Making Chaotic Great, 'Tiny Tina's Wonderlands': Finding Precedent in Unprecedented Times

[Music] so hello everyone and welcome to making chaotic great finding precedent and unprecedented times making Tiny Tina's wonderlands I'm Kayla Belmore the senior producer on the project and this is Matt Cox creative director hey folks thanks again for coming this is awesome that you guys are all here but a little bit uh more about us before we get started uh again my name is Matt Cox I was born in Washington DC but I grew up most of my life right outside of Kansas City in Kansas and I am a Shameless Nintendo nerd uh for as long as I can remember and about high school times I wanted to have a really robust music career and go on the road but I figured that was going to be pretty risky so I decided to get a Bachelor of Science and journalism from the University of Kansas and uh at College I met my soon to be wife then uh and I decided to stick around and I became a newspaper sales manager for

about 5 years which was probably one of the most boring jobs I've ever had and then something happened Halo PC happened uh gearbox released Halo PC and then the Halo editing kit and that was the first time I was able to spawn master chief on a piece of geometry that I created from a totally legit copy of 3ds Max um but that uh and it was that moment that I realized that oh my gosh I really want to do this for a living and so I started creating a bunch of level designs but I had a moment where I was like well do I want to choose the art path or the design path so I went out and bought a book on how to for illustration and the first task at the end of the first chapter was like draw someone from memory and of course who did I choose but my lovely wife Emily and uh this was my illustration thank you

and it was from this moment I realized design it is so uh my first game job was with THQ on the Destroy All Humans franchise and then I was the lead designer on the very first scribbl knots game and then I left video games entirely for about uh six years but even uh during that Hiatus I made four little micro games for uh Android and iOS as well as Steam and then I came back uh to AAA on Borderlands did a bunch of design stuff for Borderlands 3 then directed The Campaign expansion Bounty of blood and then I landed as creative director on wonderlands and if you have any questions about the the design track versus the production track and the mindset just look at our slide differences uh so my job in the industry my very first one was as a personal assistant back in 2010 at a rational games and I worked my way up through the ranks and learned everything I could about production and became a senior producer at gearbox eventually um I had some weird Pand pic Hobbies everyone did

this is some great Icebreaker material I started befriending my neighborhood crows now they land on my chimney and scream at me if I don't give them peanuts I also collect antique cookbooks so if you need an aspect recipe I got you I asked some friends to describe me and here are some quotes I am always one drink or hangry away from coming back to my Boston accent Wicked pissa kid uh and I am the living embodiment of all trash birds and that's a seagull Matt okay seagulls got it yeah Fin and I have been dubbed the official project mom whenever we go somewhere whenever we travel I just hear mom can we get a meal and that's how it happens uh and I love putting this in here uh this little quiz at the end if you can read those acronyms if you know you know it's either a localist or a dmv5 diagnostic I made two sets of people in the room on comfortable with that one fantastic the reason why I put this in here and it's going to become more important later in apparent in this talk

is that yeah it's hard it's hard up here sometimes and you can still be a leader and you can still do it but it's going to take a lot of work and proactive effort to make that happen you'll learn a little bit more about that later and how we decided to manage wonderlands and unprecedented times quick look at my ship titles started with BioShock Infinite worked on the DLC started at the season pass of battleborn so I worked a little bit of production on the art Pipeline on that postlaunch content did uh work on Borderlands 3 as a pipeline prod producer as well as an AP and I became a senior producer on wonderlands so developing precedent in unprecedented time so first we want to call out the three time periods that kind of happened to all of us over the last several years there is the before times pre- lockdown we had precedent on how pipelines worked how relationships worked how we we reacted to the new

challenges of just normal development your studio had those uh precedents and so did we but then the lockdown happened these were obviously unprecedented times it was a novel environment uh and we had to make more proactive choices for empathy understanding and advocating for the health of our teams and during lockdown our our nature was Amplified especially with how we react to harsh circumstances or strong disagreements so when people have that fight or flight or freeze response we had to develop the habit of assuming the best in all of us and then present times when we came through the lockdown we had better tools and a better lens for proactive problem solving and we were better prepared for change uh and

we learned one of the biggest things that we learned is you don't naturally have to do combat not every disagreement has to be combat and when it comes to Kayla and I we're very fortunate because uh before we started working together we kind of already agree on a lot about the intersection of scope and uh quality but we know there are stereotypes of the roles of creative director versus project producer and uh stereotypes look about like those fight cats over there and that's because these roles in some ways are diametrically and my job is to make sure that it ships and sometimes those things are just in disagreement uh it can lead to this idea in the industry where producers are the sanity and creative directions the vanity or if you're on the other side of the coin the kill versus The Joy uh we were in there with the scissors cutting things saying you got to ship it on time you're spending too much money and the creative directors are like hey we want to make

