Dev to Dev S03 E05 - Heather Chandler

speaker-0: you
speaker-1: What hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Dev to Dev, the podcast about everyday video game developers and why they do what they do every day. This week a conversation with another person I've never met. Although I said this season was gonna be a mixture, so far it's been mostly people I don't know. That will change in the in the near future. But hey, on we roll. Yeah, this week a fascinating conversation with Heather Chandler, who was very generous to offer her time. I I appreciate that. It was really great conversation. Heather's had a wonderful career, especially I think starts with an angle that I've not had on the show before. Someone that wasn't into games, actually into movies, and and found their way in almost by chance, and it's become what was not a major part of her life, became a major part of her life. She's worked on some wonderful titles, gone from Big Triple A to Small Indy, to mobile games to Fortnite and Helldivers Two and great games like Apocalypse with Bruce Willis. A great mixture of games and Some some wonderful insight into getting the opportunity to learn on the job, figure out a place for yourself in in the in the industry and then really owning that that place and continuing to push forward. I think one of the things I took away from the conversation is Heather's very curious and just very excited about the process, about the people, about the technology. I mean, we sort of talk about how powerful a bridge that can be. You're not necessarily the expert in the room, but you're just fascinated and excited and curious about the the way people do things and that can be a a great way to to help. Bridge gaps and help bring people together, especially in a production role whereas Heather's held many times. So yeah, great conversation. Hope you enjoy it. Usual blurb. The podcast is on Patreon with season one and season two there available for you, and the video versions of season three. All the usual posts and socials go out, the clips, the blog. I also have a newsletter now. ⁓ a little newsletter which you can ⁓ subscribe to on the info from this episode. All the links are there as well in the details for the episode. Please check out dev to dev podcast.com as your launching point to connect with the show, connect with me. Again, I I've had a couple of people reach out. I really appreciate it. If anybody knows anyone they think would be a great guest on the show, please let me know. I'm more than happy to to connect and and get to know folks. I think there's there's so many of us that make games and so many of us that never get a voice and that's really what this podcast is all about. So please connect me with anyone that you think would be great on the show, including yourself if you want to. A dev to dev podcast at gmail.com. Keep an eye out for me in various places across the internet. But I will stop waffling and let's sit back and listen into another episode of Dev to Dev with Heather Chandler. Thanks, Taylor. Thank you for making the time. Excited to to get to know you more. I've never met you before, so I appreciate you you're ⁓ offering to be on the show. I'm excited. You've got a great history, so many interesting you know things you've done and projects you've worked on. So ⁓ but I always kick this off with my favourite first question. What first inspired you about video games?
speaker-0: That is a great question because I will be honest with you, I hadn't thought about having a career in the video game industry when I was growing up. ⁓ I was interested in having a career in the film industry. And I was living in Los Angeles and I was working as an intern at New Line Cinema and trying to get my foot in the door at various other places. And ⁓ Activision got my resume or someone over there got my resume. Now this was a very, very long time ago in the 90s. And at the time, Activision was looking for folks that had film backgrounds because they were trying to figure out how can they better organize the teams and get stuff done. Cause at the time, Activision had a huge internal studio for that time and they were working on like 10 or 12 different projects. And so I told the woman, said, ⁓ you know, I'm actually interested, not that interested in working in the game industry. ⁓ but she convinced me to come in and talk to them. And when I got there and I started seeing all the things that they were doing, I was like, wow, this is like way better than the film industry because it was a very welcoming environment. was very collaborative. And I guess the key thing is, is that people there were super passionate and very smart. And you can say, well, it's like that in the film industry. But I mean, I can tell you from my experience in the film industry, there were a lot of negative things. You see in the movies these executives that act like jerks and stuff towards their assistants. Yeah, I have a few stories like that. But when I walked into Activision, was like, wow, I really could see myself working here. They're creative in a different way. I really liked technology. I was always interested in STEM and whatnot when I was younger. So that appealed to me. At the time I wasn't a huge computer gamer. had played more casual sort of fair. I'd played a lot of board games. And so really it was kind of the people that inspired me. And so when I got there and I talked to them and I talked to like all the different teams, because I was interviewing for basically a production coordinator role slash executive assistant role where I would be working with the head of the studio. ⁓ And ⁓ it was just really... But that's what got me. And then when I started talking to my friend group and I said, you know, I'm going to interview with Activision, they were all like, ⁓ wow, Activision. That's so amazing. Because at the time, ⁓ what was the big game at the time? That was right when Dune had come out. Not that Activision published it, but they were super into video games. And they're like, yeah, Activision is one of the greats. They did all these Atari 2600 games. And it's so cool. They did Pitfall. And I was like, okay, like I've already gotten a much better reaction about this move than any of the film stuff I've tried to do and get my foot in the door. Why not try it? And so that is how I ended up working at Activision. And then 30 years later have stayed in the video game business the entire time.
speaker-1: I love that yeah, that's such a a a different genesis to to plenty of people I've had on on the on the show, which is which is which is excellent. I love the idea of you know, you're not really giving games a second thought until you met the people and then were like, actually, these are great people to work with. ⁓ what ⁓ 'cause yeah, you you sort of went to USC and and Vanderbilt and were very focused on on film. but you joined Activision at a really interesting time, right, when a w the apocalypse game with Bruce Willis was was around, there was some sort of Yeah, overlap like you said with with film and and and video games. So so interesting era to join.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think that was also part of it is that at the time, Activision was working, one of the few studios working on at the time a very cool technology full motion video in games. And so they had ⁓ a game called Spycraft, the great game, which was a very interesting story because that was a game where you played a spy and it was kind of like a point and click adventure game where you would click on different things and you were a spy and had to interpret clues. And then they would show full motion video to kind of propel the story forward. And that was a very big deal and we were super excited by it. And then they had the apocalypse game, which was one of the first games that I'm aware of that had a major at the time, a major celebrity attached to play a main character in the game, which was Bruce Willis. And ⁓ they were really kind of trying to, I think. figure out how can we marry sort of the game space with movie space and bringing in people with film backgrounds, I think was one way they're like, we probably could do this. Now, of course, we know the end of the story, which is that collaboration never really came to fruition the way that people thought it would, because games in and of themselves are very different from movies and require different things to keep the players excited and interested. so games went off and has had their own success, even surpassing the movies, I might add. ⁓ in many instances.
speaker-1: Yeah, and and and how was that process for you? I mean, it sounds like you were very versed in kind of the language and the process of of making film. ⁓ did you find yourself kind of on the back foot going into to you know video games? Or was there enough parallels that you could kind of get a footing and then learn on the job?
