How to Go from Good to Great

[Music] thank you all for coming um there's a lot of people in here and i'm really nervous so thank you um all right so um i've been at riot games for several years now and we are the makers of league of legends our free to play multiplayer online battle arena that's not working no wait sorry here we go one second there we go all right we are a no free to play multiplayer battle online battle arena um and i can remember about five years ago when brian thompson first joined the team as an intern we put him on gatekeeper galio and when we saw his work on gatekeeper gallio this [ __ ] [ __ ] blew our minds this

was really good and it was better than anything that any of us had produced up until then um you know he was using colors in a way that was much more interesting than we had ever done before his shapes were more stylized and graphic there's actually some semblance of visual hierarchy where none existed before and it was communicating gameplay really well without detracting from the aesthetics it was amazing work and we all reacted really poorly to it we were all mid to senior level artist at the time and up until then we were all thinking you know we're doing pretty awesomely and here comes brian this intern who like blows our [ __ ] out of the water raises the bar completely and also has no ego about it doesn't even realize how amazing he is so you know we all started to feel kind of jealous of him and it made us question our own capabilities as artists we're like [ __ ] what are we even doing here um and so rather than recognize that we

had this gold mine to learn off of who could teach us and you know help us get better in our skills instead we distanced ourselves and we put up these walls we were trying to you know mask how fragile our little egos were and we kept to ourselves we kept trying to find ways to one-up each other this was the landscape of the team not because brian came in um because brian came in and was awesome it just exacerbated what was already there um so we were trying to find ways to to differentiate ourselves from each other you know prove to one another that we're better than everybody else and i was definitely guilty of this we had a you know small little side project spinning up and it was staffed with a superstar animator and a superstar producer both of which were really well known in the studio and they needed some vfx help and they reached out to me only because they happened to know somebody on the team and so i snatched that opportunity for myself immediately without doing the

right thing which would have been to you know understand the needs of the project and take it back to the team and you know figure out who would be the right resource for that project because it probably would have been brian you know you saw how amazing his work was in the last slide and it also would have been a really good opportunity for him as a junior artist by then to completely own his own project a great opportunity for him to learn but i took it away from him because i wasn't thinking about any of that i was just thinking about how this project was going to make me feel more special and above everybody else and that is how i felt and it you know continued to exacerbate that competitiveness and underlying animosity on the team another thing that we were really good at was we would blame failures on individuals rather than you know look at failures like their team failures so when we were working on lucian which by the way shipped like three years ago so this toxicity on the team persisted for two

years maybe more than that um when we were working on lucian you know we would have our regular feedback sessions but we had a very weak feedback culture so people weren't asking for like specific feedback and we didn't take the time to give actionable quality feedback to others and on top of which the artist who was working on lucian just had sort of like a standoffish vibe to him so you know we didn't try to break through it and he didn't ask for feedback we didn't give it to him eventually he ships lucian more eyes get on it and we realize that it's not hitting the quality bar and instead of saying like this was a team failure you know we all had eyes on it but we didn't do anything to help him give him the feedback help him grow instead we pointed the finger and said you know that's the artist that worked on lucian it's his fault not ours so this is only three stories um but we do have you know two years worth of stories that you know that are all of the same vein

and we had become one of the most unhealthy and least liked teams in the entire studio and working from the inside you know that toxicity and unhealthiness it was really difficult to work in every day was trying to get really hard to be a part of it so something needed to change and you know frankly i think each one of us had gotten to a point where we were ready for a change but even though we were ready for a change that change was still going to take a lot of time and hard work so at this time you know the tension on the team was really high toxicity and that inability to work well with it with each other was at its peak and that's when chris joins our team and coming from an outside perspective chris can immediately see just how toxic the team is but rather than first take time to build relationships with us so we could get to know him understand where he's coming from he immediately you know starts pulling us each aside and says this is the thing

you're [ __ ] off on this is the thing that you suck at that's what you need to change and you know we didn't know who he was we didn't understand what his intentions were um so it really rubbed us all the wrong way we were thinking like who the [ __ ] is this guy um so he immediately lost trust and rapport with each one of us so feeling at a loss he he turned to a mentor and this mentor recommended something called campfire campfire is something where everybody kind of sits around there's no real agenda for the meeting and the purpose is to just talk the goal being that by talking you start to get to know each other eventually build relationships maybe start to actually trust each other enough to air out your differences actually talk through your grievances and get out the other side better for it but the caveat being don't you dare try to attempt to do campfire unless you are ready to take in all the [ __ ] that someone might have to say about you and possibly die in that fire if