it the most fun game ever and both people are right both jobs are just doing their jobs and the right amount of that friction can actually make a really good game because it comes out there are constraints but it's also still fun and it's really important to make sure that when you're thinking about production you're also quality-minded because the quality of your game cuts into profits and it makes it so you can probably get more money to make great games later as a creative director it's really important to make sure that you're thinking a little bit about production and the pipelines and the constraints that your projects are under to have realistic expectations and decisions and avoid things like crunch when you can so instead of going into a divided mentality that Us Versus Them culture we decided that it was the most important thing to work together as Matt said we already kind of were on that same track of like I like a good quality game I like a fun game and he likes to ship games so may as well work together and make it work and that became so

important to make a conscious decision to wake up and go to the office virtually every day during the pandemic and understand that we were making that decision together even when things were hard and even when it was just awful and feeling awful means that it's a lot harder to come to the table with compromise and that is something that we funneled down to the team when they saw us working together they were more likely to work empathically across departments and understand each other's constraints and at the end of the day we avoided a lot of toxicity that could have happened and we've seen happen on other projects and at other Studios and that was super important to us and we made a great game as sane as we possibly could so how did we prevent all of this toxicity during unec unprecedented times and how did we work together so we developed a proactive precedent and these are sort of uh not

all but three of the main pillars or the lens that we try to direct with uh through our entire process scope minded creative Direction quality-minded production and whole health advocacy and that's where we're going to spend the rest of the time today sort of unpacking these three pillars and we're hoping that the learnings that we have can better help in all Lanes of development no matter what the title or what the department so what is scope minded creative Direction well first of all we want to have our developers create achievable design goals from the very beginning see we know that there is going to be amount of scope creep like the goal is not to like have no scope creep there's always going to be an element of scope creep so the more that you can prepare and buffer that from the beginning to the best of your ability the the good the better the development is going to

be and also we want to have our developers not just production Lanes take timelines seriously report issues early and often be transparent with your leads and your teams at all times uh so that it's because you never want uh uh those uh those above to be caught flat-footed we want all teams to be very very aware of the challenges every moment of every Milestone because we don't want anybody else to get caught flat-footed with scope mishaps so yes make the effort to understand the full array of time and resource limitations we don't want designers or any other developer to create and work in a complete vacuum not understanding how every choice affects Downstream departments it is okay for artists and designers and programmers to understand understand the totality of how

production Lanes work understand where they bottleneck uh teaching teams to understand scope not just creating that vacuum and it's okay and I dare say necessary to educate our teams and how all of that works every choice affects more than just you in your seat and that is an okay thing to teach uh in the design department so once you have those constraints and you understand all of the limitations let the constraints spark the creativity instead of letting unchecked Blue Sky mode persist beyond the concept phase where that's obviously a lot more buffer time to allow scope mind in Creative direction as well the core concept I understand is is sort of unpopular uh the concern is well I want to be able to create everywhere at all times with Community but for me I like

to ship games and eventually you do have to buckle down and fully embrace the limitations of time and scope and so we want to choose our Innovations carefully it doesn't mean you don't innovate it doesn't mean you don't add a plus one to your IP or whatever new thing you're bringing to the table because it is the job of the designer to bring something new to the table or bring something new to the IP of course but not everything needs to be original and I'm glad this is the production Summit and not the design Summit because i' get so many more booze in the design Summit but I I know I it sounds controversial right but effective content is better than original content for the sake of being original sometimes it is better to be effective than original originality should never come at the expense of

being effective sometimes it's better to be effective than original and not reinvent every wheel instead knowing your constraints be calculated with what parts you choose to innovate and provide improve the fun first spend the Innovation effort on the things that you have proven early find the fun early and find it cheaply if you need a ton of Animation polish and pretty art to make it fun guess what it wasn't fun but understand your constraints I believe that uh amazing creativity can come from within constraints so prototype a lot cheaply early bring something new to the table definitely even if it's not even if it's just new to the IP itself right and and

embrace performance limitations Embrace memory limitations learn to be creative within constraints and this is what I like I kind of like to say these are the Legos you have a bunch of Legos that are gathered from a bunch of different sets and the plans you've lost the plans and a bunch of pieces from all of the other Legos but you have the bucket of Legos that you now understand dump it on the table these are the Legos build something so what is quality-minded production this is not something that we hear every day because there's that diametrically opposed bit to production in itself where we're numbers we schedules we're keeping things on track we're removing roadblocks but NE quality isn't necessarily our motivation certainly for some producers it's not making creative changes or having creative opinions a lot of the time but keeping quality in mind is really important even if it's not your jam because it helps you understand the motivations of your team and if you understand the motivations of your team you'll understand how to work better with them and work with them that is the