speaker-0: say not on my back foot per se because the role I had was like low person on the totem pole. So the expectations weren't like huge. So it actually was an advantage for me because I came in very fresh with fresh eyes and open mind and I was able to learn a lot of stuff on the ground. Now, as I started kind of comparing it to what I had learned about and film and whatnot, and I was always interested in a production role. even when I was interested in film, I wanted to be a producer because I all about getting people together, helping them figure out how to do a thing, making a plan, unblocking things for them, all of the stuff that a producer does. so what I found was that the game industry at the time was very Wild West as to how they actually made stuff. And so I would come in and they had like 10 or 12 internal teams. They were all working on very uniquely different projects. We had a game called Interstate 76. I don't know if you remember that game, but it was a car combat game. And so that was using, you know, their proprietary engine. had the MechWarrior 3D ⁓ game, which at the time also very cutting edge, which had a different engine they were working on. They had the sports game called Hyperblade. They had the Zork games. So they had like these, all these different games and every team was approaching ⁓ making their game very differently. And so that to me was really interesting because I'm like, wow, it seems like there's a lot of effort going on and maybe if they did this or that and had better sort of process and production stuff. because games are the way they are and the people that were working on them were the way they were, they really just wanted to go in, get some prototyping done, write some design documents and kind of see their efforts. versus trying to overlay any type of process or planning on it. And so the things that I was on my back foot about basically were just sort of the game development type terms, know, alpha, beta, things now that are second nature to me, ⁓ you know, engines and how do they work? ⁓ What do all the various people on the team do? Like what's difference between this programmer who's working on this versus this designer? What does this designer do? And so I was able to actually learn all of those things at Activision. And because I was low person on the totem pole, but I also worked for the head of the studio, I actually had a lot of freedom to kind of go around and I was able to talk to whoever I wanted to on the team. I could sit down and talk with designers when they had time, like I was in a pain, ⁓ you know, ask them questions, learn about, and they were all, all very happy to share knowledge and There was a guy there who really ⁓ was interested in teaching me how to program or the basis of programming because I was asking him a little bit about that and he's like, hey, you were asking about it. There was some other person in the team who wasn't a programmer who wanted to learn more. So he started doing lunchtime things for us. Like once a week we would get together and he would kind of just talk about the basics of programming and engines and all of that. obviously, you know, an incredibly supportive team and very helpful people, many of whom I still in touch with today. And they got the games done. It was a time when you would say, hey, when can we play the game? Like, you know, so and so wants to look at the game and they'd be like, ⁓ we can't play it for six months. Because at the time you wrote everything down in a design document. And then if you were lucky, you were able to prototype it. But that's only if you had an engine. because we didn't have Unreal or Unity. Everybody had to build their own engines. And so if the engine wasn't ready and you didn't have anything to play, it was kind of like building a bridge from two different ends, and you were just hoping that they would meet in the middle around the time when you thought they would. And of course, when they did, it was kind of mismatched. And so then there was these horrible bugs and stuff like that, and that would take another three months to sort out. ⁓ And so those were all the wonderful things that I got to learn about and experience. And so even though I came from a very different background, I was able to jump into the chaos and experience it. And, ⁓ you know, I think provide some help and support. was often, I play tested almost all the games. We would organize these sort of company wide play tests. I've ⁓ played a lot of, a lot of those games. We had a Muppet game we were doing. And it was just, it was so much fun, so much fun. just, the people, like I said, were so awesome. ⁓ fun story. I used to work with Mark Lamia. And if you're familiar with him, ⁓ he was, he was like a senior VP at Activision in charge of the Call of Duty stuff. But when I met him, he was the person who sat in what we called the burn room, who had to burn all of the CDs that we would use. because we would go through hundreds of CDs in a given week because that was the only way we could get the games down to the QA department or because we didn't have things where you could upload the games or anything like that. that was his first job is sitting there burning all these CDs. And then he, of course, rose up kind of like I did and became, you know, a pretty top dog over
speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it and it sounds like what a great four, you know, almost just over four years, that opportunity to be, you know, between different teams and sort of see those differences, but also learn those different practices and kind of give you a very broad understanding of how games are put together. At, like you say, a very important time, right? An important time when technology was advancing quickly, you know, the way things are doing. I mean, you could argue even though engines have maybe you know, homogenized a little bit, our processes still happen, right? We're still in that world of everyone sort of builds their game slightly differently. So great ground g I'm sure gave you an excellent grounding to then take on to EA and then on to to Ubisoft as as a ⁓ you know, as a producer.
speaker-0: Absolutely, I mean, one of the things I remember is back then, just even getting a game ready for Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft was very different than how you would do it today. Again, most of the time because we didn't have like cloud stuff and digital uploads and you would have to burn, ⁓ you would have to get, for Nintendo you had to submit the actual cassettes or the desks, you know what I'm talking about, the cartridges, cartridges. And so you'd have to make eight or. nine of the cartridges with copies of the game and physically mail it to them. ⁓ One time my boss came by my desk. It was the end of the day and he's like, Hey, do you have a passport? And I'm like, yes. He's like, ⁓ okay, well we need someone to deliver the gold master of the game to Europe because the, ⁓ manufacturer is waiting for it and it's faster for us to just send somebody on a plane tonight. than it would be to try to, at the time, even FedEx couldn't do international shipping overnight, it would take at least three days. And so I said, sure. So I hopped on a plane and I went to London and dropped off the disc for them the next day, which is, know, so it was always, it seemed very exciting. Like there was all kinds of stuff like that happening all the time and just learning how all these pieces go together. And I learned a lot about physical disc manufacturing actually. And of course, as you know, that's becoming less important, but just the process of making a physical disc of a game and then getting it into a box and all the pieces that go into the cost of goods, like you've got the box, you've got the manual. Back then, every game came with these manuals that were like this thick. And one of my jobs was ⁓ converting that to HTML and then putting together like these little very simple HTML files. But I would put those together and we would put those on the physical disk and we're like, ⁓ we're so cutting edge. Cause now they have this electronic version of the manual.
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, like you say, such a fantastic sort of transition point in the industry. ⁓ yeah, and as someone who's, you know, sat up till five in the morning to burn a gold master to hand to a a FedEx guy to whisk whisk off somewhere to get it get it manufactured. I I s I know what you mean. ⁓ but so so you spend, like I say, about four years at Atomidgen and then move over to EA. Like what triggered that move and and you know, when you left, how did you feel in terms of being someone in the industry? Did you feel very like you kind of had a good handle on it or or were you still sort of catching up?