necessary so chris recommended that we do campfire and we all but gradually did it and the reason why we were so reluctant was because even though deep down we were ready for a change you know when we when we looked at everybody else in the room our perceptions of everybody was you know they're kind of egotistical they're difficult to work with i don't really like them so the last thing you know i wanted to do was sit in a room for an hour with these people but you know it's kind of the only option on the table so we did it and that first week that first meeting came along an hour passed nothing happened sat in silence super awkward so the next week happened and you know we tried it again so another hour passes sat in silence nothing happened super awkward and then the next week comes and finally somebody breaks ground and this person said i don't think that anybody in this room respects me

which is a really hard thing to say to a room full of people who you don't think respects you so that moment of vulnerability really snapped us out of it and we immediately started jumping in to explain to him how wrong he was and that we really did respect him but somebody else said you know the reason why i don't talk to you is because your work is so intimidating you make me feel like a shitty artist and so i just avoid you all together and one by one we each just started to word vomit on each other and reveal how we really felt and it turns out that the what we thought was a problem you know we originally thought that everybody was egotistical they're kind of full of themselves they're not very nice people it turns out that that wasn't the problem at all the real problem was that we were each dealing with so much insecurities and we didn't have the tools to understand how to navigate through those insecurities so the way in which we each reacted was by throwing up walls you know putting up this false sense of ego so that we can pretend like we have confidence when we're really just

masking how frail we are inside um you know and and to also try to feel like a peer amongst all these other artists who we massively respected and so it turns out that we were all dealing with a bunch of insecurities we were coming from the same place and so when we were finally able to find some common ground we could finally take a step forward which was a huge deal for us because we had never ever been able to find common ground before and who knew that we all suffer from the same problems and so you know at this point we're starting to build relationships with each other those relationships turn into trust and eventually we're actually feeling open to be vulnerable and share our weaknesses and craft with each other something that could have never happened in the past old culture and at this point in our history we're also trying to shift the style so where we were using photorealistic textures we were moving into hand-painted textures where we were you know our effects had a lot of high

detail we're moving into large graphic shapes and also emphasizing the importance of a visual hierarchy where before our effects you know the elements and our effects would be fighting against itself so for one of our artists troy who was you know original artist on the team and he originated the old style we were essentially asking him to take everything that he's ever known everything that he's ever done and just throw it out the window and try to do something that's completely out of his depth that's just so foreign to him which is a very scary proposition for any of us um and we actually did ask him to do this back in the old culture back when it was still toxic and you know a scary environment where we could you know be vulnerable and when we asked him then he completely rejected the idea and he was really defensive about his work but now that we had started started to build relationships and trust and it was okay to be vulnerable this time

when we asked him he came to the table and he was really honest with how he felt and said i don't know if i'm ever going to be able to hit this new style because this is something that i've never done before and it freaks me out i don't know if i can get there but i'll do everything that i can to try which was such an awesome change of attitude it was really humbling and it inspired us so the rest of us rallied around him and we supported him as best as we could and that support was really motivating to him and you know troy took the initiative and reached out to brian and jyn who i'll talk about later both who are were junior artists at the time him being a senior he didn't care he was just really excited to learn off of them and they were really honored to be able to teach him their skills and soon enough much to especially choice surprise you know troy didn't know if he was ever going to move away from this style to him this was what he had been doing forever

he felt like he was an old dog with old tricks he didn't know if he could do anything more than this but incrementally he was able to slowly move closer to the new style and the thing that freaked try out the most was whether he would be able to hand paint his textures and he wasn't he he wasn't sure if he'd be able to do it and he didn't want to feel stupid you know making a texture and if it failed but now in this new culture where we were becoming more supportive and we were okay with failures you know troy felt comfortable to try hand painting textures and then you know fail at it and then learn from those failures and try again again something that could have never happened in the old style or in the old culture so at this point learning becomes a really big part of our culture we we care a lot about learning learning from anybody it doesn't matter if you're learning from an intern or a junior everybody has something that they can teach someone else that's that's really the thing that we

