Lessons In Writing and Directing for Video Game IP

[Music] welcome to the novic gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and AD advisory services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu Europe and Asia with its dedicated gaming practice light speeded gaming the firm is investing from over $7 billion in early and growth stage Capital making

it by far the largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology Light speed's Team combines deep expertise in gaming with a global multi-stage investment platform and a culture that truly puts Founders first selected Investments include epic games snap and stability AI as well as game designers and producers who led the creation of titles like fortnite Call of Duty League of Legends valerant Starcraft 2 and many more for more information simply go to gaming. lsvp docomo gaming podcast I'm your host David Taylor and today we're talking about trans media writing and World building in video games it's an often overlooked part of game development but as consumers it is one of the most memorable aspects of any game we play I'm thrilled to host Neil upier a creative Power House who has left his mark on some of the most iconic franchises in gaming from shaping the

lore of Star Wars the Old Republic in Battlefield 2042 to crafting stories from the outlands for Apex Legends Neil has redefined what it means to merge storytelling with gameplay in this episode we'll explore Neil's Journey Through the gaming industry dive into his creative process and what the future holds for Trans media storytelling welcome to the podcast Neil thank you so much for having me David so just to kick us off it would be awesome uh if you could just share us sort of your path into into the gaming world I think there's a lot of people who are probably uh creatively inclined who just would love to understand how one breaks into the industry and and then sort of you know has as much successes you have I started my path into gaming at USC where I actually studied film and when I graduated from USC I had two job offers in front of me one was in the film industry proper in post- production it would have been like a union job dubbing tapes one day I would have gotten to actually edit something and

the other job was to work at Electronic Arts cutting marketing podcasts for their Command and Conquer series and I chose that job because I felt like they're going to let me cut every day and I'm actually going to get better at my craft every day now a couple years in I thought i' made a huge mistake because all my friends that just sucked it up and were getting coffee for you know Seth McFarland were Now assistant writers and like the writer's room for family guy and I was like what am I doing I'm in this other weird industry but you know as we know the industry has only grown and become more respected as a storytelling medium and I've been fortunate to grow alongside it so uh I ultimately ended up working at EA for 14 years both on the marketing side and the developer side on a number of titles I left EA and worked at a startup for a few years and now I work for myself helping various Studios up their storytelling craft whether that's ingame or through other channels awesome so I think we'll sort of dive into a little bit more of each of those aspects of

your your life throughout the conversation but just to help us sort of get grounded in the work that you do uh what is sort of and I know that you've you've also written and directed a movie before so you know right what's the difference between writing and directing for uh a movie versus a video game that's a great question I think the number one difference between them is that the posture of your audience is different so when you're watching a movie or a TV show you're in what we call a lean back posture so you're passive you're ready to receive and you're it's not necessarily less engaged but it's a different form of Engagement when you're dealing with games you're working with an audience who is leaned in it's an active participation and so that means that your attention is just going to be different

and you have to be crafting your narratives based on the posture of the audience The Stance of the audience right so if you're for instance if you're in a passive mode and receiving things and you're not having to make other decisions because it's not interactive you may pick up on subtleties if you are in an active mode and you're participating in something uh if the narrative is directly in line with the goals you're already achieving you may actually pick up on it in a stronger way like let's say walking into a room and being able to look at everything that's on a table but if the narrative is coming at you um at Cross purposes from the thing you're trying to do let's say something is trying to give you World building while you're trying to make sure that another player doesn't shoot you and kill you and end your game session then it actually might be filtered out as a noise in your brain so the posture of your audience whether they're in a lean in or lean back type of posture is really important to know when you're crafting your content the other big difference of course is interactivity and that that's the easy

