speaker-0: I know I said there was going to be a themes episode last week, but holiday and various things meant it was easier to re-release an episode. An excellent episode, I think, with Bill. I really enjoyed re-listening to. I hope you all did too. This week, a slightly delayed episode again because of the holiday, just got back on the weekend. This week's episode is the theme of what it costs trying to highlight through some of the folks that have been kind enough to lend their time to the podcast in season two, focusing on some of the personal cost of being a game developer. We start with Mark Acero, who it gives some really interesting insight into anxiety and some of the challenges that the stress of crunch on some previous work has cost him. Even to the point where he discovered he was having panic attacks that he didn't realize he was having because he felt he'd always handled stress well and it turned out he wasn't. And that's a really some good insight there. Following that with Scott Neissenfeld, some insight into Crunch. As well as some of the challenges of of the recent layoff that that he and I were both a part of at Zenimax. And some of the challenges he's found losing his job and and not having anything to go to for the first time in his career. I thought there's some some really good insight there. Next we have Nathan Kelman back again with some more insight into layoffs. How he'd just been handed his first real level design role and then shortly after found out the project that work was going to be on got cancelled. And the challenges of navigating that. And closing with Brian Kindrigan. Who's opens up about some of the challenges of living in Edberton to pursue the job that he loved, but the at the cost of his first marriage and and how that affected his view on video game development over time and how he's navigated that subsequently. And also some good insight into the challenges of being a narrative director and what that role means, especially across cultures. So I hope you enjoy this. Collection of snippets from season two. If you haven't already heard these conversations, please go and listen to them. I think they're excellent. ⁓ you know, I'm really proud of season two. I think we've got some really great insights and good personal discussion, uncovering some elements that that people don't really talk about, the challenges of making video games, both good and bad. I don't want to imply that season two is all negative and a lot of people are grumpy about it. Far from it. ⁓ but I think there is some, you know, I think this episode sort of tries to poke a little bit at that thread of, hey, it's not all fun and games making video games and Doing something you love, you know, can be tough when it when it maybe doesn't go as the way you hope it will. As always, Dev to Dev is on Patreon. Thank you for my ro most recent subscribers. Again, if you want to check out all of season one, which the episode the last two weeks have been rehighlighting, the archive of season one is only for patrons. Please check that out, as well as the video versions of all of season two. And when season three drops, season two will move into that archive. So The value of Patreon will only only increase. I've been on a few podcasts recently. I'm excited to be guesting on the level design lobby very soon. Recording that tomorrow. Very excited about that. I hope that'll be released soon. That should be a fun conversation. But in the meantime, as I've mentioned, discovery is my hardest barrier. So if you could spend some time telling someone that you that you think might enjoy it, reposting and and sharing any of the clips and and the episodes that I shared, really appreciate that. But anyway, enough of me waffling. Let's sit back and listen in to another episode of Dev to Dev, this time focusing on the theme of what it costs.
speaker-1: Funny thing is it was also around the same time MM, you know, lose yourself came out. So that was like my theme song as I was crunching late at night. You only live once. When opportunity knocks, you got it. I won't butcher the song. All that together was like, I'm gonna put my heart and soul into this because I want this to be my career. And that was before EA's spouse. And so there was times when I was crunching. I was literally working hundred, 120 hours a week. I had a little fold out bed. I work until really late at night, fall asleep, wake up, get back to working again, go home for lunch and shower or eat. But that that's what I was doing back then because that's what I wanted to do. Because it was golden axe, in which I played a ton in the arcade, that's what I nerded out on. And I really appreciated that studio because now there's some articles about Crazy Crunch or some of the antics that we did at that studio. But the director who hired me told me, Hey, we had a bunch of juniors, production went longer than we'd like, we got rid of the juniors, and now we're only hiring senior people to help fix a mess. So we're gonna crunch and I want you to know that up front. I appreciated that he told me I'm gonna inherit a mess and it's gonna be some hours and so I was ready for it and you know was ready to work. I was getting older then. At that point I was married and ⁓ my first was born during the time that I was ⁓ at that studio because of all the production issues. Scope had to be cut back a lot. So my role I was the designer in charge of all the beasts that you ride and even fight against. Well obviously it's a big part of the the game and gameplay. So we were intending for MoCap to cover all of our humans so a lot of our hand animators They were gonna get to focus on the beast and the boss fights, since obviously giant proportions of enemies and creatures. Story for another day, or there's an article out there if you want to read it. But ⁓ things happened where the footage from the mocap shoot wasn't usable. I think it was like two animators whose job was intended to convert the mocap and to make it into usable assets. But it was determined that it was far faster to just make an animation from scratch than to Convert what footage was taken. So all my hand animators that was supposed to work with me on beasts and bosses, all hands on deck. And now, because of course we need all our humanoid animation since you're playing as Tyrus Flare. So that dramatically cut a scope of what we had intended to do for the game. There's times I've definitely looked back on I know I was being taken advantage of. Even if I'm in a studio, if I don't feel like I'm appreciated, then that has made me start to look elsewhere. Actually, I think there's only one project where I didn't finish it to the end before moving on. And that's how bad it was. How else did it harm me? Well, mental health. I was having crazy anxiety attacks. Even when I was first diagnosed as anxiety attacks, I didn't believe the doctor 'cause I was like, what? I've always handled stress well. What are you talking about? Because I have a heart murmur as well. So I thought it was all related to my heart. But he's like, No, these are symptoms of anxiety. And he explained to me what it is and why. And sure enough, after I left that location, I was happy. I wasn't having anxiety attacks anymore. Yeah, it was a very toxic environment. I went there because I was told, ⁓ no, we believe in empowerment. And the same guy who told me you can make decisions was also the same boss that I micromanaged me the most in my life. Like every little thing was overlooked on and like it wa it was it was really crazy. So yeah, I have suffered health wise because of some locations where we're nuts.
speaker-3: Pretty much after graduate school, I spent the next four years trying to get into the game industry through all the wrong methods, not realizing the exact kind of good ways of getting your foot in or finding the right website to apply through. But in two thousand and seven, I or two thousand and six I lucked into working for a year for a company that was making a what I would describe mostly as basically a college MMO. They wanted to do kind of like a virtual campus, but I think they were also about ten years too early. This was something that probably would have taken off right when the coronavirus kind of kicked in and everything. But I came in with that and the first thing they wanted to do was to integrate Lua into their system. And so I had never heard of Lua the scripting language before. But later realized that I had had run-ins with it because ⁓ playing Monkey Island and the Lua bar being a reference. And so picking that up and integrating it into a, you know, this existing MMO s system they had built on top of Gambrio, it was really a kind of trial by fire and kind of like learning how to number one integrate it into the system. Number two, having to write things so that people who weren't programmers could script out interactions in the world and whatnot. And then also having all this over a networked connection. Just throws another spanner in the works when you're doing all that. Yeah, it was very much like basically getting that scripting system set up and running for them, and then towards the tail end it was ripping out and replacing the audio system they had. Yeah, it was a very small team and yeah, it was just a very interesting project for sure.
speaker-0: Sure. And and how did it feel to kind of land that first? You know, you'd taken you four years to land it and then you kind of you got your foot in the door. How did that feel?