started to focus on and so at this point jyn joins the team as a junior artist and pretty immediately we throw him out into the deep end and have him working on new champions and for those of you unfamiliar we frequently patch new content to the game and sometimes that new content is a new champion so the which is unique to the game and so the artist who works on that new champion is responsible for creating a whole new suite of effects that's completely unique to that champion to the game and some would argue and some did argue that that kind of work requires a level of autonomy and creativity that should only be reserved for a senior artist and that a junior like jyn should work in that senior's shadow so that they can learn incrementally and slowly but that's something that i call [ __ ] on because i truly believe in trial by fire that everybody deserves the chance to own something really huge and demonstrate to the rest

of us that they actually do have the capabilities to get there and of course we would support him along the way we wouldn't just throw him in the deep end without a life preserver or some swimming lessons but the point is you know giving him the opportunity to really own it and demonstrate that he can get there so we sucked for our guns and we kept them there and jyn worked on atrox this was his first champion ever this was probably the worst new champion any junior artist could work on because aatrox is a darkened character and up until this moment there was no such thing in our universe that is darken in fact i don't think there is darken that exists outside of atrox um and you know had we started gin on an ionian champion jyn could have at least you know looked at the other ionian champions pulled references and used those as resources but for aatrox all he knew was it can't look like anything else in the game which is a pretty broad spectrum and in my opinion i think that he really

knocked it out of the park i know jyn's sitting right there he's cringing at this slide and he probably is really mad that i keep staying on this but to me a junior artist you know working on such an ambiguous problem i think he did a really great job he was really bold with his color his use of color you know he was creative with his meshes it it the gameplay reads really well and so we were impressed with jyn's work and we kept him on new champions and we kept challenging him with big challenges so you know as as time progresses champions become more more challenging the game play becomes more complicated and sophisticated and jin continues to you know step up to the plate he you know because jin is who he is he continues to try and challenge himself to do better than his previous champions so his use of color becomes more deep more interesting his meshes also become more creative

more interesting he's constantly leveling himself up one champion at a time and in just one year jin went from a junior to a senior and now as our principal artist on league jyn uses the same method of mentorship in which he challenges others with seemingly larger-than-life challenges he trusts in their capabilities more so than they trust in themselves he supports their development along the way but he really allows them to own the big challenge so that they can own the big win and in fact jyn believes in this way of mentorship so much so that he takes it to the next level because jyn truly believes that every single person no matter what level you're at in turn junior doesn't matter that everybody possess some strength that's unique to them that they can teach to others and so jin doesn't even call it mentorship he calls it a knowledge swap and whoever he does mentor is challenged with having to teach him back something else not to be

facetious but because he truly believes that they can make him better and so now at this point our culture has totally shifted we're all about learning and learning through feedback you know we we continue to cultivate our relationships we continue to value vulnerability and so now these parts of our culture are starting to creep into everything else that we do so when jason applies for riot jason applied for a motion graphics position because he was a 2d flash animator at the time and even though he wasn't right for that role the motion graphics lead came and showed me jason's application because we were just nerding out on his flashwork it was really awesome so i decided to give jason a call he hadn't applied for the real-time vfx position but honestly i just wanted to meet another artist and tell him that i really admired his work so i gave him a call and that conversation was really awesome he asked me lots of great questions we

ended up talking about real-time vfx and he he was intrigued by it and it was something that he wanted to try and challenge himself and and learn more but he was really honest about his capabilities as an artist and also honest about his reservations of you know sinking time into something that seems pretty out of his league at least at the time and his honesty his vulnerability also his you know commitment to challenging himself really resonated with me so i also wanted to give him a shot so we we left that conversation with an understanding that jason was going to teach himself real-time vfx and i gave him our test so that he would have something to shoot towards and throughout this time you know we were corresponding he would ask me some questions i would send him to any tutorials that i could find and eventually he sends in his first test the first iteration of the test um in 3d

along with the 2d flash animated version so that i could see what he was trying to do now clearly the 3d version still needs a lot of work you know the timing is kind of linear the colors are all the same the shapes are very obvious but i was really impressed that he even got this far he taught himself to do this in a short amount of time and i was also impressed with his vulnerability with you know even being able to show me this because the 2d version is so [ __ ] awesome and then he was so i know he has taste as an artist um and he was willing to show me you know this other version which clearly isn't quite the same um so all of those things again his vulnerability his commitment to his own growth and development his openness to feedback all of these things really resonated with the whole team and so we gave him feedback told him what was and wasn't working how he might be able to technically achieve in 3d what he was doing in 2d and he went back at it and the next iteration was much better