part of the answer that's what everyone knows is with video games being interactive that means that fundamentally it's not the characters that are going to be making choices in their story it's going to be the player and you have to hold that in mind and try to create as much immersion as you can which usually means removing friction between what the player is supposed to feel and what the character is feeling if you and the character are at odds in terms of the experience then that's usually when you get ped out and you're like oh I'm watching or I'm in an experience but I'm not immersed in it and of course there's also a change in terms of how the content is authored and how it becomes good right in film we often talk about how the final rewrite is really in the editing room and I'm an editor myself and so I certainly know that um I love getting things on a timeline and then changing my own work for games I would say the re-editing process the final rewrite is through play testing

can't stress important how I can't stress enough how important that really is until it's in the engine and you're hearing the line you won't know if the line is too long you won't know if the player who going to be running past it colliding with another line that could overlap and uh whether it's even having the intended effect is it sticking in the player's mind the way you expect is it really crucial information the play player needs to know uh and play testing is the best way to get that and so that's kind of how I'd break it down interactivity versus linear posture of the audience being lean in versus lean back and where does the final rewrite happen in the editing room or through play test thinking about sort of the final changes that you make right if you get feedback from your audience that something's not working uh in in in either medium I imagine it's a different approach where in one you're you're working on with code and logic and and

changing uh mechanics in the other movies you might have to bring people back and and re-shoot on on site I'm curious if that changes the approach to when you do user testing or or when you do those those final edits um just from like a a production standpoint certainly I think that the way I approach it in some ways is the same which is that you want to start validating your approach to a story as early in the process as you can and do it several times through your process and you want to move from using sledgehammers to make changes down to using paint brushes to make changes so that just looks different in different mediums so let's take film for instance if you read a script and the story is not making sense it's very easy in script form it's a couple control C's control vs that type of thing thing to

make massive structural changes and you should you should make the most number of changes when it's just pen and pencil once you're on set you might be rewriting lines on the Fly because you are having your own actors reacting to you saying this doesn't make sense I don't feel like I should be saying in this moment you want to react to that make changes once you're in post now yes you can always resort to a re-shoot sometimes you have to and that is expensive but you want to try and use a smaller strument instead of a wrecking ball at that point and so perhaps reordering a scene will work perhaps doing ADR which means just recording a line from the actor maybe that's off camera so you get that extra bit of exposition perhaps you need to add in a little title card up front you know Star Wars crawl style uh perhaps you need a lower third to let you know you're at a particular location because the audience didn't get it so you use different tools at that instance to make those types of changes right perhaps it's just that the

tone is wrong and the composer can put in a different piece of music that will entirely make the player or make the viewer reinterpret how they should be feeling in that scene and so you want to move from most destructive to least destructive changes and the same thing is true in games so how does that look in games well initially you're going to do something that's like a level layout uh the the blockout is very rudimentary it's mostly about design and getting people running through the space moving through the space and the art is usually just gray box right or slap Bing things together that you've been able to pull off of let's say the unreal asset store or the um or the unity asset store so making changes there is pretty easy once you've done your few first few play tests you'll be able to figure out if a level feels too big too small you could have dialogue in there with no V so if you have to make a change there's

no calling actors back a part of my process right now is actually recording AI voices for all the characters and putting it in and if a performance is really dependent on something that AI just reading a script won't be able to do convincingly and then I'll do a voice too AI change so I'll perform all the parts to the best of my ability use AI to convert them into 60-year-old man 15-year-old girl whatever it might be and then at least I'm hearing the lines and I can't tell you how invaluable that is in terms of knowing whether something's going to hit that process also applies to visual storytelling as well in the level and as you get further and further into the play tests yes it would be possible to make big changes and big changes usually do happen throughout production um but you want to try and move from using sledgehammers to using paint brushes as you get closer and

closer to final yeah makes sense in my current job I get to at least be a fly on the wall for for some of these early builds and yeah the voice over is is a it's hard to deliver humor uh in an AI voice and so I totally can understand why you would want to step in and and play both parts as a sort of rudimentary version of that yep very helpful I'm curious so you've gotten to work on some amazing IPS I'm curious like when you reflect on on working on Star Wars battlefield Apex Legends like what are what are sort of the projects you're most proud about I mean Star Wars was definitely a dream uh getting to you know play on such a hallowed playground is is definitely an honor and I got to write and direct two short films that are based in the Star Wars universe that were produced by ilm and you know I got to I got to name a planet after my mom