most important part if production isn't working with a development team they will work around you I'm sure some of you in this room have experienced that I see a lot of heads knotting so this is a little bit on how to work with the team keeping quality in mind because that's their motivation it should be part of yours too and I'm going to say it and this is another controversial line iteration is important and inevitable there will be feature creep there will be unknown know there will be things that just don't work out the first time you try them and that's okay help your team make a plan to get to where they need to be if you try to fight it if you try to force it not to happen chances are the people that are the powers at be are going to want the better game and the more profitable game anyway and they're going to force the change and it's going to be more costly and more expensive and more detrimental to the physical and mental health of your team so understand going into this that your plan your beautiful brilliant production plan that is in

three places and it's in jira and it's a Gant chart and it is wonderful is not going to survive contact with the team something is going to go wonky and that might be a bad plan it might be absolutely outside of your control because suddenly a department becomes short-handed or you couldn't get the recruiting that you need there are a million reasons that the plan just goes bad and that's okay make a new plan and work with your team to help them realize their goals within the constraints that you need to set because sometimes there are hard restraints constraints but you need to make those understood so not everything's a fight and that also means advocating for the team when those limitations those hard constraints those very very real deadlines uh resource issues a pandemic all of those things sometimes make the current schedule the current plan just not livable for the team as production it is

our job to report those issues and become The Advocates when our teams do not have the things that they need to do to make a good project We Are The Advocates we are a conduit and we are the removers of roadblocks so that means that we have to speak up and say something even if it's just about making quality better because good quality on time that's the magic right there and it has to be said and this is really good for any leader you have to say the words you have to say that the limitations are there you can't just assume that if a department only has two people left in it everybody knows that you're going to have to rely Less on that department it has to be said because everyone is hyperfocused on their own lanes and leaders and producers in particular have a unique view of the project where we get the bird's eye we get the thousand foot view we are the ones that have to set those expectations for the team and another another unpopular thing with producers because most of us have a very

similar High Strung mindset you can't control it all stop trying no really you will drive yourself like a little bit nuts I've have done it I'm still not recovered from it you cannot control it all and I say this as someone who ridiculously went into Tiny Tina's wonderlands as the only senior producer on the project so how did I approach it as a leader on Tiny Tina's wonderlands to help the game move forward within constraints but out of good quality the most important thing that I came to every meeting thinking and I Tred to impress upon the rest of the production team working on the project is that we do negotiation before negation love that do not say no to things on principle it's just not good for the project it's not good for your team a lot of the times when a designer comes and requests something or when a change

needs to happen there's flexibility there so it's your job to be flexible too help get to the goal and help them understand where the constraints are before just saying no you can say hey that whole thing might not be table but if we cut something else that's less important or scale it down we might be able to get halfway there those conversations are key to building trust and it also takes transparent communication as long as you are being as long as your motivation is good and you're being honest in a way that is not damaging transparency is the way to go you will regret it far fewer times than you will obscuring information and nothing again is implicit and I will say that a few times because there are so many times in my career where I thought that should have been obvious but then I realized that my perspective on the project is a lot different than other people's and I see a lot more it's my

job to give the whole picture so if something's happening way down in effect Land Art team needs to know about it concept needs to know about it so they can prepare they know which teams to lean on and which teams to not lean on and that also leads into expectation management if you tell the team where our constraints are where our challenges are and where the freedom is they are empowered to make better decisions to help the game move forward trust that in in this industry we're working with all really smart pretty cool people most humans want to be good to other humans but if they're lacking context and information they're going to just move forward with blinders on and make the best decision for their department and throw things over the fence if you Foster empathy across teams educate people on the pipeline and what it takes for a character to become from go from concept to in the game across the teams even the production Department it's really important that you know your p pipeline it's going to make everything

move a lot easier people will be more willing to work with each other because you've created empathy you have created understanding between departments and you will get less siloed work I also fundamentally believe that leadership is a service role it's okay to be a leader it's okay to make decisions half the time that's the hard part of our job is making those hard decisions but you're not there to crack the whip and tell everyone just what to do you're not going to make any designer just work faster artists love to hear that go ahead and try that with the art Department don't really don't um you are a service you are the person on the curling team with a little broom helping that thing get across the way you are the air traffic controller you are the plumber leadership is messy it's scary and if you feel uncomfortable with it you're probably doing it right if you feel like everything's going great and you're just on high giving orders something's probably going wrong that you don't know

about and that's important to build that trust I'm going to talk about trust a lot the negoti the negotiation requires trust the team coming to you and have feeling safe to bring up problems if scope is untenable if there's something that needs to change in the schedule if there's something that needs to change in the content they need to trust you and they need to trust that you will do something about it and you have to you have to follow through and that sometimes means showing your work napkin math great gut checks amazing you'll probably be right all of you have probably been in this industry a hot minute and those got checks almost always right but if you have to report these issues up to anybody that's in the powers at b or if you have to report these issues to a different team you are going to have to show your work you're going to come up with material truth because people believe data over fear feelings feelings are not fact feelings are subjective data is not so you need