speaker-0: always felt like by the time I left Activision, I felt I had a good basic handle and I knew that I was on a production track and I was interested in doing that. I really honestly, the reason that I was like, hey, I think it's time for me to find something different is number one, when you're kind of trying to build your career, you're always trying to find the next step forward for you. And I really was like, okay, I want to become a producer with my own project. And at Activision, it probably could have happened. but I started putting feelers out because I honestly wanted to move back to the East Coast because that's where I was from. So it was a bit influenced by sort of personal reasons, but ⁓ at the time when I made that transition, EA was trying to build up a presence in the East Coast with a studio there in Charlottesville that they had purchased a studio. And so... I was brought in as a producer there. And so I thought, okay, this fulfills both my goals. I'm going to be a producer on my own projects and I'm going to be closer on the East coast and better access to family and friends. Because I flew out and moved to California. It was just me. I had no support system or anything like that. if you're close to your family and you don't see them that often, it kind of, after a while, I was in LA for seven years and it just, I was like, I need that support. I started working at EA and they had purchased a studio called Kesmai. And Kesmai was semi-famous because they were one of the first studios to do ⁓ online gaming over, I think it was called the Genie system, where you could, they had a game called Air Warrior, where you, it was a flight sim based on different, I want to say World War II, where you could go and fly planes and stuff. And so they had set up all of this technology, backend technology, where you could play it online with your friends, which at the time was very novel. And ⁓ so they already had this technology and they also had a really good partnership with AOL. And back in the day, AOL was a huge name in games and they had all of these casual games. And so they had a suite of casual games that they were doing with AOL. ⁓ you know, there was, what was it called? Slotto. There was some sort of like slots lottery combination game that was super popular. They had card games and stuff like that. And so, ⁓ I interviewed and became a producer there. And so I moved to Charlottesville and, ⁓ everything was going great. We had a fun suite of games we were doing. It seemed like EA was really interested in kind of growing the studio. ⁓ But in the reality was is that the studio got shut down roughly a year after I had been there. think EA wanted to build it up into a thing, but you know, EA is EA and things happen and business decisions get made. so the studio, most of the folks were laid off. Some people, were, you were offered the opportunity to go work for another EA studio, but I was not interested in moving back to California. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to have to go find something else, what other studios are on the East Coast. And while I was at EA, the benefit of working there is that I learned a ton about online games. Like at Activision, everything, we didn't have any online games. And so I learned about backends and servers and clients, and that was not stuff that I had been very well versed in. And so I learned all the pieces about that. I learned how to do backend releases. All the producers were trained on how to update basically all the backend service systems, how to update the clients. ⁓ And so I learned a bunch of technical stuff there that I was always very interested in learning. ⁓ yeah, that was a great, great learning experience. And again, working with very smart people, very passionate people. And ⁓ yeah, that was a really, really great experience.
speaker-1: Hmm. Interesting. So yeah, and and it sounds like at that era, just like the Activision gig, right? Sort of at a very important time when the industry's shifting and giving you a a good opportunity to pick up on on some of that technology, some of the stuff you need to know moving forward. ⁓ and that took you on to Ubisoft to also i in you know on the east coast. ⁓ so you got you to sort of stay in that area.
speaker-0: And then one fun story about working at KESM-I. ⁓ At the time, they were super excited because there was this new engine on the scene and we were gonna get a demo of it and that was the Unreal Engine. so I got to Tim Sweeney at the time, Tim Sweeney was just Tim Sweeney, genius programmer and Mark Raine ⁓ came to KESM-I to demo their engine. And so that was super exciting and everybody's like, Ooh, maybe we could use this. Cause everybody's like, this is going to save us so much time. And, ⁓ you know, then EA shut us down. We were going to use it, but then we didn't get a chance to. So I did end up, ⁓ working at RedStorm and which had just been acquired by Ubisoft. And again, as part of kind of your career growth, I'm like, okay, like I've learned all this stuff here and yeah, I got laid off and totally sucks to get laid off. ⁓ But I opened up sort of my ⁓ job search because I thought, okay, staying on East Coast was the priority for me. And so if I couldn't do that, ⁓ I wasn't going to relocate back to California for a game job. So I put feelers out at a lot of different non-game places, but I was very fortunate that ⁓ Red Storm hired me and I went in as an associate producer. And that was a different sort of thing because they had Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six. And they needed me at first to come in and focus on marketing because they had just been acquired by Ubisoft. And so Ubisoft wanted to come in and provide ⁓ marketing support and other types of support. So basically I became the person that helped organize all of the stuff that our publisher needed. So I guess kind of like a hybrid dev slash publishing producer. And from there, I mean, again, I was able to learn a lot of stuff that I hadn't. been ⁓ exposed to before, you know, from the marketing side and from the publisher side. And what's it like working with a person that's providing you funding? Like, how do you manage that relationship? You know, how do you prioritize their asks versus the stuff that you need internally? And then I was also there to support the other producers on various things, know, play testing, localization stuff, did a ton of localization stuff, marketing stuff. and learned a lot about ⁓ downloadable content. Because again, ⁓ back in the day, that is when the console system started doing more extensible content. Because before you would buy a disc, and then that was the game, and you would play it, and then would put it aside and come back, but they didn't really have any way to update it, ⁓ update that content. And so when Xbox came out and Ghost Recon was one of the launch titles, we learned a ton about, well, how do you plan for that post-launch life after your game? Right? So what does that look like? What does downloadable content look like? And at the time it was usually paid downloadable content, not sort of the live service model we see today. And so my role there was just, ⁓ I moved on to getting my own team. So I believe... It might've been some of all fears was one of the first titles over there that they're like, okay, Heather, you're no, actually I was the AP on that one. But, ⁓ the producer I was working with gave me a lot of, a lot of responsibility, which I so appreciated. ⁓ but it was Ghost Recon 2, think that, ⁓ one of the expansion packs was kind of like my first, like I'm piloting the ship. You know, I'm on officially on the leads team. I'm the one that's setting these meetings. I'm the one that's responsible for making sure everything happens. Got to make sure that people have what they need, that we are providing Ubisoft the information that they need, that the game is good, that it's playing well, that it's on track, ⁓ and all of that stuff.
speaker-1: Yeah, it sounds like a fascinating remit then, 'cause it was it was the the more traditional production, but also working with it, you know, Ubi is the sort of mother brain, right? There's the the sort of the and then also the marketing side, like how did you how did you adapt to that? 'Cause that's quite a different focus, right, from focusing very internally on the team and the process to how this project gets seen outside of the studio. Like how was that?
speaker-0: Yeah. And I would say like one of the things that I was constantly doing in that role is trying to manage the marketing department's expectations versus what the team was able to do or deliver. Marketing is all about, we need new content. We need screenshots. We need demos. We, ⁓ we're going to have it at E3. So we need to set up a special build for that. And so they're constantly need all of this stuff and they would say, ⁓ we have this opportunity to work with XYZ celebrity, so what celebrity voiceovers could we do? So from my side, it was a lot of kind of like getting all of these requests and stuff in, and then of course, personally knowing where the team was in development thinking, well, they won't get that, that's probably not gonna happen. This we might be able to do, but we won't be able to get it done in the timeframe in which they need it. And so then it was a lot of prioritizing. Okay, we definitely know that E3 is a priority. So we gotta have something good that we can showcase for that. Marketing's building a whole marketing plan around it. They're gonna have these 30 journalists blow through the booth during E3 and we're gonna demo it. ⁓ We're going to, ⁓ let's see, what were some of the other things they would do? ⁓ they would do these things where they would have PR specific events. So they would set up at a hotel or something. and then they would fly the devs out there. And so we would have to write up the demo scripts. So it was all tangentially related to the actual game. But from my perspective, because I was responsible for it, it was equally important. And so it was very interesting kind of understanding. OK, at what time? And that's when I started really was able to kind of ⁓ say, hey, guys, I think there's a better, nicer way we can do this. And so I was able to kind of build out sort of ⁓ a pipeline for marketing assets and then marry it into the development calendar. So I was able to work pretty closely with the producers and say, okay, we know that marketing is going to ask about this. So before they ask us and tell us what they want, let's figure out what we can do that would roughly fit what they need. And then we go to them and say, here's what we can give you. And that helped a lot because it made marketing feel safer. and that they were able to know that the team was keeping marketing at the forefront of our minds and that we were planning for it versus what had been happening is like the team gets very focused because at the end of the day, we want to make a great game and deliver it to the players and we're less concerned about these sort of checks and balances in the way that marketing needs honestly to make the game happen. And so once we started thinking with their brain and putting the marketing stuff in there, I think it smooths it over for everybody at that time. And then we could more easily prioritize and say, we can do this, no, we can't do that. Or if you want this, we're not gonna do this. And then that worked out really, really well.