that's pretty special so I'd probably say that was a highlight super cool so maybe taking Star Wars as an example or if if this is going to be I I know that Lucas film is a little bit um you know uh cautious about uh sharing what goes on behind the scenes but if you can use that example or another example can you take us through your creative process for writing a script and and directing an animated short yeah certainly if I'm creating an animated short specifically for games right we're talking trans media here um it has to start with the game and so generally what I do is I start with a business brief and that includes why are we telling this story with this character right now right um what's the tie in in the game going to be is it going to be a skin that matches what the character looks like in this short is it going to be taking place in a particular level if it takes us 10 months to create

this thing are we lining up with a new level or new map that's going to be coming out 10 months from now is it a tease for something that's actually not going to come out till well after that so you think about all these things and you have to get Buy in from the team and make sure that everyone who's going to contribute to that is you know is bought in from there you go to an outline form hitting out the Beats of the story you want to spend as much time in there really ironing that out and getting it locked in as possible sometimes that also means writing to a budget or writing to a constraint I'm a firm believer that short films are best when their scope is as limited as possible usually that means no more than four or five locations usually that means no more than three fundamental relationships so that could be like three characters and it's the Triangular relationships between each of them right and once

everyone's feeling really good about that and you know you're not going to write something that is unproduced tons of collaborative rounds of feedback on uh on the Apex Legends uh the Apex Legends team was amazing because you had animators that had been responsible for breathing life into these characters that knew them so well that could give me amazing feedback as much as the narrative team could right and the designers would get involved talking about the mechanics that made that character special and I'd be finding ways to pull that type of detail in in some small way sometimes it's a line sometimes it's a shot so can I ask a quick question on this so are you doing interviews with all of these folks before you start writing are you writing something and then letting them react to it and then sort of going back and forth how how does that work it it's like any part of game development there's meetings there's bumping in people you know bumping into people in the hallway there's hey can I pull you aside and just have a brainstorm with you and work

through this thing I always try to get as much snowballed alignment with a few key people as I can even before you get to an official meeting where you're just rolling out a bunch of ideas every Studio Works differently the studios that I've had the most success at are the ones that generally would prefer to feel like they were a part of the process of getting there than having a super polish idea presented to them and so in each Studio I've worked at you know I've had to make my allies I've had to make sure that people trust me that I'm knowledgeable enough about the game and respect what they do as storytellers uh in that field or respect what they do as storytellers through their own medium that they trust that I'm going to play with their toys in a respectful manner so that when you get to something that's like a script review meeting most of the people in there are already kind of aware of what's happening and there's no crazy surprises yeah that that was definitely

something I learned at EA as well as definitely want to keep as many people involved in the process as possible before uh you get to that that approval moment no doubt uh I mean and so that's really just all pre-production right from there the process follows much the same process you would for any animated film so you're going to go through storyboards editorial for animatics sometimes there's motion capture or performance capture involved vo sessions and then of course editorial sound design and mix to get it out the door the production of those Apex shorts or even the Star Wars shorts I did with ilm roughly took about nine months each to make okay um how like just broad I just giving us a broad sense not of any specific short but I'm curious how much these shorts cost to produce generally it really depends on the art style you choose uhhuh you can tell any story from for $5 or 5

million um and the work I've done has generally been in uh the the high several hundred thousands to a couple million got it okay and the runtime for those of course has been sometimes well over 10 minutes got it I might come back to this like I want to ask about sort of how you make the argument internally to to take the risk to build something that is you know not not uh not free obviously um could you sort of give us a sense of like what you had to do what what the opportunity you saw um and how you were able to um convince the broader respawn team to to take a risk on something that hasn't really been done widely in video games well I really took my cue from some success cases I saw at other Studios so Riot and blizzard had really paved the way with league and OverWatch shorts respectively and about six to eight months before

