In this episode:

Jordan interviews Brian Allgeier, a veteran game designer and creative director at Insomniac Games, renowned for his work on classic titles such as Ratchet & Clank, Spyro the Dragon, and the VR game Edge of Nowhere. Brian shares his journey in the AAA game industry, lessons on creative direction, working with large teams, and how to maintain a cohesive creative vision across complex projects. He also highlights some leadership tips from his book, Directing Video Games: 101 Tips for Creative Leaders, which offers practical guidance for both aspiring and seasoned game directors.

Topics covered:

• Brian's career journey: from Spyro to Ratchet & Clank and VR gaming
• The role of a creative director in managing game design and storytelling
• Best practices for getting the most out of a game’s mechanics and assets
• How to maintain a cohesive creative vision across large development teams
• Tips on working effectively with teams and leading without dictating
• Lessons from Ratchet & Clank: balancing action, platforming, and storytelling
• The importance of “economy of design”: stretching mechanics for maximum gameplay value
• Key leadership tips from Brian’s book, Directing Video Games: 101 Tips for Creative Leaders

For more game industry tips:

• Learn more about Jordan & Bright Black
• Listen on iTunes | Spotify (Support the show and leave a review)
• Visit www.playmakerspodcast.com for the full blog post and more!

Timestamps:

[02:44] Brian’s early career: From Spyro to Ratchet & Clank

[06:00] Maximizing game mechanics and designing with economy in mind

[10:23] Transitioning from artist to creative director at Insomniac Games

[12:30] Guiding players' attention and creating focus in level design

[16:50] Techniques for managing large teams of specialists

[21:00] Working with Mark Cerny and learning about production efficiency

[26:00] Balancing creativity and budget in AAA game development

[30:30] Directing video games: Lessons from Ratchet & Clank and Edge of Nowhere

[34:20] Brian’s advice for aspiring creative leaders in game design

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

Learn more and Connect with Marc Mencher:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Directing Video Games: 101 Tips for Creative Leaders

Games & companies mentioned:

• Ratchet & Clank series (Insomniac Games)
• Spyro the Dragon (Insomniac Games)
• Edge of Nowhere (Insomniac Games)
• Directing Video Games: 101 Tips for Creative Leaders by Brian Allgeier
• Super Mario 64 (Nintendo)
• Uncharted series (Naughty Dog)
• The Last of Us series (Naughty Dog)
• Diddy Kong Racing (Nintendo)
• Zelda series (Nintendo)
• Titanfall 2 (Respawn Entertainment)
• Final Fantasy series (Square Enix)

I’m Jordan Blackman, and you're listening to Playmakers, the podcast where I interview game industry experts. This week we have Brian Allgeier. He is a creator of games like Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet and Clank, and Edge of Nowhere. We talk about what it's like to be a creative director and how to do it well, which impacts everyone who works in games. So definitely listen to this one. Let's talk about it more after the sound.

Both Spyro and Ratchet and Clank have the touch of Brian, our guest today, who is a creative director at Insomniac, one of the creators of Ratchet and Clank, and has worked on Spyro, the Ratchet and Clank series, and the recent VR game Edge of Nowhere. He has an incredible resume and experience, creating quality content year after year for decades. It was a thrill to sit down with him and pick his brain about the art and craft of creative direction and how that works at Insomniac.

One of the first things we talk about in the interview is how to get every last drop out of the mechanics you put in your game. This is not the kind of thing you’d immediately think a creative director would focus on. You might assume it’s all about big ideas, but Brian brought this up right away. We also discuss the documentation and segmentation system they created for Ratchet and Clank to plan out level by level, segment by segment, and setup by setup. You’ll learn what that means in the interview.

We talk about what it’s really like to be a creative director, what the job entails day-to-day, and some of the challenges. One topic that will be valuable to almost anyone is how to get the best work out of people who know more about their specific skill set than you do. This is common in game development, where you want a team member to do something incredible, in a specific direction, but without telling them exactly what to do. We talk about the best approach to that.

Brian also recently released a book called Directing Video Games 101. He shares several tactics and strategies from the book, which are really valuable. I bought it, and it’s fantastic. I recommend you check it out at directingvideogames.com. I just checked Amazon, and they’re out of stock—congratulations, Brian—but you can still find it on his website. While you’re waiting for your copy, please listen to this interview.