speaker-1: Yeah, smart. Yeah, kind of getting in front of it and and s you know, feeding the the the supplier rather than waiting to be asked. And and I guess it's also a really interesting time as well where, you know, yes, E three, you know, still a thing, but also kind of general internet, you know, coverage, you know, outside of the traditional magazines. The internet's starting to really take off around that era and and therefore a much bigger appetite for screenshots and report and interviews and all that kind of stuff. I'd imagine that added to that was an interesting time to navigate as well.
speaker-0: Yeah, and then the amount of attention and detail that go into making a screenshot was also a learning curve for me. Because I'm like, I remember marketing needed something and I was like, ⁓ I'll go take some screenshots. And of course, we have to internally review all these screenshots. And so I was like, OK, here are some different things that we could do. And I took the screenshots myself and I take them to the leads group. And of course, the art director's like, ⁓ who made these screenshots, they're horrible. And I was like, ⁓ I did them and he's like, yeah, we can't send these out. I mean, like the camera angle, the lighting, the this or that, you know, and again, I'm not an artist. And I was just like, okay, I get it. And he's like, look, ⁓ you just tell me what you need and we'll grab like a QA testers actually, they were because they know the game so well, we would then, he's like, and I want you to sit down. with so and so, and then we've got the list, and then let him make some screenshots, and then we can look at them together and kind of decide from there. ⁓ Because screenshots were so, and I guess they still are, I don't know, because at the time, these were like actual screenshots of gameplay. Like they were not doctored in any way, they didn't have any tweaks on them, so they had to look as good as they could. And then other things like making key art. Okay, well what's... what's the key art, what art's gonna be on the box. And I remember going through all the details like, ⁓ like Ghost Recon, mean, one of the hallmarks is all of the realism. So even down to the guns and like it uses this type of ammunition and it has these attachments on it. Like looking at key art and being like, huh, the barrel of that gun is not quite right because it should be this versus that, let's fix that. And things like that and so that that was super interesting
speaker-1: Yeah, and and you know, say very high pressure, right? 'Cause everything that gets shown publicly has to be right, you know, as someone that's done a lot of screenshots for games as well. Yeah, it could i you know, those especially I think even more so now in the modern age, right, where anybody can take a screenshot, right? The official ones like have to be the best of the best. I think it's even more pressure.
speaker-0: Yes, they do. And if you have rabid fans, they're going to go and dissect those screenshots, everything. then you're like, ⁓ wow. You know, that was the thing. that was actually ⁓ Ghost Recon was the first game too, where I got would get, I got called out on the forums because they're like, Heather Chandler, you know, what does she know about military stuff? Because obviously I don't have a military background or whatnot. And so that was kind of amusing to me that they were thinking, If they think that me, associate producer working in marketing assets, has any influence on the game at all, they just don't know. But that was always entertaining to me because at the time I could say that I don't think the internet is as toxic as it is today. But ⁓ that was kind of fun too, to really understand how important community can be and how they have these expectations and they want everything to be perfect because they've been sitting there waiting. the next iteration of their game to come out and you know if you don't do it justice they're going to be quite upset with you.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah, and they have a voice to that they will very loudly vocalise that if they do. ⁓ and a and ⁓ so you know, you're you're you've soft for about about four years. Around that time you also become an author. You start writing some what what triggered that and what inspired you to to to go write some books?
speaker-0: So I love school. I love learning. And at the time, I would always buy a book for anything that I'm like, hey, I don't know anything about this. Let me go to the library. Let me go buy a book about this. And so as I got to know and understand more about the game industry and the role as a producer specifically, there just was no material about it at all. There was no information about localization, which was the game localization handbook was the first book I wrote. And again, going back to the Activision days, We would often ship in English only first because it would take six months to localize the game. And so then all these territories would have to wait all this time. And so one of the big things they were trying to solve back in the nineties is how could you get games localized more quickly? And I ended up doing a ton of localizations at Activision and ⁓ also at Ubisoft. And so I became very well versed in that. And as I would be talking to people, I'd be like, wow, there's just some basic localization stuff that if people knew and they could plan for it, that would be super helpful for them. So I wrote the book because I was like, I think there's a need for this and the publisher who published it agreed. And so that was my first book, which was just game localization handbook. Didn't really think anything about it because I just, was an easy book to write because I'm like, ⁓ gosh, there's just so many different things that nobody was talking about it. And so when that came out, And it did pretty well. My publisher's like, well, you what other ideas do you have? And I said, well, you know what? I would love to write one about production because when I started being a producer, I had no idea what a producer did or what the role was. And you can't find any books or information or even blogs. Like this is before people started having blogs. And I said, I'd love to write a book about game production and kind of what's What's the process for building a game? And so they're like, that sounds great. And so basically I wrote the book that I wished I had had about game production. And if you've read the book, I very much structure it like you have a project that is nothing. And then here are all the different things that you're going to need to do. And it's got a lot of project management stuff. Like if a project manager reads the book, they recognize, ⁓ yes, of course you want to. scope out your thing. You want to prioritize this. Here's how you want to approach planning. But again, in the game industry, a lot of these things hadn't been verbalized or spoken about in a more formal way. And so I wrote that book and both the localization book and the production handbook, I still, I'll go to a conference and people come up to me, ⁓ my God, I read your book. It's so helpful. know, and most, I think it's been like eight years since I've made any updates to either one of them because You know, the producer's role still fundamentally is quite much the same as far as the different techniques and stuff you can use. And so that is how I ended up writing those books. And in both instances, I was finishing the book the same time I was trying to get a game released. And this was before I had ⁓ a child. So I had a lot more time on my hands. ⁓ was able, managed to do it. It's not something I would want to do today though, cause it's just so incredibly time consuming.
speaker-1: Mm. Yeah, I love I love the idea of like, ⁓ that book was easy to write, even though books you know, books I'm sure are not easy to write, but like you say, when you've got the time and you've you you kind of understand the subject matter so well, I guess that's a lot easier to to have that book come to be.
speaker-0: My editor did tell me that my writing style was very dry. So I'm not going to say these books are a laugh, a riot, but I will say they're packed with information. And so I did attempt on one of the versions to kind of, I don't know, not spice it up and just make it sound less technical. But I mean, at the end of the day, people, these, I think the books are easier to write because I'm just partaking information, taking it directly from my experience and saying I did this. And here's the outcome, here's the template that I used, you know, here is other ways that you could think about doing it. So it's not, you know, it's not a bedtime read, it's not a beach read.
speaker-1: But like you say, the book that you wish you'd had when you were when you were coming to be. So after so you you spend s at this point you've kind of spent some time at some big studios, right? Activision EA, Ubisoft. ⁓ and then you go freelance. You you become a consultant. What triggered that? And and and obviously, you know, were and and have were a consultant for a for a good while. What triggered that? What what made you feel like you were ready to move into that kind of consultant role, which can be a lot more challenging?