Apex Legends came out I saw that Apex had a similar profile to these games and that they were new IP essentially they really required players to have an affinity for these Hero characters that they were going to be playing as but there was no single player in the game and so the pitch was quite simple which was that marketing can become your single player but this was definitely easier than said than done because the the point that the narrative director on the game made Mo alavi he's a great guy was that the head Cannon for everyone on the team was different because they didn't have to sit down and agree on all of these details because there was no single player everything wasn't written down that's always true when you're building a game documentation gets out of date very very fast and so as someone that at the time was a part of like a marketing Central resource to come in and do something that was this closely tied to the game the risk of it going wrong was

incredibly high and they didn't have an appetite for it uh and so I remember them saying basically no one that doesn't work in this building can possibly do what you're trying to do and so I decided I decided to call their Bluff and I was like okay I'll start working from this office then and I just drove across town an hour every day and stole a desk in that building and started working out of the respawn office instead of the EA office and still were too busy to meet with me the game was about to come out but just bumping shoulders with them you know on the way to the restroom I started to pull out of them what characters they were really passionate about what made the game special for them and that ultimately allowed me to come up with an idea that got them excited and initially again it was all about risk mitigation don't set the story in the Apex games don't set the story in the same map as the game take place in because then you're going to

write checks that we have to cash if you have a spaceship crash in the map then everyone wants to see that we can't do that but as we really started to move forward with the first short film uh which was called void Walker and was about the character wraith the team really got excited and invested and ultimately when that short came out there was a really strong tie into the game in the short film wraith finds this underground facility and we added that as a secret discoverable level in the middle of the Battle Royale map amazing and for for those who haven't watched it it's gotten 11.3 million views on on YouTube so this is um you know not a small not a small uh segment of the Apex audience who's uh following these shorts um I'm curious you know to to that end what were sort of the indications when you when you got the green light well actually before I'm jumping ahead like you know how did you how did you get the green light finally to to do it and then what was it like to

actually you know Cobble something together that would actually be well received by by the Apex audience we got it greenlit similar I I think I kind of answered that part of it it was it was really first earning the trust of the team and then coming up with an idea they thought was worthy of being told and slowly addressing all of their uh risk RK assessment questions about whether this could go badly and they were more concerned about it going badly than it not existing if that makes sense and that concern went throughout that was the smallest budget we had to work with on any of the shorts and up until the very end there were questions about about quality whether this would you know stand toe-to-toe with the quality of the blizzard shorts for instance and we certainly had a fraction of the budget as uh as they did on that

first short film but when ultimately through some really hair raising experiences I've never worked that many hours straight ever uh I I definitely thought I was going to die at one point um when the film did come out it I think it ended up garnering like between seven to n million views or something in a very very rapidly short amount of time and it ended up trending number one on YouTube worldwide as did the second short and the success continued to snowball and The Wraith skin the legendary skin we created that mirrored the look of the character in the short ended up being the highest monetizing skin in the game at the time and so that's when it became really evident that there was something here and the second film followed that same mold ended up trending number one on YouTube worldwide upon launch and that skin became the highest monetizing skin at the game at the time of its release and and so that really is what

eventually convinced EA to continue investing in it uh you know to a to a point you know I would say there I think is a point of diminishing returns and let me be clear what I mean by that I don't know that I can say looking at the data that I have access to and it's been several years now that I haven't been a part of that team that doing these is a way of growing the user base I think that it is more of an engagement and retention tactic than it is an acquisition tactic and there comes a point in every life service game where the fundamental business priority shifts from new user acquisition to efficiency of scale and keeping the golden cohort there for as long as possible mhm and I

think that the budget for some of this bright and shiny stuff eventually needed to come down and so again like I said earlier you can tell any story for any budget but it doesn't mean you should and so it became incumbent on the creatives working on the game to find other ways to do storytelling whether it was wholly in the game or through other channels you know we use Twitter pretty extensively on battlefield for instance uh to be able to do some of those same things if you're talking to a more Niche audience that's going to be hanging around anyway for instance so just to make sure I'm understanding so you you're saying that the the the the audience for you know stories from the outlands became sort of the the golden cohort the ones who were sticking with the game and at over time did was that there were other levers that the team wanted to in order to retain that audience or uh was it just

that that golden cour had shrunken to a point where there weren't as many uh players who were you know interested in watching now I'm not saying that the people who watch stories from the outlands were the golden cohort okay not necessarily uh what I am saying is that every live service game is going to have a tale It generally won't continue to just grow and the performance of every single Channel every trailer you drop and everything is going to be dependent on how rabid um and whether the how rabid the fan base is and whether it's on a growth trajectory right in terms of the users like daily month monthly average users for instance let's say right so uh what I'm saying is that I think that at some point multi-million dollar short films

for Apex Legends was not the best deployment of those resources MH and that doesn't mean that the storytelling isn't still as important uh to that game but you have to be honest about what's going to move the needle and what metric are you optimizing for so one of the reasons that we did stories from the outlands early on with these high budget shorts was because we found that the Apex Channel which had gone from like Zero Subs because the game had a ghost launch to pretty substantial in a very fast amount of time was a great channel to invest in it was driving traffic and the way that the algorithm was set up at the time again YouTube changes how these things work all the time but the way that the algorithm was set up it favored watch time over just

views or clicks and a long form piece like that that was done at a high quality and had high retention and we were getting signals from players that they wanted this type of stuff meant that when we dropped like a 9 minute video like that it ended up being the most watched video on the channel and then the entire Channel got promoted which meant that the more traditional ads and launch trailers for New Seasons also perform better and so there were other ancillary knockoffs and it wasn't just hey we need to invest in storytelling it was a I think a very smart decision to say we seem to have a Golden Goose with this YouTube channel we need to invest in this YouTube channel and a part of the way that I got it greenlit was also using this argument that unlike a launch trailer that comes out and then has a very quick drop off things that are

narrative or tend to be Evergreen which means that they have a much longer tale they continue to aggregate views over a very long term as you can see I think like I said when wraith came out it had seven million views or something like that and it's up to 11 plus now right that's probably not the case for let's say the season one launch trailer yeah there's no nostalgic reason to go back and watch that so those are the calculations that I think every team has to make on why are we doing this and it can't just be because it's cool you know I don't think that trans media in and of itself is some kind of golden bullet I wouldn't really buy that argument got it and so yeah that makes a lot of sense and and it's super interesting to hear that like you know you're also developing a separate asset like a YouTube channel uh uh I don't think many game developers think about um their activities in those terms but obviously a YouTube channel that is uh

popular is is a very strategic asset especially in a time when there's so much noise and so much you know uh attention that's scattered through various platforms and not necessarily even within gaming but you know uh on Twitch and YouTube and Twitter Etc right um I'm curious you know you you had done stories from the outlands and then you you work on Battlefield Battlefield 2042 was a pretty special experience for me it's because that's the game that really took me from doing purely trans media work into making that shift slowly into being on the developer side of things Battlefield was creating its first fictional setting in a very long time coming off of Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5 and they were also experimenting with having a hero shooter specialist kind of mechanic

in the game and wanted to create fleshed out characters and seeing the work I'd done on apex Legends I was asked if I would help flesh out and refine The Narrative and and the the theme of the game well more specifically I I was asked to help Define how the the fantasy of that game could best come across no matter what channel it was really um and again I was really a marketing asset that was on loan to the team and the team had its own world director narrative designers and writers that were working on the game and I ended up coming in to really supplement and help them and it started with something that was really just going to be focused on fleshing out the backstory the team knew that they wanted to do something that was set in this CI

setting and the question became well how do you make that feel integral to a war game and the thought that I had was that if you have these massive climate disasters the the thing that is gerine to a war game is that it would create the biggest Mass migration of people in history and that's going to create geopolitical conflict and so that's how the idea of the noats came along instead of expats noats all these countries that have become failed States all of them at some point had their own type of elite special forces right whether it's Massad or Grom or MI6 and if those States fail what do these people with very particular skills do and who are they fighting for now and that ended up being a lot more interesting than just let's say a generic mercenary and it also allowed us to say that they're really fighting their own

