In this episode:

Jordan interviews Ian Milham, a veteran Art Director and Game Director, known for his work on Dead Space, Battlefield Hardline, and Tomb Raider. Ian shares deep insights into the creative process of art direction, the concept of game “chi” (the alignment of the game’s vision across all teams), and the challenges of managing large AAA projects. He also shares how his journey from Art Director to Game Director informed his approach to maintaining a consistent creative vision while balancing production and creativity.

Topics covered:

• Ian’s journey from art direction to game direction
• Understanding game “chi" and how to align it across large development teams
• The importance of maintaining consistent communication within large teams
• The role of the director in maintaining a unified vision
• Balancing creative ambition and managing team resources
• How to balance between realism and artistic expression in game environments
• Using a Ripomatic to create game trailers and set the tone early in development
• The power of a well-defined promise between developers and players

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:

[03:03] Ian’s career journey: From LucasArts to EA Redwood Shores

[07:05] Managing Dead Space projects and aligning the game's chi

[10:30] The impact of large team structures on creative alignment

[13:25] Communication and maintaining a consistent game vision on AAA titles

[16:50] Dead Space development: Why "squinting" helps simplify and focus design

[21:20] How Battlefield Hardline redefined the tone of the Battlefield series

[25:52] Balancing innovation and expectations with limited team resources

[30:10] The role of "chi" in maintaining a unified experience for the player

[35:00] Collaborating with external studios and scaling production efforts

[40:05] [40:00] Ian’s thoughts on the future of game development 

Resources & media mentioned in this episode:

Learn more and Connect with Marc Mencher:

• Website 
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Ripomatic Demo Reel - Chris Weakley Ripomatic Demo Reel - Chris Weakley

Games & companies mentioned:

• Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores/Visceral Games)
• Battlefield Hardline (Visceral Games/EA)
• Titanfall 2 (Respawn Entertainment)
• Grim Fandango (LucasArts)
• The Matrix Online (Monolith Productions)
• LucasArts
• Naughty Dog
• Ubisoft
• Telltale Games
• Bethesda

You're listening to Playmakers Podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman. And on this week's episode, we've got Ian Milham. He is the game director at Crystal Dynamics over in Redwood City. Before that, he was the creative director and art director at Redwood Shores Electronic Arts, working on games like Battlefield Hardline and of course the Dead Space games. And before that, he worked at LucasArts. This man knows his stuff. We talk about that stuff on this week's episode of Playmakers.

So I am very excited about this interview that I'm sharing with you today. I was excited before the interview. I was excited as soon as we recorded it. I felt that it was something special, and listening again to prepare this intro, I had the same feeling. Ian is, in addition to being clearly an incredibly talented game maker, also a great interlocutor and somebody who is able to explain the concepts of game creation and the processes, and his own opinions on it, in a way that is unique. Before I even interviewed him, I had seen his GDC talk about doing the art direction on Dead Space 2, and we'll put a link to that on playmakerspodcast.com. That talk was so good that I knew I had to have Ian on the show, and I recommend watching that talk. We do cover some material that's a little bit similar, but it's largely separate, and it's incredible. So you're definitely going to want to check that out. Ian and I had, I would call it, a wide-ranging talk.

We had a great conversation covering just a lot of meaty stuff around making games. So we talked about the history of the Dead Space franchise. We talked about why sometimes you actually want to squint at your work. And that's not just an art thing; it's actually a metaphor for all sorts of stuff. We talked about some of the differences between working on big AAA projects with huge budgets and smaller indie games. We talked about why maybe your studio's first game shouldn't be the big opus that you had in mind when you created the studio. And we talk a lot about "chi." And I know that sounds strange, but we talk about the game's chi. This is a concept Ian has, and it is well elucidated in this episode and in this interview. So, what chi is, how to align it across the game. And we talked about the role of different tools in doing that. And one of the ones that was interesting to me is the Rip-O-Matic. So we talk about that, and we talk about how you do all that to cultivate this game feel, and Ian calls it a promise between the player and the game creator about what kind of experience you're going to have. So, this is an episode about that promise and about how to deliver on it, and about studios that have the values to do it in an exceptional way. Ian was a great person to interview. I'm very excited to be sharing this week's episode. So let's dive in with Ian Milham.

Ian, thank you very much for coming on the show.

I'm really excited to have you here. I'm excited to be on. Glad to be here.

I love Dead Space and I loved your GDC talk. I think your approach to that work was so thorough. It was inspiring to me.

Oh, thanks, I appreciate that. You work on talks like that and stuff, and I've always found them, no matter how you end up delivering them or whatever, just the act of creating one, especially in that case, right at the end of Dead Space 2, it was a good chance to sort of codify what we’d learned and how it had gone. So, in a way, I just made that talk for myself, just to sort of really think about how things had gone, but I’m happy to hear other people got some use out of it, too.

Well, one of the things I was curious about is, kind of, from Dead Space 2 to 3, where you went from there.

The straight-shooting idea, basically, is, right, we made Dead Space 1, we loved it, it was a good expression of what we wanted to do. We thought we could do better, and it had come out at a very crowded time. It came out in October of ‘08, right before, like, Modern Warfare, and a bunch of other big, heavy-hitting games that fall, and so I think a lot of people found Dead Space later. It was sort of a critical hit, but not really a giant seller, although it’s proven to have some good legs over time. And then we were like, "Oh, but if we really...we’ll just...let’s do a great one." So, Dead Space 2, obviously, we expanded and improved the formula and worked a lot on it, and we...it’s probably my favorite game that I’ve made, but the sales didn’t really expand that much. And in the intervening time from ‘08 to ‘11, games got a lot more expensive, and making games that were getting more expensive but not selling more was not an appetizing prospect to anybody.

So, the real challenge with 3 was, well, man, Dead Space 2 was already a 90 Metacritic. I think there are ways we could make it better, this formula, but just making it better is probably not going to solve this problem. So we need to think about how we can evolve it. That was a big-time challenge. The idea there was, well, let’s see if we can...it’s always a challenge with some of these straight, 9 or 10-hour single-player-focused games, although Dead Space 2 did have a competitive multiplayer mode. In the age of rentals and everything else, they just have some real challenges. So, the idea of bringing co-op into the Dead Space universe, we thought, would actually be pretty cool.

The number one reason why people loved Dead Space is because it was scary. But the number one reason why people said they didn’t buy it is because it’s scary. And the idea of the whole co-op was, it’d be like maybe going to a scary movie with your friend, and it could sort of bring people along that way. I actually thought the implementation of co-op in that game was pretty clever and pretty successful. So, there are aspects of that that I’m proud of. I think it was critically a lot more mixed than the other two, I think because critics over time just...they thought they had an idea of what Dead Space was, and Dead Space 3 was different than that. But there you go. In the end, I think it has some real stuff going for it.

One thing that I noticed in your GDC talk that I thought was very interesting is you talked about this quote from one of your art school professors who had said squinting can replace four years of art school. And I kind of wrote that down. Like, that's a really interesting quote. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means for you?

Well, it means a lot. It means a lot of, a lot of different things, I think. In his case, he was talking about two-dimensional illustrations. I was an illustration major in school, and that's what he was talking about. And that idea was just, when you squint at something, it needs to work that way. It needs to work in its bones. Details will not carry the day for you if your core composition, color theory, and everything else aren't successful.

I think that applies for games in a lot of ways too, where we, especially as game developers, can get so caught up in implementation and the way things are being made, and all these little details. But the real key is being able to squint at your game and still get it, and is it strong. And so often you can also, when you squint at something, see what's wrong with it, because you're taking away the superfluous details and things. It's always a challenge, because you get down really into the weeds of your game and you're working on this little texture or this beat or whatever. It behooves us all to take a step back and squint at it every once in a while, and really see if it’s paying off at the top level.

Sort of like, specifically, visually, if you're squinting, you can kind of, you can kind of like, are the colors working? Is the contrast working? Is it still, is there still something cool there? What I like about the way you express that is that there's, it sounds like there's kind of a deeper level, like squinting, the metaphor of squinting. At whatever you're doing, the story—can you squint at the story and still have it work?

Right. And if you can't, then you’ve got a problem. This happens a lot in the art context, right? Because you can make fundamental compositional errors or biological errors if you're drawing a person or something. And it doesn't matter how nicely you render that skin tone or the hair, if you didn't lay out that face right, you're not going to save it. It’s not going to work. And also as you're laying in light and shape and form, you should be able to squint at it and still get it. I think it's the same thing metaphorically with code or story or design or any of those things. It needs to work at a detail level and at a squint level.

Something I wanted to ask you, I noticed that you started back at LucasArts. Is that kind of where you feel like you've got, I mean, I know you did some work before that.

I did work before that. So my first gig was doing art back in the sort of when the PlayStation came out in 96, that's when CD ROM was sort of a part of the package for the first time. And we all remember what a leap Final Fantasy VII made in terms of graphical storage and that kind of thing, and being able to move around on these background paintings. So that was my first gig—working on an RPG. It was a lot like that, which was just fine. And then in November of 98, Grim Fandango came out and it was technologically very similar—moving around a relatively crude 3D character on a 2D background, with some elements cut out and stuff like that, so it kind of had a faux 3D effect. Man, I just loved every part of that game. I loved the vibe, I loved the originality, I loved every part of it.

Talking about a product where you can squint at it and it still works.

Yeah, in terms of like, what an incredibly strong concept. And so, I went to LucasArts about six months later, after Grim Fandango had come out. Unfortunately, I kind of felt like the guy who got to the party that was kind of lame, and there were a couple people at the party that were like, "Dude, you should have been here an hour ago. It was amazing." Because right as I was getting there, during that year, nihilistic, Infinite Machine, and Double Fine all got started by LucasArts people who had all just made stuff I loved, and then decided to leave. I got there only just in time to see the bus pulling away.

What year was that?

This is '99, and it would turn into other fabulous opportunities, and I had a great time there. It just wasn't what I thought I was joining up with.

It's amazing how many great studios came out of that.

And Double Fine is still going strong and really sort of delivering on the same mission that Tim had when he struck out to do it in early 2000. And then a lot of the guys that I came into and worked with for a little bit just after that, they left and formed Telltale. And man, were they ahead of the curve with their episodic model. What they've been doing at Telltale has been quite a machine ever since.

I actually did a few games with them when I was at Ubisoft. So yeah, I know that crew pretty well. Amazing talent over there, and they're doing... The way their vision has become their reality is just awesome.

Right? Yeah, those guys were on point.

I mean, even their name, from way back when they started, is exactly what they're still doing—and better and better.

I thought it was very wise of them to have something that their studio was about. They knew who they were as game makers, but they didn't necessarily try to make their opus right out of the gate. They weren't making some giant game, right? They started with some licensed IP. And of course, that's turned out to be their bread and butter. But it was pretty small in those days, and they were just like, "Hey, let's just learn what we're about as game makers, and let's get something out, and let's stay open and see how it goes," and then gradually build.

I think some of the new studios that start, and they start because the creator has this amazing game idea or something, and they immediately try to make that giant odyssey of a game—that rarely ends well. I find the studios that are still open, that have made it happen, and eventually get to make that giant game, usually started with something more modest.

You've worked on lots of huge games. Just, I don't obviously know the budgets, but we're talking incredibly large budgets.

Over nine figures in one case.

Wow. Wow. Okay. Can we talk about which project that was? Is that Hardline? Battlefield 1?

No, no, for that, Battlefield Hardline.

Yeah, that's, okay, that's what I was figuring. Incredible.

But yeah, man, games are getting expensive.

You retweeted, I don't remember the name of the account, but you retweeted this picture of the Battlefield 1 team.

The launch party that DICE had in Sweden. Now, that was with their, like, plus ones and stuff like that, but these days, I mean, it's not at all uncommon for AAA teams to have—I mean, the legend on GTA V is that they had a thousand people—but if you count partner studios, and easily if you count outsourcing, it's not at all rare to have teams in the 250, 300, 400, 500 people range.

Yeah, I've seen some of the kind of huge rooms housing some of the Ubisoft teams. And it's enormous. It's really something.

How many studios pitch in simultaneously on an Assassin's Creed or something is pretty remarkable.

It seems like you're someone who's just very comfortable working in that environment with those huge teams. And I'm curious, if you were... What from that process would you take if you were doing a game that was like a few hundred thousand dollars and you were doing pre-production or concept work on something like that? What do you feel like from that experience working on those huge games would apply down to those smaller projects?

Well, what I would say would be maybe the actual development wouldn't resemble so much, but one thing I can absolutely see is that when you get to a really big team or really high stakes, communication is critical. And what I mean by that is, with so many people working on something, it becomes a big effort just for them all to have a really clear idea about what the thing is.

The vision for it needs to be really clear, and the priorities of it need to be really clear. The metaphor that sort of comes to mind for me would be, the game at that scale needs to have really good chi—like the energy of it needs to be aligned, whatever it is. Like, to bring a recent example, I think Titanfall 2 has really great chi. You know what that game is about. Respawn, they don't want to get too big. They are a design-first and on-the-sticks-feel-first company. You can tell that that is a group of people that really agree about what they're making. How that applies at a more indie scale, I think, is good news about making an indie game is you've got a lot of freedom. The bad news is you've got a lot of competition, and getting the game out itself might not be as much of a challenge, but getting it noticed sure can be.

I think that sort of clear chi, that alignment, that communication—when you're an indie, it's not so much about within the team, it's more about can you get that clear communication with your audience or your potential audience? Can they look at it briefly and get, like, "Oh, I really get what that's about. I understand that, and that's something that might appeal to me," because chances are there's going to be something like it. Unless you're really being crazy innovative, there's probably something else like it, and there's going to be competition out there. So is that vision really, really clear? So I spent, as a creative director writing a game director, that was my job. My job was to make sure that an animator in Montreal, a modeler in California, and a coder in Vancouver all had a really clear idea and were bought in on what we were trying to do and were all really aligned. So if I was part of an indie group, I would be trying to take that same approach, that same power of, like, are we crystal clear on what we are making and what we are not making? It might just be that that's being pitched or shown outside because there's only six of us in a room and we already know what we're making. But that same idea of making sure that that is really, really well defined, I think, is critical no matter what scale you're working at.

That makes sense. And it's actually really interesting because that, in a lot of ways, was the story of your GDC talk as far as Dead Space 1. And when I think about that message that you're saying for kind of standing out in indies, that's always been what I think of as what's required to create an IP. Like, if you want to start an IP, better to have not the greatest game, but have a really vital feel, brand, something that pops, and you know exactly what it is. If you can create that, you get the opportunity to kind of continue because you're going to stand out. I think you're right. That makes a lot of sense for anyone trying to stand out in indie and mobile and in what's becoming more and more just an incredibly crowded field.

And if you do have that clear—whatever you want to call it—clear energy, chi, vision, it allows you so much, especially, what's great about an indie game is that it doesn't really have the same expectation of features that a AAA does. So you can get away with not having stuff, if it makes sense that you don't have it, right?

Take The Stanley Parable. That game is great because of its tone, its visuals. It hardly has anything in terms of mechanics, but you're totally fine with that because it's exactly in line with the experience that you heard about and bought. And so the fact that you can't do much in that game but sort of walk around and interact with things—you don't mind because that's exactly the tone, and the vibe, and the energy of that thing is very, very aligned.

One of the things that can be frustrating about AAA is that you really aren't afforded that. At that scale, your game needs to appeal to everyone on planet Earth, and it becomes a little bit of a feature shopping list where it has to have this and it has to have that no matter what your perspective, alignment, or vision for the game is.

If you don't supply an answer as a game maker, if you don't supply a vision to your customer or to your teammates, they'll fall back on other metrics like, "What features does it have?" Yeah, I don't know. They'll do reports on what the frame rate is rather than how did that game make them feel? But if you do have a really clear and compelling vision that is aligned all the way through, the features that you don't have, no one will mind because they get it intuitively why it's not in there because it's not appropriate for the vision that you've communicated to them.

What kinds of things do you do to communicate that vision to these large teams? I know there's kind of the famous story of Tim Schafer making the social network for the characters in Psychonauts, or I've had guests talk about making the box art. I think that might also be a thing that they've done at Double Fine before they even complete or start development.

It's really whatever you can do at the time, over and over again, and it sort of develops. So I've done a lot of rip-o-matics, and depending, so like just taking clips from movies and creating something. Usually I prefer, rather than trying to create like a fake movie trailer out of stuff, just create little example experiences that kind of hit a tone or hit a vibe specifically. Early on with those things, you can't really control how they look, right? Because you're just sourcing from found footage. Although a couple of times, I have shot new footage just to kind of intercut with existing DVD stuff to kind of give an overall tone and feeling. And those can be, those can be really helpful. They can be misleading. And a lot of times, if you do it wrong, people just end up playing sort of "spot the movie." They want to feel clever, so they go, "Oh, that's from Mission Impossible," or "That's from that." So you have to kind of be, be a little bit careful about it. But I've done that a lot.

I've never done or seen one of those. So what you're saying is you take clips from different movies and splice them together? Are you creating a story or is it just a feel?

It kind of, it depends. So usually you can't because you don't have the... You can't use just one movie because then it doesn't really work, and people think you're doing the movie. And you can't really straight rep, and recognizable actors are distracting. So you are just grabbing shots and using new music and doing whatever to kind of give a generalized tone. Dead Space was relatively easy to do because there's a lot of spaceship movies and sci-fi business that you can use from a lot of things. So we cut one together out of, I think there was, lots of Solaris and, and I think...

The new one or the old one?

The old one and a bunch of other, Sunshine and a bunch of other things just trying to kind of get stuff together that kind of gave a general impression of what we were going to do. One of the biggest ones was for Battlefield Hardline because Battlefield had a, I mean, had such an identifiable tone already and we wanted to do something different. For that one, we cut together a bunch of, sort of, sexy crime and car chase stuff, sort of escalating that to give that, because our whole point was to give something a little more aspirational, a little more polished. And the key is to just sort of, again, you're trying to make them, make people feel a certain way. How did they feel at the end of that minute and a half? Are they excited? Are they full of dread? Are they curious? And, eventually you're hoping that your first game trailer, that your first other material will make people feel the same way.

I like editing video. I just enjoy it. It's an incredible time suck, but I just find it fun. And this sounds like something I'd like to try to do. I'd just like to know kind of your process. So, you don't have the main characters, I assume it's not a lot of plot, it's more like, here's an opening shot, here's some interior shots, here's some key moments, that sort of thing.

Typically, lots of times, we've tried to start with a song. A song is a good place to start 'cause that's going to be the glue because it's largely going to be a montage of different stuff. A couple of times, if there's a really great voiceover or conversation from one movie that really sort of sets a nice tone, we might start from that, but then undercut a bunch of other footage underneath it to give an overall impression of what we're trying to do. That's if we're going for a tone piece. Just as often, if we want to inform how are animations gonna feel or the kind of... sometimes we'll just do like a supercut of the kind of things that happen in this game, running along rooftops or swinging from vines or what, like some adventure kind of game or whatever. You might do it that way instead.

The tricky part is to really kind of have an understanding audience. Because I've done these before, people from the marketing might get it and look at it and go like, "I don't... what, that wasn't in..." Let's say you're making a space Western. Like, let's say you're making some sort of adventure that happens in space, but you don't yet necessarily use movies from space because you're really going for the tone and the vibe and the feeling of it rather than the literal images. That can confuse people if they aren't kind of people of imagination and fluency with this kind of thing.