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is a lot more challenging. That was part of kind of my long-term plan is to become a freelancer and a consultant. And so when I wrote those books, I was kind of thinking, okay, this is a good way to establish credibility and whatnot. The transition happened sooner than I thought it would because I was ready to kind of, I thought, okay, I've still got some stuff to do and learn at these studios. But there was a company in Los Angeles that had read my localization book. And ⁓ they were a translation and subtitling company that worked mostly in film. And they were very interested in opening up a games division. And they read my book. And so they specifically came to me. They didn't just say, hey, we've got to figure this out. They read my book. They contacted me. And I was like, is this even real? Like, this just seems so... And they're like, yeah, you know, we'd be really interested in talking to about this. We're actually going to be at E3, you know? So if you're there, we'd love to meet with you. And ⁓ I said, sure, because I was going to be at E3. And ⁓ it was a legit thing. they were, it was a real company and they, they said, yeah, we're really interested in understanding the games industry. How can we do stuff like that? And so that was my first gig. And so I was very fortunate that the first freelance gig I received was a year long contract. And so I was like, okay, even though I loved. working at Ubisoft and they had lots of exciting things to do, I thought this is ⁓ worth taking a chance for, right? Because as you know, the life of a freelancer is feast or famine, but it's a one-year contract. So at least I know for the next year, things are great. And then I'll figure it out after that. And so that's really what triggered that. And so I got to go and I worked with them and they were based in Los Angeles, but I still worked ⁓ here. ⁓ on the East Coast. And again, a great learning experience. So again, part of my plan is like every time I took a gig or did something, I was like, what new things am I going to learn? How can I apply this and stuff like that? And so that was really interesting learning a lot about subtitling and dubbing and all of that in the film industry. And then how could you take the processes and things they have and translate it to the game industry in a way that makes sense? in a way that provides rates that are competitive for games and quality controls and all of that. And so I worked with them for a year and I got their whole process set up. And then once they got it all up and running, their plan was, which they did, is like, okay, now that we've got it, we're gonna hire a full-time on-site person to do that, which is fine because I already, as a freelancer, you're always out there networking and making connections. I already had started lining up sort of my next sort of freelance things. And so that was a very strong start to the freelancing career. And I think with my background and the length of time that I had been in the industry and I had people from Activision that I do now at Ubisoft and Red Storm that people knew to come to me. because they're like, ⁓ yeah, Heather has worked on stuff like this before. So if we need a freelance producer, which is really sort of my main thing that I was freelancing on, we should go talk to her. And so, you know, as a freelancer, lots of little gigs add up. And so ⁓ I'd get a gig to go, you know, be a producer for three to six months. Sometimes it would be a year. And I was able to kind of, you know, be very lucky again and finding jobs that kind of just kept feeding sort of that freelance career. And my goal was, I'm just gonna follow this through until the end of the thing. And if I don't have any work or if the work dries up, I've got other options because you can always take the skills that you learn and apply them to different industries. The trick is getting the person that is from the other industry to understand that you can do the job. It's just that it's skinned a different way, right?
speaker-1: Hmm. Yeah, that's a good way of phrasing it. And and fascinated that your first ⁓ freelance gig kind of smashed the two things that you love together. That was kind of perfect, like the films and the games. Yes. What a great opportunity. ⁓ and and I'm curious, sort of how did you you know, freelancing's not for everyone, right? And it takes a certain type of mentality and personality to be able to be a successful freelancer. Like, did you feel you said it was always your goal, did you feel like you were that person from the start, or did you kind of learn that process along the way, or like How did you f have the confidence to step out as a freelancer?
speaker-0: Let's say I'm at heart a very entrepreneurial person and being a freelancer is pretty much being an entrepreneur. And so I always felt 100 % confident in my abilities to do stuff. I also felt 100 % confident in saying, you know what, if I have to take up a job, like a job, like, you know, working at a retail place or whatever, I'm not opposed to doing that. Like I felt that I had the mentality like I'll do whatever I need to do to pay my bills. And so I was very lucky in that regard. And I think that confidence definitely helped me continue to get working.
speaker-1: And and and so ⁓ y you y you also, after, you know, a long a long period of freelancing but sort of maybe with some overlap, you form a studio. You form Elephant Mouse and you you start
speaker-0: yeah. So Elephant Mouse, that actually, I did not form that studio. That was a studio that I had some friends that I had worked with at Red Storm worked at. so Elephant Mouse was the name of that studio and he brought me in as kind of their studio director. And so that got a special mention in my profile mostly because that became my main gig for quite some time and I was basically working with them full time as a studio director. And that was a fun team. because that was a mobile studio. So they were making mobile games and I had not done that before. I had only really worked on proper video games and certainly not mobile games at that time, proper, you know what I mean? I had only worked on PC console games. And so it was a four person team and they needed a producer type to come in and help them just kind of do stuff. They had some really fun games they were working on and they had already at least one called Little Birds where you, it was like a casual game where you collected birds and you hatched eggs and stuff like that. know, the typical mobile game fair, but our game was just really cute. The art was beautiful. The mechanics were really nice. And this is before mobile games had gone free to play. And so you just simply paid for the game and then you could play the game and it didn't have any of these weird mechanics like, ⁓ you're running out of time. You know, you need to pay more money to do this. And so I stayed with them, I think about a year or two, and it was the same core four people. had an artist, we had a designer, we had an engineer, we had an audio guy, and then myself, and we handled all aspects of it. ⁓ we had QA testers. So we got some local QA testers, so very small team. And the person who owned the studio, ⁓ He had other things he was doing. He was an entrepreneur as well. And so the studio was one of the things that he did because he really loved video games. But I ran all the day to day stuff. again, in keeping with my theme of like, what am I learning? I learned about mobile games, I learned about free to play, I learned about buying ads, you know, because from a marketing standpoint, mobile games get marketed at the time very differently. So you had to buy ads. So I had to learn all about that. ⁓ And I also learned how to run ⁓ a business. So I took care of, I was the HR department. I was the finance department. I did everybody's paychecks. I picked the health insurance plan, talked to the landlord when there were issues. So I learned all of those aspects of basically how to run a business. And cause I took care of all the day-to-day stuff. If it was something that required money, I would message my guy and be like, Hey, here's the deal and here's what's happening. And it's going to cost this much. And he'd be like, ⁓ okay, ⁓ no problem. And then I would just take it from there and do all the stuff that was needed. At one point we were looking for new office space. So I learned all about leasing offices and square footage and stuff like that.
speaker-1: Well and and I'm I'm guessing that served you well in the future for for a whole brain. But yeah I I d I do want to just spend a little bit of time on Fortnite. You know, you join you jump over to Epic, ⁓ you know, you know, in your relatively in your neighborhood, right? In the staying on the East Coast and you join at a fascinating time. Like how did that role h come up and and what was that like?