Before we dive in, I want to thank some people who’ve written us reviews. We’re up to 36 five-star reviews, and I really want to break that 50-review threshold. If you’re thinking about writing a review, now is the time. Here’s one from ‘Space Loft 2’: “It’s really hard to listen to this in the car—I’ve had to pull over a few times, rewind, and take notes because the info is spot on.” Love that, Space Loft 2. Thank you very much!

Here’s another from ‘Videosyncratic’, five stars: “Great podcast with really interesting interviews and solid production value. Jordan’s found exceptional guests with valuable and practical information on topics ranging across the full production cycle of a game.” I really appreciate that, Videosyncratic. I believe this episode falls squarely into that category, with an exceptional guest in Brian and valuable, practical information.

So with all that said, let's dive into the interview with Brian Allgeier.

Take me through the beginning of your career. How did you become you, and how did you kind of fall into games?

Yeah, the crazy thing is before Spyro, I think I'd worked in the industry for about eight years on a bunch of games that a lot of people hadn't heard of. I originally started working in games back in early '92 on Philips CDI projects. They had come out with the first CD-based console that had full-motion video, which was like this crazy new thing. Philips and Sony at one point were in talks to join together to create a console, but Philips decided to split off and create their own console. Then, of course, Sony did the same. I was an artist and animator back then, working on 2D pixel artwork. I was the only artist on a game that featured the Hanna-Barbera characters—Huckleberry Hound, Scooby-Doo, Fred Flintstone, and all that stuff. I got the job by drawing Scooby-Doo at 16 pixels high and animating him. The fact that I could pull that off got me the gig.

That does sound hard. It's like a little favicon of Scooby-Doo.

Yeah, absolutely. It all came down to the economy of design and picking your pixels.

Had you gone to school for art?

Yeah, I went to Savannah College of Art and Design for a couple of years, and I majored in video and animation. Back then, they didn’t have any kind of game design curriculum. I was kind of all over the place. When you're 18 or 19, you don't know what you want to do. I dabbled in video, illustration, and I programmed with my Commodore 64, trying to make little games. I played a lot of games on my Commodore 64, but I didn’t think that was an option because I considered myself to be more of a creative type. Back then, when you thought of making games, it was all programmers. It was like two or three programmers sitting in a garage, programming.

And the engineer was creating the music and all that stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Games were getting a little more sophisticated around that time, but I didn’t think about it much. Then, I decided I wanted to come out to LA because I wanted to get into filmmaking. They only taught video at my school. I remember a professor telling me that video was the future. Little did I know how right they were. But I knew that if I wanted to make good films and learn the craft of filmmaking, schools like USC or UCLA in Los Angeles were the place to be. So I decided to pack up and drive out here, and I had a few leads. Then, the opportunity came up to work at Philips Interactive Media as an artist, because a lot of artists back then were scared of using computers. Art and computers didn’t go together. I think Photoshop was just getting started. I happened to balance the line between the two, and that's how I got my first job. From there, I eventually got into design because I realized I wasn’t the greatest artist. I was more logical, but also artistic, and could combine those two sides of the brain.

Right, and level design—in a way, it's like making a giant sculpture.

Yeah, it's thinking about the sequence of information, what the player is going to expect, and how they're going to improve their skills and build on them. That's something I like to think a lot about. Frankly, I did not like being told what to draw; I wanted to be the director—but in a nice way. I did these random assignments, put my heart and soul into drawing this stuff, and then it would end up getting canceled. I wished I was on the other side in those meeting rooms, understanding what the producers wanted.

In the work that you've done, what's your proudest accomplishment?

Well, the biggest thing is absolutely the Ratchet & Clank series. I joined Insomniac back in '99 and began working on the Spyro series. We started developing Ratchet & Clank after we initially dabbled in this other project for about a year. It was called Girl with a Stick, and that didn't quite...

Working title.

Right, it was very much a working title, but it just wasn't gaining traction or momentum. We decided to scrap it all and go back to our platforming roots, focusing on developing Ratchet & Clank as a more action-platformer style game.

