GduX.me 2020 | Day 3

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the world has changed game development has changed in 2019 g-dux was created as a platform to give a voice to all game developers it is a virtual conference made by game devs for game devs it was a groundbreaking idea however this year everybody their mom is throwing virtual conference well what sets gtx apart from all these copycats is that we have presenters telling their story not just about their wins but also highlighting their hardships to become successful

for three days straight from june first to the third anybody with the internet connection can tune in to arm themselves with the best tools and advice to not only survive the industry but thrive we have speakers that will teach you how to survive long term and demystify marketing come and learn how to protect your own work and your brand we review a case study from an indie game and understand the conceptual process behind it overall look at the game industry and move forward with a business mindset and teach you how to navigate that world through the lens of an artist we will discuss important topics like the emerging market of user generated content and what that means to us developers from a legal standpoint furthermore take measure the tools that we have thus far and talk about how to move across different industries outside of games we will acknowledge how game development is evolving and how we can remove technical barriers to make games faster

but that's not all we have amazing developers that will be streaming gameplay live and provide behind-the-scenes commentary of the development of these games such as scott the children of light a new the distant light finally to cap off the best character game conference ever we'll be doing technical breakdowns of amazing personal art projects to get you to approach your projects with a bigger purpose [Music] for your own well-being i hope to see you there on june 1st [Music] this is an official call for all game devs to report to gducks.me immediately blue champs over

hey everybody welcome to the third day of g ducks this is a three-day live streaming event to tell the hero's journey of every presenter of how they navigated through the industry and highlight all the hardships and the success that they have to kind of go down to key points to you guys out there who are watching and joining us from all over the world to upgrade your gain dev career so i am your host brandon fam you can find me or tweet at me at blue champs or gdu x m e you can see the on the name plate down here uh as well as going to gdux.me i've been doing this about

three times is the third time we're doing g ducks but i host a weekly podcast called gamedev unchained for those who don't know and you can find that on spotify or apple or anywhere that you listen to podcasts which is a again a weekly episode uh it's been a crazy last three days it's always a bit fun it gets a little bit uh tricky at the beginning as i'm kind of rusty because i only do this every six months but then by the end of third or but but the end of the second day actually i start to hit really my rhythm and and talk to you guys it gets a lot easier and don't have to really look at my teleprompter as much so i'm relaxed i'm rested we do this for like seven straight hours and uh for the last two days we had about uh like eight presenters nine to ten presenters and it's a mixture of speakers technical breakdowns and game demos so hopefully if you're just joining us

right now you get to have a glimpse of what we're all about and for those who uh have been watching the last two days i want to thank you for your support so uh one of the things i want to cover and make sure that you guys and point you guys over to our discord channel so our discord channel if you go to gdux.me we have a lot of presenters over there a lot of people who are watching are interacting with each other within the channels and uh it's a great way to kind of follow up with any of the presenters today to talk about any questions right so we are taking questions uh with everybody as soon as the presentation is done but uh there's there's a limited amount of time so uh so any questions that you don't get that doesn't get asked on air you can follow up with them in the discord channel uh on top of that we are lucky enough to be sponsored by masterpiece vr

for this this g ducks so uh we're doing something really great with them which is they are partnering up with us to give away 10 free indie licenses for their software masterpiece vr so the vr landscape is a huge landscape and there's a lot of tools like masterpiece vr that is making game development a lot easier a lot faster i truly believe it's the future where you can put on a goggle and and work with 3d it makes sense for a developer so we're teaming up with them and they're they're gracious enough to kind of give away 10 free licenses and all you need to do is go to gdux.me and sign up to our mailing list and be a part of that go ahead and tweet at masterpiecevr as well as me to talk about which presenter or presentation that you really dig the last two days or throughout today so if you do those two

things you are automatically entered into a raffle and we're already having a lot of great responses for people enjoying a plethora of different presentations and i want you guys to not miss out on that for sure and get something all right and uh it's uh it's been crazy man it's been fun if anything uh what i've been saying the last two two two days is that um 2020 sucks you know the pandemic has has really taken everybody by surprise and we've been quarantining for the last six it feels like since the beginning of the year right we're in june but let's say february end of february is when we really uh paid attention to this and uh i think on a personal it's been tough for me uh i think the first month even with me working from home before

this all happened this is a quite a change because uh if you're a parent like myself it's a lot to ask uh to become full-time teachers at the same time so the world is adjusting and and changing with it and the game industry if anything is finally stabilizing uh i've talked to this many time on podcast i think the last two days we kind of mentioned and ran some unchained report clips uh especially with brad hart cto perforce uh file source version control software so you can imagine with his stance and where his company is at perforce is used throughout all game studios and even with a lot of game development using perforce or or software just like it uh it was a challenge uh for a lot of industry vets and companies to kind of set up for

this a lot of it infrastructure and using vpn to kind of pipe in all at it takes an adjustment it takes some time to kind of set up correctly but all of a sudden everyone was asked to work from home and the turnaround was within a week essentially and uh realistically it took maybe a month or two after uh for every game studio can pipe in game devs to continue working from home now that things are stabilizing we're two months in uh the the echo that i'm hearing around the studios or around the the industry is that people are finally adjusted companies already setting people up uh people who didn't have nice computer rigs before have a comp uh a company issued a computer for them to work from and so i am looking forward to see what the

result of this is when you're not restricted a game company isn't restricted by the best game developer within the area but throughout the world and that's what remote working can lead to and can be very exciting so i hope you guys are excited as as i am because this is a unprecedented time but it is a it's a new chapter for game developers to finally be accepted uh as a remote worker and although i don't believe all game companies are gonna be adopting this new method when things go back to normal where people are invited back to the office essentially i i do see it as a positive change and a good percentage of anything will start allowing some time during the week for for developers to have that choice and i think that's a positive step and something to really be excited about uh

also you know uh i want to thank you for everyone's uh especially the presenter for coming on and everybody who who've been reaching out uh in social media and and talking to me directly right i'm very approachable and accessible i know i'm in this secluded nice motel office but uh within discord within you know twitter you know i i try my best to kind of respond to you guys especially providing a platform for game devs right so g ducks was initially realized as a place where game devs can promote can talk about issues and not be restricted by any corporate filter right i i run this place pretty independently as you can tell there's not there's nobody behind the camera right i i share a motel room by myself so to speak so it isn't uncommon for me to to talk

pretty openly and when i invite and presenters to come on the show i i encourage them to do the same because about four years ago uh four or five years ago is when i started to look past by nine to five to reach out and wanted a place to uh voice my concerns about the industry uh openly without any repercussion of course um you know i come from a background of aaa and about five years ago it was pretty taboo to talk anything bad about industry because there's on a personal level it's very career suicidal to think and talk that way uh because you become pretty unhirable if you talk bad about a major company right and to this day i don't tend to do that i try to have a positive feedback loop uh open conversation

with anything that i i complain about and uh which is why game dev unchained was born kingdom unchained the original podcast if there's a mystery out there for anyone that's seen this guy and hearing my voice for the first time uh game devon chain is the original originator of g dux so gdx gdu x actually stands for gain dev unchained expo whoa whoa mind blown right so game devon chain was created years ago to as a selfish way for me to kind of reach out to professionals who are people that i respected people who are at a place where despite of all the complaints the crunching and the politics within the office and the restrictions of commuting and moving across the country these are people that i respected because they still found a way

to become successful within the game industry right so for the podcast and for the heart of what gdux is is finding these professionals big or small working at aaa companies or what they call quad a companies now to the smaller companies which is as much as like a single developer i wanted to kind of find out what worked what didn't and what what kind of hurdles they had to jump through or jump over uh to get to where they are today all right and uh and that's the biggest thing i want you guys to walk away from all these presentation especially the last few days if you haven't seen those um especially today as you're tuning in you're gonna really realize that as a game developer we're actually a very valuable commodity now if anything the last two years have taught me as i'm

finally doing my own thing and my running my own businesses is that the game developer have a huge future ahead of us and that's because a lot of the game tools are finally getting to a place where other industries are kind of turning their heads all right and uh this is this is i'm not even talking about facebook getting getting into our industry google i mean that has been the trend the last few years major tech companies having some skin in the game and i actually celebrate that because a lot of these developers who were struggling being limited with salary because we on average get paid a little lower uh than all these other tech companies they're finding stability in these tech companies now uh still doing what they love they love doing it's just in a non-traditional way of of an actual game right

the the idea of creating a game from scratch right these companies are using game tools to create uh real-time demos real-time interaction it's an extension of what game development is and what games are which is a way for the audience to interact with the viewers or the players right if that if if we just boil it down to essentially what games are a lot of these industries are taking that and running with it i mean we're talking about architectural visualization right these are architects right these are people who are actually making physical things but they're they're using unreal they're using unity to express their ideas within the engine and furthermore they're inviting their clients to walk through the space and that's what a game level is right even though they're not making a shooter by the end of it but basically walking someone through and

visualizing it with vr with anything with the ipad of what their space could look like before they actually build it uh which is a huge huge huge improvement and they're all using game developers essentially uh because the the knowledge that we've built up the last 20 30 years applying to these applications um the auto industry is a big industry for gamers or game developers because we're in there a lot of these autopilot programs autonomous programs are using engines to kind of simulate the streets because it's the most effective way to kind of test their vehicles without actually putting their ai car out there and crashing into people right you can crash into people within within the within the the game engines right i mean the whole point is to avoid crashing to people which is why they're using simulations with game engines to kind of

figure that out there's a huge industry out there outside of the traditional game industry and it's given me a lot of hope and a lot of love for what i do and and it's been very adventurous to see that develop in the span of when i started the podcast which is five years ago to now like even the last two years it's been so fun so awesome and uh if the future looks really bright i mean yesterday we ran a unchained report which is uh a a glimpse of next week's episode with ray graham who is a frequent roundtable episode guest and uh we discussed the unreal engine 5 demo right and how amazing it looks and how baffled veteran game developers are just by looking at it i mean they haven't shared too many details of what's under the hood but the future is bright i mean if it's getting to that level of fidelity and having that

that many graphical information on screen in real time that is what makes our medium so exciting because when you can get it to look good sound good play well and it's all happening by reacting to an input from the player from a client from whatever it to me is the ultimate expression of art right it's it to me is the ultimate expression of your creativity so eventually we're going to get to that spot where everybody wants a piece of this like what why wouldn't you want to create something that engages people right instead of i'm not i'm not movies and everything else has its place for sure not downplaying that what i'm saying is that you know there's a reason why game murders game developers and people who are starting to realize what games are uh are are are participating in this

field because the future is bright the future is fun so again i want to remind everybody that throughout the day uh i will be checking in with uh with you guys on discord through twitter uh giving away masterpiece vr software and um i would love for you guys to jump in the discord because i would love to try to talk to you guys and get you into the program and if you have something to promote you know maybe we could talk about that but on the discord there's a dedicated channel called color hotline and uh haven't used it throughout the last two days but if i see people in there just hanging out in between each presenter i'm gonna try to throw it to you guys this is a great place for you guys uh to talk about how you're feeling and i want to check in with you guys because uh you know i'm talking towards the camera i don't really have a way to kind of listen uh what's being said i do have

moderators out there to you know gathering recon to kind of help filter in all the questions that you have the presenters but if i can get you guys to to go on that voice channel and pipe you guys in and talk and and put it out there in the world and help whatever promotion that you have uh i am wanting to do that and that's what gdexes is what g ducks is is right because we want to have this platform for game devs i'm a game dev uh there's no one behind the scene controlling me uh this is just me so uh anything any message any thoughts uh be sure to jump into discord in the car hotline uh if you don't know where it is go on the discord we do have moderators in there to kind of point you in the right direction all right that is the way for me to intro this so before i talk about my next presenter i do have a clip for you guys to kind of watch

and this is a subject that i always have been making fun and i'm again i'm not making fun of anybody that's working at magic leap who have been impacted by the layoffs and the turmoil of covid and all that but it is a story that i personally have been investing in and investigating uh to to talk about because vr is an exciting frontier and um like any new ventures there are uh risk that comes with it so there's a lot of companies that had promising [Music] futures uh like magically but uh haven't had the enough time to to bring it to fruition so this next clip right here again i'm not dogging anybody working magically you know you guys are my brothers and sister but it is a subject that uh is worth mentioning and talking about so without further ado uh this is a clip a

roundtable discussion on the game dev unchained podcast about what magic leap is doing how they're doing and what their future is looking like or the first topic of today are the round table news and again uh i i just want to reiterate that these are opinions that only reflects upon ourselves and not of our companies i'm a lot safer than ray over there but i just want to reiterate that so let's go into it why magic leap is scamming everybody all right so i'm gonna go up here and then switch my camera uh to to this news article that we've been checking out here uh so like the last time we talked actually it's funny how these roundtable news are tying into each other uh because it just takes about a month for things to kind of show its ugly colors right so magically the last time uh kind of as a warning signal a fire where there is uh a fire there's smoke right

or there is when there's smoke there's a fire there's fire they were asking 10 million uh 10 billion dollars um that's kind of like a prayer hail mary that nobody bit on and then shortly after they found out that no one's really liking them as much they basically laid off i think a good portion of their staff um it's like a thousand it's like a thousand people or something like that they laid off yeah i didn't realize they were that big of a company to even start with um they're enormous enormous man australia florida offices in san francisco enormous company yeah well i'm always impressed with these companies um being able to build these hype trains uh it's funny how these companies are all in your area man the bay they seem to be able to kind of hoard all this investor money and have nothing to show well that's where the investors are that's where all those like climate perkins and all those all

those dudes are in um or in the bay area but um like at the end of the day right i think i messed with magic leap right i tried it i thought it was cool right um i didn't think it was like three thousand dollars cool right and that's really what it all boils down to is that unlike vr um they they were able to get it they weren't able to get the price down to something reasonable for that so people on the streets would just be like yeah give me that right and uh and and with all of these things the other thing i say about all these things is content sells right content actually will sell the box right and i didn't see any content that would really sell sell that right to to the mass market especially at to a 2 000 3 000 price point right and then they realized that too and they realized they couldn't or these they currently were struggling with getting the price down

to the consumer level and so they're like okay let's just go with enterprise right and if you're gonna go with only enterprise all the things that are related to consumers well that's that's done right um gaming gaming the gaming applications and all that stuff just well you don't need to do that anymore right um it's and it's it's sad for the people that are working there um you know it's just overnight jobs jobs are gone especially during this time and getting laid off during uh the covid stuff is like probably a horrible situation um but like yeah like i don't know about no i wouldn't i wouldn't use such strong language as scamming and all that kind of stuff because you know investors are going to invest in the promise you know what i mean and actually had a promise and when you when you mess around with it you're like oh yeah this is promising right but uh it just you know like money money drives up nobody's investing everybody's like okay well how's this gonna be how are you gonna scale this i

need to sell this and i think they can still be a viable business just to an enterprise it could be applicable in that space uh for like architecture or for you know training or surgeries or whatever right um it's just not a consumer device right now so that's that's basically that's basically the story right well as you were saying that like you know they had great promise i i wish i went back to college and redid it and majored in promises because it feels like the wrong business it takes a lot of effort it takes a lot of effort to make something that could convince people to give you billions of dollars you know what i mean and uh it's the size of a couple years it was obvious right don't get all those people because they had a project

yeah works right but so i want to ask you this right from from the time you demoed and it it feels like even the article i was pulling up and reading through um there was a lot of smoke and mirror like even the press and everybody even the consumer market was kind of like at arm's length it's like all right all right i see where it can go right but let's just see where you guys actually how close you actually get to it but like how far away if you were to guess how many more years would have taken them without any all these financial troubles in the pandemic to get to where they were saying that this technology will be for consumer and be basically a profitable business without investor money yeah i yeah i think they're so far far far away from that too far away um like like the video you know the initial video they showed of like the first person shooter in the office kind of thing um given given the size of the screen like you

know the screen size is actually really really tiny uh when you when you're looking through the magically the screen size is super tiny it's like a little box right um so delivering the promise of what that video was um like there are years away from that right and then on top of it i had no idea what it would take to make that tech cheap enough and small enough where it would be so bulky and cumbersome right um so yeah like i think they're way way way way far off and that's kind of that's also kind of why you do the pivot now right you're like hey um we're really far from this money's going to run out so let's uh kind of make a pivot and see if we can make a sustainable profit business just focusing on the people that will pay thousands of dollars for the hardware yeah i mean this pivot definitely is admirable for any company that can see the dangers and actually have a chance or give themselves a chance but

this type of pivot kind of reminds me of like the game stop type of pivot where it's the last roll of the dice yeah well for sure for sure it's a it's a hail mary roll of the dice right um the one thing we're not talking about is how it's how they did this during coped right and kind of mentioned cove it as a reason why they're doing this um and like and that's that's yeah to me that seems kind of disingenuous i'll say it a nicer way it seems disingenuous right it seems uh it seems like to blame it to blame it on covid why their product is uh five years old maybe being into fruition yeah maybe maybe it uh it played a role in it maybe um but like i think it was like when they announced it and they said they were shifting to um enterprise like