to show your work and be able to build your case to do that follow through for your team and if you do follow through you will build that trust and make that feedback loop a lot better so this is arguably uh in from my view kind of the biggest takeaway uh that we learned over the course of the pandemic and it's something we're calling whole health advocacy so instead of waiting for a moment for an issue to arrive and just try to firefight and like get rid of something instead build an actual habit of advocating for your team's Whole Health from mental health to physical health and we were trying to come up with some phrase that kind of En encaptured like a lot of this and we didn't want to say the term healthare uh sorry healthare well uh self-care sorry different talk um we didn't want to say self-care due to the the association

with possible toxic positivity because it doesn't all always give a full picture right we don't mean anything by whole health advocacy anything like fake happiness this isn't about fake happiness we mean whole health advocacy mental to physical and Beyond but before you can Advocate effectively or authentically for your team's Whole Health you have to take a look inside and advocate for your own Whole Health and figure out what that means for you to move forward so it's the the old rule put on your own oxygen mask first so some of you are probably thinking but why is it important I can just work until I die and that's fine it's not producers in the room I got you you need boundaries as speaking as someone who had trouble with this you need to set boundaries a work life balance is

extremely important there will be times that you might have to push that it's unavoidable but then the times that are your downtimes in between don't feel guilt for not being busy every second of the day if it doesn't warrant it don't feel guilt for taking a day off if you need it your sanity meter is key to the project especially the higher up you get in leadership if you come to work in a nasty mood that sets the tone for the team for the day if you can't pick yourself up it's better to just walk away before you accidentally start a fight or you become combative for no reason or you're just down the team will see that it's advice I got early on in my career and it still maintains truth the more I can present myself calmly and approach issues calmly and approach challenges in a logical way and still be able to deal with anybody else's feelings the better it is you need to have the spoons to support your team so

keep that sanity meter up by maintaining some work life balance and step away if you have to and that's because our ability to reason is all tied into adrenal response the frontal lobe of our brain actually shuts down if we are overstressed for creatives that means you're not doing your best of work and for people who have to make logical decisions on behalf of large teams or whole departments you need that you need need to be able to have that to make good decisions and make them with the best and most rational mind that you have at the time so all of these things advocating for your own mental health are so important it's actually science it is in your brains this is how we work this is not some woo woo stuff this is not we all feel good toxic positivity this is just how we work things shut down if you are not taking care of yourself and that means accepting conflict I know nobody likes conflict it's

uncomfortable it hurts it does not feel good but if you accept conflict as opportunity to grow as a a challenge as a potential to make the game better to improve your workflows and your pipelines if you can accept a little criticism or at least a little bit of a challenge that's good that's a good thing some amount of friction is a good thing to make a game new decisions get made by that Innovation gets made by conflict but not by fights so just remember when you're approaching a conflict it does not have to be a battle it does not have to be combative if you are setting good boundaries and have your sanity meter high you'll be able to talk through it and in times when you kind of mess up the art of a good apology is a whole thing that you could do a GDC talk in but I will leave you with this because uh a good friend and colleague of mine laurian meari also a producer gave me this one time and I have never forgot to this day if you mess up have a

regrettable in incident say something personal or that you really shouldn't have a good apology must pass the corpse test if a corpse can do it it's a bad apology if you say I'm sorry I'll never swear in a meeting again that's a terrible apology no one's going to believe you one it's not realistic to a Corps can do it if you say hey I will make a conscious effort to not use offensive language and I understand that I hurt your feelings with that that is a much better apology and an action that you can take a conscious effort is not the same as I'll never do it again so keep these things in mind for why what we're talking about is so important and we're going to give you some real life examples of how we dealt with our own mental spoons in stad staying through the project uh so yeah the pandemic was the worst time of my depression I struggled with depression off and on my entire life in the pandemic uh was the magnifying glass

from the Sun uh so I went back to therapy and I've been I've been very open about that and I forget I forget sometimes that Generations before us have just a huge stigma and even even our generation uh Our Generation I'm old um but like the mo the Elder Millennials in here oh god um there's a stigma and I forget that there's a stigma but nothing bus stigma like leadership admitting that they have mental health issues and they are seeking help you should do it make a point and and I there was one uh quarterly we have like these quarterly updates our our company does like hey showand tell sort of thing at a very very high level and one quarterly I decided to say hey I'm in therapy to everybody across all gearbox Studios and I didn't think anything of it because I was like saying hey times are hard please go get help and I was surprised that I got so many

messages like I'm so glad you said that because not enough people talk about it and it blows blows my mind but hey if you're like me thinking oh yeah everybody's cool with mental health now and everybody's seeking ther it's not true you probably have so many people on your teams that have some sort of shame that has learned from previous generations passed down to us that it is shameful to go seek help for your mental health it is it is not so for me anyway uh quick creative Outlets so being a creative director you're not on the front lines anymore you don't own specific Lanes of content because you can't but that I love I love creating content so I had to find different ways of doing that so uh I got on Tik Tok I that might be weird to you but there's a whole slew of Elder Millennials that found Tik Tock over the pandemic um so I I found and it was so awkward guys like it's like what do I do is this a sound and I'm doing dance trends that didn't last at all it's like gosh then I did cat videos and then I like eventually landed in this like '90s nostalg