I happened to be the only designer at the company at the time and ended up being the design director on the project. I worked very closely with Mark Cerny, industry legend, and he taught me a lot about the nuts and bolts of design—how you're very economical with your designs, how you're careful about what you're planning, understanding how much it impacts production, and also just those A plus B—adding up the different skills and mechanics and how you layer all of those, progress difficulty, and how the player learns gradually.

I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the aspect of economy that you mentioned learning from Mark. How does that work for you and him?

Well, I think the key is that you can get a lot of mileage out of just a few assets and elements. You can take a few simple mechanics and combine them in very novel ways and really stretch out the experience. So often, junior designers think they have to keep entertaining the player and throw new and interesting ideas at them, and they're not taking something all the way through to completion. If you are teaching Ratchet, for example, how to use the swing shot and how he's swinging through the city, there's a lot of different ways of mixing up how he's swinging—grabbing targets, launching, landing on platforms, doing multiple swings in a row. There are lots of little atoms you can introduce that help both the player learn and are also very economical for production.

Like wringing the most value out of each individual mechanic and the mechanics you have in combination, as opposed to trying to just keep adding new stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a certain confidence in being able to really focus on a particular mechanic or skill and diving deep with it, looking at all the different facets and how people are approaching it. This is actually part of our learning process—we begin to grasp things through repetition. So often we'll have people do something two times and expect them to know it perfectly, but we have to repeat it until it becomes second nature.

How do you know when you've got the most out of one of these mechanics? How do you know when it's time to move on—not necessarily in the progression of the game, but in the design? When have we really gotten the most value out of what this thing can offer?

Early on in the game, you can focus on just a couple of mechanics. One thing I learned from Mark was that we would divide the entire game into segments and create a macro plan that listed them all. Each segment was roughly 10 minutes. I find that, like in a chapter of a book or a mission in a game, 10 minutes is about a good segment of time where people can stay focused before they want to move on to something else.

In the Ratchet and Clank series, over time we learned what felt right in terms of length. It was around 12 different setups—12 to 14 setups per segment. We knew that it would take roughly 45 seconds to complete a setup before people advanced. You learn these metrics and learn about the cadence, the pacing, and the building blocks over time. Like, "Oh, that was a really fun segment. What was so great about that? What was the magic behind it?" Then you analyze and say, "Well, it has roughly 12 setups, much like all these other cool segments," and that becomes your metric.

That's the other thing that junior designers don't do—they don't log all that information down. They don't write down all these metrics: how far does the character jump? How long is a particular mission? It's about making sure they're sticking to some degree of formula or knowing what the formula is and what's working.

I love that idea of knowing how long a segment needs to be before it's got to change, and then subdividing it into these setups. Then, as a team, you can talk about it in a pretty clear way: "This part's not working."

I think divide and conquer is the way to go, absolutely.

Who are some other people that you look up to, or whose work has really influenced you, both in the game industry and outside? Maybe there's a particular art form or artist or designer that's meant a lot to you.

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there's a bunch of them, certainly. I've always been a big Hitchcock fan and Spielberg fan. I've always enjoyed those movies and the art of storytelling. When I look at games, I'm a big fan of Naughty Dog, and prior Naughty Dog developers like Amy Hennig, and of course, Neil Druckmann, who directed the recent Uncharted, as well as Bruce Straley.

And so, I think that, yeah, it's interesting. When developing the Ratchet & Clank games, we look at both storytelling as an art form and platforming games, more game-y style games. With Uncharted, I'm really impressed with how Naughty Dog developed characters, stayed true to them, created some great plot twists, and always surprised you with what's next.

Of course, I'm a big fan of Shigeru Miyamoto. I was kind of a late bloomer with Nintendo. I didn’t play all the early classics; I was playing more computer games or trying to make games during the SNES and NES era. But when the Nintendo 64 came along, and Mario 64, I was completely blown away by that game. I became a huge fan, and that was another nuts-and-bolts game design moment where I learned a lot just from playing.

That's kind of a Spyro era game as well, right?

Absolutely, yeah. During that period, it was good to analyze that style of game and figure out how we wanted to take it in a different direction, especially when we started working on Ratchet & Clank. With Ratchet & Clank, we obviously took it in more of a weapons, shooter direction, and we kind of came into our own. But I think initially, we were definitely looking a lot at Zelda and Mario.