and each iteration just kept kept on getting better so we learned enough about jason to really understand who he is his motivations and most importantly his potential and that he would be worth bringing in to teach from the ground up but that decision was met with opposition because the question was why would we bring someone in and sink time and resources into when we could use that amount of time to go and find some other artist like a senior artist and that person can come in and hit the ground running but based on our history we knew that craft wasn't the most important thing to us we knew how difficult it was for us to cultivate this culture of you know being open to feedback vulnerability commitment to your own growth and development and we saw all those things in jason immediately something that was really hard for us to cultivate on the team and so because because of the testing process and we learned all of these things about jason it was very easy to dig our heels in and fight for him and some of you may

know that we ended up hiring jason and in just three years he went from an artist who knew nearly nothing about real-time vfx into one who actively mentors nearly every vfx artist in the studio and also mentor students and artists in the industry and had we been in our old culture we would have never hired jason we would have looked at you know that first version of the test and we would have thought not good enough [ __ ] him and in fact you know when i think about that i think about all the other amazing artists with massive potential that we passed up on because back then we weren't we weren't in a place where we realized that like attributes other things that artists bring to the table are just important as craft and so i can really attribute the growth and evolution of the style and our work to the growth and evolution of our culture

in fact at this point when we were working on aram that was the first real inflection point in the change of our style and that's actually when we had started doing campfires and from there we were you know building trust relationships building a supportive learning environment and from then on we've been able to grow and level up our work and our style ever since and so now this is the new status quo of the culture of the team this is who we are we're we very much value relationships trust vulnerability and learning in fact learning is such a big part of our culture now that it's a responsibility it's like a expectation of your job so artists like chris jyn jason bryan they're all expected to give back and teach what they know all all while continuing to continuing to cultivate this um environment of you know support that it's safe to be vulnerable about

your weaknesses and i know that i'm painting a really rosy picture of how like everything is so awesome but it wasn't an easy one two three step for us it was a long arduous and emotional journey and one that we continue to work at every day in fact three years later we still do campfires it's something that we've been doing every week since because we know what a pivotal moment this was for us and how important it is for us to continue to cultivate relationships and trust and vulnerability with each other and now that actually we have our team has scaled and um it's a pretty large team so we're sprinkled across the entire studio um we don't sit next to each other anymore we sit next to uh we are separated by buildings and then because of the projects we work on there are barriers between some of us between projects as well in this new landscape it is even more critically important to continue to bring the artists back in and continue continue to cultivate

our culture through relationships and trust building and we are now using campfires to share knowledge teach each other at times we share our challenges with each other and even if you know nobody else in the room is experiencing the same challenge we get together as a group we help that artist brainstorm and we help them find a solution to their challenge and by doing so we are able to demonstrate just how important relationships trust vulnerability learning used to the health and culture of the team and so even though this is something that we work at every day that in a nutshell is how we were able to turn our toxic team environment into what it is today thanks guys um i know that you know i had a lot of time

and i sort of blew through it or there's still a lot of time left so if anybody has questions it'd be awesome if nobody has questions that's also awesome super happy to get off the stage as well yes hi sorry i'm going to keep you there uh so you mentioned that the team is now growing and it's it's spread out um and i'm assuming there are new people coming on you know you kind of ramp up how do you deal with with new people coming into this culture of say dealing with campfires or um getting comfortable with that and have you had people that have had that are resistant to it and how would you deal with that um yeah so because we have such a long history of sort of building this really fortified membrane of our culture we we very much know what we're looking for in artists and we have a pretty rigorous hiring process and so those attributes are actually attributes that we look for when we're

when we're hiring in fact we have panels specifically targeting those attributes and so first off you know coming into the door we already know that they they should you know feel more open to wanting to build relationships and then secondly because you know when people are new the first thing that they want to do is make relationships and friends in their new office and so we're very on top of you know making sure whenever new artists come in we grab them and put them into campfire and our campfires are once are every monday and so that's kind of where we start to you know they get to at least meet other people in the studio and so far we really haven't had a problem getting people into the culture because we have a really rigorous hiring process and then we you know make sure to grab them and start to get them into the culture immediately so thank you yeah sure hi hi there um thanks for the great presentation love it um my question would be how are you able