speaker-3: It felt it felt very good and like, hey, I can finally start to use this, you know, all this information in my head and I can start applying it and I can start, you know, just having a real world experience with it. 'Cause there's a lot that you learn in school about this stuff, but the development side, the the actual like processes that you have to go through for development aren't ever really brought to you. Like there is no like you know, you're handed projects in school and you do them. And here it's like, okay, we have this incremental step on something that we need in a week or two. We need to get on it and we need to work with these two other people that do it. And it's like, okay. And ⁓ that first job was also completely remote. So it was just a real kind of it felt weird because I just go down to my basement where I'd always gone to just play video games. But now I was, you know, working during the day. After about a year, the project ⁓ Proton Media, they had to have some reductions and so I got laid off. But I kind of with that knowledge and that under my feet was able to kind of take off running again and ⁓ breakaway, which is a local studio in Baltimore. They just had an opening for an engineer and I applied and came in and they asked some weird questions to me about ⁓ movement on spheres and I was like, it's an odd thing to talk about. And was lucky enough to ⁓ to land kind of a junior or just a gameplay engineer working on what I found out to be the expansion for Command and Conquer 3. The company had previously worked with EA on the Rise of the Witch King expansion for Battle for Middle Earth 2, which had gone over very well for them. And they were told that time that the engine they were working on, the Sage 2 engine that had been running, That this was the last game that was going to be using that engine. And so they could go wild with it. Well, and then a year later, Command Conquer 3 comes out using the same engine, and they were approached again to work on the the expansion pack for that. And they were told that this was going to be the last game running on this engine. And so it was very interesting getting into that code and seeing a lot of stuff that was very hard-coded. At a lot of variables of is Army of the Dead, which you're just like, that's an interesting variable to have in a kind of an engine that's supposed to be you know very flexible and modifiable. It sounds like you know, it you could see a lot of the code just basically of well, well, the last project we can just do this and we don't have to worry about it. That project did not go as well. We we were working for ⁓ EALA. They're on the West Coast and we're on the East Coast, and so we get about halfway through our day before they would start having questions and comments on stuff we were doing. And because we're this was fully owned by EA, they had a lot more demands on how they wanted it end up to being. And they tried running us as an internal version of EA and changes it made to to the engine of that game so that data builds would take about three hours. And so while you could slice in like data changes for designers, as an engineer, if you made any changes to any of the underlying data structures of the game, you had to completely rebuild the data. And so we ended up getting two PCs in our cubes at this point so that when we were doing a data build on one one, we could work on pro problems on the other one. We ended up having way more units that has ever been added to an expansion to a game ever before. We were adding this world conquest mode, which was one of the things I was brought in to work on. And I I was hived off with an artist and a designer to kind of prototype out and work on it initially of just how how you were gonna do this giant world. And at first they were thinking of doing a globe that you would spin around kind of XCOM style, but we just couldn't figure out a good way of doing that in engine because the engine was made basically for ⁓ you know RTS's. And so we ended up just kind of ⁓ working on the RTS map and working on and tweaking on that. And over the year production, you know, it it took slower than they liked. And they were gonna pull it at one point, and then it was in, there it was out, it was in. They pulled it for the Xbox 360 version, so it was in on the PC. It was just a lot of kind of back and forth on it, and kind of it didn't get the love it needed, the final version that came out. I was told by basically the senior guys on staff, they're like, this is the worst. experience we've ever had working on a project. And it's like if you've made it through this, you know, you've made it through the hell of development. ⁓ a lot of light nights, extra weekends, a typical industry version of crunch. And luckily since then, that's the only time I've ever had like basically eight months of crunch on a project. It's always a disappointment because there's always the glimmer of this could you know, for a lot of the project you see what the end goal is and you're like, that is going to be really interesting. And the point you are at right when it's cancelled, you're like, Well, I can see the steps it's gonna take to get there and we just y you just give us a couple more, you know, months and whatnot will really show you something really spectacular. The That one really hurt because ⁓ not only was it canceled, but you know, the whole team was let go. And previous times when I like had been moved on to projects that was canceled, I got rolled back onto existing project. And so this was ⁓ the first time in twelve, fourteen plus years that I'd actually was out looking for a job again. Like before I had a steady job when I was looking f to kind of change. And so the double shock of that and just everyone else being laid off and the fact that this interesting project that we're working on just wasn't gonna see the light of day really hurt. You're told make what you love your job and you never work a day in your life, but at the same time what you love to do then becomes kind of work. The hardest time of the layoff was the fact that I didn't have something to work on during the day. And just feeling aimless and even trying to start up and do small self-projects. It just i it didn't have the same kind of the same kind of grab to me. And a lot of the times it just would suffer from scope creep of just like, well, I let me just tink around and do this tight small little thing. Well, I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do this, and so working at a company really provides a nice good steady ⁓ a steady environment for me that I feel like I flourish in and work well in. And that, yeah, this this is what I do and I like doing what I do and I'm happy that I'm able to do what I do because I'm sure I could find if push comes to shove, I'm sure I could pivot to something else, but I really I really would be missing working on games and w watching people's reactions to the stuff that I make and you know, knowing that when someone does something and they're like, ⁓ look at what I did I'm like, I had all hand in that
speaker-4: Yeah, so with Hangar 13 what happened was I came in there around June, then around November November the game we're working on got canceled. And then around that time there was a lot of different shifts and things that were happening and probably six months later is when we had like a big layoff. So essentially with Hangar 13, they had three or four studios around the world. And the one that I was working for was in Novado in San Francisco and essentially everyone in the Navado office got let go. But luckily enough for me, and this is so crazy, my friend Kyle was working at Lost Person Interactive and for about six months she was trying to convince me to go work there with him. And I like, No, I like where I'm at, I hang at thirteen, I think I'm good and then probably I would say a month before the layouts happened I like, Okay, you know what, Kyle, fine, just give him my resume, I'll I'll talk to him and I did interview with the recruiter and they actually told me at the time if you get hired you'll be working on Diablo Four and I like, ⁓ that's kind of like a really big deal And then yeah, I didn't hear from them for about a month and then the layoff happened and then I emailed them and they said, Yeah, we actually wanna do another interview with you. So I think the layoff happened that Monday and by the Friday I had an offer from Lost Boys. When that happened, I remember people looking at me like, How the hell you get a job so fast? But I was already in the process and then that's when my journey with Lost Boys started.
speaker-0: Right. So I mean, it sounds like you landed on your feet outside of out of the layoff, but yeah. Having landed your first professional role, you know, you're you're doing it, right? You're doing the dream and then something gets shut down, the project gets cancelled, like how did that feel and how d how did you process that?