I think one of the reasons why you might have picked up Nintendo later—I'm kind of the same, I was a Genesis kid—is that, as you start doing design and looking for inspiration, Nintendo's work just pops out on so many levels, including this economy aspect you just brought up.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I remember playing through Diddy Kong and taking notes of all the different ways they were doing vertical platforming with ropes, and how you were jumping back and forth on different vines. It was amazing how much you could eke out of just a few simple mechanics and the spatial relationships of where you were jumping and where you were going.

This is a job that a lot of people see as the dream job, right? You're a creative director, just directing creatively, and everyone's looking to you. You just walk in there and point at some computers. What are some of the key differences between what people think creative direction is and what it actually has been for you, doing the work?

I think at every company, it's probably a little bit different. One thing to note is that there's typically a creative director and a game director on some of the bigger projects. The creative director tends to handle all the touchy-feely, story-related, experience-type stuff, whereas the game director handles more of the design. They're pretty much what was once called the lead designer, but they're also working hand-in-hand with the creative director to make sure both the story and game design flow together.

But yeah, I think the one thing—this goes back to the economy of design and really the economy of creativity—is people think the director just has these wild ideas and they can say anything, and it’s going to get made, like whatever they can imagine will appear on the screen. That’s certainly not the case. There is a lot of power, and you do have a lot of influence over the direction of the game. But you have to think about production, what your budgets are, and what you can actually do technically. Then you also have to understand how to work with the team and listen to them. I think that’s a big thing people don’t think about—you’re working with a group of very talented people, and through your collective efforts, you're going to develop an amazing product.

I've found that whenever I or someone else—when a director becomes too much of a dictator, people start to rebel in their own ways. They just don’t like being ordered around. So, being a director is a number of different things. One is you're always holding the vision. You’re always ensuring that what we're all talking about is moving in the right direction. Often there are so many different documents, and things are changing constantly. The one person who kind of has the idea of what this game is all about, it’s in their head. They’re still listening to people and changing that vision, but they’re the ones who continually have to communicate and make sure that documents get updated and people know what they're making. It’s very hazy early on when you just have a few prototypes and ideas.

The other thing they do is help provide structure. They put together the story structure and the design structure. At Insomniac, we’ve always put together a macro plan, which is a document that sums up how all the pieces of the game fit together and also includes some of the story elements. The creative director also works with the writer in terms of creating the scripts and the story documents. All of that structure helps the team get an idea of what the vision is and where things are going.

Another aspect of being a creative director is having that toolbox of ideas for solving creative problems—using various techniques from both filmmaking and game design. This is stuff we’ve learned from movies or experienced over the years of making games. And then, a couple more things... I’ve got my list of five things creative directors should do right now—one is being a creative leader and just being able to work well with people. And that’s huge.

Modeling the behaviors that you want.

Yeah, people will look at their leads and the creative director as a role model, and they'll follow suit. They’ll see how passionate you are, how excited you are about something, and realize that what they’re working on is very important. That means a lot. And there are situations where it’s about saving face. If there are two people in disagreement on which way to go, you can come into the situation, listen to what they have to say, and look at both points of view. Even if you’re not going to go with one person’s point of view, you can say, "Hey, I’m so glad you brought this up. This is a really good idea." But then you have to make a decision and explain, "I think we just need to go this way." You can acknowledge there are valid points on both sides, but ultimately say, "The best way for the game is to go right or left." That way, people don’t feel slighted—they feel heard and respect that decisiveness. In some companies, someone might say, "That’s a ridiculous idea, why would we do that?" and people feel shamed in front of their peers. You may not even realize it, thinking you’re being funny, but they might take it to heart and think, "Well, that’s the last time I’m pitching an idea."

Right. And then you lose out on their ideas.

Yeah, exactly. My final thing about being a creative director is knowing production too. That’s the other thing that can be problematic—there are directors who get into making games and haven’t really made a lot of games before, and that can be a disaster. They’re trying to call the shots without understanding what they’re asking for. Once you understand what goes into making games and how long it takes to build, rig, and animate a character, you can’t just make these off-the-cuff requests. You become more thoughtful about picking your battles.