speaker-0: So I knew a lot of people that worked over at Epic and I was very happy freelancing and at the time working for Elephant Mouse, but I kind of got that itch. I'm like, okay, like mobile games is okay, but it's not really where I see myself long-term. And also a team of four, know, versus a team of 60 or a hundred is very different. And I thought, you know what? It's time I freelanced for long enough. I kind of missed that face-to-face communication. ⁓ at the time, of course, this was way before the pandemic. so you worked on site for everything and they were at my neighborhood and I knew folks that worked over there and I liked all of them. And so I thought, Hey, you know what? I'll apply. I'll see what happens. And so they brought me in. Now this was pre-Fortnite. Fortnite was in development and I was going to be on the Fortnite team. And at the time, ⁓ I think it was like 60 or so people they had on the team. And they only had, I think, two producers, and then they added me. And we were trying to figure out, ⁓ when can we get this game launched? They had actually made it, had done a lot of work. So by the time I came on board, the Fortnite Save the World ⁓ was what it was. Like they had the building system in place. They had ⁓ all of the design systems in place. They had the look of the game, the art style. And so the question was just what more content do we need to add? What progression mechanics do we need to have? That's where I learned a lot about sort of user experience, UX, progression mechanics and stuff like that. Because one of the things they had at Epic was they had a full UX testing ⁓ department that was headed up by Celia Hodent, ⁓ who if you're not familiar with her, she is the queen of UX. And so that's where I met Celia and she was bringing sort of like, here is how you properly do UX at a game studio. And so she had, you know, a department, she had folks in there and she was spending a lot of time. They were looking at Fortnite and UX testing it and figuring out, okay, like for example, ⁓ in the game you have to take your pickaxe and destroy things. Well, what... players weren't doing that in the UX test and what they discovered, ⁓ okay, whatever mark you're using to say, hey, you can hit this thing like it's not registering with players. So we tried out various different things like that. They would give us feedback on like, how do you open doors or how does the building system work? So I think one of the reasons that ⁓ Fortnite, and I'll talk about the battle royal piece in a minute, but that the building system in Fortnite always was very highly praised. because we had the luxury of doing a ton of UX testing on it. And so a ton of tweaking and polishing. And so it was very smooth. And you could just kind of go in. You could build really fast. ⁓ And of course, they had the most talented artists that work there. And of course, the most talented programmers and designers. And we had the Unreal Engine. And so if we needed something changed in the engine, the engine department was right next door. You could go and say, We want to do add some grass that, you know, waves in the wind. Okay, we'll put it on the list of features for the engine. And so I was brought in and all of this stuff was ongoing. And so my big thing that I was responsible for was how are we going to get the game lined up and ready to be sort of self-published? So this was when Epic was doing the... ⁓ their launcher. So Fortnite had its own launcher. You were going to download it and all of that stuff. And so I worked with ⁓ various departments, sort of like the technology department. I worked with the dev team. ⁓ I worked with publishing folks, so sort of like the marketing and the localization and sort of pulled all those pieces together. And so that was kind of my role. It's like we had the most talented people working on the stuff. I was there just keeping the trains running. and making sure that ⁓ we had an understanding, we had a schedule, we had the technology in place that the bugs were getting dealt with. So basically all that sort of pure producerly stuff that producers worry about on a day-to-day basis. And so we launched the game in July of, don't remember the date now, I to say 2016 maybe. And so, At the same time, when we launched that version of Save the World, which was all it was at the time, there was another team that was working on... They had been working on Unreal Tournament, and so they had this idea for a game mode for Fortnite utilizing the Fortnite assets that they were working on. And so that was the battle royale that people now associate it with. And so they were able to take all those wonderful... systems, the building system, the art, the characters and whatnot and put them in that game mode. And so I want to say we released that in September just to kind of see what would players think. One of the big things I learned on Fortnite was the importance of getting real-time player feedback and the importance of being able to sort of test things with a trusted group of beta players before it goes out to the real world. Because we had a whole thing set up where we had ⁓ we would launch the game to a couple hundred people that were part of what were they called? Fortnite storm chasers. And they could play the game and give us feedback on stuff before it went live. And so we kind of did that and we launched Battle Royale and we said, okay, well, what are players going to think about it? And of course the rest is history. It caught on super fast. People loved it. so, know, Epic as a business was like, hey, like this has really caught on. What can we do to... make this a better gaming experience for the players? What can we add to it that gets people excited to continue playing the game? And so that was one of the things that we then were like, okay, like the train is running, we're on it. And so then kind of our focus pivoted towards content. And so we're like, how do we keep feeding the content machine? And so that's kind of, we pivoted from doing, I think more traditional style, like make a thing, test it, release it. Players enjoy it for a couple months. We release an update for it and they play that. I believe we were one of the first live games as a service games that really went to that weekly content cadence, which was insane at the time, but also insanely fun because it was so challenging. you know, everybody was very passionate about making this happen because you get excited when the players are excited. And so we had teams that were working very hard to kind of come up with this new stuff. We figured out how to do these weekly content updates and that really kind of helped set it on a really strong foundation for it to continue to grow and become kind of the behemoth that it became.
speaker-1: I mean for sure, like what a what an incredible moment in in the the industry, right, to to be there as that pivot happens. And you know, you you're very I think you're very humble about your impact on that. I mean it that must have been a very challenging, like you say, very exciting but very challenging ship to wrangle, right? All these not only wrangling shipping again, but then this pivot into this, you know, substantially harder ⁓ approach that, you know, you're obviously a you know a big part of.
speaker-0: Yeah, it was incredibly challenging, but as noted earlier, I love a challenge. so ⁓ when you're in it together with a whole bunch of other people that are like the same mindset, it's still challenging, but somehow enjoyable and bearable. Now look, are there times when I was like, God, I'm so stressed out? Like, yes, obviously that happens. Were there times when I came in on a weekend to get something done? Of course. but you feel like you want to do these things because when you work on a game like that that kind of shatters expectations on that level, it's very exciting and it kind of fuels you. Now, I will say there is a cautionary tale. Then that's the thing I learned is you can't go 110 or 120 % all the time. You have to be able to say, you know what? I'm going to draw a line here because I need to take that break and kind of recharge myself. And so I think that's something that I definitely learned on that project is you can't go all out all the time because then you're not going to have anything left, you know, later on.
speaker-1: Yeah, so true. yeah, so so you spend so you know, almost four years there. And then you sort of make the pivot from what was probably the biggest game in the world at that time over to Indies, right? Over to indie game business and you know, and kind of focusing on on smaller projects again. What what drove that change?
