'FTL: Faster Than Light' Postmortem: Designing Without a Pitch

The creation of FTL: Faster Than Light began with the desire to experience what it would feel like to be the captain of a starship. Many games have focused on space battles, but few games have focused on what happens in the ship itself. By focusing on a high-level goal of experiencing a singular feeling, and developing it with minimal preconceptions about FTL's gameplay, Subset Games was allowed to frequently alter or abandon aspects of its design, which eventually led to the game we know today. In this 2013 talkMatthew Davis and Justin Ma share their creative process as they take you step by step, from concept to crowdfunding to release.

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

Follow us on Twitter

Checkout our Facebook page for GDC exclusives

[egoalter]

"We're out of food, half the ship's on fire, and the cargo holds are overrun with giant scorpions." No that's one hell of a pitch.

[SecretlyStarscream]

I'm really glad they gave in to the demand of having a "save" function. It's one of the things that really makes this game as enjoyable as it is, that you don't have to commit to like 2 to 3 hours of gaming at once just to do a run.

[Syberi]

About halfway through this video, I forgot what I was doing and went to play FTL again after some years. I had a run that was just nuts: Engie Cruiser with two Ion II's, and a fire drone. Every ship I met burned to a crisp and by the time I faced the boss, I was almost fully upgraded and nigh invincible.
I just love this game so much. I can't imagine any other rogue-like coming out that could top it.

[HardyRyan]

I love FTL. Ive played over 300 hours and think it's one of the greatest games ever made - seriously, it's that good. It has almost a Tetris level of perfection.

[TehJumpingJawa]

Fascinating how such a wide and rambling design space, which could have easily gone off course or collapsed entirely, quickly coalesced into the game we see today; a cascading chain-reaction of ideas.

[FreshApplePie]

the "negative feedback loop" really is a core part of the game, there's so many near failures I've had where I've had to scrape by, every victory like that feels like it's luck or deserved, barely winning keeps the game exciting

[Manabender]

28:00

You know what, I'm actually OK with scrapping ship customization. It sounds great, yeah, but the system of "there's 18 ships you can pick from, now pick one" is actually better in this case.

Because, invariably, with such customization, there is going to be one "best" build that you gravitate to. Of course, that's still true of the prebuilt ships; some are provably better than others, but there's still a couple reasons why the array of prebuilts is better. First, it's another layer of difficulty selection; is playing on Hard with a good ship still too easy? Play on Hard with a bad ship. Second, it's a palatable (even if still massively difficult) achievement opportunity; "Beat the game once with each ship" is a viable goal, even if you don't explicitly make it an in-game achievement (because people will make it a personal goal on their own).

[Xune]

They were able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!

[bigchunk]

I really liked the writing and the music. I liked the concept of the slugs. You two hired well.

[General-Doge]

wow never imagined FTL was inspired by split screen Tetris, but it makes perfect sense!

[Baleur]

44:50 same as Darkest Dungeon or The Long Journey Home. Its a game based on attrition.
You are supposed to end up in bad situations where, fixing one thing eliminates your ability to fix another.
You're not supposed to always be able to repair and fix everything back to square 1 perfect status after every encounter.

[charlesajones]

"Just because you you have some extra money doesn't necessarily mean you can improve the game. You can't just throw money at something and it gets better" - The Mighty No 9 Principle

[SussyBokChoy]

The negative feedback loops really drive the game design home. One missile, causing a double fire and a breach, can have disastrous consequences. And it’s unbelievably exciting. “Oh god that missile got my doors. I can’t control them. But if I focus on weapons I’ll be fine! Right?”
About 25 seconds later, your doors are down, and fires are spreading like crazy. Fires can spread through doors, and you can’t open your vents to drain the oxygen to starve the fires! At that point, you just need your FTL to charge so you can jump to safety. The design is GENIUS!

I only got into FTL a couple months ago, but I’m glad these are the guys who got my money. 8 years late, but still. The game was so close, on multiple occasions, to be thrown off it’s current course during development. And honestly, I can’t imagine any significant improvements upon the game. Plus, the modding community is very active, so you can supercharge FTL with TONS of bonus content if you find the base version unappealing.

Congrats guys, this game rocks. Very nice work.

[TubeRudeYou]

Played the game about 1000 hours. Great job guys. A bit of learning curve, but with deep and varied gameplay (be sure and pray to the RNG god, haha). It's heartening to hear that a shared passion and vision can create a great things.

[ocksee]

It helps so much when the devs are half decent at presentations. GDC should offer a free course for their presenters to help improving their speaking or performing skills. There can be really great information in some of these videos that people can easily miss if the presenter is boring or hard to listen to. With some simple changes, it could make better content for GDC and provide better learning opportunities for people watching.

[MarcusAseth]

first 80 hours playing this game I never managed to beat it, then after that something clicked in my brain, maybe I started seeying this game patterns more easily, anyway 100 more hours after and I had finished it on Normal difficulty with all the ships types and variants and it actually felt really easy as well. (actually also finished once on hard, just to see if I could)
Just wish you guys had put Steam achievments though, so I could brag about it :)

[TheKenttt]

45:54


It's kind of sad that the game industry is at a point where so many people are putting micro transactions into their games that saying that you WON'T be putting them in gets you a round of applause. 3 years after this video and it's even worse.

[billygowhoop]

i've played around 80 hours all on easy and I think I've beaten the game once lol. still an amazing game

[gabrote]

I am now tearing through the GDC archives and this one is interestingly different. This is one of the first games I watched on YT and I owe it so much

[connorjackson]

So this talk was before the Advanced Edition? I noticed they kebtioned hacking didnt make it in but it is found in the AE