Nostalgia Niche making these goofy like whatever Nostalgia things that was really fun for me but it was something quick to do and I finally got that that hit of ah I created something I'm not checking anything in in jir anymore but at least I made a Tik Tok um but yeah like and and I started creating started creating music again I'm a musician off and on and so I like to create music and so I got back into creating music and again that's that helped uh with the the creation need and my 12-year-old daughter found that she a love of baking over the pandemic and so I taught her the basics of video editing and then she just just like like helping her create her own like little Baking Channel was was was wonderful for me and then settling routines like settling routines became big like I I had certain shows that I absolutely love like comfort food and my gosh uh comfort food it was great during the pandemic especially if it wasn't actually food um

but I found my familiar shows to watch an animal crossing oh man that came out at just the right time didn't it I I could have I think I poured like a thousand hours into Animal Crossing for like that good three months that it was out and then I just dropped it I don't know but it was such a great moment but finding something that you can pour yourself into to get your mind to escape and then I don't know about you but I discovered weighted blankets over over the pandemic and oh my gosh that helped my sleep a ton for me uh I also am in therapy and I was open about it to the team reinforcing the idea takes more than just one voice and as Matt mentioned leadership reinforcing that idea makes it feel okay for the team it sets a good example you taking care of yourself will make your teams want to take care of themselves if you are someone that works your way up to leadership and you are fortunate to have the respect and admiration of anyone on your team they're going to act like you thinking

that's how you got to where you are and even if you crunched like crazy even if you push yourself too hard if you don't want them to get to where you are if you believe that there is a better way and there is you need to walk the walk you need to act like there is a better way you are a leader and you need to make it okay for them to do that and one of the ways Matt and I decided to do that was to be open and say hey therapy is cool um and again nothing's implicit if you don't say that some people might not understand or believe that and also it's important to work with your company Gearbox software is very good to us and we are extremely fortunate that they are supportive of therapy that they can provide resources for us through our health insurance and through other means so work with your company in leadership find out what resources are available if you can get HR to like send out a mailer that's cool but if you can just find out personally on the team what those things are definitely try to do that it's really really helpful for folks to be able to get that information cuz

sometimes starting is the hardest way to go about it I am also High Strung I need to move I've probably been fidgeting this whole time I blink a lot I know I hate watching myself after these things so I need to get outside I need to be run around like a greyhound and that was not as easy during the pandemic because a lot of the things that I like to do outside were social so I did more longdistance running uh away from people away from everything I also discovered standup paddle boarding or stuffing if you're cool um I am not cool but it's it's a great lower impact activity you can be out on a lake away from people and I found a lot of good friends that way after the pandemic so if you can if you're someone who likes nature and you be outside and that's your happy place definitely try out a few new things too if you're feeling a little bit stagnated or you break your foot uh I also enjoy some like lowkey uh stress reducing shows I know like some of the later seasons are a little problematic

but early seasons of The Great British baking show are my jam I go back to those I love my Mary Berry she calms me down it's just great chilling out stuff I do not have a Tik Tok um I am not that cool but I can tell you there is nothing weirder than working like very closely with somebody for a long time on a project and then Doom scrolling at 2: in the morning and then hearing real things people talk about in the night and seeing your cooworker face that is a moment all the ELO Millennials found Tik Tok another thing that just sounds way less fun than anything that Matt's doing that I found that really personally helped me was delegation it sounds boring and it sounds hard and it's icky uh but it's super important I took on way too much I had a team of feature producers uh Strike Team producers and departmental producers that all were really really good at their jobs I just did didn't like want to bother them uh you guys get it um so it was really

hard for me to delegate and then I realized after reading some books on leadership and trying to level myself up that not doing that feeling like I'm bothering my own team actually was robbing them off the opportunity to take on new challenges and learn I was doing a bad manager by not allowing my team to do some learning so I had to let go of the idea that working with people was bothering them that foisting new opportunities that I didn't like to do on to people was not rude it was not mean it was delegation it was helping them help themselves and generally speaking if I gave someone the opportunity to learn something new I would ask them you know hey do you have enough on your plate right now do you want to take on more have that conversation don't just like give everyone your responsibilities but they were actually happy to have it they're like oh I learned some things and now I feel like I can level up now I feel like I can promote it or I just know more things so it's really important to make sure that you are delegating for your own sanity