Many of those five bits also apply to production and the producer. I know, for example, Ubisoft basically has two leads: a creative and a production lead. It’s like the equivalent of the game director and the creative director, but they mix production and creative because production also has to make decisions with a lot of competing priorities. They also have to model the behaviors they want from the team.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, that’s kind of how it works at Insomniac. I forgot to mention that part. There’s the game director, creative director, and a project manager who focuses solely on the schedule. There’s actually a group of project managers who all work together, and you divide and conquer different portions of the game. But it’s hard when you’re working with a project manager for them not to always appear to be the bad cop. So the creative director might be like, "I got this great idea."

I'm curious about that. So if you have a creative director, a game director, and a project manager, who runs the P&L? Like, who's actually responsible for the success of the product?

It's both the creative director and the project manager. And certainly, we have what's the equivalent of an executive producer. That's someone like Ted Price, who's our CEO. He'll come down and essentially make the final decision if it comes to that.

Yeah, I guess that works for a studio that's doing one or two products at a time.

Yeah, exactly. But usually, the way it's worked in the past is the creative director tends to make the final call. But, if they're a good creative director, they're listening to their project manager and game director.

Now, one of the things I was excited to have you talk about is what to do in situations—because I think this is something lots of people, all over the game industry and even other industries, run into—where they’re giving feedback on something, but they don't quite know how to express it as well as the person doing the work. For example, audio: you're doing creative direction, and the audio clearly fits inside the ambience of the experience and all the bits that go into the storytelling and the feeling that the players are going to get with the game. But the audio person may have a much larger vocabulary for music, and they understand instrumentation and rhythm and how these things affect the feel to a greater degree of granularity than maybe the game director does. How do you interact in those sorts of situations?

That's a great question. When I was a more novice creative director, I felt like I had to be prescriptive and tell exactly what needed to be done. Sometimes I'd try to hum the music or use terms like, "add in the percussive beats here." Later, I learned that there are two things—and this is actually something in a book that I'm working on. One is that you have to direct with emotion, so you explain what you want the player to feel. Talk more about that level of emotion they would experience and give context for where this feeling is happening in the game. You might say, "Well, at this moment, the main character just lost their partner. They're devastated, and they don't want to go on. They've completely given up." So, we want this feeling of isolation and loneliness. From there, the composer can come in and try to come up with a score that works with that.

Like the way you would talk to an actor—you wouldn't say to the actor, "frown deeper," you would express more how they're feeling.

Yeah, it’s like the classic line: “What's my motivation?” Right? So you have to talk about what the motivation is. That goes along with the idea of stating the problem, not the solution. There are so many people on the team who love to solve problems, and a lot of times, they'll be so close to working on something. You might come in for five minutes and say, "Well, we've got this problem." And if you try to force a solution, they'll just do it, but they've probably been thinking about this problem for a full day. So they probably have a lot more ideas that are a better fit for solving it.

And of course, the individual contributors are going to have a larger toolkit in their specific subdomain. So, moving on to your book, Directing Video Games 101, right?

That's right. Yeah, I’ve been working on this book for six years now, which is kind of crazy.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it’s not easy, working in games, living a life, and then also working on a book. So, I decided to put a book together that was 101 tips and techniques. These are little things I’ve learned over the years, and it’s the book I wanted to have when I was about, you know, 15 in high school, wondering what a director does—like a film director. Back then, there weren’t game directors, but I wrote it for my younger self or whoever’s out there who’s maybe curious about getting into games. But I also realized these are common problems that directors often forget, and creative professionals can benefit from. They’re kind of universal principles and truths, anywhere from knowing your core game loop to the art of the jump scare to what a story MacGuffin is, and just elements like that—how to direct the player's attention, guide them through a level. I think there’s a lot of helpful things that seasoned professionals can learn from, too.

Could you take us through some of the tips and techniques, maybe two or three that you can share with our audience?

I guess directing attention is a good one. There are a lot of different ways to guide people through a level. An example might be using breadcrumbs. So if someone walks into a space and you want them to find the hidden treasure chest, you can add a bloody trail of footprints that guides them over. Or you might have a cool archway that frames a particular location, so people tend to walk through the archway and then see this magnificent view.