like i was not shocked by such a an announcement right that's just that just made sense yeah even with the pivot to the enterprise space and this is something that um i feel uh a very similar headset that was promised by microsoft a few years ago hololens did but they saw kind of the path clearer and earlier and they actually pivot towards enterprise and have secured like a major uh american military contract uh since and they're not as in the news as much for a consumer market but they're definitely making money and profiting and are probably leagues ahead magically uh i don't know how much do you know about that uh headset as much no yeah yeah no i've actually tried both and i do think the magic leaf magic loop was better in my limited interactions

um you know i had bigger bigger aspect ratio right i don't even know what the current state of the hololens tech is these days i've been just having to look at any new hardware or anything like that if there is anything to do um but like everything about measurement seems seem better um better quality image and everything seemed better than hololens like the at least the last version of hololens i tried yeah but i'm pretty sure since um you know magic doesn't make money anymore and hololens is getting military money that they updated there yeah yeah i better be sure if that's if that's if that's profitable that way i have no idea right so i can't comment but uh but yeah yeah well you don't imagine if you'll be there to get that military money eventually from somebody i'm pretty sure they're getting that kovitz uh sba loan money if anything [Laughter]

but in terms of uh actual money i think they're far from it man a thousand people lay off and even investors now are i feel like are a bit too naive to think that they're going to be turning this around anytime soon they've lost i think people's faith uh in its product and uh i'm pretty sure the ceo is looking for a way out if anything and then count yeah yes maybe yeah yeah maybe if they're smart about it i don't know maybe they're just going to talk to gamestop and work together somehow i just think so it's just as ridiculous but uh good rinse hopefully this is the last time we talk about them i always track them because they've always been super hyped uh but i i never really i've never tried the product right it sounds like you were impressed with it but from what i've seen through the demo it just seemed too far away for it to make an impact

immediately yeah no right and i think it's the same with all this stuff right like with the early vr stuff the newer vr stuff is built on the learnings of that technology has improved there's hololens there's magic leap there's other spatial computing stuff like people like ar kit just on your iphone um there's there's there's things that apple might be working on that that people keep kind of hinting at right um there's all sorts of stuff right that um that you're gonna see down the line that's gonna kind of try to improve on this tech and you know sometimes you're the first part person there and you fail and then other times you're the first person that you succeed right right so it just depends on the time right um i think it's the same thing with like you know google stadia right stadia um is on the line of working on tech that was developed before that really failed

dramatically like on live and guide kai dramatically and now everybody's back at it again trying to uh be successful with with game streaming right and maybe everybody who's trying now will fail too but then there might be somebody that comes after that improves all the technology and learns the lessons right i think that's the main thing it's about learning you know there's a lot of failures along the way to actually being successful yeah yeah yeah i i think through the rotting corpse of um magic leap and stadia that we're gonna get something really good out of all this

my next presenter is with scott knapp he is the principal lighting artist at turtle rock studios and his topic will be about flowing between worlds lighting and games and film this talk will go over how to navigate working in both industries as a lighting artist we will deep dive into how to make yourself marketable in both industries and steps you can take to get your foot in the door as a lighter for both i'll discuss well he'll discuss the differences and similarities of what you need to know if you're seriously considering transitioning from one to the other all right so scott by this time everyone should be able to hear you man how you doing good can you hear me good to go yes we are good to go man all right whenever you're ready to kind of take the uh baton go for it all right cool

yeah just a quick introduction about myself um like brandon said i'm a principal artist at turtle rock studios we work primarily on aaa games but we've done vr stuff um notable projects that they they've worked on in the past is like left 4 dead and evolved um for me i've worked in feature film television games even simulation um one of my first big game jobs was at ea then i transitioned to zoic went to frame store then turtle rock then did a little feature film work at npc and digital domain um so some of the projects i've worked on in feature film uh recently i worked on avengers infinity war which is super cool uh batman v superman and night at the museum um some of the video games i've worked on has evolved and evolved stage two uh and madden nfl 25

so i just want to talk about like uh i guess what this whole presentation is going to be about um i want to talk about how i got my foot in the door um what it's like lighting for games what it's like lighting for films and then kind of steps you could take to to get into both industries um so what do lighters do lighters drive the mood and tone of a scene um they they kind of craft and shape what viewers are looking at or gamers are looking at and where they're supposed to go they help help drive and direct um they're kind of like digital uh directors of photography i guess you could say um you use light and shadows and reflections um fog things like that to help create depth and separation um create visual interest using contrast color and composition and a lot of times you know we usually try to draw inspiration from real life on real lighting phenomena so uh things like caustics balance light um all that kind of stuff we use as like tools to help help uh craft things make them look

believable um so here's like a quick comparison of like where we've come kind of as an industry with film so this screen shot on the left is like one of our first animated movies toy story and then toy story 4. so you can see like the models aren't too different actually um a lot of what's changed is the rendering and the lighting and the way they've they're mimicking how cameras uh function so you have things like bokeh so things like depth of field and stuff um you have rim lights and bounce light whereas in toy story one you know it's it's pretty flat um so that's a film comparison here's a game comparison so here's uncharted one on the left an uncharted four on the right um you know they're using tools like silhouette uh purposely placing the camera here during this climb so that the character silhouettes against a bright background or on the left you know it's it's kind

of a limitation of the hardware and um also just you know probably not having real lighting artists going and craft that stuff a lot of times back in the day it was just environment guys so lighting is super important for both film and games it's kind of what's helped push a lot of that stuff forward um so i'll talk a little bit about lighting for games uh i kind of got into it in the first place i went to school at ucf in florida and got a degree in digital media and thought i was going to do the feature animation thing but i actually started falling in love with games so i went into their master's program at fia which is still part of ucf and uh they had like an interactive entertainment course and i was like the only dude interested in lighting like everybody else wanted to be character or environment guys but i always loved lighting uh so i dug deep into that and any kind of projects we had going around at the studio like i always wanted to be the one to help do the lighting for them uh so i you know really try to push my

portfolio um start networking stuff like that um i did do an internship at a motion graphics studio uh during my time at school so you know really just trying to get my foot in the door and get some experience um so i did an internship a studio called deva studios they do mostly type mostly like title sequences and stuff so i was doing rotoscoping work um like plate cleanup stuff um then i transitioned to a simulation company so that was kind of my first job doing real time stuff um i got to model texture and light simulators for like military and drone work and stuff um so i was doing all that stuff while i was in school but when i graduated i was kind of rough like i you know apply to everywhere and you know as a student usually your portfolio is not the best you don't have any professional work or anything really uh so i just started really focusing on crafting a portfolio and uh trying to do more real-time stuff uh collaborating with people um just to

to get some kind of uh portfolio of those shown that i could do real-time work um but i started networking and uh the lead lighting artist on madden um came into our school and did like a talk uh joe warren who was still like a good buddy of mine now um he you know me and him connected and since i was the only lighting guy he kind of took an interest and we talked a lot and when a lighting position like an associate lighting physician opened up at ea i was able to scoop that which is super awesome so a lot of it was just networking um being at the right place the right time and stuff so um [Music] so day to day for a lighting artist and games uh most of the time you're just lighting environments so you're you're gathering reference and you're you know you have an entire scene to compose and uh you know set up you're working with designers and stuff to uh make sure the gameplay um you know is accounted for and that you're leading the players where they're

supposed to go stuff like that so your lighting maps your tuning like volumetric fog and effects um color grading the whole image uh definitely optimizing so you can see in the screenshot even with uh goliath from evolve uh he's got like a fire light next to him but it doesn't cast shadows so you know you have to like make choices like that uh as a lighter a lot of times because performance just you know it can't handle fully shadow casting ray trace lights yet so a lot of it's optimizing and making sure you're in budget um debugging things a lot of times there'll be bugs lights doing weird stuff or light maps not breaking properly so a lot of it's debugging stuff and knowing how to do that um play testing the games um especially at turtle rock we play test the crap out of our games uh and are just constantly iterating on stuff so play testing is a big part of it and then just pushing the quality like up to the very end you know as a lighting artist you're kind of able to

really really push push push uh until ship really um to get the quality where it's at while still maintaining performance you know so if we want you know less shadow casting stuff here because we have a hero area you know we might make those kind of sacrifices um here's another shot from evolve uh so collaboration collaboration is huge in video games um i'm constantly getting out of my desk and going and talking to other departments i collaborate with designers so if there's you know an important blocker or something like that for sightlines but we still want light to come through maybe we can ask it are we able to punch a hole in the wall or something like that to bring in some natural light um so you constantly work with those people to see you know are there things that we can push and pull to make the lighting better um and then what's important for the map so where we want players to go what's the story beat uh how they how should they feel in this area should it be like dark and moody or should it be

you know inspiring and exciting so you're constantly you know collaborating with those guys rendering programmers because they're the ones who make everything possible they're the ones who uh you know give you features and and help you get tools the tech artists as well get tools and stuff to to really push the lighting they're the ones who make all the tech um character artists a lot of times you help character artists with shading or uh materials and textures and uh like what their setup would be so they light properly visual effects artists a lot of vfx kind of add to the entire image so you know they help with the ambience and the mood of the of the environment so it's very important to work with those guys uh environment artists are probably who i work with the most so those are the world builders the guys who are composing the scenes so we you know a lot of times we'll go together and block stuff out um i'll block stuff out with lighting and we just go back and forth a lot um to make sure the level looks as good as

it can and then the art director of course so the art director you know he's got the big vision and you're trying to help sell that vision um a lot of times i do stuff like make marketing renders um ui renders stuff like that that you know you might have in maine menus and whatnot um and then a big thing that i've been doing at least at turtle rock is helping maintain uh consistent texture standards so you know a lot of times people might have albedos that are too dark or you know base color textures are too dark or their roughness values might be at a range for what the material type is so a lot of times you know because materials go hand in hand with lights that's something that working in feature film has helped me with a lot because everything's so physically accurate um in film i've been able to bring that knowledge over to games and kind of help elevate um you know what like our textures and materials and stuff would look like um some technical knowledge stuff so

people who've worked in feature film a lot of these things you've probably never heard of like draw calls and like spherical harmonic probes um there's a lot of technical things that we have in video games to fake things that we don't have to fake in future film so uh yeah a lot of stuff is profiling your image so checking what the stats are for your gpu for your cpu and like what your costs are for your lights because every light has a cost and this thing's got to run at a frame rate where nerdos can be happy uh shooting people and stuff so it's got to be at least 30 frames per second most people want 60 frames per second these days um so yeah a lot of it's just profiling debugging um getting stuff into a good performance range and then trying to use these tricks to make the the image look better so using cue maps and reflection captures and screen space ambient occlusion uh screen space post processes like uh you know depth of field and stuff like

that it's it's a bunch of things that just kind of all come together to help it run and look good uh being able to debug why models light strangely is really important there's a lot of times like i'll open up a scene and something's just black or it's got artifacting on it so being able to open up someone's model and see if the normals are bad um see if there's bad light map evs all that kind of stuff is super important um it's also really important to familiarize yourself with how game engines do render passes and make good choices with your render programmers based on what kind of game you're making uh to stay within budgets because uh you know forza might have a very different uh lighting pipeline and setup than something like battlefield where there's like 60 uh you know players on screen at the same time and then working within constraints like in feature film a lot of times you don't have as many constraints i mean the constraint is really time with film uh you know you want to make sure your render times aren't crazy on

the render farm and stuff but um for the most part you know you're able to render millions millions of polygons and have tons of shadow casting lights everywhere and it's okay but in video games it's it's a lot more constrained than that so working within those constraints is something that's kind of a learning curve um luckily though there's tons of resources unreal engine is what we've been using at work and their documentation is like stellar like they really deep dive into a lot of different features and if you just want like a broad overview this rendering overview one here is is excellent and that's on their main uh documentation page um so there's tons of things that you just dive into and learn uh just from digging around so and plus the engines are free now you can download unity and unreal engine for free so there's like no excuse not to just like jump in play around they have sample scenes where you can jump in and kind of see what lighting artists have done and why they made certain choices um so it's a lot of really cool stuff um

and it's a great time to get into lighting uh in real time for sure um so for getting a job in games uh i would do just that i would download one of those game engines bang out some real time scenes um there's tons of free assets there's characters you can practice with there's environments there's ones you can purchase but there's also ones that are free um i would definitely showcase your ability to you know guide players act as if you're lighting an environment and you want to be the person who's playing in the level so that you can you know show that you're able to what tell people where the important parts are um also showing your ability to work efficiently have nice optimized scenes so if you were to you know pop open something during an interview you can show them how you might have saved some memory saved some frame rate that kind of stuff is you know it's not as important as making a pretty image but it's still pretty important like people want to know that they can trust that you won't come in

and uh just yolo place tons of shadow casting point lights everywhere and make the frame rate take they want to know that like you are doing something that is uh efficient and practical um and also when you're applying for jobs you know dig into what kind of aesthetic they have what kind of um environments they they have and what kind of lighting they typically do like if you're going for like an overwatch type uh position you know they have a very stylized kind of disney-esque um look for their shading and their lighting um if you're going for something more grounded and gritty and realistic like naughty dog you know gear your portfolio towards that stuff um so that's definitely something that's important is making sure that you're crafting what you're presenting to whoever you want to present it to um getting familiar with industry terminology and pipelines so understanding uh kind of where you come into the pipeline is important uh typically

level designers will do like a gray box or white box version of the map so they're just getting layout done but still even at that early stage it's important to start thinking about lighting so understanding where you come in in the pipeline and how you can help people do their job until it's time for you to go in and really polish is good something else is creating art station for sure our station's kind of taken over um as like a digital platform for you to show your work uh back in the day people probably use cg society and stuff uh which is still like a valid thing to have a portfolio for but art station's like one of the most viewed websites uh for this stuff in the world so um and a lot of recruiters go there and actively are checking out people's work to to recruit so definitely make an art station account and only post your best work you can let go of the stuff that is years old that don't really show that you can light like it's good to to clean that stuff up and only show them your best stuff um and do stuff that's unique too like

uh you know if you go through our stations sometimes it's pretty fatiguing because a lot of the pieces just look the same so i would suggest do something that's different uh look at what cinematographers do in future film and like how they craft scenes in a beautiful way check out like deacons and uh chivo and like those really really good digital uh cinematographers who they know how to light so try to make something more interesting uh to make your stuff stand out um as much as possible try to gear your portfolio to real-time lighting since that's what you're going to get a job in like it's cool if you're able to lighten arnold and renderman too it shows that you're able to light nicely if you have a good portfolio but it's important to show real time stuff and collaborate with others there's game jams contests um indie projects you can be a part of where you don't have to compose a whole scene uh you don't have to do something from scratch you can work with character artists and animators to make a little cinematic

or uh you know work with environment artists to just really craft something that you guys both think is cool um let's see also reaching out to recruiters um linkedin is a great platform um i have gotten probably like three or four jobs um through linkedin and i get offers from there a lot because it's just a great platform where people are able to network what you've done they can see recommendations so it's like a great online resume so definitely using linkedin as a tool um and this is something so like i was saying before you can download uh free marketplace stuff so this is like a paragon asset it's like a really high quality character that epic gave away for people to just practice with and play with so this is a scene that i composed it's just a simple backdrop and like a cool kind of magenta cyan studio setup um and yeah this is something i was able to bang out like in a day or whatever um just like having fun setting up

different lighting setups so this is the kind of stuff you can just do really quickly to make your your portfolio kind of stand out use use the tools that are there also quick so just made mega scans completely free for unreal users so you can use their whole library and just compose simple scenes and they have they actually have tutorials on youtube and stuff on how they compose scenes so there's a lot of cool stuff there all right so uh lighting for visual effects and film um so for this after my job at ea um in florida there's like no other studios so i knew i needed to like make a choice um like where i was going to go my wife luckily is super super awesome and she was down to move um so i was like look everything's kind of in la um and it was in canada as well but in the us mostly as la and new york so i was like i you know i enjoyed my time at davis studios so much uh because that was an internship in california uh that i was like let's just go back to

california like i would love to to work there so i kind of moved out there um and couch surfed for a little bit on my buddies on my buddy's couches while my wife uh was back at her parents for a little bit um and i just kind of hustled like i went around and like i i wrote tons of recruiters uh try to get uh you know jobs put out my feelers as much as i could and uh one of my buddies that i ended up working with at ea rory jones he reached out to one of his friends who was a recruiter at zoic uh laura costner who's she's really awesome and she uh saw my portfolio i was like hey like we got a show coming up like would you want to jump in on that so my first show in the industry for visual effects was once upon a time which was like a fun little show like it's got like tons of characters and uh you know magical fantastical things so it's pretty cool like first job uh in visual effects and i met like a ton of cool people there um