speaker-4: Man, I mean it was it was crazy because I remember we I had a meeting with my lead and the senior that day and it was when they were just about to give me my first task where I was gonna block out my own level by myself because before I was working on different levels already blocked out or putting in ⁓ objects so this one they were like, Hey, we wanna give you your first level, you are gonna block us out and I remember being so excited and then probably an hour after that meeting ⁓ we got an email from a CEO saying the project got it cancelled and I remember st thinking to myself like way so Do I keep working on stuff? Do I not? Do like what what do I like what do I do? And it was I mean, yeah, it was pretty panicky for people 'cause people were like, Are we getting laid off? Is the studio shutting down? What's happening? So a lot of people were rightfully so scared. And I think some people kept working on the project a little bit, but for me, I just kinda was like, Well, you know, I'm just gonna stop myself. So we have having a meeting with CEO, he started telling us like, Hey, we have some things in the works. I think around the time too, that was when Mafia All Country was in super early pre production. So I ended up being on that for a couple of months where I did some really basic prototyping 'cause it was hard because the one thing about with pre production, especially on new project, is like juniors really aren't needed on pre production that much because seniors and principals and leaders trying to figure out, okay, what are we making? 'Cuest juniors come on when they were making this, can you help but execute that? But for me I was just given tasks and then Elite was trying to be onto another project within the studio, but then that game got cancelled. So we had like two games get cancelled spending like two months. But yeah, I mean it was it was hard, it was crazy, but I think for me it was a huge lesson to understand that at the end of the day the game industry is a business and if the numbers don't make sense then things are gonna happen. So had Lost Boys actually the project we were on had gone and shelved and that time it's been a lot of studios doing layoffs. I think it was that one week where Riots and Activision and Blizzard all had major layoffs that week. And because we do co development, we were talking to people, but I think at that time nobody was looking for codep because we don't need to pay a studio X amount of money when we just laid off like a whole team. So it was difficult for us at that time 'cause also Lost Boys were under the embracer group and so when that whole embracer thing kinda went off Yeah, yeah. So when that all happened, even the projects that they had that we're thinking were gonna get put on, those were all getting cancelled or students are getting sold off too. I remember 'cause we had a layoff at Lost Boys, I remember messaging the studio designer. He said, Man, we just couldn't find work. We were looking for work for for months and he said up to the last day we were trying to find a studio to work with and just nobody was nobody at the time was looking for help for Kodev. And that was a big thing 'cause you would think that Kodev is is safer, but definitely with how the industry was at the time, if no one's hiring anybody, it really doesn't matter, so So after Lost Boys, I worked at a place called Sorda One for about six weeks. And because when the layoff happened, a friend of mine, I knew him from Michigan State 'cause he was an alumni there, he was kinda mentored to me and he was actually part of a startup. And ⁓ the person who was a CEO and founder, I also kinda knew her because when I got laid off at Hangout Thirteen, one of the guys his name is Vance, he was ⁓ game game designer at Hangout Thirteen at time. And when he saw I got laid off, he was like, Hey, I have a friend of mine, here's on LinkedIn measure right now, she's gonna try to help you. And she actually years later became the CEO of this company sort of once. When they saw I got out they were like, hey, we really wanted you to come onto our project and help us out with some things level design wise. So of course I'm like, well yeah, sure, I would I would love to and I was there for about six weeks and during that time I was talking to Escape Velocity. And the way Escape Velocity happened was the associate design director was my previous lead at Hangar thirteen. Lost boys having a layoff, I reached out to him. I was like, Hey, I'm looking for a job. Do you guys have to have anything? He said, Ashley, we actually were about to start looking for a level designer, we'll love to interview you And I think because I knew so many people from a hangar through team when they heard the news, a lot of them were looking out for me when all that happened. So I was at sort of one for about six weeks and I got offered a full time job at Escape Philosophy. No sort of one they they really wanted me to stay there. I totally love you guys, but this is a contract position and I know they were looking for a publisher. I can't hang my hat on hoping you get something when there's a studio that's has a full time output for me. And they un and they understood they understood that for sure. So I ended up going to be Escape Velocity and I got brought on as an associate because for them they felt like my s my skill sets weren't there yet for mid level. Which at first I was kinda like, But what do you mean? And then when I came on to the project I started learning like, okay, I'm not ready to be mid yet. Now I'm mid level and now I feel more prepared to say that I'm mid level, but every studio was different, especially with Escape Velocity. So made them work in Triple A for so long that In their minds, mid level is a different thing than Osboys had, right? I I've been blessed with that, the fact that my connection is able to help me get the jobs, especially in times of need for sure.
speaker-2: Bioware wanted me to move to Edmonton, Alberta, which is extremely far north. I mean, I had served in an extreme cold weather unit in the army. I had no problem with the cold, although my then wife did. But yeah, we moved up to Edmonton and I loved the work. So I was I was writing on Jade Empire, which was one of the last games for the very first generation of Xbox. And it was just this amazing feeling of coming into work every day and doing something that I love, which was writing. dialogue or coming up with stories and talking with people about that. And I I enjoyed it a lot. I had a lot of fun. Towards the end of my time on Jade Empire, when I probably would have rolled on to Dragon Age Origins, I think, Hollywood came a knock-in and offered me a job as a supervising director on an animated TV show for I want to say triple what I was making at Bioware. And I had spent all that time as a storyboard artist and I did the thing that everyone does, I think, where you look at the director and you go, Yeah. He or she's okay. They kind of could do these five things better. And I was like, ⁓ this is my chance. So I went back. I moved back to LA, went back to Hollywood, directed the show, and almost immediately was like, I've made a mistake. Yes, I'm making a lot more money and I'm getting to direct, but I don't enjoy this. This is not what I want to be doing. I remember showing up to work on Jade Empire and just loving the actual thing that you do for let's say 70% of your day, right? But After a few years of going, ⁓ maybe I should go back to games. The guy who'd been my boss on Jade Empire, Drew Carpitian, he was the lead writer, he emailed me. I don't know. I don't remember how things worked back then. I'm pr I'm nearly sure he didn't call me because we didn't quite have cell phones yet. Anyway, he contacted me and he said, Hey, we're just about to ship this game called Mass Effect, and we're starting up on two, and I really need you to come back and need you on Mass Effect 2. And I was like, All right, this is it. This is what I wanted. So ⁓ so that I went back to games to write on Mass Effect two at Bioware in Edmonton and after that I have been in games, you know, consistently.
speaker-0: Got it. While you were back being directors, did you try and get back into games?
speaker-2: I actually I did talk to Drew briefly when I heard that Bioware was starting up a studio in Austin. So I want to say this is around two thousand four, two thousand five. I was like, well, I did hate living in Edmonton. And please, if you're from Edmonton and you wanna send hate my way, please don't. I I'm not saying it's a bad place. I'm saying it wasn't for me. And it wasn't the cold either. It was it was some other things about the the lifestyle there. But I thought, you know, hey, maybe, you know, maybe maybe moving to Austin. So I remember I kind of Talked to Drew a little bit. He put me in touch with some of the people in Austin. They were a new division starting up, and I ⁓ you know, I got the sense that they were a little like, you're kind of like an Edmonton guy, which I did not see myself as. And so it was kind of there was like a brief interaction, but there was not a lot of interest. So other than that, no, I really just focused on film and finding, you know, finding my next gig in film and continuing to pursue that until Drew really like sort of did the full court press to get me to come back, which I was thrilled by. It's not like I don't want to make it sound like he was twisting my arm.
speaker-0: No, it's it sounds like it was an offer you couldn't refuse. But it's it's fascinating to me. It's almost like you'd gone back to something you trusted but didn't enjoy. I don't know, may ⁓ maybe I'm reaching here, but maybe you didn't think you'd get that chance again.