Another common technique, and this is all part of one tip, is putting a dead end at a really cool vista. You have them walk to the end of a T-junction, and they’re forced to look at this cool view. Then they have to turn right or left to advance.

A little Final Fantasy moment right there.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Yeah.

And then a lot of times, motion is another key thing. Anything that moves in the level, people immediately look at it. I think it’s an instinctive response to determine if something’s a friend or foe.

Light as well, right? Like, I see a lot of bright things and kind of know to go over there.

Right. Yeah, drawing a moth to a flame. That’s there too.

Sometimes I’ll play games with some friends who aren’t gamers. I’m usually the one playing, and they’re like, "How did you know to do that?" They think I’m brilliant, but in fact, I just know the sort of grammar of what to look at in the room.

Yeah, exactly. If there’s a flickering light bulb in a room of dim lights, that’s probably where you need to go, right?

Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the thing—a lot of people have collective visual and game grammar in their subconscious. And that’s another tip: just don’t reinvent the wheel. There are certain things we as gamers inherently know. You expect the fire button to be on the right trigger. Don’t move it to the left trigger. Don’t be clever and try to move it somewhere else. And it can be tempting to try to do something a little bit different. Typically, jump is always on X if it’s the PlayStation, and then jump and swing or melee is on square. That’s been kind of a standard. So then, I guess, let’s see, another tip here would be… just kind of looking at various ones.

I’m drawing a blank and stuff. Actually, one of them I’ve found in terms of decision-making is to sleep on difficult problems. The pressure that I think a lot of directors face is that they want to make a quick, decisive decision immediately. They think if they do that, they won’t appear to be waffling or indecisive. This is just a common leadership problem. I’ve sometimes made a rash decision and then had to go back on it. It’s like, "Oh, all the troops are moving this way," and then you’re suddenly like, "Okay, go back, go back," or "Stop, stop." That can really be demoralizing.

If there are simple problems that have low impact, you should be very decisive with those because when you reverse or course-correct on them, it doesn’t have such a big impact. And part of it is just moving forward—you always have to keep production moving forward.

So you have to find that balance between saying, "Okay, this is an easy problem, we’re going to make a decision, we’ll move forward with it. And you know what? Even if I made the wrong choice, it’s not going to be deadly to the project." But if you have a really big, meteor-sized issue, it’s best to sleep on it, talk to the leads, gather opinions from the team, figure out what’s best, and then explain that and talk about your rationale behind making that big decision.

So sleeping on it is great. People will know that you are actually considering, and then explaining your rationale. I mean, that’s something I try to do when I’m making a decision—just even if I disagree with you, I’ll tell you why. Because even if you don’t agree with my reason, at least you know that I’ve, in addition to hearing you, considered your reasoning as well. Like, "I know you want this because of these reasons, and that makes sense. I’m going to go this way because of this other thing." Even if they disagree with the relative importance, people will respect that you’ve considered all that.

Yeah, yeah. I think people want to make sure you’re being thoughtful with your decision and that it’s not completely off the cuff, and that you’re not going to change your mind. They do like knowing the 'why.' What is the motivation behind it? I think that’s important. People also want to know how it fits into the greater picture. What is the context of why this decision is being made? How does this connect to everything else? Let’s see, I got one more tip for you here.

Alright, yeah, lay it on.

Well, I think this goes back to one of my ideas, which I call 'finding your magic beans.' This is early on in production, but it’s essentially those seeds that grow the project. This is something we learned with Girl with a Stick, where we didn’t really have a great high concept. We didn’t get something that was that kernel of an idea that really motivated the team. With Ratchet & Clank, credit goes to Brian Hastings, our chief creative officer. He said, "I want to make a game about an alien that travels from planet to planet, collecting weapons and gadgets." That’s what got everyone excited.

And that is a great idea. There’s just no way around it.

It gives you that who, what, and where. Suddenly, the character artists can start drawing aliens, designers can start coming up with weapons and gadgets, and the environment artists can start creating worlds. That was something that really fueled the game, and we clung to it throughout the entire production process.

Do you think that concept can help people in other parts of the industry, or even outside the industry?