and for the sake of your team if you won't do it for yourself because a lot of people who can't delegate won't do it for the fact that it will help your teams and it will help them Advance it will help them grow and that helps you in the long run too I also have to keep myself organized I'm going to say something truly controversial and awful but I don't like putting my personal tasks in jira which is the worst because I make everybody else do their tasks in jira but it's because especially at the producer level I have about a million things to do a 5,000 spinning plates that all take less time technically in the day than actually creating a closing Aira task I am a recovering sticky notes addict and notebook addict so I personally like Trello as a program because you've got that visceral ability to move something from one category to another but it's less messy than having your uh monitor look like a li in from all of the sticky notes on it or wondering which notebook you put that really really important thing that you totally weren't going to forget in and when you have the level of responsibility that you do senior

project producer or any production department or any leadership Department it's really important not to forget that little tiny thing that you put in that notebook somewhere so I recommend having your stuff digital I also recommend having it all in one place the hardest thing that I had to learn was letting go some of that was through delegation some of that was through harder things and this is why we say whole health advocacy is not the same as just self-care or at least what self-care has been thought to mean to become it is not manic carees always it is not a hot bubble bath although like if those things are your jam go do it sometimes it's taking care of yourself in the hardest ways possible during the creation of wonderlands and during the pandemic I realized I was in a marriage that had become toxic and wasn't working so part of my self-care and letting go was ending that so I could be okay and that sucked that was absolutely awful but it was the right thing for my

mental health and it made me a better leader to my team to not be distracted and hurting all the time so when we say whole health advocacy sometimes it means doing the worst feeling thing for the greater good for yourself and your team in a long run and sometimes that's project decisions too and then of course my pets because every time I talk about something heavy I always add a picture of the cats let's bring it on back the Tabby is Kirk and The Tuxedo is Omen I know that's important information so the precedent that we learned and found during the unprecedented times once we started trying to apply these lessons during development what did we see what were some of these observable results well we saw developers take the time time to learn about cross-discipline departments and not

just their own specific Lane we saw I saw people start to learn about Downstream impacts of choices that they make under and this understanding helped change attitudes on push back and on limitations it created empathy across disciplines and one of the things that can happen when you just stick to your own lane it toxicity it becomes a breeding ground for toxicity especially when you have leadership that is hostile hostile leadership creates developers that go around them and that breeds the worst type of toxicity so empathy across disciplines which comes from understanding what other disciplines go through in this crazy messy thing called game development is absolutely critical the

relative stress level was reduced and I know that's a crazy yeah we were in the pandemic we didn't have stress that's not what this is saying I'm saying in general the stress that we create ourselves by not having empathy or understanding for our fellow developers was reduced when things got tough we were able to keep on keeping on through it and Landing the game wasn't the worst again relative to the stress that we create start trademark ourselves yes still very hard hardest thing to ship a game during the pandemic but overall the types of stress and hard things we create ourselves by being in our own vacuum uh was reduced we saw teams starting to raise red flags for people's mental health uh and developers themselves started raising their hand and they had to go uh and like take care of themselves or take care of of their family for sometimes an extended period of time and nobody was shamed for that

people's response and gearbox in general I'm I feel very lucky to work at this company because gearbox was already very good about a a family first Focus but oh my gosh did the pandemic ever put a magnifying glass on how important that muscle is to build being a people person focused game Studio first person over product and so yeah we saw that people started feeling safer to ask for help leads and teams rallied around the common goal of shipping something great um while first taking care of people and so that gave us the compass for leadership during very incredibly hard times but of course people focused approach still has to ship a game and

people who are feeling good that are less mentally taxed are going to work a little bit easier it's going to be better for them creatively it's going to be better for them physically and mentally but at the end of the day we all are here for the project so how did all of this actually help the product because I know there are some people in the room that're like yeah people okay but like bottom line and in fact it actually did it really really did because we had compromise as the rule not the exception saying no out of principle is bad it just shuts people down they won't want to work with you and that's going to make everything feel like a fight that every Hill is one that you have to die on when you set compromise as part of what your production process is people will be less likely to work around you and when they really fight for something you know it's important to them real world example is that there was a designer who was really famous for having big Ideas not necessarily talking to the rest of

the pipeline and by the end of the project this guy got it he understood what the impact was where everything was coming from the cross departmental chain reactions down the pipeline the impacts that it was having and very late into one of his missions he said Kayla I want to make a change and I went okay go on probably exactly like that too and he said all right hear me out I want to add this new area and I was like cool cool go on well I already talked to LD level design level art I already have all the content I need and I already talked to effects and I already talked to audio and they're all okay with it and I went it plays I didn't have to do any of that stuff I didn't have to say well did you talk to this person did you talk to that person I didn't have to run it through multiple departments this individual figured it out talked to everybody understood the pipelines that would be impacted by his changes and that bit of the mission became a fan