speaker-2: Yeah, I think I think there was a couple of factors. I think that was a part of it. I think also that I only the only contacts I had in games at that time were all in Edmonton. So in my mind, going back to games meant moving back to Edmonton, which was just not it had contributed to the end of my first marriage, you know, and so I was not super excited to do that. And then honestly, you know, the the money was a part of it. At that time game I when I first went to work on Jade Empire, I took a huge pay cut when I went back to film. As I said, my salary tripled. And you know, I'm not I don't I don't make decisions based purely on the money, but you do gotta pay your bills and you know. And so my first experience had been that I had to really sort of downgrade my life a little bit in games. And one of the things that happened in the intervening years while I was back in film is that game compensation sort of caught up to film. There was a combination of things. There was You know, the financial side of going back to games started to look better. I was really impressed by Mass Effect One, so I really wanted to work on two. And for that, you know, and that did involve moving back to Edmonton. And I was in a new relationship at the time. And that period of living in Edmonton actually damaged that relationship as well, although we survived it and we're still together and we're happily married. So so, you know, all of that made it more tenable. But certainly on the more sort of wistful side, I I agree. I do think that I I thought I had a shot at happiness and I kinda bungled it and I was like, Well, I guess I just gotta stick with what I know. Yeah.
speaker-0: I think those are both really important factors that a lot of people maybe don't think about for us developers, right? Is is the the relationship impact of maybe doing a job that you love, maybe working heavy hours in a place that maybe, you know, is more about the job than it is about the location. And the compensation, right? Like you say, everyone has to pay bills, everyone has to live. So sometimes the right role for the wrong money just doesn't work as much as it might be a dream role. ⁓ I think those are realities that we all face, you know, at different Different times, different points of our career.
speaker-2: Yeah. I remember when I was a young storyboard artist, there were these older, more experienced board artists who would always say stuff to me like, you know, never take a job just for the money. And I'd I'd always think, Okay, you say that, but you have a four bedroom house in Burbank, and I'm living in a one bedroom apartment in North Hollywood, which for those who don't know LA, like Burbank, North Hollywood in terms of safety, infrastructure and so I was always like, Well that's that's easy for you to say. But I do think, you know, at at a very high conceptual level, that is true. I think if you take a job just for the money, then you should go back in time and become like a brain surgeon or a lawyer or something or some other job that you may not enjoy, but you would make a lot of money. ⁓ you know, the choices that you made that led you to this creative career, you absolutely, as a as a person in the world, you have to consider finances and your financial future and outlook and blah, blah, blah, all that. But like you shouldn't you shouldn't extract or remove the creative fulfillment. Heart of your consideration for the job because that's why you're here. When I left Blizzard, there were no narrative directors there. I think it came around because of some bigger teams, like at Ubisoft, for instance, where the teams get quite large, you end up just needing a director level person to be the champion of the narrative at that level. They do very little direct narrative work. It's more organizational. But I had already started to kinda realize that if there are narrative directors out there, I need to become one defensively. Because there comes the point. This is a really big realization I had about working as a creative. There comes the point where you should not accept another promotion, right? Because you get into something that you love, like say writing, because you love doing it. And then you get promoted to like lead. And now you still do writing, but you're also doing one on ones with people and going to resource allocation meetings and all this. And eventually, and this is what happened to me on the TV show that I directed if you accept too many promotions, you find that you're not doing any. of the thing that you loved and a bunch of stuff that you don't love, right? So when I first started to hear about narrative director, I was like, hmm, is that something I want to deal with? But this is this is the the the part two of what I just said is that you also you also need to rise high enough that you don't find yourself constantly subjugating the stuff that you know how to do really well to someone who knows how to do it less well. Right. So in other words, if I as end up as a lead writer working for a narrative director Who doesn't have a really strong narrative background, and there are some out there, right? Then every day will be an exercise in saying, Hey, I think we should do it this way, and then being told, no, we're gonna do it that way, and me being like, Okay. So, so as a creative, you have to find this weird range where like you don't go too high, but you're also high enough up in the food chain to kind of like, you know, do the thing that you know how to do really well, right? ⁓ you and As you know, game development is all compromised. So you still you still won't get most of what you want, right? But at least you have a voice at the table. So I realized narrative director was something I should pursue. And yeah, I I had a couple friends that had left Blizzard to go to Epic and they were having a great time there. And Epic seemed really interested in me. So yeah. So I went there. At first it was not that different from Lead Writer because Epic also had never had a narrative director. So me and Epic together were defining what it was, but Yeah, it was it was it was a great experience. It was a very different culture because if Bioware and Blizzard are tech companies that make games, Epic is much more tech company that makes games that will demonstrate how good its tech is. And that's just a very different approach to things. It's not a better or worse approach. ⁓ but yeah, I had a lot of revelations, a lot of lessons learned. I that's not code for bad experiences. That just means I just had I as soon as I said that, I was like, ⁓ that That sounds bad. Yeah, I I I I really I feel like learned a lot of new things and and and had a really good time. Yeah, so the thing that brought that on was a confluence of events. It's very interesting times. So the project that I was on at Ubisoft, which I really believed in, was an unannounced game. We ended up getting cancelled, not at least this is what they told me, and I believe it, not through any failure on our part. It was just a thing where we were we were still early on, we were in the conception phase. But to give you a sense of the scale of Ubisoft, we had a hundred programmers on our team, right? So we were in conception and there were multiple other projects that were struggling. And the decision was just made to cannibalize our team, right? Shut our project down, disperse us to other teams that really needed us. And I was asked to move. There was another project that I was asked to move to. But at the same time, that was that happened in December twenty nineteen. So I was in Montreal. My wife was still in LA working down here, and I was like, ⁓ I think the world's gonna end. So I actually am going to move back to LA so I can, you know, when the nukes fall and the disease comes, I can be in my house with my wife. So, you know, I I was I had already had a relationship with this studio NetEase, which is one of the biggest developers in China. I'm trying to remember how that relationship started. Part of it was working on Reaper of Soul.
speaker-0: I was gonna say, was it Diablo? Yeah.
speaker-2: published our game in China. And I had gone over there and given talks a few times and we had a great relationship. And they wanted me to come over and sort of help some of their Chinese game teams learn more about global development, how to think globally in terms of the way they approach their their projects. And so a part of that was, you know There's the writer part of me, there's the middle manager, I guess, part of me. And then the other part, you know, I mentioned I used to teach, right? And so I've always enjoyed teaching and mentoring. ⁓ and if you haven't guessed from this video, I enjoy lecturing, apparently. And so that that seemed really interesting. And they were totally fine with me working from LA. So so I did that. The title change was A, so that if I went to a game team in China and said, like, hey, you need to do things differently, I sort of showed up with the credential on paper to tell them that kind of thing. And B, the title Creative Director is a really strange one in games because it means something wildly different at every studio I've worked at. And what I find interesting about that is I work with some people who know one definition from their studio and they they always kind of like begin conversations with the assumption that it means this or that, right? I would say the way they use Creative Director at Blizzard now these days, they didn't have them when you and I worked there, but they do now. Is really more like a narrative director, right? The way they use it at Ubisoft is more like a systems game systems director, you know? It's like much crunchier. And I've I've just I've seen many different variations of it. So to me it's it's a good title because I can sort of show up and say, look, this is this is the stuff I'm good at. This is the other stuff that I I'm not an expert in, but I I have informed opinions and can discuss intelligently, you know, and all of that fits under the umbrella creative director. So Lot of lot of lessons learned. I think that one thing I really value from from that experience is the level of communication that you need. You're dealing with people that speak a different language, but also have a very different culture. And then everything you say is being filtered through a translator who might be excellent. This is not a criticism of the translators, but there's no way around it. Everything you say is gonna get kind of flattened down. And so one I just I've learned a lot of techniques. for making sure my communication is clear and crisp and concise and I repeat the important points. It's just it's a lot of stuff that actually I can take from that and apply to people who have the same language as me and and benefit from it.