Yeah, I wrote this book with the idea that it would have broad principles that won’t go out of date. I’d like to think that 10 or 20 years from now, they’d still apply. And I think they apply to all facets of production. Simply being a leader or learning how to work well with people on a team is very beneficial. A lot of times, on these really big projects, people are like mini creative directors. Senior designers or designers are heading up their own features, and they can certainly benefit from these creative techniques. I think every creative director or leader’s dream is to review a level or a feature and say, "Wow, this is all working, this is fantastic. I don’t have to give any feedback here. Thank you." By being your own mini creative director, you can apply these principles and figure that stuff out.

I was actually curious to know if in the process of putting together this book, if all your skills working on things like Ratchet & Clank, if you were able to bring some of that into your authorship.

It's one of those things—if you really want to learn a subject well, try to teach it. I would often find that I’d be reminded while working on a Ratchet & Clank project, like, "Oh, that’s right. We’ve created..." One of my tips is creating a 'platypus.' It’s about trying to glom all these different ideas into one idea, and it ends up becoming this freak of nature that doesn’t make any sense.

Oh man, I’ve been there several times.

Yeah.

There’s only one product that everyone’s working on, so it’s like their only chance to get this stuff in.

Yeah, and they just want to kind of shove it in. Or it’s a great idea on its own, but it may not work well with this other idea. So those are little things that would pop up in my head, and I’d think, "I need to write this down and remember this." That’s part of where the book came from.

I think, for me, it’s just important that we continue to learn and educate ourselves. And I’m not just saying this because I want people to buy my book. I’ve recently gone through a lot of changes with my path. I worked on a virtual reality project recently called Edge of Nowhere. There are a lot of examples in the book on that, but I found that everything I thought about in storytelling kind of got turned on its head with VR. That was really exciting, to be in this new arena and rethink my traditional methods of how I would approach storytelling and design. So I think, as I’m getting older, part of me just wants to share some of this wisdom I’ve gained over 25 or so years, but I also want to stay agile and be able to learn new techniques and be open to new ideas. And I think that’s something we need to continually do.

I agree. This podcast is my way of both sharing and continuing to grow myself. So thank you very much for coming on, and I hope you’ll come back again.

Yes, and I do have to mention the website of my book too.

Of course, of course. We'll also post it on the blog as well. But yes, please. It's anything else, anywhere else you people can find you, Brian?

Oh, sure thing. Yeah. It's directingvideogames.com. So you can go there to sign up for updates on the book. And then, I'm also at Brian Allgaier, B-R-I-A-N A-L-L-G-E-I-E-R for my Twitter account. So you can contact me there.

Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks, Jordan. It was my pleasure.

So, a couple things as we close out this episode. First of all, another thank you to Brian for coming on the show, and also for giving so much useful information and sharing with the community here. I really appreciate that, and I know that a lot of our listeners are going to get a lot out of this episode. Now there were a couple of interesting things that popped out to me between this episode and the previous episode with Dave Roll, where they were kind of like harmonies.

So one of those was the economy of design and wringing the most out of each mechanic. I thought it was interesting that Dave, who's doing a lot of mobile, casual, really focused on that as a way to be agile, to find what works best and to make the most out of what works best when you don't have a lot of resources, when you don't have a lot of time, when you don't have a huge team.

And then you had Brian, who basically made the same exact point, but in reference to huge AAA games where you have enormous resources, but moving the ship is a lot of work and changing direction is incredibly disruptive to huge numbers of people. And also you have a case with these bigger projects where the level of sheen and shine you need to put on each mechanic for it to be complete is humongous. So he and Dave both emphasized this economy of design and really wringing every last drop of value out of each mechanic. And certainly, that's something that, when I think of that kind of way of design, I think of companies like Nintendo that really put in a mechanic and explore it and exhaust it completely as you master it.

So, I thought it was really interesting the way they both talked about that, and also, Brian and Dave both mentioned Mark Cerny. So, he's an industry legend, and I know he's doing a lot of work with Sony now. I am going to see about getting him on the show, because I think it would be amazing to interview him given the influence that he's clearly had on the industry. So, just a couple thoughts to close out the interview. What was interesting to you, and who would you like to see on the show? You can let me know at jordan@brightblack.co. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode.