Finding Inspiration: Tools for When You're Stuck

[Music] so let's go ahead and get started so hi my name is Lauren Kasem and I am a senior artist at s2 games where we recently shipped Monument Valley - I've been working in the industry for about six years Here I am at the end of art school I think days before I got offered my first internship and Here I am last year I've been changing my hair pretty regularly but obviously some things never change and my career I'm sure like many of yours has been really all over the place I got my start working in triple-a and free-to-play so I was on really really big teams with a lot of structure my first job was actually 38 are there any 38 ears in the room and what do you remember that yeah hey yeah and as a young junior artist at these

bigger studios the problems that I had to solve were always really well-defined for me by someone else so draw a cute graph or render these materials or make a really cool helicopter but about three years ago I went from mostly working on really really big teams where my role was really well defined and I was always tasked by somebody else to much smaller teams on games like Luna where the water tastes like wine and Monument Valley - which I was really excited about my heart really lies with these sorts of experimental emotional games and honestly I felt so lucky that these smaller Studios took a chance on me but I really wasn't prepared for how though my ability to make things and render and having the craft of being a game artist was really important a large part of my job was going to be so different from the kind of problem-solving that I was used to it

was stuff like how do you make a VR hand that doesn't make people win a hit or what should that and honestly I sucked I sucked it answering these questions at the beginning there's that word concept artists and concepts and problem solving had just become a much bigger part of my job title and I was finding it super hard I found myself doing stuff like throwing pages and pages of color keys at problems that probably needed a really different approach or just iterating as fast as I could on stuff without thinking about why I was in reading on that a particular idea in the first place and I think for a lot of us this is a really emotionally difficult thing to admit that you're having trouble with I know that I found it much easier to say to my art director hey you know I don't know how to bake this kind of light map then hey I'm having a

really hard time coming up with ideas and I don't feel like I have strategies for it I think we look at this kind of creativity as something that's innate to people and not something that can be learned or improved on that people are just born with it but that's a false narrative that I think I've heard before that artists are born with talent and I think most artists in this room will tell you that that is not really true talent is kind of a myth artists are good artists because they practiced it's your love of a thing and it is the hours that you have put in so this Roach was actually one of my first portfolio pieces that I submitted to studios and this was definitely the best thing in there there was a lot worse and I unfortunately couldn't find the rest of it but I was not that good people would not have said that I was talented in fact art directors specifically told me that I wasn't when I went to portfolio reviews but I put in the hours and I got better and I'm pretty sure that this whole creative thinking inspiration

stuff is probably pretty similar that we have a broken narrative and it's something you can get better at it's just a question of where you put that time and that's what this talk is going to be about its where can you put that time to improve at this pretty nebulous concept I'm definitely still figuring this stuff out I don't have all the answers but I'm going to share with you some processes that I have found really useful and some things that I incorporated into my daily routine that have really helped me with expanding my own creativity and at the end of the talk I'll actually walk you through how we built a monument alley to level and how we incorporated a lot of these processes into that and a caveat as far as inspiration goes I am NOT here to tell you one cool trick to pull your hat or pull out of your hat during difficult brainstorming sessions this isn't about cool tricks game devs don't hate me maybe my ex but that's a different story the things I want to talk about are les one cool trick they're more like going

to the gym or keeping a sketchbook it's stuff that you make a habit of and if you can integrate it into your routines you will see change and you will see improvement so the first thing that I want to talk about is something called open mode it comes from this talk that John Cleese the Monty Python game called how to be creative it's pretty easy to find just Google with John Cleese creativity talk I'm slightly remiss to recommend it because he makes some pretty questionable - about women's liberation in Eastern Europeans but it's an old talk and we're gonna pull some of the good nuggets out because I think the way he verbally is this idea is really really good so he talks about us having two sorts of creative modes you've got open mode and you have closed mode so closed mode is the sort of getting stuff jet mode it's emails it's blasting through your JIRA tickets it's putting on your headphones and doing some really really careful

rendering all day and I think a lot of us are the most comfortable in closed mode I know that I certainly was this are I was realizing was probably where I had spent most of my artistic career and then there's open mode open mode is the more quote unquote creative mode it's more contemplative it's more inclined to humor it's more playful and this is the space where a lot of our best ideas come from it's where a lot of our problem-solving happens and it's where we find a lot of our inspiration so I saw this talk and I was like ok great I just need to do it the morning Python and get myself my opa mode so he that's I'm tied you go to a quiet room you get your sketchbook and I was like cool open mode gonna do it we stone and you're like oh yeah you know what I have this email something to do to reply to I forgot to check that violin I should probably do that what about that thing that Stacy said this morning that was really weird I'm just gonna check Twitter really quick I know I'm supposed to be an open

mode right now I don't know what I'm doing this is useless I'm useless so if that train of thought sounds familiar to any of you then the first study to do that I'm actually gonna recommend is mindfulness I'm not saying that you should be doing it while you're trying to come up with ideas but I find that having a daily practice with this really helps me because it trains some pretty specific things that make it much easier to stay on that open creative useful space but what actually is mindfulness I feel like I've been hearing a lot of talks but it was quite explained it it's a big concept but in short it's kind of a simple form of meditation and it bolts stuff like focusing on your breath and body awareness I personally use headspace but there's a lot of other cool apps and books and stuff out there and it's helped me and some pretty specific ways so the first is I found it helps with bringing your mind back to the problem at hand when you are blueSky

thinking it's so easy to get off-topic or to get what you were supposed to be doing in the first place and it helps train that focus but more importantly it helps stop that voice in your head that gets mad at you for getting distracted in the first place the second is honestly it can be really boring but there's a lot of studies that show that boredom is actually really really good for creativity and getting more comfortable with being bored can be really helpful and learning to sit with discomfort and anxiety now we don't necessarily mean about your life so that's great too I mean more that this open mode is more uncomfortable than closed it feels better to go with the first side that you have and to start drilling in rather than staying in that space of I don't know and I'm thinking about it but often your best ideas are not your first ones they're the ones that you get to when you've been letting your mind step

against that discomfort and if you can't stay in that uncomfortable space you're not going to get to them so I just sort of similar doubt I would really recommend getting off the internet on days that you know you're gonna be solving these sorts of difficult problems maybe some of you have a healthier relationship to social media than I do but I know that the first thing that I do and I'm uncomfortable or I'm unsure is I tend to grab for Facebook or social media or reddit or whatever it's become a mental security blanket for a lot of us and I find that this sort of scrolling really really hinders me I think going back to a previous point because it means I never really have to be bored I never really have to be uncomfortable so I personally use an app called zero willpower it blocks a list of websites and apps on my phone for myself and a browser extension called stay focus so I know that hey if today is a brainstorming day at work before I get there in the morning I hit the button on both of these apps so I cannot be scrolling Twitter not even in the bathroom is hey maybe he said hang on the toilet is when you would have been making those really valuable connections in your brain so that's the

first starting to do then that's mindfulness and getting off the internet what is the next thing that you might want to work on randomness so working on your ability to come up with random things to follow seemingly stupid lines of thought and make irrelevant connections and leaps will really greatly serve you especially when it comes to things like brainstorming and mind mapping introducing an element of randomness has been serving humanity for a very long time and my personal favorite examples are usually from divination particularly something called scapular mansi so in a few cultures around the world particularly in a few ancient communities in North America people used to take a scapula before going on a hunt and they would burn it and then they would use the cracks in that scapula that form from the heat as a map of the area and it would follow the lines to figure out where hunt that day so scapula NC was a great

early random number generator that meant people didn't end up going hunting in the same area all the time it mix things up and it helped make sure that they struck out into new areas and introducing your own kinds of randomness into your process and even ritual can really help you strike out into new areas so to Fred a couple more divination examples because I think they're really fun an old one is Bible dipping I grew up in the Bible Belt of Texas so we used to do this as kids but you can do it with books at poetry or Sandman comics or whatever you want so you open a book to a random page and you pointed a line how does it apply to your current problem point in another how do you mobile to what game could that be another personal favorite here is Tarot I've been reading tarot for about five years and it is my absolute favorite two-player branching narrative game that gives me my best ideas pull three cards what story to those three things tell put them in a different order what does

it tell now so if this all seems a little bit witchy and woowoo to all of you and maybe a little bit irrelevant we kind of already do this I know that a lot of us have turned to Jesse shells deck of lenses to get ideas brewing and it's a lot of the same principles so much of this post from divination and if you want some really wonderful rituals for introducing randomness into your process I would really highly recommend doing some research on divination methods my coworker Joel this is Joel took some similar approaches in the early stages of mine in valley to but with podcasts instead of cards so Joel is a game designer and he had to come up with a ton of puzzles per week so every time that there was a 99% invisible episode that would come out he would try to come up with a monument vally puzzle that was based on that subject matter so you can do this with really anything you know whatever works for you if it's cloud shapes if it's bird flight patterns if it's podcast if it's the thing that reached the top of Reddit whatever works

there's another really easy and fun way to get started being at being random as a Japanese word game called Shiratori so you say word you take the last letter of that word and you come up with a word that starts with it and so on and so on so for example you could have captain swifty Cho ends with e escalator what would that game be or lipstick kibble elephant another favorite of mine is Wikipedia's for Anna page generator so this landed me on a page about a Welshman and the 50s who lived in Sweden but was a karate master which sounds like a pretty cool game to me or maybe you land on a page about kinetic energy how can you apply that to the problem that you're trying to solve and when you're playing these games understand that a lot of it it's going to be a strikeout that's okay there is

probably nothing to cat to escaliers maybe kinetic energy is not going to be the answer this time but playing that these concepts is going to do a lot to expand your thinking and your methods of problem solving and speaking of play a lot of what I've been describing is play which is great games are play I think we like play and play is a really good mindset to be in when you're trying to find inspiration play is in that open space that we talked about earlier and if I'm getting frustrated a lot of times I will play some runs of shiritori I'll play with my tarot cards it puts you in a much better mind space and blowing off steam on Facebook or trying to force yourself to have a cool idea and also speaking of play play is often best when you invite others but only if you play nice if you're fostering psychological safety if the people that you invite in make you feel defensive or unsafe it shuts down that creative process there's

a lot of research that supports this Google have that really cool study about psychological safety and I'm sure a lot of you saw you also want to do what you can to be somebody who also plays nice who is supportive and who keeps other people's ideas rolling and if that's something that you want to get better at I would recommend trying improv now I don't personally do improv but I do something that stretches a lot of same muscles and has similarly devout followers which is partner dancing so both of these things help you with building on other people's ideas going with the flow reacting in the moment all of which is going to make you a better teammate and a better brainstorming partner and probably overall cool human now there's a particular principle from improv but I want to talk about and that's yes and the general idea being if somebody says something to you you cannot say no during the sketch you have to say yes and it was a cat or something

like that this is a really really really great thing to bring with you when you are working on ideation it really helps keep the bull engaged it helps promote safety and it helps keep things moving so the last strategy I have got for you is objective description so what exactly does that mean a good way of breaking it down would be say taking the puzzle or the level or the problem or the behavior that you're stephane and described it as if you were telling someone about it over the phone someone who had never seen it before this is actually a strategy that I learned from a mentor of mine Jeff hasser back when I was in University he's been some really really good DDC talks where he goes way more into depth on this so I would highly recommend checking those out so let's look at an example with every bit skewed how would we describe a Rubik's Cube we can say it's a cube it's made of black plastic

it's got 26 smaller cubes each side of the cube has 26 spaces or yeah 9 faces they can be white green yellow red or blue you can twist it along certain accesses it's about 4 by 4 inches it makes a clicky sound when you play with it so what's up what's the point of this exercise if you're stuck if you're trying to design around a problem with a Rubik's Cube you've already been looking at it for a while you probably know intuitively that this thing is made of black plastic so I find it really helps you find the details and things that you didn't see before things that maybe you already spent a lot of time looking at I've often been surprised by how much about a puzzle or a problem I didn't notice before going through this process of verbalizing and description to myself it really helps you find those pieces of information that might have seemed

irrelevant but are often really key to the problem at hand and this list can be helpful in a lot of different ways so let's look at how we use this method on Mon you have a li 2 so I'm actually gonna take you through the whole process of creating art for this particular level from start to finish and you'll see a lot of the principles that I talked about at play so the process for a level design was we would get a puzzle from a designer and then the artist would have to figure out what it looked like with the art direction at least at the beginning usually starting with the very open make it look cool and there's a billion directions that you could take this in but by going through that process of describing the puzzle we can narrow that possibility space in a meaningful way and find some things that maybe we haven't considered before so how would I describe this puzzle it is vertical it has three structures it has turrets it's layered the top of

structures can move they rotate they teleport and they repeat so once I have this list of words that I think objectively describes the puzzle I'll pull out the ones that I think are the most important in this case we had rotation repeated elements and layers I'll write that down and anything I can think of related to those words trying to keep my mind in that open mode and gathering reference anything goes this is where having done those randomness exercises with stuff like shiritori can really help you you'll find that the possibility space that you go to become so much larger when you've been doing stuff like that regularly so what did we end up with for reference for layers made it up with references like for tight and licorice and exploded views for a petition we had a lot of food we liked it Wayne Tebow and shop displays and for rotation we had Ferris

wheels spinning tops music boxes and we gather all of that into a Pinterest board to start with usually but after that we almost always ended up printing things out and moving to a physical board so we have a real culture at s2 around these boards and printing things out in general we're always printing everything and sticking it up on our walls and on foam-core we actually printed out the entire game and we have it on a wall at the studio and it helps us make decisions about things like color is there too much pink and this part of the game it's a too dark here when we're trying to tell a narrative that's light it's much easier to glance across a wall and understand these things then it is to click through JPEGs and you end up with insights that you do not see without was hitting the hole the same goes for the boards you end up seeing patterns that you didn't see when it was digital and on a Pinterest board for this board in particular one of the things that popped out that I didn't see before was a color scheme it was this

form pale pink it was a turquoise blue and yellow with accents and black that kept coming up I like having them around too because I'm someone who stares off into space a lot and I cannot tell you how many times just having my reference material in my line of vision when I was taking off into space instead of a JPEG on my desktop ended up inspiring a solution they're also really great to have around if you have a really important visitor to the studio and you need to quickly walk them through the project and speaking and playing with others earlier it invites other people to take part the programmer who sits on the other side of the office probably isn't going to go surfing through my Pinterest boards even if I have opened it to them but if they're surfing by my desk and they see something that piques their interest or something that they have knowledge about it might start a dialogue it invites conversation it invites collaboration and invites other people's insights so

back to the level these are the sketches that we like the most in the end and we usually kept it pretty rough and you can see the influence of the references here licorice the layers when Tebow's repetition they're all chosen because they in some way related specifically to the mechanics that we broke down by objective description and this was the final result and there's a lot of these principles that we talked about that went into making this level and other levels of Monument Valley - there was an objective description there was random word association there was bringing other people in and things like having a practice of meditation some easy to impose internet restrictions also helped so that wraps up the talk what are takeaways here how do you work at this muscle how do you get better at ideation and inspiration so first keep this idea of open mode and closed mode in the back of your head if you haven't seen it I would highly recommend checking out that John Cleese talk are

you going into closed mode too quickly because it's easier try it mindfulness it might help you get into a better head space for ideation I know that it certainly helped me practice objectively describing things it will help you find that seemingly irrelevant information that could be the answer to your problem and help you come up with more elegant design solutions practice being random it will make you better at brainstorming and creating new and interesting connections try stuff like shiritori try word games try divination play with others if I learned anything I Sangha it is that everything is better with friends and remember to play nice and play safe try something improvised remember - yes and use physical things when possible it helps invite others to come play - and I think most importantly remember that you can get better at the if you are feeling uninspired or like

you are not very creative it does not mean that there is something innately run with you or that you are untalented or that you are bad you are not a hack I think that is a story that a lot of us tell ourselves about creativity inspiration that is just not helpful if you find this stuff hard it just means it's a muscle that you haven't been working and I promise you you can get better at it and that's it I believe in you guys and you have totally got this [Applause] if anybody have any questions hi great talk and really enjoyed it I also seen that creative talk that John Cleese did and I think it's really good I think he talked about when he does those kind of was creative clearing your

mind spaces it's a two-hour process or something like that yeah do you do do you take those kind of sessions yourself or do you kind of find that you have kind of grown out of that at least um so a test should we do tend to like time box brainstorming sessions that I think are sort of open mode but yeah I think we do like have specific times that are for this cool thanks yeah thank you [Music] no okay oh all right thank you [Applause]