or have the other art departments using sort of liaison with you to try to spread this sort of you know great group cohesion and exercises to their other art departments yeah we have actually so the tech art group um within riot also was suffering sort of through the same things as we were they were sort of a disjointed group because you know tech artists they all have like really different kinds of skills and so it was difficult for them to sort of find that common ground and we did the same thing we recommended that they do campfire and we also offer to facilitate for them but actually campfire like those kinds of meetings are most powerful when it's only the people in the room who who matter like having a facilitator just sort of makes it feel like you've got a therapist in the room and so yeah they started doing campfires as well and they've actually also been able to turn over their culture so it's a pretty powerful tool guys i would really recommend that you try it so yes

we have shared and we've we've really shared this with anybody who wants to know about it okay awesome thanks yeah hi uh that was a really cool talk thanks a lot thank you um my question is um hiring having hired people that haven't come from a background doing a real-time vfx like just the process of like optimization to be able to get that stuff running properly like how hard is it to you know teach that kind of thing to someone that comes from like completely different background you mean like teaching them the technical skills like knowing when to optimize and how to optimize that kind of stuff um i think um if you guys were here earlier for keith's talk um keith and drew um there's always going to be some kind of ramp up you know like every studio uses different tools every studio has different parameters for optimization as well so there is kind of this like two-month ramp up time for everybody um but as long as a person is open to learning and they

understand that it's going to be different at every studio they do understand that it's important to optimize we found that it's not difficult to actually teach those things that they're just like technical tools but as long as you have the frame of mind of you know you know that you need to optimize your work then how you do it isn't so hard to teach that makes sense cool thank you thank you hi um so you're talking about there are certain attributes that you look for uh during your hiring process and there are certain attributes that you saw in jason um that made him appealing uh to be hired on for that kind of thing i guess with that understanding um are there are there tangible or certain things that you do to try to look for those attributes um if that makes sense or is it you know like just kind of like a gut feeling like oh this this feels right as far as basically how how do you how do you get

those attributes to be like something tangible that you can kind of communicate to other people and be like this you know this person is a good fit because of this this and this yeah i would say that it's really it takes time to learn how to dig into attributes especially when you're interviewing somebody for like an hour you know somebody can put in their put their best foot forward for an hour or even for like a whole day of interviews it's pretty easy to mask who you really are and so for the testing process i really recommend finding a way to like define your attributes that you're looking for and find a way to test for that so for us the way that we're able to dig into that is by doing rounds of feedback because through those rounds you understand can this person take feedback do they have an ego about their work do they know how to apply feedback can they ask questions back to me can they even challenge me on my feedback which is like that part if a person doesn't challenge us it's not like a test but my point being by being able to find a way to just spend a little bit more time with that person to understand who they

really are i think that is the most powerful way for us to try and dig into attributes rather than just trying to interview somebody for an hour okay great thank you yeah you're welcome anybody else uh i'm just wondering the hierarchy in your office like the way that the structure is at riot did they allow for this kind of thing to happen or did you guys kind of have to fight to make this happen like there's i worked in the game industry and there's just there's with the way we had it set up it was like this would be very hard to do although totally needed but be very hard to do because the the eye of sauron's always you know what i mean yeah i can definitely relate to that because i've worked at other studios as well we are very lucky at riot in that we're pretty empowered to do as we want to with our time where because we have a rigorous hiring process we trust everybody that comes into the door it's like we we know that you are

the kind of person that we can empower with you know however it is that you want to spend your time because we know that you'll get to the end point however it is that you get there so we're really lucky that we can work in this way and so you know that's how we've been able to do a lot of experimentation i guess have meetings where they're not about crafts spend the time to actually mentor each other we have wheelie desks so we kind of like wheel to each other's workstations you know if somebody needs to level up we'll have a mentor sit next to a mentee so we're really lucky in that way um but i think you know for those studios where you know there is an eye of sauron i think that you know if there's a need on your team and if there's enough you know like where we were we were kind of ready for a change so if you can't do it within work you know there's opportunities where you can go out for lunch and try to talk maybe go out for beers and try to talk but limit the amount of alcohol because it might get a little too hairy but but there are you know creative ways

that you can try to work around it if it if it is something that you really need to work on um but i do understand so so we are pretty lucky all right thanks anybody else nope cool well thank you very much for [Applause] coming you