war and they're have they're fighting for this displaced people group and that may sometimes align with what these superpowers are doing in this world war but they're not fighting just for America or for Russia and it created this Nuance that was really interesting and the other thought that we had was that the game was going to be set in these really exotic locations and there was an opportunity here to tell a story that felt like it could only be told in those locations instead of feeling like a James Bond film where just some European dudes to go to all these locations and it's just set dressing right and so I pulled together a writer room with a South American writer an Indian writer South Korean writer a Singaporean writer um a writer that had shot some some Netflix originals in the Middle East uh to come together and create backstories for each of the maps

in a way that then connected and became the world history of the game and so that work ultimately was handed over to the dev team that figured out how to make that work show up in the game what does like the no Pat logo look like how does this fit into the types of back Stories We want for each of these characters let's say and then I took that same material and started to develop about a road map where the marketing could feel like a part of the storytelling and from the moment the game was announced that there could be this drip feed of content that would tell the story that led right into the first moment of you hitting play and going through the firsttime user experience and into the game and so on that title I was the creative director of the trans media portion which was again the single player that wasn't in the game essentially working very very closely with my partners at dice who

were working on taking that and having it realized in the game very special experience and we used a variety of mediums to tell that story Twitter interactive websites that had Maps almost like a Indiana Jones map that you could follow uh the reporting of a madeup investigative journalist that we said was embedded with this population this boat of refugees as it was going across the world all leading up to a giant short film that we produced that confirmed that a character from Battlefield 4 was returning and you know set the hype on fire right before the game came out and that was Michael K Williams's likeness yeah exactly um amazing all right uh well I'd love to to move on to talk about your experience uh working for a web 3 game company I think this is is an interesting topic because uh I imagine

that there are different elements that you need to consider when when uh building a web 3 game I also know that your role evolved there you had a production role and just curious to understand sort of how you took that that creative background and applied it to to this so I guess two questions one is you know how did because I know that you continue to work on the creative side like how did working on a web 3 game change your approach to uh to doing you creative trans media creating trans media moments and then two is you know what were the different roles that you that you had and how did you um leverage your background to to have the biggest impact there I'd say the big thing that changed for me building narrative and developing IP at a web 3 company versus a traditional company was the focus that web3 companies put on building in public and there there was a desire for these companies to show that they were transparent to show that funds were being used appropriately to show that

there was concrete gains being made on the project and so the so the need to continuously put your work out there while you were still in really an early stage building and pulling things together um that created tension on the team honestly because I think the traditional way of building games is hold hold hold wait till it's polished right uh and that was a big shift in me to operate that way ultimately I would say that both AER games and a majority of the web 3 Studios out there have found that they were doing buildin public the wrong way and that the traditional gaming Market has been building in public just in a different way than what web 3 game studios decided needed to be the way to do it and what I mean by that is great things come out

of constant iteration and change and sharing all of those things sharing concept art where the art style isn't baked yet sharing characters that might get cut you sharing backstory and lore for things that definitely will end up changing dramatically in terms of how they end up presenting in the final game is not incredibly helpful I think because for one thing it ends up it it makes it harder to create a real moment that feels like it is a cannon burst of excitement because there's been a little bit of a drought of you saying something I like building tent pole moments but also it can actually make the game feel more incomplete because something doesn't feel cohesive yet I think the right way to build in public

is to do play tests then you're taking a certain slice of code you are bringing in outside opinion to help you validate your assumptions but you're not screaming it on the internet and you're not making your decisions based on Twitter polls or comment sections you're actually getting and making de you're actually getting information and making your decisions based on people with Hands-On code experience so yeah I I'd say that most web 3 Studios that started off with this really big initiative to build in public ended up backtracking on that and becoming more of a polishing private and you know speak when ready kind of approach and and I think that that is the right approach to create the best possible storytelling experience for your players provided that you are play testing in