so something that you do in visual effects um a lot of times it's just matching plates and plates uh if you're not familiar with that or just like the practical photography so it's when they go on set and shoot actors the plates are what get sent to the visual effects studios and the visual effects studios have to integrate all the cg elements to the plates so a lot of times you're just looking at how you know robert downing jr is being lit and figure out where that his key light's at figure out where his fill lights are at all that kind of stuff and as a base typically you'll just match that um on set they'll usually capture hdrs and stuff so you have an understanding of where the lights are at it's just matching those and then from there it's iterating so it's a lot of you get you get a toe base it's the proper lighting for how it was on set now you got to make it actually look cool and look nice so a lot of times you'll have your lighting leads your supervisors um all those guys will have daily

sessions you present your work so you'll do a lighting pass you'll slap comp it and slap comping means you just take your your cg elements and put it over the plate and see like how it integrates so you'll do a lot of daily sessions where they pull up your screen everybody's looking at it on the team you'll get feedback and you'll to get notes production coordinators will take those notes down and then you go back to your desk and you try to bang out those notes you try to you try to hit it it's just that iteration so it's that that loop of do something render it out get notes fix the notes do something render it out and it becomes like a very clean pipeline eventually another thing you do sometimes is look development which is a lot of shading and material work so a lot of my time at visual effects companies has been in a pinch you know they might not have time to texture things or things might not have time to go back to texturing so

look development artists can go in and oh let's add some damage here let's put some dust here though specular roughness isn't responding properly can you fix that so sometimes lighters are expected to go in there and do some look dev as well and you work with a ton of other departments um so here's what i was talking about with plates so uh for the batman's shot that whole thing is uh just practical that's a practical set but in post we ended up redoing the whole thing because there's tons of destruction there's rain and the action was super intense batman crashes through and slams superman onto the ground so obviously we didn't want actors to have to do that and anyways both both characters are completely cg and the environment is like a cg matte painting so it's it was you know doing volumetric uh fog lighting and all that stuff this isn't a shot that i actually lit this is a

look dev shot that i did so i i did all look development on batman but my buddy daniel lit this shot um but you can just see like how they use the onset lighting to guide how they let the cg characters make it look more believable same with vision and thanos on the right uh practical vision and then fully replace cg vision and uh replace josh brolin with thanos obviously um but you can see here like we matched the plate but then we also went in and made it look more interesting like the plate was a little bit flat and you couldn't quite see the emotion on vision's face as much in the plate so full cg face replacement besides like the teeth and the eyes for vision and thanos we did stuff like add rim lights things like that so you match the plate and then you make it look cool and interesting um and then stuff like this where you have a practical person interacting with a cg object so uh captain america

in this shot was actually grabbing i think a hockey glove that josh brolin was had on his hand or something and anyways we had to go in and compositing how to do things like reshift his arm placement um we match moved we match moved uh chris evans here with a cg digi double and use that to project his hand on and get proper reflections on thanos gauntlet so there's like a lot of technical things that you do to make these things look more believable and look more grounded um collaboration so you work a lot with compositing those are the people that you give all your render passes to some places lighting artists are actually expected to do the compositing as well but in my experience i've always just passed it to super good compositors to make stuff look way better you work with animation layout vfx texturing modeling matte painting cloth and groom

production coordinators look development it's just a huge big collaboration and everything gets assembled in a lighter scene usually usually everything gets put together all the different departments are doing their jobs and then you assemble a scene that comes in from layout and stuff you assemble all the lights and bring everything together and you're the one who kicks out the renders make sure passes are separated properly and then yeah there's a feedback loop i kind of touched on a little bit earlier um technical knowledge so strong understanding of how lights behave is super important like knowing like what kind of uh you know how lights decay uh proper key to fill ratios for situations what kind of colors make sense all that stuff is super important to make things believable uh understanding how to manage scenes and bring things in you have to do stuff like bring in olympic caches from visual effects and animation uh being able to do things in a pinch so i had a shot for example uh with thanos where

he had like some of his muscle penetrating through his shirt or something like that and that shot was ready to be final everything looked good um the only thing was that penetration so being able to go in there select some verts and like push it back in through his cloth just for that shot you do stuff like that sometimes like they're little band-aid fixes um but if something's really ready to get funneled sometimes you do that that kind of stuff just to get it out um being able to diagnose render issues if you have artifacting being able to figure out where that's coming from a lot of times uh reflections refractions caustics some some stuff will look buggy unless you have proper settings so being able to diagnose where stuff's coming from is important uh breaking out render passes for compositing so compositors like to have stuff separate so they have full control being able to separate the foreground and background elements um give them the proper passes so they can tweak things in post um also uh using onset data is super important

so like here's a picture of me i was on set for a super bowl commercial here which is super cool and the gray ball chrome ball are used to help show you where lights are coming from so you're able to recreate uh where those are lit usually what you do is you'll take a shot of those balls and then you'll play cg balls in the same area where it would be on set and light those until they match and usually that's kind of your ground truth you can check your colors check your intensity um everything's shot full dynamic range so you're able to to get accurate lighting information with that stuff and you also capture uh proper hdrs there to make sure the lighting is like correct and stuff um so getting a job as a lighting artist um i think showing that you can light uh and integrate stuff with live action stuff is really important that's a lot of what you'll be doing you'll be taking a cg robot and putting it in a real environment or sometimes it could be set extension sometimes it's things like

we're going to make this look like it's the 1950s instead of a contemporary street so you're putting in cg background stuff to make it look more you know retro or whatever so i would suggest doing things like that because that's the kind of work you'll be doing also this is a great time to collaborate with other disciplines uh to do cool stuff so if you do have someone who's a really dope character artist and a really good animator put a really good looking robot in a scene or something put something in there that you know will make you stand out and looks professional uh doing difficult shots uh is good as well like the thanos interacting with uh captain america is a good example like making it look like it's believable that someone is interacting with a cge object you have you know in future films you have richard parker being pet like the giant tiger from you know the movie or whatever so things like that things that show practical interaction with the cg element is really good um and again only show your best

lighting work uh you can let go of old student projects and stuff if they're just not that good just make new stuff that's better and then reach out to recruiters and be willing to do roles that aren't as glamorous uh and that you know you'll work your way up like i like i said like i was doing mostly mostly rotoscoping work which if you don't know what that is it's essentially just tracing objects so they can be pulled out of a plate um so i did a lot of that kind of stuff early on until i got a real job doing lighting so be willing to do that so you can make connections and make relationships uh you know don't be too too proud to take a job like that because at least you'll get your foot in the door i've also seen people who are uh at visual sex effect studios that are runners like they'll just go around and like restock the kitchen do stuff like that and then they end up getting into like either a lighting academy or something like that to where they're able to transition into actually doing shots and working as a visual effects artist so sometimes you have to do that kind of

stuff but you know it's a way it's a way in for sure another thing is just being willing to move uh depending on where you're at uh there's also there's obviously like big visual effects hubs canada is a big one uh la it's more commercials in television now not as many feature films but la new york london so australia there's like a few hubs so being willing to work and move to those places um you know it's it's going to be likely that you'll have to do that so the core differences between games and film games have heavy constraints for performance so it's always a balance of quality and perf uh film is all about quality uh but deadlines are tight so things need to be done efficiently there's a lot of one-off uh things you have to do to complete shots kind of like the the muscle penetration stuff i was talking about um film you light to the shot so you know there's a locked camera

angle and you might have a rim light coming behind a character to make it look more interesting and then you flip the camera 180 degrees the other character and he also has a room light so that your lighting to the shot just to make it look more interesting right uh where in games it's you know 360 degrees the character can go wherever so you kind of have to craft moments more in games than crafting a single shot so if you know a character's gonna come out of a door you can craft that shot of what they're gonna look like when they come out of the door so there's there's some control there but you're you're completely lighting an environment i guess working in games as a lighter is a little bit more comparable to working in like future animation or something um in film you have typically like a lot more clear direction there's a lot more like uh r d and and stuff that's been done before you get there so there's a lot less to figure out it's more just like here's your shots this is what it should look like you know let's let's do it and let's make sure that the sequence is all consistent

um wherever you get like fully cg shots though sometimes you get a little bit more control over how things look there especially if you're like the sequence lighting lead you can kind of pop in there and set establish the look i guess um yeah i guess in games something that's pretty cool something that i've really liked is that i'm able to experiment a lot more i'm able to try try things more it's not something where i'm constrained to make it look how it looked on set you know it needs to look perfectly photorealistic in video games you can kind of experiment and stylize things and cheat a little bit more so it's kind of a little bit more liberating um cultural differences i'd say games is a little bit more laid back it's a little bit more of a nerdy culture people you know a lot more likely to play d d and uh play video games in the kitchen and stuff we're in visual effects it's a little bit more serious you have a lot more uh dudes like wearing scarves and stuff

like taking themselves seriously uh i guess the comparison i always say is like at game studios usually you have dudes drinking like red bulls and and junk food and visual effects studios you have to use drinking like green tea and stuff uh that's a stupid comparison but anyway uh so yeah if you guys want to connect with me like i'm always down to to answer questions um sometimes uh sometime in the near future i plan on doing a lot of tutorials trying to help people transition from games and or from film into games and vice versa so uh if you ever want to talk or reach out you know just you can hit me up on twitter uh our station you can email me as well um if you go to my art station my my emails on there i forgot to list it here um i'll just uh the next slide is just my reel so i guess i can just let this loop while we talk brandon uh and if anybody has any questions all right man uh thanks for uh

for being part of g ducks dude and uh i always welcome and like talking to lighters because i i feel like the the next step for graphical fidelity if unreal is is any uh indication it it always is leading with lighters and material creation i it feels like those are the natural steps to kind of elevate our medium to the next level and even if you're not an artist even if you're working in other disciplines it's good for you to kind of get familiar with that and with your talk too like being able to kind of um uh move across industries and and stay put like in la like what you've done right if if for some reason the game jobs have dried up you know you have a whole other industries to kind of move across without having to uh to leave which is a lot of issues that game developer uh have you know the and it's the perfect time i kind of alluded to that before before the your presentation where a lot of these industries are

opening up for game developers so places that we never really really thought of and uh it's exciting to kind of hear your take on that man yeah there's a ton of that stuff now man like uh even for feature film uh there's just technology like i know what uh they'll bring like light lighters on set because a lot of times for things like avatar they have fully cg environments so it's good for the director and the director of photography to be able to have an idea of what their shot's gonna look like at the end so they'll have onset lighters you know doing stuff in a cg environment like real time stuff so they can see through the camera what something might look like and we talked about in the in the last uh game dev uh unchained talk about you know things like the mandalorian where they're using real time lighting to light practical actors on set now so you're using things like um the projectors and like the onset uh lighting workflows super super cool

yeah it's huge so i this is actually a perfect time for me to kind of remind everyone if you want to have questions answered directly with uh scott uh it will be filtered through me because we want to make sure all the good questions go through but uh so far we haven't had any bad bad problems with that so uh this is a question from shadow marnar so do you make and develop the cgi models as well as apart from the lighting when creating the scene uh typically no um usually like i i've worked more in uh i guess i guess it depends on the studio so some studios you're expected to more act like a generalist usually you'll see that at commercial houses or television so like when i worked in commercials you know i've had to model cars and texture them model model some assets so i guess the answer is typically at

smaller studios you will be expected to do some of that stuff at larger studios or on larger projects they want your full time dedicated to lighting sometimes like i said look dev and compositing but usually it's just lighting for video games i think it depends as well like where you're at um at turtle rock i've been doing a little bit of texturing a little bit of modeling but usually i'm spending most of my time just doing lighting right so uh like this is more like for me too like um you kind of mentioned this before where environment artists used to kind of have to kind of take care of everything right you know i come from a background environment art and i have very little knowledge with lighting like uh you know the the most that i do is just turn on the light switch to this motel room right so i don't really do much aside from that

thanks you dude uh you know credit to the guys who created this place but uh but that that that is the limitation now i feel where maybe in the ps3 era where environment artists can get away with lighting uh the world but like current generation and most deaf point next generation we can't do that anymore and the remnants of those type of mentality at studios are are disappearing like there there may be smaller studios that still think that way whereas like hey i know a little bit lighting and placing things here and there it's like no you don't right right but i i feel like that that is a dying breed and uh it's a fully dedicated uh like you know where you're coming from a job to kind of make sure that it's it's done correctly and it's getting more and more complex and complicated as we're seeing the you know unreal engine 5 demo uh which is actually a good good i would

want to would love to kind of hear your thoughts about that uh i'm sure by now you've seen it right oh dude i'm so excited like i uh just the idea of not having to bake light maps and stuff uh super exciting dude having uh real time global illumination and uh sharp shadows on you know million billion i think they have a couple billion polygons and their scene is like insane dude so it's stuff that we've like these constraints uh just being lifted and with that uh time to like not having to bake not having to wait around for stuff uh being able to completely light in real time and and see exactly what your image is gonna look like is a huge time saver like uh there'll be times where i'm at work and i don't really know what something's going to look like until i do a production fake so a lot of times i'll do my production bakes before i go to sleep at night and i'll wake up the next morning and see how it was uh but you can imagine like that iteration is super slow and even with

like preview quality bakes for a lot of our environments it takes like 15 minutes uh to really see what it's gonna look like even at a previous preview level so uh being able to light in real time uh without looking that good with like that kind of bounce light and stuff is crazy exciting uh because it's just gonna make things look way better artists are gonna be able to craft things way faster it's gonna be able to get art directed way better because you'll be able to have people tweak things uh next to each other in real time and really like block out what a scene's to look like so i'm stoked man this is a question from byrne how hard or is easy was the transition from games to film stressful the change between the two industries with deadlines etc um there's a little bit of stress like it it's you know i think you get a little bit of um imposter syndrome right a lot of times when you're starting something new seriously oh dude i don't belong here these people are freaking pros you know me bro but

you pick things up quickly yeah it's like obviously learn from me guys step back now i'm kidding but yeah dude like it's it's uh it can be nerve-wracking a little bit but just get out of your own head and just be dependable and don't be afraid to ask questions like even if it makes you look like a noob that's okay because you will be a noob like when you're when you're transitioning you're you know you're just learning a lot of this stuff try to do as much research as you can and learn stuff before you get that job but you know it's okay to ask questions and even if it makes you look a little dumb at least you won't mess something up because messing something up makes you look way worse so if you render something badly or you have the wrong settings or you're not doing things properly within the pipeline it's going to be way worse than just asking a dumb question so um i think as long as you know you're willing to to really dig in and learn you're going to learn something new at every studio you go to too like even working within film i've used probably like four or five

different renders and tools uh because each studio has their own pipeline so they're not expecting you to know everything about their pipeline because you haven't worked there yet so it's it's okay to have that little bit of growth a lot of times we'll have learning programs like when i was at digital domain they have really really good proprietary stuff for maya that helps lighting just like way you know manage things way better than maya out of the box so if you can light uh you know using maya's default stuff you can definitely like using a studio's proprietary tools because they're making things better and cleaner for artists to come through and stuff great uh so this is a question what are your recommended resources for upcoming lighting artists to learn from and uh let's answer that one first he has two questions dude i uh for me it was a lot of a lot of tutorials like in school i didn't have a lot of teachers that that were super familiar with lighting a lot of them were animators or

or a layout artist or something so yeah like i just went deep on tutorials uh gnomon usually has pretty decent ones some of them are dated at this point but a lot of the the theory and stuff is still really really relevant um tutorials that i fell in love with early on that probably still hold up today uh jeremy vickery is he's a really really good lighting artist from pixar he put out some gnomon dvds like way back in the day um and that dude's like a double threat he's able to to do concept painting and uh you know digital lighting so he's he's just a stud and he's also moved back and forth between film and games like he worked at pixar for a long time and i think he was a naughty dog and ubisoft and stuff so um yeah i would say learn from from tutorials uh there's documentation it you know i would say be a little bit wary of of uh youtube tutorials because sometimes there's some bad information but also reach out to people you know um

i've done mentorships with people in the past like official mentorships so you know that's something that i might consider in the future so i could be a resource to help people learn um yeah reach out to people uh all i can say is dude leave me alone like try not to pester people you don't want to be like uh you don't want to be bugging people about stuff but a lot of times uh people know what it's like to start out so they're willing to kind of give back and help people learn and stuff yeah i think this is definitely a relative um there's a cool way the social distance before social distancing was cool right i mean yeah she kind of read the situation and and at conventions if anything it's um it's a lot more intimidating to walk up to professionals and you have all these weird uh quirks right that you have to work over but online i i think there's a way to kind of compose your message and and and time it correctly and and come across a little bit safer

uh yeah but you know the other side of that is it's so it feels so approachable that people go overdo it right um and if anything i i always uh related to how people should sell things right you're selling somebody you're selling yourself essentially to somebody for a possible mentorship for advice um there has to be an exchange in value somehow right there has to be the more that you can create that benefit for the person you're asking something from and and and giving them some value in return uh the better the exchange um the the more invested they will be to kind of help you so you got to figure that out uh yeah because you're you're you're paying for someone's time at that point right and people get off work they have families and stuff so you know answering a bunch of questions might not necessarily be what they want to do at that moment but like you're saying like if there is like a some kind of more formal thing like i

know cgma has really really good mentorships and programs so there's stuff where you just you know instead of going to school you might be able to just do something like that and you know it's a little bit of money but it's worth it for things like that so this is a question from roberto uh would it be better to have animated models instead of static when doing lighting uh what is the difference um i think so yeah i think having some kind of dynamic uh movement is important when showing off your lighting just because uh you're able to see how shadows and reflections are playing off a surface seeing the spec highlights and stuff and how they roll off a surface is really important so if there's no movement it's hard to see a lot of that stuff so screenshots are good but having like a subtle camera move like a pen or a tilt um just something to show it off if you can have animation that's even better

as long as it's good animation if you have like really dodgy animation uh it's just gonna make your whole piece look like so i'd recommend uh working with someone who's actually an animator making sure it's good otherwise uh just keep it static and move your camera this is a question from burn again do you see yourself staying in the game industry now or still jumping from games to films uh for now i'm i'm really liking video games like it's it's uh it's a little bit more slow paced i guess uh the the deadlines aren't as tight uh at least at turtle rock the the overtime has not been an issue at all um when i was working at other studios in television and visual effects i've done 19 20 hour days like two days three days a week sometimes and that's not super typical but it's not uncommon either you know it's a lot of times especially when things are getting tight with film you can expect to be doing like 10

