems are actually his fault.

In Defense Grid, players build and upgrade towers using "resources," arbitrary units of in-game currency that accumulate at a variable rate, depending on how many resources you bank and how many enemies you kill. The better you are at the game, therefore, the better you can be at the game. And that was one of Defense Grid's hidden weaknesses. Players who struggled early on would still be struggling further along. The game was a blast for players who grasped early on how to maximize resources, but punishing for those who didn't.

"We kept leaving players behind that weren't getting it," Daud tells me privately the day after the lunch meeting. "It just compounded. If you don't do this one thing right, that's it."

For Defense Grid 2, Hidden Path wanted to make the game more accessible to newcomers, which meant making it less punishing to those who take longer to get good at playing it. That meant changing how resources accumulated. At the very start of development on Defense Grid 2, Austin proposed a solution: the drip.

Austin's proposal was to make resources accumulate at a fixed rate — a steady drip — of five resources per minute. Predictable as the sunrise. But the problem with predictability is it's ... well, predictable. Killing enemies no longer grants any resources and resources accumulate whether you're good at the game or bad. Equitable. Easy. Boring. The very tool the team put in place to make the game more accessible has also made it less exciting.

As Austin lays out his reasons, point by point, for why the game isn't good, there are winces — but also nods. They've been expecting this. What's surprising is Austin's stark admission that the drip, his drip, is holding them back.

"The other feeling that went with this is killing aliens didn't matter anymore," Austin says. "What I was doing was, I was staring at the resource thing and ignoring [the action]. ... Because it didn't matter whether my guns took out the wave or anything. All I cared about was, 'That's going up by five. I can make my decision in 15 seconds.' All of the drama was in the number, which is not where you want the drama.

"I actually ended up not paying attention to the aliens very much while I was playing. I was playing the numbers thing. Which is also not a desired outcome."

Austin's proposed solution is complex, but it amounts to a sort of compromise between original Defense Grid-style resource accumulation and the drip. It's basically a bigger drip that accumulates more resources faster along with an end-of-wave bonus that grants a flood of resources once a wave of enemies has been killed. In theory, it should combine the best effects of both styles of resource allocation, giving the player more opportunities to make decisions and be less dependent on the drip. In practice, this means more work — and time — from programmers who are already straining.

Daud has remained silent for almost half an hour, listening, taking in Austin's notes with stone-faced reserve. Finally Austin asks for Daud's opinion.

Daud's response: He's concerned that tightening up the resource system will take programming time away from making sure the multiplayer networking functions properly and that testing the new drip will take time away from testing the multiplayer.

"[T]here's a lot of stuff left to do," Daud says slowly. "We can make this a high priority and that's great, but something else falls off the list. That's my biggest concern. These are all great ideas. I want this. But I [also] want multiplayer to work."

"But this is critical," Pobst replies. "This is the fundamental rock that the whole game is built upon."

Daud says: "I know."

As the meeting wears on and chimichangas are eaten, Austin, Pobst and Daud outline the changes they'll need to make to make the game fun. There aren't many, but they are deep. And the most important is a tool Daud has needed for some time but hasn't asked for out of concern for the programmers' time, a tool that would allow him to load the game in between waves of enemies instead of having to play entire levels just to get to those waves. Now, in order to properly test and iterate on the new drip, that tool is essential.

As the list of changes accumulates, Austin and Pobst finally break and tell Daud to let it go and stop worrying about other people's time. His responsibility, they say, is to the game. Making demands on other people's time is his job. It's their job to figure out how to manage that. And Associate Producer Dacey Willoughby's job, specifically, is to make sure it can all get done.

"Why don't you let go ... and let Dacey do that?" says Pobst, exasperated. "Seriously."

Daud acquiesces.

Austin jumps in: "Your job is to ask her for unreasonable things and then let her figure out how to do them."

Daud nods. He swallows, and he says, "OK."