speaker-0: Well that's it folks, thanks for listening in. I hope you enjoyed these little snippets from season two. I think that theme of what it costs is really fascinating and and and although there's plenty of other clips I could have pulled, I thought these were some good ones that really zeroed in on that challenge. As mentioned at the intro, thank you for everyone that listens. Thank you for the likes and shares. Please continue to do that. Next week will be another revisit of an episode from season one. I continue to work on season three in the background. Excited for this episode. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna spoil it. I'm gonna let you discover it next week. It's a really good one that I'm excited to reshare. One that although I was finding my feet, I'm I'm super proud of. So again, thank you to everyone that listens. Thank you to everyone that shares. Please continue to do so. And in the meantime, catch you next time.
speaker-1: Funny thing is it was also around the same time MM, you know, lose yourself came out. So that was like my theme song as I was crunching late at night. You only live once. When opportunity knocks, you got it. I won't butcher the song. All that together was like, I'm gonna put my heart and soul into this because I want this to be my career. And that was before EA's spouse. And so there was times when I was crunching. I was literally working hundred, 120 hours a week. I had a little fold out bed. I work until really late at night, fall asleep, wake up, get back to working again, go home for lunch and shower or eat. But that that's what I was doing back then because that's what I wanted to do. Because it was golden axe, in which I played a ton in the arcade, that's what I nerded out on. And I really appreciated that studio because now there's some articles about Crazy Crunch or some of the antics that we did at that studio. But the director who hired me told me, Hey, we had a bunch of juniors, production went longer than we'd like, we got rid of the juniors, and now we're only hiring senior people to help fix a mess. So we're gonna crunch and I want you to know that up front. I appreciated that he told me I'm gonna inherit a mess and it's gonna be some hours and so I was ready for it and you know was ready to work. I was getting older then. At that point I was married and ⁓ my first was born during the time that I was ⁓ at that studio because of all the production issues. Scope had to be cut back a lot. So my role I was the designer in charge of all the beasts that you ride and even fight against. Well obviously it's a big part of the the game and gameplay. So we were intending for MoCap to cover all of our humans so a lot of our hand animators They were gonna get to focus on the beast and the boss fights, since obviously giant proportions of enemies and creatures. Story for another day, or there's an article out there if you want to read it. But ⁓ things happened where the footage from the mocap shoot wasn't usable. I think it was like two animators whose job was intended to convert the mocap and to make it into usable assets. But it was determined that it was far faster to just make an animation from scratch than to Convert what footage was taken. So all my hand animators that was supposed to work with me on beasts and bosses, all hands on deck. And now, because of course we need all our humanoid animation since you're playing as Tyrus Flare. So that dramatically cut a scope of what we had intended to do for the game. There's times I've definitely looked back on I know I was being taken advantage of. Even if I'm in a studio, if I don't feel like I'm appreciated, then that has made me start to look elsewhere. Actually, I think there's only one project where I didn't finish it to the end before moving on. And that's how bad it was. How else did it harm me? Well, mental health. I was having crazy anxiety attacks. Even when I was first diagnosed as anxiety attacks, I didn't believe the doctor 'cause I was like, what? I've always handled stress well. What are you talking about? Because I have a heart murmur as well. So I thought it was all related to my heart. But he's like, No, these are symptoms of anxiety. And he explained to me what it is and why. And sure enough, after I left that location, I was happy. I wasn't having anxiety attacks anymore. Yeah, it was a very toxic environment. I went there because I was told, ⁓ no, we believe in empowerment. And the same guy who told me you can make decisions was also the same boss that I micromanaged me the most in my life. Like every little thing was overlooked on and like it wa it was it was really crazy. So yeah, I have suffered health wise because of some locations where we're nuts.
speaker-3: Pretty much after graduate school, I spent the next four years trying to get into the game industry through all the wrong methods, not realizing the exact kind of good ways of getting your foot in or finding the right website to apply through. But in two thousand and seven, I or two thousand and six I lucked into working for a year for a company that was making a what I would describe mostly as basically a college MMO. They wanted to do kind of like a virtual campus, but I think they were also about ten years too early. This was something that probably would have taken off right when the coronavirus kind of kicked in and everything. But I came in with that and the first thing they wanted to do was to integrate Lua into their system. And so I had never heard of Lua the scripting language before. But later realized that I had had run-ins with it because ⁓ playing Monkey Island and the Lua bar being a reference. And so picking that up and integrating it into a, you know, this existing MMO s system they had built on top of Gambrio, it was really a kind of trial by fire and kind of like learning how to number one integrate it into the system. Number two, having to write things so that people who weren't programmers could script out interactions in the world and whatnot. And then also having all this over a networked connection. Just throws another spanner in the works when you're doing all that. Yeah, it was very much like basically getting that scripting system set up and running for them, and then towards the tail end it was ripping out and replacing the audio system they had. Yeah, it was a very small team and yeah, it was just a very interesting project for sure.
speaker-0: Sure. And and how did it feel to kind of land that first? You know, you'd taken you four years to land it and then you kind of you got your foot in the door. How did that feel?