12-hour days pretty regularly and i'm sure some game studios are the same way uh but at least at turtle rock it's it's been sick man like we've really been trying to manage scope and and do things to make it so people aren't working crazy hours yeah i mean that's so i'm digging games right now well i mean this is another follow-up they might have missed it but we can expand it a bit further uh it's the question about lumen using uh with within unreal five so um when i had ray on last week who's a graphic engineer we were kind of talking about because if anything that demo kind of kind of baffled a lot of game devs like how exactly what are they doing right because they haven't shared too many of the behind the scene of how it works right with you working on a lot of engines for priority engine and unreal i would love to kind of hear more of your thoughts behind the tech behind it um if it's something that what you're guessing how it works how optimized it is and how realistic

it's going to be used across all studios dude it's it's really hard to say because they had so many dynamic things uh in the scene so like you have like dynamic effects i don't know if is their niagara system or what what their effect system was they're using but a lot of effects and things that were following that also receiving global elimination so like it was like legit it seemed like it was legit real-time gi um and how they're accomplishing that i'm honestly not sure i don't know if they do like a i'd assume they would do like a pre-computation of the scene so figuring out what objects are static and what's and what's movable and able to you know at least have the renderer know where things are at so that if a light does hit the surface like what would be the proper bounce response so i'm sure there's some kind of precomputation where it knows like this area is terrain this is not going to move this is you know static and then it kind of stores that i imagine a lot of times

uh at least traditionally there's you know spherical harmonic probes have been the solution for lighting like dynamic gi like faking dynamic gi and essentially those are just capture points of lighting data that interpolate between each other so you'll do like a big for your scene and then those probes all know uh where things are coming from and they can light movable objects and stuff like that it's kind of like the uh the volumetric light maps in unreal engine um so there's there's been fakes in the past uh and lighten is like a pretty solid one that that does you know real-time gi but i haven't seen it look as good as the ue5 demo dude like that thing was looking real juicy dude real tasty so yeah i uh my max resolution in the house is on a 4k so i watched that like five times just to nitpick and study and and froth at the mouth right uh magic that's one of the things they haven't

shared too many details not not a lot of people know we're all guessing really it's not just a lumen system it's your uh night night system you know the polygonal how they're reading it per pixel and stuff because yeah they're changing the complete way things are textured and everything dude like there's like no mips and stuff anymore apparently like it's like it's crazy man so uh and that was on a playstation 5. it like wasn't even on a beefy pc it's on a ps5 so it's it's pretty crazy man i'm excited it's pretty crazy yeah it seems like it's very doable because they wouldn't they can't lie to us this early i mean this late before a launch right so this programmer in the corner finally came up with this it's like now that i have money i'll i'll work harder um yeah it's definitely exciting and um as an environment artist it feels like a

very natural step for for for people like me to kind of like all right let's let's kind of like go outside of my comfort zone and at least understand um this a little bit more so i can talk to you guys to that department and look kind of uh relevant and not so dumb but i i encourage all the other disciplines as well to think the same because like you said lighting affects everything animation visual effects i mean you guys are one of the last people in there uh before shipping so you touch pretty much everything and so every department needs to be able to communicate with you and it's super important to show off your work too right like if you're a prop artist or a character artist um you want to show all those details off that you've put into your your piece the best way you can so learning how to light is important for everybody i think um and you know traditionally things like mental ray uh you know pretty much hot garbage and stuff and there's like all these weird

tricks you had to do to make it look good but now things like arnold uh and even render man's wrists uh renderer there's things that are just like so much better out of the box like they behave better out of the box but there's still so like the tools and the light behavior all that stuff is a lot more accessible for people to use now but there's lighting theory and fundamentals that people need to research as well like compositionally you know what makes sense for for lights you know uh like how are we showing things off how are we shaping things so just because the tools are getting better doesn't mean that everybody can light i think uh if you're interested in lighting you should definitely study photography and study film and see how people like masters have done it in the past even like old paintings like rembrandt paintings and stuff like a lot of the mood and stuff is coming from how the lighting and the the shadows are are painted so uh cool this is a question from ahmet a moderator oh man hopefully i'm seeing

your name i don't i don't think i ever actually say your name out loud uh what is the hardest part in in lighting for you and what should people well this is a follow-up for me is like what should people concentrate uh for the next couple years to kind of be at the at the top of the game i think probably just you know trying to create something that feels grounded and believable and still looks beautiful you know like i think i i guess it's a lot of things right like it's it's hard to make something look grounded and and believable uh so you know using things like real world reference uh figuring out how how light behaves in real life you know i go around and i just look at stuff all the time like oh that's interesting the way the windows are bouncing the light off that skyscraper you know there's weird phenomena that happen with how light behaves and just studying that stuff and trying to recreate that

it can be hard sometimes without looking cheesy or weird or whatever so i think you know just studying stuff from real life as much as possible even if you're doing a stylized game it's still important to know like how light decays and how you can i can use certain tools that happen in real life like caustics from water stuff like that to make things feel more grounded and believable um so i i think that's something that takes time and it takes a lot of just researching and stuff so yeah great man and uh this is actually a perfect time to to tell everybody that uh they're pretty active in discord and we can spend all day talking to you for sure but again i want to be respectful you see that guys social distancing uh my approach to you so uh if scott you know if you don't mind you know uh he'll be in the discord channel and kind of follow up to kind of answer and talk to you guys uh

moderately right because he is busy and and uh we'll answer some of those questions for you for sure i want to thank you man for for coming on and hope everything is is going well for for you and your family and friends and everybody uh we we live pretty close but i haven't seen you guys over at toyotaro for a long time and it's just i know man we miss you bro yeah of course you do yeah thanks for having me on dude yeah of course when you play some basketball soon too man yeah yeah just come to the motel room at any point and we'll hang out yeah you got some hoops back there right i got a hoot i got i got a hoop over over the last two months because i wasn't going anywhere the gym is still closed and it was getting kind of bonkers yeah man well cool bro thanks for having me on dude it's been fun yeah well uh before i send you off let's kind of maybe throw up your your slide once again with all your contact information and i'll hand over the mic to you and this is a place for you to go ahead and and

shout out give attention to or tell people where they can find you and connect with you after this presentation yeah so um like i said feel free to add me on any of these and if you guys have more questions or whatever like i'm always kind of open to talking with people especially if they have questions pertaining to this if you guys just want to talk about you know the weather and stuff that's cool too but uh if you have like lighting questions and stuff you know definitely hit me up um yeah and just shout out to all the people who've helped me in my career really i've had so many really really good artists that i've worked with and leads and supervisors um people who have really helped me flourish and grow so i just want to give a shout out to everybody that i've worked with really i've been super super fortunate and haven't really had anybody that i don't like working with like i've had really really really good teams for like every production i've been on um so

i would just say as like a closing point just you know reach out to people uh really be dependable be the person that people want to give a task to because you can just knock it out and it won't be a problem uh try to really listen to notes and address them uh like people don't like giving the same note twice so if someone gives you a note on a piece uh you know make sure you fix it and you hit it and just yeah try to soak up as much knowledge as possible it's good to know at least at a fundamental level what every other department's doing that you'll be affecting uh so just yeah try to try to learn and you know keep growing you all right well on behalf of everybody that has worked with you you're you're welcome [Laughter] i just want to thank you in particular it's a mutual feeling man it's been a pleasure working with you and uh it's always fun in the office it makes it a lot easier although i'm a huge proponent

for working from home but the things i do miss in the office is working with people such as yourself and it's always a fun time uh to be away from the family and just hang out with your friends basically for sure so yeah yeah dude let's just do game and change all week i know right i've been doing it for three days give me a give me a week off and then we'll resume but anytime of course when you want to talk about something and come back on we're always a platform so appreciate it man and i want to give you one more thank you to you for uh for never having albedos that are too dark or baking too much ao into your base color dude i appreciate that basic pbr settings yes uh i'll be sure to kind of continue that trend and a lot of that is again talking to uh lighting artists yourself and learning what the hell you're talking about right tight bro well yeah man i really appreciate it and thank you everybody for listening man it's cool all right scott thank you

have a good one man later you too bro all righty then well thank you everybody uh we are gonna be talking with more presenters throughout the day that was with scott and as always a lot of people are reaching out or are missing at least day one day two i want to remind everybody you can go to youtube.com forward slash blue champs right now they're in this long seven hour marathon uh mega video clip but eventually when i get some rest get hydrated moisturize and get some nice deserve sleep uh these videos will be in its own block uh hour so to make it consumable for for anyone that is looking for that one presentation that they missed so again that's youtube.com forward slash bluechamps uh as always um you know if you wanna hear it in more

digestible form it's kind of like what scott kindly mentioned and we've had them on the podcast many times the gamedev unchained podcast it is a podcast that you can listen to all your apple or android or anywhere that you listen to podcast you should be able to find it but again hanging out on discord is the best way to kind of make myself accessible to you guys to ask any questions and who knows you know the next g ducks is something that i've been seeing a lot of people are reaching out uh to not be exactly in a a presenter but a opportunity for them to kind of amplify their indie project or their work that they're doing the personal projects and it is something i'm really really really uh considering to make sure that you know the next edicts while i'm planning things to kind of invite these these guys and gals in between presenters to kind of promote and talk and that's what the caller

hotline is so i want to remind you guys you know if i see you guys hanging in the caller hotline in the discord i will jump in there and have an impromptu conversation to viewers directly and have you guys talk through the mic and hear your lovely voices because it does get lonely here uh in the motel room in between presenters so if i can talk to you guys that'll be a fun little segment that is unplanned and give me a little insight of where you're at where you're from and and how gdex is helping you uh gives me real-time feedback you know uh at the same time i can cut your mic if you're saying stuff that i don't don't like no i'm kidding so uh in the meantime uh before we go move on to our next presenter i do want to introduce an unchain report segment clip discussing about the ps5 is actually a perfect segue and not about just the ps5 but also the

onslaught of next-gen so you know we're talking about xbox series x as well and this is a conversation i've had with my regular roundtable crew a few weeks back and it's worth bringing up again because if anything i want to give you guys the best information of what's happening the last six months uh to kind of plan ahead because that's what g ducks is about so without further ado before we bring on the next presenter i'll have you guys uh talk amongst yourself but also watch and discuss uh our discussion on what the next gen console means for all our game developers out there enjoy the ps4 the ps5 uh kind of went on to uh have their little uh announcement but it was

disengaging uh within the ten minutes it was some kind of this is the kind of rape horn that he loves right but for the rest of us they're like what the is this it was literally this guy talking in front of a green screen with these fake people in the front wait and we're supposed to buy into that so i don't know richard uh wait wait wait are those people no dude this is technical no i didn't see it no no i cannot i could immediately tell that's dude i was and it's moving too yeah i saw them moving a little bit that that's it was oh wow that looks so fake but like they talked about stuff that i was snoring through so i i think it's fair to at least go over to ray right right at least can he break this down was it relevant was there anything about this interesting because they have yet to get right look at that let me break it down let me break it let me break it down two ways right first of all you have to understand that this was going to be a

much bigger thing at gdc okay what is gdc for gde gc is for game developers it's not for the consumers it's for game developers right and so if they're going to do a substitute event it's gonna be all about the megahertz and the gigawatts and all that nonsense right and it's gonna be about ssd and and the fast loading speed and all that right it's gonna be about the technical details and uh we got the technical details right and the specs of the hardware which is which is cool like that's exactly the type of event this was if people went into expecting more uh they don't know what gdc is about period right it looks like um the main thing to take away from this though is like from with all the stats all the numbers and everything is like they're really pushing hard on low times

and they want seamless load times and they want to reduce uh they're doing some interesting things in that area right and so there's a lot a lot that i'm excited about to see what how games utilize this hardware in order to do no load screens ultra high speed streaming and all this stuff right um so like that's that's that's that's the news and that's what it means to gamers right okay um to gamers is like oh like i could just get into my game and play it right away oh that's like that is the new thing right uh and the hardware is also like the gpu cpu is also great right so performance is gonna be crazy like we might actually start seeing games that actually at 4k actually running at 60 native or just running at 60 with some sort of dynamic resolution set up like there's a lot there's a lot to like about the announcement but of course was it dry and technical and absolutely

boring hell yeah of course it was right so um you know so i want to see the games now right so i want them to start talking about okay here's what we've actually built on this yeah it's worth noting that even with this being boring and it was a total bait and switch in my opinion uh it had 13 million views right and i saw an article measuring with the xbox uh uh what do they call it scarlett what's the next one l1x xbox series x xbox series uh that only garnered 10 million so even with this boring ass presentation it beat xbox's launch announcement with like typical gamer exciting stuff but you're saying that hardware was worth it it was at least something that that moved you yeah i also mind you remind you that the xbox announcement ii was very technical as well right okay these are gdc talks this is this is during gdc where

they're talking to developers making games for the system so of course developers making games for the system want to know how the hell this thing works yeah right like at this level right so uh so it just makes sense right like talking about like my xbox came out was like you know uh constant like if you saw the digital it was the digital foundry expose right foundry did a big article about xbox series x and it was just like talking about locked frame rate not very locked frequencies of the cpu and the gpu and what frequencies they were at talking about compute compute units and compute cores where most folks most folks that like most uh people that just playing video games just wanted to know oh i have more compute units than this other thing has right just to say hey i have a bigger number than you without really understanding how that stuff actually works um so like you know like it's it's yeah it's this is not the real news you want to see the games and you want to

see how they perform on the hardware all right so uh i'm going to go over to richard real quick uh right after i asked ray this one thing so just comparing the boxes right is it pretty much the same or what were we saying right here is there anything you saw from the ps5 that you're like oh okay that's more interesting than i thought it would be um i don't know i'm just a gamer i need to see the games i think like honestly man like yeah because like that question to ray first i know you're the game designer you don't care about this stuff yeah i yeah if you put them on paper side by side and look at all you know honestly the hardware that they're using is very similar to each other they're all based on amd um what is it our dna zentu architecture both of them so it's pretty perhaps the same cpu and gpu but with custom modifications on both fence

um so on paper but on paper uh the xbox series x looks more powerful on paper right uh but there's a lot of things that the in the sony talk they were talking about like i said with the with the hard drive and and uh the frequency clocks and all this stuff that it really is going to come down to the games right and i think i've been on here before where i said like xbox don't really have the games right now right um and so that's so crap uh they got whatever obsidian is doing no honestly honestly microsoft has the games if you look at it from like if if game pass is their way of making money right they have the games and they have the studios for that to give people a variety of different games right sony is like nah we're just gonna deliver you hits right this every first party game is gonna be a hit hit right and so

and so it really just comes down to what those what those games are yeah honestly because at the end of the day that's what those boxes at the end of the day is games game sale boxes right yeah uh ray uh is uh is it true like i just i'm reading this on tech radar right now that ps5 could potentially support backwards compatibility because that's like old-school playstation 2 days that i'm thinking about this stuff and that sounds really cool if it can do that well the only backwards compatibility that they're talking about is uh ps4 names right oh so it doesn't go all the way down no that would have been so dope i'm playing my yeah but like microsoft is like nah we're backwards compatible to like xbox 360 right like they're like yeah that's great wow that's cool yeah yeah yeah yeah no that that that'll uh i think that'll have a much bigger they'll actually