closed groups early and often so that you're not in an echo chamber about the actual state of the game yeah makes sense it sounds like uh web 3 sort of went into the extreme opposite direction of what triaa does which is sort of to not really play test uh with with the public because they don't want any leaks and then you know it's sort of a a roll of the dice when when the game launches because it hasn't really had uh as much flighting as like an indie game might have um with you know play tests from all through development and in Early Access partially to fund the game but also you know as part of um shaping the direction of the game well think about let's dig into what you just said right both triaa and web 3 have let's define it this way both traditional game studios and web 3 Studios can make the mistake of putting out a bad product and it's always

because there was either a misaligned vision there was uh mismanagement within the creative process of bringing that game to fruition or there wasn't enough play testing the the buildin public thing I think is is just noise you know the the web 3 games that went out there and failed may have been sharing art and lore and q&as and amas on Discord all the live long day but they weren't actually getting code in players hands and then they failed and there's plenty of huge games that you know in traditional gaming that work for five six seven years then come out with a crazy flashy launch trailer when everything is super baked and super polished and they fail too because they didn't validate their assumptions with play tests so it all comes back down to play tests yeah keep play testing um makes sense I wanna I wna

zoom out and talk about just sort of trans media broadly and get your perspective on that um did you did you watch secret level by any chance yeah I did okay so secret level just for the audience is essentially like it's um made by um Prime video or it's on Prime video made by the creators of um of um love death and robots and I I've actually only watched one episode but I'm curious Neil what your perspective on it was given that you've made a lot of of uh of shorts based off of um video game IP in the past I thought the execution was quite beautiful I loved the art styles I've worked with several of the studios that came together to create that Anthology piece and the what makes love death and robots so special certainly has found its way into this and I think it was a

great great idea I will say that um I'm disappointed in how extremely violent they all were uh kind of disturbingly so even rather innocent IP like Pac-Man yeah was interpreted in kind of one I watched yeah it's like the most horrific interpretation of it possible interesting yes um not necessarily I would say um Brave or insightful to do that yeah um perhaps uh closing off how accessible it can be and I would say the same thing of of the Fallout series as well to be honest with you um incredibly gripping opening there's no question that the Actors and The Craft on display and creating that series is incredible uh I didn't need that level of violence and and and I'm not sure why the creators went in that direction

I I personally would have loved to see that be a little bit more um accessible or clever in the way that it hit those same tonal markings without being as gory that's kind of my honest review of it yeah execution quite brilliant some really great ideas it's just a lot of blood for no reason yeah I mean I I'm also surprised by by the Pac-Man one I'm surprised that Bandai Namco signed off on that for for kids IP um on the Fallout side I kind of get it I mean that they're sort of doing what probably most players do when they play Fallout is just shoot everything um but uh I'm also kind of curious um you know do you have a perspective on why this sort of amalgamation of very different IPS were sort of slapped together in in in this um sort of format it took a long time to

pull that piece together I remember that there were discussions about Apex Legends being a part of it MH and when they were talking to EA about Apex Legends or some other IPS being a part of it the general question was well who else is in it and nobody wanted to be the biggest fish amongst a bunch of tiny fish but no one wanted to be the tiniest fish either and so I have a feeling that the final cast of Secret level kind of came about through just a lot of churn and burn and just straight up huta from Tim to not give up and keep pounding the streets and keep pounding the town and getting people to say yes there there's probably a couple really close ones that didn't make it in um I believe there was supposed to be one for Concord which got pulled out and and who knows you know what it could have looked like

if some other IPS had said yes and some other IPS had said no it really depends on the on the priority of those games the you know there's a couple that really makes sense to me like new world is in is actively uh you know is an active live service having New World on there smart it's on Amazon all of that makes a ton of sense some of those IPS are kind of dormant on the gaming side and so I'm curious if they have other projects that are on the brink and this was part of their marketing beats to getting there some of them may have been purely brand plays and um yeah some of those without being a part of the production team I couldn't really you know speculate more than that uh as to why this was the final lineup in secret level again brilliantly you know brilliantly done even if aesthetically some of them weren't to my taste got it um let's Zoom a little bit even even further out now and talk about uh sort