But you asked about process. In the beginning, it's a lot of harvesting. It's a lot of just grabbing as much as you can from certain things that feel right and feel like an expression of character. And then typically, like I said, we've started with a song and sort of felt the beat along that and then started to fill things in around and just sort of see where it takes us. And like I said, a couple of times I've shot new footage to kind of intercut with it because we had a very specific, like key image or something that we wanted to make a little more ownable. One of the things that can be difficult, right? Is following a character through action because you're using a bunch of different found footage. You can't really do... I mean, sometimes you can get away with it. Maybe if you are... I haven't ever done this, but I could see maybe someone with a huge filmography like Tom Cruise. You could intercut movies or something, but for the most part, you can't do that. So, it tends to be more...

That actually sounds hilarious.

Right? He's got a great run. He's easily the best runner in Hollywood, always has been. And then you just sort of go from there to cut something together. And it's really just a conversation starter. Hopefully with the team or whoever you're communicating with, you're like, "Well, this is sort of the ballpark of what we want it to be overall." And someone might go, "Oh man, that's... that's a little darker than I thought," or "That's a little..."

One of the key learnings from the Dead Space ones that we did is that it was pretty slow. The ripomatic that we made, it was... there was punchy, but there wasn't a lot of jump scares in it. And it was sort of a slow, psychotic build. With some purposely vague voiceover about, "Why don't we... we can't explain what's going on. Why don't you come see for yourself?" kind of stuff. And it had sort of a tone that is actually pretty good through line to how the shipping thing... how the shipping thing felt compared to, for instance, they might have thought we were making Aliens. There was going to be space marines in it, and it was going to be machine guns and stuff. But from the beginning, the Rippomatic helped establish, no, no, this is going to be a game where you actually kind of walk a lot.

Yeah, and it's... and then that kind of gives you some of that chi.

Right, right. But then, for instance, one of the core things about the mechanics of Dead Space is that, it's a game with long enemy interactions. Like, you don't... you're not fighting eight dudes simultaneously, at least very rarely, that all sort of drop with one shot. It's about having a long combat relationship with something, with a powerful thing that's approaching you slowly. And you have to do fine motor movement. You got to get it in the elbow, you got to get it in the other elbow, you got to get it in the leg.

Right. Contrasts nicely with F.E.A.R.

Right. And... that's it. You know this because also in F.E.A.R. people have a hard time doing fine motor movement in fear. And the analogy that we used a lot for Dead Space combat is it's when the person is getting chased and they get to their car and they have to get their car keys in the door and they're like... right. They're trying to get the car started and it's, it's... it's that. So we would literally use a clip of somebody, like fine little things, like someone trying to get their keys in the lock or whatever. Even though that could be like from Friday the 13th or something, it's not on a spaceship at all, but the emotional truth of it was applicable.

Although, from what I remember, it's been a while, but I remember in Dead Space, you think you've got the monster, but then they're still alive. It's like you finally get the key in, and then there's another lock.

Yes, that's true.

Before we go, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the transition from working as an art director to a game director. What do you think has served you really well from working as an art director, and how have you had to adapt or change?

I think just like anybody who makes a transition from someone who has a work product, who makes something, and that thing does most of the talking to them, as you transition to direction, it's really about achieving through others. So that's the natural transition that anybody has made. And, the role changes quite a bit through production. In the beginning, you might be making a lot of stuff, but as the team gets bigger, I've always found that directors are best served by being at other people's desks and making other people more efficient and better and not really making things themselves. I mean, really, what does anybody on a game team want? They want to be given... one metaphor I like is they want to be given a road, not railroad tracks, right? They want to have some restrictions and a goal, but they don't want to have it literally... they don't want to be just used as hands. They want to contribute to the whole thing. So they want a target to shoot at. They want feedback along the way that they are in fact going towards the target. And then they don't want to have to do it over. So they don't want you to change your mind. Now, you do change your mind sometimes, but you have to kind of own that that's your problem.

And so as an art director, that was mostly my job, right? Was to help establish in the early times a vision and a look for how this thing was going to look on screen and how it was going to communicate what was important about the gameplay and the mood and the tone and working with the other departments and negotiating with the other departments. I think that's a big, big sort of misconception about being an art director. I found more than half my time was with non-artists. It was working with the engineers and the designers to make sure that art's needs were represented with them and that their needs could... is there something that art could be taking advantage of to deliver something even better?