i haven't thought about backwards compatibility in a long time but that's really cool i think like especially now with like a lot of uh players like they have to like dig up games that they've like uh played like a long time ago because they're in quarantine now yeah buried in the garage and so like saying that you have backwards compatibility when you have a library as big as you know it's like you know people people like that stuff i i definitely would appreciate that for sure it's actually interesting you're mentioning this because i think people appreciate it but the actual people the number of people that actually use it like in practice like for real for real is like really really small yeah right and uh and like you do all this work all this blood blood sweat and tears to to get the epilation or whatever stuff to work and then like nobody uses it right you know what i mean and but then of course it's a major it's a major selling point when you want to sell the console right because everybody's like oh yeah you have to be backwards compatible and then the five people that really care about it um

everybody else just has their old consoles still hooked up but they just play games on that right so it's kind of it's really good yeah i see it as a long-term investment like um the same way that dvds kind of kind of left uh you know in the streaming world for movies kind of just have that huge library of inventory right i see once they have those 10 subscription up and ready from both xbox and ps 5. uh that's going to be a huge selling point to be able to play ps2 games on your phone or whatever right so i think it's definitely worth the investment for them to do it now but i think you're correct for the ps5 people that actually buy the console they're not going to really mess with that as much but the subscription service is going to be huge just having thousands of games available for 10 bucks a month man oh my god that is a dream game oh yeah oh yeah like you know imagine i mentioned like imagine game pass and then you add project xcloud like that's microsoft's strategy right they

like they want you playing their games everywhere right and uh and that's gonna be it's gonna be interesting yeah yeah i mean it's a very interesting year and uh we're we're at the hour mark but i also want to have your guys final thoughts right i'm very surprised that they're going forward with these consoles at the end of the year will there be people still having jobs to buy these things like is that a does that still happen it seems insane that we're going through this like economic downturn and then people will have enough like 500 i'm guessing right to kind of shell out to to buy these consoles i i'm very surprised that they haven't delayed this i'll say this right i think all these things all these things are coming out at the end of the year right so christmas right i think like you know everybody's hoping that this will be over long before christmas yeah right so that's that's that's what everybody's thinking is and that's what everybody's hopes and dreams are because if it is going on much longer like yeah it will be real

bad i think if that was to happen right yeah i um i think that what in the optimistic case and i want to be optimistic because i've got kids and uh you know you know and all that stuff no i don't know i left them having home but instead i'm talking to you no just kidding i'll still be here yeah uh yeah i know um i i want to believe there will be the uh coveted 19 before the end of the year for sure i think if we do i think what will happen is you know the global economy will kick back up slowly though i mean the damage is done there's not a lot of people have lost jobs unemployment rate is ridiculous right now across the globe um but when things stabilize i think people uh will want to start buying stuff again and um i don't know like how that compares to a normal economy uh when you have these

announcements and you have all the conferences to build up the hype um but i do think there's going to be you know once the coast is clear like a lot of people are just going to come out of their homes and just want to party and do things and live life like they like they used to you know and so uh end of the year is a pretty good time they always a good time because of christmas and the holidays and all um so we'll see uh yeah i'm hoping yeah well for everybody out there that is going through this uh we are at home with you and uh if china is any type of uh sign of hope you know it seems like they are in a better uh position after like four months or so so it seems to be gonna take us through the summer like everybody kind of am guessing right now so uh by that time we'll we'll save enough money to get a ps5 i guess that's dude

my next presenter is with jonathan gagne he is the ceo of masters peace vr who is also the sponsor for this year's gdex event he will be discussing with us the making of masterpiece vr using vr and machine learning to democratize 3d today less than 0.1 percent of people who have the technical ability to create 3d models the mission is to enable anyone to be able to take whatever they imagine in their heads and then easily create a digital copy of it in 2015 masterpiece vr

the team over there started a company from nothing to make this a reality experts told them it was impossible thankfully they were wrong today we have a strong or they have a strong team of over 25 and greatly simplified creating 3d content they used virtual reality and machine learning to help people create content 10 times faster and their software is over 200 times faster to learn than traditional tools what was the first in the world war world with real time co-creation letting remote team workers work together they have over 30 000 people using their tools today and are determined to grow until they have democratized 3d content creation for everybody so jonathan we see you and we're about to hear you man i'm going to pipe you in uh let's do a little mic check real quick hey how you doing perfect all right i'm always holding my breath making sure yeah absolutely all right so uh whenever you're ready to go uh the the show floor is yours man

thank you everybody for uh being out here and you know thanks for giving the chance to chat about this so um i'm here today to talk about you know both the story of the making of masterpiece vr as well as you know how all of you can use this technology to really simplify and accelerate creating 3d content especially for those of you who don't have any previous experience creating 3d modeling you know here's now an opportunity where you can do so so a little bit about me i'm the ceo as i mentioned the masterpiece vr leading a team over 25. we've got over 30 000 users in virtual reality using this today and we're growing exponentially before that i got a master's in systems engineering uh university medalist at the top of the university and i've got the highest national research award canada for the level in machine learning and the technology inside virtual reality

i've raised millions of venture capital and grants i've got you know over 5x business awards and dozens of tech awards so now here's what we're about to talk about today you know first part one is the story this is about the lessons of the passion and perseverance and why failure is really absolutely necessary i know you know some of that's sort of hard to take sometimes but it really is very important and that first part comes across as like a story and then the second part is uh talking about how you can actually use it it's very a shift of gears and being less about story more about as much information as we can give you in a short period of time now when i was uh asked to talk about this they it said that you know we don't just want to hear all the positive things we want to hear of the challenges and obstacles along the way but i don't think they may have known how

deep this rabbit hole goes and the truth is is that i've never actually told this story before so you're all about to hear it uh for the first time uh well actually anybody's about to hear for the first time but to understand it it starts uh many years before uh ever even creating this company you know at a young age i had to go through a lot of struggles and obstacles and this is what helped me grow and to be able to do what i could do today and i'll go back to grade two and i was misdiagnosed i had a appendix ruptured i was hospitalized for an entire month and i had to fight through that the doctor said i probably wasn't gonna survive and every day i had to fight to you know to make it through that well you know thankfully the doctors were wrong and here i'm here today but you know it continued on in this way

shortly after um you know my parents broke up and that could be hard for you know a child to be from a broken family but uh what made horror is that you know we didn't have any money like you know like charity presence money sort of uh you know like so little that uh you know you'd get gifts from like charities for christmas sort of thing um and my mother's uh partner was uh you know after my father was um a huge alcoholic so that was sort of every day was a challenge done that way we had a rough neighborhood and uh you know he eventually drank himself at that so you know there's been times where you know it's not even sure you know if things are worth living but you know as you get through that it just gets you stronger and stronger and now you know that can make a whole story on its own but fast forward a few years and you know i first get to university

this was the first out of any of my family trees to go to university and the truth is from the high school i went to uh less than 10 percent of people uh in the graduating class we're still continuing on to university even a year later um so you know not so surprising my grades weren't that great uh pretty much was failing out and then you know it occurred to me then to to start actually you know taking advice and following my passions so i really got into you know machine learning and specifically how the humans do it and that sort of flipped everything around where i went from you know all f's to basically getting you know really good grades and um you know but even with that flip you know i still didn't think i was you know good enough to get any type of scholarships or awards or anything like that but i was encouraged to apply anyways well i didn't get the

though i didn't think i was going to get the lowest one and i didn't get that one i end up getting the highest national one in canada uh where i'm from and you know next thing i know i'm getting a pluses and everything i graduated university medalist top of the university and then had all the universities across canada reaching out to me if i would come and work with them for grad work so then you know took an offer from university of waterloo where i got the opportunity to focus on uh the junction of machine learning computer vision robotics and um and the technology motion capture the technology inside of virtual reality so that was really exciting and did really well there was nominated for international awards um and um uh essentially from from that point then you know i was considering uh an offer from uh i was a lab at mit that wanted me to go there said i've been in school

long enough head back to ottawa and uh where i'm from and there's no jobs so um so basically you know i started over from scratch again where i had uh you know i basically picked up a job as a web developer i specifically know jobs in my area of machine learning and all that stuff about a decade ago before it was popular and i started from a junior engineer and then within you know two years i went from a junior engineer to technical director uh leading large-scale government projects you know we've been doing uh the prime minister's office uh and a number of number of others you know at this point um you know i i decided i was going to do my own thing and this is where the start of masterpiece vr comes um can you hold on one second please sorry

[Music] oh my sincere apology about that there was just uh someone here it was really important um so i was at uh that was the start of masterpiece vr and you know i took all the money i had and you know instead of buying a house and a car i used that to see start this company and you know i maybe had a little bit of tech but i knew nothing about business and as of now my role as ceo that was the most important part of what i had to do you know but knowing nothing about business i i couldn't get any funding i couldn't

get any grants i couldn't even get any customers uh because i was really that bad at it and uh so so i decided you know just just when i felt like i was low and i wasn't good enough to do it i actually got uh bell's policy and had half my entire face paralyzed um now it's hard enough as it is but trying to make relationships where you know this is where you make a smile um the doctor said i wasn't going to recover from it and that i just had to make a decision you know give up shop or you know just keep finding a way so i decided on the ladder just to keep finding a way and and that was great so i decided i read as many books and business i could i read over a hundred i got all the mentors of the smartest people i could find to help me understand this deeper and then i finally started to to understand how everything works

uh but then a downside came and i um uh we were running out of money so with less than a week left of having money we got accepted to the top uh startup accelerator in the world for virtual reality boost we see in silicon valley that gave us the enough money and turned out there was you know a lot of people doing these crazy things you know at the start everyone told me i was crazy doing this stuff doing this you know you're trying to democratize for you know hundreds of millions of people the creation of 3d content like what are you using virtual reality machine learning you know that's just kind of crazy talk where i'm from uh but now there's a lot of people doing it well so things were looking optimistic but right around that time uh vr went through a downturn and all the investors stopped funding virtual reality um

so that led to the next challenge you know trying to figure out how to to build something and add real value to the world when no one not even investors believe that it's going to be a thing anymore so we then ended up running out of money another three additional times now it's one thing if it's just you but now imagine that you have two dozen people and you know you they're about to be laid off you know and then have families you know that's a whole other level of stress so i continued to work like 80 100 hour weeks and focused all my energy and managed to pull it off you know time after time in these times and these crunches i managed to pull off you know a quarter million or half a million uh in extension funding each time and i'm sort of pleased to say that you know we're finally you know running well we've got over 30 000 users on our platform we've got one of the leading vr 3d creation tools

worldwide we've got partnerships with mainly the major tech companies and we're on exponential growth now and in one month we'll be able to do the entire production pipeline within virtual reality just you know greatly simplifying the creation of content so things are now looking you know extremely exciting i i can actually start paying myself now and uh we're now on an exponential growth uh and we're not going to stop until now until we get to you know hundreds of millions of users and enable a billion people to do this so i didn't tell you all these things so that you know you'd feel pity for me i told you then for you to understand that they're you know the more struggle you can go through them the more that you will build i mean to to do something great you need to accept the failure and take it as a challenge and grow from it and that you know the more challenge you

can't take the biggest challenge on unless you you know work your sort of your mental ability to overcome obstacles and persevere find your passion and persevere so you know if you're not taking if you're not failing often enough then you know that failing often is not a sign of losing it's a sign that you're taking on big challenge so if you're not failing like 90 of the time then you're probably not shooting high enough so i'd love to encourage any of you people out there who want to create a startup or create a studio of their own you know it can be one of the most rewarding things that you can ever do and um you know and i love it if you on your own time maybe you know either right now or later today just think about what are the obstacles holding you back and then don't let that smash through those doors so that's the the first part that's the story that's the first time i've ever told that story behind uh masterpiece vr

now the second part this is this is where you can learn about how to actually use what we've built and use what other people in our space will tell you about the whole ecosystem as well now create today creating 3d is a pain it takes a huge amount of work uh huge amount of effort to learn the software but it doesn't need to be this way so let's talk about what what's going on right now well right now you're creating 3d using a 2d interface a screen and a mouse and there's a mismatch between the interface it makes it slow it's expensive takes years to learn how to create this software sorry how to use the software to create things to give an analogy on why this is the wrong interface let's you know let's look at something similar if you want to create 2d with a 1d right etch a sketch is essentially two 1d knobs that you use to create a 2d picture now this person's created

starting nights but i'll tell you you know that's easier easier looking at it than doing it uh this is extremely challenging to do but instead you just use a 2d interface to do 2d like a wacom tablet then it becomes easy it becomes natural because there's a one for one match between the interface well virtual reality is the first truly native 3d interface and it allows you to easily interact and create 3d you know we've demonstrated well over 10 times improvements in speed and over 200 times quicker where the average person takes only a few seconds to be able to start creating organic 3d modeling you know when you compare that to the traditional tools where that could take you hundreds of hours to learn how to do so what we've created now is this amazing new platform the masterpiece

studio that lets you go from all the way from concept to animation i'll show you a quick video of this hopefully it streams okay we'll see oh and it is not streaming okay here we go extreme but i don't have the audios going through this yet [Music] oh i hear there's no audio uh that's okay as long as you guys can can see at least yeah they can get a rough idea yeah it'd be great to kind of like uh maybe to explain like what what they're seeing wow sure play the trailer again just to make

sure okay so here what you're seeing is a scene that was created using our software now what you can do is you can put on the virtual reality headset and you can start to sculpt with your hands as you see kind of happening quickly here you can create all different kinds of structures as well that should use in your scene you can then rig it and skin it so you can prepare for animation then you can export it and here we export it to substance painter to get some extra touch and then you can export and use it in whatever animation that you're looking to do and then i'll dive down a little bit deeper into that uh in a bit so not only can you create things quick and easily one of the powers that it does is to

give co-creation now our original product masterpiece vr allowed you to do this but in just one month we're getting an advanced uh update to that in masterpiece studio you know that allows real-time co-creation enabling you and your team to work and to create content no matter where you're located in you know lock down anywhere in the world you and your team could come together in virtual reality talk to each other interact and create together as a team [Music] so here i wanted to give a contrast in the speed comparison uh here was a speed a test done with uh to copy a robot and the the one on the left here was done in zbrush by jeremy uh he's got you know 10 years experience doing 3d modeling and it took him 10 hours to do that model to get it to ex explicit detail on the right using masterpiece vr ian

was able to do a similar one in just 45 minutes and he has no 3d modeling experience granted he is also an artist he has no previous 3d modeling experience so to put other way an untrained professional without 3d modeling experience was able to create comparable content uh to someone using zbrush 14 times faster now that's that's incredible increases in speed [Music] now when i talk about democratizing 3d content we're talking about the ease of use right so i like to make the analogy with you know making your own engine versus using unity unreal you know you know you guys are all gamers and if you remember back in the day before unity unreal people needed to make uh their engines from scratch now sure some of the large companies still do it this way but for the most part people will use unreal and unity because it just makes

it that much easier well we're looking to do the same thing with creating assets you know today it can be done with you know maya or 3ds max or blender but you know tomorrow we're looking at democratizing this allowing anybody to use masterpiece studio to do this now sure the large companies might you know if you need something really polished you may still want to put it into the traditional software too to get exactly what you want but you can do everything much faster uh when you have a product that's that allows it to be democratized our software works with all existing 3d modeling software so if you want to create something quick and edit it in a traditional app you're absolutely welcome to do so or pop it right into unity and unreal and start using it in your game it can be used for creating illustrations it can be used for creating animations you know if you want a 3d print let's say you have a character in your your

game that you'd like to 3d print i can send it right to a printer you can use it for making you know movies of your games and specifically you can make it for you know creating game assets as well now i i will mention that if you need the high polish you will probably want to put it into another product a traditional 3d modeling tool in the end to get those extra sharpness but this enables will enable you know your concept artists people that that may not have those 3d modeling skills to quickly create the content even to block out your scene [Music] so what do you need to actually use this well you need a first you need a virtual reality headset it has to be a pc based six stop one so any other ones you see here and you have to have at least minimum the minimum vr specs of uh you know 1060 or higher uh but you know i do recommend if you're going to be doing this seriously having a you know 1070 or 1080 or higher

will allow you to go in more detail so you know there's a lot on this page but i'm just going to quickly summarize it you know our tools virtual reality tools versus the traditional ones we're more targeted a little bit more towards the concept artists creative executives and makers fine artists designers or even a developer for example just wants to quickly try things out you know although we are useful for the 3d modeler and the 3d animator who do this full time with traditional tools they can they can use our software to accelerate it uh the biggest value that we add is is that ease of use um so we're particularly you know useful for the the creatives who are maybe perhaps a little less technical and ours provides real-time worldwide collaboration there's no experience required and as i mentioned we got speeds up to 10 times uh increase so here's a little bit about our platform it comes with two main apps masterpiece creator that's the main