of the the different attempts uh Bridging the Gap between video games and movies like with Netflix's band or snatch for example like I'm curious do you do you think we're going to move in that direction where the the lines of of movies and video games continue to be blurred or are we going to always exist in a world where movies complement video games and video games complement movies I think we'll see more executions that experiment with that I don't think that one is going to go away the the need to have passive entertainment is I think always going to be there you know technology has changed how we consume passive entertainment we've become a little bit more in control of it being able to hit the pause button you know those types of things are certainly true and and I can see something like bander snatch becoming uh um if there was a breakout IP I think or a viral moment with one of

those that really hit an audience that's already used to watching their passive entertainment in a semile leaned in way let's say on Tik Tok just the speed at which you're scrolling I think there could be something there that really blows up and becomes even more mainstream than bander snatch did but I don't think that's at the cost of linear entertainment or purely interactive entertainment yeah that that makes a lot of sense I I found that to be the biggest issue with Bender snatch aside from that I didn't love the story uh but like also if I'm in a leaned out position I don't want to have to lean in to progress the movie no uh and so put finding a different medium like like Twitter or maybe there's some other medium that doesn't exist yet that will come around makes a lot of sense um as we're sort of wrapping things up I would love to just because you know I came to you you know four

years ago when I was at EA and I was thinking about uh narrative design and and storytelling and video games I wanted to just make sure we had some time for you know for someone looking to break into narrative design or or creative Direction in in the gaming industry what advice would you have for someone like that my advice for anyone breaking in is you know take take any door that opens to you um I've had a very nonlinear uh career path coming in through marketing becoming a World Builder a game writer and then you know working now both in marketing and in the in engine right like I don't know anyone else that does what I do where half my day is spent in unreal and the other half is spent you know on set you know directing

a live action commercial or something that that's very very odd yeah but it's possible and the Very and it's possible for me because that is the intersection of my skill set and so if you lean into the things that make you particularly you I think you can create opport unities that just actually don't exist as a job to apply for or um a role that could be filled by anybody else and so that would be that would be by that would be my advice don't say no necessarily to stepping in and getting experience at a studio because it's in a different department or discipline from the one that you want to be in if you're early on continue to do side projects that that are refining your primary skills that you're interested in for instance the entire 14

years I was at EA I was also still a filmmaker and I got a development deal at Disney and I created a pilot there I fundraised wrote and directed a feature film that's on Amazon Prime and I wrote five screenplays in that time while still working in marketing and it's the marketing that got me into video game jobs and strangely enough it was the transm media films that I did for Star Wars that eventually got me an agent in Hollywood right so the crossover there is a little bit crazy and I think that that is possible for people that are breaking in from all sorts of other things that at first glance might not seem to line up exactly so don't say no you you just you have no idea where strange opportunities could open up and it

is at least 60% based on you earning the trust of the people that are on the other side of the table yeah I feel like what I'm what I'm hearing is sort of you know continue to refine your craft even if you may not be doing exactly the thing that you want to do long term um you know like with you making movies while you're at EA I think that uh also you know recognize that you're getting more opportunities in the thing that you are doing and that there's uh room for growth like your journey at EA and then one other thing that I sort of heard you say earlier in our talk was just like you moved to the respawn office when you saw an opportunity that you really believed in and I think being creative about how you pursue the things that you have a lot of conviction about is really important because if you are creative and you show that you care people will you know open doors for you

absolutely well summarized awesome well as we wrap up here what's the best way for people to get in touch if they have more questions or or just want to chat please find me on LinkedIn um my profile is just my name Neil upad and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have there or engage with you awesome this has been an enlightening conversation thanks so much Neil great to have you on the podcast absolutely thanks for having me happy holidays if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu novic digest or contact us to learn about our wide- ranging

Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]