favorite after if I had just said no out of principle because it was late in development and I was worried about the other departments getting hit the world would have been robbed of that super fun moment and he would have felt like crap I would have felt like crap everybody would have been mad about it instead we taught people how to talk to each other how to talk across departments and when he really wanted to fight so fight for this thing that he wanted that he believed would make the game better and it objectively did he went and had the conversations he needed to have and it didn't become a hill the die on it was just this is important to me and I figured out how to make it without hurting anyone and we said cool go ahead so never say no out of principle you're just you're just going to make it bad and at the end of the day truly I believe that this was the best game that we could make all games have constraints all games have challenges but the overall sentiment of the team even in the retrospective and I

asked for the retrospective around RTM which is the spiciest time to ask for it all of the problems that people had all of the big feelings all of the challenges we wanted those raw and visceral the one thing that was consistent nearly across the board was that people were proud of the game that they made and that was before any critical accolades that was before anything came in they were just proud they thought it was fun and there's no better feeling for me as a leader than seeing that through all of the challenges people came out of this still liking each other and proud of the game that they made and that all came from working within limitations but also making sure that we understood one another all right before we wrap up uh what were some of the real world challenges that required these new precedents or brought about these new habits so in a minute I'll give a time where the team uh or of scope minded creative Direction and quality-minded production helped us uh through a really

big challenge late in development uh but Kayla can first highlight where we saw whole health advocacy uh really hit a stride uh so go home the world is on fire most of Tiny Tina's wonderlands was developed during the pandemic and that meant a global crisis something that in our Generations in hundred of years or so we had not seen and we not necessarily prepared for as individuals and that wasn't just the pandemic there were wildfires across the world we had a deep freeze in Texas that paralyzed us and it was dangerous and it killed people and murder hornets and like any other year murder Hornets would be the headline yeah yeah no they were there all of this was deeply mentally taxing on the team so we knew that our normal day-to-day Dev problems people were instead of at this threshold already here because their pipes were

burst the Hornets were in their backyard I don't know and everyone was afraid of this novel virus that we didn't understand we didn't have vaccinations for and we had to figure out how to still make a game cuz we like having a job and eating and roofs over our heads and we are fortunate to be able to do this from home we are truly lucky but it wasn't something that we just had were prepared for we didn't have a go home button yet so a First Response the People First Response the empathetic response was to get everyone home get them safe people were primary the game at that point was secondary we needed people to give have the room to be happy and healthy and okay as okay as they could be we were very fortunate that the leadership at gearbox is supportive we know that we're privileged that when we said we need to go home they said okay or we need to give this person extended leave they said do what you think is right and we were empowered as leads to be able to do that for our project uh and had a lot of trust there also bizdev

finance and it fantastic getting people set up I think we were already in under two weeks but we still had that space for people's mental health and we had to continue supporting the team for General messaging that it's okay to take time off it's okay to be overwhelmed please let us know if the scope that your ability to do has changed asking if you can do something on time versus you can do something reasonably on time is a great thing to practice as a producer because if you're a developer who loves your game if you're a creative those two are very different questions and that's something I had to learn actively during this pandemic if you don't make team time for your team's wellness and your Wellness you will have to eat time for illness and that is very true and you'll have to remember that even in non-pandemic times stress is just bad for your health ah the age-old question is is it fun yet you can make all the greatest efforts to find the fun early but game

development as we all know is iterative so deep into production we learned our strengths and we learned these tools at how to apply it we uh the relationship of scope mited and creative Direction and quality mind and production was in a great compromising uh set and and and back and forth between departments but of course we still faced design challenges and late like you do uh we got several layers of feedback we have an amazing consumer research Department in internally and we do a lot of internal testing and so we get pages and pages of feedback and the most critical part for us and in almost any game is the first hour of the game the first hour of the game wasn't connecting like we wanted it to so we quickly identified very a lot of areas to improve and we worked to get the most value for the lowest impact and so I don't know if youve played Tiny Tina wonderlands but we basically tweaked how the intro cinematic the character creation and

then we created a whole new scene at the table live in game with Tiny Tina explaining the rules uh and then we dumped into the tutorial level which was not the first version of the tutorial level go figure um but it was that relationship the handoff the all those four elements that clearly describes the game within a game bunkers and badasses being played at the table in the world and the game you're playing down below that connective tissue wasn't working very early and so we had to make a lot of changes Fair some fairly significant very late but we were more equipped on how to act and how to compromise what to trade what to not do so that we could make the first hour of the game the best experience that it could be and so the Strike Team meetings happened we developed strike teams and re-evaluated Staffing and resources so that we could make the game as good as it could be