But it was mostly a communication job. And then as people are creating work, capitalizing on wins when somebody on the team makes something incredible, making sure that the rest of the team hears about it and learns from it and maybe changes their plans based on it, and so on and so forth. And I actually haven't found it to be that different between art direction and game direction. Just scale, but it's the same ideas of how giving people a playground to work in and having a nice target. And then as things develop, staying flexible and excited and communicative around the whole team. So they can get those things they want. They have a target to shoot for, and they don't have to redo it, 'cause there's not enough time for that.

Do you have a way when you're kind of at someone's desk, working with them, do you have a ton of reference on a server somewhere or on your phone? Things that you're bringing up regularly to kind of realign Chi as you're working with people?

It depends. Hopefully, you've assembled quite a lot of that in pre-production. So yes, there are vast folders full of images. And then it can be all kinds of different stuff. It can be the tone from some movie or that kind of stuff. But a lot of times, I find the best reference or alignment for Chi is just real-world. That way you're not really being derivative of some other creative work necessarily.

But if you talk about the way certain activities feel or certain experiences we've had and that we're trying to translate, like I was talking... I don't think this is a spoiler or anything about searching and discovery. Like when you go to the beach and there's that old guy with the metal detector, and he's got the earphones on and he's sort of walking around, well, that's the thing. You make fun of that guy, but you're also watching him. You're also a little bit jealous. Like, there's a primal curiosity going on there. And so we might talk about things like that. And that's the kind of stuff you're doing during pre-production. Then, when it comes to actual production...

You want to be as concrete as possible. There's certainly a lot of exploration still to do, but to the point where I'm a big fan of getting paintings done early on that are basically screenshots. Everybody agrees, "If it looks like this when we're done, are we good?" And we will do paintings that are graphically real to whatever our look is, and scrub them on the screen, right on top of the live scene. We'll capture it from a camera in the game, paint over it until it's really tight and everybody really works on it. Then, we aim towards that specifically.

And then rather than reference and touchstones in a broad creative sense, my job is to focus on: what can we get done right now? What's the most important thing right now that gets us on the way to that? I find so often artists and designers, they sort of see all the problems broadly and they're like, "Oh, we got to do ABC and D, and we've got to do this, we've got to add that." And a lot of my job comes down to, "Alright, cool. You're not wrong, but how about for right now, let's just get one part." Almost all the quality that I've ever really gotten to in making games has come through iteration. You're so much better off bringing your ambitions in so you can iterate on something than you are trying to get so much done at the same time.

So I found that my job can be like, "Alright, don't worry about it. We will get there." I frequently, I'm a supplier of faith, right? It's my job to express faith and be like, "I believe in you. We are going to get there. Let's just do this little part that we can get all the way through the process, and we can learn about getting all the way through the process." And as we get to the end, we will realize how completely screwed we are and how this is no good, but then we'll go through the process again, and we'll be a little less screwed, and we'll keep on going from there.

I actually found broadly that's what the role of director ends up being a lot because, as anybody working on a game by themselves or with 500 people knows, games look like crap for a long, long time and then they all of a sudden kind of look good. And they don't make their own case for existing until pretty deep into it. So a director's job in the beginning is to sort of draw the treasure map for everybody about, "Hey, this is going to be great." But then it's a lot of months, and maybe years, of just creating faith for people who don't see it, even if they're working on it. Or frequently, in a big organization, creating faith outside the team.

mSo people will just leave the team alone long enough for the thing to actually become what you are certain it could be.

Yeah, I've definitely seen how just protecting the team from disruption can be a huge, huge benefit.

Yeah, it's a necessary thing. And the thing is, no one means ill. They're just sort of, they're doing their jobs and they're either curious or they are whatever and they just can't see what the thing is going to be, or maybe no one knows yet. That's the process. That's how things just take a while. And so your job is to act like you know exactly where it's going, even if you don't. And to have faith that it's going that way while still doing your homework and making sure as much as possible that it's going to go that way.