speaker-3: It felt it felt very good and like, hey, I can finally start to use this, you know, all this information in my head and I can start applying it and I can start, you know, just having a real world experience with it. 'Cause there's a lot that you learn in school about this stuff, but the development side, the the actual like processes that you have to go through for development aren't ever really brought to you. Like there is no like you know, you're handed projects in school and you do them. And here it's like, okay, we have this incremental step on something that we need in a week or two. We need to get on it and we need to work with these two other people that do it. And it's like, okay. And ⁓ that first job was also completely remote. So it was just a real kind of it felt weird because I just go down to my basement where I'd always gone to just play video games. But now I was, you know, working during the day. After about a year, the project ⁓ Proton Media, they had to have some reductions and so I got laid off. But I kind of with that knowledge and that under my feet was able to kind of take off running again and ⁓ breakaway, which is a local studio in Baltimore. They just had an opening for an engineer and I applied and came in and they asked some weird questions to me about ⁓ movement on spheres and I was like, it's an odd thing to talk about. And was lucky enough to ⁓ to land kind of a junior or just a gameplay engineer working on what I found out to be the expansion for Command and Conquer 3. The company had previously worked with EA on the Rise of the Witch King expansion for Battle for Middle Earth 2, which had gone over very well for them. And they were told that time that the engine they were working on, the Sage 2 engine that had been running, That this was the last game that was going to be using that engine. And so they could go wild with it. Well, and then a year later, Command Conquer 3 comes out using the same engine, and they were approached again to work on the the expansion pack for that. And they were told that this was going to be the last game running on this engine. And so it was very interesting getting into that code and seeing a lot of stuff that was very hard-coded. At a lot of variables of is Army of the Dead, which you're just like, that's an interesting variable to have in a kind of an engine that's supposed to be you know very flexible and modifiable. It sounds like you know, it you could see a lot of the code just basically of well, well, the last project we can just do this and we don't have to worry about it. That project did not go as well. We we were working for ⁓ EALA. They're on the West Coast and we're on the East Coast, and so we get about halfway through our day before they would start having questions and comments on stuff we were doing. And because we're this was fully owned by EA, they had a lot more demands on how they wanted it end up to being. And they tried running us as an internal version of EA and changes it made to to the engine of that game so that data builds would take about three hours. And so while you could slice in like data changes for designers, as an engineer, if you made any changes to any of the underlying data structures of the game, you had to completely rebuild the data. And so we ended up getting two PCs in our cubes at this point so that when we were doing a data build on one one, we could work on pro problems on the other one. We ended up having way more units that has ever been added to an expansion to a game ever before. We were adding this world conquest mode, which was one of the things I was brought in to work on. And I I was hived off with an artist and a designer to kind of prototype out and work on it initially of just how how you were gonna do this giant world. And at first they were thinking of doing a globe that you would spin around kind of XCOM style, but we just couldn't figure out a good way of doing that in engine because the engine was made basically for ⁓ you know RTS's. And so we ended up just kind of ⁓ working on the RTS map and working on and tweaking on that. And over the year production, you know, it it took slower than they liked. And they were gonna pull it at one point, and then it was in, there it was out, it was in. They pulled it for the Xbox 360 version, so it was in on the PC. It was just a lot of kind of back and forth on it, and kind of it didn't get the love it needed, the final version that came out. I was told by basically the senior guys on staff, they're like, this is the worst. experience we've ever had working on a project. And it's like if you've made it through this, you know, you've made it through the hell of development. ⁓ a lot of light nights, extra weekends, a typical industry version of crunch. And luckily since then, that's the only time I've ever had like basically eight months of crunch on a project. It's always a disappointment because there's always the glimmer of this could you know, for a lot of the project you see what the end goal is and you're like, that is going to be really interesting. And the point you are at right when it's cancelled, you're like, Well, I can see the steps it's gonna take to get there and we just y you just give us a couple more, you know, months and whatnot will really show you something really spectacular. The That one really hurt because ⁓ not only was it canceled, but you know, the whole team was let go. And previous times when I like had been moved on to projects that was canceled, I got rolled back onto existing project. And so this was ⁓ the first time in twelve, fourteen plus years that I'd actually was out looking for a job again. Like before I had a steady job when I was looking f to kind of change. And so the double shock of that and just everyone else being laid off and the fact that this interesting project that we're working on just wasn't gonna see the light of day really hurt. You're told make what you love your job and you never work a day in your life, but at the same time what you love to do then becomes kind of work. The hardest time of the layoff was the fact that I didn't have something to work on during the day. And just feeling aimless and even trying to start up and do small self-projects. It just i it didn't have the same kind of the same kind of grab to me. And a lot of the times it just would suffer from scope creep of just like, well, I let me just tink around and do this tight small little thing. Well, I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do this, and so working at a company really provides a nice good steady ⁓ a steady environment for me that I feel like I flourish in and work well in. And that, yeah, this this is what I do and I like doing what I do and I'm happy that I'm able to do what I do because I'm sure I could find if push comes to shove, I'm sure I could pivot to something else, but I really I really would be missing working on games and w watching people's reactions to the stuff that I make and you know, knowing that when someone does something and they're like, ⁓ look at what I did I'm like, I had all hand in that
speaker-4: Yeah, so with Hangar 13 what happened was I came in there around June, then around November November the game we're working on got canceled. And then around that time there was a lot of different shifts and things that were happening and probably six months later is when we had like a big layoff. So essentially with Hangar 13, they had three or four studios around the world. And the one that I was working for was in Novado in San Francisco and essentially everyone in the Navado office got let go. But luckily enough for me, and this is so crazy, my friend Kyle was working at Lost Person Interactive and for about six months she was trying to convince me to go work there with him. And I like, No, I like where I'm at, I hang at thirteen, I think I'm good and then probably I would say a month before the layouts happened I like, Okay, you know what, Kyle, fine, just give him my resume, I'll I'll talk to him and I did interview with the recruiter and they actually told me at the time if you get hired you'll be working on Diablo Four and I like, ⁓ that's kind of like a really big deal And then yeah, I didn't hear from them for about a month and then the layoff happened and then I emailed them and they said, Yeah, we actually wanna do another interview with you. So I think the layoff happened that Monday and by the Friday I had an offer from Lost Boys. When that happened, I remember people looking at me like, How the hell you get a job so fast? But I was already in the process and then that's when my journey with Lost Boys started.
speaker-0: Right. So I mean, it sounds like you landed on your feet outside of out of the layoff, but yeah. Having landed your first professional role, you know, you're you're doing it, right? You're doing the dream and then something gets shut down, the project gets cancelled, like how did that feel and how d how did you process that?