sculpting app and then masterpiece motion which prepares it for animation we also will be inviting third-party apps to our platform soon to integrate uh in an easy turnkey way and as i mentioned before you know this connects to any existing 3d modeling software now here's quickly sort of the vr 3d modeling landscape we've got a masterpiece creator medium blocks and a number of other ones that are great for painting and i'll dive deeper into this in a second and then you have uh you know other ones for the animation part right you have masterpiece motion which will allow you to prepare it for animation or you can plug it right into your you know unity or unreal engine um or if you want to keep it within you know vr you can use flip side to bori or quill for showing it uh you know quickly kind of illustrating what you want to do so here's a kind of quick feel free to take a screen snapshot if you want of

this um but it kind of we've kind of broken down into what each app is can do now the ones that you see this 3d type there's a drawing and modeling you know the drawing is good for if you just want to do kind of quick sketches but the modeling is necessary to create solid geometry that's going to be used for your for your game and it shows kind of which app can do uh which feature beside it will also show what parts of the pipeline we can do you know uh there's many stages you know there's creating the concept the 3d model you got to clean up that mesh you've got a uv unwrap it texture it rig it so that you can animate it skin it so that it bends over the bones you know blend shapes you can do facial animations and things and then some asset animation and then in the scene animation you can either do that in vr or pop that into unity unreal and finish it there so talking a little bit about the vr space where you know we've been seeing

exponential increases in headsets uh the statements where vr's dying are completely ridiculous if you look at the steam data it is on an exponential growth and idc is one of the most respected market research out there uh they're showing uh estimating 86 million headsets by 2023 so uh this isn't even the highest estimate these are sort of the middle range uh you know very reasonable estimates then you got the backing of you know people like mark zuckerberg who who's you know invested billions of dollars into this and is doing everything his goal is to put a billion people into virtual reality and there's just a few of the companies that are supporting this underneath as well so right now there is a revolution happening here there's an amazing thing where you you know there's now an easy and quick way to create 3d content and this is leading to you know the democratization of 3d content where

there's today there's just this point one percentage of people of creatives can also do 3d modeling you know this opens up the door for the other 99.9 of creatives to create 3d content um so once again i'm john gunning the ceo of masterpiece vr you're welcome to reach out if you need anything and uh you know thank you everybody for listening john uh it was a great talk and i'm glad to have you on at this time because it's actually a perfect opportunity for me to kind of dig deep into not only masterpiece vr but also uh talking more in depth about you know the landscape of vr itself because you are the most expert person i've had on uh because you guys are constantly looking at this space and even with the previous guests and who we've talked to in our round table discussions it's only been speculative because we're we're only looking at it from a game developer but still outside that circle

um and i i think what your your last few slides and and everything that you've been talking about have illustrated that the vr space is growing and uh finally people are realizing the potential and uh how getting excited right and a lot of that is just a lot of what these other tech companies are kind of driving forward with and and making sure that it becomes accessible and a lot of that i i wonder how much of that is attributed to the quest just finally getting rid of like those 10 cameras set up know what there's there's so many key pieces the quest is is selling like hotcakes you know um people love the quest and it's great because it's just reducing friction right just as you said it's getting rid of those cameras which is keeping you don't need any external hardware and really that's happening every year you know we're removing roadblocks that are making it easier and easier for people

to just pop in and start experiencing it so that's one of the key things but the truth is actually um that for the last about six months most of the vr headsets have been sold out in most places um it's it's and if you look at the steam data uh we've got something like you know just over the last few months we've had something like double the the number of active monthly active users at the same time this is useful for the developers in hearing at this conference over the last year the demand for vr devs has increased 1400 percent over the year before fourteen hundred percent for you guys out there who are vr devs um other factors is half-life alex wow that's mind-blowing i don't know if you've had a chance to try it yet especially with the index controllers

uh it is you know there's a reason why it's uh metacritic's top game of the year so far and one of the top 20 games of all time it is uh it is the truly the first you know true vr first triple a game that has ever been made yeah i think this is just a mention of you yeah yeah like what one of the long running joke between me and we have a frequent guest on uh named ray is that he's a huge proponent of like have you heard of beat saber right i was like come on man beat saber is great but i come from playing triple a i work in triple a i want to see a triple a quality game and i i'm with you with half-life alex i felt like it was a dawn of a new era for vr uh because game developers i think initially the hardcore it's even the word hardcore is hard to define nowadays it's like what does

harcourt mean but i i feel like at least my hardcore audience that i grew up with the people that love looking at graphical fidelity upgrades and playing the latest and greatest tech saw half-life alex as a blossoming of a new market of finally people are going to take this seriously and see the the realities of the outcome of use using virtual reality right and and i'm sure uh it sounds like you and your team are super excited because it's finally hitting that point where i felt like when the first oculus was announced through kickstarter that we've reached that stage where we're like okay now i can see myself living in this world and and and and be embraced by it fully yeah oh yeah this is you know that was an exciting time with the kickstarter and then there was uh you know a couple years after that the

hype cycle continued to go and it was just you know presented in a way to to appear it was the wow factor that got it but it wasn't at that point adding real value uh outside of the just the oh my god wow i'm in another universe it needs to add real value after that wow wears off and it's taken this many years and it's finally there there are games that are are amazing triple a game you know we talked about uh half-life alex um and you know the the mod kits have just been coming out and they're going to be continuing to add to so all these new games are going to explode from that one game at the same time even outside of the game space uh for you know well like i'm doing for example with creating their apps to support gaming um you know we've been working there's been uh put 70 developer years so far of work on on this app and uh it's taken that long just to crack the surface so you know we've been competing the

reality is we've been competing against billion dollar companies where the bars set so high for non-vr apps and games uh but would finally reach that we're finally adding true value today and uh you know that's the reason why even like apple and all these companies are starting to make headsets in the background um and what's really exciting actually is with uh 5g so you know what the what they're making in the background here i can't give names to this because we're you know we've got a lot of ndas here but the part i can tell you is that um there's headsets being built that are 5g enabled they will have a cable the phone doesn't plug into it right the phone sorry the phone the phone doesn't go on the headset it just plugs in and it then basically you just have the screen and the sensors on the headset it's lightweight it's really cheap to make the compute happens some of it happens

on the phone and the rest happens over 5g on cloud compute on the edge on gpu compute on the edge and that's that's crazy because then you can have a lightweight headset cheap headset low friction that can do rendering that your pc could never do yeah that's huge uh cloud computing cloud gaming over the last i would say even just a year have made major jumps i think initially when the last xbox kind of scared a lot of people saying that it always has to be plugged in the world wasn't ready right but uh but now more than ever people are embracing cloud tech um having that availability to move across different devices freely and openly and not be bogged down by the high prices of entry of a lot of these headsets and what you're saying

sounds like a another step towards a like hey man let's just make these super cheap and let's just have people put glasses on essentially that doesn't cost much for them to to kind of embrace because a lot of that a lot of the barriers i felt like before was just getting people to wear the the headsets right because once they put the headset on everyone gets it no one's questioning the technology after they play a demo especially if we put them on half off alex is like i get it right um and it's always just that you know first it was the the quartered pc element of it and then uh you know having the the phone explode on your face uh potentially and then we move past that removing all the cameras and then finally having like this very lightweight quest and then now you're saying well you have your phone anyways just having your pocket just plug it in and just power this very lightweight cardboard box uh not cardboard but like something you

know as not as cheap but like the idea of it being very accessible uh it sounds very very uh awesome and i always look at pioneers such as yourself and and like what valve is doing right when i valve is like a sleeping dragon right they they rarely do anything outside of you know their cash cow of steam and dota and all these counter-striking you know successful formulas that they've played with for years and then finally they're they announced their own headset they're they're dedicating all their future games to vr right that's when the game industry has to take attention because like all right something's going on with the space that they know about and what you guys are doing know about because um it it's completely true like um and i'll lead into a question i won't ramble too on so my question is this so yesterday actually uh we we had a zach rich on and it was a very interesting conversation to kind of cap

off day two where he kind of uh dropped some knowledge bombs more about the user generated space right we're talking about roblox minecraft and i feel like there's a lot of similarities to what you guys are doing where we're just removing the barriers for a lot of interested potential game developers and going through school myself i know there's like a huge influx of people interested in this space but because of the tools in application and the stress that comes with it a lot of people don't make it to the end right uh to actually gain development right so this is something i think what you and your company is echoing is like hey let's remove all that problem because user generated space is a lot of those people who want to be game devs who are doing game dev but without having to learn like the traditional tools of even unity unreal just skipping that completely and just making something from dreams or or these more accessible uh

programs and you're talking more about more vr being that entry way for a lot of people uh absolutely so you know vr just makes it it's it's that it's the interface problem that i was talking to at the beginning um you know when there's a mismatch it just makes it hard it's like using an inch sketch to draw a picture well that's the situation we're in with 3d modeling right if you can natively just interact with it then if everything becomes easier whether using a vr headset or actually there's some really amazing ar headsets that are just a couple years out from being into production that you know that are incredible like you know the truth is that people you know think ar is big with their phone no ar on the phone is the the reason that apple the reason that google are getting everybody into this space is because they're building headsets it's a fact that they're building headsets

and uh you know once you have you know a bazillion developers who understand this technology and then you have the headset who which is lightweight you know connects to the cloud it's stylish because they're made by um you know some of these design companies i think i think actually uh the facebook one when i heard i can't remember if it was luxxotica or you know one of these other sunglass companies uh possibly the ones that do great band uh they're anyways they're designing anyways the rumors are that they're designing the the headset so it looks great you know you look good while you're doing it it's cheap and it's powerful it's a no-brainer at that point yeah and you know to add to all this machine learning is just doing amazing things if you look what it's doing in the 2d world um it you could literally just take your pen and draw across the screen and go

trees road you know house and it will automatically adapt everything in the scene and create those as if it's realistic well we're just a couple years off from doing that in 3d but that's where we're headed you know right now we use deep learning already to automate a lot of these complicated functions uh in our software but you know in a few years from now we're gonna be generating content from scratch in uh with machine learning yeah a lot of what you're saying is is definitely what i'm seeing in the uh the underbelly of game development right so machine learning deep ai uh especially procedural um procedural world building is because i come from a bathroom environment art and um games are are growing right as i mean with unreal engine 5 and all these expectations the team isn't really growing that much more and so the only way to achieve that

fidelity is through procedural or machine learning uh relying on the computer to kind of assist with the world building to make it accessible to game developers to actually make and uh kind of like what you're talking about um i there was a company like procedural ai or i forgot the name but um you know it was a bunch of ex developers from naughty dog who who pretty much had this um like kind of like a surrey service uh that that helps design a bedroom right the idea is to like hey uh here's a bunch of references from the 80s make me a 80s like bedroom for a 10 year old kid right but it's assets provided into the machine and then it's able to arrange around and this is very early tech but when i saw that i was like oh okay i'm not completely fearful of like these guys are going to replace my job but it's more like

this is exciting because this is where it's going to be assisting me to um display my creativity right and it's the only way to do it because people are going to expect more the gamers the publishers anybody that's giving you money is expecting your team to deliver this fantastical world with your very limited amount of teams so the only way that actually give into that is using tools like like what you guys are doing for for a lot of creators out there like masterpiece vr to kind of speed up the flow uh and not necessarily compound more people and jump up the problem right that's what game developers our studios like to do they just throw people at it to make it go faster but there's a breaking point as we uh we all know in in our experience you're totally right with that i mean you know we're not replacing the jobs we're just empowering them to do more

right and you know you're always going to need people that are creative and that have the mind and can see the object you know it's a natural progress the tools get you know better over time and i'm gonna be honest with you even the downsides of our software you know there's reasons there's certain reasons why you shouldn't even use our software like let's say you need to to do something like super detailed and with you know pixar quality or like super detailed aaa quality and result you know our product is not great for doing that end result yet because it still needs to mature enough but i can't i i can't name the name here but there are triple a companies uh with you know with some aaa gaming content that is coming out where the uh the concept art and the original 3d models in the concept team are made with our software so you know if you're making like an indie game you can make it from start to finish with our software today and

especially oh wait till a month from now for a big update coming out it's a game changer update uh some really exciting stuff that's going to allow you to do the you know the full pipeline for an indie game inside of here but even if you're out there and you're coming from a triple-a studio and you know you're earlier in the pipeline uh well our software's super useful even for that so i have actually a question here and i want to remind everybody if you want to talk to john directly filter through me right somewhat indirectly go ahead and ask in the social channels as an aspiring vr dev this is from green gift what would your be recommended steps to get food into the door nowadays so this is kind of like jumping off of what you mentioned before there's an increase of need for vr developers how do you recommend these vr developers um where should they look where should they

start applying and applying their skills to i mean that's that's a broad question so i'll have to make some assumptions in that there's you know it depends if you're making your own studio or if you want to be hired from an existing studio um is there a follow up with that which restriction it is this is very let's just go with the maybe an existing studio for now until he asks again okay yeah if you're if you're in an existing studio then um you know then yeah i i would uh just continue to develop your skills in that area and you know meet as many people as you can um you know don't forget the power of networking you know a lot of jobs come about where people don't even get posts you just meet the right people and you showcase their skills um and and i can't speak for every studio but i can tell you what i i look for is i like to see that you're not just okay you've done more than just your you know your gaming degree or something

small inside i want to see that you have a passion for it i want to see that you're willing to put those those hours into just really making it something great so so i also look for you know having projects on the side that you're working on outside of your you know your school or your main stuff get yourself a portfolio something that you can showcase you know and and it doesn't have to be like massive one but if you can show like a few pieces that are super polished um you know that's that's really exciting to me uh and that's those are the kind of qualities that i'm looking for is that you know that skill and also that passion um other things now also i i can't comment on whether or not how much these games are caring about but i can tell you it's going to greatly improve your quality as a programmer one of the big problems is a lot of these gaming schools don't actually teach really good programming skills uh i hate to say that but like it's the truth um i've never met someone that came out of school that knew how to write scalable code

so you know learn what a code smell is learn your programming patterns learn um you know about dependency injection and ways that you can write code that's scalable because if you know sometimes companies will give an assignment right they may ask you to to do certain tasks and you can you may go home and you want to work on it well they might look at you know the quality of what you've done you might look at your code quality too so i guess to sum it up there i'd say you know showcase some great stuff if you can do some great computer graphics stuff it seems like from in my experience you know those are very valuable skills um and you know get something to showcase learn how to code properly not just the crap that some of your teachers told you um and um and then go out there and network meet people as many people as you can in the industry and learn from them and i say that would be your best bet guess for the follow-up for me

personally if you are a vr developer uh what companies or what industry should i be looking at right now to to apply for jobs uh by industry do you mean like gaming or other like well gaming is the biggest right game is the biggest oh yeah gaming is the biggest um the right now that the the headset manufacturers they're they're looking all over the place but they they know that like the gamers have the best usually some of the best pcs right so there's a big opportunity there for for gaming the majority of the apps still made are our games uh and some of the highest grossing apps right now are are still games so uh the great thing is that your your game development skills are useful in anything relating to to vr because night like 95 plus more than that more than 95

of all vr apps are built off of unity or unreal to some level um so i'd say your best bet would be you know look for a gaming company in your area or even remote that's you don't need someone with your skills um but the great thing is that if you want to decide to do something outside of gaming your game development skills are are really useful and i want to tell you uh something else exciting this is a little bit outside the question but um it's my personal belief that uh union and unreal are the next generation of not just gaming engines but our of per computer programming we're all going into a digital visual world so i really think that your your skills there are just going to be you know even outside of gaming give it you know five to ten years and they're gonna be needed everywhere yeah i i definitely sign off on that i'm seeing a lot of these enterprise companies already looking at unreal developers unity developers to kind of help develop

their product and not just programming but every discipline who who have game knowledge especially in those two ecosystem uh are very valuable uh for sure uh this is a question from nightwolf uh can masterpiece vr work with ar for those that do not have a vr headset uh so right now there's there's sort of only two ways to do ar there's the phone based one and there is the ar headsets now the hey our headsets are really in a primitive state right now and they're not really good for um you know direct interaction with the world like you could do things like this and stuff like that but it doesn't have the fidelity to create so you can't use a an ar headset to do it and you also can't use an ar phone yet to do it because you do need that that touch that high precision touch interaction so you you'll need a vr headset today to

use the software um in a few years you'll be able to use an ar headset but also just to know later this year well this is not public yet but i'll let you guys know we're also going to be building a non-vr version version later this year now it's a sort of graceful degradation of capability you've got the best power if you've got a headset but uh i can't say that as i said before the price is going down a lot and it'll get easier and easier to get one of those definitely um it's actually a follow-up question for me you know you were mentioning about ar and how um the the phone is kind of being used as a trojan horse to kind of get developers feet wet in learning that tech and and being used to developing for that tech but they are building ar headsets a lot of these tech companies i mean we saw some of it with microsoft and uh magic leap