speaker-0: Well, when you work on a game like Fortnite and you're giving sort of all your all to it, I was like, I've been working in the game industry for a long time. I have learned lots of different things. And I do want to say for those listening out there, ⁓ you know, working in the games industry is incredibly valuable and it's super fun, but you're not necessarily going to be able to retire off of it. And so people are like, ⁓ Fortnite, blah, blah. But you know, I kind of left before it became. what it became now. And so it's not like, no, I mean, I have to, I still have to go out there and work. don't have anyway. So, but what I wanted to do was I said, you know what? I feel confident in my abilities. I'm going to go out there and see what I can do. And so my pivot was I started an escape room, a physical escape room with my husband. And so that was supposed to be that pivot, which is like, I've learned all this stuff from the games industry. I've learned how to run a business. I've learned how to make games. I've learned how to think about it from a publisher standpoint, from a player standpoint. And I thought, I'm going to bet on myself, we're going to start this business. And so my husband, who is ⁓ a game designer, and I, we're like, okay, like, what can we do? What can we do together? And so someone had suggested, ⁓ you guys should open an escape room. And we're like, wow, that's really interesting. We should go do that. And so ⁓ we did that. And we opened our escape room in 2019. I think you see where this is going. And so my husband had built out all of the rooms. I had done all of sort of the operations and business stuff, lease negotiation, marketing, website, all of that stuff. We had tested the games. Everything was going really, really well. And we opened it in 2019 and we're like, this is awesome. And so I had these grand plans like, ⁓ we're going to open up multiple locations. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. And then 2020 happens and there's this pandemic and you can imagine an escape room is not an essential business. And so we had to completely close it down for eight months. Done. Like, you know, it wasn't even worth going over to the building. And so that was, that was pretty disheartening. will say that is, that was, that was a very, that was tough, very, very tough. And so then I was like, okay, like we, need we need to make a living here. Like our livelihood is on hold right now. And so that is, so then I ended up, you know, I said, okay, time to put the shingle out again and start freelancing. And so I knew Jay Powell, who I think you've spoken to, he and I go way back because we ⁓ run in the same game development circles. And I also had ⁓ some contacts from when I had worked in Los Angeles. And I was able to kind of cobble together enough freelance work with indie studios to kind of, you know, keep me busy while the escape room was closed. And so that's how I ended up working on a game. was a game called Beyond Blue about underwater exploration. had worked with Elon before when I was a freelancer prior on a game called Never Alone. And so I always liked working with them because they were very interested in impact games like. games that had something more than just something fun to do. And so this underwater ocean game was, you you would go explore, you would find the sea creatures and learn about them. It was a beautiful game. And then ⁓ Jay had, you know, stuff for me through indie game business, because he always had like little gigs here and there that he was doing. And then I was like, wow, this is really fun. Like, I feel really good doing this because I think, you know, you leave Fortnite, it's a high stress situation. high expectations and you need that decompression time. And because I was going flat out and so then I did the escape room in 2019, like seemed like it was good. ⁓ But then when I got a taste of it again, after we had, so even after we reopened the escape room, I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to keep my foot in the door because you're also a little gun shy. You're like, what happens? Like I did not have a contingency plan if the escape room had to close again. And so ⁓ I kept on working and I, I worked on, ⁓ Trover saves the universe. worked on beyond blue. worked on lots of different things. And then, ⁓ Jay was like, Hey, I'm a starter publisher. And I said, that sounds great. You know, let's, let's do it. And so that's kind of where I am now with the game industry is, ⁓ that is how we've, formed this publisher and we're focusing on indie games. And I found while I loved working on sort of the large budget titles, there's different stressors that come with that. With the indie games, you feel more like you're having a huge impact ⁓ on the team and helping them. And that's the part where I get a lot of satisfaction.
speaker-1: Yeah, an interesting kind of shift in what you like you say, what you draw inspiration from, right? From trying to make big teams be successful to you know, to helping small teams and with your experience and and and helping them get on their feet and be successful. I think ⁓ you know, a very different mentality, but you know, coming from I'm sure a lot to learn as well. And and you sort of left out in the middle there that, you know, that period on Helldivers too. Also ⁓ my god. ⁓ project. Just you know, just that little thing that happened in the middle
speaker-0: And that was so that was an interesting yeah, I was like I know I'm missing a title here. So I got contacted at the time the CEO of the of Arrowhead I'm sorry the chief operations officer her name was Maria was looking for a producer to come in to help her kind of assess the game and where it was it sort of it's You know, can we get this launched? And so I thought this was just gonna be ⁓ I go in and I work with her like a week or so and I kind of assess the game. Cause like as a freelancer, you get a lot of little audit gigs like that. Hey, come in. Can you talk to the team, kind of see what's going on and let us know your opinion on, you know, what we can improve. And so that's what I thought it was going to be. And so I did that. And what was fascinating to me is that the Helldivers team was very much in a similar spot as the Fortnite team back when I started. So there was a lot of really interesting parallels. And so as I started working with her and the team and whatnot, we decided that there was room for me to kind of come on board and a more, ⁓ just spend more time with them. So I actually ended up on Helldivers for three years. I forgot about that. ⁓ helping them with sort of getting the game prep for launch, launching the game, you know, pulling together the pieces for the content updates. And again, ⁓ that was nice because instead of me learning, on that one. And of course I did, but I was also able to teach, which felt really, really good. And that was a fun team to work with as well. And then, you know, that comes to its natural conclusion because as a freelancer, eventually either they need to hire somebody full time to do the stuff you were doing, or they have learned the things that they needed to learn from you. And it was just sort of time to say, Hey, you know what, I think we've gotten what we can out of this. Now, if I I would have loved to have moved to Sweden and that was something we did discuss, but I have, you know, personal obligations here that didn't really make it ⁓ something I could do. But honestly, like me back in my Activision days, if they had said, Hey, would you move to Sweden? I would have been absolutely.
speaker-1: Yeah, I love Sweden. Sweden's beautiful place. ⁓ yeah, and like you say, you have a great opportunity to to to teach instead of you know, continue to learn but to teach as well. I love that. I love that mentality. Similar to I'm sure what you've been doing with the indie studios as well. ⁓ I'm c I'm conscious of time. So couple of couple of sort of couple of other questions. You mentioned that technology has been a draw to you throughout certainly in your early days and it sounds like you know continue throughout your career. Wha why, Heather? What is it about you that's that's drawn to technology?
speaker-0: like how quickly it moves and how quickly you can get improvements on it that help you gain improvements later in process. It sounds super boring, but it's like at the heart of who I am, I'm a very process-oriented person. And so I view technology as a tool in which you can set people up and their pipelines so that they can do their best work. And it's just incredibly exciting, you know, kind of when new engines came out and then when Unreal and Unity and then people would find cool new ways to kind of use it to make the art look better and things like that. That's the, mean, I'm not an engineer. Like I can't sit down and have a deeply technical conversation with anybody about anything. But what I do understand and appreciate is that it can provide a lot of different ways and get better at. helping people realize the things in their head come out to something that other players can experience.
speaker-1: ⁓ that's a great answer. I I love that. And and I think also, you know, if I may, like from talking to you, you know, over this hour, it sounds like you're also someone who's very curious, right, and very excited by what you don't know. And I think I've I don't know if you've found this, I've certainly found that can be a great bridge between the expert who you know, you're never ⁓ I'm never gonna be as smart, you I'm never gonna be an engineer. I'm not I don't I don't think I have that brain. But if you're curious and interested in how people go about it, you can bridge that gap between, hey, you know, I don't understand what you're doing, but I can at least get under, you know, get inside what your process is and and help rather than just being sort of like, I don't know, I I'm not interested, right? Like I think that curiosity can really help bridge that gap.