speaker-4: Man, I mean it was it was crazy because I remember we I had a meeting with my lead and the senior that day and it was when they were just about to give me my first task where I was gonna block out my own level by myself because before I was working on different levels already blocked out or putting in ⁓ objects so this one they were like, Hey, we wanna give you your first level, you are gonna block us out and I remember being so excited and then probably an hour after that meeting ⁓ we got an email from a CEO saying the project got it cancelled and I remember st thinking to myself like way so Do I keep working on stuff? Do I not? Do like what what do I like what do I do? And it was I mean, yeah, it was pretty panicky for people 'cause people were like, Are we getting laid off? Is the studio shutting down? What's happening? So a lot of people were rightfully so scared. And I think some people kept working on the project a little bit, but for me, I just kinda was like, Well, you know, I'm just gonna stop myself. So we have having a meeting with CEO, he started telling us like, Hey, we have some things in the works. I think around the time too, that was when Mafia All Country was in super early pre production. So I ended up being on that for a couple of months where I did some really basic prototyping 'cause it was hard because the one thing about with pre production, especially on new project, is like juniors really aren't needed on pre production that much because seniors and principals and leaders trying to figure out, okay, what are we making? 'Cuest juniors come on when they were making this, can you help but execute that? But for me I was just given tasks and then Elite was trying to be onto another project within the studio, but then that game got cancelled. So we had like two games get cancelled spending like two months. But yeah, I mean it was it was hard, it was crazy, but I think for me it was a huge lesson to understand that at the end of the day the game industry is a business and if the numbers don't make sense then things are gonna happen. So had Lost Boys actually the project we were on had gone and shelved and that time it's been a lot of studios doing layoffs. I think it was that one week where Riots and Activision and Blizzard all had major layoffs that week. And because we do co development, we were talking to people, but I think at that time nobody was looking for codep because we don't need to pay a studio X amount of money when we just laid off like a whole team. So it was difficult for us at that time 'cause also Lost Boys were under the embracer group and so when that whole embracer thing kinda went off Yeah, yeah. So when that all happened, even the projects that they had that we're thinking were gonna get put on, those were all getting cancelled or students are getting sold off too. I remember 'cause we had a layoff at Lost Boys, I remember messaging the studio designer. He said, Man, we just couldn't find work. We were looking for work for for months and he said up to the last day we were trying to find a studio to work with and just nobody was nobody at the time was looking for help for Kodev. And that was a big thing 'cause you would think that Kodev is is safer, but definitely with how the industry was at the time, if no one's hiring anybody, it really doesn't matter, so So after Lost Boys, I worked at a place called Sorda One for about six weeks. And because when the layoff happened, a friend of mine, I knew him from Michigan State 'cause he was an alumni there, he was kinda mentored to me and he was actually part of a startup. And ⁓ the person who was a CEO and founder, I also kinda knew her because when I got laid off at Hangout Thirteen, one of the guys his name is Vance, he was ⁓ game game designer at Hangout Thirteen at time. And when he saw I got laid off, he was like, Hey, I have a friend of mine, here's on LinkedIn measure right now, she's gonna try to help you. And she actually years later became the CEO of this company sort of once. When they saw I got out they were like, hey, we really wanted you to come onto our project and help us out with some things level design wise. So of course I'm like, well yeah, sure, I would I would love to and I was there for about six weeks and during that time I was talking to Escape Velocity. And the way Escape Velocity happened was the associate design director was my previous lead at Hangar thirteen. Lost boys having a layoff, I reached out to him. I was like, Hey, I'm looking for a job. Do you guys have to have anything? He said, Ashley, we actually were about to start looking for a level designer, we'll love to interview you And I think because I knew so many people from a hangar through team when they heard the news, a lot of them were looking out for me when all that happened. So I was at sort of one for about six weeks and I got offered a full time job at Escape Philosophy. No sort of one they they really wanted me to stay there. I totally love you guys, but this is a contract position and I know they were looking for a publisher. I can't hang my hat on hoping you get something when there's a studio that's has a full time output for me. And they un and they understood they understood that for sure. So I ended up going to be Escape Velocity and I got brought on as an associate because for them they felt like my s my skill sets weren't there yet for mid level. Which at first I was kinda like, But what do you mean? And then when I came on to the project I started learning like, okay, I'm not ready to be mid yet. Now I'm mid level and now I feel more prepared to say that I'm mid level, but every studio was different, especially with Escape Velocity. So made them work in Triple A for so long that In their minds, mid level is a different thing than Osboys had, right? I I've been blessed with that, the fact that my connection is able to help me get the jobs, especially in times of need for sure.
speaker-2: Bioware wanted me to move to Edmonton, Alberta, which is extremely far north. I mean, I had served in an extreme cold weather unit in the army. I had no problem with the cold, although my then wife did. But yeah, we moved up to Edmonton and I loved the work. So I was I was writing on Jade Empire, which was one of the last games for the very first generation of Xbox. And it was just this amazing feeling of coming into work every day and doing something that I love, which was writing. dialogue or coming up with stories and talking with people about that. And I I enjoyed it a lot. I had a lot of fun. Towards the end of my time on Jade Empire, when I probably would have rolled on to Dragon Age Origins, I think, Hollywood came a knock-in and offered me a job as a supervising director on an animated TV show for I want to say triple what I was making at Bioware. And I had spent all that time as a storyboard artist and I did the thing that everyone does, I think, where you look at the director and you go, Yeah. He or she's okay. They kind of could do these five things better. And I was like, ⁓ this is my chance. So I went back. I moved back to LA, went back to Hollywood, directed the show, and almost immediately was like, I've made a mistake. Yes, I'm making a lot more money and I'm getting to direct, but I don't enjoy this. This is not what I want to be doing. I remember showing up to work on Jade Empire and just loving the actual thing that you do for let's say 70% of your day, right? But After a few years of going, ⁓ maybe I should go back to games. The guy who'd been my boss on Jade Empire, Drew Carpitian, he was the lead writer, he emailed me. I don't know. I don't remember how things worked back then. I'm pr I'm nearly sure he didn't call me because we didn't quite have cell phones yet. Anyway, he contacted me and he said, Hey, we're just about to ship this game called Mass Effect, and we're starting up on two, and I really need you to come back and need you on Mass Effect 2. And I was like, All right, this is it. This is what I wanted. So ⁓ so that I went back to games to write on Mass Effect two at Bioware in Edmonton and after that I have been in games, you know, consistently.
speaker-0: Got it. While you were back being directors, did you try and get back into games?
speaker-2: I actually I did talk to Drew briefly when I heard that Bioware was starting up a studio in Austin. So I want to say this is around two thousand four, two thousand five. I was like, well, I did hate living in Edmonton. And please, if you're from Edmonton and you wanna send hate my way, please don't. I I'm not saying it's a bad place. I'm saying it wasn't for me. And it wasn't the cold either. It was it was some other things about the the lifestyle there. But I thought, you know, hey, maybe, you know, maybe maybe moving to Austin. So I remember I kind of Talked to Drew a little bit. He put me in touch with some of the people in Austin. They were a new division starting up, and I ⁓ you know, I got the sense that they were a little like, you're kind of like an Edmonton guy, which I did not see myself as. And so it was kind of there was like a brief interaction, but there was not a lot of interest. So other than that, no, I really just focused on film and finding, you know, finding my next gig in film and continuing to pursue that until Drew really like sort of did the full court press to get me to come back, which I was thrilled by. It's not like I don't want to make it sound like he was twisting my arm.
speaker-0: No, it's it sounds like it was an offer you couldn't refuse. But it's it's fascinating to me. It's almost like you'd gone back to something you trusted but didn't enjoy. I don't know, may ⁓ maybe I'm reaching here, but maybe you didn't think you'd get that chance again.
speaker-2: Yeah, I think I think there was a couple of factors. I think that was a part of it. I think also that I only the only contacts I had in games at that time were all in Edmonton. So in my mind, going back to games meant moving back to Edmonton, which was just not it had contributed to the end of my first marriage, you know, and so I was not super excited to do that. And then honestly, you know, the the money was a part of it. At that time game I when I first went to work on Jade Empire, I took a huge pay cut when I went back to film. As I said, my salary tripled. And you know, I'm not I don't I don't make decisions based purely on the money, but you do gotta pay your bills and you know. And so my first experience had been that I had to really sort of downgrade my life a little bit in games. And one of the things that happened in the intervening years while I was back in film is that game compensation sort of caught up to film. There was a combination of things. There was You know, the financial side of going back to games started to look better. I was really impressed by Mass Effect One, so I really wanted to work on two. And for that, you know, and that did involve moving back to Edmonton. And I was in a new relationship at the time. And that period of living in Edmonton actually damaged that relationship as well, although we survived it and we're still together and we're happily married. So so, you know, all of that made it more tenable. But certainly on the more sort of wistful side, I I agree. I do think that I I thought I had a shot at happiness and I kinda bungled it and I was like, Well, I guess I just gotta stick with what I know. Yeah.