but at least the microsoft said they're they're militarizing it within the army and but we know for a fact the other tech companies are are definitely seeing a future with ar and uh in a lot of ways i feel like ar is like the the the entryway for a lot of people into this space yeah a lot a lot more natural um and it's a crazy amount of applications to kind of be a medium or a median between me and interact in the world so like an extra layer right um with that being said i want to hear your take about if you can educate us more about the ar world as well because it's something that's been kind of kind of quiet versus vr uh and i i think if anything they're they're just very they're very much just developing behind the scenes but any inside on that would be great well

so how to focus on this this is a lot so there's levels of development there's a technical amount of uh complexity that's required to do ar now phone ar is one thing but i'm talking when i say talking about ar i'm saying you know that's just a gateway to the headset ar which some people call mr mixed reality so as you said you saw you know magic leap uh microsoft but you know the bigger one some big ones in behind the scene um is google they're they're building one as well uh apple they're building one as well there's some other ones that i can't speak about because they're under nda uh i'm allowed to say those ones because i happen to know about some things but it's also public um but there are other head companies as well making high quality headsets in this space but um but there's a delay between it and and i

you know to avoid going to the the detailed complexity of like uh you know basically motion capture technology and basically what they have to do is like an advanced version of something called slam it's where you do a type of uh complex filtering where you you understand basically you simultaneously have to solve the equation of where the environment is based off of where the headset is and where the headset is based off the environment so it's this this statistical you know uh equations and and often it includes a machine learning where it it does this really complex process to be able to get it and that's where the the um you know the quest and and these things have started to do pretty well but you know you need to keep doing this better and better um and you need to have it in lighter lighter ways uh to get the for the ar headset that's been a challenge and now

that that's starting to get better um there's still other huge challenges like uh that the screens right you know the there was one um uh a few years there's been some headsets where you know it basically has like a mirror on top and you have a screen and it projects it onto onto the glass and uses a like 100 year old technology called pepper's ghost but that's really bulky and it's not scalable instead some of the better headsets like the hololens and stuff they use like wave glock guides but there's huge problems in extending the field of view to that um so there's a number of technical challenges to get it so we're a couple years off from getting to ar but the way i kind of see it is we're going to have sort of three stages first because vr is a little bit easier to to build uh vr is going to be the bigger one right then once the ar headsets ar is going to be the bigger one because now they're going to look sleek and you can

walk around anywhere with them and then so some people think that ar is the bigger one but i actually disagree i say it depends on the time frame i i truly believe that in the next stage after that in the long run you know we're talking we might be one or two decades away from that that vr will eventually be even bigger because you know once the virtual world gets better in every way than the real world you know why the hell would you be in the real world you know like and then there's always going to be some people that are that are like nah man i don't like that i like the real world you know cool that's no problem but then what about the next generation what about the kids who grew up in that they don't already have an affinity to any world they're going to pick whichever world's better so i think vr is bigger now ar is going to be bigger in a few years and then give it a you know one to two decades vr is going to be the biggest of them all i definitely uh sign off on that message uh there's a

reason why the matrix is in vr not not hey so uh i want to thank you john uh we are at that hour mark and i want to thank you for coming on and sponsoring for the event i want to it actually is a great time to kind of remind everyone to we are raffling off copies for masterpiece vr to go ahead and go to gtox.nb2 to see how to enter people are already thinking and tweeting at masterpiece vr throughout the last three days talking about which their favorite presenter is and what the presentation means to them so go ahead and do that but before uh i send you off i'm gonna hand the mic over to you to kind of give the shout out give attention to uh tell people how to connect to you after uh g ducks oh thank you for you know having me out today i've got my information up on the up on the screen in the bottom left you can uh you can follow us we've got our website masterpiecevr.com uh twitter and

insta at masterpr facebook at facebook slash masterpiecevr you can also reach me if you need something at jln.gagne masterpiecevr.com now just like to say one more thing to those those license we're giving out um just for any clarity that's not the original consumer product masterpiece vr that's uh the subscription you know the the better the professional product masterpiece studios that would be giving license out for that um so uh and as i mentioned before you know it's great right now but in one month from now check it out again then on top of that and you're really gonna be impressed by uh you know all the capability that it has well thanks a lot so once again thanks everybody yeah thanks for being uh having an honest conversation talking to to a lot of developers out there who are looking to start out and and push through and and become a success man it was really

enlightening to kind of hear uh your story and how masterpiece vr kind of came about and it's a story that i want to amplify as much as possible so thank you for coming on well thank you i'd like to say simply i didn't scare anybody with that you know maybe didn't put enough emphasis on how effing rewarding it is so the bigger the challenge the more rewarding and this is the the single uh best decision and the most rewarding thing i've ever done so i encourage anybody else who has any ambitions to do anything in their space to do the same well thank you again man and uh i'll be sure to connect after this perfect take care take care all righty then uh so before i to bring on my next presenter i i do want to introduce a a

clip um unchained report this is another roundtable discussion and this is actually a perfect time to kind of talk about this because uh as mentioned you know vr er is is is coming and ps5 the next gen casa of xbox is coming uh cloud gaming uh has been making the rounds uh especially the last six months with xbox with playstation with stadia there was so much cloud gaming services out there for everyone to try and more than ever during this pandemic during during these trying times a lot of people are looking for escapes that don't really have the best and craziest rig or the latest and greatest consoles so cloud gaming of anything is becoming our future to a lot more gamers and it's a subject that i think everybody should at least made aware about and start discussing within your own group so here's a clip

from a roundtable discussion about i would say a couple months ago so enjoy yeah well the main summary was they showed a bunch of indie games that are coming to stadia um they announced uh what are they events ea um the last star wars game fallen order jedi fallen order or whatever um that is available this will be available in savior now um and what else pubg pubg is going to be outstanding those are those are kind of the big the big takeaways fifa fifa maddener um and they and then they showed off a bunch of indie indie stuff um you know more variety kids co-op multiplayer games um so yeah like you know they're they're they're swinging for the fences right um i oh i can't i think that's uh i think i'd be a little bit too strong uh it's not exactly strange for defenses because like a lot of those games some kind of like i don't know um but but uh like about two i'm not too

excited i'm not too excited about a lot of these games but but i think they're they're trying to beef up the the catalog right trying to be forgetting this is where i feel it was a mistake i mean this guy's face right here i think i've made fun of this guy enough i've seen this guy's face at every single console right we're talking about initially sony he had a weird statement microsoft which was and now he's over i'm not gonna i'm not gonna hate on this guy like like this that's og og shipping consoles over many many years right so you know but bro there is about being the front man of a a competing product that just devalues the product right you can't be at tesla and say tesla is the best car in the world and then next week i see you over at bmw saying no this is the best car in the world it just it just leaves a bad

taste of consumers how can i trust somebody sometimes things happen man then you gotta keep it moving right well that's why nintendo didn't have them because they understand good pr [Laughter] but like definitely like give it give it away give it away two months two months to stay be a pro you know so you get a bunch of free games with stadium pro and and then they made a bunch of announcements you know yeah do maternal yeah yeah sure i got a taste of the two months stadium right it popped up in everyone's email i think it was a smart marketing decision for sure to at least have people try i logged on for about two minutes i looked at their catalog and then i immediately unsubscribed yeah yeah dude no i said it already with magic leap i'll say it again like you know content salesman and and they have some stale content on there they have stuff that like is old

and people have already played and like you're not gonna get a whole lot of people attracted um they are working on first party brand new stuff and when that stuff hits like maybe it'll be successful right but right now it's like it's a waste it's a wasteland of old games that you've played already you know that's like that's what that's the number one thing but that's why they're doing this though to say hey we may have the old games that you've played already but if you haven't played these games um you know and you don't want to install them and you don't want to download them um you're all good you know octopath traveler is a pretty good game you know what i mean so why not play it and i think too like um their whole founder's edition thing was kind of holding it back um but now it's just you could play it in a web browser um it's free to to try it out right so like there's no harm in trying it out right hey yeah except you know there's so many dreams that you should be playing right now and not waste your time on

[Music] also saying it's probably not for us right it's not really for us right like but who is it for yeah that's a good question that's a good question you know like i can't really say who maybe people that can't afford or don't want to buy a super expensive console uh well here you go you could play you could play on stadia you don't need to buy the console right um [Music] i just wonder what like for me like the proper rollout would have been kind of like a closed beta right just to get people testing until the first party content was ready to go right i don't understand why they had such a lackluster launch knowingly so and then have basically vacant months of not producing content for their uh you know

they're they're number one fans right it's just underserving everybody and well the two big they're two big games right were um were uh odyssey and uh destiny right uh but if you're a hardcore player you've already played these games right but for folks that like i said they haven't and you didn't buy a console right like you could play on stadia why not right um it's it's yeah it's i don't understand it i don't understand i don't understand how it's gonna be successful but i think i think it has to be successful with um this looks so much like fortnite anyway um but uh it can be successful um you know with a really standout first party title that really leverages the cloud based machines leverages youtube leverages all of the

cool features and says this is why you have stadia right right now none of this is saying this is why you guys stayed here you could play this on a bunch of other systems right and they're announcing some exclusive very announces of exclusive games right that are going to be first first on stadium so they're going to release first on stadium and then probably be everywhere else later um so that's cool they're trying to lock down some exclusives right but you know it's their indie titles are like you know very fun games to play you can play with your friends play it on the couch or whatever but you know um it isn't destiny right or is it it isn't a game of the destiny caliber right yeah it's definitely what they can afford right now for sure yeah they're trying they're trying to they're going for it so like yeah i would say this right um in this time where you got sony microsoft and

nintendo like this is if anything the best fourth console uh that you should be competing the only thing with this is kind of relevant to what we were talking about with how magic lee pat this hype at the beginning right and that eventually died down we're talking about three to five years before that first party game from the assassin's creed team uh is producing it's gonna be out maybe right does this have enough legs until then uh can they afford basically operating at a loss until then is google cool with that i think well it's google shows yeah is google cool with it it's the real question um i know google google can spend the money yeah sure yeah um but like yeah they have to be really devoted to this right and yeah only time will tell with that right uh i have no idea

what i'm seeing right now is it's just without sound in context i am so bored what is he doing well this is uh yeah i think this was like testimonial testimonials from streamers and players saying how awesome it is all right um that's that's what that is it clearly isn't you gotta get some random ass gamers that isn't ready for camera time right interlaced with boring gameplay video as if that was your cutaway shot and your cutaway option i would say almost it is what i'm seeing here is i'm seeing a lot of rdd right and a platform that you want to reach a bunch of different people you have to bring the priority right you have to bring many different experiences all right same thing with the like you know xbox game password has a lot of different experiences and different types of caliber and quality of games you got to do that you got to do that on

these five farms like for real for real you know um i think it's at the end of this video where they show the pubg stuff um all right let's go let's go pubg so what's the big announcement with webg it's free completely yeah yeah it's available now it's available now you can start playing right because it's so that's a big deal a lot of pubg players out there they're definitely getting a lot of mileage out of that game already so they don't get and the thing is it's it says free with stadium pro and they're giving you two months of stadio pro right so you can play it for free for two months right so hey yeah man don't play all these other battle royales that are free play this one on google stadium she's the is the granddaddy right it's uh i guess whenever i look at this stuff i'm just so [Music]

i get it i mean it's good to have a fourth player in the foray of things google is a major player i just don't understand why they launched this way they could have done closed beta and we wouldn't be critiquing it as much it would have been just fine they would have had the same amount of paying customers you know the hardcores and it would have been forgivable if they weren't updating every month on their stuff but it's very weird that they launched without a key first party game i don't know if they thought they needed the launch like i wonder if they thought they just needed to launch before xbox one series x and ps5 right um like these need to get out there before the new console cycle sucked all the air out of the room all right i i mean i don't know man if they're stadia they're all about the cloud like who cares if it's a console well that's something the biggest thing that i said

yeah yeah no go ahead but um i was just saying that's one of the biggest advantages is that it's in the cloud right because then you can upgrade the hardware whenever you want and they can just get faster so why why try to be a ps5 when you're gonna be a ps 5.5 at any second right or any minute i don't understand that yeah but the biggest the biggest draw for me when they showed that trailer was the youtube future the ability to kind of jump in like that's huge that's a huge future not only are they attacking twitch but like all the consoles at once they should have just worked on that and have a division like game ready and just launch with it they would have had a better success than what they were doing now but you becoming a joke but you also but you also know that like it's hard to make those happy games like completely unique experience on some new experimental hardware um i'm sure like when

the when the kits were working a lot of those features weren't even working yet right those are promise features but that weren't quite working yet weren't quite ready for prime time we're quite ready to scale out to all the players and so they're kind of doing a gradual release um i do think the baron wasteland that is the content offering is is pretty it's like bad it's really bad um but uh but yeah like i don't know how you launch it unless you were working on it working on the games three years before the launch rate you know what i mean and we're brand new like when it comes to making video games like google's brand new who doesn't know how to do this right so um so that's why it's taking longer yeah i mean the only lingering hope that i have is because they have a lot of your old co-workers over there some key players um from they've got somebody yeah they've got some folks they've got some folks

i mean they can't just lay all those people off at once i'm anxious to see what games come out like the the flagship first party games like what what actually comes out i'm super hyped to see what happens right and now you know it's small plus small plug too like you know you know there's the google what is it stadium makers program with with unity of course so so folks can make stadia games with unity right so yeah you know you know how it is [Music] to live off of you can reach once you can reach every platform right where they can publish those games yeah no and i'm also curious to see what happens with like you know project x cloud for microsoft and sure and whatever

whatever somebody said so do you see that you know we'll spend too much on this topic but do you see the x cloud what sony is doing threatening what stadia is doing like stealing their steam and or do you think they can still coexist because state is so different now i think it depends on the business model and it depends on the games right you you know um from day one when project xcloud is like out of beta or whatever and you have your xbox series x or whatever um those first party microsoft titles are going to be on that thing that's right you know you know your game pass you know your game pass you probably have game pass and pay extra five dollars and then all of a sudden now you have their all your game pass on next cloud like you know it's going to be something like that and and if it's exactly what if it's yeah and if it's that it's gonna be a problem right the extreme it's already a

problem dude right i've seen the games that they are beta testing right now it's way better than what because you're talking about the xbox library right and sony has the same ammunition they have the sony library day one that's hundreds of awesome games greatest hits content is king always always so i don't see my own opinion is i don't i don't see how stadia can can do anything i mean but fall back on youtube flagship first party games right but they're not going to have hundreds or species but microsoft doesn't have hundreds either microsoft has a solid five right but uh right but sony bro sony every every 35 years stadia can have

maybe 0.5 awesome game right like how are they going to beat any of these systems in the long run it's impossible how is it going to work but also like i said right um does it need to win right does it need like define define what is the success right like is it you know what i mean right like oh it has i'll just find i'll just find google's google maps google the search engine all right these are wins uh yeah that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying that's why i'm so worried for your friends in their mansion right now shaking in their boots over at the studio camp

they know the outcome has to be better than just good it has to be the best console ever

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[Music] hey everybody welcome back uh the next presenter i'm gonna have on is a dear friend been a while and we always like to check in uh with him his name is jeff spoonhauer from resonator and he will be demoing their game a new the distant light

how are you doing jeff by now i'm going to pipe you in let's do a mic check whoa not hearing your audio just yet we do see your face though what is going on uh while we get that going uh i want you guys to go ahead and uh go to gdux.me uh to talk and to uh hang out and connect while we get this going so give me a sec guys while i work this little little issue here one sec all right there we go perfect i hear you

oh my god oh wait for some reason i just i heard you and now you're gone try it again oh maybe because it was whatever you did let's just redo that yeah okay so i hear you okay okay what is going on well one sec guys so i hear you but the the listeners and viewers can't hear you so let me kind of get that get that going for you guys on discord one sec guys