speaker-0: Yeah, and I can say like one of the things I was doing on Helldivers actually is for a while I was their technical producer. And it was very interesting because I'm not an engineer, ⁓ but I get it. Like when I'm talking to technical people, I understand enough of what they say they need to translate it to something that other folks can understand. And so I like to say, or I like to think that the tech teams enjoy working with me because I know what I don't know. So I'm not gonna go in and be like, ⁓ you shouldn't be doing it this way. You should be doing it that way. What I do say is, okay, tell me what the deal is and what you need. Okay, this is what we need. Well, why do you need that? Well, because this, this, and this has happened. Okay, well, if those things are happening, have we talked to art and design about other ways we could mitigate this versus trying to have you code this new thing? And so that's the piece that I get excited by because it's... You can use technology to solve problems, but then you can also, if you can explain what the issue is to the other departments, you can find maybe cheaper solutions elsewhere, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, absolutely agree. ⁓ and and and also, you know, production, right, ⁓ seems to be the you know, forms of production seems to be, you know, kind of the backbone o of what you've done. ⁓ what is it about production that you love and what is it that y that suits you as a person?
speaker-0: I think at the end of the day, production is about organization and efficiencies. And I think what suits me is because I'm able to come into a situation and I think pretty quickly assess, wow, if they just changed this one thing that they were doing this way, they're going to free up all this time. And then that person that was burdened with doing all this grunt work could now do something else. I love finding those little gains like that. One of the fun things I do, and this is going to sound really silly, is when I go to a fast food restaurant ⁓ or any sort of retail environment where it's exceptionally busy, I'm always like, okay, how do they have things organized to get people out of line, through the line as quickly as possible? And I see bad examples and good examples, and I'm like, ⁓ you know what, if they took that person and instead of having them do that, put them over here, that would free, you know, and it's just, think that's how my brain works. And the satisfaction I get is like making order out of chaos. And I think one of my superpowers that works well in the game industry is even though that is my desire, like my ultimate desires to have everything be organized and kind of process oriented. When I work with game teams, I can tell you a hundred percent of the time we never reach that state and I don't ever try to force people to reach that state. but I'm able to work within where I'm able to meet them where they are and say, okay, I know that we'll never be able to do it this way, but let's try making this one change and see what happens. So I think people enjoy working with me on that because a lot of times they'll be like, ⁓ we've worked with producers and it's horrible, it was bad experience because they kept telling us that we couldn't do it this way or that way. And I'm like, well, I'm not here to tell you that what I'm here to say is how can we improve things with what you've got. And so I think that's part of it is that problem solving, how could you get some gains? How could you satisfy most of the people, right? Because at the end of the day, I can tell you from experience, people are super happy when you solve a problem for them and it makes their life easier. Now they may be skeptical of the solution you propose to them because it's coming from a producer. So you have to go in there and prove yourself. And oftentimes there's lots of little things I can point to and say, hey, let's do this. So that I'm able to lay that groundwork like, okay, Heather's coming in and she's not being too outlandish in what she's saying. Hey, and we did that thing and it was, it was good. Like, yeah, she was right about that. So let's trust her and we'll let her do, you know, make a bigger change that, you know, cause sometimes they'll, they'll be talking about things that they have debated over and over. can't, and I'm, and I'll come in and I'll be like, yeah. ⁓ I really think you should do it that way. I know you don't want to and you don't think it's going to work, but it is going to be way better than what you're doing now. And then if I've established that trust, they're willing to try it. And you know, sometimes I'm right. Sometimes I'm not 100 % right, but I'm also never 100 % wrong either.
speaker-1: Yeah, I love that. And and and last question, you know, has this career in you know that that you've built and that you continue to, you know, push forward, has it changed you as a person?
speaker-0: That's a good question. ⁓ think it's fundamentally changed me. I mean, I think that I have always been a very curious person and very open about different things. I think it has just changed perhaps how I view games and entertainment as a whole, you know, and it makes me think about things a lot like, ⁓ what is the, so it just, I think it makes me think about things differently that I hadn't before. So now I'm all about like, what's this experience going to be like for somebody? So even like coming to our escape room, if we do it this way, how's that going to make the players feel? And so I'm really thinking, so I think the main thing that changed is I'm a person who makes entertainment versus I came into the industry thinking, hey, this is going to be an entertaining job for me. And I am entertained by these things. And now I'm a person like, okay, how can I make this entertainment better for other people? self-centered, I suppose.
speaker-1: Mm. Yeah, like you say, you you you're kind of thinking in the shoes of the player or the shoes of the person that's going experience it rather than just how you experience it. ⁓ yeah, I can I can see that's very similar to me too, how it's sort of shifted my perspective as well. Especially when you have kids, right, and then you start thinking about it, you know, I think it helps you to think through their think about them more as well, with thinking about their experience more.
speaker-0: Yeah, and we didn't even talk about the kids, but yeah, I have a child and super excited that, you know, mom works in the video game industry, but it's fascinating listening to him talk about, you know, he's a gamer, like the games that he plays and his friends plays and what he likes and what he doesn't like. And so that's been a nice way to kind of like have this relationship with your child that not most people get to have. Because a lot of times I'll talk to like, especially when I was on Fortnite. parents would come up to me and like, you're the reason my child's getting bad grades at school. And I'm thinking, well, no, I'm not. But ⁓ it is interesting from a parent perspective, like when you work in the industry, your view on video games and how your child interacts with them, I think is much different and more refined and mature so that you can be like, ⁓ it's fine for this, but I'm drawing the line at that. And you understand why, right?
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, th th that's a question I used l like to ask at the end is yeah, how does your family relate to your career? ⁓ obviously, you know, you you mentioned your kid and y y your husband's also in the industry as well, so I'm sure that's an interesting dynamic.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. mean, we're all like, my son is a huge gamer, my husband's a designer writer. And, you know, so it has seemed like a natural fit. ⁓ Of course, ⁓ when I left Fortnite, I remember telling my son, ⁓ you know, ⁓ I'm wrapping up my time on Fortnite. And honestly, he was not a huge Fortnite player. He didn't really play it. All his friends did. And whenever I would go to school, the friends would be like, ⁓ can you give me V-Bucks, blah, blah, blah. And so I remember he was like, ⁓ by the way, I go, I'm not at Epic anymore. He's like, ⁓ good. Now you can go work for Mojang, because Minecraft was his game. So he really wanted me to get a job there. And of course, you know, he didn't understand. You don't just walk in and be like, hey, you know. The same with Subnautica. Then he was like, well, what about Subnautica? And I'm like. ⁓ So yeah, they love it. We all get along. play games together and it's super fun, you know, to kind of play it and then be able to talk about it in sort of the language of a game developer.
speaker-1: Yeah, and fascinating how, you know, your career started out without video games sort of being that part of your life and now they've become yeah you know, a massive part of your life across the board. And I love that. That's a great, great, ⁓ great story. Great journey. Well, thank you, Heather. Thank you for your time. Great conversation. You've worked on some great stuff, you know, and some great insight. I really appreciate you taking the time and ⁓ yeah, thank you.
speaker-0: Thank you so much for having me, really appreciate it.