speaker-0: I think those are both really important factors that a lot of people maybe don't think about for us developers, right? Is is the the relationship impact of maybe doing a job that you love, maybe working heavy hours in a place that maybe, you know, is more about the job than it is about the location. And the compensation, right? Like you say, everyone has to pay bills, everyone has to live. So sometimes the right role for the wrong money just doesn't work as much as it might be a dream role. ⁓ I think those are realities that we all face, you know, at different Different times, different points of our career.
speaker-2: Yeah. I remember when I was a young storyboard artist, there were these older, more experienced board artists who would always say stuff to me like, you know, never take a job just for the money. And I'd I'd always think, Okay, you say that, but you have a four bedroom house in Burbank, and I'm living in a one bedroom apartment in North Hollywood, which for those who don't know LA, like Burbank, North Hollywood in terms of safety, infrastructure and so I was always like, Well that's that's easy for you to say. But I do think, you know, at at a very high conceptual level, that is true. I think if you take a job just for the money, then you should go back in time and become like a brain surgeon or a lawyer or something or some other job that you may not enjoy, but you would make a lot of money. ⁓ you know, the choices that you made that led you to this creative career, you absolutely, as a as a person in the world, you have to consider finances and your financial future and outlook and blah, blah, blah, all that. But like you shouldn't you shouldn't extract or remove the creative fulfillment. Heart of your consideration for the job because that's why you're here. When I left Blizzard, there were no narrative directors there. I think it came around because of some bigger teams, like at Ubisoft, for instance, where the teams get quite large, you end up just needing a director level person to be the champion of the narrative at that level. They do very little direct narrative work. It's more organizational. But I had already started to kinda realize that if there are narrative directors out there, I need to become one defensively. Because there comes the point. This is a really big realization I had about working as a creative. There comes the point where you should not accept another promotion, right? Because you get into something that you love, like say writing, because you love doing it. And then you get promoted to like lead. And now you still do writing, but you're also doing one on ones with people and going to resource allocation meetings and all this. And eventually, and this is what happened to me on the TV show that I directed if you accept too many promotions, you find that you're not doing any. of the thing that you loved and a bunch of stuff that you don't love, right? So when I first started to hear about narrative director, I was like, hmm, is that something I want to deal with? But this is this is the the the part two of what I just said is that you also you also need to rise high enough that you don't find yourself constantly subjugating the stuff that you know how to do really well to someone who knows how to do it less well. Right. So in other words, if I as end up as a lead writer working for a narrative director Who doesn't have a really strong narrative background, and there are some out there, right? Then every day will be an exercise in saying, Hey, I think we should do it this way, and then being told, no, we're gonna do it that way, and me being like, Okay. So, so as a creative, you have to find this weird range where like you don't go too high, but you're also high enough up in the food chain to kind of like, you know, do the thing that you know how to do really well, right? ⁓ you and As you know, game development is all compromised. So you still you still won't get most of what you want, right? But at least you have a voice at the table. So I realized narrative director was something I should pursue. And yeah, I I had a couple friends that had left Blizzard to go to Epic and they were having a great time there. And Epic seemed really interested in me. So yeah. So I went there. At first it was not that different from Lead Writer because Epic also had never had a narrative director. So me and Epic together were defining what it was, but Yeah, it was it was it was a great experience. It was a very different culture because if Bioware and Blizzard are tech companies that make games, Epic is much more tech company that makes games that will demonstrate how good its tech is. And that's just a very different approach to things. It's not a better or worse approach. ⁓ but yeah, I had a lot of revelations, a lot of lessons learned. I that's not code for bad experiences. That just means I just had I as soon as I said that, I was like, ⁓ that That sounds bad. Yeah, I I I I really I feel like learned a lot of new things and and and had a really good time. Yeah, so the thing that brought that on was a confluence of events. It's very interesting times. So the project that I was on at Ubisoft, which I really believed in, was an unannounced game. We ended up getting cancelled, not at least this is what they told me, and I believe it, not through any failure on our part. It was just a thing where we were we were still early on, we were in the conception phase. But to give you a sense of the scale of Ubisoft, we had a hundred programmers on our team, right? So we were in conception and there were multiple other projects that were struggling. And the decision was just made to cannibalize our team, right? Shut our project down, disperse us to other teams that really needed us. And I was asked to move. There was another project that I was asked to move to. But at the same time, that was that happened in December twenty nineteen. So I was in Montreal. My wife was still in LA working down here, and I was like, ⁓ I think the world's gonna end. So I actually am going to move back to LA so I can, you know, when the nukes fall and the disease comes, I can be in my house with my wife. So, you know, I I was I had already had a relationship with this studio NetEase, which is one of the biggest developers in China. I'm trying to remember how that relationship started. Part of it was working on Reaper of Soul.
speaker-0: I was gonna say, was it Diablo? Yeah.
speaker-2: published our game in China. And I had gone over there and given talks a few times and we had a great relationship. And they wanted me to come over and sort of help some of their Chinese game teams learn more about global development, how to think globally in terms of the way they approach their their projects. And so a part of that was, you know There's the writer part of me, there's the middle manager, I guess, part of me. And then the other part, you know, I mentioned I used to teach, right? And so I've always enjoyed teaching and mentoring. ⁓ and if you haven't guessed from this video, I enjoy lecturing, apparently. And so that that seemed really interesting. And they were totally fine with me working from LA. So so I did that. The title change was A, so that if I went to a game team in China and said, like, hey, you need to do things differently, I sort of showed up with the credential on paper to tell them that kind of thing. And B, the title Creative Director is a really strange one in games because it means something wildly different at every studio I've worked at. And what I find interesting about that is I work with some people who know one definition from their studio and they they always kind of like begin conversations with the assumption that it means this or that, right? I would say the way they use Creative Director at Blizzard now these days, they didn't have them when you and I worked there, but they do now. Is really more like a narrative director, right? The way they use it at Ubisoft is more like a systems game systems director, you know? It's like much crunchier. And I've I've just I've seen many different variations of it. So to me it's it's a good title because I can sort of show up and say, look, this is this is the stuff I'm good at. This is the other stuff that I I'm not an expert in, but I I have informed opinions and can discuss intelligently, you know, and all of that fits under the umbrella creative director. So Lot of lot of lessons learned. I think that one thing I really value from from that experience is the level of communication that you need. You're dealing with people that speak a different language, but also have a very different culture. And then everything you say is being filtered through a translator who might be excellent. This is not a criticism of the translators, but there's no way around it. Everything you say is gonna get kind of flattened down. And so one I just I've learned a lot of techniques. for making sure my communication is clear and crisp and concise and I repeat the important points. It's just it's a lot of stuff that actually I can take from that and apply to people who have the same language as me and and benefit from it.
speaker-0: Well that's it folks, thanks for listening in. I hope you enjoyed these little snippets from season two. I think that theme of what it costs is really fascinating and and and although there's plenty of other clips I could have pulled, I thought these were some good ones that really zeroed in on that challenge. As mentioned at the intro, thank you for everyone that listens. Thank you for the likes and shares. Please continue to do that. Next week will be another revisit of an episode from season one. I continue to work on season three in the background. Excited for this episode. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna spoil it. I'm gonna let you discover it next week. It's a really good one that I'm excited to reshare. One that although I was finding my feet, I'm I'm super proud of. So again, thank you to everyone that listens. Thank you to everyone that shares. Please continue to do so. And in the meantime, catch you next time.