I've been very lucky to be a part of some very talented teams, and most of my career, even as an art director, was not really spent improving people's art necessarily. They were pretty good at that. It was aligning their art as much as possible so it looked like one person did it, making sure that as much of their effort ended up on screen as possible, that they weren't searching for things, and they weren't doing things by half and then being told to redo it because the designer actually forgot that we had to go into this room instead of that room or any of that kind of stuff. Or marketing or direction actually thought they were getting this kind of game when we promised them this kind of game or any of those other kinds of things. It was really just trying to align those teams and set them free more than creating anything, for me personally.

I think that the real key in the sort of game maker audience and the whole relationship is that focused, powerful promise that you are telling people. "We're going to deliver this kind of experience for you." And they say, "Oh man, that sounds awesome." And then if you do deliver that experience for them, that's a really powerful loop, and there's a lot of affection and loyalty that's created there.

And I think the best game developers, you kind of know what they're about. I know what Naughty Dog is about, I know what BioWare is about, I know what Bethesda is about. And as people become fans, because they identify with what you're about, like I think Bethesda is a really great example, right? They promise, they're like, "This is the game where you can do whatever you want." You can do whatever you want when there's castles and dragons, or you can do whatever you want in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but you can do whatever you want. And they keep that promise radically, even if it means their games are gonna be kind of buggy and breakable. We're gonna let you do whatever you want, even if it's collecting every head and putting them in this one house. Until the frame rate goes to three and the physics explode, but we're going to let you do it because this is the game where you get to do whatever you want.

And what's interesting is that promise is so focused and so powerful for that audience that they forgive a lot, right? Naughty Dog kind of makes the opposite promise. You don't get to do much of what you want in Naughty Dog games, but holy hell is it gonna be amazing. Like, they're like, "Listen, man, we're gonna do a little less choice, but if you trust us, we're gonna deliver a really impressive time." And people go, "Wow, you know what, that really was an impressive time. I don't mind that I didn't get to choose that much." And that kind of focused promise on either end, or whatever other promises that other games are making, I think that focus is so important compared to, "Well, this game is going to be super fun, and it's going to have single player and multiplayer and co-op and it's going to have all that."

That's not something that I can really feel passionate about as a fan. And it's not a focused enough promise. So I think related to that same idea of squinting or chi or whatever you want to call it, having a focused promise is super important.

Well, I can't wait to see what the next focused promise you're going to create for us is.

Yeah, me too. We've got a long road ahead of us, so there's a lot of focusing yet to do, but I'm pretty excited about the opportunity.

Well, thanks so much for coming on, Ian. It was great having you and learning about the way you approach delivering on the promise to the player.

Thank you very much.

Well, that wraps it up with Ian. I think it was a fantastic interview—super valuable, lots to learn. I love this idea of a promise between a studio and its audience about what kind of experience they're going to have. Ian gave us a ton of tools to deliver that experience and to align the values and, what he calls the chi of that experience, across these large teams. And I think a lot of this stuff could work on small and medium-sized teams as well. And that covers 99 of games. It's very rare that there's just one person making a game. For every Stardew Valley, there's everything else that's ever been made.

As I'm doing more and more of these interviews, there are themes that come up. There are things that appear over and over again—the importance of the team, the importance of all boats rising together, of making sure that your team is working well as a unit. That shows up over and over again. The greats, they don't make it just about themselves, they make it about their team. It is the team that makes the game great. It is the team that fulfills the promise. And what can you do for your team today? That's my question that I'm going to leave you with.

But before I leave you, I do want to ask you—if you're getting something out of the show, if you're enjoying these interviews, if you've listened to a few episodes and you find them useful and enjoyable, please do support the show. You can do that by rating us and reviewing us on iTunes. Those reviews are how we get noticed by more people and get a larger audience, which helps keep the show going. So, I would very much appreciate it if you would head over to iTunes and write a review. If you don't listen on iTunes, if you listen on Google Play or Stitcher, we're on all those platforms, and you can leave us a review there as well. That's it for this week. I am looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of PlayMakers.