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[Music] hmm [Music] all right you can hear me right so i can still hear you let's just try this out i can hear you all right let's uh let's i want to check them yes i can hear you okay cool i can see you i believe let me just check the channels here to make sure that there's no weird echo going on that'll be horrific let me check these guys let me know if you guys are watching right now um if everything's sounding right

let me check the moderator this is part of the g ducks fun right here yeah technology okay everyone says that we're good all right all right i see it i see you i hear you the only thing is i can't figure out why the game audio is not going through so uh the live streamers of anything we're just gonna have to settle with the lovely voices of ours to narrate through and we're gonna fix it in post because i believe you're gonna record that in the background and if anything we'll do a cleaner recording uh after the fact of of the gameplay so um i believe at this point you're just getting things set up and uh jeff uh if i haven't given enough introduction and i haven't uh i i i i i share a special kinship with you because i i started my career at 2k and you you're in the industry way longer than i

have but i way back then i believe i told this story many times you know when i saw you and saw what you could do which was everything i looked at you and i look at myself like i didn't know those people exist where they can just do the pipeline from beginning to end and having no input from myself or any other people they can really kill it right and of course we know the resonated team is is uh is made up of a group of two or three people right besides you uh yeah two person myself and my dev partner steve copeland yeah that's an insane small team so uh i always root and uh it actually is perfect timing because we started podcasts right around when you we started development of a new and we're we're at that point where you guys are having exciting news and i'll let you kind of take the the the field here uh to tell more people about the game and what your team is about before we get started yeah sure um so yeah i'm jeff spoonhauer um thanks for having me again brandon um

working on a an indie action exploration game um people like to call them metroidvanias called the new the distant light um i guess while i'm talking i'll just let the demo go into it what we call in the biz the attract mode uh which is a bunch of video footage to attract people to look at this look at their screens um but yeah i knew the distant light um been working on this game with my partner steve copeland for um believe it or not it's coming up on six years uh in this coming july um so we've been working on it it's been a full-time job which is pretty crazy um but uh we're really excited about the game and we are amazingly enough staying motivated after such a long um development cycle um uh the game is sort of like the premise of the game i guess you could say is um something catastrophic has happened on earth and you are a baby and you're

launched on a spaceship from earth into the far reaches of space to this weird um alien moon and you wake up to try and find out who you are why you're there and what happened to your co-pilot who on the mission who's gone missing um and that's sort of the setup for the game um and uh doing lots of fun things sort of with the tried and true metroidvania genre we have um as you can see in the footage here and you'll see in the demo all sorts of different movement types so in addition to what you usually get in a game like this which is you're running around on foot we've got like swimming and jet packing and wall climbing and we have all of these crazy vehicles like mechs and dune buggies and flying saucers and stuff so the game is huge um obviously it's been a a lot to to take on for a very small team um but we can talk a little bit more about that as we play through the demo

uh i'll just pause the game if you have questions or we can chat about what the experience of making this game has been like so yeah definitely yeah so this demo itself like i always like to kind of hear as we're seeing through it um how long specifically do you guys work on this part and is it is it a demo that's reflective of a part of the game like how smart did you guys go about creating this because it's one of the worries of creating demos because it takes away from making the main part of the game yeah so this demo has been sort of this long burn thing that we sort of um have been working on for a long time and we continually sort of add little things to it and update it and and fix bugs and stuff like that yeah because the demo i mean demos can take a crazy amount of time away from development and when you only have two people um i also want to mention we're working with an amazing compo freelance composer named will roger he's writing the music for the game but

yeah anytime you do a demo it just it just basically destroys your production schedule um uh but yeah so basically our demo was really hard to make because again we're doing like this is like a really huge open world non-linear game um but you have to create a demo that can be used at trade shows so we've gone to like gdc and pax and e3 and stuff like that so the game has to like you have to put together a slice of the game that can be played in like a 15 or 20 minute chunk of time by someone on a show floor but it also needs to be like a meteor experience so something that's more like 45 minutes or an hour for someone like a streamers because we send out our demo to streamers on like for uh twitch and youtube and stuff to get press for the game um so what we ended up the basically the compromise that we did with our demo is that the demo that i'm going to show you now that we're using for our game is linear because you can't if you want to

show off like a diverse number of locations in the game world and like enemies and vehicles and stuff you can't really do that effectively in a non-linear way in a short amount of time because you're going to confine the player to a tiny little piece of the world so what you're going to see in this demo is basically sort of like this linear romp where we're going to we tunnel the player through a variety of different content um if that makes sense but the actual shipping game is going to be like this big open world um non-linear thing that's fantastic man i'm not challenged let me sneak my face can i oh no i can't my headphones is restricting me but i'm always impressed by your output man like a decade ago when i was only starting to recognize your skill set uh and then you coming out and every part of this game is so it looks so polished man like um and you're the main artist of the on the

team right like um yeah what what extra what extra things besides what you've had already that you had to learn to kind of get this from from start to finish um if you want to boil it down to this demo like what what skill sets that you have to pick up what resources did you use to kind of be the other half uh to to deliver yeah well thank you for saying that it looks polished i mean we've that's the thing is this we've just taken a six years you know so that doesn't come like quickly that's the thing and it's just really interesting you say well it looks polished you know it it takes a crazy amount of time and effort to make um a polished game you know uh and that's a decision as a developer that you have to make it's like well we're going to maybe make a smaller game that's less ambitious visually or with gameplay or we're going to make something that's blown out and we don't even know how long it's going to take us right so that's always a difficult decision to make but as far as like

um skills to get to the point where like i can take on basically all of the creative aspects of the game while my partner does all the engineering and game direction and programming and stuff i mean i started working in games in 2002 um as an animator at ea so basically my career track was like i started as an animator um went worked at volition on the saints row game as a cinematic artist worked at um worked it did like lots and lots many years of freelance animation and cinematic direction and animation and lighting and stuff for sony um uh worked at 2k for almost six years as a video edit editor and animator so basically like to answer your question in a short a short amount of time as possible like each step of my career i did something different and i stacked my skills and i kept building my skills from job to job so animation

stacked on the cinematics stacked on the you know lighting and rendering and editing for um cinematic design stacked on the video editing until all of that sort of came together to the point where i was like i think like i think i could probably put all that stuff together and build and like and put it all together in the production of an indie game if that makes sense so it was just a lot of time and a lot of hard work and a lot of like dedication you know yeah well you're telling me man and like the the the beginning problem with all our developers is that and i think your guys's approach is the best approach is the commitment to make the best product that you can no long no matter how long it takes because i feel like the no sacrifice approach is is um at the forefront it's great for the end product but at least it's uh more self-serving because i i i always feel like um when you look at a product and

you're building on it and you're like you know i can do much so much better but because i'm limited by time you know they're only seeing half my my my my flex right but like doing every step of the way 100 i feel like it's a lot better no and even if it takes longer it's definitely like the most painful route that you can take in making a game uh i mean it's like it's it's super super risky either way like if you decide to do what we've done which is to make this huge game that's super polished and it takes forever to make it's mentally and physically draining and it's also risky because um see t i have a full-time teaching gig at a university so i have a salary that you know allows me to live and to support my family which i would never be able to do this indie game thing without that um because i can't you know basically go offline for six or seven years without any money um but um like my partner steve was he

saved up responsibly his entire career as a aaa designer and engineer and has been working without salary for seven years on this game um i feel like engineers have so yeah i mean that's a huge huge financial risk for him but we're sort of like we feel like in order to stand out in like an incredibly oversaturated indie game market we right from the beginning said we're gonna make something that looks like super professional feels like it was made by a triple a studio and and that sort of drove the entire production and the decision making on our game and we knew that it was going to be really difficult and really hard and um and painful painful which it has been but we're also like we're getting close to the finish line and it's like super rewarding to see people reacting positively to it you know yeah i want to congratulate you guys on a couple fronts so it's like your your um your ability to kind of see things

through to have that ambitious uh goal and i don't know if part of what your your shift to to kind of focus on the game you kind of like uh created the situation so that you could finish the game uh taking on maybe the teaching job i wonder what came first was it teaching shop or the game or what what what what helped which goals yeah do you want me to play the demo while we chat yeah yeah go for it yeah let me go ahead and fire it up yeah we can i can just sort of address your questions as we go yeah um i mean for yeah the teaching definitely came first um so i got the i teach at the university of notre dame i'm a professor here um but yeah again like without my teaching oops getting some feedback uh without my teaching gig i wouldn't have been able to uh explore this project again just for like purely financial reasons um yeah so definitely got the teaching gig and then as a part of my

teaching and what i do academically this game is actually my creative research work uh for the university so yeah yeah that's huge man having a professor that actually is making a game that's looking this good and plays this well and getting good reception is a huge plus uh if i was a student in your classroom i'm just like a teacher is a doer ah that's a little different yeah yeah and that's really important to me personally with my students is as you know as someone who once was a college student and a grad student you're always frustrated some not all the time but sometimes with like your professors who have been out of the loop like out of the practice for so long you know um so i do pride myself on the fact that like everything i do in this game all of the like hundreds or thousands of things that go into the making of this game i i incorporate into my teaching in my classes to give to my students who want to some of them want to do this type of stuff yeah i mean that's incredible inside right there because as you're making the game the whole other side of business

and marketing relationship and strategies i i wonder how much do you go into that with uh with teaming and talking about it yeah um and that's the thing about making a game is you know actually working on the game is you know part of what you do as an indie game developer but a lot of there's a lot of bs that you have to deal with on the side with running a company and negotiating contracts and press and media outreach buildings your social media following like all of that it takes a tremendous amount of time so like if you're thinking about doing an indie game it's it's like uh it can become an all-consuming thing you know because so much of your time is you're just you're just your time is just completely absorbed seven days a week but yeah i mean sorry to answer your question um i don't really directly incorporate a lot of the non-development stuff into my classes um

as far as like the business stuff unless students are really interested in it and then you know we just have sort of side chats about it because just teaching the art and the design and stuff of all this takes up more than the amount of time i have allotted in my classes you know so this uh this demo that you're playing are we at the the beginning of the game uh yeah okay yeah so um what you just saw in the opening cinematic was the sort of you sort of get a hint of the of the destruct partial destruction of earth and you see yourself as a baby traveling through space and you wake up inside your ship so what you're seeing here is the actual inside of your spaceship that you traveled on and in it in and of itself this ship is a playable level or zone in the game that you have to unlock so there's all of these rooms that have different functionality within the ship you have to find figure out how to unlock these offline rooms in your ship

and you can sort of see these computer terminals hinted at there's functionality hidden in there so but uh we're going to go ahead and grab a weapon here you were mentioning metro venia being like a like a inspiration what other sources of inspiration uh at least in terms of art and design that you guys kind of drew from to kind of create a new yeah um so as far as like inspiration goes uh i mean for as the artist and the artist on the game [Music] the look and feel of the game i was i mean i probably am a little older than i might i may look but um i grew up watching sort of those classic sci-fi movies from the late 70s and early 80s like um the original alien movie um the last starfighter

some of the early like special effects sci-fi movies and they have like a certain look and feel to them from that era and i sort of wanted to capture capture that in this game in a way um so some of the technology um and the look and the feel of some of the architecture and stuff is sort of drawn from some of those uh um inspirational sources uh other sources of inspiration like for the look and the feel and the tone of the game the game is like the entire story is presented visually so there's no real text there's no dialogue so everything that you learn about the backstory and your character is all done purely through basically through live gameplay and environmental storytelling so some filmmakers like alfred hitchcock stanley kubrick uh we're definitely inspirational as far as the way they tell stories visually

um and then on the gameplay front oh i'm sorry gameplay front go ahead yeah on the gameplay front i mean steve is the game the game director steve copeland my partner um we knew that we wanted to make sort of a metroid style game so like gameplay inspirations come from the you know the core nintendo catalog like the metroid games zelda series and then games like more recently like hollow knight dark souls uh limbo just like emotionally tonally limbo yeah so those are some of the inspirations for the game you should be hearing me better now right i can hear you better i had my desk mic on so i was realizing oh man you must be hearing me from a distance so now it's not gonna be good yeah so um man it one the crazy thing is that you

you were able to kind of construct a situation to kind of finish the game to where it is right now but also found a partner just as committed as you are which is a double double lottery winning right there and uh for people who haven't been doing that before can you explain them like what that really means uh and how impactful that is to a project yeah i mean i feel incredibly blessed and lucky to have uh then connected to steve it was actually the story of us coming together was really pretty unusual um [Music] i'm gonna it's actually surprisingly hard to play an action game and talk and answer questions i know right actual like a dlc content for for future reference now you guys want to make it more it's all good man um so uh steve and i did not know each other we had never

met but we worked we both independently worked with a guy named tom happ and tom made an indie game called axiom verge he's actually working on the sequel now but uh steve worked with tom at um in a variety of studio positions i went to grad school with tom at rochester institute of technology and um weirdly enough after his first game axiom verge shipped steve and i almost at the exact same time independently contacted tom asking if he wanted to work on a game which was really really weird uh timing-wise and um tom basically said hey he introduced he put steve and i in touch and that's how we started working on this game together um so it was a very unusual sort of congruence of timing you know that happened but yeah steve basically quit his aaa career and wanted to go all in

on making an indie game and building an indie studio so we both had like the same goals at exactly the same time um and steve was is basically at the same point in his in his career um as i was i think you know he started working in games in around the year 2000 but he was like a high level senior level engineer and game designer and i was doing the exact opposite career track so our skills came together like really nicely and and what i realized now is an extremely rare uh you know combination of of two people that sort of had the same goals and uh experience yeah that's that's insane you guys weren't even friends before i became friends through the development of this that's that's even more of a rare situation it's like i've never met you before but let's uh get married and be committed for like the next six years it actually is like my wife is i always publicly thank my wife because without her we have three

kids i mean she does any crazy amount of work and has sacrificed a lot to allow me to make this thing happen but um yeah working with it's almost like i have um a wife and then another spouse as a game development partner so yeah there's a lot to have a lot to yeah so let's let's go with the uh as we're going through these puzzle elements right here let me throw you another challenge here so uh the original uh estimation of uh release versus now like it's a question i always like to ask um uh where you guys thought would the where the game would have finished versus uh six years in development like when did we think we were going to be done originally yep uh a long time ago yeah we never we never like it's funny because one the crazy thing about making about making games um

is that you don't really know how long it's going to take until you start working on it and building all of the many many pieces that have to go into it um if you know what i mean yeah but i i think i think our original estimates were probably maybe like three years um because that's as a studio developer typically like the longest project i ever worked on at a studio was maybe two and a half years and i felt like i was going to completely lose my mind spending that spending that much time on one game uh but what we realized as we continued to develop and build this game is that we just had so many ideas for the design of the world and the visuals and the story and the gameplay it sort of i don't know if i'd say it was feature creep but like the game just kept getting bigger and i think we were okay with that because we loved it so much and we really believed um

in what we were doing that we accepted the fact that it was gonna take a lot longer than we thought um if that makes sense yeah and i'm sure the feedback loop was uh pretty rewarding just to see something that you guys both created with the relatively small team and and seeing it yeah actually uh in in actual um fruition yeah and i'm sure by that time you guys were testing it a lot right a lot of feedback from those guys or friends and colleagues yeah i mean we've had the good fortune of getting um having been accepted into like a bunch of conferences and festivals like i mentioned uh we showed the game last year at pax east and gdc we've done a couple shows um one of them is a really great one called the mix the mix at e3 run by a really great guy named justin woodward um so we've shown the game publicly we went to actually uh comic con what else

uh we did the unity conference a couple years ago which was pretty sweet called unite um so those live shows were really really awesome to just get the game out there in front of people and just let them play you know get their reactions and feedback uh to what we were doing um and that was it was rewarding because you know if any of the people watching this that are making their own games know like 95 of the time making a game is you are you're just you're completely isolated you know you're working in isolation you're not getting any feedback and then you always question like what am i why am i doing this to myself um constantly doubting and full of fear and anxiety and so when you take it out publicly it's nice to get validation that what you're doing actually is working [Music] so how much of the um

i'm sure it was a collaborative process between you and your partner um the the story i feel like when i talk to a lot of any diffs it's a very personal one when it comes to applying it within the game uh what can you tell us about uh coming up with the theme and the backstory and what this character is doing to achieve the goals so the way that um the sort of like the relationship that steve and i had early on is steve steve basically said look i want to make like an open world like a non-linear metroid style game that was really the only high level direction that he gave me so he really said like you know he gave me total freedom uh to figure out like the story the backstory and like the characters and the look and the feel of the game you know

which was which was awesome um uh but so yeah like yeah i mean i just sort of thought like what what have i never seen in a game before what what type of story like would be really weird and different and unique um not only the story but just sort of like the visual style like what can we do to make ourselves unique and stand out so i just sort of went off and listened to lots of weird orchestral music um and uh a lot of progressive rock i like rush i'm a huge rush fan and um looked at a lot of surrealist artwork and that helped to inspire me um in the conceptualizing like the idea behind the game and the backstory and everything so that's huge yeah music plays a huge role and i'm sure when you guys

decided to uh invite someone into your party like the composer uh was it will what was his name again sorry do you hear me yep i got you okay what was the composer for you guys um our composer's name is will roger wilbert roger the second yeah okay um yeah he's he's great he's a he's a freelance composer um we we actually he's been working on our project since like 2015 on and off and it's actually funny because his career has really taken off and we sort of like to joke because like in the process of him writing the music for for this game he has scored a destiny game he has scored a call of duty game and he has scored mortal kombat 11. so like in between every aaa game he works on he