very late I give Matt a lot of credit uh because this is a very hard conversation to bring to production uh hey I I know you've seen the feedback I don't know if the game is fun yet there's a really easy way to fix that but it's going to be pretty impactful that's not an easy conversation to have and I've seen this go a lot of ways I think we all have in this industry uh sometimes it's that I'm not going to tell production and we're just going to work around it or figure it out and production says but we don't have enough time or people and they say figure it out uh Matt's question to me was how can we do it I am willing to remove some things to scale back some things that are less important we need this first two hours of the game to be critical and because he came to me in that way it was super easy to get the data we needed to figure out what we needed to do and I say easy in a Rel Rel ative term but comparatively on a major pivot fairly late in development of the

project we were able to Rally the team get the strikes teams together and understand what we needed to do pretty quickly so this is by far one of the most important examples of how something that we learned in unprecedented times became practical this is a normal game development problem but because we had been through the ringer and getting the team home and getting them healthy and keeping everyone safe questions like this became a lot easier because we had already dealt with a lot harder big decisions so this is when we say these things that we learned during these really hard times actually work for just G day-to-day game development problems as it turns out games still have problems it's still hard there are still challenges Matt and I are still working together and ever so often there is still friction but we took with us that proactive communication empathy and our production and quality mindsets to make sure that we are are still making good games together and using that same mentality we had during the hard times

in the easier times so just as a quick recap those skills that we developed in crisis do work on everyday problems the empathy that we built with each other for each other's work and knowing that we were both trying to make a good game spread to the team that the team empathy that we have continues to this day we still actually work with a lot of the same people so it's important not to make a lot of enemies at the end of the game uh and that's just something that we learned and we really enjoy working together with um and there's still a better understanding of limitations across discipline we still see even with colleagues that we're no longer working with on the same project more of those ideas coming up more hands being raised to managing directors when they say hey I think there's a problem here which is great to see we've got that creative and scope mindset production is flexible for change design is flexible in changing their new plans to fit within the hard

limitations of Productions our powers combined we can make magical things happen and we can make a chaotic great game trademark and we can still do it without putting too much pressure on the team compromising before fighting that's the mindset you can fight for the things that you want you can fight for your ideas but be willing to compromise cuz the magic is probably somewhere in the middle of between what you want and what your colleagues want and again that whole health advocacy this is not a song we just sing to say that we did it's something that we both take very seriously and want to impart on our team person First Response your people are required to make the project you cannot make Project without people even if it's just you you need to take care of your only people you do not pass the bus Test please take care of yourselves and each other that makes a better game that makes a more creative game and it makes a less toxic work environment for everyone around you and also that requires trusting open communication be there for your team

follow through if you do not follow through you will lose that trust they'll just assume you're saying things because you are just saying things be ready to act on whatever you promise if you lose that trust I cannot stress this enough it will take you 10 times longer to get it back trust that your team understands what they're talking about trust your subject matter experts and they'll trust you to guide them as a producer any closing thoughts um no you did wonderful all right uh we have a few minutes left for Q&A oh thank you thank you

empathy across different subject disciplines was that sufficient to changing the team's mind around more constraint Focus direction or was there more to that process I think the constraint Focus direction is something that's more like innate in me and it wasn't necessarily uh something gearbox is is not necessarily used to it's just something that's innate to me but as far as like a whole sea change like I it's it's more like you're driving a cruise ship and not a speedboat so you can't you can't expect like everybody to change and take a left turn but I would say that uh fundamentally we did see change and that was a great example of one of our designers start to think uh within constraint and what those constraints are particularly with departmental impact so it's like taking those moments and and hoping that what what you're saying has some sort of impact and sometimes it just you have to look for for those moments of of of getting it I would say people have to see it work too you need some early

adopters if you don't follow through if it just doesn't work if it ends up being worse on the team than it was like not working in that way you're going to lose everybody if people start to see at working even some of your toughest critics will become good adopters and I definitely recommend appealing to your toughest critics if you can get them to adopt more people will follow so first thank you very much for an extremely validating and nourishing talk on design and production leadership um the content that you produced today although it was largely about production and design leadership was sort of a cultural Manifesto so I'm going to ask a question sort of tongue and cheek and I want you to read between the lines a little bit um whose job is it to create a cultural Manifesto leadership in the industry like I I know it's tongue and Chic but I believe this from the top down and when I say that we are very fortunate at gearbox to have that autonomy that we

have it's because we are supported by leadership uh and that's really important so they allow us to just do what we need to do make sure that it's working well and they don't ask too many questions and we are almost out but we will have the speaker Lounge thing after this we still have we have are we done do we still have time for for more we have zero okay so we will uh uh we will go to what is the uh we are going to head over to overlook 2014 wherever that is so if you want to talk more um oh it's that way I'm that way okay our friendly GDC volunteers are pointing the way we'll have you to take more question thank you so much for coming guys if you have time to fill out the survey please do oh yeah fill out the survey if you can thanks everybody